“The age of kings is dead and I have killed it.” I just get goose bumps every time I see that line gracing the marvelous cover of PROMISE OF BLOOD (US | UK | AUS). It won’t be much longer now before this new epic fantasy series begins hitting shelves. (April 16th!) In the meantime, we’ve just launched The Powder Mage Trilogy Facebook fanpage as way of introducing you to this explosive debut. “Like” the page and you’ll get access to the first chapter of PROMISE OF BLOOD and be eligible to receive other exclusive content as it becomes available.
A little about the book in case this is the first time you’re hearing about it.
It’s a bloody business overthrowing a king… Field Marshal Tamas’ coup against his king sent corrupt aristocrats to the guillotine and brought bread to the starving. But it also provoked war with the Nine Nations, internal attacks by royalist fanatics, and the greedy to scramble for money and power by Tamas’s supposed allies: the Church, workers unions, and mercenary forces.
It’s up to a few… Stretched to his limit, Tamas is relying heavily on his few remaining powder mages, including the embittered Taniel, a brilliant marksman who also happens to be his estranged son, and Adamat, a retired police inspector whose loyalty is being tested by blackmail.
But when gods are involved…
Now, as attacks batter them from within and without, the credulous are whispering about omens of death and destruction. Just old peasant legends about the gods waking to walk the earth. No modern educated man believes that sort of thing. But they should…
Sounds good right? Check it out for yourself by becoming a fan of The Powder Mage Trilogy on Facebook. Believe us, you don’t want to miss a minute of the action.
The short version of this post is that I’m excited to announce the acquisition of David Dalglish’s Shadowdance series! For the formal version, the official press release is below.
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NEW YORK, NY (February 15, 2013) – Today Orbit US & UK announced the international acquisition of the Shadowdance novels – an epic fantasy series by self-publishing success David Dalglish. The author has already digitally published the first four books in the series, all of which have been e-book bestsellers.
Dalglish said of the deal, “I’ve seen the limits of what I can accomplish self-publishing and hope that with Orbit I can reach the next level, both in the quality of my writing and the size of my audience. I’m thrilled with everything Orbit has offered me, and feel this is the next step I need to take in my career.”
The Shadowdance series includes the novels A DANCE OF CLOAKS, A DANCE OF BLADES, and A DANCE OF DEATH. Orbit will launch A DANCE OF CLOAKS in October 2013, and the two sequels will follow in consecutive months in November and December.
A dark, gritty epic fantasy, the Shadowdance series is a character-driven tale of assassins, thieves, and treachery. The series begins when Aaron Felhorn – the son of the greatest assassin of the age – is sent to kill the daughter of a priest, but instead chooses to protect her.
Acquiring editor Devi Pillai said, “We are looking forward to building on David’s self-publishing success and helping to make him a worldwide bestseller in all formats.”
While world-building a city is an exercise in imagination, it’s always preferable, I think, to make sure you’re grounded in at least the basics of reality.
It’s possible to make buildings that can support many, many levels, so why not a city that can do the same? It takes a little extra forethought and planning perhaps. In the case of Mahala, it didn’t start off meaning to grow up, that’s just the way it happened. They ran out of room sideways, so they began building up. While this is fine to start with, just building as and when, at some point things are going to start to collapse under their own weight. Not to mention other considerations, such as “what do you do with all the waste?”.
So at some point in the past, well before the story of Fade to Black starts, a bright mage-king decided it was time to sort it all out. A superstructure was grafted on to what already existed and gave a backbone for more and bigger buildings. As Mahalians are well known for their inventiveness and ingenuity, it wasn’t just any old superstructure – the steel was strengthened to withstand almost anything. Archive details are hazy, but it seems likely that magic was involved in this – in those days magic was involved in everything. The only thing the superstructure couldn’t withstand, so it turned out, was mages. But never mind, the resulting Slump made a handy dumping ground for bodies, especially when space for crypts was at a premium.
A second problem was light – once you go up far enough, light is at a premium at the bottom. That same thoughtful mage-king made sure that even the poor sods far below his sun drenched palace got at least a minute of daylight a day by the cunning installation of lightwells and mirrors to bounce all that light around, and I’m sure everyone was jolly well grateful.
Wink, New Mexico, population 1,243, is a town unlike any other. Sure on the surface everything appears mostly normal, but what town doesn’t have its oddities and urban legends?
