www.orbitbooks.net

Jennifer says:

Bitten to Death is a love story. Sometimes it’s twisted. And a little sick. And there are parts you shouldn’t read while eating. But it faces the fact that sometimes people fall so hard they want to fold the objects of their affections into origami swans and lock them in cedar boxes forever. (No, that doesn’t literally occur in BTD, but you’ll get what I mean by the end.)

Of course my books are also all about the assassination. When you’ve based your operations in a Vampere community, however, you’ve created a dilemma. Namely, which ubercreep should you smoke first? The serial killer who greets you at the door? The snappy dresser who calls for your head before he even gets your name? The ally who may be just as evil as your target? Or Edward ‘The Raptor’ Samos, the guy you’ve been chasing forever? Decisions, decisions…

Read an Extract!

Ken says:

The Night Sessions is a crime novel set in 2037. It’s also an SF novel that asks the question: what if we finally got fed up with the influence of religion on politics, education, and law, and decided to drive it out of these areas for good?

We wouldn’t get the consequences we intended - quite apart from the blowback of faith-based terrorism that drives the plot of the book. The cops (there’s a reason why it’s regular beat cops, and not the army or the secret police) who enforced the reforms could be warped by the experience. Even years later, when they’re Detective Inspectors.

Besides, you can’t have an Edinburgh detective without a dark past. It’s the law.

The book also has robots, space elevators, presbyterian terrorists, a creation science park and a gothic lolita secret policeman.

And Russians. Sinister Russians. In Leith.

These are some of the reasons why I think you might like this book.

Multpile award-winner and award-nominee (he’s been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Awards no fewer than five times) Ken MacLeod’s new novel, The Night Sessions, is out now from Orbit UK in hardback. You can read an extract over at fantasybookspot.com.

Visit Ken’s blog, The Early Days of a Better Nation for more of Ken’s thoughts on a whole range of topics related to his writing, interests and the major themes of his work.

Jacqueline says:

At heart, Kushiel’s Scion is a simple coming-of-age tale – one that just happens to feature a boy with a treasonous mother, a perilously attractive foster-mother and an impossibly heroic foster-father. Oh, and a childhood based on lies, a terrible abduction and long months of torment in captivity that would have crushed a lesser spirit. Imriel de la Courcel comes into his story with a lot more baggage than the ordinary protagonist, and the essence of Kushiel’s Scion is about his struggle to transcend it.

It’s also about the redemptive power of love in all its forms, intrigue, trust, betrayal, possession, war, and the true meaning of heroism. And sex, lots of sex. There’s something here for everyone to enjoy!

Kushiel’s Scion, the first part of Jacqueline Carey’s Treason’s Heir series, is out now in paperback from Orbit UK.

Visit www.jacquelinecarey.com for more information her writing, and to read an extract from Kushiel’s Scion. You can also join her emailing list to be kept up-to-date with all the latest developments.

Philip says:

Space pirates, exotic aliens, battles in outer space, exploding stars, and characters we care about and love or hate (or both) and secretly or not so secretly want to be.

Those were the elements I wanted to include in Debatable Space. I think of it as a rocket fired through the reader’s imagination.

The several narrators of Debatable Space - the pirate crew who steal and pillage and murder and endeavour to save the universe - are like a family to me. Which means, sometimes annoying! But always my family.

And Lena is my favourite of all the characters I’ve ever created. She has many flaws, and one redeeming feature; she is vividly alive.

Debatable Space is Philip Palmer’s gloriously mind-mashing debut space opera and is out now in paperback from Orbit UK and large paperback from Orbit US (the regular paperback will be published in the US on September 1st). Click here to read an extract.

You can catch up with the latest news from Philip Palmer at www.philippalmer.net, where he regularly blogs about his writing (screenplays and radio-plays as well as prose), the movies he’s seen, the books he’s read… all sorts of good stuff.

