Archive for Orbit US

Orbit authors taking part in Conflux 5 Virtual Minicon

Canberra’s fifth annual Conflux convention takes place later this year, over the weekend of Friday October 3rd – Monday October 6th, at The Marque, Canberra, Australia.

Ahead of the main event, Conflux is staging a Virtual Minicon this coming weekend, August 2nd – August 3rd.

Participation is easy: simply sign up for the Conflux Forums and then log in at the appropriate time, depending on the author(s) you’d like to chat to via the forums and bearing in mind the relevant time-difference between your own timezone and Canberra’s (GMT +10) of course.

A number of Orbit authors are taking part in the online activities over the course of the weekend, with time-slots as follows (again, these are Canberra-time…)

Saturday August 2
12.00 p.m. – Glenda Larke
7.00 p.m. – Karen Miller

Sunday August 3
11.00 a.m. – Sean Williams
12.00 p.m. – Kevin J Anderson
5.00 p.m. – Marianne de Pierres

Visit the Virtual Minicon page of the Conflux website for more information.

Orbit Links for July 25 2008

Welcome to our regular Friday links round-up. Plenty to get through this week, so without further ado:

As always, if you see any online articles, reviews or interviews that feature an Orbit author, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know! We’ll happily name-check your website or blog with a heads-up credit in return (please remember to provide us with a link…)

Orbit’s 300th Post! And our Top 30 items to-date…

According to our content-management system (and we have no reason to believe that it would lie to us) this is the 300th post to go out on the Orbit website since we launched it back in March last year.

To celebrate, we thought we’d take the opportunity to consult with our traffic analytics software and run off a list of our Top 30 content items to-date. Looks like you folks really like your extracts! Well, we hear you, and we’ll make sure we keep them coming.

We’d also love to hear which articles you, our readers, have particularly enjoyed. Any hidden gems or more recent pieces that didn’t quite make the Top 30, for instance? Please feel free to use the comments below to let us know what sort of content you’d like to see more of (or less of – we can take it!) on the site.

And now, without further ado, here are those Top 30 items since March 2007:

  1. Read an extract from Matter by Iain M Banks
  2. Read an extract from Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley
  3. Read an extract from Once Bitten, Twice Shy by Jennifer Rardin
  4. Read an extract from Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
  5. Priestess of the Write: An Interview with Trudi Canavan
  6. Read an extract from The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
  7. Read an extract from The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
  8. The Wheel of Time Continues to Turn
  9. Announcement of Robert Jordan‘s passing
  10. Read an extract from Black Ships by Jo Graham
  11. Read an extract from Debatable Space by Philip Palmer
  12. Read an extract from Empress by Karen Miller
  13. Read an extract from The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
  14. Orbit announces plans to expand in the US and UK
  15. Mike Carey on camera
  16. Introducing The Last Wish
  17. Tom Holt Talks Time Travel
  18. The Escapement arrives
  19. Read an extract from The Devil’s Right Hand by Lilith Saintcrow
  20. Introducing Matter
  21. Urban Fantasy come true
  22. Orbit acquires Red-Headed Stepchild by Jaye Wells
  23. Just another day at the office… IN HELL!
  24. Standing Out or Fitting In? Tim Holman on Orbit cover art
  25. The bestselling debut of 2007 – The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
  26. Devi Pillai reports from World Fantasy 2007
  27. Orbit in Australia
  28. Fiona MacIntosh‘s video-intro for Odalisque
  29. Orbit acquires two more books in Jim Butcher‘s Dresden Files series
  30. Best Summer SF Reads in The Times

Lilith Saintcrow – Comicon and beyond!

Well, not beyond really, but Lilith Saintcrow will be at Comicon in San Diego! She’ll be on the “Looking at Our World: Eye on the Present” panel along with Kelley Armstrong, L. A. Banks, Kate Brallier, Marjorie M. Liu, C. E. Murphy, Justine Musk, and moderator Samantha Sommersby ( Room 3). That’s a veritable who’s who of urban fantasy stars, so if you’re a fan this is a can’t miss event.

And stop by the Orbit booth to get your books signed and to pick up a sweet Orcs pin, which will likely be handed to you by a bedraggled looking guy with a few days’ old beard (me). You can also get some great stuff from our friends at Grand Central Publishing, Little Brown Books for Young Readers, and Yen Press. For a complete listing of HBGUSA events at Comicon, including panels with Stephenie Meyer, Jacqueline Carey, Brad Meltzer, Method Man and more, download our event schedule here.

