Mark Chadbourn

Should We Be Sending Pyr Books to the Oval Office?

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The Telegraph recently released Barack Obama: The 50 Facts You May Not Know. Among them, the facts that he collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books and that he has read all seven Harry Potter books. And we’ve all seen the MSNBC clip (on YouTube and below) where he admits to being born on Krypton.

When you remember that JFK’s remark that From Russian, With Love was one of his Top Ten favorite books was what launched Ian Fleming’s James Bond to widespread popularity, having a president that is genre-friendly is fantastic.

New Pyr author Mark Chadbourn agrees about what having a Geek-in-Chief could mean for genre fiction:

A new president always sets the wider cultural tone for a country (and in America’s case, the world). Look how Bush spawned all those testosterone thrillers, in novels, and on TV, like 24. Obama is already likely to have a much wider cultural impact than Bush, purely because his election was so much more iconic. Knowing that he loves genre stuff is bound to leech into the mainstream and give it a certain kind of cachet, at the very least.

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Spring/Summer 2009: A Look at the Future

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Want another reason to feel good about the future?
Here’s a peak at our Spring/Summer 2009 Season:

March:
Tom Lloyd, The Twilight Herald (Book Two of the Twilight Reign)
Less than a year after being plucked from obscurity and poverty the charismatic new Lord of the Farlan finds himself unprepared to deal with the attempt on his life that now spells war, and the possibility of rebellion waiting for him at home.

Matthew Sturges, Midwinter
Mauritaine once heroic Captain in the Seelie Army, now accused of treason and sentenced to life without parole, is offered one last chance to redeem himself, an opportunity to regain his freedom and his honor in the secrete service of Queen Titania.

April:
Ian McDonald, Brasyl(coming in trade paperback!)
Be seduced, amazed, and shocked by one of the world’s greatest and strangest nations. Past, present, and future Brazil, with all its color, passion, and shifting realities, come together in a novel that is part SF, part history, part mystery, and entirely enthralling.

James Enge, Blood of Ambrose
Behind the King’s life stands the menacing Protector, and beyond him lies the Protector’s Shadow… Against this evil, Morlock Ambrosius–stateless person, master of all magical makers, deadly swordsman, and hopeless drunk.

May:
Joel Shepherd, Crossover(coming in mass market!)
The first novel in a series that follows the adventures of Cassandra Kresnov, an android created by the League, one side of an interstellar war against the more powerful, conservative Federation. The product of an experimental design and dangerously intelligent, Cassandra raises probing questions and experiences moral awakening. Soon she has deserted the League in search of a new life in the territory of the Federation.

Sean Williams, The Hanging Mountains(Books of the Cataclsym: Three) (coming in trade paperback!)
In this third installment of Williams’s Books of the Cataclysm, Sal and his companions seek the source of the flood in the legendary Hanging Mountains, hoping to head off a crisis that was put in motion a thousand years ago. They uncover uncomfortable truths about the world and how it relates to the one that came before — our world.

Mark Chadbourn, World’s End(Age of Misrule 1)
A dragon firebombs a freeway. Shapeshifters stalk the commercial district. The deadly Wild Hunt wreaks havoc on the highway. The Age of Misrule has dawned. In times of trouble, heroes arise!

June:
Joel Shepherd, Breakaway(coming in mass market!)
Cassandra Kresnov is a highly advanced hunter-killer android. She has escaped the League and fled to Callay, a member of the Federation. Breakaway is a great story with a cracking plot and strong characters. At its heart is the enigma of Cassandra: Is she more human than human, or is she totally untrustworthy?

Mark Chadbourn, Darkest Hour(Age of Misrule 2)
The Eternal Conflict between the Light and Dark once again blackens the skies and blights the land. And in the middle are the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, determined to use the strange power that binds them to the land in a last, desperate attempt to save the human race.

