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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.

Welcome!

Why an Orbit blog? The truth is that we’ve got a general idea of why we’re doing this, but we haven’t progressed very far beyond the general idea stage. The general idea is this:

  1. The posts you’ll read here will be written by anybody and everybody who works for Orbit, in our London and New York offices — so we’re expecting there to be a wide variety of posts, both in terms of content and style. Very few mainstream publishers have followed this route, but we think it’s right for the SF & Fantasy field, which is increasingly a global conversation.
  2. Our posts will give you an insight into what goes on at an SF publisher’s office. Not just what we do, but what we talk about and what we think about — sometimes small things, and sometimes the bigger issues that affect the entire community.
  3. Our posts should also help you to keep in touch with what’s going on in our corner of the SF world — what our authors are getting up to, news, events, reviews, articles and so on.
  4. Finally, our posts should be fun for us to write and for you to read.

So, without further ado, let’s get on with it!