Mona Bright wants to make a change in her life – a break from the endless chain of cheap motels and constant wandering. When she discovers that she’s inherited a house in Wink from her deceased mother, Mona decides to take a chance on this small town. But a house is not all that awaits her in Wink and the mysteries she uncovers there are both twisted and strange. “We, like Mona, feel the town closing in on us, trying to take us over. A beautifully written, claustrophobic, and deeply memorable horror novel” wrote Booklist in their review of this book. You do not want to miss this chilling novel from Edgar Award winning author Robert JacksonBennett.
Check out some of the other great reviews that AMERICAN ELSEWHERE has received or read the first chapter here.
“Through sharp empathetic detail, the horrific becomes both achingly poignant and comic; a wholesome diner where no one can ever order just one piece of pie shares space with a harsh alien landscape where a quivering blue imp cowers in terror while pleading for his life. Readers will be captivated from start to finish.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“You’ll want to linger over this riveting and scary novel that straddles sf and suspense to startling effect. This wonderful offering is perfect for fans of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman.” Library Journal (starred review)
“THE TROUPE (US | UK | AUS), Robert Jackson Bennett’s wonderful 2012 novel was one of my favorites of the year, so I had high expectations for American Elsewhere. Luckily it far exceeded those expectations. From the moment I was introduced to Mona Bright, I was hooked.” My Bookish Ways
Rojan Dizon doesn’t mind staying in the shadows, because he’s got things to hide. Things like being a pain-mage, with the forbidden power to draw magic from pain. But he can’t hide for ever.
Because when Rojan stumbles upon the secrets lurking in the depths of the Pit, the fate of Mahala will depend on him using his magic. And unlucky for Rojan – this is going to hurt.
Only two more weeks until FADE TO BLACK (US | UK | AUS) releases online and in stores. Here’s an interview with Francis Knight. Find out how the city of Mahla came to be and more about the magic system employed by Knight’s pain mages.
Have you always known that you wanted to be a writer?
No, I can’t say that I have, probably because it never occurred to me to write down all the stories in my head. I’ve always read, and always made up little stories but it was only when I was struck down with ME that I started to write—I was housebound, and it was almost a defence against day- time TV. So I wrote one of my little stories and found I was addicted to writing.
Did the idea for the Rojan Dizon books come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?
As with most of my ideas, it came a piece at a time, each piece from a different direction. The idea really takes hold when they gang up on me. The theme came from one direction, Jake from another, whereas Rojan came as I was writing. He was kind of an experiment—I’d never writ- ten in first before, and he is polar opposite to me in many areas (though we do share a trait or two), so he was almost a challenge I set myself, to see if I could do it. I splurged out fifty thousand words in a month—at this stage it was a future dystopia world, but then my writers’ group pointed out, quite fairly, that I am horrible at making up future tech. One member suggested, “Why not make it a dark fantasy?” which kind of fed into a separate idea I’d had for a world where magic lived with technology. I dabbled a bit then left it on my hard drive for a few years, tinkering with it every now and again in between other projects. It was only when I decided to actually knuckle down and do something with it, when I started with the idea of pain magic in fact, that it really came to life. It was waiting for me to have the right idea to make it work, I think.
We’ve just released BEDLAM, where Ross Baker, an overworked scientist from Scotland, is shocked to wake up inside what seems to be one of his childhood favourite computer games – a mad, violent world where cyborgs fight humans and skies are filled with explosive space battles. How did he get there, and how will he ever escape? Read Christopher Brookmyre’s BEDLAM (UK|ANZ) to find out!
We asked Chris about the moments in his gaming history that shocked him, where he had felt a little like Ross, thrust into a hyper-real world he’d never experienced before, and this is what he had to say . . .
Game-changers: Five era-defining moments in my personal playing history:
Up until this point, the games I played had taken place in environments contained within a single screen, which had to be completed before the player was rewarded with access to the next one. MANIC MINER, adored though it was, had followed this model, meaning that players became grindingly over-familiar with the early levels, traversing them over and over again in their quest to glimpse virgin territory, usually for about three seconds before being killed. MANIC MINER’S legendary sequel allowed the player to roam free, exploring anywhere their split-second timing allowed them to reach. Willy’s mansion consequently felt like a true place rather than a sequence of screens, even if it didn’t quite geometrically add up.
Half-Life: “When I looked down, spotting that a grenade had been lobbed over and landed at my feet, I realised things were never going to be the same.”
