Interview with Rowena Cory Daniells

LEC Book Reviews have interviewed Rowena Cory Daniells, author of the King Rolen's Kin Trilogy.

The interview is here.

Excerpt:

LBR: What real-world inspiration is there for the characters in The King’s Bastard or any of the book’s elements?

RCD: Everything has real world inspiration - it is just not that easy to see. Some things stay with you. When I was about 10 my family went to play tennis at a set of courts in the back blocks of the Gold Coast. Behind the courts was a stretch of land backing onto a creek. 

As the eldest I was used to organising the games and I always saw myself as a sort of hero character so we'd play these long involved games with my younger siblings as my army, following orders, fighting great battles against enemy foes...



While running down one high white sand hill we left my little sister behind. I turned around to find she'd run through the deepest part of the hollow and the sand, which appeared to be solid, had given way. She was knee deep in some sort of sticky sand-clay mix and couldn't get out. Having seen plenty of Tarzan movies, I immediately thought of quicksand.



A real emergency! I told my brothers to stay back, afraid that they'd get trapped too, and edged forward. The sand's surface broke up under my feet. It was cold and smooth and wet, and I didn't know what was under there. My eight year-old brother took my arm to pull me out and we managed to grab our little sister's arm and hauled her out of the sticky sand-clay which did not give her up easily...

In King Rolen's Kin power seeps up from the land's heart, infecting people and animals. Only those trained to contain this power go near Affinity Seeps. Now you see how a childhood adventure can be the inspiration for something in a story many years later.

These days I don't order my younger brothers and sister around to play out my great battles, I have a cast of characters and they play out the battles in my books....

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Eric Brown's Engineman

This is the so-far unseen cover for Eric Brown's Engineman. I've just sent the novel to print today, and it should be out in shops in the US, Canada and the UK at the end of September.

Here's the blurb:-

Once the Enginemen pushed bigships through the cobalt glory of the nada-continuum. But faster than light isn’t fast enough anymore. The interfaces of the Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation bring planets light years distant a simple step away. Then a man with half a face offers ex-Engineman Ralph Mirren the chance to escape his ruined life and push a ship to an undisclosed destination. The nada-continuum holds the key to Ralph’s future. What he cannot anticipate is its universal importance – nor the mystery awaiting him on the distant colony world.
Engineman is a thrilling action adventure by the author of Helix and Kéthani. Also in this volume are nine stories set in the Engineman universe, including the Interzone award-winning ‘The Time-Lapsed Man.’

“Eric Brown is the name to watch in SF.”
Peter F. Hamilton

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Outre Anthologies!

Wotcher all,

In a moment's distraction this morning I put the following request out in Twitterland:

Right, let's hear outre ideas for an anthology. #outreanthology

I gave a couple of examples as well:

Heartbeet, a collection of short stories about beets and beet-farmers.
Giraffe City, a noir anthology of crime stories told in Giraffe City, the fictional city built for giraffes, by giraffes, from giraffes.

And we got some replies. Thought I'd share them with you. Some of them are funny, some of them are silly, some of them could even be interesting books.

Bloodfeast, a collection of stories about black pudding (ian_sales)
The Wax Museum, an fantasy anthology where wax figures have their own world and the relationships between them. (MihaiDarkWolf)
Stories about ants. (David_Heb)
Ponytale, an anthology about girls with hangups about horse riding ;-) (pattyjansen)
Typing Pool, a collection of stories about underwater stenographers. (ian_sales)
The Moon is Made of Cheese, an anthology of recipe-based SF stories. (KaaronWarren)
Unhappily Ever After, an anthology of stories with unhappy endings. But if that's too obvious, ...And Everybody Died. The End. might be fun. (davedevereux)
x = y+1, an anthology of stories told entirely in mathematical notation. (David_Heb)
How about a follow up to Shine called Dim, an anthology of pessimistic SF? (markchitty)
A collection of stories about drunken Norse gods putting on a musical. High Skol Musical. (warpcoresf)
Sultanas of Araby, a collection stories about raisins from the Middle East. (ian_sales)
Hard Drives, a collection of stories about trips in cars with flat tyres, (ian_sales)
Out of the Frying Pan, a collection of stories about grease spatters on the cooker top (ian_sales)

If you have any ideas, comment or chuck them up on twitter with the tag.

