Alien invasions and alien worlds: Solaris bags TWO nominations for Philip K. Dick Award!

Our heads are reeling at Solaris Towers at the moment for two very special reasons...

We're absolutely delighted and honoured to discover that TWO of our titles from last year have been nominated for the 2012 Philip K. Dick Awards!


Both HARMONY by Keith Brooke (which was published as ALT.HUMAN in the UK) and HELIX WARS by Eric Brown are up for the prestigious award - making us the only publisher to get two nominations for the award!

Both writers are very deserving of this honour with two cracking books that blew our socks off when we first read them - it's very gratifying to see that the judges agreed!

Our editor-in-chief Jon may even have done a little jig. It wasn't pretty. People died.

Anyway, the winner will be announced on March 29th at Norwescon 36 in Seattle. We'll be keeping our fingers crossed for both Eric and Keith, and in the meantime if you'd like to discover for yourselves what so impressed the judges have a gander at these:

The aliens are here. They always have been. And now, one by one, they’re destroying our cities.

Dodge Mercer deals in identities - until the day he deals the wrong identity and clan war breaks out. Hope Burren has no identity, and no past, struggling with a relentless choir of voices filling her head.

In a world where nothing is as it seems, where humans are segregated and aliens can sing realities and tear worlds apart, Dodge and Hope lead a ragged band of survivors in a search for the rumoured sanctuary of Harmony, and what may be the only hope for humankind.

Keith Brooke forces us to look again at the idea of alien invasion, abandoning tired cliché and instead creating an all-too-real world where mankind faces extinction. With his crystal clear prose and vivid imaginative storytelling, alt.human/Harmony promises to reinvigorate one of the oldest themes in SF.

Harmony is available in paperback and Kindle for North America, while Alt.Human is also available in paperback and Kindle for the UK.

The Helix: a vast spiral of ten thousand worlds turning around its sun. Aeons ago, the enigmatic Builders constructed the Helix as a refuge for alien races on the verge of extinction. Two hundred years ago, humankind came to the Helix aboard a great colony ship, and the Builders conferred on them the mantle of peacekeepers. For that long, peace has reigned on the Helix.

But when shuttle pilot Jeff Ellis crash-lands on the world of Phandra, he interrupts a barbarous invasion from the neighbouring Sporelli, who are now racing to catch and exterminate Ellis before he can return to New Earth and inform the peacekeepers.

Eric Brown returns to the rich worlds he created in the best-selling Helix with a vast science-fiction adventure populated with strange characters and fascinating creatures.


Helix Wars is available in paperback, ebook and Kindle for North America and paperback, ebook and Kindle for the UK.