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Gollancz Future News (plus competition!) | posted by Markus on Tuesday March 13, @01:56PM ( Printer Friendly Version.| Email this article) | | | |  
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Welcome to the latest outing of the
Gollancz newsletter! As well as
soaking up the warmth of the appropriately SFnal warmest winter
since people started worrying about this sort of thing, Gollancz has
also been basking in the glow of our authors' success on the
shortlists for the two major UK SF awards. The British Science Fiction Association
Award for best novel
features M. John Harrison's Nova Swing, Jon Courtenay Grimwood'sEnd of the World Blues and Roger Levy's Icarus on a shortlist of five. Look out
also for The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow published by our sister list
Weidenfeld and Nicolson. The BSFA award should be announced at Eastercon.
Which happens at Easter.
And then on 2nd
May the Arthur C. Clarke Award
will be presented. A shortlist of six titles includes Nova Swing,End of the World Blues, and Adam Roberts' Gradisil. Good luck
to all.
And in the States, the
seven-book shortlist for the Crawford Award
for best new fantasy
writer (previously won by our own Joe Hill, whose Heart-Shaped Box we publish later this month) includes The Lies of Locke Lamora by
Scott
Lynch. The award will be announced in March at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Read on for more
news about the book.
Away from the awards but equally satisfying in its
own way was the release of Locus magazine's recommended
reading choices for 2006. Locus
is
the leading genre magazine and we were especially thrilled
to have nine Gollancz books, plus one from Orion Children's and one from W&N, recommended from a year that has been a
very strong one for the genre as a whole. Steve Baxter's Emperor, the aforementioned End of the World Blues, Nova Swing and Justina Robson's Keeping it Real were picked out on the SF list and Mary Gentle's Ilario and James Morrow's The Last Witchfinder made the Fantasy list. The first
novels list had two of our fantasy debuts from 2006: Joe
Abercrombie's The Blade Itself and Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora. Ursula Le Guin's Voices was on the YA pick, and in Collections, Al Reynolds' Galactic North
and Steve Baxter's Resplendent
were
recommended. Both Steve and Al featured in the Best Novella section too, with, respectively, 'The Siege of Earth' (from Resplendent) and 'Nightingale' (from Galactic North). Again congratulations to all. The Brits really are
coming. OK so Scott and Ursula are American but they're both Gollancz author so that's
nearly as good . . .
For those of you who don't have access to a
shop that stocks Locus magazine, do check out their website. As well as being possessed of
immaculate taste in genre books (!) Locus is the home
for some of the most interesting commentary and reviewing of SF and
Fantasy and is particularly invaluable as a source of any
information worth knowing on what is going on in the worlds of SF
and Fantasy publishing. Check out their SF links page
which is a doorway to all sorts of SF goodness,
whether it be online magazines and message forums or links to author
blogs. Now that's
quite enough trumpet blowing.
What else has been happening at Gollancz
towers? *reaches for trumpet* Fans of Scott Lynch will be delighted
to know that the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies is now safely
delivered. Second book blues on the Seas? Absolutely not. The new book hits the waves and sees the Gentleman
Bastards embroiled in some fantastic action with Pirates. Pirates
like you've never seen before. We've also taken delivery of superb
new novels from Ian McDonald, Paul McAuley and Richard Morgan. 2007
is already shaping up to be fantastic year for the list.
We're
also just putting the finishing touches together on the production
of a very exciting new book that hails not from the
UK but from Poland. Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish
. Sapkowski's already immense in
Europe (2,000,000 copies sold) and come April when we
publish The Last Wish
he's going to make a real splash here too.
Oh and just wait until you see the debut novel
by young American author Patrick Rothfuss that we've just
acquired. The Name of the Wind is a
wonderful epic fantasy just perfect for everyone who enjoys Robin
Hobb and Trudi Canavan. You don't mind waiting for it until September do
you?
Simon, Jo and
Gillian
Gollancz Editorial Team | |
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| | Welcome to the
latest outing of the Gollancz newsletter! As well as soaking up
the warmth of the appropriately SFnal warmest winter since people
started worrying about this sort of thing, Gollancz has also been
basking in the glow of our authors' success on the shortlists for the
two major UK SF awards. The British Science Fiction
Association Award for best novel features M. John Harrison's Nova Swing, Jon Courtenay
Grimwood'sEnd of the World Blues and
Roger Levy's Icarus on a shortlist of
five. Look out also for The Last Witchfinder by
James Morrow published by our sister list Weidenfeld and Nicolson. The
BSFA award should be announced at Eastercon. Which happens at Easter.
