Posts Tagged ‘Bridesicle’

Cover Story: LOVE MINUS EIGHTY by WILL McINTOSH

McIntosh_LoveMinusEighty_TPThis is one of those books you start working on, and once it starts gaining momentum, turns into one of your favorite projects. LOVE MINUS EIGHTY (US | UK | AUS) is a shining example of just that. The final product ended up being a combination of a two concepts using the transparent vellum as a way to play off those concepts together. Getting a chance to do a design with vellum paper is a designer dream.

Having such beautiful material to work with only made this project easier. LOVE MINUS EIGHTY is an absolutely wonderful story. Then, pairing this amazing story with the photography by Erin Mulvehill, a Brooklyn based photographer, kicked the package for this book up a whole new level. Her photography is as vivid and beautiful as the text.

The jacket is a subtle interaction between the female in the picture and the reader/viewer. She’s reaching out and pressing this button in order to start something.

I wanted the rest of the design to really take advantage of the vellum. I wanted the reader to explore the book and find all the subtle details.

To really appreciate the book is to hold the book in your hands and roll the book around. When you look at spine and the back cover on the jacket, you see elements from the books cover peaking through. Here are a couple videos showing the cover.

  

We have an amazing team here at Orbit. Our editors really saw the potential and worked with design to create a stunning package. Erin was a joy to work with. Our production team was a great liaisons to the printer keeping track of all the details and making sure everything was addressed that need to be addressed. LOVE MINUS EIGHTY is a great example of everyone just having fun!

It’s time to wake up. LOVE MINUS EIGHTY is available now.

Love-Minus-EightyToday is the worldwide release of LOVE MINUS EIGHTY (US | UK | AUS) by Hugo Award-winning author Will McIntosh. Will is a truly original voice in SF and with this novel he’s given us a terrifying, uplifting, daring, and compulsively readable vision of where our path is leading.

Three hundred years in the future, technology has extended the lives of the rich and attractive decades. The wealthy can arrange to be reanimated multiple times, while in cryogenic dating farms, dead women await lonely suitors to resurrect them and take them home. In this big-hearted novel, the lovelorn navigate a world in which technology has found the outer limits of decency and love.

LOVE MINUS EIGHTY explores a time where we are completely entangled in social media, where life is a performance and privacy has lost all meaning, where our romances and relationships are choreographed in secret, and freedom is found in the ever-shrinking spaces off the grid. A time we can all relate to.

Read a sample, look at the amazing trailer and here is just some of the glowing praise the book has received so far:

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Read a sample from LOVE MINUS EIGHTY

Love-Minus-EightyBased on the Hugo-winning short story, LOVE MINUS EIGHTY (US | UK | AUS) is a haunting and compelling story which Kirkus called “speculative fiction at its most personal and powerful”.

In this full-length novel, Will McIntosh expands upon the complexity of love, loss, and death in a future where advancements in medicine and cryogenics have changed the dating game in a major way. Although the technology may be unfamiliar, the challenges these characters face while struggling with issues of identity, existence, and the search for love ring eerily true for all of us. Read the prologue on io9 or continue on to the first chapter below.

Chapter 1: Rob
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The woman across the aisle from Rob yammered on as the micro-T rose above street level, threading through the Perrydot Building, lit offices buzzing past in a colorful blur. He should have taken his Scamp. Public transport was simpler, but he always seemed to share a compartment with someone who didn’t have the courtesy to subvocalize.

For no reason except that she was annoying the shit out of him, Rob decided to scan her to see how much work she’d had done on her face.

As his fingers danced over the skintight system on his left arm, the woman glanced his way and curled her lip—a microexpression that was there and gone in a flicker. Now he had another reason to dislike this complete stranger. No, his style wasn’t elegant and seamless, and he was tired of being judged by the technological glitterati as lacking some vital core because he only cared about making his system function, not how he looked doing it.

Read more here. 

Video: LOVE MINUS EIGHTY – Will romance survive into the future?

Love-Minus-EightyIf you think dating is hard now, I hate to tell you this, but it’s only going to get worse. Based on the Hugo-winning story, Bridesicle, LOVE MINUS EIGHTY (US | UK | AUS) is a cold and yet stirring look at the search for true love in the future. What is already a difficult task for us now becomes even more complicated in this twisted and poignant story penned by Will McIntosh.

Praise for LOVE MINUS EIGHTY: 
“This is speculative fiction at its most personal and powerful, extrapolating current social and technological trends and exploring how they would affect future people simply trying to live their lives and make their existence matter to someone.” – Kirkus (Starred Review)

Watch the trailer below.

 

HITCHERS by Will McIntosh – be careful who you give a ride to . . .

Hitchers, a chilling supernatural/horror tale about the dead coming back to haunt the living, from the Hugo Award-winning Will McIntosh, author of SOFT APOCALYPSE, Bridesicle and LOVE MINUS EIGHTYThis month Orbit UK digitally released two titles from an award-winning author. I can honestly say that these two novels have affected me so deeply, stayed with me so long, that I just want everyone to read them. EVERYONE. So it’s just darn lucky I work in publishing, meaning I can actually help bring these books to you . . . (And yes, this is the best job in the world).

