Archive for All posts
Orbit Links for August 01 2008
Welcome once more, gentle reader, to our regular Friday links round-up. We have another choice selection of Orbit authors’ online activities for you to peruse this week:
- The Biology in Science Fiction blog has picked up and commented on one of the questions from the recent Iain [M] Banks Email Q&A and IO9 highlights the post in turn, sparking a lively discussion in the comments thread.
- Over at The Book Swede’s blog you currently have a chance to win one of two copies of Celia Friedman‘s Feast of Souls.
- Charlie Huston has posted the third part of his ‘Book of All Future Names’ flash-fiction project: Storie Latier.
- The third episode of the Reality Break podcast presents a 1994 radio interview with Robert Jordan. [via Neth Space]
- Glenda Larke posts a few sobering thoughts for would-be authors (well worth reading if you’ve ever considered giving up the day-job to write full-time…)
- Marianne de Pierres has posted the link to an interview with The Falcata Times.
- Over at OF Blog the Fallen, Larry has posted a translation of a Fantasymundo.com interview with Andrzej Sapkowski: Part One, Part Two.
- Charles Stross is planning on doing his bit for gender balance in genre fiction by promising to apply Bechdel’s Law to his future writing projects.
- And Charles Stross fans might enjoy this lego diorama of a starship bridge from Singularity Sky. [grokked from the FPI blog]
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…)
All Orc, No Play!
The Orcs are coming! And to help introduce them we’ve created an Orc Mail website and Orc widgets.
And… if you’re one of the first ten people to post an Orc widget to your website or myspace page, and you email us the link at orbit@hbgusa.com, we’ll send you a finished copy of the book when it’s available in September! (US residents only!)
Charles Stross interviewed for Agony Column podcast
Charles Stross features in the latest podcast from Rick Kleffel’s Agony Column, which is a recording of a Geekspeak interview that was broadcast on KUSP radio on Monday.
Rick and Charlie, along with Lyle Troxell and Sean Cleveland, talk about a wide range of topics, including Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein; two of the major literary influences on Charlie’s recently-released novel Saturn’s Children.
They then go on to discuss the building blocks of the milieu that Charlie explores in Saturn’s Children: artificial intelligence, a robotics-based and dehumanised future extension of human civilisation, interplanetary travel, space exploration (and the necessity for robotics therein), memory backups and personality duplication, the class-structure of robotic society in the book, the ethics of programming an artificial intelligence and a whole range of other great sf-nal subjects.
You can visit Rick Kleffel’s Trashotron site to read the intro to the podcast, and then download the MP3 file from a link in the text.
Stephenie Meyer’s BREAKING DAWN – Launch Day events
Breaking Dawn, the fourth title in Stephenie Meyer‘s global mega-selling Twilight Saga series, will be published in the UK on Monday August 4th.
To celebrate the launch of the eagerly-awaited conclusion to the story of Bella and Edward, dozens of boosktores right across the UK – including Borders Oxford Street branch and Waterstone’s Manchester Arndale – will be holding special publication-day events, with competitions, prizes, giveaways and more.
Visit the official Stephenie Meyer UK website for a full listing of all the events that are due to take place, and check to see which bookstores near you will be opening early on the big day.
What I Learned at Comicon
- A new usage for the word “harpooning” (Thanks Lilith!)
- Big frakkin’ bags are a big frakkin’ hit.
- No matter how innocent the intent, grown men with giant Curious George dolls should not offer free hugs on Kid’s Day. (Ew dude, seriously).
- Everybody is duly excited about The Watchmen and Twilight (I know, right?)
- The Orcs Are Coming!
- 140,000 people is a whole lot of eyeballs, but so are roughly 800 exhibitors – if your marketing isn’t focused, those eyes will glaze right over it (thankfully, we had Orcs).
- You would be amazed by the number of 5 dollar action figures you do not want that are out there.
- The coolest stuff was tucked away in the small press and artist alley.
