adelaidesean | Entries tagged with reprints

Andrew Thompson writes an engaging and refreshingly inclusive piece on The Future in the Age, covering everyone from Ray Kurzweil to Cormac McCarthy, with nods to Damien Broderick and little old me:

"If it was just a matter of charting technology, it would be easy. But (unpredictable) people come into the mix. There can be strange and wonderful and terrible results."

Keith Stevenson has posted his review of Magic Dirt to the interweb (I've quoted this before but it'd be nice if Aurealis gets the clicks):

"This is a book no self-respecting lover of Australian speculative fiction can afford to be without."

ETA Keith has also posted reviews of Cenotaxis and Earth Ascendant here!

The novelette I wrote in 1991 that went on to become The Crooked Letter, first published in my collection Light Bodies Falling, is selected for reprint in Angela Challis's Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror Vol 3. In great company:

"Contributors include ~~Garth Nix (New York Times bestseller),~~ Sean Williams (New York Times bestseller), Margo Lanagan (Word Fantasy Award winner), and award winners Terry Dowling (Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear), Richard Harland (The Black Crusade), Jason Nahrung (The Darkness Within), Martin Livings (Carnies)."

Lastly, the title story from Light Bodies Falling featured a giant spider crouching on a city building. Earlier this year, a group of puppeteers enacted that scene in Liverpool, little knowing that they were bringing one of my worst nightmares to life. Yaagh!

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Listening to: Hammock - This Kind of Life Keeps Breaking Your Heart

This time tomorrow, I'll be winging out of Melbourne on my jaunt to Denvention, followed by the Writers of the Future XXIV celebration, and capped off with a launch of The Force Unleashed.

(Speaking of which, here's the first review, and here's a quick interview about the joy of writing for computer games. Thanks, Graeme!)

I'll be back on the 21st and attending Terra-Nova on the 23rd, so if you're in Adelaide and can't afford Worldcon, come there instead. :-)

I have some big news for September but will save that for another day, once it's all locked down. A hint, though: it has nothing to do with Judas Priest and Bill Bailey (both of which I have tickets for, though). Friends in Perth and Queensland can expect a visit.

To close with news from further afield, I'm very pleased to have found a home for "The Seventh Letter" in Czech magazine Pevnost. The missing "g" throughout the story will be translated into a missing "d", thus changing the title to "The Fourth Letter". Maybe it's just me, but I reckon that's way cool.

PS. I'll try to post and keep up with email while I'm gone, but please forgive me if I'm tardy.

PPS. Devo tonight! Woohoo!

PPPS. ETA two more reprints: The Crooked Letter (6th) and Heirs of Earth (3rd), both in Australia.

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Listening to: Altus - Subspherical

After three and a half weeks without a phone line (thanks to ageing cables in our area, slow contractors and wet weather) we are now reconnected to teh interwebz and all is well again. It's amazing (but not terribly surprising) how much we've come to rely on it for music, tv, news, games, etc. The school holidays were tough, let me tell you.

Has everyone here watched "Dexter"? Amanda and I ripped through both seasons in a week last month, and now I'm reading the books. Jeff Lindsay has a terrific voice, and the novels are similar enough to push the same buttons but sufficiently different to be more than transcripts. I really enjoyed them.

Reprints: The Blood Debt is up to three and The Changeling has already gone back to the printers.

Demotion (voluntary): to Deputy Chair of the SA Writers' Centre. Whew!

Lastly, here's an excerpt from a book I'm working on at the moment. Apropos of nothing, except that I liked it:

"Once upon a time," the dragon said, "the world was full of creatures like me.  We are rare now, and for the most part we avoid your kind.  We see the fear in your eyes when you gaze upon us.  It's unpleasant, for we belong in this world as firmly as you do.  It was ours before it was yours.  We understand it a little better.

"So we hide ourselves in a variety of different ways.  Some live in the sky, as clouds or mysterious lights.  Some live underground, feasting on molten rock.  Some spread their wings in the canopies of forests, where vines will hide them and they can sleep out the rest of eternity.  Some find ways to walk among you as I do, as one of you.  It is difficult, but it can be done."

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Listening to: Tangerine Dream - Hyper Sphinx

Two developments on the Australian reprint front: The Hanging Mountains (second) and The Devoured Earth (first).

And I've just realised that the name of my new home suburb, Parkside, reads a lot like Darkside if you look at it the right way.

As in, "Luke, don't go up Unley Road. That leads to Parkside."

I'm not sure why I find that funny. I just do.

* My thesaurus assures me this is a valid synonym for "briefly".

Some quick things before I go quiet for a few days:

The Hanging Mountains has been selected as a BookSense Notable Book for July, when the beautiful Pyr hardback comes out in the US. Woohoo!

Echoes of Earth has just reached its fourth reprint here in Australia.

Deepspace's "The Barometric Sea", which you can stream from the link below, is my favourite music to write to at the moment. I used some of this composer's wonderful work during the reading of "The Soap Bubble" last year. Fans of ambient electronic and space music will approve. Go listen!

Current Music: Deepspace - "The Barometric Sea"

I have a new book coming out this month. Not a novel, but a collection of short stories from my early days as a writer, covering science fiction, horror and even a weird attempt at erotic humour. Some of the stories have been collected in the past; some are being reprinted for the first time; one, the seed story for The Crooked Letter has never been published before. Two of the stories deal with d-mat technology from The Resurrected Man. One, a prequel to my first novel Metal Fatigue, has been out of print for years.

If that's not enough, there's also an introduction by Rob Hood and a foreword by Shane Dix. And each story comes with (brief) notes from me, explaining where they came from and why I picked them for this book.

