Archive for Contents

Environmentally-sound Ebooks!

Orbit is delighted, excited and not a little proud to announce the development of the world’s first 100% biodegradable ebook. As you all know (Bob), the problem with the current crop of ebooks is that the electrons that make up the work have a carbon cost. Certainly, the environmental impact of ebooks is much lower than for traditional publishing, but it is a finite and measurable amount.

Electron
An electron, yesterday

Not anymore!  Orbit’s proprietary new ‘Brigadoon’ e-formatting allows for a 100% carbon-free reading experience. By exposing the ebook file to a short burst of Cherenkov Radiation upon delivery, the electrons composing the file actually decay into lower-energy electrons and tachyons after the first reading. The new, low-powered electrons return to the environment at a net carbon cost of practically zero, while the tachyons, as is their nature, travel backwards in time to replace the ebook file that has just disappeared during the decay of the electrons that formed it.

To explain in layman’s terms: the electrons return to the environment and the ebook effectively travels backwards in time, reinventing itself before each reading causes it to cease to exist. With reference to Clarke’s Third Law, we hope you’ll forgive us a triumphant ‘Hey, presto!’

All of Orbit’s April titles will be available in Brigadoon as well as epub format from all good replicators.

Brighton Shock – notes on the World Horror Convention 2010

Last weekend I attended the fabulous World Horror Convention in Brighton, a celebration of horror fiction from the Victorian age to the present, and the first time this event has been held outside North America.

Horror is a fascinating area and, as with SF and fantasy fiction, the definition seems interestingly fluid and has the capacity to evolve in new and exciting ways with each new generation of writers. We have the legacy of 19th century gothic horror (Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker). This was followed by Lovecraftian horror, and more recently we have seen contemporary horror wordsmiths such as Stephen King, James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell.

One of the highlights of the convention was watching Neil Gaiman interview grand master of modern horror James Herbert (while I sat next to the agent who discovered him). Neil Gaiman appeared unannounced as a surprise guest interviewer, and it was as if Elvis had entered the building as news of his arrival rippled tantalisingly through the convention … James Herbert focused on his epic career and on his underprivileged East End origins which inspired him to write. It’s interesting to think how the supernatural thriller/disaster fiction of the 1970s and 80s, turbulent decades of wealth and deprivation lived under the shadow of the bomb, might differ to what is being produced today.

We now have an explosion of new vampire fiction, as Kelley Armstrong discussed with other (more…)

Cover Launch: THE HEROES by Joe Abercrombie

And you thought we couldn’t get any bloodier than Best Served Cold? Here to prove you wrong is the cover of The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie. It’s a standalone story, which is great for readers who haven’t read Joe Abercrombie before, but it’s set in the same world as The First Law Trilogy and Best Served Cold, and fans of those books will definitely be recognizing returning characters.

This is the hardcover version, so we’re keeping the general style of the somewhat controversial Best Served Cold hardcover, then we’ll be repackaging for mass market paperback with the graphic Best Served Cold mass market style. Just a quick note: the map in the background is not final, it’s the one I stole as a placeholder from BSC, until the artist finishes the new map. Steve Stone, an Orbit Books favorite, was responsible for the image reflected in the, um, gore. I’ll repost the cover with the new map when it’s finished, but this one was drawn by Dave Senior. (Yours truly was responsible for the agonizing blood photoshopping.) (more…)

Only days left to vote on both Gemmell and Locus Awards …

There seems to be plenty of award talk going around at the moment, with the Clarke Award lists of nominees out, British Fantasy Society Awards longlists released and the BSFA only a few weeks away from its own Awards announcements. Perhaps these represent the first signs of Spring for the genre community…

But currently more pressing than all of the above are the imminent voting deadlines for the David Gemmell Awards (a few days away, with voting closing at the end of March) and the annual Locus Awards ballot (closing 1st April). The David Gemmell Awards are designed to honour the memory of David Gemmell and also to raise the profile of fantasy fiction in the UK, and this will be their second year. The whole team is crossing fingers for all our authors on the Gemmell longlists, including those down for the Legend Award for best fantasy novel here. You can also vote by following that link – and see above for the cute mini-Snaga that Brent Weeks was awarded last year for his shortlisted The Way of Shadows (UK I US). Also included within ‘the Gemmells’ are the Morningstar Award for best fantasy debut and the Ravenheart Award for best fantasy cover art.

The Locus Awards are in their 40th year and their longlist is the prestigious Locus Recommended Reading List of works published in 2009. So as well as crossing fingers for the Gemmells, we are also holding our collective breaths for Orbit authors in various Locus categories (this could get complicated!). Orbit nominees are  Iain M. Banks, Walter Jon Williams, Daniel Abraham, Gail Carriger and Charles Stross.  You can vote for the Locus Awards here.

Cover Launch: THE COMPANY MAN

Mr. Shivers, the debut novel by Robert Jackson Bennett, has been getting some fantastic praise around the review circuit, with a lot of comparisons to Stephen King + John Steinbeck, which is pretty awesome in my book. The Company Man is not a sequel, but if you liked Mr. Shivers, you will definitely like this one. It also takes place in an alternate history of America, and I would say this one, to me, feels like H.P. Lovecraft + Chinatown (the movie) happening in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. If that doesn’t sound cool to you, well, then, I don’t know what else to say. Haha.

(more…)

Book Cover “Mind Meld”

I know you guys are big fans of hearing about covers and design from the artists/publishers side, so I thought I’d send you guys over to SciFi Signal, where they just posted a “Mind Meld” (dorks) on recent scifi/fantasy bookcovers.  I was asked to post, and in fairness I excluded all our books, but it was great to see so many Orbit books getting a mention! Here was the question:

Q: It’s generally well accepted that a book cover’s primary responsibility is to sell the book. But artistically speaking, what makes a successful sf/f/h book cover? Which recent sf/f/h books had a cover that blew you away?

Which makes me ask you guys….what’s your favorite ORBIT cover? Let me know in the comments, I’m curious.

Oath of Fealty

Elizabeth Moon’s writing has enriched the genre for many years and in her latest book, Oath of Fealty, her magic is clearly alive and well. I’ve read many of her books, and amongst them I’ve particularly enjoyed her Vatta’s War military SF adventures, as did the Guardian). And I still recommend the extraordinary and thought-provoking Speed of Dark  to anyone who thinks SF isn’t for them (Nebular Award winner, critially lauded plus shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award: think Flowers for Algernon or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time).

But with Oath of Fealty we also have something very special. A return to the world of the classic Paksenarrion books, as Elizabeth writes fantasy for the first time in ten years. And so no one misses out on the earlier books, we’ve also reissued the original backlist trilogy in super-giant omnibus form as The Deed of Paksenarrion. Elizabeth recently posted for us on how she found out what subgenres suited her (and which didn’t!) but she is rare in her ability to easily swing from SF to fantasy and back again.

Please see here for a bit of background on how Elizabeth made her way back to fantasy, with an extract from Oath of Fealty. And here’s what others have thought of this return so far, with some early praise for Oath of Fealty, book 1 of Paladin’s Legacy:

‘What sheer delight! Oath of Fealty is an engrossing new adventure returning old friends to us in the first of three more books in the Paksenarrion universe. It’s quite simply a smashing story, and I am panting to read the next instalment from this consummate storyteller. Hurry up, Elizabeth!’ Anne McCaffrey

‘I found the book hard to put down because of Elizabeth Moon’s ability to make the story flow’
SFSite.com

‘A must-read … thoroughly entertaining’
Romantic Times (4 1/2* Top Pick)

‘A stirring start to a new story arc … I can’t wait for more episodes’
BookLoons