Cheers,

David

New Commission

Hulloh

Well, it does seem to be the week for news on Solaris, as this must be the most I've updated the blog in many a month. Anyway, I'm pleased to be able to announce that I have just commissioned a new SF novel from author Gareth L. Powell called The Recollection, due for release in September 2011 in the UK and US. Gareth is a brilliant new writer and I know that you're going to blown away by his mix of SF, Space-Opera and contemporary fiction. This is a writer worth watching and we're very proud to welcome him to the Solaris fold. Once we have a cover for Gareth's title, we will of course let you all have a look.

That's all for now. Have great weekends.

Jon

Editor-in-Chief

Jon on Books

Hello Again

You can find a guest-blog entry over on Andy Remic's site, where I discuss my love of all things book-related.

Jon

Behold the wisdom of Jon!

Back at World Horror Con they let me out of the straight-jacket long enough to talk to Andy Remic, who caught the astonishing things that come out of my mouth on film.

Enjoy

Sharing the review love and other news

Hulloh

Well it's been a fantastic month for Solaris, with our new titles garnering praise here, there and everywhere. Of particular note are the reviews for The King's Bastard by Rowena Cory Daniells:

Den of Geek give it four stars no less and say "It's a story of kings and queens, beasts and warriors, magic and religion. If you like any of the aforementioned things, then you'll probably join me in loving this book." The UK's biggest genre magazine, SFX, also love it, saying, "... what action! This is a book full of incident, intrigue and magical beasties..." Indeed it is. And Fantasy & SciFi Lovin' News & Reviews agree, calling it "a definite page turner." And the reviews are rolling in all the time. And this is just the first book in an epic trilogy, with the subsequent two novels (The Uncrowned King and The Usurper) being released in August and September. If you live in the UK, hie you to Waterstones where you can find the first book in the 3 for 2 offer as part of the Bookseller's Choice. Also, check out Rowena's guest blog entry at Fantasy Book Critic.

The King's Bastard is currently is in the top 20 of the UK's paperback science-fiction and fantasy chart. So many congrats to Rowena.

While we're on the subject of Rowena I'm proud to confirm that we have just commissioned a further fantasy trilogy from her called The First T'en, due to appear in 2012. Watch this space for more details.

The last part of Juliet E. McKenna's Lescari Revolution trilogy, Blood in The Water has also been garnering praise with Nayu's Reading Corner saying "If you've read book one then I recommend this book as well worth reading."

But it's not all about the fantasy this month, as we've also had some very positive comments on Ian Whate's The Noise Within. Total Sci-Fi Online say "This is a book crammed with different ideas and SF-tropes in a way that instantly marks it out as an enthusiastic first novel." While The Speculative Book Review say "The Noise Within is one of the best sci-fi books I've read in years." We agree, and just to give you a little treat, here is the cover for the sequel, The Noise Revealed which beams into your realities May 2011

This stunning cover is brought to you by Dominic Harman.

And last but not least, our horror has also been reaping the rewards of good fiction. On Justin Gustainis's novel, Evil Ways, Enduring Romance say "It did keep me gripped to my seat, and glaring as life made me put the book down." While on Conrad William's grim and brilliant Decay Inevitable The British Fantasy Society say "All in all, a cracking weekend."

That's all for now folks.

Jonathan Oliver

Editor-in-Chief

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'Poe' wins the Shirley Jackson Awards

The Shirley Jackson Award for an Edited Anthology goes to....

Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Ellen Datlow (Solaris Books)

The winners were announced at Readercon 21, the Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Read about the winners in the other categories, here.

The Shirley Jackson Awards were established in 2007 for 'outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic'. They were created in honour of Shirley Jackson's contribution to the genre, most notably her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

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King Rolen's Kin - enjoyed by Aussies and eBook readers alike!

Rowena just e-mailed us to say that her King Rolen's Kin trilogy is doing really well in Austrailia! It's number nine on the bestseller list in Sydney's premier speculative fiction bookstore, Galaxy Bookshop (think Forbidden Planet, just hotter 'cause they're in Austrailia).

Galaxy, obviously fans of Rowena's previous fantasy trilogy, The Last T'En, blogged about Rowena's new series last week with the jubilant words "She's back!" Rowena has written a guest post for them, here, and there's also the opportunity to win a copy of The King's Bastard.

There's more good news too - last week I created .epub and .mobi ebooks for several of our titles including Eric Brown's Helix, Necropath, Ian Whate's The Noise Within and all of Rowena's King Rolen's Kin trilogy! They should be out shortly, when the ebook elves have got them online... in the meantime check out great Solaris titles such as James Lovegrove's Age of Ra, Age of Zeus and Jetse de Vries' anthology of optimistic fiction, Shine, which we're already selling as ebooks in online ebook stores such as Amazon Kindle and Waterstones.

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