Rob Boffard's Blog, page 4

New Rapped Book Review! Infernal, by Mark De Jager

It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these, mostly because I’ve been busy actually writing books of my own. But once again, I decided to bring my unique and utterly useless talent for rapping about geeky stuff to the Internet, and make something both very cool and completely silly.

Presenting: a rapped book review of the brilliant Infernal, by Mark De Jager.

Stratus wakes in an unfamiliar place, with nothing but the knowledge that he is not human, with no memories of his past but possessing great strength, a powerful sorcery and the burning instinct to survive at any cost.

Embarking on a journey of self-discovery, he sets out across a landscape torn apart by the ten year war between the Kingdoms of Krandin and Penullin, now reaching new levels of savagery as a dark magic drives the world to the brink of destruction.

As his personality grows with each step he slowly uncovers the truth of what he has become and the unquenchable thirst for vengeance that has led him there.

Have fun! If you liked it, check out the other two rapped reviews I’ve done previously, below.

Read the most explosive scifi trilogy around

I can’t provide all the links to every store on every continent, but trust me: your favourite retailer probably has it. For now, here are the Amazon links – they’ll take you to the right store for your country.

TRACER / ZERO-G / IMPACT

How the apocalypse became the new normal

Look, do me a favour. Watch the video above. I know, it’s seven minutes long, and that’s probably about six minutes and thirty seconds longer than you have right now, but watch it.

Not just because it’s me asking (you are on my website and I did make it look nice for you and I don’t ask for much) but because it’s Bill Maher and he’s one of the funniest, most astute people on the planet.

Go on. Watch it. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. You know which part of the video stuck with me? I mean, the whole thing is brilliant; it’s this wonderful, freewheeling monologue that you’re probably going to be quoting bits from to your friends for the rest of the day. But the part that stuck with me is the idea that the apocalypse has become normal.

…You’re confused because you didn’t watch it. Fine. FINE. I’ll summarise.

What Maher says, as he builds his argument against Donald Trump and undecided voters, is that movies are scary good at predicting the future. If you think that’s insane, then ponder his examples. 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted iPads. Star Trek predicted flip phones. Mad Max? Climate change. Minority Report had augmented reality right out front. The United States had a black president in movies and TV long before Barack Obama came along, and Steven Seagal and Denzel Washington were fighting off terrorist incidents on US soil a decade or two before Al Qaeda.

Movies are good at this shit. I don’t exactly know why; it’s got nothing to do with filmmakers or producers being particularly smart or clairvoyant. But for whatever reason, there’s a lot of evidence that these people know what they’re talking about.

You know what they’re predicting now? Assuming you didn’t watch the video, I’ll give you a clue. Hunger Games. Divergent. The Giver. V For Vendetta. Maze Runner. Matrix. Interstellar. What do all of these movies have in common?

No, not Jennifer Lawrence. I know she’s in just about everything. Come on. Stay focused. Eyes on me.

What they have in common is the end of the world as we know it. There have been a lot – a lot – of movies in the past decade which have explored what happens when everything goes kablooie.

Now, I’m not saying that everything is, in fact, going to go kablooie. I’m not advocating a run for the bomb shelters just yet. But it comes down to two things: not only are we living in a time when it seems more things could end our way of life than at any other time in history, but that we are totally cool with that and ready for life in the apocalyptic wasteland.

Let me break that down real quick.

I don’t believe you can argue that there is more that threatens us as a species than any other time in our history, with the exception of when we first evolved and were living in a world where everything was bigger and hungrier than us. Oh, and that time when a comet reduced the global human population to a few thousand individuals, but I think we can call that one outlier. 

Humanity in 2016 has to deal with combinations of the following:

Encroaching and unstoppable climate change, nuclear weapons.
Innumerable splinter terrorist groups with a fervent desire to kill as many people as possible.
Home-made gene splicing that could quite conceivably create a killer plague.
Earthquake fault zones around the world that are a few hundred thousand years overdue for their next big shrug.
Killer meteorites that could strike us at any moment.
Computer systems that could conceivably become self-aware and decide that we were a wild inconvenience.
The continued presence of Lil Yachty, who, I’m sure we can agree, is a threat to us all.

