Blood. Passion. Service…

FORBIDDEN BLOOD by Kristen Painter is available now from the Orbit Short Fiction program!

The comarré were created for only one reason – to give blood – and whatever else their vampire patron requires.  But one comarré will risk all – including her life – to win her freedom.

Meet Maris – in the prequel to Kristen Painter’s gothic vampire series, which began with BLOOD RIGHTS (US | UK | AUS).

Purchase FORBIDDEN BLOOD for only $2.99

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The chat will be found on Reddit’s Fantasy forum, r/Fantasy, at http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/.

Don’t forget that Helen, with her epic fantasy novel THE HEIR OF NIGHT, is one of five authors shortlisted for the David Gemmell Morning Star Award for Best Fantasy Newcomer and that you can still get your votes in here until 12 Noon GMT 31st May.

Orbit authors N. K. Jemisin and Brent Weeks have also taken part in Reddit AMAs recently, and it looks like they had a great time of it!

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At the end of last year, we here at Orbit received a very exciting treat in our inboxes . . . a new

Author of the classic UPLIFT series, EARTH and THE POSTMAN (made into a major motion picture), he’s widely lauded not just for writing thrillingly addictive science fiction, but also for his track record for accurately predicting the future within his novels.

It’s been ten years since the release of David’s last book, so the arrival of the manuscript for EXISTENCE (UK | ANZ) really was quite an event. And it’s no exaggeration to say that this could well be his pièce de resistance.

It’s an edge-of-your-seat novel of the near-future, where discovery of an alien artefact throws the world into chaos. The absolute compelling nature of this book, and the sheer breadth and brilliance of the ideas expressed within it made me want to find out more about David’s thought processes behind it (beyond the usual questions I’d ask as part of our author/editor relationship!). Read on for an insight into what lead to its creation . . .

David Brin - photo by Cheryl Brigham

AG: Despite your incredible success as a writer, you’ve mentioned elsewhere that being an author wasn’t your first career of choice. Tell us more?

DB: Writing was the first truly verifiable, repeatable and effective form of magic. Picture how it must have impressed ancient people to look at marks – on papyrus or clay – and know they conveyed the words of scribes and kings long dead. Knowledge, wisdom and art could finally accumulate, and death was robbed some of its sting. Writing still is magical. To create strings of black squiggles that millions of others can skillfully de-code with just their eyes – into emotions and thoughts, or the struggles of believable characters.

Still, every culture had storytellers. I was drawn toward a much newer kind of profession, that only gained real momentum the last few generations. Science. A shared endeavor to find out what is true, despite our preconceptions.  Wow, that too is amazing! And I managed to contribute a few new bits of knowledge.

Still, when a chance came along to combine the two? Who wouldn’t grab such an opportunity?

AG: It’s been almost a decade since the release of your last novel. Have scientific developments over the last 10 years forced you at all to reassess the vision of the future you’ve held in previous books?

DB: Well of course. But remember, good science fiction isn’t about any static view. It should offer thought experiments about change.  How it transforms real societies and realistic characters.  Change has been the one, great constant of modernity and its rate is accelerating.  Many of our social and political squabbles spiral around this one fact. A lot of folks don’t like the staccato pace of disruptions and new ideas, even good ones. 

But if we don’t poke ahead, peering into the fog, how will we ever find our way? 

AG: At the centre of EXISTENCE is the discovery on an alien artifact – leading to First Contact. You’re an active member of SETI and have written non-fiction on the “Fermi Paradox” or Great Silence – the question of why we seem to be alone in the cosmos. Was writing EXISTENCE perhaps a way to explore this paradox through fiction?

DB: It’s the Big Question. There are billions of stars older than our sun. Many sapient species may have preceded us by eons and at least a few should have left clear signs of their passage.  Why does the sky seem so empty of voices, then? Why was Earth apparently never visited? (And we would know, if it had been.) 

Does something “filter” down the numbers? Just in the last brilliant decade, we’ve learned that planets are common and life seems likely to erupt almost anywhere with molten water. So what makes us rare? Intelligence?  Technology? Or the fact that we figured out how to advance a bit, without nuclear war? The range of possibilities is daunting. I tried to give most of them a nod . . . amid a much broader plot about our near future.