And then on 2nd May the Arthur C. Clarke Award will
be presented. A shortlist of six titles includes Nova Swing,End of the World Blues, and
Adam Roberts' Gradisil. Good luck to
all.
And in the States, the seven-book shortlist for the Crawford Award for best new
fantasy writer (previously won by our own Joe Hill, whose Heart-Shaped Box we publish
later this month) includes The Lies of Locke Lamora by
Scott Lynch. The award will be announced in March at the International Conference on the
Fantastic in the Arts. Read on for more news about the book.
Away from the awards but equally satisfying in its own way was the
release of Locus magazine's recommended reading choices for
2006. Locus is the leading genre magazine and we were
especially thrilled to have nine Gollancz books, plus one from Orion
Children's and one from W&N, recommended from a year that has been a
very strong one for the genre as a whole. Steve Baxter's Emperor, the aforementioned
End of the World Blues, Nova Swing and Justina
Robson's Keeping it Real were picked
out on the SF list and Mary Gentle's Ilario and James Morrow's The Last Witchfinder made the
Fantasy list. The first novels list had two of our fantasy debuts from
2006: Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself and Scott
Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora.
Ursula Le Guin's Voices was on the YA pick, and in
Collections, Al Reynolds' Galactic North and Steve
Baxter's Resplendent were
recommended. Both Steve and Al featured in the Best Novella section too,
with, respectively, 'The Siege of Earth' (from Resplendent) and
'Nightingale' (from Galactic North). Again
congratulations to all. The Brits really are coming. OK so Scott and
Ursula are American but they're both Gollancz author so that's nearly as
good . . .
For those of you who don't have access to a shop that stocks
Locus magazine, do check out their website. As well as being
possessed of immaculate taste in genre books (!) Locus is the
home for some of the most interesting commentary and reviewing of SF and
Fantasy and is particularly invaluable as a source of any information
worth knowing on what is going on in the worlds of SF and Fantasy
publishing. Check out their SF links page which is a
doorway to all sorts of SF goodness, whether it be online magazines and
message forums or links to author blogs. Now that's quite enough trumpet
blowing.
What else has been happening at Gollancz towers?
*reaches for trumpet* Fans of Scott Lynch will be delighted to know that
the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies is
now safely delivered. Second book blues on the Seas? Absolutely not. The
new book hits the waves and sees the Gentleman Bastards embroiled in
some fantastic action with Pirates. Pirates like you've never seen
before. We've also taken delivery of superb new novels from Ian
McDonald, Paul McAuley and Richard Morgan. 2007 is already shaping up to
be fantastic year for the list.
We're also just putting the finishing touches
together on the production of a very exciting new book that hails not
from the UK but from Poland. Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish . Sapkowski's
already immense in Europe (2,000,000 copies sold) and come April when we
publish The Last Wish he's going to
make a real splash here too.
Oh and just wait until you
see the debut novel by young American author Patrick Rothfuss that we've
just acquired. The Name of the Wind is a wonderful epic fantasy
just perfect for everyone who enjoys Robin Hobb and Trudi Canavan. You
don't mind waiting for it until September do you?
Simon, Jo and Gillian
Gollancz Editorial
Team | |
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'Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid
piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing
characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous
and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of
it.'
So starts the extraordinary tale of Edward Moon, detective,
his silent sidekick the Somnambulist and a devilish plot to recreate the
apocalyptic prophecies of William Blake and bring the British Empire
crashing down. Gollancz chatted to author Jonathan Barnes to get his
take on this remarkable and slightly grotesque debut . . .
Who do you hope your potential readers might be? And how would
you describeThe Somnambulist to them?
Packed with
bizarre characters, black comedy and outrageous adventures, The
Somnambulist is a melodrama - and quite unapologetically so.
Potential readers? Well, if you love The Vesuvius Club, The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Sherlock Holmes canon, The
Talons of Weng Chiang or the novels of Stephen Fry, you'll hopefully
find something here to enjoy. Beyond that - it's for anyone who likes to
be intelligently entertained.
The book's narrator is very funny but he's
also delightfully twisted, needlessly cruel, horribly elitist and
profoundly unreliable. Was writing him therapeutic?