It’s the eighth day of the eighth month of the eight year of the century and the Olympic Games are kicking off (if that’s even vaguely the right term) in Beijing. But you guys don’t care about all that running and jumping and swimming and stuff, do you? No! What you really want is your weekly dose of Orbit Author links:

As ever and always, if you see any online articles, reviews or interviews that feature an Orbit author, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know! We’ll happily name-check your website or blog with a heads-up credit in return (please remember to provide us with a link…)

P.S. A quick note on last week’s links round-up. I’m pretty sure I posted it at lunchtime on Friday, but at some point during the week it seems to have been relegated back to the bench and reverted to draft status. I’ve dug it out of the ‘pending’ file and reinstated it to its proper place, which would be here, in case you missed it… DT

Orbit is pleased to announce the upcoming releases of four new books from four new stars of fantasy fiction: BEST SERVED COLD by Joe Abercrombie (June 2009); THE SAD TALE OF THE BROTHERS GROSSBART by Jesse Bullington (Sept. 2009); SOULLESS by Gail Carriger (Nov. 2009); and THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS by N.K. Jemisin (Sept. 2009). (more…)

This month look for:

Debatable Space by Philip Palmer
Orphanage, Orphan’s Destiny and Orphan’s Journey by Robert Buettner
Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs
Warrior by Jennifer Fallon
Mass Effect: Ascension by Drew Karpyshyn
Kushiel’s Scion by Jacqueline Carey
Path of Revenge by Russell Kirkpatrick
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

Robert says:

What are the Jason Wander books about?

My inner teen thinks they are about cool stuff: hovertanks, dinosaurs, captured alien starships, firefights, swordfights, and cracking wise when authority least welcomes it.

My inner grown-up thinks the books are about the distance between Eisenhower and the paratroops shown here, west of London on D-Day eve, 1944. That distance is an armspan across the grass of Greenham Common Airfield, but the journey of a soldier’s lifetime across the calendar.

Why do I think you’ll like them over there? I strive to write prose spare and funny enough to make readers smile, while jammed in middle airline seats, after twelve-hour days, with headaches.

Plus, there’s all the cool stuff…

Robert Buettner’s Jason Wander series is officially published by Orbit UK on August 7th and all three books were published by Orbit US in April this year:

• - Orphanage [US / UK]
• - Orphan’s Destiny [US / UK]
• - Orphan’s Journey [US / UK]

Book four in the series, Orphan’s Alliance is scheduled for publication by Orbit US in November 2008.

Image Credit: U.S. Army. “Dwight Eisenhower giving orders to American paratroopers in England.” 1944 June 5. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

This month look for

• Path of Revenge by Russell Kirkpatrick
• Bitten to Death by Jennifer Rardin
• Warrior by Marie Brennan
• Witch by Marie Brennan

Welcome once more, gentle reader, to our regular Friday links round-up. We have another choice selection of Orbit authors’ online activities for you to peruse this week:

As always, if you see any online articles, reviews or interviews that feature an Orbit author, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know! We’ll happily name-check your website or blog with a heads-up credit in return (please remember to provide us with a link…)

The Orcs are coming! And to help introduce them we’ve created an Orc Mail website and Orc widgets.

And… if you’re one of the first ten people to post an Orc widget to your website or myspace page, and you email us the link at orbit@hbgusa.com, we’ll send you a finished copy of the book when it’s available in September! (US residents only!)

Charles Stross features in the latest podcast from Rick Kleffel’s Agony Column, which is a recording of a Geekspeak interview that was broadcast on KUSP radio on Monday.

Rick and Charlie, along with Lyle Troxell and Sean Cleveland, talk about a wide range of topics, including Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein; two of the major literary influences on Charlie’s recently-released novel Saturn’s Children.

They then go on to discuss the building blocks of the milieu that Charlie explores in Saturn’s Children: artificial intelligence, a robotics-based and dehumanised future extension of human civilisation, interplanetary travel, space exploration (and the necessity for robotics therein), memory backups and personality duplication, the class-structure of robotic society in the book, the ethics of programming an artificial intelligence and a whole range of other great sf-nal subjects.

You can visit Rick Kleffel’s Trashotron site to read the intro to the podcast, and then download the MP3 file from a link in the text.

Breaking Dawn, the fourth title in Stephenie Meyer’s global mega-selling Twilight Saga series, will be published in the UK on Monday August 4th.

To celebrate the launch of the eagerly-awaited conclusion to the story of Bella and Edward, dozens of boosktores right across the UK - including Borders Oxford Street branch and Waterstone’s Manchester Arndale - will be holding special publication-day events, with competitions, prizes, giveaways and more.

Visit the official Stephenie Meyer UK website for a full listing of all the events that are due to take place, and check to see which bookstores near you will be opening early on the big day.

All in all, we had a great time at the show. Lilith Saintcrow rocked the Eye on the Present panel, which should be online eventually. We had a limited giveaway of Orcs galleys which were snatched up by fans in minutes. Kevin J. Anderson chatted with us about The Ashes of Worlds (vid to come) And our friends at Yen Press threw a great rooftop party complete with fireworks.