AG: In EXISTENCE, you explore both pessimistic and optimistic visions. Did you feel that the time is particularly ripe for such a novel and do you see humanity at a tipping point?

DB: This generation will decide so many things about human destiny. Will we charge recklessly into lethal mistakes? Or the opposite danger: going nostalgic, cowering away from hard choices, and declining into stagnation? Or might we – instead – blend the intrepid brilliance of adolescence with mature caution, find the traps and quicksand pits and land mines, picking out a narrow path till our much-smarter grandchildren are ready to take over?

Sorry. That’s sobering stuff. But the second half of the question is this: can we explore all that in a rip-snortin’ adventure yarn, stuffed with ideas, twists and irony? 

AG: The near future of EXISTENCE portrays citizens sifting through a barrage of information, via virtual data overlain upon reality.  You hinted at some of this in EARTH. Now we see it all starting to come true, with the new Google Glass project! How do you see humans coping?

DB: Suppose you described today’s internet to the average person, in 1980, foretelling that they would zip virtually across the globe in 2012, accessing knowledge and games and amusements and news on multiple screens with divided attention . . . and loving it. Who would have believed you?  The same folks today – 30 years older – show more agility of attention than their younger selves could have imagined! That progression will follow us onto the streets and sidewalks. And yes, it will seem unnerving, at first. The technology will start awkward, cause accidents, nausea, confusion . . .

. . . and then the young will hack it. Improve it. Till it becomes a graceful layer of daily life, serving instead of confusing us. Empowering us. And just in time.

AG: EXISTENCE also explores technophobia in the extreme – a desire to stop the progress of technology in order to protect the future of humanity. Do you see a War on Technology in our future?

DB: It’s already begun.  Grouchy or nostalgic voices of both right and left are busy denouncing the can-do spirit. Countless novelists, directors and faux “news” channels use the latest hi-tech tricks to preach that “nothing good will come from all this so-called progress!”  The movement is called Renunciation and at-core it raises some important points. Indeed, many species across the Galaxy may have tumbled into ruin from mis-use of science. 

In EXISTENCE, some smart and sincere characters give strong arguments for Renunciation. Still – without undue spoilers – I must say I’m skeptical that any solutions to our problems lie behind us, in the past. The way forward has always been . . . forward. 

AG: Do you believe science fiction, as well as predicting the future, has a transformative power to affect or change the future?

DB: We claim not to predict but to experiment with possible tomorrows. Though there is satisfaction – sometimes grim – when your forecasts come true.

Of course, we hope that some of our readers will come away thinking new thoughts and perhaps just a bit more eager for better ways, better times ahead. Or girded to prevent disastrous failure modes.  Indeed, the greatest science fiction tales might be called Self-Preventing Prophecies . . . novels or films that affect millions, filling them with determination.  It’s what George Orwell achieved with Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Stanley Kubrick with Dr. Strangelove.  Soylent Green recruited countless deeply-moved citizens to ponder what we have and how fragile it may be.

I may speak up for optimism – the under-represented theme.  But warnings, also, are important.  It’s a minefield out there.  And a whole lot rides on our ability and willingness to cross it.

A limited edition of EXISTENCE (UK | ANZ) with a 3D cover will be released on 21st June 2012 – available only until stocks last. See a video simulation of the cover below.

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The Aurealis Awards represent the best of Australian fantasy, science fiction and horror across thirteen different categories. Trudi Canavan and Trent Jamieson have both been previous winners of the awards.

EMBER AND ASH (UK | US | ANZ) is available as an Orbit ebook or paperback.

Two peoples have been fighting over the same land for a thousand years. Invaders crushed the original inhabitants, and ancient powers have reluctantly given way to newer magics. But Ember was to change all this with a wedding to bind these warring people together – until her future goes up in flames.

Ember’s husband-to-be is murdered by a vengeful elemental god, who sees peace as a breach of faith. Set on retribution, she enlists the help of Ash, son of a seer. Together they will pit themselves against elementals of fire and ice in a last attempt to end the conflicts that have scarred their past.

They must look to the present, as old furies are waking to violence and are eager to reclaim their people.

