Archive for General skiffy bollocks
Dan Abnett on Babel Clash
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Babel Clash is the lively daily blog for all fans of SF & F (and maybe a bit of WTF if we’re lucky) from the American Borders bookstore chain. Starting today, and for the next two weeks, Dan Abnett is going to be providing some insights into his world(s) – and also into some of the worlds that he writes tie-in fiction for, such as Dr Who and Warhammer.
Along the way he’s also promising some sneak info on his next novel, the hard military SF nove Embedded, and maybe some thoughts on the next Triumff novel, The Double Falsehood. So check it out today, and pop back every day for the next couple of weeks.
Robot fun for the holidays
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That’s the end of our Twelve Days. The Angry Robot offices are now closed until January 4th 2010, but we will be picking up email, Twitters and Facebook messages pretty much as normal throughout so don’t hold back. Perhaps just don’t expect an instant reply.
While you’re waiting for our Christmas Day Message, or in the long days that will stretch out between now and our return, here are some robot-related links to keep you amused, bemused or downright confused.
Thanks to each and every one of you for your support, help and wild creativity this year. Here’s to a very Robot New Year. Brace yourselves, North America – you’re next.
– Marco & Lee & Chris xxx
Those links…
• Fabulous handmade retro robots
• Even more cute, with top robot love sequence (courtesy Graham Linehan)
• The Old Robots page (cheers, Lauren)
• Amazing what shows up on CCTV: One and Two
• Faces in odd places, including an angry robot
• Robot ferrets to find drugs
• That robot Xmas tree dance
• That amazing short in which giant robots attack Montevideo
• Lovely Russian kids’ book robots
• Why yes, we’d love one each if you’re feeling flush
• Not us
• We don’t talk about this one
• And finally, how we actually genuinely totally truthfully came up with the stunning imprint name Angry Robot (not really)
How do you find us?
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One of the many and varied pleasures you can get from looking at webstats for your site comes from looking at the “Referral Terms”. These are the things that people have typed into their search engine of choice to arrive at your website.
For example, if you didn’t know our web address, you might type in: “Angry Robot Books” or “Angry Robot HarperCollins”.
The following phrases are all genuine examples of search terms people have used to arrive at our front door:
- a story of survival
- nonowrimo motivation
- printable robot masks
- books for boy who likes robo runners
- robot is angry
- sex
- the girls book of secrets age appropriate
- rules dream and nightmare fantasy
- elementary age modern fiction books about robots
- best jokes 2009 competition results
- join the circus like you wanted to when you were a kid
- how to write a bold and brilliant short story
- come angry bombs and drop on slough
- totally disgusting book
- sex sex
- please leave a message after the beep song
- writing from a robot perspective
- the bookman that delivers books in london
- up yer arse
- rave reviews for scary books
- funny as disgusting as
- how popular are books on iphone
- where can i find a printable robot mask
- sex implnts
- missed my mothers funeral
- art book sex robot
- explore secret london
- novel where disease has killed people and people are walking to the coast
- when will the memoir craze end?
- rip-roaring swash-buckling
- fuck the three laws of robotics
- how to be a robot for halloween?
- xena bdsm stories 2009
and my personal favourite:
- sex doll robot in manila
A bunch of Angry Robot worldy wide webby links
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Here are a bunch of links related to Angry Robot stuff we’ve gathered over the last couple of days. Grab a chocolate chip cookie and enjoy…
SF Signal Mind Meld on memorable SF/F book covers (with Lee Harris plus assorted better company)
Mike Shevdon tells us about the Knights Templar in his latest blog post.
Review of Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero at PornoKitsch
the book had me chuckling from start to finish in a way that Terry Pratchett hasn’t succeeded in doing for a decade.
An interview with Lauren Beukes at Frightening Journeys
We’re a country in the process of becoming. Becoming quite what, I don’t know, but I hope to hell it’s not Moxyland. I think foreign readers will find the strangeness appeals, the uncomfortable mix of first world and third world. It’s a place we haven’t seen represented that often in science fiction (District 9 aside).
I turn my back for 5 minutes…
Posted by: | CommentsOk, I’ve been away for a week, sunning myself on the sunny Greek island of Zakynthos. Typically, for a parent I spent far too much time ensuring the kids were fine, and far too little time remembering to reapply my own suncream. Still – it was a good way to point out to my 5-year-old (who hates having the stuff applied) what you’ll look like if you don’t let Mummy or Daddy put your suncream on. The screams under the lukewarm shower at the end of the day were partly to underline the message, you understand.
