Archive for March, 2007

Pressing buttons

Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel is published by Orbit in the UK next week, but has begun to hit bookstores. There’s a great buzz building around it: in a five star review, The Bookbag says:

“The SF elements . . . are subtle and muted, but undeniably there. The feel of the book, however, is that of a tense spy thriller. Cleverly too, although violence is all around, we don’t meet much of it head on. It’s all in the background, adding to a feeling of threat and menace in a world that has become so immersed in power games and double bluffs it lacks even the semblance of a moral framework on which to stand. The Execution Channel was easy to read and difficult to think about. And it pressed every single one of my buttons.”

You can read the rest of the review here. More information about the UK edition of The Execution Channel is available here.

Welcome!

Why an Orbit blog? The truth is that we’ve got a general idea of why we’re doing this, but we haven’t progressed very far beyond the general idea stage. The general idea is this:

  1. The posts you’ll read here will be written by anybody and everybody who works for Orbit, in our London and New York offices — so we’re expecting there to be a wide variety of posts, both in terms of content and style. Very few mainstream publishers have followed this route, but we think it’s right for the SF & Fantasy field, which is increasingly a global conversation.
  2. Our posts will give you an insight into what goes on at an SF publisher’s office. Not just what we do, but what we talk about and what we think about — sometimes small things, and sometimes the bigger issues that affect the entire community.
  3. Our posts should also help you to keep in touch with what’s going on in our corner of the SF world — what our authors are getting up to, news, events, reviews, articles and so on.
  4. Finally, our posts should be fun for us to write and for you to read.

So, without further ado, let’s get on with it!