Now understand me. I’m not saying that any of this is certain to happen (well, except for the climate change, which is already well underway). Humans might be amazingly self-destructive, but we’re also pretty smart when we have to be. We could probably deal with a lot of the things on that list. My point is that it’s a very long list. We live in an exceedingly dangerous era, and it’s starting to be reflected in the movies we watch.

That’s point one. Point two startled me when I first realised it. In the parlance of clickbait, you won’t believe what happens next.

We have become very, very comfortable with the idea of the destruction of the planet.

You can see this in the type of stories we produce and consume, and how we respond to the idea of a complete, world ending event.we don’t dwell on it. We don’t ponder the immediate consequences of, say, a home-made ebola analogue ripping through civilisation. Or at least, not the immediate ones. Yeah, yeah, whatever, apocalypse, bring on the guns and the explosions and hot chicks with warpaint. We are only interested in what comes after.

Part of that, I like to think, is because we all have a hope that our species would carry on in some form. I think it goes deeper than that. I think that we have come to look on apocalypse not as an ending, but as a new beginning. The destruction of everything we hold dear is not something to be feared. Or at least, not for us: we are the stars of our own stories, and we will not only survive, but find love and triumph over evil in a world that we can remake.

And why not? Isn’t it easier to do that then imagine just how shitty, nasty and dirty the end of the world and the breakdown of society is likely to be? A nuclear explosion isn’t, in itself, inherently interesting. It’s a big bang that serves as a catalyst for other stories.

I had this brought home to me by my wife in a rather hair raising way. After she watched the video, and we got talking about it, she pointed out that I’d done exactly that in my own books. It was true: in my Outer Earth trilogy, the action takes place on a space station orbiting a planet destroyed by a brutal one-two punch of nuclear war and climate change. Our planet, or what’s left of it, is a backdrop. It’s a scene setter. That’s all.

I destroyed the planet, and didn’t give it more than five seconds’ thought.

Again: I can’t stress enough that I’m not trying to be paranoid here. There is no grand conspiracy among writers and filmmakers to prepare us for our inevitable apocalypse. The thing everybody forgets about conspiracies is that the larger they are, the more impossible they are to stay, well, a conspiracy.

What I’m saying is that all of this reflects a shift in how we view the world. We’ve become so used to being threatened, by everything, all the time, that it barely raises an eyebrow anymore.

And what you forget about world-ending catastrophes is this: if a bug that our bodies can’t defend themselves from wipes out 99.5% of the population, then you, me, your best mate, your mom, your boyfriend, your boss, every single person you know or have ever known is likely to be in that 99.5%. You aren’t going to be the hero. You aren’t going to lead a charge into a brave new world. You’re going to die. You’re not Mad Max, or Furiosa. You’re the poor bastard whose bones they drive over as they run from the war boys.

Sorry.

But hey. At least you got to watch a hysterical Bill Maher video beforehand, so it’s not all bad.

I blew up the world! Then wrote a book about it!

I can’t provide all the links to every store on every continent, but trust me: your favourite retailer probably has it. For now, here are the Amazon links – they’ll take you to the right store for your country.

TRACER / ZERO-G / IMPACT

I collected some more cool concept art together!

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a massive concept art fan. I also tend to post lots of concept art when I’m all written out and genuinely can’t be arsed to get on my high horse about a particular topic. That happened today. So yay! Concept art. Fortunately, it’s banging.

This is the first one caught my eye. Traditionally, I’ve seen a lot of Boba Fett art that makes him look quite clean and clinical. Not this guy. This guy looks like he just returned from a job that went bad. It lets you fill in the blanks in the story. Really dope piece from Gregory Vlasenko.

Anna Steinbauer calls this piece Seek The Wilds. A more apt title has never been given. I love the sense of scale and height that she puts in here. It also reminds me of a weird John Muir quote that has stuck with me: “Who has not felt the urge to throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence?”

I’d love to know what (or who) this dude is waiting for. Great, detailed piece by Spiros Karkavelas.

A lot of fantasy art can be really overdone. It’s either garish and eyeball searing, or just wildly impractical. Piotr Dura (ThreeDeee), a Polish artist, nailed this one. You don’t just want to know what this gate is, but you actively want to explore it. The best art immediately makes you think of storylines, and this is no exception.

