Our books and their authors have again attracted some pretty damned wonderful attention. Here’s a selection from the last week or so…

From Red Rook Review:

Kell’s Legend is an iconoclastic melange of themes that incorporates devices from various genres–Moorcook/Gemmell heroic fantasy, steampunk, and horror. It is an exciting, brutal novel, soaked in testosterone and paced like a roller coaster. The sex and violence is visceral and the action is non-stop.

There’s more. A lot more. Pop over to the Red Rook Review site and read it all – it’s a great review written by someone who evidently knows Gemmell and his work, and as we’re telling the world that Remic is the next in line for Gemmell’s crown, it’s an interesting review to read.

Next up, Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero.

Stitch and Bear tells us:

With this novel, Abnett has staked himself firmly as a successor to Pratchett. It is, in turns, adventurous, creative and inventive, and above all else, hilariously funny…

Whereas, over at Opinionated? Me? they describe the book as “pure entertainment”, before going on to say:

I’m not sure what to call this… dystopia? Utopia? Post-apocalyptic? Perhaps just ‘alternate history’. Whatever you please, this is Triumff’s greatest… well… triumph. Creating a book that is so undefinable even the most accomplished of publicists will sit at their computer for hours trying to put it in a neat little category. It’s like a huge “fuck you” to mainstream publishing and, let me tell you, it’s way overdue.

Incidentally, there’s a nifty new interview with Dan over at The Literary Project.

Speculative fiction is regarded as a difficult market to break, but worth it for the loyal readership. In your experience, is it a difficult market? What advice would you give to someone trying to make their mark in this genre?

I came at it from a slightly odd angle, but I think there’s a very fine line between innovation and commerciality in any market. In SF, particularly at the most marketable end of it, you want to try and walk that very fine line between identifying current popular trends and ‘flavours’, and not producing a bad reheat of something that’s doing well. There’s no simple formula – I wish there was.

Not forgetting some of our earlier books, Fluidity of Time has just read Nekropolis, and they comment on the fluidity of Tim (Waggoner). Ok, they don’t, but it’s late and I needed to get a gag in here, somewhere. Anyway, over to the review:

I was hooked from the very first sentence: “I was sitting in Skully’s, nursing a beer that I couldn’t taste, and which I’d have to throw up later, and trying real hard to look like I was minding my own business, when the lyke walked in.” I don’t know who this character is, but I already like him… This book was a hell of a lot of fun to read – I can’t wait to order a copy for the library so I can start pushing it to other people. And I’m treating myself to a copy, too. Extra props to the author for adding in not only a kick-ass library, but a cool librarian, as well.

And over at Examiner.com, they seemed to like Mike Shevdon’s Neverwhere for the Noughties, Sixty-One Nails:

I came away from this read feeling like I’d taken a stroll through Mike Shevdon’s imagination. Is this bad? Not at all, because it’s a great place to visit and poke around.

Though we haven’t published the wonderful King Maker by Maurice Broaddus yet, its always worth reading interviews with the man. Head on over to While I Pondered Weak and Weary and read Maurice’s contribution to their Morbid Blog Tour:

Morbid curiosity is that bit of raw over-sharing. You know, like when you are sitting around at a family dinner in a fancy restaurant and your grandfather chooses that moment to announce that he has a new penile implaSex, nt. Morbid curiosity is that moment after the stunned silence when you say, “Tell me more, Pap.” Not saying this was a Broaddus family experience or anything.

Not a lot we can add to that, really…

This week, two of our favourite genre sites are running excerpts from Aliette de Bodard‘s fabulous Aztec Magick Murder Mystery, Servant of the Underworld and Lavie Tidhar‘s equally wonderful steampunk romp, The Bookman.

Starting today, and running every day until Friday, you can read an exclusive extract from the books.

My Favourite Books is running the Servant of the Underworld extracts, and SF Signal has The Bookman.

They’re great reads, and both are out in January in the UK and Australia. (Servant is released in September in the US and Canada, and The Bookman in October).

From “Servant of the Underworld”

In the silence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco. My priests had bandaged the gaping wound on his forehead and smoothed the wrinkled skin as best as they could; they had dressed him with scraps of many-coloured cotton and threaded a jade bead through his lips – preparing him for the long journey ahead. As High Priest for the Dead, it was now my responsibility to ease his passage into Mictlan, the underworld.

From “The Bookman”

Orphan came down to see the old man by the Thames. The old man sat alone on the embankment under Waterloo Bridge, wrapped in a horse blanket, beside a small fire, a rod extending from his gloved hands into the dark waters of the river below. Orphan came stealthily, but the old man’s blind eyes nevertheless followed his progress. Orphan sat down beside Gilgamesh on the hard stone floor and warmed his hands on the fire. In the distance, whale song rose around the setting sun.

For a while there was silence. Then, “Did you catch anything?” Orphan asked.

Gilgamesh sighed and shook his head. His long hair was matted into grey locks that made a dry rustling sound as they moved. “Change is unsparing,” he said enigmatically.

Orphan echoed his sigh. “But did you catch anything?”

“If I had,” Gilgamesh said reasonably, “it would have been roasting on the fire by now.”

We’re big fans of the book trailer, especially when it’s done well.

Angry Robot author Aliette de Bodard has created one of the best book trailers we’ve seen in a long time. It’s atmospheric, it tantaslises enough to make you want to read the book, and it has been put together with obvious love for the material.

Once you’ve watched the trailer, head on over to Innsmouth Free Press, where Aliette is interviewed about her interest in writing about other cultures.

I’ve had a long-standing interest in Ancient China, because it’s had such a strong influence on Vietnamese culture (and indeed on Asia in general). I read a lot of historical crime novels when I was a child, and among my favourite series was Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee books, which feature a magistrate investigating murders in Tang China. They depicted a culture that had a lot of fascinating ideas and a way of life that was very different from mine (Europe in the Middle Ages is still vaguely familiar; Tang China is very much farther afield).

Ladies and gentlemen of the world, Aliette de Bodard’s Servant of the Underworld.