New and Impending Releases in SFF, Horror, Urban Fantasy and More: 25 Feb ’19

Hey everyone, I hope you’re all well. 🙂

I’ve got news of some new books worth your while. This ‘feature’ will probably happen here every Monday, so if you’ve got new releases you’d like to share the news of, or books that’ll be published in the next two months, get in touch. 🙂

Here are today’s notable new releases and books up for pre-order:

Jason Guinn‘s The Wretched (The Lucifer Chronicles)

Lucifer has been expelled to a place worse than Hell…Tucson, Arizona.

Having lost everything to the usurper Beelzebub, Lucifer finds himself trapped on earth, the one place he can die. Without options and shit out of luck, he does the unthinkable and realigns with his old nemesis, God, for a shot at vengeance against Beelzebub.

But there is a price.

Earth has been overrun by evil forces and God needs Lucifer to clean house. Forced to work with a band of redemption seeking degenerates, Lucifer must learn to put aside his hatred for mankind and learn to trust his teammates or they will not survive. Assisting Lucifer in his quest to liberate the world is the hot-tempered immortal Lilith, stoner Adam, a resurrected hit-man, and a witch with a pesky undead feline familiar called Dead Meat.

And they only have three days.

With the clock ticking, Lucifer must get his unwanted team up to snuff for their first mission while being hunted by his ex-wife, Agrat. Their mission is to assassinate an earthbound Demon Lord named Hornblas, who parades around as the head of the largest music conglomerate in the world.

And it gets worse.

Their contracts with God prohibit them from killing innocents or falling back into their sinful ways. Failure results in immediate banishment to Hell and certain death for Lucifer.

Filled with angels and demons, trips to Hell, and other supernatural beasties, The Wretched follows Lucifer through an ever-increasing vortex of trouble across the Copper State with a final climactic realization leading to the unraveling of Lucifer himself.

You can order your copies at the following links: Kindle version, Print version.

Next up: Philip Palmer‘s Morpho – a NewCon Press Novella:

When the corpse on the mortuary slab sits up and speaks to Hayley, asking for her help, she thinks she’s losing her mind. If only it were that simple… 

In Morpho, distinguished novelist, screenwriter, and radio dramatist Philip Palmer delivers a tense and fast-paced tale of a secret society through which the privileged govern from the shadows, of immortality bought at a horrific price, and of a rebellion that threatens to undermine the social order of our entire world.

One of four independent novellas by four different authors that form NewCon Novella Set 5: The Alien Among Us

You can order your copies at the following link: Kindle Edition, Print Edition

And finally, John A Pretorius‘ Living in a Time of Dragons:

Just to make sure you know what the book is about:

“…as with everything in my life all this began with dreams…”

American ex-pat, father and widower, Roger Rommel, did not believe in dragons. Unfortunately they did not return the sentiment.

After returning from a self-imposed exile to his adopted country of South Africa, Roger is confronted by these legendary fire-breathing reptiles who risked exposing their hidden world simply to hunt him. Gifted with the ability to create and enter dreams, as well as to see the future, he tries to survive and protect his son from enemies he does not understand.

But the past isn’t dead, and he finds himself linked to a conflict thousands of years old. The world he knew is now stranger, more fantastic and terrifying than he truly knew, especially when everyone is out to get you.

The book is already available – check out the covers below for the Kindle and Print versions:

 

Print version – click cover to purchase on Amazon

Kindle version – click cover to purchase on Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also, Helen Brain‘s The Fiery Spiral was released last week, following on from the first book, The Thousand Steps, and the second book, The Rising Tide (links for TakeAlot).

Ebba is in Celestia, the land of the gods, and the only way to return to earth is to journey across a barren, lifeless landscape until she reaches the Fiery Spiral. But the road is fraught with difficulties and danger. She must learn the meaning of love and courage before she can fulfill her true destiny. It seems like Lucas has to share her journey. But to save everyone she loves, she might have to give up her life… and her heart.