But wait. That's not all! The publisher, Altair Australia, is offering signed pre-release copies of Light Bodies Falling at a 10% discount. Follow the link below for more info on that, and for a full list of the stories.

I'm excited about this release because it gives some of my riskier, more experimental ideas another jog around the park. Most of them come from the early to mid 1990s, when I was still trying to find my voice, or muse, or whatever it was I stumbled across that's enabled me to write over twenty books since.

It also brings that one, special story out into the light for the very first time. Whether you like The Crooked Letter or hate it, or are just curious to see how little a finished work actually relies on its core idea, it's definitely worth a read.

I reckon so, anyway. But I might be just a tiny bit biased. :-)

( More info... )

Current Music: Tetsu Inoue - "Organic Cloud"

Speaking of old stuff, as I was the other day, my story "White Christmas" is now available (for free!) at Ticonderoga Online (thanks, Russ and Liz), with an added treat. Not steak knives. Click the "Writer Commentary" button at the top of the page for some thoughts on what was, for a while, my best-known story.

And while you're there, take the survey, if you haven't already. (Hasn't everyone? :-))

Current Music: Kate Bush - "Hounds of Love"

... for interviews, apparently.

Steve Wilson of Space Archaeology fame has pinned me down on the issues of Geodesica, Saturn Returns and all manner of interesting subjects. His site is fantastic, too, combining as it does two of my personal favourite things (like Haighs dark chocolate almonds). You should check it out while you're there.

And:
While it's always nice to see newer books getting attention, it's wonderful too when old books keep on keeping on. HarperCollins' edition of The Prodigal Sun has just gone into its sixth reprint here in Australia, for which I am extremely grateful.

And and:
Today marks the launch (at which I'll be speaking, briefly) of Adelaide's newest literary festival: the Fringe WORD festival, which will be unleashed upon the world next March, to coincide with the Adelaide Fringe's first year as an annual event. This comes hot on the heels of several other relatively recent gathering points for writers and readers that I've also been involved in, including the Salisbury Writers' Festival, the SA Writers' Festival, and of course the increasingly national Big Book Club/Little Big Book Club events. Perhaps there really is something in the water down here.

(Update: I've now uploaded my speech as a comment to this post.)

Current Music: Steve Roach - "Proof Positive"

Ken of Nethspace hurled a wide-ranging series of questions at me over the weekend for an interview on Wotmania, a large on-line community that started as a website devoted to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series and has since grown into several sub-communities, including one that discusses all things speculative. The conversation covers everything from religion to midgets, and includes my thoughts on the recent debate about SF and its audience (as triggered, chronicled and commented upon by Lou Anders). See the tags below for a more comprehensive list of topics.

Ken has posted the interview on his blog, or you can read it at Wotmania.

Meanwhile, The Crooked Letter (which has gone into its fifth reprint here in Australia) and The Devoured Earth are both reviewed over at Australian Specfic In Focus!.

There are a couple of recent developments that I'm not, at present, allowed to talk about. All I can say is that they're excellent and promise to make my life considerably better and more interesting in coming times. I'll report here when I can. Stay tuned.

Current Music: Thom Brennan - "Vibrant Water"

So Jonathan Strahan rings me today and tells me that Gary Numan is playing a gig just up the road from the Worldcon hotel the same week we're there. This is a Big Deal for me, and not just because I've recently finished a book that relies significantly on the lyrics of a certain postpunk-then-electro-now-goth legend. Needless to say, I will be buying a ticket.

In newsy stuff: it's been a good week or two. Rob Stephenson published the world's first review ofThe Devoured Earth in aurealisXpress (he liked it; see below). I expect this to be the first of many reviews getting the number of books in that series wrong. :-) Also, Stephen Davenport posted reviews of Geodesica in The Independent and The Program (ditto; and ditto). Being compared to Asimov is, arguably, worth another smiley.

It's also been a good week for finishing mss, with drafts of The Changeling and Saturn Returns in their final-final stages. Both will be delivered early next week so I can get on with the former's sequel. All original thoughts are being pumped into these projects, so I apologise for the blandness of this LJ in recent weeks.

Lastly, some other snippets of good news: both The Blood Debt and Geodesica: Descent have been reprinted by HarperCollins. Also, the wonderful people at Arts SA have generously thrown some cash at the Broken Land series, for which I'm very grateful. And a movie production company has been in touch about one of my older short stories--a possibility I refuse to lose any sleep over, but will report on here in due course...

Reviews:

( Read on... )

Current Music: Mark Snow - "The Truth & the Light" (X-Files)

What would happen if reincarnation was real and didn't only go forwards? What do Feynman's time-travelling electron and the velocity of money have in common? One possible answer to both questions is in "The End of the World Begins at Home", which has been reprinted on-line in the e-anthology Journeys of the Mind, compiled by Sonny Whitelaw and published by Double Dragon. It's an odd piece for me, tapping into millennial fears and my half-hearted study of Economics almost twenty years ago. It was first published in Borderlands and I've always had a soft spot for it. I hope it'll be happy in its new home .

(And while on the subject of reprints, this time in translation, I'm pleased to report that The Resurrected Man and the Orphans trilogy have been picked up by Editions Bragelonne in France. This is great because I can actually read French. C'est fantastique!)

Current Music: Sasha - "airdrawndagger"

I tend not to keep track of reprints, even thought it can be kind of exciting. Some of my fantasy novels have been reprinted three, four times, maybe more; as I said, I don't keep track. But I figure this is as good a place as any to note this sort of thing.

The Dying Light has just hit its fourth print run. Copies arrived today. I am pleased to see Australian SF selling this well, mine or otherwise. It's a good sign.

S