Not sure
about it being therapeutic but the voice certainly came with alarming
fluency. I thought it might be amusing to have a storyteller who
absolutely, unequivocally despises his own protagonist. It turned out to
be an interesting challenge to make him so unpleasant whilst also trying
to ensure that the audience has a good time in his company. Having said
that, what I'm writing at the moment has a much nicer narrator and I'm
finding that a lot more difficult than the bastard at the heart of
The Somnambulist!
The picture you paint of
life in Britain around the turn of the century is vivid but also pretty
gruesome. Where did you draw your research from and have you been fair
to the period?
I wouldn't claim for a second that the London
of 1901 depicted in The Somnambulist is necessarily what it would
have been like at the time. The whole milieu is deliberately heightened
- it's the city of Doyle, Wilde, the Elephant Man, Sexton Blake and
Jack the Ripper. In terms of research, I am indebted to the
psychogeographical histories of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair,
particularly their notion, troublingly seductive, that the city acts
almost as though it is alive.
Much of the novel is set
in and around the worlds of vaudeville, the theatre, the circus. What
draws you to the denizens of these worlds? Are you a frustrated actor or
performer yourself?
I'd love to act but unfortunately I'm
irredeemably terrible at it. As for the settings in the book, they're
not an intentional theme but reflect, perhaps, the extreme theatricality
of the whole.
Who would you say are your main influences
as a writer? Are there any writers from the period you write about that
you think we should be reading?
I certainly wouldn't deign
to tell anyone what they should be reading! Having said that, if you're
interested in Victorian gothic I'd recommend the work of Arthur Machen -
in particular The Great God Pan which exists on the same razor's
edge of funny/grotesque that I was aiming to evoke in The
Somnambulist. As for influences, they are pretty wide-ranging. Oscar
Wilde (lost count of the number of times I've read The Picture of
Dorian Gray), M. R. James, Umberto Eco (for Foucault's
Pendulum), anything by Patrick McGrath. For their storytelling skill
- Stephen King, Alan Moore. For their prose - Martin Amis, Will Self.
Also, television - 24, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor
Who. There's plenty to learn from their helter-skelter
narratives.
Time travellers make an appearance
in The Somnambulist. Does this give a clue as to what the next
book will be?
The Domino Men takes place in twenty-first century London
and details the last days of a secret civil war. It's not a direct
sequel to The Somnambulist but there are links to that book for
anyone who cares to look. There are also a couple of familiar characters
that return. Given that they were knocking around in the city in 1901
yet seem to have come back in 2007 without having aged a day, I guess
that answers your question about time travel! | | | |
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Imagine the camera, panning slowly,
lingeringly, over luscious covers with luminous beauties. Imagine the
voice, smooth as silk, dripping with honey. Imagine new worlds, opening
up before your very eyes, for this is GOLLANCZ
ROMANCE.
These are not just fantasies . . . these are
stirring novels peopled with strong, beautiful women and handsome,
fierce men, where the love of a witch can save a man from a fate worse
than death, where a king's daughter can give herself to a barbarian
warlord to save her people, where a telepathic barmaid's vampire lover
may not be all he seems.
These are not just romances . . . these
are tales where a lightning-struck heroine can find the dead, where the
Old Russia of Baba Yaga and savage rusalka are threatening to overwhelm
the modern-day land, where lovers battle with each other for the lady's
hand, and monsters are not always what they appear at first
sight.
Welcome to Gollancz Romancz, a
crossover fantasy/romance list, perfect for readers of Laurell K.
Hamilton and Kim Harrison, Heat and Bella, watchers of
Buffy and Charmed, vibrant young women who love strong, sexy heroines
out to kick ass and save the world - or at least their love
lives
This month introduces us to Xylara who must choose between
her people and her freedom when she is claimed by a rampaging warload as
his Warprize . . . |
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| If we
were to try and persuade you to pick up a copy of the magnificent
Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, we could try and dazzle you with
the quality of the writing, which is both lyrical and haunting; we could
try and tempt you with the genuinely unique and diverse style of her
short stories, which delight and horrify in equal measure; we could also
boast about the prizes and acclaim it has won all over the world,
reflecting the sheer inventiveness and originality of Margo's work, or
we could simply tell you that it's the finest collection of short
stories you are ever likely to read. In the end though, we decided it
was better to let others say it so much better than we
could:
'Her imagination is a powerful beast, encompassing clowns
and angels, dreams and nightmares - mostly nightmares. She writes with
wit and detachment, and a certain exuberant ruthlessness' The
Times
'A delicate light suffuses . . . the remarkable,
luminous, mysterious short stories of Margo Lanagan' The
Guardian
'Lanagan's work deals at once in charming
inventions and overwhelming sadnes.' TLS
'A
collection heady with emotion and atmosphere. Magic realism merges its
hard and humorous edges in this dreamy selection of vignettes'
Edge magazine
'Black Juice deserves to
be picked up and read' Shivers
We think that
says it all, don't you? | | | | |
| | 
|
Are you a
Gentleman Bastard?
