Archive for Orbit US

The Company Man

From the acclaimed author of Mr. Shivers comes a gripping tale of murder and intrigue set in an America that never was. The Company Man, Robert Jackson Bennett’s second novel, takes place in an alternate early twentieth century America. Part steampunk, part murder mystery, part horror, Robert’s writing is truly unique and original. The Guardian recently had this to say about The Company Man:

“Bennett combines horror, science fiction and alternative history in a slow-burning novel which is both a superb character study of an alienated individual and a critique of heartless capitalism”

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Cover Launch (and Series Peek): BLOOD RIGHTS

Spring is in the air, and that means it’s about time to start launching some new Orbit book covers! First up we have a cover I’m very excited about, and even better, it’s part of an infamous Orbit 3-in-3-month trilogy. And here you have it, BLOOD RIGHTS by Kristen Painter, which is Book One of the House of Comarré.

Three covers at once is a lot to ask out of an illustrator, but damn, it looks so good all out together on the shelves. Luckily Nekro was up to the challenge. We definitely drove him through the ringer getting the perfect look for the series and for Chrysabelle, our heroine, but his signature black & red work just perfectly sets off her gold signum. Want to know more about that? You’re going to have to read the books! And they were definitely great fun for me to read and work on…the fast-paced adventure of an urban fantasy, mixed with the lush descriptions and gothic romance of an Anne Rice book. And that’s high compliments from me.

For today I’m only launching Book 1, but as soon as 2 & 3 Flesh and Blood and Bad Blood) are completely polished up, I’ll launch the whole trilogy. Finishing touches and all that. Very Exciting. And MAYBE I can show you a little sneak peak of each cover… (more…)

The Dragon’s Path

“With The Long Price Quartet, Daniel Abraham established himself as one of the premiere new fantasists of the last decade.  Now he’s back with a brand new series, one that promises to be even bigger and better.  The Dragon’s Path kicks off The Dagger and the Coin in fine high style, introducing us to a fascinating world and a great cast of beautifully drawn and deeply realized characters, all told in Abraham’s trademark clean and vivid prose.  This one has everything I look for in a fantasy.  I can’t wait for the second book.

— George R.R. Martin

 

Daniel Abraham is one of the most critically acclaimed authors in fantasy. No less than Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz has sung his praises, saying: “Abraham is fiercely talented, disturbingly human, breathtakingly original and even on his bad days kicks all sorts of literary ass.” Everyone from Patrick Rothfuss (“The storytelling is smooth, careful and – best of all – unpredictable.”) to Connie Willis (“To call Daniel Abraham an exciting new author is to wildly understate the case.”) to Brandon Sanderson (“Daniel Abraham knows what he’s doing!”) have weighed in with high praise for Daniel Abraham’s first series, The Long Price Quartet.

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The Two Tolkiens

Epic fantasy is back.  Peter Jackson brought out an unprecedented work of filmmaking with the Lord of the Rings films.  HBO is rolling out Game of Thrones based on the books of George RR Martin, the man dubbed “the American Tolkien” by Time magazine.  The publishing industry is generating a huge number of similar titles by people like Pat Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, and – putting too fine a point on it – me, many of which are showing up on the bestseller’s lists.

The faux-Medieval world of dragons and knights seems like an odd genre to have caught our collective attention, but I think you can gauge a cultural moment by its guilty pleasures.  The same way that our huge romance industry tells us something about our fears about love, and urban fantasies like True Blood and Anita Blake tell us something about our discomfort with femininity and power, the knights and orcs that got us laughed at in middle school are attracting literally billions of dollars.  That means something interesting has happened.

We as a culture are anxious about something, and these particular stories comfort us.  They say something that we, the audience are willing to pay a lot of money to hear but from a distance that we can stand to hear it.

In particular, our two Tolkiens are telling us that we’re tired of war. (more…)

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Cover Launch: KINGDOMS OF DUST by Amanda Downum

Behold the new artwork for the upcoming Kingdoms of Dust – Amanda Downum’s rich and exotic fantasy adventure featuring necromancer-spy Isyllt Iskaldur.  

Larry Rostant has done us proud yet again with his luxurious imagery, which we feel perfectly suits Amanda’s lush and atmospheric writing style. And the visual sums up the epic setting for this book: think fiery red deserts, swirling sandstorms and ruined cities . . .

It’s the perfect addition to the gorgeous artwork for the rest of the Necromancer Chronicles series (see all the covers together below). And the joy is that, since these books can be read as stand-alones, you can pick up whichever book most appeals to you first . . . A difficult choice indeed! Larry Rostant: we truly heart you. And tons of thanks must also go to our very talented UK designer Peter Cotton, who put all of these covers together.  (more…)

The Enterprise of Alchemy

Alchemy is a knot downright Gordian when it comes to finding an entry point for the young scribe trying to introduce his readers to the subject. One solution is to tackle the problem as Alexander would, but this in turn leaves us with a conundrum every bit as frustrating as the one we began with—instead of a compact but impenetrable knot of information, we now have countless loose, frayed ends that are just as likely to take us nowhere as they are to reveal how the intricately assembled whole came to be.

Perhaps the best approach, then, is to do as I have done and open with an overly convoluted and essentially imperfect metaphor for the problem—the encryption of meaning in complex symbolism that references the historical, the mythological, or the biblical is, after all, an essential part of the European alchemical tradition. How else to accurately pass along your wisdom without it being exploited by the unworthy? (more…)

Here’s to you, Mr Harrison…

When I was young, and I mean really young, my mother caught me reading the newspaper. That I could was just one of those things, like having brown hair and sticky-out teeth. I’m reliably informed it was something to do with the Rhodesia crisis (something you kids will have to look up for yourselves) – what it was isn’t important, but the fact of reading early, and apparently spontaneously, is. Fast forward a few years, and we’d moved towns and schools. So while most of my classmates were ploughing through their graded Ladybird books, I was pretty much left to my own devices. I have no recollection of what I read then. All sorts of stuff probably. But I do remember this: at some point (I must have been about nine) I was shown a rack of books and told to choose one, it didn’t matter which.

(c) Puffin BooksOne in particular caught my eye. It had a man in a spacesuit on the cover which, as a child fascinated by the Apollo missions, was a big draw. And that was pretty much it for the next thirty-odd years. That book (and I’ve finally tracked it down – the 1976 Puffin edition of Spaceship Medic, by Harry Harrison) quite literally changed my life. Soon I was on the hard stuff: Clarke, Asimov, the Heinlein juveniles. Anderson. Pohl. Herbert. Aldiss. Anything with a spaceship on the front, and these were the days when Bob Foss was king – those spaceships were huge.

What fed my peculiar addiction was that my mum used to help run the village WI jumble sales. Before the doors had opened, the book stall had been scoured and any likely candidates picked off and paid for. Now – my mum’s not exactly a speculative fiction fan: she was going on the look of the book. (more…)

Aunt Teagan and the Iceberg Factor

When you write a book, you’re only ever showing the important bits. Seems obvious, right? The boring stuff, the stuff that isn’t intimately bound in the narrative, the stuff that doesn’t just leap off the page, or drive home some essential truth about your characters or the world they live in, you leave out*. But it’s still there, in a way.

What you see on the page is a result of winnowing out a hell of a lot of material. Some of it great, some of it exciting to write, but they’re ultimately scenes*, and situations that didn’t serve the story. The thing is, even though they’re gone, they still sit beneath the story, submerged, they’re the nine-tenths of the iceberg – the research, the history, the backstory – that give the bit the reader sees the extra weight.

Like Aunt Teagan in my Death Works books. (more…)