I don’t know the artist’s real name, but he/she/they goes by Madcat. I don’t know why this piece creeps me out so much. It’s not just because it’s a dead person in the middle. A dead person with something glowing stuck through its forehead. It’s because the dead person is still alive.

Some genius wants to build a real Outer Earth

I’m not entirely sure how I missed this yesterday, but it seems as if someone wants to make the city -sized space station of my novels a reality. Like, for reals for reals.

I don’t quite know how to feel about this. As you might know if you’ve read any of the books in my trilogy, things on Outer Earth didn’t go so well.

Let me backtrack. Yesterday, I got pointed to a fascinating report in New Scientist by Timothy Revell. It talks about a loony Russian scientist, Igor Ashurbeyli, who wants to create the first nation in space. He’s going to call it Asgardia (which, I have to admit, is a pretty damn cool name) and he wants to put people up there.

At least, I think he does. It’s not completely clear. He definitely wants 100,000 people to apply online to become citizens, but he’s strangely silent on plans to actually get people to live on the one satellite he plans to launch.

The idea of starting a nation in space is fraught with difficulties. The team will have to get past roadblocks in international law, and acquire sufficient technology and funding to put a physical entity into orbit. At the moment, the project relies on donations from its founding members.

“What we are setting up is a digital state, but we’re not going to put anyone in space just yet,” said Ashurbeyli. Instead, Asgardia will start off as a single satellite with its citizens scattered across Earth. Aspiring citizens can apply online. Once 100,000 people have signed up, the team will consult the UN on membership.

Exactly what Asgardia’s satellite will look like and where it will launch from has yet to be determined. “Today is just the announcement, but it will happen,” says Ashurbeyli.

Ooooookaaaay.

Very obviously he’s going to face massive legal hurdles if he ever manages to get this off the ground, so to speak. Who, for example, is going to foot the bill if there is an accident which causes Asgardia to drop out of the sky? The state that launched it? Ashurbeyli himself? Thor Odinson? Who knows?

That’s not all. The dude also wants Asgardia to function as a defence system for incoming asteroids. I don’t see this going wrong at all.

Today is not the first time that Ashurbeyli has come out with an ambitious scheme. Earlier this year, he declared the need for an international space platform to defend Earth from incoming objects. He proposed a Universal Robotic Battle Cosmic Platform, or URBOCOP, which would use on-board weapons to obliterate threatening objects such as asteroids or even missiles launched by one nation against another.

Universal Robotic Battle Cosmic Platform. Say it. SAY IT.

It’s always wonderful when a writer creates something fictional and then sees the real world follow suit. Well, maybe less wonderful for things like flesh eating diseases and psychotic killer robots, but you get what I mean. Sign me up. every nation on earth with the notable exception of Canada is going tits-up, so I may as well give Asgardia a try. Who’s with me?

I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t believe I’d get tired of this view.

Read the most explosive scifi trilogy around

I can’t provide all the links to every store on every continent, but trust me: your favourite retailer probably has it. For now, here are the Amazon links – they’ll take you to the right store for your country.

TRACER / ZERO-G / IMPACT

Brexit is already a complete disaster

Don’t believe me? Here are a few things that have happened since the British referendum in June.

1. Homophobic attacks in the UK went up by 147%.

2. Hate crime (like racist attacks) went up by 57%.

3. The government’s own cabinet committee estimated that the country would lose around £66bn every single year after they left the EU.

4. Nigel Farage went on TV and openly said that he lied during his Leave campaign. About pretty much everything.

5. The Conservative Party imploded. The new leader of Britain, Theresa May, an unelected eldritch horror with a hideous track record as Home Secretary, swiftly declared that there would be massive caps on the number of foreigners who could settle in the UK.

6. Jeremy Hunt, the scumbag in charge of the NHS, said that foreign doctors would only be allowed to remain until local ones were trained up.

7. The pound plummeted to some of its lowest levels since 1985.

8. The only assurance the British government could give Northern Ireland – which, in case you need reminding, has a southern half that is entirely part of the European Union, and which does not have a hard border between the two, and which had decades of a horrific religious war which makes borders anathema – is that maybe the Irish might possibly consider doing some more passport checks?

9. Virtually every bank in London has threatened to pull its offices.

10. Four million people signed a petition asking for a second referendum, and there were mass protests at the result, which was delivered by a tiny majority.

