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I was this close to posting a drunken blog last night. We are all quite fortunate that I couldn’t figure out how to work it enough to post my list of authors I have defeated in hand-to-hand combat…

…so that I could post it here today.

• David Devereux
• Alex Bell
• Joe Abercrombie
• Tom Lloyd
• M.D. Lachlan

You might notice that those are all authors on my own publishing house. You might conclude that I am doing this out of fear of legal or physical or fecal retribution. I assure you, though, I’m not at all above threatening people from other publishers.

Mark C. Newton. Watch your goddamn back.

Anyway, what are your New Year’s Resolutions? Mine is to stop googling my own name. Not only is it shallow, vain and nerve-wracking, but it might also lead to the other people who share my name and it irritates me to no end that they didn’t do as I asked them and changed their names to combination African and Polish names. Shambali Hoedekker, I am looking at you.

I don’t care if those names are accurate or not. This is my blog. MY BLOG.

So, 2010 is going to be a big year! Probably because Tome of the Undergates is a tantalizing four months away (if you’re in Britain; nine if you live in the US or Netherlands). Can you wait that long? Dare you wait that long? Are you possessed of the urge to light a candle in front of its Amazon page and quietly confess in sobbing tones your love for its masculine cover, its enduring thickness, its BRIMMING gore, action, vengeance, romance and philosophical undertones?

You can’t?

Oh…well…uh…

Hey! Instead of stalking and murdering me, my editors or one of the authors/bloggers in possession of an ARC (if you do choose this route, though, go for Lachlan, I’m sick of that smug lupine writer; also, he’s small), why not just read THIS BOLD-ASS POST and see if your estimations of my abilities are enough to get yourself a free ARC!

Deadline is January 13th! We’ve got plenty of guesses (most of them very gracious) but we could use more!

Resolve to enter, read and swear your undying devotion to me!

Also, do not send me nudes. They’re very charming, but I can’t appear biased.

Happy New Year’s!

Edit: It would probably help to include the link to the actual contest. Good lawd.

In 1912, a pencil-sharpener salesman named Edgar Rice Burroughs published in a short novel ‘Under the Moons of Mars’ in All-Story Magazine. Republished in longer form in 1917, as A Princess of Mars, it was the first in the Barsoom series, kickstarted the planetary romance genre, and imprinted science fiction with a set of primitive but deeply felt tropes. James Cameroon’s Avatar is nothing less than a return to the primal urges of full-blown planetary romance in the style of Burroughs, Ralph Milne Farley, Homer Eon Flint and Otis Adelbert Kline: a glorious romp through the wonders and perils of an alien world, and a love story featuring a nearly naked alien princess. If you were a fifteen year old kid living in the 1970s and grokking sf, Tarzan of the Apes, and prog rock, a glimpse of Avatar in big-screen 3D and SurroundSound would blow your everloving mind.

Let’s get the story out of the way first. It’s 2154, a mining colony on Pandora, the Earth-like moon of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri-A, source of a vital mineral, unobtanium (a nice, geeky joke: we could have done with a few more). Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-Marine who volunteers to take the place of his dead twin brother as a driver of an avatar, a hybrid creature fettled up from human DNA and the DNA of the Na’vi, the blue-skinned ten-foot tall natives of Pandora. Sully is part of the science team, led by Sigourney Weaver’s Grace Augustine, that’s using the avatars to study and negotiate with the Na’vi; after his avatar is separated from the others, Sully encounters a Na’vi female, Neytiri, and is accepted into her clan, a major scientific coup. But Sully’s loyalty is torn between the scientists and the Na’vi, and former Marine Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of the colony’s security, who plans to evict the Na’vi clan from their home, which inconveniently sits on a motherlode of unobtanium. Quaritch promises Sully that if he can deal with the Na’vi, he’ll get treatment to restore use of his legs; but Sully has fallen for the Na’vi way of life, and with Neytiri . . .

Well, you get the idea. Like the pulp planetary romances, Avatar’s story is achingly simple and laid on with broad strokes. In the first half Sully gets to learn survival skills; in the second, he gets to use them; threaded through his pilgrim’s progress is a plunkingly obvious allegory about greed and uncontrolled capitalism destroying nature’s harmony, and a love story across the divide between two species. The bond between Sully and Na’vi is undeniably affecting, in parts, but it’s also in parts silly and sentimental, the characterisation and dialogue (especially Colonel Quaritch’s – GI Joe had better lines) is basic, the plot twists are utterly predictable, and the film lacks the heart and human qualities of smaller scale sf films like Moon or District 9. But what you take home from Avatar isn’t so much the story as the setting. And the setting, and its rendering, is amazing. Stunning.