An early wonder of the Commodore Amiga, POPULOUS effectively created the genre of the ‘god game’. For the first time, instead of navigating an environment, the player could shape it: raising the land, flattening mountains, raining down vulcanism and, of course, being worshipped by your people.
Its story was back-of-a-fag-packet stuff and its visual design was a confused mismatch, but none of that mattered much when you were flying through the air, courtesy of your own splash-damage, blazing death upon your enemies below while you followed the graceful arc of your rocket jump. DOOM gave us a convincing first-person perspective, but QUAKE was the first game to be truly three-dimensional, memorably showcasing its physics early in the game with the low-gravity secret level, Ziggurat Vertigo.
By the late Nineties, the AI in even the most advanced games meant that enemies seldom bothered following you out of a room. They would wait, patiently and politely, for you to come back and resume hostilities. I recall following the usual protocol the first time I encountered the enemy soldiers in the Black Mesa Complex: quickly ducking behind a stack of crates while I readied myself for an offensive. When I heard a clunk and looked down, spotting that a grenade had been lobbed over and landed at my feet, I realised things were never going to be the same.
Contrary to the impressions given by years of moral panic and tabloid hysteria, I’d never thought a video game could be genuinely frightening. My own imagination imbued various games with atmosphere over the years, and I still remember a few well-designed jump-scares in QUAKE 2, but the idea of being terrified by sprites, pixels and polygons was absurd. Then came DOOM 3, with its constant steam-choked darkness, penetrable only by a flashlight which you had to hold instead of a gun. I recall playing the game late at night with the lights off and my headphones on, but not for long. I think there are still stains on the chair.
Doom 3 – “A flashlight? This is meant to be the future, where the frak’s my night-vision?”
This week sees the release of THE COLDEST WAR (UK | ANZ) , the second novel in Ian Tregillis’s landmark series, the Milkweed Triptych. The trilogy began with BITTER SEEDS (UK | ANZ) and concludes with the forthcoming NECESSARY EVIL (UK | ANZ).
These novels feature a secret history of Twentieth Century conflicts in which scientifically-enhanced superhumans and dark magic collide. The result is described by Fantasy Faction as ‘oh-so compelling, fascinating and frighteningly convincing’ and by Cory Doctorow as, ‘some of the best – and most exciting – alternate history I’ve read. Bravo.’
It’s possible to draw a few parallels between the themes in the Milkweed novels and Charles Stross’s highly popular Laundry Files (including the recent THE APOCALYPSE CODEX – UK | ANZ) – a series of science fiction spy thrillers featuring Bob Howard, once an IT geek, now a field agent working for a British government agency dealing with occult threats. They’re what SFX calls ‘beautifully handled, believable and well envisioned – a highly enjoyable bit of spy-fi.’
For that reason we were really interested to hear these two exceptionally clever Orbit authors in conversation about their series. The results are below!
Ian: In an afterword to THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES (“Inside the Fear Factory”) you mention that while writing the first Laundry novel you were advised to avoidTim Powers’s novel DECLARE. And that later you were made aware of the Delta Green supplement to The Call of Cthulhu RPG, which again resides in a similar neighborhood.
(After BITTER SEEDS debuted, people assumed I had been influenced by DECLARE, Delta Green, *and* the Laundry novels! But, like you with DECLARE, I wanted to avoid cross-contamination. So I didn’t dive into THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES until after I turned in THE COLDEST WAR, at which point I was 2/3 through the Milkweed trilogy and the story was on a ballistic trajectory.)
But of course even Powers wasn’t the first to marry espionage and the occult –Dennis Wheatley’s novel THEY USED DARK FORCES first appeared in 1964, and Katherine Kurtz‘s LAMMAS NIGHT was published in 1983, as just two examples.
In the above-mentioned afterword, you make a strong case for why it’s natural to blend horror, the occult, and espionage. So is this an idea that’s continually bubbling into the aether to be rediscovered by other writers? Or have we reached the point where we’re having a conversation within an actual subgenre?
Charlie: It is indeed an actual subgenre! Or maybe a sub-subgenre: a corner of that section of urban fantasy that is preoccupied with the interaction between agents of the state and the occult. (more…)
Infamous Scottish crime writer Christopher Brookmyre launches into the world of science fiction today with BEDLAM (UK|ANZ) – a first person shooter of a novel – a thought-provoking, funny look at what it really means to be human in the 21st Century. Want to know more? Here’s what everyone’s saying about it!
