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.
There’s a wonderful short film on The Guardian web site in which Ian Sinclair takes us on a fascinating short walk around Hackney.
The piece – which you’ll find by following this link – offers a real flavour of Sinclair’s new book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire which is now at number #13 in the hardcover charts, is ranked in the top 250 Amazon sellers and has already been reprinted twice since its Feb 26th release!
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.‘
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.’
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.
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.
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.
Michael Cobley, whose forthcoming novel Seeds of Earth will be a highlight of Orbit‘s schedule for the first quarter of the coming year, has written a piece for the Fantasy Book Critic web site detailing his pick of this year and his tips for the next. And on the horizon for Mike…
“Seeds Of Earth, the first part of my Humanity’s Fire space opera trilogy, steps fully-fledged onto the world stage in early March. I hope to be doing a reading or two in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and there will also be the odd competition for goodies and so forth. Eastercon, the UK national SF convention, takes place in Bradford from April 10th to the 13th, and I shall be there, saying hello, signing anything that’ll stay put long enough, and going in search of The Perfect Curry! Also in March, I’ll be submitting volume 2, The Orphaned Worlds, before diving headlong into the final part, The Ascendant Stars.“