I don’t talk about politics too often. I’m not really qualified. Then again, I’m a guy who writes about explosions and noisy fights and bad jokes, so maybe I’m uniquely qualified. Whatever: the point is that I’ve largely steered away from it. But Brexit makes me so angry, inspires such total, raging, blithering hatred, that I’m moved to actually write something. It’s either that, or kill myself by slamming my head against a brick wall.

In the aftermath of the referendum, I blamed everything on the voters. Who were these wankers? I thought. Who were these giant, racist, hideous bags of piss? Since when do they get to decide that a policy of hatred and isolation is better than one of openness and compassion? Who the hell gives a tiny shit about their towns: places like Sunderland, Slough, Bromley? Who besides them has ever gone there? Who would want to?

Obviously, this was pretty unfair. I even feel a little ashamed about it. Most people in these places, I would suspect, are relatively normal. They don’t hate foreigners. They just have no money, no jobs, and are looking to do something, anything to stop the bleeding. It’s hard to criticise someone being gullible when that someone is in a desperate, terrible situation. Without wanting to sound condescending, we are not talking about people making rational, informed judgements. I was right to be angry, but I was wrong to be angry at them. They were lied to.

Then again, have a listen to this caller to London’s LBC who is delighted to be free of EU laws, and yet who can’t name a single one. You, motherfucker, deserve everything that is going to happen to you. (LBC don’t allow their videos to be embedded, so you’ll have to follow the link, but here’s a shot from it that just about sums it up.)

Oh, and these fuckwits. I’ve never wanted to actually murder someone before. Like, literally reach into the television, grab someone, and beat them to a pulp. I’m sorry. But seriously: HOW.

It’s easy to call me a member of the metropolitan elite. I probably am. I’m a British citizen who lived in London for a long time, and who is now an expat. I have a European wife. I make decent money. I have a university degree. Large numbers of my friends are foreigners. I am everything you hate. But even in London, I’m in the minority. Most people in London cannot afford to get on the property ladder, can barely afford their rent, are working jobs that they hate and which pay bugger-all. They’re just like you.

It didn’t have to be this way. I am (grudgingly) prepared to admit that if the majority of voters expressed that they want something, we have to abide by it, no matter how difficult it is. That’s how democracy works. It’s a compromise and it’s not perfect, but you can’t go halfway on it. And yet, this could have been so much easier. You don’t have to remove free movement and free trade when you leave the EU. You could simply go to the table and negotiate new terms. You’re telling me that an enlightened, caring Downing Street, run by people who have actually grown a brain, couldn’t frame this strategy as giving the Leave voters what they want? Of course they could.

The problem is that not only were these voters sold a bill of goods, by people like Farage and Boris Johnson who both deserve to spend the rest of their lives living in abject poverty, but that neither they nor anyone else had any idea what would happen if they actually won. I’m not just talking about leaving the EU itself. I’m talking about the massive, catastrophic power vacuum that would result. The scramble for the top spot that would leave the British people in the dust. No one could predict that it would allow the craven and the criminal to rise to power in such dramatic fashion.

The ones I really hate, the people I think should be rotting in a dark hole with nothing but each other for company and a ration of rats to eat every week, are the people in charge. They are racist, hate filled, trashbag people. Remember their names.

David Cameron, for starting this. For being a weak Prime Minister who promised more than he could deliver, and who steered the country into disaster. You deserve your legacy, you pig-rogering hellbeast.

Nigel Farage. I don’t even have words for you. You’re beyond contempt.

Boris Johnson. I can’t believe I voted for you to be Mayor of London. You were one of us. You were a good guy. What the hell happened, man? Did you think that you could make such a naked play for power and that we wouldn’t notice? Do you think we’re that stupid? Of course you do. It’s the only explanation.

Michael Gove. How do you even exist? How do you not just dissolve into a tiny blob of mush on the floor? What terrifying mathematics are keeping you in human form?

Theresa May. You are evil. End of discussion. You don’t give a shit about Britain, or the people who live in it. You only want power.

Amber Rudd. Home Secretary? I wouldn’t hire you as an actual secretary. I’ve never seen someone so good at riding another person’s coattails. What the hell are you even doing in government? You should be in a straitjacket.

Liam Fox. What are you even doing here? Your job, such as it is, is to make this whole shitshow work, and you couldn’t even get Norway to sign on. You’re a waste of oxygen.