July:
Joel Shepherd, Killswitch(coming in mass market!)
Two years after the unhatching of Callayan President Neiland’s plot to make the capital city of Tanusha the center of the Federation, Callay is under siege. So begins the third installment of this gripping trilogy from an exciting new sci-fi author. When Cassandra’s lover, Special Agent Ari Ruben, discovers a plot to kill her using a killswitch, which her old masters in the League built into her brainstem, Sandy is forced to go underground to stay alive.

Ian McDonald, Desolation Road
It all began 30 years ago on Mars, with a greenperson. But by the time it all finished, the town of Desolation Road had experienced every conceivable abnormality…

Mark Chadbourn, Always Forever (Age of Misrule 3)
Mankind’s days appear numbered. Our only hope – the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons – are scattered and broken after a terrible defeat. Their last chance may lie in the great court of the old gods, reached by an otherworldly ship filled with fantastical and frightening creatures.

August:
Mike Resnick, Stalking the Dragon(A Fable of Tonight)
It’s Valentine’s Day and private detective John Justin Mallory must undertake a nocturnal hunt for the miniature dragon that takes him to some of the stranger sections of his magical Manhattan.

Justina Robson’s Chasing the Dragon(Quantum Gravity Book Four)
Returning to the life of a guns-blazing secret agent, cyborg Lila Black finds herself having inherited all of her former boss’s old offices and whatever mysteries they contain… But there are more immediate concerns. Like resurrecting her lover, Zal. And her husband, the demon Teazle, is embroiled in a fatal plot in Demonia, and her magic sword is making itself happy as a pen whose writing has the power to affect other worlds. The world is off its rocker and most everyone is terrified of faeries.

I’ll say more about these individual titles as we get closer to 2009, debuting more cover art as it comes in, and profiling some of the new authors and introducing them to you. Meanwhile, you can download a PDF of the whole Spring/Summer 2009 catalog here. But for now, what do you think?

Spring/Summer 2009: A Look at the Future Read More »

Two out of Two Anders Agree: MultiReal is Brilliant

In an earlier post, Mark Chadbourn asks “Should Scientists Forget Space?”, citing an article on the UK’s former Chief Scientist, Sir David King, who says that we are in need of a “re-think of priorities in science and technology and a redrawing of our society’s inner attitudes towards science and technology.” Sir King wants us to forgo experiments in space and in CERN in favor of addressing more immediate concerns at him. I’ve already given my opinion in the comments of Mark’s post, but it’s interesting to me to contrast it here with Charlie Jane Anders’ io9.com review of David Louis Edelman’s Infoquakeand MultiReal(books one and two of his Jump 225 trilogy).

Charlie Jane beings the review, which is titled “MultiReal is your antidote to science-bashing scifi,” by saying, “With so much mass-media science fiction featuring anti-science heroes who battle to stop science from “going too far,” it’s great to read a really smart novel about a hero who’s fighting to save scientific progress from being suppressed.” She characterizes the books as being “about the nature of technological progress” and says, “Where MultiReal really shines, however, is in the debates over the ethics of this reality-twisting software. There really is no right answer to the question of how society should deal with software that ‘liberates you from cause and effect,’ and the sequence where Natch’s mentor debates the government’s attorneys is easily my favorite part of both books. It’s a complex issue, and Edelman draws it out enough that you can see how it applies to today’s real-life challenges: should we try to suppress new technologies, should we regulate them heavily? Is it possible to suppress new knowledge after all? Does information really want to be free? It’s a lot more nuanced than the ‘science iz scary OMG’ idea that seems to be popular in media SF right now.

Now, with the understanding that I am generalizing horribly, I think that traditionally a majority of filmic sci-fi is concerned with maintaining the status quo and getting the genies back in the bottles. Something is developed, approaching, on the loose – and its up to the protagonists to stop it. An asteroid is going to hit the earth, aliens are invading, a man has turned himself invisible and is running amok – how do we divert it, repel them, contain him… In other words, there is a threat to consensus reality and by the end of the film or television show, it’s been dealt with and nicely put away. Go on with your lives. Nothing to worry about here.