Anyway, a week away, and it appears that not only have the worlds of SF and publishing managed perfectly well without me, they’ve actually gone and done interesting things while I was away – almost as if they were waiting for confirmation of my flight having left before coming out of hiding and making announcements.
First of all, news that Amazon are about to launch an “international” versionof their Kindle for $279.99. You still have to buy it from the US store at the moment (which means with import duty and carriage, it’s closer to $350) and the somewhat unusual news that all Kindle titles purchased from countries other than the US will have a $1.99 premium added to them. We’ll hear more of that in the coming weeks, no doubt, but hoorah for the announcement (you can pre-order now and shipping begins on19th October).
What next? Well, sticking with the eBook theme, Angry Robot’s first few titles have finally made it into eBook format. They can currently be ordered from just one outlet (the impressive Waterstones.co.uk), but this will change over the coming months. I’ll write a fuller post about this, shortly, but now you can own an Angry Robot book for just £3! (about US$5) That’s gotta be good news!
The old "could be any old show if you change the wording" logo
And finally, that logo! Doctor Who has changed it’s imagery for the new series starring Matt Smith.
The new "definitely Who" logo
Twitter Competition Results
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Two days ago, to celebrate reaching 500 followers on Twitter, we launched a Twitter short story competition. The rules were: Write a single-tweet short story about a robot – any robot – and Tweet it. The tweet must include @angryrobotbooks so we can see it.
Simple, yes? Not so much – just try writing a story in 140 characters or less! Nevertheless, we were inundated with entries! So many, in fact, that we had to have our submissions ‘bot recharged halfway through the judging process.
So, huge thanks to everyone who took part. Here are a selection of the best (the Twitterer’s name is in bold):
Best Philosophical Stories
jasonlblair Had he ears, they would be deafened. Mind, worried. Heart, broken. But he did not so the sound of war meant nothing to him.
djelibeybi_meg Xa stepped out of line, the others remained unmoved. “What’s the point of sentience if I don’t use my choices?” it thought.
Best Romance
jaredsorensen Her titanium hand held flesh, then bone, then dust. She sits there still. A romance to last forever, even if he did not.
Best Tales of Gore
m_Robertson_UK “Why did no-one tell me what ‘nil by mouth’ actually meant?”, muttered the rookie nurse-bot, as it wiped the bloody walls.
garethlpowell Her metal hands dripped with blood. She had reassembled the human child but for some reason, it still wouldn’t breathe
phil_lunt Gax tore off her arm and scratched a face on it. A crude substitute baby for a robot. Gutteral shudders replaced sobbing
Best attempt at currying favour
_owl_ Once upon a time … We all read @angryrobotbooks and lived happily ever after. 
Best Jokes
m_Robertson_UK “Listen” says PC99, “Here’s a good one. A1 D6 5F 83 E5….” “I need to stop you there,” says C64, “I hate hexist jokes…”
davidalanmack LG969 had learned there were only 10 types of humans: those who liked binary-language robots and those who didn’t.
tsrosenberg “I’m a combination of Apple and Asimov!” “You’re what?” “I, iRobot!”
Best dance number
mpettitt You put the left leg on, you pull the left leg off, you do the robo-cokey and you reverse the polarity…
Best original programming
Mad_Penguin
10 INPUT “HUMAN? Y/N”, Z
20 IF Z=Y THEN GOTO 50
30 PRINT “You are free to go!”
40 GOTO 10
50 PRINT “DIE!”
60 GOTO 10
Best Möbius tale
jhunterj “How is this a short story about a robot?” asked T11U. “We’ll say you wrote it,” replied 95V5. “Then it’s recursively so.”
Best story from an Apple user
petertubbs Power up. Gather weapons. Travel. Target acquired. Safety Off. Aim. Error: Critical Windows Exemption. Powering down. Fail
Best tales of anticipation
jrobertking Some people would forget their heads if they weren’t attached. KR0n5 forgot its body. Then the rugby team arrived.
AlasdairStuart The Forest had been built as a joke, metal trees with fibre optic roots. When they found the seeds, the laughter stopped
Saddest Story
mpettitt The steady tone from the oscilliator changed to white noise. “I’m sorry” said the technician “There was nothing I could do
Best Angry Robot advertising pitch
jay_lake Biomechanical serial killer? BDSM ‘bot? Droid with a duct tape fetish? @angryrobotbooks, for when three laws just aren’t enough.
Most poetic
skippy_2 Though ‘Made in Japan’ / There’s no robots in haiku / It seems such a shame.