You can purchase the third book on TakeAlot, too, at the following link.

Mary Helen Norris got in touch regarding pre-orders for a charity anthology, Defending Earth, one of many anthologies supporting the Cancer Research Institute. Here’s some info on the anthology:

And yes, it’s a Dr. Who themed anthology. 🙂

“I saw amazing things out there in Space—but there is strangeness out there to be found wherever you turn. Life on Earth can be an adventure too…you just need to know where to look!”

Sarah Jane Smith is perhaps one of Earth’s greatest defenders. Some grew up watching her adventures alongside two different Doctors, others met her in the revived series, and still others fell in love with her when she returned with her own spin-off. Throughout it all, Sarah Jane Smith has stood for justice, for truth, and for the defense of the innocent. From her childhood, to her journeys through space and time, to the wilderness years, to her adventures with her children and beyond, all periods of her life are featured in this collection!

What set a six-year-old Sarah Jane on the path she’d follow all her life? In a feature-length adventure, can Sarah Jane and the Doctor save London from disappearing in a morass of every possible London? In an independent investigation, can Sarah Jane discover who is murdering 60s pop stars—and when an 80s musical is put on about her life, can Sarah Jane get to the bottom of who’s putting the show on? All this and killer moths, the music of universal spheres, and stories especially exploring each of the Bannerman Road kids.

Proceeds from Defending Earth will go to the Cancer Research Institute. They are dedicated to harnessing our immune system’s power to control and potentially cure all types of cancer; they fund the most innovative clinical and laboratory research across the world, support the next generation of the field’s leaders, and serve as the trusted source of information on immunotherapy for cancer patients and their caregivers. Their scientific director, Dr. James P. Allison, won the 2018 Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine, showing the advancements the CRI has achieved.

Defending Earth features stories by Kara Dennsion, Jon Black, Niki Haringsma, James Macaronas, James Bojaciuk, Anna Maloney, Joshua Wanisko & Lillian Waniso, Tina Marie DeLucia, Scarlett Ward, William J. Martin, M.H. Norris, Harry King, Sophie Iles, and Anne-Laure Tuduri.

Pre-order your print copies here, which will be releasing on 2 April. The ebook edition is already available. 🙂

Also up for pre-order, Jesse Teller‘s Legend of the Exiles:

The isolated barbarians of Neather have deep ancestry and strict traditions. Four resilient women defy tribal customs as they fight to overcome their own tragedies. Abuse. Addiction. Assault. Grief. What struggles can they endure to defend their hopes and their hearts?

 

Helena seeks a love as bold as she, yet finds the men of her village lacking. Jocelyn fears her strange visions and sacrifices a life with the man she loves for the one her destiny demands. Torn apart by abuse and grief, Ellen is a brilliant woman who must focus her intellect on finding reasons to persevere. Rachel, a brash girl of noble heritage, dares all men to challenge her and longs for one who will.

 

In this set of four interwoven novellas, award-winning author Jesse Teller challenges assumptions and showcases the strength of feminine resolve.

The book will release on 15 April, and you can pre-order at Amazon. Also, check out Jesse on Goodreads, Facebook and Instagram.

Until next time (Wednesday, probably, with a new review),

Be EPIC!

 

John Jarrold’s Corner: Agency Clients Listed on Books of the Year 2010

Great news for these authors – and I have to say I’m surprised! The Financial Times?! I’m impressed!

Here they are:

Hannu Rajaniemi‘s début, The Quantum Thief (Amazon UK, Exclusive Books) (Agency Client);

Philip Palmer‘s Version 43 (Amazon UK, Exclusive Books) (Agency Client);

Check out the post (which came out on Saturday) here.

Be EPIC!

 

The Cover to Philip Palmer’s Version 43!

