Amanda is to be interviewed by Roz Kaveney at the next BSFA monthly meeting. The event takes place at The Antelope Tavern at 7pm on April 22nd and you’d be a fool not to be there!
For those of you on Facebook, here is the event page.
Congratulations to Ian McDonald, whose superb novel Brasyl has been announced as one of the six titles on the final short-list for this year’s Nebula Award. The full list of nominees in all categories can be found here.
The awards will be presented at the 2009 Nebula Awards® Weekend, April 24-26,2009 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
Boing Boing – one of the finest, most popular and in my opinion, influential Internet sites around today posted a feature by Cory Doctorow on Ian McDonald and his recently published collection Cyberabad Days…
“Ian McDonald is one of science fiction’s finest working writers, and his latest short story collection Cyberabad Days, is the kind of book that showcases exactly what science fiction is for. ”
Scifi Wire has an exclusive and in-depth interview with Ian McDonald following the US release of his new story collection Cyberabad Days…
‘The title Cyberabad Days is a deliberate echo of the Arabian Nights. The stories are fairy tales of New Delhi. River was an Indian—novel, fat, many-voiced, wide-screen; Cyberabad Days is tales. Mumbai movies tell stories in ways that challenge our Western aesthetics and values. They’re not afraid of sentiment, they’re not afraid of big acting, or putting in song and dance, because Bollywood cinema’s not supposed to be a mimetic art form. It’s not about realism—that most pernicious of Western values—it’s a show. I wanted these stories to have a similar feel. There are dance routines in the ‘The Djinn’s Wife’ (and it ends in a Bollywood melodrama bloodbath). There are indeed princesses who fall from power and exact revenge on their enemies. There are brothers whose feud plays out over decades.‘
It’s not due out from Tor for some months, but Freda Warrington‘s forthcoming novel Elfland has received a fabulous review from Charles de Lint in Fantasy & Science Fiction.
As well as grading the book as ‘Highly Recommended’, de Lint praises Freda’s novel to the rafters, saying it is ‘…a real page-turner and a very magical book…‘ and that ‘…even the most jaded fantasy reader will quickly fall under the spell of her characters and the warm, intimate voice Warrington uses to tell us their stories‘. Read the full review here.
In other news Immanion Press are publishing an omnibus of two of Freda’s Blackbird titles – A Blackbird in Amber Twilight is scheduled for release in March – more info on Freda’s Immanion titles can be found here.
Freda reports that she will be attending this years Eastercon. She’ll be one of a number of Zeno clients who will be attending – and both John’s will be there too. More on this anon.
Stories by Zeno clients Aliette de Bodard and Stephen Volk grace the pages of the brand new issue of British horror mag Black Static. In terms of fiction therein, that makes it 20% Zeno!
Alliette’s story is called The Lonely Heart and Steve’s has the typically uncompromising title of Fear.
Issue #09 is out now – subscribe here.
Ian McDonald reflects on the digital doppelgangers that our growing use of the net is bringing about…
‘I’m in bits. Pieces of me are all over the place.
My history is on Wikipedia, my photos are on Flickr, my petty rants are on Livejournal, my indiscretions are on Facebook, my globetrotting is stored on half a dozen travel sites, my likes and dislikes profiled and my reading recorded on Amazon.
And I’m a part-time mage in World of Warcraft. Well, I’m not. But it might be fun. More fun than Second Life, where I could be some tedious avatar and hang with boring people.’
… according to Olympics minister Tessa Jowell in this article which aired last night on the Channel 4 news.
We are absolutely delighted to welcome Aliette de Bodard to the Zeno agency.
John Berlyne says “Aliette’s reputation as a rising star of genre fiction had reached me long before I had the pleasure of meeting her in person at last year’s World Fantasy Convention in Calgary. That reputation was well founded – her work is both delightful and ingenous, her voice distinctive and her feeling for history and the ancient civilisations where she sets much of her work is instictive, thorough and a credit to her extensive research. No longer can she be considered merely one of the Writers of the Future (she was a winner of that competition on 2007) – Aliette is a very much a writer of today and one that is going to be around for a long time to come.“
Reviews are coming in now for Michael Cobley‘s superb epic space opera SEEDS OF EARTH, which is due to be released early next month by Orbit.
Check out this review at Bookgeeks.com and if that intrigues you, nip over to Concept Sci-Fi via this link where an extract of the novel is available. And here is an interview with the author for good measure.
He’s only been a client for a day or two, but already Stephen Volk is out there flying the flag! Here’s a little something worth putting in your diary…
Stephen Volk is giving a talk on the creating and writing of his award-winning TV drama series Afterlife at ‘Fantastic Writing – science fiction, fantasy and magic: Writing the future, the past and other worlds‘, a one-day event for budding scriptwriters taking place on Saturday 7th March 2009 at De Montfort University’s Leicester City campus.
The day also includes a keynote speech from acclaimed novelist Graham Joyce (The Facts of Life, DOOM), Q&A sessions with guests such as Phil Ford (Sarah Jane Adventures, Dr Who, Torchwood) and James Moran (Dr Who, Torchwood, Spooks), and a presentation on writing for on-line drama.
Tickets for the event are £65 per person including lunch, refreshments and car parking. For more information or to book a place, please contact:
Promotion & Recruitment Centre
Faculty of Humanities
Tel–0116 250 6470
Email – pghums[at]dmu[dot]ac[dot]uk
Here’s a nice piece posted by John Joseph Adams on the Tor.com web site on Sarah Ash‘s new novel Flight into Darkness.
Zeno Agency is delighted to announced that we’ve signed up the Bafta award winning screenwriter Stephen Volk as a client, specifically representing him for books. All Steve’s other writing commitments (film, television and radio) will continue to be handled by Linda Seifert Management.
John Berlyne says ‘I met Steve at the World Fantasy Convention last year over in Calgary and we got to talking about his novel The Gospel According to Lazarus. When I read a sample it was clear to me it was something really very special indeed – an epic and powerful work, dark, brooding and exquisitely written. This is part Jacobean revenge tragedy, part variation of the ‘Frankenstein‘ myth and part heretical alternative history – and it’s terrific! I’m absolutely thrilled to have Steve on board.‘
Sarah Ash applies The Page 69 Test to her latest novel Flight into Darkness, published recently in the US by Bantam. Sarah says…
“A reader recently emailed me, mentioning how intrigued he was at finding a fantasy series in which gunpowder and eighteenth century weaponry can be found alongside dragons and daemons. I really appreciated that comment! Because in writing this series I wanted to evoke an Age of Reason not unlike our own and confront the enlightened thinkers and scientists with the raw forces of an ancient and powerful magic that they can neither explain away nor begin to understand.” Follow this link to read more…
And if this wets your appetite and you’d like to investigate Sarah’s wonderful fantasy novel further, follow this link for an excerpt of the first chapter, available to read free at Randomhouse.com.