There’s a nice scene near the beginning of this very long film where Sully first drives the body of his avatar, and realises that he can walk again, and breaks free from the technicians and the base and joyfully canters through a garden of native plants: that sense of freedom and awe is evoked over and again as the camera floats and zooms through Pandora’s forest. The 3D is crystal-clear and Cameron seamlessly blends live action characters, CG motion-capture characters and CG scenery, using a computer-camera system that allows him to zoom in and twist around anybody and anything. And Pandora itself is the best and most fully-detailed rendering of an alien world ever seen, a forest reimagined as a coral reef, with drifting medusa-like seeds, barracuda-like wolves, shark-like tigers, hammerheaded buffalo. . . In short, an entire, self-consistent biome packed with eye kicks and explored in beautiful and thrilling set pieces: Na’vi leading Sully through the luminescent galaxy of the night-time forest; the ascent of a chain of floating rocks to a floating mountain peak (straight from one of Roger Dean’s album covers); an aerial battle amongst those same floating mountains between helicopters and lumbering transports and a flock of warriors mounted on manta-ray dragons. . . And so on, and so on.

Sure, Cameron has spent enough money to reforest half of the Amazon Basin on a film with a by-the-numbers story that mixes tropes from ancient pulp fiction and the greatest hits from his previous work. But it also conjures, over and again, that heady, full-blown, good old-fashioned sense of wonder: it is, shamelessly, gleefully, a science fiction epic. What it isn’t, is a groundbreaking film, in the way that 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Wars were. But it is a major envelope-pushing advance in terms of what is now possible. Because what’s possible now, thanks to the techniques Cameron has developed, is that anything we can think of can be thrown up on the cinema screen. Think about that: anything at all.

Thanks much to Lou for inviting me to participate in this blog. My name’s Ari Marmell, and while I’ve been writing for a decade, I’m still learning how to navigate the ins and outs of publishing. Up until a couple of years ago, most of my writing was freelance work in role-playing games while I tried to build up my fiction chops. I’ve done some shared-world fiction, tied to the Vampire: the Masquerade, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: the Gathering games, but my first wholly original novel, The Conqueror’s Shadow, is just coming out this coming February from Spectra.

Any way, all of this is by way of saying, I’m still learning how to interact with editors and publishers. So when I hear “Gee, I really can’t buy this book from you, but I like your work and I’d like to do something else with you,” I tend to see the “Can’t buy this book” and not really the rest of it.

(We writers are a neurotic bunch at the best of times.)

Thankfully, Lou decided to prove me wrong.

See, the novel that he’s publishing–The Goblin Corps–wasn’t the first book of mine that he saw. My agent first sent him another fantasy novel that simply wound up being too short for Lou to be comfortable publishing. That’s fair enough, but I’ll admit that, even though he raved about it and specifically said he wanted to work with me on something else, I didn’t have a lot of hope when we sent him TGC. Yet, here I am, a new member of the Pyr stable. (Neigh. Winnie. Snort.) And very happy to be here.

Funny thing is, that’s actually how I got my start with my freelancing, too. I submitted a book idea for the Vampire: the Masquerade roleplaying game to White Wolf Publishing. Not a proposal, the entire book, which I’d written in my spare time. The line developer at the time, Justin Achilli, couldn’t use the book itself, but he liked it enough to hire me on for something else.

All of which means that I should probably start being more optimistic, and start believing people when they say “I can’t use this, but…” I should–but then we’re back to the whole “writers are neurotic” bit.

But if any of you reading this are up-and-comers, looking at selling your first work, consider this a gentle bit of support: Sometimes “No, but…” means “but” more than it means “no.”

Thanks for the reminder, Lou.

Since we’re in the middle of the holiday trifecta (TG, Xmas, and NYE), I want to take a moment to give thanks for all that I have received this year.

I’m thankful for my family, my wife, Jenny, and our son, Logan. I never thought life could be so rewarding, but every day is better than the last.

I’m thankful for our extended family; our parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. So many have volunteered their time and energy to help us as new parents. It’s marvelous to witness how Logan has brought our entire family closer together.

I’m thankful for Lou Anders and Pyr Books for giving me an opportunity to share my writing with the world. One of my main New Years wishes is to make them very glad they chose me. I’m also grateful to all the other publishers who have taken on the book, and to all those who jump on the Shadow-Train in the coming year.

