Gollancz

Upcoming: RAVENCRY by Ed McDonald (Ace/Gollancz)

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This is the sequel to Ed McDonald‘s very well-received debut, Blackwing. Featuring a bleak, grimdark post-apocalyptic world and an interesting magic system and cast of characters, I’m quite looking forward to continuing Galharrow’s story. Ravencry is due to be published by Ace Books (US) and Gollancz (UK), here’s the synopsis:

For Ryhalt Galharrow, working for Crowfoot as a Blackwing captain is about as bad as it gets — especially when his orders are garbled, or incoherent, or impossible to carry out.

The Deep Kings are hurling fire from the sky, a ghost in the light known only as the Bright Lady had begun to manifest in visions across the city, and the cult that worship her grasp for power while the city burns around them.

Galharrow may not be able to do much about the cult – or about strange orders from the Nameless — but when Crowfoot’s arcane vault is breached and an object of terrible power is stolen, he’s propelled into a race against time to recover it. Only to do that, he needs answers, and finding them means travelling into nightmare: to the very heart of the Misery.

Also on CR: Interview with Ed McDonald (2017)

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Twitter

New ALTERED CARBON trailer!

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Netflix has released a new trailer for its upcoming adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon! My anticipation levels for this series are very high (I’ve mentioned before on CR that the novel carries much of the blame for getting me into sci-fi), and this trailer further ramped up my impatience. Here it is:

Here’s the official synopsis for the series:

In the distant future, human consciousness can be digitized and downloaded into different bodies. Brought back to life after 250 years by Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) the richest man on Earth, ex-Envoy soldier Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman / Will Yun Lee) must solve Bancroft’s attempted murder for the chance to live again in a world he doesn’t recognize.

Altered Carbon releases on February 2nd, 2018. In the meantime, the novel is published by Gollancz in the UK, and Del Rey in North America (a new, series tie-in edition will be released in February).

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Upcoming: ALTERED CARBON (Netflix)

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Richard K. Morgan shared the above trailer on Twitter, and it kind of made my day. This coming February, Netflix will release Altered Carbon, their TV adaptation of Richard Morgan’s novel of the same name. I am very much looking forward to this. Continue reading →

Upcoming: THE TESTAMENT OF LOKI by Joanne M. Harris (Gollancz)

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HarrisJM-L2-TestamentOfLokiUKHCIn May 2018, Gollancz is due to publish Joanne M. Harris‘s next novel: The Testament of Loki. To the right you can see the stunning cover, which is what first caught my eye. There aren’t many details available about the novel, save the jacket and release date, but here’s the sparse synopsis from the publisher’s website:

The second adult epic fantasy novel from multi-million-copy bestselling author Joanne Harris.

Using her life-long passion for the Norse myths, Joanne Harris has created a vibrant and powerful fantasy novel.

See? Very sparse… According to Goodreads, it is the second prequel in Harris’s Runemarks series, following The Gospel of Loki, and set before Runemarks. The author’s website has a dedicated page for the novel, with a few more details (including a mini-Q&A):

THE GOSPEL OF LOKI ended at Ragnarok, the End of the Worlds, with Asgard fallen, the gods defeated and most of them either dead, or consigned to eternal torment in Netherworld. However, Loki manages to escape into another World through Dream, and finds himself, to his surprise, incarnate in  a human host – a 17-year-old girl called Jumps, and living in our own World. But, as he starts to come to terms with the challenges of being in a human host, Loki realizes that  there may be a way to escape the chains of mortality and return to the World of the gods.

I’m really looking forward to reading it.

Also on CR: Review of The Gospel of Loki

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Twitter

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Guest Post: “On Theon Greyjoy…” by Mark Alder

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AlderM-AuthorPicTheon Greyjoy – do you like him now? Did you ever like him? Will you ever like him?

As a writer, I find Theon by far the most interesting character in Game of Thrones. He illustrates a lot about how to make a character disliked. He also, in his long redemption, illustrates the techniques novelists and screenwriters use to build sympathy in a character.

Theon has had many of these sympathy building techniques applied to him in the course of his redemption, but here’s the thing – up until the very last scenes of the last series of  the Game of Thrones TV series, they simply have not worked.

He’s particularly interesting when compared to another GoT character who has undergone his own redemption – Jaime Lannister.