Like I said: remember their names. Remember what they did. Remember how they treated you. When the borders close, when the Polish shop on your high street is finally gone, when all doctors are British, when you have to pay money to get a Visa to Europe, when there are openly racist white power groups operating in broad daylight, remember them. When you still can’t get a job because the factory in your town closed up shop and moved to France, when your doctors don’t have the experience to treat you, when your salary has plummeted, when you still can’t afford a house, when the government can no longer afford to pay your benefits, when the price of beer and tea and coffee skyrocket, remember them.

Read the most explosive scifi trilogy around

I can’t provide all the links to every store on every continent, but trust me: your favourite retailer probably has it. For now, here are the Amazon links – they’ll take you to the right store for your country.

TRACER / ZERO-G / IMPACT

I’m not American. Why am I obsessed with Donald Trump?

There is absolutely no reason for me to be this obsessed with Donald Trump.

I am not an American. I have no voting rights for that country. I have never lived there. I have no business interests there beyond those conducted by my publisher. The outcome of their Presidential election should mean very little to me. I should be far more concerned with what Jacob Zuma is doing to my home country of South Africa (tearing it to pieces), what Theresa May is getting up to in the UK, where I lived for seven years (shitting on it from a dizzying height), and what Justin Trudeau is involved with in my adopted country of Canada (mainly cuddling pandas and being accused of fake feminism, if you believe our local magazines. On a related note, I fucking love Canada).

And yet I am completely obsessed with Donald Trump. I search for stories about him on Twitter a dozen times a day. Vox, FiveThirtyEight and The Guardian are constantly open in my browser. I subscribed to the Washington Post purely so I could read David Fahrenholdt’s amazing reporting on the campaign. I was glued to both debates, and they both inspired the kind of butterflies I’d only ever experienced watching Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Yes, I have family there, and plenty of friends, but that’s not what it comes to. It’s something deeper. Something horrible.

I’m not alone. The world as we know it has become hooked on Trump. Never before has the electoral process of a single country been so well known to so many. Trump dominates headlines from Bangalore to Vladivostok. He is the single most reported-on human being in history.

I’ve tried to understand this. I’ve tried to get my head around just why the world has gone loopy for Donald. I don’t completely buy the argument that it’s because American media and culture is predominant across most of the planet. That’s a part of it, but it’s not the whole picture. I also don’t believe that it’s a natural outgrowth of how we view celebrities – that eventually, a politician (for Donald is a politician, much as he tends to spit twice upon hearing the term) would cross over into Taylor Swift Land. Neither of those explain why everybody wants to watch America bend over and try to lick its own asshole.

Here’s what I think does.

1) We have never – and I mean never – seen anything like this.

Not anywhere on Earth. Sure, we’ve seen despots: ridiculous African leaders in ermine cloaks, bellowing Russian panjandrums above marching soldiers, third-rate corrupt douchewads in South America. But we’ve never seen a robust democracy get so rapidly fucked by someone. We’ve never seen an established method of government fall to pieces in such a dramatic, ridiculous way.

2) We all have connections to America.

One way or another, it affects us all. America, to paraphrase AA Gill’s writings on Los Angeles, is our modern day Athens, our Rome. It’s the centre of the planet’s culture. Even if you’ve never been there, or never known an American, it has somehow touched your life. American music, food, culture, lifestyles…one way or another, we’re all American. In some deep part of our souls, we all want to be natives of LA or New York or a tiny, mythical small town in Texas. If the world was a country, America would be its capital. So Trump hits home. Watching him is like having a long needle driven deep into your body.

3) Horror. The horror of a car crash you can’t look away from.

Trump is a piece of shit – he’s a dirty, slimy, sleazy, corrupt, horrible trashcan fire of a human being. And not only is he making America lick his boots…they want to do it!!! They’re voting for him! There are vast segments of the country who hear what he says and don’t care. They know all about his taxes, his sexism, his racism, all of it; they know he’ll be a disaster, and they still want him. For anyone not involved, it’s impossible not to have your jaw drop in horror. It’s impossible not to think that, falling in the polls though he might be, Trump is America laid bare. He’s everything we were terrified it would be.

I can’t wait until the election is over. I need this fuckhead out of my life. He will almost certainly lose, which is good, but I can never get back the endless hours I’ve devoted to watching him fuck a country I love. More than anything else, that’s what I hate him for.