Best “something we might need to check when we get home” story
coffeewithkate The staff at @angryrobotbooks were neither angry nor were they robots. At least, that’s what their masters programmed them to believe
Best tale of Doh!
davidmbarnett “I still can’t believe we didn’t give them an off-switch,” said the last human to fall before the robot army’s onslaught.
and the winner is…
Best environmental story
punktorian Every day moved them closer to a planet without nature. To the amusement of the robots, they had not had to do a thing.
Punktorian – please DM us your address in Twitter and we’ll get a goody-bag out to you, including copies of our first 6 books and a couple of other cool things!
To everyone else who entered, thank you. This has been a huge amount of fun! We must do something similar when we reach 1,000 followers on Twitter…
Meet Moxy
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This little fellah goes by the name of Moxy.
It’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that he’s the star of Moxyland (though we’d never tell him that to his face – he may look cute, but just look at those teeth!) but he’s certainly an important part of the book.
Moxy was made by a women’s collective in his native South Africa, and we believe he hopped into the cargo hold on a commercial flight some weeks later.
The thing about Moxy, though, is that he’s virtual. He’s a digital character. He lives within a game designed for children. And being digital, he’s rather easy to duplicate. We got to the office early this morning, only to find him sat atop the photocopier, making digital copies of himself.
So now we’ve a dozen or so. A good job we got to work when we did, otherwise there may well have been tribble-level trouble, so now we’ve changed the PIN on the photocopier, and we’re going to dispose of his clone brothers over the next month or so, part of competition prizes, perhaps, or simply by offering them up for adoption. Then again, maybe we’ll just unravel their stitches and tear out the stuffing! Bwahahahahaaaa!
*ahem*
The best thing about Moxy, though? He’s part of Moxyland by Lauren Beukes - one of our two launch titles. So, although we’re not planning on keeping his copies around for very much longer, Moxy himself will always remain part of our office.
Just look at him, below, reading his story to his devoted other selves. You’d never suspect his homicidal tendencies, just by looking at him, would you?
Awwww, bless… 
Name That Droid
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The Angry Robot “Name that Droid” competition has finished, and we will be announcing the winner in a few weeks.
Meanwhile, if you fancy getting a droid named after your good self, why not head on over to CyborgName.com.
I punched in Marco’s name, and pretty much got his job description thrown back at me, as a result!
It even successfully predicted my love of travelling.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Chris Roberson nominated for Sidewise Award
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That headline pretty much says it all. We were delighted to learn that Angry Robot author Chris Roberson has been nominated for the prestigious award for excellence in alternate history, for his fine Chinese-in-space SF novel The Dragon’s Nine Sons. Coincidentally, that book was published by Solaris, Marco’s old stamping ground, and whose new boss, George Mann is also nominated (hey George). The winner will be announced at the upcoming SF Worldcon, Anticipation, to be held in Montreal in August. And then we can all get hammered at the Angry Robot launch party. Of which more anon.
Meanwhile, the frenzy of anticipation grows ever louder around his AR debut, Book of Secrets. Praise be to our own Chris, who came up with the killer line, “It’s like Angels & Demons – only with real angels and demons,” and thanks to the recent Dan Brown news, interest in it has gone even higher. Here’s the first look at the cover. Nope, not a spaceship in sight.
Fiction Crossing Boundaries
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We are absolutely delighted to announce our first truly crossover novel. We’re a huge fan of the crossover, and have been working hard behind the scenes to bring you something truly special and innovative. Something that will make other publishers think Why didn’t I think of that?
Novels that cross genre boundaries are not new, but with the release of Perl One (1 December, 2009) we’re not just crossing genres, we’re crossing media! Perl One is a space opera, huge in scope, with one big difference – it’s a “knit your own adventure”.
It can be read front-to back as a standard novel (and what a great novel it is!) but the truly innovative part is that the bottom 20% of every page is set aside for knitting instructions (in a mid-grey font so as not to detract from the prose). As the knitter completes each page, another clue is revealed within their fabric, and by halfway through, the knitter is able to influence the outcome of the story by choosing to knit one here, drop a stitch there, etc. There really has been nothing like this in fiction, ever!
The beauty of the format is that non-knitters can read the story like a straightforward novel (set on the asteroid Perl One, a renegade supersoldier must be brought to justice), and will lose nothing of the vitality of the story. Knitters, however, will get the added bonus of reading the first science fiction novel ever written with them in mind!
Perl One will be available to pre-order from May, and the sequel – The Needle of Axos - will be published by Angry Robot in mid-2010.