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We’ll reveal a little more about this thrilling conclusion to the trilogy closer to the time, along with an excerpt, but for the time being here’s the final front cover – courtesy of our wonderful designer Peter Cotton and the talented illustrator Steve Stone.

If you’ve not yet joined the legions of fans that have been captivated by the Traitor Spy books, now’s the perfect time to start as both THE AMBASSADOR’S MISSION (sample) and THE ROGUE (sample) are available in paperback.

Trudi Canavan can be found online at both her website and on twitter.

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The goal was to create a cover that would signal a big book about space, but we also wanted something that reinforced the timelessness of the  storytelling by bringing in mythic symbolism. The cover isn’t a literal snapshot of anything in the book — it’s a collection of symbols that evoke the story.

I don’t want to give away too many of the book’s secrets (some of which are hinted at in the design) but I will explain why there’s a rooster and a sickle silhouetted against the tree.

The two main characters in 2312 are from Mercury and Saturn. You probably remember that in Roman mythology Mercury (like Hermes) wore winged sandals and bore a caduceus. He was also often accompanied by a  rooster (representing the new day.)  Saturn — the god of agriculture, justice and strength –  held a sickle in his left hand and a bundle of wheat in his right. So these two symbols represent two of the key locations in the book. 

There’s also a very simple visual story in the design. As you roll the book over from the front, to the spine, and to the back, you’ll notice the sun going down on each image.

You’ll also notice that the rooster isn’t on the back cover. Why? There are a few possible interpretations for this.  But there’s also a straightforward scientific explanation in keeping with the rigorous logic of the book. Why isn’t the rooster on the back cover?

… It’s nighttime. The rooster has gone to sleep. ;-)

So that’s a bit of background on the design thinking that went into the cover. You can enlarge the cover below to see the sun setting effect.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

This was a really fun project and one (as I always do) I feel lucky to be a part of.

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Why am I writing a brand new epic fantasy series when my long-suffering readers are constantly asking for the next episode in the Three Worlds saga?

I’ve spent two-thirds of my writing life on that 11-book sequence, and by the time I finished the last book, The Destiny of the Dead, in 2008, I was creatively exhausted. I didn’t want to grind out another series, full of reluctance and angst, and let my readers down with a story that wasn’t good enough. When I do write the next episode – the one that finally tells what fate befell Karan and Llian after The Way Between the Worlds – I want to be white-hot with enthusiasm.

Also, at the end of each big fantasy series I like to write something completely different, so as to freshen and rejuvenate my writing.

Inspirations

Three years ago I began The Tainted Realm, a new epic fantasy series set in an entirely new fantasy world. Or at least, a small part of a new world. Most of the world is covered in ice and it’s steadily closing around the last place where people still survive, the island of Hightspall, which is still ice free because it’s so incredibly volcanic. Though the eruptions have been catastrophic in the distant past, and they’re getting worse …

Hightspall, once home to the peace-loving Cythians, was brutally colonised two thousand years ago. The colonists were led by a band of Herovians, a supremacist race whose ancient sourcebook, the Immortal Text, told them that the land was theirs by right. The Herovians did their best to exterminate the Cythians and their culture, and thought they had …

For fifteen hundred years the surviving Cythians have lived underground in Cython, served by their Pale slaves, the descendants of noble Hightspaller children once given as hostages but, incomprehensibly, never ransomed. For all this time, the Cythians’ lives have been shaped by the alchymical books called the Solaces, sorcerously bestowed upon them by an unknown benefactor.

Now Hightspall is struggling under one natural disaster after another and the colonists’ power and magery are failing, as if the land itself is rising up to defeat them. Then the last of the Solaces appears in Cython, the iron book called The Consolation of Vengeance, and the Cythians know that it is time to take back their land.

And only Tali, a furious but terrified slave-girl, stands in their way.

I’ve long been fascinated by the nature of political power, and in particular how the means of seizing or maintaining power can undermine the legitimacy of the realm – it happens all the time in history. In Australia, where I live, the current government is constantly undermined because of the way its previous Prime Minister was overthrown.

Such historical realities were the germ of the idea behind The Tainted Realm – a nation tainted by a deep sense of national guilt about its own origins, and now facing a resurgent enemy it has no idea how to fight.

