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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The Four Authors of the Apocalypse: Eric Brown

I am now, according to my publisher, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse… or should that be authors of the apocalypse? For one of such a normally cheery disposition, I might find this hard. I'm of the view that whatever mess we make of things, life on Earth in some form will survive, and prosper. A critic once said my fiction was imbued with logical positivism, and I won't disagree.

This blog came about when junior editor Jenni Hill suggested we four get together to write about the end of the world, and James Lovegrove, being the optimistic soul he is, came up with the title you see above.

By a stroke of coincidental luck, my next-but-one novel from Solaris will be a post-catastrophe tale set sixty years after the fall of civilisation on Earth. The story came about when Mike Ashley invited me to submit a story to his forthcoming Apocalyptic SF anthology, and I wrote a long piece entitled "Guardians of the Phoenix". During the writing I realised that there was far more story than I was telling; it extended both ways: that is, before the story opened, and after it closed.

The story begins:
It was dawn when we set off from beneath the twisted skeleton of the Eiffel Tower and crossed the desert to Tangiers. We travelled by day through a blasted landscape devoid of life, and at night we stopped and tried to sleep. I'd lie in my berth and stare through the canopy at the magnetic storms lacerating the troposphere. The heat was insufferable, even in the marginally cooler early hours…

The band of survivors trek across the desert that was France, towards the dried-up Mediterranean, in search of water. They travel in a truck encrusted with solar panels, drilling for water wherever they can, and scavenging – along with competing survivors, some more feral than others – for dwindling supplies of food. On the way they meet another troupe of desperadoes, this one from what was Egypt, led by a woman called Samara. She is in possession of a secret that might mean the survival of human race. Times might be desperate, resources almost exhausted, plant and animal life very nearly extinct, and the ozone layer shot to pieces – but there is always hope. The novel follows these self-appointed guardians of the phoenix towards what they hope will be eventual redemption...

I take the long view, which I think for the sake of my sanity is a wise way of looking at things. Perhaps it's a result of being a science fiction writer – or perhaps I became a SF writer because I tried to look past the here and now, the mess we're in, and envisage a more rosy future. Perhaps I'm just a head-in-the-sands, rose-tinted spectacled optimist writing fantasies of wish-fulfilment because the alternative would be despair.

Anyway, the way I look at it is even in a worse case scenario, where the human race fouls up and destroys itself, then something will survive – be it bands of stone-age people who scratch a living in the wreckage, evolving over the millennia into something unrecognisable to us today; or other forms of life, animal or insect, who over the course of time might evolve intelligence... and perhaps use it more wisely than poor, hapless, self-destructive Homo saps...

But it would be nice to look into the far future and learn that humankind has overcome its difficulties, its differences, and evolved into a peace-loving, tolerant species which celebrates difference and diversity and has learned to treat the Earth with the respect it needs… and perhaps even, equipped with these qualities, headed for the stars and the many adventures awaiting us out there.

But that's another blog.

~Eric Brown


Eric Brown has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories and has published over twenty books: SF novels, collections, books for teenagers and younger children, as well as radio plays, articles and reviews. His newest book for Solaris, the Bengal Station novel, Cosmopath will hit the stands in January.

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Eric Brown's Ten Tips for Aspiring Writers

Eric Brown, the author of several Solaris Books including the Bengal Station series, has been kind enough to send us his top ten tips for aspiring writers:-

1. Write. Write as often as possible. Write even if you think you haven't an idea in your head. Write until the subconscious kicks in and ideas and words begin to flow. Remember, fiction is modular. You can always go back and lift out entire sections, rewrite them and put them back, improved.

2. Trust in the subconscious. Beginning writers are beset by fear. I was. I overcame the fear - i.e., the doubt that I had anything to say, the tools to say anything - by writing and writing and trusting in the subconscious. Write long enough and the old SC kicks in. Try it.

3. Read. Read everything. Read what you like to read, and what you don't like to read. Admire and attempt to emulate what you like to read. Despise and shy away from what you don't like. Work out how certain effects are achieved, and learn from good effects.

4. Write what you know about. Also, write what you don't know about. You'll find that if you do the latter, the subconscious will kick in and soon enough you'll be writing about something you don't know about as if you did. (Crazy, I know; but it works.)

5. Rewrite. Never rest on your laurels. Never think that what you've written, because it was so difficult to produce, is good enough. It can always be improved. Put the piece aside for a week, two weeks, a month, and then come back to it with fresh eyes.

6. Find one or two, or even three, people whose judgement you trust, show them your work and ask for criticism. It's hard, at first, to have your precious MS ripped apart before your eyes, but it's necessary. The process of finding those few critics might take time - as you discard those critics who offer nothing - but persevere.

7. Remember that conventional education, or intelligence, has no bearing on whether you'll make it as a writer of commercial fiction. You don't have to be a college graduate to write good stories.

8. Write about emotions. Keep a jotter just for the explication of emotions, of how you feel. Remember, every piece of fiction is about characters; those characters are human beings. They not only think, but feel.

9. Remember that the majority of readers read fiction not to learn, but to feel. We want to identify with characters, and we can only do that if the characters' emotions are described with sufficient fidelity and verity. If the reader believes in your characters, feels for them, wants to know what will happen to them, then you've won over that reader.

10. Keep description to a minimum, no matter how wonderful the world is you're describing. The reader isn't interested in your world as a world; they're interested in how your world affects your characters. Have your characters respond to the landscape, as seen through their eyes.

10a. Try to make your dialogue as naturalistic as possible. Use apostrophes. Don't say: "I will now go to Mars," but, "I'll go to Mars." Use 'said' rather than the million and one synonyms for said. Keep your stories pacey, unless you're imitating Proust or Thackeray. Short scenes, preferably. Keep the reader guessing. End on cliff-hangers. (And remember that there are always exceptions to the above.)

10b. Send out your MS and keep sending the damned thing out. Don't be discouraged by rejections. (I had twenty novels rejected before I sold my first.) And, when you are published, don't take bad reviews to heart. Remember: they're just one person's opinion. Every book out there will have readers who hate it, readers who will feel neither love nor hate for it, and readers who will love it and think it the best thing they've ever read.

Never stop writing. The only people who have failed at writing are those who have stopped.

Good luck!

- Eric Brown

Eric's newest Bengal Station novel, Cosmopath will hit the stands in January. In the meantime, watch out for more guest blogging from Solaris authors, here at When Gravity Fails!