Just released on Twitter by Phil, care of Orbit:

Looks awesome! Love the cover! 🙂

I’ll be reviewing Red Claw in the next couple of months, keep an eye out for it. 🙂

Be EPIC!

P.S. The cover came about due to the awesome photography of Eric Westpheling. 🙂

 

John Jarrold’s Corner: News & news from Mark C Newton!

This news was originally posted over at Realms & Galaxies: Celebrating SFF on the 21st of December 2009.

I’ve got one last batch of news for you from John Jarrold for 2009, and it really is awesome news!

PRESS RELEASE – TWO-BOOK DEAL FOR SF NOVELIST PHILIP PALMER

Bella Pagan, Commissioning Editor of Orbit UK, has acquired two new novels by British SF author Philip Palmer. The agent was John Jarrold, and the deal was for World rights.

These novels – the first is entitled HELLSHIP – are both due for delivery in 2010, and will see a concerted push by Orbit on both sides of the Atlantic in 2011.

Philip’s first novel, DEBATABLE SPACE, was published in 2008, with RED CLAW following earlier this year. His work has drawn praise from the Guardian, SFX magazine and many other sources, both in print and on-line. The latter novel features in the Top Twenty SF novels published in 2009 in leading genre website SF Crowsnest’s reader poll. His third SF novel, VERSION 43, comes from both Orbit UK and Orbit US in 2010.

Wonderful news for Philip! 🙂 Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, and I’m really chuffed that we’ll be reading more of his incredibly funny blend of hard SF / Space Opera! 🙂

Next up, here’s the official US cover of Mark Newton’s impending entrance into the US Fantasy market – Night’s of Villjamur! (I quite like the cover, btw)

Mark is also looking back on 2009 in this post, and head on over to Pat’s blog to read an excerpt of the sequel to Nights of Villjamur, coming in 2010! 🙂

Be EPIC!

 

An Interview with Philip Palmer

You know how sometimes life becomes so busy that you have to sacrifice a few less-important things to get focused on the really important ones? That’s what happened with Philip, and why this interview took so long to get onto the blog. 🙂 After all, the man is not just a SF / Space Opera Author; he works in TV too. 🙂 But in retrospect, Philip’s timing couldn’t be better – with his latest novel on the way, this interview will give his fans (and I am most definitely one of them) some insight into his thought-processes, and wont spoil Red Claw at all. 🙂 So, without further a-do, I give you Philip Palmer!

First of all, welcome to the South African SF-reading public, Philip, and thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. 🙂

It’s a real pleasure Dave.

Here’s my first question: Were you smoking something when you wrote Debatable Space? 😉

I’m tempted to try some illicit drugs as a way of calming myself down a little; my natural metabolism is WAY too high. But I prefer to use endorphins – Nature’s natural narcotic.

I do like safe formulaic writing – when I’m looking for something to read on a Friday night. But when I write, I want to take risks. We’ve all read so many novels, seen so many films; so I want to know, what else? And how else?

Will you please tell us a bit about yourself? Your work in TV, influences, etc?

I’ve had a gipsy life as a writer – a bit of this, a bit of that. I worked as a script editor, and a script reader – David Puttnam was my boss for many years, when I was a humble reader. I’ve been a TV development executive, a TV script editor, I wrote for the British cop series The Bill, I’ve even been involved in the production side of things, for a company called Lucky Dog.

Working in TV taught me about story – how to tell a story, how to brainstorm a story, and how you need to never underestimate your audience when telling that story. (Which of course most British TV shows do ALL the time – but it’s good to know your enemy!)

Will you please take us through the process of writing the book – what led to Lena popping into your head, any ‘eureka!’ moments where something worked even better than you thought it would, and seeing your book on the shelf for the first time?

I really don’t know where Lena came from; I just had that voice in my head, and I listened to it. I knew I wanted an “unreliable narrator”, someone self-deceiving, but ultimately loveable. And the moment Lena started talking to tinbrain, her remote computer – the tone and energy of the book was all there.