America: put a line under this. Close this chapter. Send this monster wearing badly-fitting human skin back to his hole. Prove you’re better. Turn the wheel at the last second, and avoid the 18-wheeler you’ve been driving towards with the system pumping death metal. Please. For my mental health, if nothing else.

(Photos: Gage Skidmore, CC 2.0)

Introducing…ECHOES

That’s the problem with spending nearly four years in a fictional world.

You get to tell the story you want, true. If you’re really lucky, like I was, you get an amazing publisher backing you up, which lets you stretch the story out to three whole books. So I got to tell the story of Riley Hale, and how she almost saved Outer Earth. It was a total blast, and some of the best fun I’ve ever had.

But the problem with writing a focussed story is that you can’t explore. You have to stay on track. I might want to go explore that dimly lit corridor Riley is running past, the one with the evil looking graffiti and the sparks flying from a distant plasma cutter, but I can’t. I need to keep shit moving. Otherwise the books would never have been finished.

Fortunately, I had two things going for me. One: I write fast. Not Seanan-McGuire-fast, but at a reasonably speedy clip. This helps me make my deadlines, and gives me a little bit more free time. Two: I don’t jump straight from one book into another. My head is too fuzzy. I need to write something else, clear the cobwebs, take a long breath of fresh air after three or four months with my head plunged beneath the surface of the book.

So what did I want to do, after I’d finished working on book two of the trilogy, ZERO-G? I wanted to explore the world of Outer Earth a little bit more. I wanted to delve deep into the cracks of this century-old, rusted, angry little space station. More importantly, I wanted to find out more about the people who lived in it. Riley’s crew, for example. You got a tiny bit of their back stories in the books themselves, but believe me, I was just curious as you were to know more. Where did Carver get his mechanical ability from? How did The Twins hook up? What drove Amira to do what she did? And what about Sam Royo – the gruff cop who just wants to keep the station safe? What was his story?

So I started writing. I hung out with these shady characters for a little while, and got them to tell me about themselves. It was one hell of a ride, and I came back with some great stories. I took them to Orbit Books, that mysterious, enigmatic company who are stewards of the world of Outer Earth, and asked them what I should do with them.

And now we have ECHOES.

Four stories. Bite-sized snacks you can read in an hour. A chance to find out more about the nooks and crannies of this fucked-up little space station. If you’re a fan of the series, then you’re going to bloody love this. If you’re a new reader, then this will give you an idea of what to expect before you bark on this insane, breathless ride. Whichever camp you fall into, buckle up.

How is it being released?

The Outer Earth series is both paperback and eBook, but ECHOES is ebook only. It’ll be out on Amazon, Kobo, Google Play etc soon, worldwide.

WHEN is it being released?

Orbit need to coordinate a worldwide release, and make sure Amazon get it up in time, so that’s still being worked out. Expect it within the next month. I’ll be on Twitter shouting about it if you need me.

How much will it cost?

£1.99 in the UK, $2.50 in the US, or thereabouts.

When’s your next full-length?

Coming sooner than you think.

Read the series Glamour Magazine calls “Exhilarating and guaranteed to keep you hooked until the very last page.”

The Music Of Outer Earth

The Music of Outer Earth





7

“The Outer Earth trilogy (TRACER, ZERO-G and IMPACT) tells the story of a courier on a city-sized space station, and her race to save her home from a deadly conspiracy. It’s a lightning-fast, action-packed series of novels that never lets up.

I don’t write to music, but I’ve always got songs playing in my head while I’m working, and they helped shape the books and the world my characters live in. I thought I’d post up a few of them, explain why they’re important, and riff a little on what they make me feel.

BUT I don’t just want to do this myself. Everyone experiences a book differently. I want to know what YOU were listening to while reading it, or what was going round your head, or if a piece of music made you recall a character or scene. All you have to do is stick a YouTube link in the comments below, with maybe a line or two about why you chose it. I’ll format your choice so it looks awesome, and post it up alongside mine. I’ll also be adding new songs everyday, right up until 30 August 2016, when IMPACT releases worldwide.

(Oh, and if none of this makes sense: go get the damn books already. What are you waiting for? Seriously. You’re killing me here.)