The Grim Task of Writing – and Rewriting

One of the best things about being a writer is the “next-book dream” – that the story I’m about to write will be original or provocative or funny or life-changing, or non-stop, edge-of-the-seat suspenseful. Sometimes, in moments of authorial madness, I imagine that it can be all of the above. And everything in my life: every snippet of research, every odd idea jotted down or moment of inspiration can go into the pot, get a good stir, simmer for weeks or years, then miraculously and effortlessly flow into the story. Ha!

One of the worst aspects is grinding out the first draft. It usually starts well, and sometimes runs well for as much as eight or ten chapters. Vengeance did. And I was lulled, poor fool that I am. Yes, I thought, this book is going to be a snap.

Then suddenly I was in the writer’s ‘death zone’ where every word came with an effort, every sentence sounded banal, every character was done to death, every situation boring and repetitive. Nothing worked; nothing felt inspired. What had gone wrong? Had I used all my ideas up and burned myself out as a writer? I started to think that I’ll never write anything worth reading again.

Nearly every book I write goes through this stage, a quarter of the way in, but Vengeance was one of the worst because I had so many interruptions from other deadlines – pre-existing commitments for a quartet of humorous children’s books, plus various other stories. Writing is hard work at the best of times, but doubly hard when I’m forced to jump back and forth between different kinds of books.

Also, because really big books present a writing challenge that doesn’t occur with small ones – it’s difficult to keep the whole vast canvas in mind at once. The only way to write such books (for me, anyway) is in long, uninterrupted slabs of time, otherwise every interruption hurls me out of the characters’ heads and I have to laboriously write my way back in again. And no matter how well yesterday’s writing went, each new day presents the same challenge.

As I plodded on, I realised that the story wasn’t working. I’d been too hasty; I hadn’t planned Vengeance properly in the first place. I stopped, tore the draft apart and spent a month or two planning the book anew, in vast detail, then revising the plan over and often until I was excited by the story and could block out many weeks of uninterrupted time to write full bore [see my previous post on Orbitbooks.net].

Then I turned off the internet, told lies to my clients, made excuses to friends and family, and pulled down the blind so I couldn’t see the overgrown lawn, which was already higher than the ride-on mower (we live in the country). I set the alarm clock for an hour before dawn, then wrote all day and late in the night, seven days a week, week after week, never looking back over what I’d written until the draft was complete. For me, this is the only way to short circuit the ‘my writing is crap’ phase, and In this time I made more progress – and better – than in months of plod writing.

The Joy of the Ending

And it worked. One of the greatest satisfactions of writing comes when it’s going well and the story is flowing onto the screen as fast as I can type. The faster I write, the better the story seems to work and the less editing is required afterwards. And once I have a good draft, the rest is easy. Even though I’ll work on the book for another 4-6 months, it’s a dream once I know where I’m going.

I love editing my books, particularly in the later stages. Doing the final draft is always a pleasure. The story has finally come together, it’s tight and dramatic and full of surprises, and as I go through it I see hundreds of places where tiny changes can add so much depth, drama and suspense: a line of dialogue, a character’s sudden terror or insight, reshaping a moment or a setting to heighten the mood.

I never feel my books are quite finished; there’s always an urge to do one more draft, because each draft makes it a little bit better. Thank heavens for deadlines, and editors who say, ‘It’s time!’ as they tear the final draft from my reluctant hands.

And I’ve learned my lesson, by the way. From now on it’s one series at a time.

That’s all very well, readers are bound to say, but what about the Three Worlds? What about the story you’ve been promising to write for a dozen years, the follow-on from The View from the Mirror, tentatively called The Fate of the Children?

It’s coming. Honest it is!

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Sabina and friends set off for Italy hunting for the means to defeat Cain, the father of all vampires and the man who murdered her family. Revenge may finally be within reach unless Cain finds her first. It all comes to a head in this dramatic series conclusion.

Check out this excerpt from BLUE-BLOODED VAMP or start the series from the beginning with RED-HEADED STEPCHILD (US | UK | AUS).