I’m thankful to my agent, Eddie Schneider, and his (professional) partner, Joshua Bilmes, at JABberwocky for taking in a poor wretch like me. Likewise, I aim to prove myself a wise investment of their time and talents.

I’m thankful for our friends, for their love and support. They make our lives richer.

I hope all of you have a safe and merry holiday season, and a wonderful new year.

Greetings all, and thanks to Lou for allowing me to contribute to the Pyr-o-mania blog.

Have a look at this guy:

His name is Sir Richard Francis Burton and he’s the hero of my alternate history steampunk series, THE BURTON & SWINBURNE ADVENTURES. I want to take this opportunity to give you a little taster … without giving too much away, of course!

First off, some of you may know me from my BLAKIANA website. Back in 2000 I discovered Sexton Blake, the second most written about character in the English language (the first is Nick Carter). Blake is a sort of cross between Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones, and his stories (approx. 5000 of them!) are simply terrific … and until this year, none remained in print. So I decided to blow the dust off the old fellow and celebrate his adventures with a huge website. This attracted the attention of such luminaries as Mike Moorcock (whose first published novel was a Blake) and George Mann (who edited the recent Blake anthology) and through these good souls I was fortunate enough to attract the attention of publishers and thus get Burton & Swinburne off the ground.

The first book in the projected series is currently entitled THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEELED JACK, and the style is very Blakeian — the emphasis is on mystery and adventure and, well, BRITISHNESS, I guess!

This is alternate history, folks, so a great many of the characters that appear in the story were real Victorians (howcome famous Victorians had such cool names?). I freely admit, I have walked over their graves, then backed a car over them, then sprayed graffiti on their headstones, then dug ’em up and danced on their bones, then painted a clown’s face on their mouldering corpses. In other words: MASSIVE DISRESPECT! I’ve made Darwin a criminal mastermind, Florence Nightingale a ghoul, Lord Palmerston a freak and Isambard Kingdom Brunel a … well, you’ll have to wait and see.

How do I justify this treatment of Britain’s national heroes? With a simple phrase:

“When one man changes Time, Time changes everyone.”

It’s the ripple effect. One event turns out differently, and from it new opportunities and challenges are born, and in meeting them, people travel different paths to those we’ve recorded as history.

So what can you look forward to? I can promise you a complex hero who very definitely ain’t as pure as the driven snow, a wildly eccentric sidekick who gets an erotic thrill out of pain, a pub crawl in London’s worst stinkhole, missing chimney sweeps, The Beetle, werewolves that spontaniously combust, a panther-like swordstick-wielding albino who is NOT Elric, and, of course, Spring Heeled Jack.

The latter, who is surely one of the weirdest and most mysterious figures in British folklore (Google him!) is fully explained in my tale, and I’ve managed to stick pretty damned close to historical records as far as his exploits are concerned. But man, I wish I knew the truth!

Okay, so let’s say my total disrespect for British history’s great and good is PUNKY; where does the STEAMY come into it? I have to admit, at this point in the story (I’m about 80% done), Burton’s relationship with Nurse Raghavendra

of the Sisters of Noble Benevolence has become far more steamy than I’d planned … but we want TECH, don’t we? Sorry to disappoint, but there aren’t any airships of the dirigible variety. I do, though, have rotorcars, communication pipes, velocipedes and steam-horses. There’s a good deal of copper, brass, studded metal bands, dials, levers, flywheels, gyroscopes, cogs, funnels and crankshafts. I’d love to show it to you right now but a London Peculiar has settled over the city and I can barely see the end of my hand.

So, tally ho, what! THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEELED JACK is scheduled for publication in the UK in April and in the US in the Fall (-ish).

End of ad. Anyone for jellied eels?

Following on from my world-building piece about ‘Sasha’, I thought I’d do something similar for the ‘Cassandra Kresnov Series’.

Obviously there’s a fair few scientific improbabilities in Cassandra’s world, starting with Earthlike planets of roughly similar gravity, atmosphere, etc. My technical excuse is that the primary scientific improbability (faster than light travel) gives humanity such a wide range that even if such worlds are a million to one, humanity now has access to tens of millions of stars, so logically there are quite a few million-to-one shots inside that range. But the real point of a story like Cassandra’s is not to ponder scientific accuracy, it’s to tell a good story. So long as it’s vaguely plausible, science shouldn’t get in the way. Besides which, no one has any real idea how many Earthlike planets there are… maybe there’s plenty, just waiting for us to figure a way to reach and colonise.

