First up, Mike Shevdon, on why fantasy makes such great TV:

Because urban fantasy is set in current reality, it becomes possible to adapt it into current time. That’s why True Blood and The Dresden Files (and Buffy) could make TV, and consequently reach a whole new audience. After the show is over that audience naturally wants more, and the sudden explosion of vampire romances and supernatural detectives is the result.

Read the full feature, here.

Next up, the Zoo City review:

Zoo City is as fantastical or as ordinary as you want it to be… it’s exactly the kind of book that should get her on late night US chat shows as it is carried up the New York Times Bestseller list. Yes, it’s that good. Zoo City is major league writing. It is effortless, easy and, quite frankly, astonishing.

And, although Kaaron wrote the award-winning horror Slights, nothing will prepare you for the (frankly disturbing) image that accompanies her interview.

I love that moment of original spark and will often take pages of notes before even thinking about writing the story. It can be just a title, like Cage Life, used to describe the life of Mustafa 1, who was kept imprisoned for 14 years by his brother.

Read the rest, here.

We’re having a pretty good time of it in the dead-tree magazine, too. As well as last week’s superb review of Zoo City in SFX, this week, SciFi Now tells us:

Lauren Beukes stuns with a richly textured venture into a pseudo-fantastical Johannesburg of the future… this is a fine novel that will wrap itself around your imagination like a sloth on your own shoulders.
4**** – Must Read Now

and SFX also covered Gav Thorpe’s epic The Crown of the Blood:

there’s plenty to keep you turning the pages… An intriguing ending promises something different for book two

And finally (for now) at Falcata Times, Mike Shevdon is interviewed.

FT: It is often said that if you can write a short story you can write anything. How true do you think this is and what have you written that either proves or disproves this POV?

MS: My first work of fiction was over 150,000 words and I really struggle to write anything under 5,000 words. I don’t know whether an accomplished short story writes can write everything, but I suspect not – the two forms are quite different. It’s a bit like saying a good pastry chef can cook anything, which is fine until you have to eat their mushroom and banana risotto.

What we’d like you to do is to take a photograph of you, holding one of our books, standing next to one of our displays in a Barnes and Noble*. The display should be clearly in shot with you. It’s probably a good idea to get permission from the store before you start taking snaps, though.

Send your photo to us at: INCOMING @ ANGRYROBOTBOOKS.COM

We’ll blog some of our favourite photos (so by entering you’re giving us permission to use the photo in this way). And one lucky winner will receive some random Angry Robot stuff from the Angry Robot Cupboard of Win. We’ll get one of our authors to choose the outright winner, so we don’t get the blame. The prizes won’t be books this time around, though – they’ll be something… else.

Competition closes midnight Saturday 4th September (that’s midnight, wherever you are). No purchase necessary to enter (though we’d obviously like you to).

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*Thinking about it a little more logically, it might be easier to get someone else to take a photo of you, standing next to the display. If either Mr Fantastic or Elastic Man happen to be reading this, you can obviously make your own arrangements.

Kaaron Warren’s critically-acclaimed – and award-winning – debut novel Slights is arguably the best horror novel of the year. Here, Kaaron tells us about how it all started…

Slights is the story of a young woman who sees the afterlife as a place where anyone she’s ever slighted is waiting in a dark room to take a piece of her.

I wrote it as a short story first but was frustrated trying to cram all I wanted to say into 3000 words. The more I wrote, the stronger Stevie became as a character and the more she wanted to say. Once I started telling the stories of the people she slights, the novel grew and grew. I wanted to tell those stories, though. I knew that every body in the room had a voice.

In the process, I ended up telling a far deeper story than I first intended. I wanted to think about the possibility that we each choose our own version of hell; I ended up with Stevie, a character who seems to resonate with people even though most think she’s awful.

I wrote the first draft of Slights in something of a frenzy. The local government gave me a small grant, enough for me to take leave without pay from my office job and write for three months.

That’s all I had.

At the same time I wrote a short story “The Speaker of Heaven” which tells an opposite story. The main character can tell the sort of heaven a person will go to if she touches them as they die. So just as in Slights, everyone creates their own hell, in The Speaker of Heaven everyone creates their own heaven. Even the serial killer of young women, the centre of much protest, has his own place to go.

