Posts Tagged ‘Charles Stross’

Cover Launch: QUANTUM OF NIGHTMARES by Charles Stross

A new adventure begins, set in the bestselling world of the Laundry Files . . .

We’re thrilled to reveal the cover for QUANTUM OF NIGHTMARES, the second book in the New Management series by Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross:

Cover for Quantum of Nightmares by Charles Stross. Depicts black shadowed figures walking up staircases towards bright green doors. Large tentacles are reaching out from the background.

Design by Crush Creative

Publishing in hardback in January 2022, QUANTUM OF NIGHTMARES is available for pre-order now.

Read on for a preview of what’s to come:

It’s a brave new Britain under the New Management. The Prime Minister is an eldritch god of unimaginable power. Crime is plummeting as almost every offense is punishable by death. And everywhere you look, there are people with strange powers, some of which they can control, and some, not so much.

Hyper-organised and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to the death. Now she’s in charge of the Bigge Corporation, just in time to discover the lethal trap Rupert set for her long ago . . .

Wendy Deere is investigating unauthorised supernatural shenanigans. She swore to herself she wouldn’t again get entangled with Eve Starkey’s bohemian brother Imp and his crew of transhuman misfits. Yeah, right.

Mary Macandless has powers of her own. Right now she’s pretending to be a nanny in order to kidnap the children of a pair of famous, Government-authorised adepts. These children have powers of their own, and Mary Macandless is in way over her head.

All of these stories will come together, with world-bending results . . .

Praise for the Laundry Files:

‘Brilliantly disturbing and funny at the same time’ Ben Aaronovitch

‘Stross at the top of his game – which is to say, few do it better’ Kirkus

‘Alternately chilling and hilarious’ Publishers Weekly

‘Ferociously enjoyable’ SFX

Cover Launch: DEAD LIES DREAMING by Charles Stross

A new adventure begins in the world of the Laundry Files . . . 

DEAD LIES DREAMING (UK|ANZ), a brand new novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross, is out in October 2020. But if you can’t wait that long take a look at the spectacular – or perhaps tentacular – cover design below and read on for a taste of what’s in store.

The cover for Dead Lies Dreaming

In a world where magic has gone mainstream, a policewoman and a group of petty criminals are pulled into a heist to find a forbidden book of spells that should never have been opened. 

Praise for the Laundry Files:

‘Brilliantly disturbing and funny at the same time’ Ben Aaronovitch

‘Stross at the top of his game – which is to say, few do it better’ Kirkus

‘Alternately chilling and hilarious’ Publishers Weekly

‘Ferociously enjoyable’ SFX

Cover design by Crush Creative.

THE STONE SKY wins the 2018 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel

The winners of the 2018 Locus Awards were announced this weekend and we’re happy to announce that THE STONE SKY by N. K. Jemisin [US | UK | ANZ] won for Best Fantasy Novel!

There was a strong lineup of nominees for the Best Fantasy award this year, including Orbit’s own JADE CITY by Fonda Lee [US | UK | ANZ], and THE DELIRIUM BRIEF by Charles Stross [UK | ANZ]. Orbit was also represented in other categories: PERSEPOLIS RISING by James S. A. Corey [US | UK | ANZ], PROVENANCE by Ann Leckie [US | UK | ANZ], and NEW YORK 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson [US | UK | ANZ] were nominated for Best Science Fiction, and AUTONOMOUS by Annalee Newitz [UK | ANZ] was nominated for Best First Novel.

You can find the full list of nominees and winners here.

Congratulations to all the nominees and to N. K. Jemisin for her win!

Cover Launch: The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

Feast your eyes on the latest Charles Stross cover, with design by Crush Creative and Ellen Rockell. THE LABYRINTH INDEX, coming later this year, is the ninth novel in The Laundry Files, where spy thrillers meet the supernatural . . .

Britain is under New Management. The disbanding of the Laundry – the British espionage agency that deals with supernatural threats, has culminated in the unthinkable – an elder god in residence in 10 Downing Street.
But in true ‘the enemy of my enemy’ fashion, Mhairi Murphy finds herself working with His Excellency Nylarlathotep on foreign policy – there are worse things, it seems, than an elder god in power, and they lie in deepest, darkest America.