Tanusha is one such planet. We never really see the planet because we’re concentrated where most of the people are, in the city of Tanusha. Tanusha has 57 million people at the time of ‘Crossover’, though even by ‘Killswitch’ it’s gone up a million or so. It’s a boomtown, and was planned that way from inception. For one thing, environmentalists have it wrong when they oppose large cities, putting people into big cities keeps them out of the countryside, so all environmentalists should be fans of skyscrapers — cities that aren’t allowed to grow upward will grow outward instead, eating natural land as they go. Dense cities are also more economically productive, which is not to say farmers are unnecessary (though with futuristic hydroponics, synthetic food replication etc, who knows?) only to say that the more we move into the future, the less significant farming becomes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product in any economy. That still leaves us with mining, but again with nano-tech and replication technologies, who knows where minerals will be coming from?

Read the rest of it on my blog…

I used to say ‘I have re-read this novel every year since I first read it, when I was 12.’ And that used to be true; but then last year, for whatever reason, I didn’t get round to my annual re-read. And this year’s nearly over. So I’ve decided to go through it again, before I run out of year.

Now, the point of this post is not to talk about the novel as such, so much as to flag up these beautiful, nay exemplary Pauline Baynes cover illustrations. Let me hear you say ‘oooh!’ (‘oooh!’). Click on them and they should become enlarged.

This was the edition in which I first read LotR (my mother’s old edition, I think). When I discovered it again in a charity shop [thrift shops, I believe they’re called, Stateside] for the absurd price above indicated I couldn’t resist buying it, and adding it to the four (or five; I’m not sure) editions of the title I already own.

But I hope it’s not merely rank nostalgia that makes me say: it’s a lovely cover. Even the Victorian Playbill title font works. I love the way there’s an outer frame of stylised trees (with orcs lurking in the roots) surrounding an inner frame of stylised trees, itself surrounding a vertically stacked perspective of more trees, houses, hills and mountains. The visual idiom is a perfectly pitched Edwardian-Medieval, spot-on for the novel. And there’s a canny little visual push-pull about the way the picture invites the eye to run up from the miniature figures at the bottom through the landscape they must traverse to the mountains at the top, at the same time that the words of the title invite the eye to work their way down from ‘The’ to ‘Rings’. Very clever.

The back is lovely too. Those kiln-shaped mountains and towers! Like pottery models. And the sea-blue barrenness of peaks and troughs. I suppose imagery from the cinema versions will, nowadays, tend to overwrite other visual realisations; but for me these pictures will always hold a special place.

I’ve written a post on my blog about the world building that went into the land of Lenayin, from my novel ‘Sasha’. Rather than posting the whole thing here, I’ve put in a link, and an excerpt.

‘I can’t think of many fantasy novels where the people live beneath the rule of a king, but are ambivalent toward him and his authority. Because fantasy novels tend to be in love with the power of kings, and in love with the feudal system that sustains it… and sure, there is a lot of romance surrounding a position of such extreme authority. But the reality of such systems, of course, is that much of what we perceive as romance from that period of European history (picture glamorous king in crimson cloak on prancing white steed), was in fact propaganda by those kings who wanted to make themselves look good, and semi-divine, for obvious reasons.

Though power itself can be glamorous, much of the romance surrounding that power was in reality bullshit, and much of the manner in which kings actually ruled was cruel, arbitrary and unenlightened, to put it mildly. A good king could certainly be better than a bad king, but the system itself doesn’t allow much of what we would consider today ‘liberal open mindedness’ — you’re either loyal, or you’re dead, and that applies to those living beneath good kings and bad kings alike. George RR Martin is one fantasy author who grasps this extremely well in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’. But a lot of fantasy, sadly I think, tends to swallow the propaganda whole, because the propaganda is pretty. Perhaps this just goes to illustrate that there is a statue of limitations on the offense caused by nasty political systems. Fantasy writers glorifying Nazism would get into trouble. Feudalism, not so much.

And yes, I am just stirring.

To those of you enjoying the Pyr edition of Paul McAuley’s incomparable The Quiet War, I say this: “ner ner n’ner ner, I’ve read the sequel”. It’s called Gardens of the Sun, and I’ve blogged an instant review too. If The Quiet War deserves to sweep all before it in America (and it does) then Gardens of the Sun deserves to do just as well: it makes a coherent whole with the first book, and together they constitute “a very major work of contemporary science fiction, amongst the great genre achievements of the noughties, a long novel that will still be being read and remembered fifty years from now … If you have any interest in SF today you’ll need to read both books.” Or that, at least, is what I think. [AR]