The Hugo Award-winning Will McIntosh has already talked about his debut science fiction novel SOFT APOCALYPSE here, so today I wanted to focus on his other title released this month – HITCHERS.

HITCHERS is a hard book to define. Part horror story, part contemporary supernatural tale, part post-apocalyptic adventure, part touching tale of grief and redemption. But ALL compulsively readable. Chilling, amusing, sad, creepy, gripping, and deeply, deeply affecting.

To start with, the book has just about my favourite prologue ever. Read it here, and see a brief excerpt below:

“You don’t think she’ll get fired, do you?” Lorena had asked drowsily as we drifted. “I didn’t mean to get her in trouble, even though she was incredibly rude to me.” She was still ruminating about the argument she’d had with our waitress at the Blue Boy Diner. I was ruminating about the argument I’d had with my grandfather that morning, which had far greater implications for our future.

What I didn’t know at the time was that we had no future. We had about twenty-five minutes.

Someone is about to die . . . and this opening sets up one of the most fantastically-crafted and creepy tales you’ll read. In fact, in not too long, a terrorist attack is about to wipe out half the population of Finn Darby’s home city.

With all this destruction around, it’s expected that everyone would be pretty upset. But what isn’t expected is the mass phenomenon that starts to occur after the attack. People start to blurt out voices beyond their control. They appear to be taken over by a sinister unknown force, and can do very little about it. What’s so disturbing is that these voices sound freakishly similar to the voices of the recently deceased, that somehow the dead seem to be “hitching” onto the living . . .

If I say much more then I’ll be giving away too much, but what I really want to get across is how  addictive this book is, how intelligent and multi-layered the writing, how intriguingly unsettling Will McIntosh’s view of the afterlife, how heart-wrenchingly attached you’ll become to his characters.

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Love-Minus-Eighty, a tale of love, loss and technology 100 years in the future,, from the Hugo Award-winning Will McIntosh, author of SOFT APOCALYPSE, HTICHERS and BridesicleSo the moral of the story is – you need to read this (and that’s not even with my publishing hat on).

You also need to look out for LOVE MINUS EIGHTY, which will be a big worldwide release from Orbit next summer.

And you also need to put pressure on Film4 to make sure that they actually make a film out of the rights they optioned for ‘Bridesicle’, the Hugo award-winning short story that LOVE MINUS EIGHTY is based on, because it would make the best, most wonderfully weird, chilling and entertaining movie ever.

Get mobilised people – let’s make this happen.

If there is an apocalypse, it will probably be soft…

Will McIntsosh is the Hugo Award-winning science fiction author of SOFT APOCALYPSE and HITCHERS (both released as digital editions this Thursday in UK and ANZ), as well as the up-and-coming LOVE MINUS EIGHTY (released worldwide in June 2013). Will tells us below about exactly what kind of apocalypse he envisages . . .

Soft Apoclaypse, an apocalyptic science fiction novel from Hugo award-winning author whose other novels include HITCHERS and the up-and-coming LOVE MINUS EIGHTY

I’ve had a longstanding interest in the end of the world. I’m not a True Believer – I don’t have a six month supply of freeze-dried food and a ten year supply of ammo stored in a bunker under my house – but I do believe the likelihood of an apocalypse is greater than most people think.

In most apocalyptic literature, the apocalypses are caused by sudden, surprising, cataclysmic events, like nuclear weapons, meteors, or killer viruses. I wrote a novel about a “soft apocalypse”, where things unravel slowly, over the course of decades. Rather than one event, a series of events cause a long, slow decline, and the world population dies off gradually. If there is an apocalypse, I think this is how it will happen. Here’s why.

A social psychologist named Dan Gilbert pointed out that the human mind has evolved to react primarily to immediate threats, especially if those threats have a clearly identifiable cause, and especially if that cause is an identifiable person or group of people. In other words, we’ve evolved to react to immediate threats perpetrated by human villains. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were exactly that kind of threat. During the cold war, the threat was nuclear annihilation, and the villains were the leaders of the Soviet Union or the United States, depending on where you lived. These sorts of threats scare the hell out of us. We sit up, pay attention, and take action if we can. (more…)

New Short Fiction: THE PERIMETER by Will McIntosh

In 2010, Will McIntosh astonished us with his Hugo Award-winning short story, “Bridesicle,” so we signed him up to write a couple novels for Orbit. But we never lost sight of the fact that McIntosh is a consummate short story writer, and we are thrilled to publish his new one on our Orbit Short Fiction program.

The Perimeter” is set in a human colony on a distant planet; beyond the colony’s borders, strange fauna with sinister agendas lurk. All this creepy tale needs is Rod Serling standing in the foreground, saying “Picture if you will …”

Buy it today at your favorite online retailer!