By contrast, literary science fiction is often set after such an event has already happened, sometimes a good deal after, and throws us in medias res into a world in which part of the fun of the narrative is working out how the world in the tale differs from the world we know and part of the theme lies in examining how these changes act as a lens to illuminate some aspect of humanity that we take for granted. So, an asteroid hit the earth and killed everyone over 18, how do the survivors cope? Aliens invaded and are now our overlords – would you let one date your sister? 1/3 of the population is invisible, what new class of people do they form? The intrusion isn’t repelled, it’s part and parcel of the way things are now going forward. I find this the more honest approach, and underscores on of science fiction’s strengths as the genre that embraces the reality and inevitability of change.

There are, of course, examples of both approaches in both mediums. In fact, one of the (many) failures of The Matrix trilogy is that it began from what I’m calling a more literary position of science fiction and transitioned to the filmic. At the end of the first movie, Neo promises to hang up the phone and, “then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world … without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.” The goal of the protagonists isn’t to preserve consensual reality, but to destroy it, by ushering in a world where anyone can do the things he can. But instead of this, the subsequent films shift the emphasis radically away from the Matrix (which is never anything more than a set for agents and rebels to play in henceforth) to saving Zion and restoring the status quo of balance between machine and rebel. We never actually deal with another person who still believes in/is imprisoned by the Matrix’s view of reality – and the battle that is fought is all about getting things back to the way they were in the first film. I don’t know why this is, though the best explanation I’ve heard is that 9/11 occurred between the first and second films, forcing Warner to rethink the wisdom of making two more movies staring a group of admitted terrorists out to destroy 1999. (In some ways, V for Vendetta – which was released as public opinion was beginning to change re: the current war and Bush’s approval ratings were dipping, and questioning him was no longer being seen as being unpatriotic – is the film the Wachowski’s should have made out of Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions and didn’t/couldn’t at the time). But I digress…

To bring this back to the Jump 225 trilogy: What I personally love about Edelman is that he sets his story not before (and up to the point) of the radical transformation, nor after (and at a comfortable distance from) the transformation, but that he is actually charting the course through the societal singularity, showing how all the institutions of government, business, and society rearrange, realign, and topple. To an extent, Charlie Stross did this with his brilliant and essential Accelerando (though he moves his action off-world for a good deal of it – which is no criticism, it’s a different animal), but I’ve never personally encountered a work that did such a thorough job and concentrated so much of its focus in taking us through the shift point between paradigms. I think that’s why so many readers say that the future Edelman presents is a “believable” one, and why I think, though he mixes and matches tropes we’ve seen before, his approach is so unique.

Two out of Two Anders Agree: MultiReal is Brilliant Read More »

Fantasy Author Signs Six Book Deal with Pyr

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I’m very excited about this:

Two-time British Fantasy Award-winning author Mark Chadbourn has signed a six-book deal with US publisher Pyr.

The highly-acclaimed SF and fantasy imprint will publish the first of Chadbourn’s epic Elizabethan fantasy sequence, The Swords of Albion, in Fall 2009, with books two and three in subsequent years.

Pyr has also acquired the rights to Chadbourn’s British Fantasy Award-nominated Age of Misrule sequence, described as “One part Lord of the Rings, one part Illuminatus!, one part Arthurian romance – 100% original!” The three books—World’s End, Darkest Hour and Always Forever—will be published in Spring/Summer 2009.

Chadbourn says: “I’m very excited to be working with Pyr on the launch of The Swords of Albion and the US debut of Age of Misrule. Pyr has a dynamic, cool and smart approach to the genre, which, of course, is an excellent fit for my writing!”

Pyr Editorial Director Lou Anders says: “Mark is a brilliant writer — who not only has a tremendous imagination but manages to marry his vision to a very readable, accessible and fast-paced style. It’s amazing to me it’s taken this long to get him to America, but between these six books and the epic fantasy trilogy that Solaris recently acquired (Click HERE for the Solaris deal details), that egregious oversight is about to be resoundingly corrected.”