A thousand-mile-wide storm system has blanketed the midwest, and the president is nowhere to be found – Mhari must lead a task force of disgraced Laundry personnel into the storm front to discover the truth. But working for an elder god is never easy, and as the stakes rise, Mhari will soon question exactly where her loyalties really lie.

Orbit’s Urban Fantasy Covergram

Looking to recommend or discover the perfect urban fantasy book to keep you warm through the long winter months? Orbit has you covered with our covergram. Featuring a range of bestselling authors alongside newcomers to the genre, we’ve dissected the world of urban fantasy and re-assembled it so every reader can find their next book.

Click on the image below to see a full size version.

Urban Fantasy Covergram

 

If you can’t decide and would like a little bit of everything, try Charlie Fletcher’s delightfully dark adventure set in Victorian London, THE OVERSIGHT (US|UK |ANZ), which has garnered the praise ‘exciting, exhilarating, scary and moving in equal measure . .  . this feels like the start of something amazing’ from Mike Carey, and Cory Doctorow called ‘a dark and glinting book . . . told in a kind of compelling and hypnotic poesie that I just lapped up’.  The second book in the series, THE PARADOX (US|UK|ANZ) is out in paperback this month.

Cover Launch: The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross

Coming July 2015, THE ANNIHILATION SCORE is the latest science fiction thriller from Charles Stross, in a series where British spies take on the supernatural.

The Cover for Charles Stross's latest science fiction spy thriller, The Annihilation Score, showing a London scene and two spies pointing guns at each other, with a glowing violin pattern overlaying the picture.

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER . . .

Dr Mo O’Brien is an intelligence agent at the top secret government agency known as ‘the Laundry’. When occult powers threaten the realm, they’ll be there to clean up the mess – and deal with the witnesses.

The Laundry is recovering from a devastating attack and when average citizens all over the country start to develop supernatural powers, the police are called in to help. Mo is appointed as official police liaison, but in between dealing with police bureaucracy, superpowered members of the public and disgruntled politicians, Mo discovers to her horror that she can no longer rely on her marriage, nor on the weapon that has been at her side for eight years of undercover work, the possessed violin known as ‘Lecter’.

If this wasn’t bad enough, a mysterious figure known as Dr Freudstein is committing heists and sending increasingly threatening messages to the police. Who is Freudstein and what is he planning?

The Laundry Files by Charles Stross

Many thanks to crushed.co.uk and Sophie Burdess for their beautiful cover!

Ken MacLeod on Scotland in Science Fiction

Ken MacLeod’s DESCENT is an alien abduction story for the twenty-first century set in Scotland’s near-future, a novel about what happens when conspiracy theorists take on Big Brother. It comes out in paperback this week, and we asked Ken what is is about Scotland that brings him, and other writers, back to it as a science fiction setting again and again.

Two months ago, Scotland was in what Charles Stross called ‘The Scottish Political Singularity’. The referendum made the entire political future so uncertain that even planning a near-future novel set in the UK had become impossible – not least because you couldn’t be sure there would still be a UK to set it in.

My novel Descent, just out in paperback, was written before the result looked close, but I was careful to leave the outcome of the then future referendum open to interpretation. In earlier novels such as The Night Sessions and Intrusion, I’ve also left it up to the reader to decide if the future Scotlands described are independent or not.

Preparing for a recent discussion on ‘Imagining Future Scotlands’ I realised that the majority of my novels are at least partly set in Scotland, or have protagonists whose sometimes far-flung adventures begin in Scotland. And it made me wonder why there haven’t been more. With its sharply varied landscape, turbulent history, and the complex, cross-cutting divisions of national and personal character which Scottish literature has so often explored, Scotland may inspire writers of SF, but as a location it features more often in fantasy.

The result is that there have been many Scottish writers of SF – including Orbit’s very own Michael Cobley, Charles Stross, and the late and much missed Iain M. Banks – but not many SF novels have been set in Scotland. Of those that are, quite a few are written from outside the genre, such as Michel Faber’s Under the Skin. Flying even more cleverly under the genre radar, Christopher Brookmyre has been writing what amounts to an alternate or secret history of contemporary Scotland – some of them, such as Pandaemonium, with SF or fantasy elements – for two decades. And within the genre, there are some well-regarded novels I haven’t read, notably Chris Boyce’s Brainfix. I can’t help feeling I’ve missed stacks of obvious books. If so, I look forward to being corrected in the comments.