I started with a mind full of hazy ideas – solar yachts, space pirates, the notion of writing a story that was a yarn, not an interior monlogue. And then each section leaped into place as I continued through the book. The Cambria sequence was a particular delight for me.

Some stuff I had to work at – building up Peter Smith’s character, getting the balance between Lena’s thought diary and action-adventure. But most of it really was eureka stuff.

And I remember I went with a friend into Blackwell’s Bookshop on Charing Cross Road, just before the official publication date of the book – and found 3 or 4 copies on the shelf, which had snuck out early. My friend actually bought one, and got me to sign it! Now that was a good moment. Then a few seconds later, my wife phoned up to tell me the roof was leaking and we had an infestation of ladybirds in the bedroom. So I said, ‘Yeah, but who cares? My book’s on the shelf in Blackwell’s!’

The main concepts that you dealt with, such as Emergence and Primary Imagination; did they grow out of telling the tale, or did you know from the beginning that you wanted to deal with them?

Before I started writing, I did quite a bit of science reading to get my head in that space, and it was then that I became fascinated by emergence. It just struck me as the only answer I know of to that vital question; how does this stuff actually happen? Evolution explains how complicated things evolve, by surviving or dying out; but how do simple things get to be complicated things? Why isn’t the universe just a great big mush of mess? If entropy and chaos are the natural state of things then, huh? Explain a snowflake!

The concept of Primary Imagination is something that has always intrigued me. At University I was a huge fan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and who also wrote philosophy, and coined the phrase ‘suspension of disbelief’ to explain how we read and actively perceive fiction – and that phrase is still the best definition ever of the amazing magical thing that happens in our heads when we read a book, or see a film.

And it was Coleridge who coined the phrase Primary Imagination – based on his reading of Immanuel Kant – and guess what, it makes absolute sense. We each of us create the world, every time we look at it. We find pattern and beauty when we perceive matter that is actually made of atoms inhabiting weird quantum states, we see colour because of the way light interacts with our eyes, we make the real “real”. How cool is that?

You’ve given life to some incredible characters in DS; did any of them ever sneak up and surprise you with something you hadn’t planned?

Kalen’s ‘miaow’ was a bit of a shock to me. And Alby was the character I loved writing most – because he is so unpredictable, and hard to define, and so effortlessly powerful. I would love to have a friend like Alby.

You spoke of Michael Crichton’s novel Prey in the ‘Extras’ section at the back of DS; what are your opinions on ermergence and the ‘Hollywood’ threat of AI? (I say ‘Hollywood’ threat because it’s such a money-maker there)

Prey was indeed a great influence – Crichton (bless his memory) is such an uber-nerd that he actually has a reading list at the back of the book – which I devoured voraciously. The reading list proves he knows what emergence really is – a powerful ‘theory of everything’ for biologists. But he’s also smart enough to know that you can’t have a book without a villain; so he quite shamelessly uses emergence as a way of creating monsters.

I can’t be judgemental about that – I use the same approach myself all the time. You take the truth – great concepts in science – profound ideas – then you make a rattling good yarn out of them. So though I don’t really think emergence and nano-technology are any kind of urgent threat to us; it’s cool to write stories in which that is so!

You left clues all through the novel as to the final fate of Peter; how was it writing the particular character that did the deed?

The clues were particularly cunning because I didn’t really know that was going to happen at the end. But, without giving anything away – I wanted magic in the closing sections of the book, and hope I achieved that .

Lena is vibrant and emotional and utterly fearless (when it suits her); Will Lena (and Flanagan, and the rest of the pirates) ever return? We certainly miss her (all of them) already. 🙂

I’d love to write another Lena and Flanagan book, and hope to do so. I’d be wary, to be honest, of making a series of books about the characters – because that might make them seem ordinary, and it’s their extraordinariness that defines them.

