Orbit Author on Radio 4

Philip Palmer is the author of the fabulous debut Debatable Space, to be published by Orbit in January. He is also a dramatist of some note, and his short play Gaza is being recorded today to be broadcast on Radio 4 tomorrow at 7pm. Philip imagines what it’s like for ordinary people caught up in the violence and in-fighting in Gaza City, as well as portraying the reactions of British nationals working in the region.

The play will be repeated on Sunday, and you can catch it for a further week on the Listen Again section of the BBC website.

Do have a listen if you get the chance!

Orbit in Australia

The launch of Orbit in the US is only a few months away, but it was off to Australia last week, with Orbit UK Editorial Director Darren Nash, for Convergence — the 46th Australian National SF Convention in Melbourne — and a week with our sister company Hachette Livre Australia in Sydney.

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The Top Ten SF Authors of the 00s

Marc Andreessen is one of the major figures of the Internet age — a founder of Netscape, he was a co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser. Andreessen recently published his selection of the top ten SF authors this decade on his blog, and I was really pleased to see two of Orbit UK’s authors on the list.

Andreessen describes Charles Stross as ‘first among equals — the single best emerging talent’. Stross is a prolific writer: we published his acclaimed novel Glasshouse in March, and we’re due to publish his supernatural spy thriller The Atrocity Archives next month.

The other Orbit UK author picked is Ken MacLeod, of whom Andreessen writes: ‘MacLeod is incredibly creative — his imagination is second to none — and he’s a superb writer. [H]is novels certainly qualify as dizzyingly inventive and frequently rewarding.’ His most recent book, The Execution Channel, was published by us in April.

Orbit at BEA

orbit_team
Alex Lencicki, Jennifer Flax, Tim Holman, and Devi Pillai at BEA

Orbit launched in the US at Book Expo America in New York. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hello. We still have ten messenger bags left, so we’re giving one to the first ten people to email us at orbit at hbgusa.com with the words “gimme one of those bags!” in the subject line. (This offer is only available to US residents.)

Jae Lee’s covers for The Electric Church

I’m Devi and I’m an Editor at Orbit and I’ll be chatting about the upcoming books, authors, reviews, etc.

I’ve just gotten early sketches for THE DIGITAL PLAGUE by Jeff Somers! That is his second book starring Avery Cates, criminal-for-hire.

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Dark Space review and YouTube trailer

Dark Space book jacket

This month, Orbit UK is extremely excited to be publishing Dark Space, the new start of a new series from Marianne de Pierres.

As a sharply written space opera, it’s something of a departure for Marianne, who until now has been best known for her near future thrillers. It’s great to be able to report that reviewers seem to agree: in particular, there’s a great review of the book in Hub Magazine:

“This is serious modern space opera, grappling with big themes and painting on a broad canvas with a great eye for detail, and readers of simple spaceship adventure stories may wish to pass this title by. On the other hand, readers who hunger for perceptive, intelligent and unflinching literary science fiction should seek this book out as soon as possible.”

Here’s the trailer, and there’s more on Marianne’s official website.

Introducing The Innocent Mage

The Innocent Mage book jacket

In the bestselling tradition of Trudi Canavan and Fiona McIntosh, Karen Miller’s debut for Orbit, The Innocent Mage, is an irresistibly compelling tale of destiny and forbidden magic, and the first volume in the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series.

We’re very excited at publishing Karen in the UK this month — and our sister imprint Orbit US will be publishing the series for American readers in the autumn.

It’s not always straightforward for us to get across our enthusiasm for a book in writing, so we decided to go straight to the author and sat Karen down in front of a video camera. This is a bit of an experiment for us, but we’re intending to do a lot more of these sorts of videos, and we hope that you’ll enjoy this first attempt and will perhaps try the book.

Terra Incognita for Kevin J. Anderson

We’re extremely excited to announce that Orbit has bought a new series by New York Times bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson, for publication in 2009. The Terra Incognita trilogy, based on the great sea voyages of the Age of Discovery, is a departure for the author, who is best known for his SF works, such as the Dune novels (co-written with Brian Herbert) and his Saga of Seven Suns. Orbit will publish in the US and the UK, and it will be a flagship series in both territories.

Kevin J. Anderson comments: “For at least a decade I have been developing and pondering a fantasy epic about sailing ships and sea monsters and undiscovered territories. I’ve always been intrigued to stare at amazing old maps with great swatches of territory marked “Here Be Monsters” or “Terra Incognita” — when brave captains dared to go out into the unexplored vastness where, for all they knew, they could sail directly off the edge of the world. I’ve read about the exploratory voyages of Balboa, da Gama, and Magellan, coupled with the religious and political inspirations for such desperate journeys. The concepts and the imagination simply grew too large to be contained within a strict historical framework, and so I have taken the basic ideas and recast them into a brand new, and yet excitingly familiar, pattern.”

Orbit Publishing Director Tim Holman adds: “Kevin is a masterly storyteller and this is a wonderful idea for a fantasy series. With its imaginative roots in a fascinating period of history, it promises to be a series that will appeal to both genre and mainstream readers, and this makes it a particularly exciting publishing prospect for us.”

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.