Canberra’s fifth annual Conflux convention takes place later this year, over the weekend of Friday October 3rd - Monday October 6th, at The Marque, Canberra, Australia.

Ahead of the main event, Conflux is staging a Virtual Minicon this coming weekend, August 2nd - August 3rd.

Participation is easy: simply sign up for the Conflux Forums and then log in at the appropriate time, depending on the author(s) you’d like to chat to via the forums and bearing in mind the relevant time-difference between your own timezone and Canberra’s (GMT +10) of course.

A number of Orbit authors are taking part in the online activities over the course of the weekend, with time-slots as follows (again, these are Canberra-time…)

Saturday August 2
12.00 p.m. - Glenda Larke
7.00 p.m. - Karen Miller

Sunday August 3
11.00 a.m. - Sean Williams
12.00 p.m. - Kevin J Anderson
5.00 p.m. - Marianne de Pierres

Visit the Virtual Minicon page of the Conflux website for more information.

Welcome to our regular Friday links round-up. Plenty to get through this week, so without further ado:

As always, if you see any online articles, reviews or interviews that feature an Orbit author, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know! We’ll happily name-check your website or blog with a heads-up credit in return (please remember to provide us with a link…)

According to our content-management system (and we have no reason to believe that it would lie to us) this is the 300th post to go out on the Orbit website since we launched it back in March last year.

To celebrate, we thought we’d take the opportunity to consult with our traffic analytics software and run off a list of our Top 30 content items to-date. Looks like you folks really like your extracts! Well, we hear you, and we’ll make sure we keep them coming.

We’d also love to hear which articles you, our readers, have particularly enjoyed. Any hidden gems or more recent pieces that didn’t quite make the Top 30, for instance? Please feel free to use the comments below to let us know what sort of content you’d like to see more of (or less of - we can take it!) on the site.

And now, without further ado, here are those Top 30 items since March 2007:

1. Read an extract from Matter by Iain M Banks
2. Read an extract from Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley
3. Read an extract from Once Bitten, Twice Shy by Jennifer Rardin
4. Read an extract from Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
5. Priestess of the Write: An Interview with Trudi Canavan
6. Read an extract from The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
7. Read an extract from The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
8. The Wheel of Time Continues to Turn
9. Announcement of Robert Jordan’s passing
10. Read an extract from Black Ships by Jo Graham
11. Read an extract from Debatable Space by Philip Palmer
12. Read an extract from Empress by Karen Miller
13. Read an extract from The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
14. Orbit announces plans to expand in the US and UK
15. Mike Carey on camera
16. Introducing The Last Wish
17. Tom Holt Talks Time Travel
18. The Escapement arrives
19. Read an extract from The Devil’s Right Hand by Lilith Saintcrow
20. Introducing Matter
21. Urban Fantasy come true
22. Orbit acquires Red-Headed Stepchild by Jaye Wells
23. Just another day at the office… IN HELL!
24. Standing Out or Fitting In? Tim Holman on Orbit cover art
25. The bestselling debut of 2007 - The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
26. Devi Pillai reports from World Fantasy 2007
27. Orbit in Australia
28. Fiona MacIntosh’s video-intro for Odalisque
29. Orbit acquires two more books in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series
30. Best Summer SF Reads in The Times

We’ve just re-launched the UK website of mega-bestselling author Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight saga is published in the UK by Orbit’s sister-imprint, Atom.

It looks a lot like this:

The fourth book of the saga, Breaking Dawn, will be published in the UK on August 4th and there are launch-day events taking place right across the UK - see this news item on the site for details of events taking place at bookstores in your area.

Iain [M] Banks enjoyed providing answers for his first email Q&A session so much that he’s asked us to set up another one right away.

And so, without further ado, we hereby call for all you Banks-fans and readers to send in your questions for Iain. Visit the official Iain Banks website for more information, general guidelines etc.

Over at FantasyBookCritic, blogger Robert Thompson has posted a hugely complimentary review of the second of Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels, Vicious Circle, which we published back in 2006 (and have since followed up with volume three in the series, Dead Men’s Boots).

Robert says:

“Vicious Circle … makes a strong case for being one of the top urban fantasy novels released this year. Simply put, I think Mike Carey is one of the most exciting new authors in supernatural fiction today and I can’t recommend the Felix Castor series enough.”

He’s also added an email interview conducted with Mike, which includes an update on a number of writing projects (including a fifth Felix Castor novel), the progress on a couple of film projects, his many comics-related interests, and what Mike sees as the future of fiction in printed form.

Check out the full review an interview at FantasyBookCritic.blogspot.com.