But I do have a notion for a follow-up novel, featuring Lena’s son (a son she didn’t know she had) in cahoots with Flanagan and Lena, on a mission at the far edge of the galaxy…But I have a bundle of other ideas too, so I’m not sure which ones I’ll write next.

And finally, what’s next for you, and for us? Already working on the next novel?

I’m having a joyous time at the moment writing my third book, a noir sci-fi novel set several hundred years later than Debatable Space, in what I call the Exodus Universe. It’s a detective drama, a murder story, it has killer aliens, it has it all really! That should be ready to send to my editor (DongWon Song) in the autumn I hope.

Meanwhile – book number 2 is to be published later this year. It’s called RED CLAW, and it’s similar to DEBATABLE SPACE, despite being totally different in every single respect. It’s not a space opea, it’s a thriller set on a planet rich in deadly aliens. And the main characters are a bunch of scientists who, like me, are geeks; geeks in peril no less.

Orbit have put a lot of work into designing a cover and approach for the new novel that will, we hope, make it stand out. The cover is “pulp”, but with attitude; and it’ll be published in the rather snazzy “B Format” – the paperback format that’s used for Iain M. Banks’ books here in the UK.

RED CLAW is my love song to the old fashioned ‘bug eyed monsters’ genre – the twist being, each of the bug-eyes monsters in my story has a Latin name, and a beauty all its own. It’s really a novel about the joy of discovery, and the naturalist’s love of nature – with a bunch of killer doppelanger robots shooting the hell out of everyone along the way.

Thanks, Philip, for giving up your time to answer these questions, and for writing such a brilliant novel! We wish you all the best!

A pleasure – and let’s keep in touch.

If you haven’t had a chance to read DS yet, and are wondering what DS is, check out my review of the excellent debut here. 🙂

I’m sure the wait for the interview was worth it, don’t you agree? 🙂 And I’m sure you’re all looking foward to Philip’s second book for Orbit, Red Claw. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the cover; and go ahead, have a good laugh! I know I did! 🙂

Check out Philip’s website here for further updates from him, and check out Orbit’s website here. 🙂

You can also order Debatable Space here (US) and here (UK), and pre-order Red Claw here (UK).

Be Fantastic!

P.S. Did you know that John Jarrold is Philip’s agent? 🙂

 

Review: Debatable Space – Philip Palmer

Reading Debatable Space is akin to being shoved into a washing machine while tripping your brains out – it is such a wild ride that I still find myself amazed that I survived it! 🙂

Take it from me (if you’d like 🙂 ), Philip Palmer is going to be regarded as one of the legends of SF. This book, as more and more people read it, is going to be held up as one of the most innovative SF novels to hit the shelves in years! This book sits well in the same company as Clarke’s Odyssey and Rama series, Ian MacDonald’s Necroville and Chaga, and Peter F Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy. 🙂

The story seems a bit off-beat once you start reading – Lena, someone very important, is captured and held hostage by a pirate captain and his crew. What’s at stake? Well, Lena’s (and our) sanity, and the fate of humankind, because the pirates are going to use Lena to strike at the Cheo, the tyrannical ruler of the Universe. And not how! 🙂

This book deals with some incredible concepts (I’ll keep you in the dark, read the book!), takes us on through epic space battles, to distant and wonderful planets, with characters that grab you by the short and curlies and drag you along (and believe me, you’ll enjoy the experience) through one of the funniest and most hard-SF adventures you’ll ever read.

This is, without a doubt, one of the best SF books I’ve read in years, so go read it and agree with me! 🙂

9/10

Many thanks to Philip for signing the copy for me (okay, okay, he had no idea I was going to get one, but the fact remains) and a huge thank you to Darren Turpin at Little Brown for getting the contest going on Facebook that led to this review (and the upcoming interview!), 🙂

BTW, follow this link to become a fan of Debatable Space (and Philip); all news regarding Philip and the book can be found there!

Debatable Space

Check out this link to go to Philip’s website!