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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…)

Cover Launch: ARTEMIS by Philip Palmer

Philip Palmer’s Red Claw was one of the first covers I designed when I joined the Orbit team, and it’s still one of my faves. I love working on these covers, they’re so much fun, because his writing has this fabulous pulp scifi feel to it, and you can get that feel with the photo shoots. That’s one of the fun things about establishing a really strong author look, it anchors a book, and let’s you get crazy within that framework. It’s kind of like a mullet—business up front, party in the back! (Yes, I really just compared Book Cover Design to Mullets, call the graphic design police, it’s been a rough week.)

Photographer Laura Hanifin was my partner-in-crime for this cover, which we shot at the same time we shot for Hell Ship and the new e-book cover for Debatable Space. It was an exhausting (and smelly!) shoot, but we got three fantastic cover images out of the day, and you don’t get 3-cover-days very often, trust me!

After the jump, see the whole series of covers together, as well as a teaser!

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TURN COAT 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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Turncoat definition: ‘A person who shifts allegiance from one loyalty or ideal to another, betraying or deserting an original cause by switching to the opposing side or party.’

After tense events featuring the Fae in Small Favour, we’re back into Wardens, Wizards and vampires in this one. The cease-fire existing between the vampires and the wizard White Council seen in Small Favour still remains, but is still fragile. This is in no small part due to the so-called Black Council (an exciting addition), the fifth-columnists within the White who seem determined to bring the wizards down.

We start, as is usual, with a bang. Though most of the Dresden novels start with a hit of adrenaline, this one tops the lot so far. Harry is at home when on his doorstep appears a badly injured Morgan, the Warden with whom Harry has had a difficult relationship with to date. Then after asking for protection from the White Council, Morgan collapses … (more…)

Hell Ship – its maiden voyage

Hell Ship by Philip Palmer (UK | US | ANZ)  is now unleashed, unabashed, unstoppable and available for reading! And it   is in truth a rollercoaster ride featuring adventure at its most adventurous. Look no further than the info below and this free extract to see what we mean:

The Hell Ship hurtles through space. Inside the ship are thousands of slaves, each the last of their race. The Hell Ship and its infernal crew destroyed their homes, slaughtered their families and imprisoned them forever. But one champion refuses to succumb. Sharrock, reduced from hero to captive in one blow, has sworn vengeance. Although Sai-as, head of the alien slave horde, will ruthlessly enforce the status quo. But help is close. Jak has followed the Ship for years and their battles have left Jak broken, a mind in a starship’s body, focussed only on destroying the Ship. Together, can hunter and slave end this interstellar nightmare?

Philip has been kind enough to put up a ‘moodboard‘ of what has influenced his writing journey (a.k.a. time spent exploring space) and will be unveiling further creativity on this site and his blog over the next few weeks. You can also meet the man in person at Orbit’s upcoming London Summer signing on 30th July, so please come along and say hello! (more…)

Orbit Summer Signing in London!

                             

Orbit UK have gathered together some of our authors with books publishing this June-Aug, and are holding a BIG SUMMER SIGNING!

Come to Forbidden Planet, London on Saturday 30th July, 3-4pm, to meet…

TIM LEBBON, PHILIP PALMER, SIMON MORDEN and NICOLE PEELER

Four brilliant authors, loads of fantastic books and an entire shop worth of other exciting distractions.  What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon?

Full details on the Forbidden Planet events page, here.

                                      

Artificial Stupids

One of the hoariest of science fictional archetypes is the idea of the artificial intelligence — be it the tin man robot servant, or the murderous artificial brain in a box that is HAL 9000. And it’s not hard to see the attraction of AI to the jobbing SF writer. It’s a wonderful tool for exploring ideas about the nature of identity. It’s a great adversary or threat (‘War Games’, ‘The Forbin Project’), it’s a cheap stand-in for alien intelligences — it is the Other of the mind.

The only trouble is, it doesn’t make sense.

Not only is SF as a field full of assumed impossibilities (time machines, faster than light space travel, extraterrestrial intelligences): it’s also crammed with clichés that are superficially plausible but which don’t hang together when you look at them too closely. Take flying cars, for example: yes, we’d all love to have one — right up until we pause to consider what happens when the neighbour’s 16 year old son goes joy riding to impress his girlfriend. Not only is flying fuel-intensive, it’s difficult, and the failure mode is extremely unforgiving. Which is why we don’t have flying cars. (We have flying buses instead, but that’s another matter.) Food pills out-lived their welcome: I think they were an idea that only made sense in the gastronomic wasteland of post-war austerity English cuisine. I submit that AI is a similar pipe dream. (more…)