If you can’t make it to Comicon, you can still catch up with Lilith at her sparklingly redesigned site, www.lilithsaintcrow.com – and stay tuned for a free, never before seen serialized novel coming very soon.

lilithsaintcrow.com

First Iain Banks Q&A posted at www.iain-banks.net

We’ve just posted the write-up of the first email Q&A session with Iain [M] Banks, over at his official website, www.iain-banks.net.

In case you missed the announcement first time around, we invited readers of this site and www.iain-banks.net to submit their questions for Iain – ideally something other than the usual sort of thing he tends to be asked at readings and convention appearances all the time – and then we selected a half-dozen question to put to Iain.

So, if you’d like to know which Culture character Iain would choose to write a novella on, or whether Iain would ever write a science-fiction novel that wasn’t filled with war and violence, or even which parts of Scotland Iain recommends for a visitor who’s also a fan of his books, then www.iain-banks.net is the place to head to next.

Orbit Links for July 18 2008

Welcome to this week’s round-up of links of interest featuring Orbit authors that we’ve found (or have been sent in to us) over the course of the past seven days or so:

If you see any online articles, reviews or interviews that feature an Orbit author, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know! We’ll happily name-check your website or blog with a heads-up credit in return (please remember to provide us with a link…)

Robert Buettner stars in AISFP Podcast #47

Orphanage UK editionFormer military intelligence officer turned military-sf writer Robert Buettner is the subject of the 47th Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast.

The first three volumes in Robert’s Jason Wander series are out now from Orbit US and will all be published by Orbit UK in August:

  • #1 – Orphanage [US / UK]
  • #2 – Orphan’s Destiny [US / UK]
  • #3 – Orphan’s Journey [US / UK]

I’ve just finished Orphanage myself and I thought it was a cracking, high-octane read that will definitely appeal to fans of Allan Cole & Chris Bunch’s Sten series, but don’t just take my word for it: check out these two recent reviews of Orphan’s Journey at bookreviewsandmore and sffworld.

The Big Idea: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan pops in over at Whatever, John Scalzi’s blog, to talk about her novel, Midnight Never Come, and the Big Idea behind it:

What would faeries be doing while English history is trundling along? Of course, that automatically implies something: that the fae aren’t static, timeless creatures. They have a history, too, and it reflects, contrasts with, or otherwise interestingly comments on what humans are doing.

Fittingly, then, the first thing I came up with was Invidiana: Elizabeth’s dark mirror. Being a faerie, she’s all about immortal beauty; Elizabeth tried desperately to create an unchanging image of herself as the beautiful Virgin Queen, even as she aged and her teeth went bad and smallpox left its scars. Elizabeth never married; Invidiana is the most loveless creature you can imagine. And both of them, of course, are reigning queens of England. I originally just implied a metaphysical link between them, but in the book it’s explicit: when Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower during Mary’s reign, she made a secret deal with Invidiana, that they would help each other out.

Read the full piece here and pick up Midnight Never Come at all good booksellers today!

Freya and Harry star in ‘Interview with the Succubus’

Okay, okay… so there was this retired succubus and this model-47 femmebot… no, wait, that’s not how it goes. Alright, I’ve got it: a retired succubus and a trenchcoat-wearing wizard walk into a Chicago bar and… no, that’s not right, either.

But seriously, folks, Freya Nakamichi, star of the new Charles Stross novel Saturn’s Children, and the one and only Harry Dresden, loved the world over by fans of Jim Butcher‘s Dresden Files series, are the subjects of the latest couple of author Jackie Kessler’s Cat and Muse interviews.

In this ongoing series, fictional character Jezebel the former demon interviews fellow fictional characters about their lives, loves, longings and, in Freya’s case, fashion nightmares. Jezebel also chatted to Lune, of Marie Brennan‘s Midnight Never Come fame, not so long ago. Check them all out, well worth a tea-break read!

Orbit Links for July 11 2008

Welcome to the latest weekly round up of links of interest featuring Orbit authors; various item that we’ve found online (or have been sent in to us) over the course of the past week:

As always, if you see any online articles, reviews or interviews that feature an Orbit author, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know! We’ll happily name-check your website or blog with a heads-up credit in return (please remember to provide us with a link…)