Well, Locke Lamora is. He's the first choice
for theft, treachery and a first-rate con job. He'd give both Sharpe and
Flashman a run for their money. Discover more including on just how much
of a cad you are at: www.lockelamora.co.uk | | | |
| | MEET STEPHEN BAXTER MEET
STEPHEN BAXTER MEET STEPHEN BAXTER
| | | |
| | | 
| STEPHEN BAXTER
Stephen Baxter was born in 1957. He has a
degree in mathematics from Cambridge University and a degree in
Engineering from Southampton University. With an academic track record
like this it was difficult for him to escape a series of 'proper jobs';
he worked as a teacher of maths and physics and, for several years, in
information technology. In 1991 he applied to become a Cosmonaut -
aiming for the guest slot on the Mir space station eventually taken by
Helen Sharman - but fell at an early hurdle. He's been a full time
author since 1995.
He is the author of numerous SF novels,
including Raft, Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, Ring, The Time
Ships, Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, the Manifold trilogy,
Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, short story
collections such as Vacuum Diagrams and Resplendent, some
novels co-authored with Arthur C. Clarke including The Light Of Other
Days, Time's Eye and Sunstorm. He has also written three YA
novels about mammoths; Silverhair, Longtusk and Icebones.
All of these have been published in the US, Germany, Japan and
France.
His current series is called Time's Tapestry. Four
novels, Emperor, Conqueror (published this month),
Navigator and Weaver will use historical events and
characters from the time of the Roman Empire, through the Norman
Conquest, the Crusades and the Discovery of America to tell a story that
will eventually reveal itself to be entirely SFnal in conception and
design. He has also written non-fiction including collections of essays
and a biography of the geologist James Hutton.
He has published
more than a book a year since 1991. In this case, however quantity does
come with quality. His novels have won several awards including the
Philip K. Dick Award, the John Campbell Memorial Award, the British
Science Fiction Association Award, the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany) and
the Seiun Award (Japan) and have been shortlisted for several others,
including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Hugo Award and Locus awards.
He has built up an extraordinary critical reputation and is regularly
compared to Olaf Stapledon and H.G .Wells.
Stephen moved to
Northumberland a few years ago. This move towards the spine of the
country, in close proximity to Hadrian's wall has, it could be said,
brought into focus a major strand of his writing: the presence and
influence of history on our present and on our future and a fascination
with how massive spans of time visibly shape our world and provide the
background for our lives. If Stephen Baxter's novels do nothing else
(and they certainly do - here are novels with flawed characters,
extraordinary ideas and awe-inspiring scope), they provide a vivid and
illuminating context for our lives; a clear pointer to where and when
and what and how we really are. | | |
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January saw the second and final part of James Barclay's epic new
series, The Ascendants of Estorea, hit the shelves. Shout for the Dead followed on from Cry of the Newborn (which itself went
into mass market paperback late in 2006). The books chronicle the
dramatic and terrifying events of an empire facing collapse. Into this
tense situation are thrown four teenagers.
Able to control the
elements, they mark the birth of magic into the world. Imagine what
would have happened to Ancient Rome if someone had suddenly developed
the ability to cause earthquakes and bring down lightning strikes and
you get some idea of the high drama and excitement that James brings to
these books.
Already described as the Sergio Leone of the genre
for his bestselling Raven books, James ups the ante with his new series.
There are still the characters you care for, there's still the fear that
your favourite character might not make it through to the end of the
book, there are still the breathtaking action scenes but this time it
comes on a bigger, grander scale. Oh - did we mention that there are
armies of the undead too? | | | | |  |
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We're offering 15 lucky subscribers to the
Gollancz Newsletter the chance to win a first-edition HB of Cry of the Newborn, the first book of
James Barclay's new series, personally dedicated and signed by James.
All you have to do is tell us the names of two members of THE
RAVEN, James' heroic band of mercenaries from the Chronicles of the Raven and Legends of the Raven trilogies. Send us your entry
along with the text of the dedication you'd like to competitions@orionbooks.co.
uk. Good luck, and see you next month! | | |
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