- The first person to start selling baby onesies at Comicon will make a fortune. (Seriously, I spent a day looking for something for my son and couldn’t find anything smaller than a toddler size, and I was not alone).
- Lamest costume: All those Dark Knight Jokers with un-smeared makup (the smeared makeup was the whole point guys!)
- Coolest costume: the little girl in the pink dress, pink shirt, and pink Vader helmet – you rule!
All in all, we had a great time at the show. Lilith Saintcrow rocked the Eye on the Present panel, which should be online eventually. We had a limited giveaway of Orcs galleys which were snatched up by fans in minutes. Kevin J. Anderson chatted with us about The Ashes of Worlds (vid to come) And our friends at Yen Press threw a great rooftop party complete with fireworks.
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:
- New blog on the block, Suvudu.com, has posted video footage of Kelley Armstrong signing for fans at Comicon.
- Marie Brennan has purchased an original music composition in an online charity action which will become a theme for Midnight Never Come. In the same post she explains her stance on fan-fiction based on her work. And in another post she presents a round-up of recent review coverage.
- Robert Buettner has posted his Worldcon Schedule and is urging folks to take part in the Heinlein Society Blood Drive at the con.
- Another new blog on the block, Tor.com, is also at Comicon and they grabbed Dresden Files author Jim Butcher for a quick interview in a storage closet (plus bonus video material).
- Kate Elliott is losing patience with Hollywood blockbusters that are all about the man-factor and in which women are relegated to secondary supporting roles.
- The Book Swede has posted a review of Celia Friedman‘s Feast of Souls.
- Jo Graham posts Some Thoughts on Villainy.
- …and Jo Graham‘s debut novel, Black Ships gets a four-star review from fantasyliterature.net.
- Laurell K Hamilton has posted a new episode of her podcast via her blog and is hoping to make it a monthly event.
- Charlie Huston has written a second flash-fiction piece, Shadding Lyttle and has announced his plans to turn the two pieces to-date into the start of an ongoing online fiction project, ‘The Book of All Future Names‘.
- The Guardian Online has a feature on Breaking Dawn author Stepenie Meyer.
- Jeff Somers‘ The Digital Plague got roasted.
- Meanwhile, Jeff Somers‘ debut novel, The Electric Church has been reviewed by one of the BookGeeks.
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:
- Read an extract from Matter by Iain M Banks
- Read an extract from Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley
- Read an extract from Once Bitten, Twice Shy by Jennifer Rardin
- Read an extract from Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
- Priestess of the Write: An Interview with Trudi Canavan
- Read an extract from The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
- Read an extract from The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
- The Wheel of Time Continues to Turn
- Announcement of Robert Jordan‘s passing
- Read an extract from Black Ships by Jo Graham
- Read an extract from Debatable Space by Philip Palmer
- Read an extract from Empress by Karen Miller
- Read an extract from The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
- Orbit announces plans to expand in the US and UK
- Mike Carey on camera
- Introducing The Last Wish
- Tom Holt Talks Time Travel
- The Escapement arrives
- Read an extract from The Devil’s Right Hand by Lilith Saintcrow
- Introducing Matter
- Urban Fantasy come true
- Orbit acquires Red-Headed Stepchild by Jaye Wells
- Just another day at the office… IN HELL!
- Standing Out or Fitting In? Tim Holman on Orbit cover art
- The bestselling debut of 2007 – The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
- Devi Pillai reports from World Fantasy 2007
- Orbit in Australia
- Fiona MacIntosh‘s video-intro for Odalisque
- Orbit acquires two more books in Jim Butcher‘s Dresden Files series
- Best Summer SF Reads in The Times
New-look StephenieMeyer.co.uk website goes live
We’ve just re-launched the UK website of mega-bestselling author Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight saga is published in the UK by Orbit’s sister-imprint, Atom.
It looks a lot like this:
The fourth book of the saga, Breaking Dawn, will be published in the UK on August 4th and there are launch-day events taking place right across the UK – see this news item on the site for details of events taking place at bookstores in your area.