Anyway, check it out. I can’t wait to hear yours.”

– RB

Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites – Skrillex

“The main character in TRACER is Riley Hale, a speedy courier who takes shit from nobody. In her first appearance, she’s sprinting through the station, on the run from a rival crew. This tune captures both the joy she takes in running, and the danger she puts herself in every time she takes a job. Skrillex gets a lot of flack, but his music – especially the stuff from the EP that shares a name with this track – injects dubstep with a level of imagination and emotion that it badly needs. This song is Riley Hale.”

My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up) – Fall Out Boy

“Riley runs with a crew of her own. Every time I wrote one of them, I always had a specific tune running around my head – usually something that popped up spontaneously. Aaron Carver, a gifted inventor and mechanic who builds the crew’s gear, is a wisecracking, smug practical joker. He and Riley don’t always get along, but they respect each other – and when it comes down to it, they’ll always have each others’ backs. This is the perfect song for Carver: stupid, fun, but with a razor’s edge on it.”

Fighting Fish – Dessa

“The leader of Riley’s crew is Amira Al-Hassan. She’s an ice-cold, calculating, focussed warrior who will do anything for her crew. Riley might be fast, but when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, nobody’s fucking with Amira. When I was writing her, I kept hearing this song in my head. It’s by Dessa, one of the best rappers on the planet right now, and it’s the perfect level of controlled aggression for Amira. Every time I hear this, I imagine her taking down a posse of enemies, single-handed, without so much as a scratch.”

More coming soon – add your own in the comments below! I’ll upload and format it for you so it looks awesome. 

I’m in the UK! Come say hi

(I also solemnly pledge to say “Shut up and sit down, you big, bald fuck” to the first Brit I see. Even if he’s not fat. Or bald. Or male. Or – you know what? Never mind. We’re good. Let’s move on.)

This month is going to be massive. I’m spending most of it bouncing around the UK, doing some immensely cool stuff, swinging through your city and bringing all the boys to the yard with my milkshake. Or something. If you’re around, you should come say hi. Here’s where I’m going to be.

 

11 August – Fantasy In The Court

The annual gathering of the greatest and glorious-est in all of fantasy and science fiction is coming round again, and this time, their shine will be ever so slightly diminished, because they’ve invited me.

Fantasy In The Court is basically a giant piss-up at a terrific bookshop where you can hang around and meet your favourite authors. We’re not there to sell you books or pitch you our podcast – we’re just there to have a good time.

It takes place at Goldsboro Books, just off the Charing Cross Road. I will have flown in from Canada the day before, and will be so jetlagged that I’ll be floating five feet above the crowd. Wave at me.

Come on down.

12-14 August – NineWorlds, London

Damn right. I’m heading to the UK’s biggest, baddest scifi convention – and I won’t just be hanging around the lobby, either. I’ll be holding court and spouting my unique brand of bullshit on three different panels, which you should totally attend, because the results are going to make for some hysterical GIFs.

They are:

Fri 12 August, 3.15pm: Societal structure in fiction

What it’s about: From high school hierarchies to dining with royalty, there’s all sorts of societal structures reflected in fiction, but how true are they, and how widespread? From the One True King to the hidden illegitimate royal child to the shining towers of BUSINESS MEN?, how accurate is the class structure in fiction, and does it reflect reality as it is? What could be done to improve this – if it even needs improving?

My initial thoughts: BURN IT DOWN! ANARCHY IN THE UK AND ELSEWHERE! DESTROY THE CLASS SYSTEM! WE – oh, shit, sorry, didn’t mean to yell in your ear.

The suckers doing it with me: Lucy Hounsom, Alex Lamb, Bex Levene, Tom Toner. Poor bastards.

Saturday 13 August, 10am: The end of the world, and why we love it

What it’s about:  We may live in a time of uncertainty and flux, but humanity has always been obsessed with its own end. Why? Why do we love staring into the abyss so much? Why do we have such an endless fascination with zombies, superflu, alien invasions and all the other myriad ways that we can be done in? What’s the BEST apocalypse, and the most terrifying? Are they the same? How do we think our world is going to tank today?

My initial thoughts: Wait, people are going to come listen to me talk about blowing shit up? AWESOME!