It was a crazy couple of months. My first dedicated period of writing, and this was before I had children so there was nothing else I had to worry about. I wrote until my fingers ached, until my head hurt and I was so happy. Sometimes I wrote in front of the cricket on TV; I found I could look up and be distracted but not for very long, and the comforting voices of the commentators somehow helped me think.

I still remember a friend who is no longer one calling me when I was mere pages away from finishing. She wanted to tell me how awful her day had been. To this woman, awful meant if the light had turned red against her and only four people told her she looked fabulous.

“Can I call you back? I’m about to write The End on my 100,000 word novel,” I said, thinking I’d get at least a “Wow, you’re amazing!”

“If that’s what you think is important,” she said, and hung up.

Yes, you boring woman with your bright red lipstick and your too-loud laugh, it is.

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This article first appeared in Robot Legion #1 – the Angry Robot monthly newsletter. Sign up here.

Slights is available from all good booksellers – both online and in meatspace – in the USA and Canada.

Dark Fiction Review continues their epic Angry Robot special, with an interview with Colin Harvey:

I’m actually quite an optimist, most of the time I think that we’ll muddle through somehow, but it will be despite – rather than because of – our efforts. I have the feeling that there are going to be less of us in a hundred years. A lot of whether the human race survives the century depends on how we cope with the end of cheap oil. If we can find an alternative to oil, or deal with the scarcity equably, then we stand a chance.

and a review of Andy Remic’s blood-soaked, clockwork vampire epic, Kell’s Legend:

The vachine are an absolutely incredible concept: fascinating, slightly appalling and something I would never have expected. I loved the way they worked and found their society fascinating, although clearly unpleasant… It’s a fast and brutal fantasy adventure with some fun characters and some fantastic ideas. I am really excited to see the series develop.

Completely Booked also loves Andy’s novel:

it’s a fine start to a heart-pounding action tale, complete with quests and durance vile. Oh, and a bad guy you can really hate. I like it!

If you entered last week’s competition over at io9, the winners have been revealed.

Meanwhile, Gav Thorpe’s The Crown of the Blood gets the review treatment at Daniel’s Thoughts:

The Crown of the Blood is a very well-plotted and well-constructed book; the politics and military elements meld well together and the character-driven plot is exceedingly well-paced, pushing ahead without overlooking the more dull elements of military campaign (there’s a nice bit about waiting being the worst part, done in a fresh enough way to not be clichéd!) and moving slowly enough to let us get to know the characters and get attached to them… this is an absolutely fantastic novel; I recommend it.

That’s all for now – enjoy your day.

This will be our last blog entry of the day – we think you deserve a rest.

Today (as you will have gathered by now) we launched in the US and Canada. Our books are being carried by many bookshops (chains and independents), but in Barnes and Noble for the next three months our titles will be presented in freestanding Angry Robot displays.

Which is cool.

We’d quite like to see these displays, but we’re thousands of miles away. {sad face} So, we’d like to see some photos of them! {happy face}

What we’d like you to do is to take a photograph of you, holding one of our books, standing next to one of our displays in a Barnes and Noble. It’s probably a good idea to get permission from the store before you start taking snaps, though.

Send your photo to us at: INCOMING @ ANGRYROBOTBOOKS.COM

We’ll blog some of our favourite photos (so by entering you’re giving us permission to use the photo in this way). And one lucky winner will receive some random Angry Robot stuff from the Angry Robot Cupboard of Win. We’ll get one of our authors to choose the outright winner, so we don’t get the blame.

Competition closes midnight Saturday 4th September. No purchase necessary to enter (though we’d obviously like you to).

• Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
• Slights by Kaaron Warren
• Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero by Dan Abnett
• Winter Song by Colin Harvey
• The Crown of the Blood by Gav Thorpe
• Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon
• The Road to Bedlam by Mike Shevdon
• Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
• Kell’s Legend by Andy Remic

Our eBooks can be purchased through a number of online retailers, including the Amazon US Kindle store*, Barnes and Noble, Sony Reader Store, and many others. In the UK you will shortly be able to purchase them through Amazon Kindle UK and Waterstones. Within a few days our titles will also appear in the Apple iBookstore.

We have also launched our own eBook store at

www.angryrobotstore.com

Our eBooks are all currently priced at £3.50 (through UK retails) or $4.99 (overseas).

and if you purchase your eBooks through our own store, you can download them as often as you need to (in case you change eReading devices, for instance, or lose access to your copy for any other reason). And all downloads from angryrobotstore.com are DRM-free!