[Please Note: Spoilers for Game of Thrones!] Continue reading →

Quick Review: BLACKWING by Ed McDonald (Gollancz/Ace)

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A promising debut grimdark fantasy

You think you know Misery? You’ve not seen anything yet…

The republic faces annihilation, despite the vigilance of Galharrow’s Blackwings. When a raven tattoo rips itself from his arm to deliver a desperate message, Galharrow and a mysterious noblewoman must investigate a long dead sorcerer’s legacy. But there is a conspiracy within the citadel: traitors, flesh-eaters and the ghosts of the wastelands seek to destroy them, but if they cannot solve the ancient wizard’s paradox, the Deep Kings will walk the earth again, and all will be lost.

The war with the Eastern Empire ended in stalemate some eighty years ago, thanks to Nall’s ‘Engine’, a wizard-crafted weapon so powerful even the Deep Kings feared it. The strike of the Engine created the Misery — a wasteland full of ghosts and corrupted magic that now forms a No Mans Land along the frontier. But when Galharrow investigates a frontier fortress, he discovers complacency bordering on treason: then the walls are stormed, and the Engine fails to launch. Galharrow only escapes because of the preternatural magical power of the noblewoman he was supposed to be protecting. Together, they race to the capital to unmask the traitors and restore the republic’s defences. Far across the Misery a vast army is on the move, as the Empire prepares to call the republic’s bluff.

Blackwing is one of the most hotly-anticipated debut fantasy novels of the year. Social media and the blogosphere have been filled with glowing reviews, squees and other evidence that suggests the hype has been entirely justified. There’s a lot in here that will certainly appeal to plenty of fantasy fans. However, I ultimately came away from this novel underwhelmed. Continue reading →

Interview with ED McDONALD

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McDonaldE-AuthorPicLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Ed McDonald?

Hello! That would be me. I’m an author, swordsman, medieval historian, lecturer, husband, reader, and gamer.

Your debut novel, Blackwing, will be published by Gollancz. It’s been getting quite a bit of pre-publication buzz. How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

Blackwing is the first part of The Raven’s Mark series. It’s epic fantasy in scope, but with a tight focus on a single character and the individual part he plays in a wider conflict. The pace is more like a thriller than the usual wander through a fantasy landscape, so I’d say that if you like your fantasy fast paced, character driven, hard hitting, free from gender bias and set on the edge of a post-apocalyptic magical wasteland, then it’s probably for you. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Love and Hate for 4x4s” by Jon Wallace

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WallaceJ-AuthorPicFor those of us who navigate London by tube and bus, it can be easy to resent the city’s Range Rover drivers. The hulking black monstrosities are every bit as staggeringly inefficient a modern indulgence as the plastic water bottle, the sort of thing that makes us throw up our hands and ask: ‘have we all gone quite mad?’

For what good do they do driver or pedestrian? There are no mountains to conquer in London; no swamps or muddy tracks. They bloat beyond their parking paces. They burn through fuel and fume out our streets; and they draw the eye to our unequal distribution of wealth, almost as such as the ubiquitous chauffeured Black Mercedes.

Well, perhaps that’s the point; their presence on the tightly packed, jumble of central London streets could be a willfully calculated offense to those with shallower pockets. Bring on climate change, the drivers seem to say. Drown the riff raff, make it a swamp again, and let us dominate the surface alone! Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Writing Exodus, or: How to take on too much and learn to love it” by Alex Lamb

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LambAlex-AuthorPicExodus, the third novel in the Roboteer series comes out this month. It was, by far, the most difficult creative project I’ve ever undertaken, and also, probably because of that, the most satisfying. Never have I teared up so much whilst writing, or laughed so hard, or felt such terrible tension. Why was it hard? There were many reasons, both personal and creative. In this post, I’ll do my best to share them.

The most obvious cause of my problems was that I had set myself up with an almost impossible challenge. Before I wrote Nemesis, the book that precedes Exodus, I had made the decision that the trilogy would need to answer the enormous question that I set up in Roboteer:

What is the difference between an intelligent species that survives, and one that wipes itself out? Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Write what you know… even if that’s just being an idiot” by Tom Lloyd

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Write what you know, it’s the first piece of advice a writer will get. It’s sometimes useful too. After eight years and almost a decade as a published novelist, I was starting a new series and so I asked myself what I’d learned, what I liked and what I wanted for the next few years. But this time round I wasn’t some newbie, I was a wise and skilled crafter of words who utters profound witticisms as he works the room of industry types, right?

Much to my disappointment that clearly wasn’t the case. I was pretty much the same damn fool I’ve always been. Well meaning, stubborn not the cleverest, getting on a bit with something of a food preoccupation – not without some skill but not ever likely to be one of the biggest and brightest stars in the sky. So hey, write what you know? Continue reading →