“A fascinating, fast-paced but thoughtful blend of science fiction and techno-thriller” – Iain M. Banks
“Funny jokes, characters you can empathise with and devastatingly employed swearwords.” – Ed Byrne
“It’s warm, funny, excellently violent and highly recommended. Game on.” – SCIFI NOW
“Brookmyre hits another high score with this brilliant, fast-paced nightmare.” – Charles Stross
PRISON OR PLAYGROUND?
Ross Baker is an overworked and underpaid scientist developing medical technology for corporate giants Neurosphere, but he’d rather be playing computer games than dealing with his nightmare boss or slacker co-workers.
One rainy Monday morning he volunteers as a test candidate for the new tech – anything to get out of the office for a few hours. But when he gets out of the scanner he discovers he’s not only escaped the office, but possibly escaped real life for good. He finds himself trapped in Starfire – the violent sci-fi video game he spent his teenage years playing – with no explanation, no back-up and most terrifyingly, no way out.
Would it be your ultimate fantasy to enter the world of a video game? Or would it be your worst nightmare? This is where you find out if you’re in a prison or a playground.
This is BEDLAM.
Read an extract on the Orbit website, check out Chris’s website or follow Chris on twitter at @cbrookmyre. And if you still need more Christopher Brookmyre in your life, keep checking the BEDLAM tag on the blog, as we’ve got some fantastic guestposts lined up this month!
Art first glance Wink, New Mexico is a seemingly normal town except that you won’t’ find it on any map. You see Wink should not exist, but that is not the strangest thing you’ll find there when you crack open AMERICAN ELSEWHERE (US | UK | AUS) – the latest novel from Edgar Award winning author Robert JacksonBennett.
Check out Publishers Weekly starred review and read the first chapter of this riveting novel.
“Bennett (The Troupe) gives the idealized image of the American dream a pan-dimensional twist with this alien invasion tale, part Bradbury and part L’Engle with a dash of Edward Scissorhands…Through sharp empathetic detail, the horrific becomes both achingly poignant and comic; a wholesome diner where no one can ever order just one piece of pie shares space with a harsh alien landscape where a quivering blue imp cowers in terror while pleading for his life. Readers will be captivated from start to finish.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Chapter One
Even though it is a fairly cool night, Norris is sweating abundantly. The sweat leaks out of his temples and the top of his skull and runs down his cheeks to pool around his collarbones. He feels little trickles weaving down his arms to soak into the elbows and wrists of his shirt. The entire car now has a saline reek, like a locker room.
Norris is sitting in the driver’s seat with the car running, and for the past twenty minutes he’s been debating whether leaving the car running was a good idea or not. He’s made several mental charts of pros and cons and probabilities, and overall he thinks it was a good idea: the odds that someone will notice the sound of a car idling on this neighborhood lane, and check it out and sense something suspicious, feel fairly low; whereas the odds of him fumbling with the ignition or the clutch if he needs to start the car quickly seem very, very high right now. He is so convinced of his own impending clumsiness that he hasn’t even dared to take his hands off the steering wheel. He is gripping it so hard and his palms are so sweaty that he doesn’t know if he could remove them if he tried. Suction, he thinks. I’m stuck here forever, no matter who notices what.
He’s not sure why he’s so worried about being noticed. No one lives in the neighboring houses. Though it is not posted anywhere—in any visual manner, that is—this part of town is not open to the public. There is only one resident on this street.
Norris leans forward in his seat to reexamine the house. He is parked right before its front walk. Behind the car is a small, neat gravel driveway that breaks off from the paved road and curves down the slope to a massive garage. The house itself is very, very big, but its size is mostly hidden behind the Englemann spruces; one can make out only hints of pristine white wooden siding, sprawling lantana, perfectly draped windows, and clean red-brick walls. And there, at the end of the front walk, is a modest, inviting front door with a coat of bright red paint and a cheery bronze handle.
It is a flawless house, really, a dream house. It is a dream house not only in the sense that anyone would dream of living there; rather, it is so perfect that a house like this could exist only in a dream.
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“The age of kings is dead and I have killed it.” I just get goose bumps every time I see that line gracing the marvelous cover of PROMISE OF BLOOD (US | UK | AUS). It won’t be much longer now before this new epic fantasy series begins hitting shelves. (April 16th!) In the meantime, we’ve just launched The Powder Mage Trilogy Facebook fanpage as way of introducing you to this explosive debut. “Like” the page and you’ll get access to the first chapter of PROMISE OF BLOOD and be eligible to receive other exclusive content as it becomes available.