The Swords of Albion, which will be published in the UK and Commonwealth by Transworld—Mark just signed the deal with the UK publisher yesterday, June 30th—follows Elizabethan England’s greatest spy:

Meet Will Swyfte—adventurer, swordsman, rake, swashbuckler, wit, scholar and the greatest of Walsingham’s new band of spies. His exploits against the forces of Philip of Spain have made him a national hero, lauded from Carlisle to Kent. Yet his associates can barely disguise their incredulity. What is the point of a spy whose face and name is known across Europe?

But Swyfte’s public image is a carefully-crafted façade to give the people of England something to believe in, and to allow them to sleep peacefully at night. It deflects attention from his real work and the true reason why Walsingham’s spy network was established.

A Cold War seethes, and England remains under a state of threat. The forces of Faerie have been preying on humanity for millennia. Responsible for our myths and legends, of gods and fairies, dragons, griffins, devils, imps and every other supernatural menace that has haunted our dreams, this power in the darkness has seen humans as playthings to be tormented, hunted or eradicated.

But now England is fighting back!

Magical defences have been put in place by the Queen’s sorcerer Dr John Dee, who is also a senior member of Walsingham’s secret service and provides many of the bizarre gadgets utilised by the spies. Finally there is a balance of power. But the Cold War is threatening to turn hot at any moment…

Will now plays a constant game of deceit and death, holding back the Enemy’s repeated incursions, dealing in a shadowy world of plots and counter-plots, deceptions, secrets, murder, where no one—and no thing—is quite what it seems.

The entire world is the battleground: from Russia, across Europe, to the Caribbean and the New World. And while great events play out in the public eye, the true struggle takes place behind the scenes—the Spanish Armada, the Throckmorton Plot, the colonisation of the Americas, the Court intrigues, the battles in Ireland and against Spain, the death of Marlowe, the plagues, the art, the music, the piracy, the great discoveries…all are simply window-dressing as the great sweep of recorded history is peeled back to show the truth behind.

Lou Anders says of The Swords of Albion: “I first encountered Elizabethan Superspy Will Swyfte in the short story “Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast,” originally published in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy (and subsequently selected for Hartwell and Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy), and fell in love at first read. I was weaned on Ian Fleming and Fritz Leiber, and this wonderfully fun character seemed to marry both these loves into one. I wrote Mark to ask if there were any more planned outings for Swyfte, and was thrilled to hear back within minutes that a proposal for a trilogy was going out the very next day. Naturally, I couldn’t wait for the next day. Now, I can’t wait for him to finish writing the first novel. And the second. And the third…”

The Age of Misrule deals with the return of the Celtic gods to modern day Britain and is steeped in the mysticism and mythology of the Isles with an edgy modern take—from Fabulous Beasts firebombing the rush hour-packed motorway outside London to the ancient secrets of Avebury stone circle.

Lou Anders says of The Age of Misrule: “Every once in a while you read a work that treats its subject so well you realize it’s the last and final word on the topic. Like the way a certain Boy Wizard pretty much owns the school for magic space, and the idea of all of reality being a virtual illusion ends (for the foreseeable future) with the film The Matrix. That’s the sense I got reading the books of the Age of Misrule. Mark’s rigorously-researched exploration of Britain’s sacred sites reads with such authenticity that I can’t imagine there being any other explanation. That it underpins a fantastic adventure story chocked full of great characters—a sort of modern day Lord of the Rings transposed onto contemporary Britain—makes for a simply irresistible combination. I can’t wait to spring it on unsuspecting Americans . . . they have no idea what’s in store for them!”

Praise for Mark Chadbourn:

“A contemporary bard, a post-industrial Taliesin whose visionary novels are crammed with remixed mythologies, oneiric set-pieces, potent symbols, unsettling imagery and an engaging fusion of genre elements. His work is distinguished by breakneck but brilliantly controlled plots, meticulous research, deft characterisation and a crisp, accessible prose style” ~ Zone-SF.com

“Reminiscent of Alan Garner (the highest compliment I can pay to someone working in this mythic mode).” ~ SFSite.com

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