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Kindle US Note:

The search facility for these titles isn’t currently working at the Amazon.com Kindle store, so here are the direct links, while the techie gurus work their magic:

• Moxyland
• Sixty-One Nails
• Slights
• Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero
• Winter Song
• Kell’s Legend
• The Road to Bedlam*
• Zoo City*

*available from Thursday September 2nd.

I loved the idea of a man capable of acts of incredible brutality, yet who could write beautiful poetry, who was almost heroically ugly, yet his vitality attracted women. Ragnar (the antagonist in Winter Song) was a fusion of two people I knew, because the sagas don’t attribute emotions or motives, only the character’s actions.

The book review blog Dark Fiction Review is having an Angry Robot Special this week, to celebrate our US and Canada launch. The first book under the microscope is Kaaron Warren’s award-winning Slights.

Slights, is one of those books that reaches into your core and takes something from you, whilst ultimately leaving something you really aren’t sure you wanted to be left with.

Read the full review here.

Gav Thorpe’s epic fantasy The Crown of the Blood is published this week in the UK and in 4 weeks in the US and Canada. Gillian Polack had this to say:

The Crown of the Blood (Gav Thorpe) is an old-fashioned sword and sorcery romp. There’s not a great deal of sorcery, but there’s lots of fighting and plotting and planning to conquer… it’s a fun book. This book is for readers who want a blast from the past; who want their hour of adventure in a strangGe world.

Mike Shevdon’s superior urban fantasy, Sixty-One Nails has its roots in fact as well as legend. Here, Mike reminds us of some of the history behind the novel.

“Red Light District in a Convent Garden” is an article on the history of Covent Garden, one of the main locations for Sixty-One Nails, proving that truth can sometimes be more surprising than fiction. This is a genteel area in the heart of the West End now, but it has a seedy past.

SciFi Now magazine talks to Dan Abnett about his first (after 35 tie-in titles) original novel – Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero – out today in the US and Canada.

Triumff has been around in my head as a concept for a long time, I think a lot of writers when they start out, they have projects they’d like to develop, and Triumff – bits of it anyway, are getting on for 20 years in terms of an idea. Way back when I was first getting into comics I was thinking ‘Can I make this into a comic? Is there a book lurking there?’ All sorts of things like that. So when I finally got to write a novel of my own for publication, one that somebody was actually going to buy and publish, it seemed that by dint of seniority it deserved the chance.

while over at SF Signal, Dan extols the virtues of the pun:

what it is with me and puns. Call me paranomasiac, but I love ‘em, god help me. Homophonic puns, homonymic puns, homographic puns, Homer Simpson puns, I can’t get enough. I love graphological puns and morphological puns, logical puns and illogical puns, polysemic puns and metonymic puns, old school puns and current puns and, at the risk of fracturing myself, I love compound puns. I can’t have too many multiple puns and as for double entendres, woof! get a load of the double entendres on that, if you know what I mean.

More, soon.

It’s been a fascinating, exciting journey, with one or two minor hiccups along the way, and we’re in a stronger position than we’ve been in since Angry Robot was first conceived, just over two years ago, in Hammersmith, London, England.

At 1.00 this afternoon (BST) we’ll be cracking open a bottle of champagne to celebrate, and invite you* to do the same**.

Check back throughout the day for further updates, competitions, news, and general buffoonery.

*Not at our expense, naturally – we’re lovely people, but we’re not rolling in money!
** Feel free to substitute cola, tea, coffee, or the beverage of your choice.

To celebrate Angry Robot’s imminent invasion of the US of A and Canada, those lovely people over at io9 are giving you the chance to win some Angry Robot goodies. Head on over there to enter.

This week’s Big Idea feature is on none other than Mike Shevdon’s Sixty-One Nails. UK readers have been able to read and enjoy this for almost a year, of course – next week the US and Canada can do the same.

Here, Mike tells us all about the history of the novel, and the amount of historical research that goes into creating something very modern.

When I started writing Sixty-One Nails, I wanted to write fantasy set in the real world – the world of shopping malls, CCTV cameras and mobile phones. I wanted to create a feeling that if you were quick and observant enough, you might see something quite extraordinary. I wanted magic in the now.

This is easy to say, but it immediately spawns a host of questions.

Head here to read the questions, and the answers that Mike came up with.