Let’s start with straight, unarguable genre SF.

Halting State by Charles Stross is a police procedural set in a near-future independent Scottish republic. Unlike many fictional detectives, the heroine is married, and her wife understands her. The multi-viewpoint second-person narration, though disorienting at first, soon becomes transparent – you could say you get used to it – and apt for a novel set partly in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. From the opening shots of a bank robbery in virtual reality, the story has you under arrest and briskly frogmarched along.

Time-Slip by Graham Dunstan Martin is a much grimmer vision of a future Scotland. Decades after a nuclear war, the Scottish Kirk has resumed its dour dominance of society. Our sympathy for the hero, a young heretic who founds a new religious movement on his rediscovery of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, fades as the implications sink in. It’s a thought-through and engaging novel, sadly out of print, but easily available secondhand.

Not quite SF, but set in a (then) future with a deft touch or two of technological extrapolation, the political thriller Scotch on the Rocks is an old-school Tory take on an armed insurrection for Scottish independence. Sex and violence are never far away. Glasgow gangs and Moscow gold play a bit part behind the scenes. Given that it was written by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond, this isn’t surprising. What is surprising is the sharpness of its insight into the issues that drive the independence movement, from cultural alienation through economic decline to nukes on the Clyde. The speeches, give or take the odd detail, could have been delivered this September.

Moving to fantasy, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark is often rightly cited as a landmark in Scottish literature. It was an avowed influence on Iain Banks’s The Bridge, the closest Iain ever came to writing SF set in Scotland. But my own favourite of Gray’s novels is Poor Things, a Scottish revisioning of Frankenstein that confronts the poor creature with the harsh self-confidence of the Victorian age and that age with her outraged innocence.

Michael Scott Rohan’s science-fantasy novel Chase the Morning starts in Scotland – or at least in a port very like Leith – and casts off for worlds unknown on an endless ocean, full of adventure and romance. Its striking image of the Spiral, in which ships magically sail upward beyond the horizon to farther seas in the sky, was inspired by the vista down the Firth of Forth. On some evenings looking down the Firth you can’t tell where the sea ends and the sky begins, or what’s a cloud and what’s an island. Like all good science fiction and fantasy, this novel and its sequels make us see the real world in a different light.

Finally, we shouldn’t forget Scotland’s abiding presence in the wider field: Victor Frankenstein built the mate for his creature on a remote Orkney island; the Mars mission that opens Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land had as its prime contractor the University of Edinburgh; and Star Trek‘s engineer Scotty was born in Linlithgow . . . a few miles from Scotland’s notorious UFO hotspot, Bonnybridge.

Goodreads Choice Awards: the Semi-Finals

The semi-final round of voting for the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards is now open until 15 November, and we have ever more titles in this round than in the opening round! Get your votes in for your favourite fantasy, science fiction and horror books of 2014.

 

Fantasy – VOTE NOW

THE BROKEN EYE by Brent Weeks (UK | US |AUS)

SKIN GAME by Jim Butcher (UK | AUS)

NIGHT BROKEN by Patricia Briggs (UK | AUS)

SHATTERED by Kevin Hearne (UK | AUS)

TOWER LORD by Anthony Ryan (UK | AUS)

THE BROKEN EYE by Brent Weeks   SKIN GAME by Jim Butcher   NIGHT BROKEN   SHATTERED, the seventh Iron Druid book from Kevin Hearne, an urban fantasy series starting with Hounded   Tower Lord by Anthony Ryan

 

Science Fiction – VOTE NOW

CIBOLA BURN by James S. A. Corey (UK | US |AUS)

ANCILLARY SWORD by Ann Leckie (UK | US |AUS)

THE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST by Claire North (UK | US |AUS)

HEAVEN’S QUEEN by Rachel Bach (UK | US |AUS)

EARTH AWAKENS by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston (UK | AUS)

Corey_CibolaBurn_HC   Leckie_AncillarySword_TPB   The cover for The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, a Richard and Judy Book Club 2014 pick   HEAVEN'S QUEEN by Rachel Bach   Earth Awakens, book three of The First Formic War series by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston - a prequel series to Ender's Game

 

Horror – VOTE NOW

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS by M. R. Carey (UK | US |AUS)

THE RHESUS CHART by Charles Stross (UK | AUS)

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey   THE RHESUS CHART by Charles Stross

 

Goodreads Choice Awards: The Opening Round

The initial round of voting for the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards is open! Below are the selection of Orbit titles that we’re really proud to see have made the list.

