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 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.
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.
Over at Of Blog of the Fallen, Larry has translated this June 2008 Fantasymundo interview with Andrzej Sapkowski. There are some marvelous insights from the author, including this digression on cats:
“For me the cats are an obsession. … I believe that they are supernatural creatures, with an identity and personality of their own … . It is very good to have one in the house, because then no demon will cross the shadows, because this [the cat] is in the shadows, waiting and vigilant.”
You can read the interview in Spanish here, or read Larry’s translation here and here.
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.
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.
Jeff VanderMeer put six questions to Marie Brennan, author of Midnight Never Come [UK/US], for a piece on the Amazon.com blog, Omnivoracious.
Marie answers questions on her academic background in archaeology and folklore and how that helps her writing to develop and maintain a sense of perspective and separation from twenty-first century modes of thought and belief, as well as explaining her fascination for exploring the under-city of London. She even comes up with a survival plan for being stranded beneath the city with no hope of rescue.
Check out the piece at www.omnivoracious.com.
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:
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.
Iain [M] Banks enjoyed providing answers for his first email Q&A session so much that he’s asked us to set up another one right away.
And so, without further ado, we hereby call for all you Banks-fans and readers to send in your questions for Iain. Visit the official Iain Banks website for more information, general guidelines etc.