The St. Charles streetcar lumbered its way toward the Garden District like a mourner in a funeral procession. The rocking motion should have soothed me, but I was pretty sure I was beyond ever relaxing again.

Adam sat next me. His warm hand on my leg helped dispel some of the chill. He wore his trademark brown duster and heavy boots. The goatee and muscled frame added to his general air of menace, but the mage’s real danger lay in his ability to wield magical weapons.

In addition to being my partner, he was also my . . . boyfriend? No, too high school. Lover? Ugh. Consort? Meh.

I guess when it came down to it, he was just my mancy, plain and simple. And his presence had become as critical to my equilibrium as gravity or blood.

Read More

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“The sun is always just about to rise.”

What a great first sentence, for a novel in any genre, but particularly one concerned – from start to finish – with possibilities.

More early praise for this remarkable novel:

From SF writer Iain M. Banks:

Intellectually engaged and intensely humane in a way SF rarely is, exuberantly speculative in a way only the best SF can be, this is the work of a writer at or approaching the top of his game.

From thriller writer Robert Crais:

Robinson (Galileo’s Dream) delivers a challenging, compelling masterpiece of science fiction…Robinson’s extraordinary completeness of vision results in a magnificently realized, meticulously detailed future in which social and biological changes keep pace with technological developments.

From Publishers Weekly (starred review):

Robinson’s extraordinary completeness of vision results in a magnificently realized, meticulously detailed future in which social and biological changes keep pace with technological developments.

The book will be available at the end of May (US | UK | AUS) and you can read the entire prologue here.

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A creature that’s genuinely alien would by definition be so far outside our understanding that we’d struggle to find any common points. It’s perfectly possible to write a book about the completely impenetrable mystery of an alien life-form, but then the story becomes about the people observing it, not the aliens themselves. We might like to think we’re very different from other animals on our own planet, but we’re not, and the more that biologists have put aside our cultural biases about humans being unique, the more they’ve found we all have in common — communication, emotion, and even mathematical skill.

So novels are about people, using human reactions as a benchmark for the audience, even if the non-humans view the world very differently. What matters is their internal logic — why they see the world as they do — and the points where they mesh with or clash with us. I approach non-human characters exactly the same was as I do human ones, starting with their environment and, for want of a better word, biology. What kind of creature would live in this world?  What would it need to do to thrive?  What would its needs and fears be? I have to be able to get inside every character’s head and see the world as they see it, because that’s what my stories are –  every character’s thought processes and experiences, seen through their own eyes, not through mine. As in real life, characters see the same situation in very different and often conflicting ways, and aliens and other non-humans are one of the richest ways of observing this.

I’ve created an alien species, the Wess’har, whose evolutionary survival strategy was cooperation rather than competition,  but it didn’t make them remotely friendly to humans. I’m currently writing an AI character who has no corporeal form but is constantly looking for analogues in his own systems to reach a better understanding of the humans he works with. In another series, I have non-humans who are actually very human indeed, in that their worst excesses are in fact mirrors of our own that the humans in the story don’t even recognise.Exploring the relationships between humans and non-humans is always fascinating and it brings me back to the question that ultimately absorbs me – Us and Them, the line that all humans seem to need to draw between what we find kinship with and what we feel justified in exploiting or destroying. What’s us? What’s them? Where’s the line between person and non-person? There aren’t any definitive answers, and I certainly don’t provide any in my books – it’s up to you as the reader to work out what you think.

But without an examination of the common ground between those with apparently impossible differences,  there’s nothing to work with. And, for the audience, there’s nothing to love, fear, admire, laugh at, sympathise with, root for, or generally engage with — because to begin to understand the otherness of a creature, we have to be able to draw on our own perception of the world.

So my AI character tries to explain to his humans that thinking is like breathing for him – not something he does for fun, but because if he doesn’t think, he literally doesn’t exist. The Wess’har make humans cooperate — at gunpoint, not by negotiation. The citizens of Sera in the Gears of War books can only see the Locust as a genocidal enemy — which is what they are, of course — and rarely realise, or find breathing space to reflect, that the Locust only do what humanity does, only much more so.

They’re not like us, you see. Humans are special, unique, different… or maybe not. It takes somebody alien to show us what we really are.

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