Fantasy – VOTE NOW

THE BROKEN EYE by Brent Weeks (UK | US |AUS)

SKIN GAME by Jim Butcher (UK | AUS)

NIGHT BROKEN by Patricia Briggs (UK | AUS)

THE BROKEN EYE by Brent Weeks   SKIN GAME by Jim Butcher   NIGHT BROKEN

 

Science Fiction – VOTE NOW

CIBOLA BURN by James S. A. Corey (UK | US |AUS)

ANCILLARY SWORD by Ann Leckie (UK | US |AUS)

THE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST by Claire North (UK | US |AUS)

HEAVEN’S QUEEN by Rachel Bach (UK | US |AUS)

Corey_CibolaBurn_HC   Leckie_AncillarySword_TPB   The cover for The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, a Richard and Judy Book Club 2014 pick   HEAVEN'S QUEEN by Rachel Bach

 

Horror – VOTE NOW

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS by M. R. Carey (UK | US |AUS)

THE RHESUS CHART by Charles Stross (UK | AUS)

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey   THE RHESUS CHART by Charles Stross

 

If your favourite Orbit title of 2014 isn’t listed, you can also still enter a write-in vote for it at the bottom of each genre page.

From the Editor: Why I love Hugo Award-nominated NEPTUNE’S BROOD

Charlie Stross is a genius. If you ever get the chance to talk to him, you’ll find the ideas flying so thick and fast that you have to shift your brain into a higher gear just to keep up. You’ll also come away from the conversation with several new ideas about how you’re going to change the world and an armful of science fiction reading recommendations (for other writers’ work, not his own, because he’s just that kind of guy).

You know those moving walkways you get in airports? Where you’re walking down them, but the ground is also moving underneath your feet so that when you jump off at the end just walking at normal speed is like hitting a wall, smack, bang, and everything is moving at normal speed again, too slow?

Talking to Charlie, or reading his books, is like running down that walkway.

Now his books might not be for everyone – I understand some people (not us) prefer life in the slow lane, that some readers just can’t handle this much raw plot, character and awesome things happening, that they want something a bit more sedate. I imagine these are also the kind of people who prefer to cook without spices, who like bland TV and even blander books, because anything else might be a bit too much excitement.

But that’s why I’m so pleased by Charlie’s continued success at the Hugo awards. You love Charlie’s work, you’ve supported him at these awards again and again. This is an author who has broken records for the number of consecutive times one can be shortlisted for the Hugo Best Novel. His sixth shortlisting broke the record. NEPTUNE’S BROOD, in the 2014 awards, is his seventh.

NEPTUNE’S BROOD has mermaids, communist squid, roving gangs of accountant-privateers, zombies, spacefaring clergymembers, superhuman assassins, murder, backstabbing, family feuds and an incredibly intricate and utterly unprecedented financial con that could only occur in a universe with no faster-than-light travel.

If you’d told me before I edited NEPTUNE’S BROOD that something including all those elements would become one of my favourite novels, I might have laughed. How could one book fit so much in it? Now, I would tell you that ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.’

On top of the squid and the mermaids and the banking, NEPTUNE’S BROOD is also a genuinely moving story about a woman searching for her lost sister. The fact that that sister is actually a copy of her grown in a vat, and both characters are metahumans – the race artificially grown to replace humans when we proved too fragile for the trials of space travel – is by the by.

NEPTUNE’S BROOD is, according to io9, ‘the perfect book for our times’.

SFX call it ‘a thoroughly entertaining sci-fi mind-expander from one of the genre’s most reliable imaginations’, and SF legend Alastair Reynolds says ‘NEPTUNE’S BROOD is fast-paced and imaginative, with fascinating ideas about the economics of an interstellar society constrained by real physics. Above all else, though, it’s just terrific fun’.

But don’t listen to them. Read it yourself, and find out how a space opera with no faster-than-light travel can be the fastest, wildest ride of your life.

NEPTUNE’S BROOD, along with our other Hugo nominees, is currently available at a celebratory price of just £1.99 in the UK. Go, read, enjoy.