CHANGES by Jim Butcher: A Dresden Files reread

Mark Yon has been a reviewer and web administrator at SFFWorld, one of the world’s biggest genre forum sites, for nearly ten years. He has also been on the David Gemmell Awards organisation committee for the last two years. In this series of rereads, Mark will guide us below through the whole of Jim Butcher’s fabulous Dresden Files series as we count down to the new hardback Ghost Story at the end of July.
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Changes: a Dresden Files novel by Jim Butcher.

Here is, as the title would suggest, where everything changes. This is the Dresden equivalent of Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, or of the Battle of Minas Tirith. This is one where Jim rips up what has gone before, and makes, in many ways, a fresh start. Many of our previous reference points are removed here — this book really does transform things in the Dresden world.

As I’ve said before, the Dresden books have a reputation of starting with a bang. This one is pretty outstanding:
‘I answered the phone, no big deal, until I heard the message: ‘They’ve taken our daughter.’

The phone call is from Susan Rodriguez, his ex-girlfriend who was turned into a vampire by the Red Court back in Death Masks. Harry is told about the daughter he didn’t know, Maggie, kept in secret from Harry for her protection. And then that Arianna Ortega, Duchess of the Red Court, has found out about her, kidnapped her and plans to use Maggie against Harry. Arianna is out for revenge following the death of her husband, an action precipitated by Harry.

Over the next three days Harry’s task, with Susan and half-vampire Martin, is to find his daughter and save her from Queen Arianna and the evil vampires!

Simple? Well, when Arianna initiates the kidnapping, she also simultaneously proposes a peace settlement between the vampire Red Court and the Wizards: something that would be greatly desired by the exhausted Wizard Council. Thus given a choice of saving Harry’s daughter or ending the war, the Wizards’ activities seem most concerned with ending the War – exactly Arianna’s point. (more…)

San Diego Comic Con!

It’s here – the annual crush of awesome that is San Diego Comic Con. This year Orbit is hunkering down in booth #1116, right across from the fabulous Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore. After the jump you’ll find some Orbit events and programs you won’t want to miss.  And be sure to come by the Orbit booth #1116 to say hello – we’ve got lots of fun stuff to share!
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A look behind the cover art of THE KEY TO CREATION

THE KEY TO CREATION has now been released in trade paperback, completing Kevin J. Anderson’s TERRA INCOGNITA trilogy – which in Kevin’s own words is “A complex and sprawling tale of sailing ships and sea monsters, intrepid explorers voyaging to uncharted lands, and a religious war that has thrown two continents against each other.”

If that doesn’t sound extremely cool, we don’t know what does. If you’re itching for some exciting swords-and-sails action, then rejoice because the first two books in the trilogy – THE EDGE OF THE WORLD and THE MAP OF ALL THINGS – are readily available in mass market paperback. So if you like your sea monsters, quite frankly you’ve got no excuse.

To mark the completion of the TERRA INCOGNITA trilogy, we asked cover artist Lee Gibbons a few questions about the wonderful illustrations he came up with for the books.

Can you tell us a little about the way you approached illustrating the TERRA INCOGNITA series? Were there any particular influences that you drew upon?

When I was first commissioned to produce these illustrations, Peter Cotton the designer had already decided on the layout he wanted: two elements separated by the type. It was always planned to have a scene at the bottom of the page and a close up of a piece of shiny navigational equipment at the top, linked by the map in the background.

Two things I had to bear in mind from the brief were that this had to appeal to both the UK and US markets and also to downplay the fantasy elements in the maritime scene, instead emphasising exploration and adventure. To this end, I drew on the influence of Victorian maritime paintings, which I have always had a soft spot for.

By the time we arrived at book two things had got a bit free and easy as regards the fantasy content! I was keen to have the map background continue across the three covers, but have to admit that with the type in place you would be hard pressed to notice that on the final printed covers. (more…)

In the Beginning Was the Word

Have you heard the joke about the Hollywood starlet who was so dumb she slept with the writer?

Another favourite of mine is the joke about the writer who died and was offered the option of going to Heaven or to Hell.  So he went to Hell, escorted by St Peter, and was shown a room full of writers chained to desks, being beaten and whipped and abused by demons. He didn’t fancy that, so he went to Heaven and was shown a room full of writers in chains, being beaten and whipped and abused etc. The writer, baffled, asked what actually was the difference between the two places? And St Peter said, “In Heaven, the writers all have book deals.”

I love writer jokes because they’re all true;  writers are crazy people who only write because they have to.

In the course of my career I’ve met a lot of writers.  Almost all of them nice, a couple not so nice.  I’ve worked with theatre writers and movie writers, including one Oscar winner (“The British are coming!”), and as a writer myself I’ve written prime time TV cop shows, thrillers, movies (2, as co-writer), and a pretty wide variety of radio plays, as well as writing SF for those nice people in Orbit.  [NB the software on this site is programmed to automatically amend  the words ‘my bloody publishers’ to ‘those nice people at Orbit’ – clever, huh?]

Writers, you’ll be interested to hear, are all the same, no matter what medium they write for.  We’re all, in other words, wonderful, warm-hearted, generous, and totally obsessed with the ideas in our own brains.  We’re also inclined to carp; Kieran Prendeville once told me that the apposite collective noun is a ‘whinge’ of writers. (more…)

Swearing, Sex and Fantasy Ale

“Phat off, you molking bucket of steaming clang!” Right. So what’s that all about, then?

My first fantasy novel Dusk (published by Bantam in the USA, and winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel 2007), polarised opinion. I think that’s a good thing – I’d rather have people love or hate my books, as opposed to being mostly indifferent. And some of the criticism about the book focussed on the sex and swearing it contained. It was suggested that, because it was a fantasy, I should have thought up new swearwords. But I argued that if that were the case, I’d also have to think up new words for hill, and saddle, and kidney.

