Interesting commentary here from US writer Edward Champion’s blog. He’s noted the success of the comic industry’s Free Comic Book Day, and wonders whether the book trade shouldn’t follow suit.
We already have World Book Day with free £1 book tokens and specially produced £1 books, and it seems to work very well, but if we removed the world ‘World’ and replaced it with ‘Free’, might it work even better . . . ?
Orbit UK author Charles Stross has contributed a piece to the BBC website, published today. It’s a fascinating look at the effect that increased data storage will have on history and memory:
We’ve had agriculture for about 12,000 years, towns for eight to 10,000 years, and writing for about 5,000 years. But we’re still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history.
Don’t we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don’t. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us.
Indeed, we’ve acquired bad behavioural habits — because we’re used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we’re on the edge of losing the ability to forget.
Looking forward to the publication of Matter by Iain M. Banks next year (from Orbit in both the UK and US) I’ve been surfing the huge and helpful body of websites on the Culture, and happened on this comprehensive Wikipedia entry listing the ships of the Culture. They include the General Contact Unit “Well I Was In The Neighbourhood”, the Offensive Unit “All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff” and, my favorite, the Demilitarized Rapid Offensive Unit “Resistance Is Character-Forming”.
Wilda Williams at Library Journal reports here on a lunch hosted by Orbit at the ALA (American Library Association) Convention in Washington D.C. recently. It was great to have the chance to talk with so many librarians and journalists about our launch list and publishing strategy, and hear about some of the issues and challenges they face.
And I got to meet Jo Graham, author of Black Ships, for the first time. She’s fantastic. She spoke wonderfully about her debut novel and read the opening pages beautifully. Everybody wanted more — but they’ll have to wait! Also got to see the White House for the first time — but Jo was the highlight of the day for me.
Jeff Somers, author of The Electric Church (Orbit US and UK Sept. 07) has been blogging (reluctantly and hilariously) at Jeffreysomers.com/blather.
Before being ‘compelled’ to blog, Jeff was a long-time zine publisher, running the The Inner Swine since 1995. (The Inner Swine has the kind of cult following that posts videos of dogs eating the latest issue.)
In his latest posts, Jeff writes about the economics of zine publishing, the mixed blessing of telecommuting, and the lengths Orbit goes to encourage our authors to blog.
I’ve just received my copy of issue 3 of Death Ray, a startup glossy SF magazine. It’s good to report that there are some nice reviews of Orbit UK titles, especially Allen Steele’s Spindrift — “an interesting, entertaining, well-told tale” — and Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job, described as “an insightful piece on the nature of death, and grief, how we deal with such things and find the strength to go on. Christopher Moore is adept at making such points even while making the reader laugh out loud at the absurdity of life in general. And that’s his greatest strength.”
There’s also an interesting feature on the young adult/SF crossover, with contributions from Orbit’s Publishing Director Tim Holman and Editorial Director Darren Nash. And though we don’t publish either of these authors, I really enjoyed the extended piece on Neil Gaiman and a shorter article on Samuel R. Delaney’s Babel-17. Death Ray is available through newsagents in the UK, and readers in the US can find it at branches of Barnes & Noble and Borders.
The launch of Orbit in the US is only a few months away, but it was off to Australia last week, with Orbit UK Editorial Director Darren Nash, for Convergence — the 46th Australian National SF Convention in Melbourne — and a week with our sister company Hachette Livre Australia in Sydney.
Marc Andreessen is one of the major figures of the Internet age — a founder of Netscape, he was a co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser. Andreessen recently published his selection of the top ten SF authors this decade on his blog, and I was really pleased to see two of Orbit UK’s authors on the list.
Andreessen describes Charles Stross as ‘first among equals — the single best emerging talent’. Stross is a prolific writer: we published his acclaimed novel Glasshouse in March, and we’re due to publish his supernatural spy thriller The Atrocity Archives next month.
The other Orbit UK author picked is Ken MacLeod, of whom Andreessen writes: ‘MacLeod is incredibly creative — his imagination is second to none — and he’s a superb writer. [H]is novels certainly qualify as dizzyingly inventive and frequently rewarding.’ His most recent book, The Execution Channel, was published by us in April.
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:
So, without further ado, let’s get on with it!