I stick by that now, and though Echo City is, of course, a purely imaginary world, it’s inhabited by very human characters. A fantasy novel needs distinctly human characters to make it work. So they drink Mino Mont ale and, if they can afford/steal it, Marcellan wine; they swear when they’re angry or scared; and they have sex. Indeed, it’s not glib to say that there’s a hand-job in the novel that is a pivotal plot-point. So watch out for that one when you’re reading it.

I love swearing. It’s effective in real life and in my writing, and can be cathartic, a venting of angry steam. I love ale – dark, light, summer ales, heavy winter warmers. And I love … well, doesn’t everyone?

So in order to create characters that feel human to the human readers of Echo City, I wanted them to come across as people you could almost know. Admittedly, some of the inhabitants of Echo City wouldn’t look at home anywhere we know. But I’d really like to sit down for a beer with Nadielle, and Malia, and Gorham. We’d put the worlds to rights, both mine and theirs. I’d talk about “f**king phone hackers”, and they’d talk about “bastard border spites and Marcellans”. And in ale and swearing, we’d find a common language.

Cover Launch: EXOGENE by T. C. McCarthy

Mid-series covers are at the same time a relief and a challenge. On one hand you already have the general look and feel of the art established, so a lot of the trial and error is skipped. Unless something has gone terribly wrong you are usually commissioning art from the same artist, and they start working a lot closer to the target. The type style is usually set, and overall it’s kind of fun to be able to play within those constraints. However you also can’t play it too safe and end up with boring art, or at least, art that isn’t pushed to its full potential. Because sometimes, especially in the case of a new author, the second cover is even more important than the first—you want to really show this author is establishing a strong series and the world is something you want to be drawn into. I know a lot of people—in fact, I am married to one—that won’t start a series if just the first book is out. (For example, he’s recently got into Game of Thrones on HBO and was really interested in reading the books until he heard it wasn’t a completed series…and yes, these are the fights that go on in my house) Thus, it’s really important to make mid-series covers as awesome, if not MORE awesome, than the first cover.

This brings me to Exogene, the next book in T. C. McCarthy’s Subterrene War series (Germline is the first, which just came out and is getting great reviews). Steve Stone did a fabulous job on the Germline cover – it was the perfect tone – obviously military SF but the attitude tells you there is something deeper going on here. Of course, this makes the Exogene cover harder. For one, a female lead character which means you are immediately fighting certain clichés, and (I don’t want to give away anything here) she is a character full of contradictions. We wanted to capture her maybe right on the edge between blind belief and doubt. A soldier still heroic, but perhaps with just the slightest uncertainty beginning to show on her face. And add to that delicate proposition the fact that it’s a beautiful young woman who also happens to be bald. And then make her look like a convincing soldier. Not an easy task. But in my opinion, yet again, he nailed it.

After the jump, see the cover next to Germline and get a teaser…. (more…)

MR. SHIVERS Wins the 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel!

We’d like to extend our heartiest congratulations to our author Robert Jackson Bennett, whose debut novel MR. SHIVERS was chosen as Best Novel at the 2010 Shirley Jackson Awards, held this past weekend at Readercon. MR. SHIVERS, compared by Publishers Weekly to “a collaboration between Stephen King and John Steinbeck” and called by the Guardian(UK) “a startling debut, a deft amalgam of thriller, cerebral horror and American gothic, written with a stark and artful simplicity.”

If you haven’t yet read MR. SHIVERS, do — and don’t miss Robert’s second novel, THE COMPANY MAN, about which Booklist notes, “Bennett does the seemingly impossible here. He’s written an alternate-history novel that measures up in every respect to Philip K. Dick’s masterful The Man In the High Castle.”

High praise indeed — and completely deserved.

New Short Fiction from Jennifer Rardin

Over at Orbit Short Fiction, we have a new short story from Jennifer Rardin. It is a standalone — and it’s completely different from the Jaz Parks novels.

What do you do when you’re in college and can’t think of anything better to do with your time? Make a deal with a voodoo queen, of course! And so starts the journey of Paul and Brady in PAUL AND BRADY GET HOODOO WITH THE VOODOO.

You can find the rest of Jennifer’s short fiction here, or you can start by reading the first novel in the Jaz Parks series, Once Bitten, Twice Shy.

Wallpapers: ECHO CITY by Tim Lebbon

We’ve got a visual treat for you heading into the weekend: beautiful atmospheric Echo City wallpapers for your device of choice.

The imaginative Lee Gibbons has done the illustration, and Peter Cotton has designed this fantastic dark fantasy cover.

Tim Lebbon posted about Echo City earlier this week, so definitely check it out if you haven’t already.

Wallpaper download links are below. Enjoy!

iPad | iPhone/iPod | NETbook | 1024 x 768 | 1280 x 800 | 1440 x 900 | 1680 x 1050 | 1920 x 1200

 

Crime and Punishment

One of the major influences on Rule 34 was a throwaway idea I borrowed from Vernor Vinge — that perhaps one of the limiting factors on the survival of technological society is the development of tools of ubiquitous law enforcement, such that all laws can be enforced — or infringements detected — mechanistically.

One of the unacknowledged problems of the 21st century is the explosion in new laws.

We live in a complex society, and complex societies need complex behavioural rules if they’re to run safely. Some of these rules need to be made explicit, because not everyone can be relied on to analyse a situation and do the right thing. To take a trivial example: we now need laws against using a mobile phone or texting while driving, because not everyone realises that this behaviour is dangerous, and earlier iterations of our code for operating vehicles safely were written before we had mobile phones. So the complexity of our legal code grows over time.

The trouble is, it now seems to be growing out of control. (more…)