The suckers doing it with me: Aliya Whiteley, Peter Newman, Nate Crowley, Leila Abu el Hawa, Lavie Tidhar

Sunday 14 August, 1.30pm: Writing utopia

What it’s about:  Authors are always creating new societies, but is it possible to have a utopian society free from politics? Is achieving Utopia easier to write into a second world Fantasy compared to a science fiction setting?

My initial thoughts: I’d like a utopia. So I could blow it up.

The suckers doing it with me: Aliya Whiteley, Oliver Langmead, Gavin Smith, Anne Lyle, Glen Mehn

Get your tickets, popcorn and commemorative T-shirts here. 

16 August – Unsung Stories

Wanna come hear me do a live read of a brand new, never-before-heard short story? At least, I’m hoping that’ll be the case – the one I want to do is long(ish), and it depends how much time the chaps at Unsung Stories give me.

The event, which happens at The Star Of Kings pub, has four authors standing up and reading something cool and hoping not to get hit by rotten tomatoes. Here are the other three sacrificial lambs Im doing the night with:

Angela Slatter is the award-winning author of the collections The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings and Black-Winged Angels, as well as Midnight and Moonshine and The Female Factory (both co-written with Lisa L. Hannett). She has been shortlisted for numerous prestigious prizes, including the Norma K. Hemming Award, and has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and five Aurealis Awards. Her short stories have appeared widely, including in annual British, Australian and North American Best Of anthologies. Vigil is her first solo novel. Angela lives in Brisbane, Australia with her husband David.

Eli Lee is a writer with fiction and non-fiction published in The Pigeonhole, The Quietus, Delayed Gratification and the Financial Times, among others. She is Fiction Editor of literary journal Minor Literatures and Articles Editor at speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons.

Malcolm Devlin’s stories have appeared, or are forthcoming in Interzone, Black Static and the anthologies Aickman’s Heirs, Gods Memes And Monsters and Nightscript Volume 2. He attended the Clarion West writers’s workshop in 2013. Unsung Stories publish his debut collection, You Will Grow Into Them, in 2017.

It’s going to be a blast. Come on down. We’ll get drunk together.

Stuff that I might be doing but which still needs to be confirmed:

17 August: Signing copies of TRACER, ZERO-G and IMPACT at Waterstones Liverpool One – also possibly doing a talk of some kind with another author. I dunno. I have people for these things. They’ll figure it out.

20 August: Signing copies at Waterstones West Quay, Southampton

25 August – #IMPACTDAY
Y’all know what it is. 

7 Things You Should Know About Writing A Book Series

We are one month away from the end of the Outer Earth series.

One month away from a trilogy that has consumed the past four years of my life, that has sold thousands of copies across the world in multiple languages and given me a reason to keep living, mostly because I have the most kick ass readers on Earth.

It’s bittersweet for me, and a little scary. I don’t claim to be a veteran of scifi (like, AT ALL) but I know a little bit more about writing a trilogy then I did a year or two ago. Here are a few things I’ve learned.

(Regarding the images: I wrote lovely captions explaining what they are and where they’re from, which WordPress refuses to let me display. They’re all CC-sourced.)

1. You have to tell people it’s a series

This one got to me. It walked up and kicked me in the nuts while my back was turned, leaving me writhing on the ground, trying to ask why, why, dear god WHY. Metaphorically, I mean. I didn’t actually get kicked in the nuts. What I meant to say was –

You know what? Forget I mentioned my nuts. Let’s not go there.

What I’m trying to say is, it really surprised me early on that people didn’t realise that the Outer Earth series was, well, a series. That’s the problem with living in a world for so long; you take the most basic shit about it for granted. I never felt like I had to explain that there was more than one book, because in my world, only having one book was a physical impossibility. Of course, this didn’t take into account the shifting attention spans of a million readers, and so I totally forgot to point out that TRACER was the first of a trilogy.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m always delighted when people enthusiastically demand more. I was just a little puzzled but they felt the need to. Didn’t they realise that ZERO-G was being published in less than six months? Didn’t they understand?

It’s a well understood practice of bookselling that you don’t put the number of a book in a series anywhere on the outside cover or spine. It hurts sales. Someone won’t buy a book if the only ones available on a shelf are numbers two or three or four in a series. And while the information was, of course, available inside, it became clear pretty quickly that I actually had to tell people that this was a trilogy.

Learn from my mistakes. Make sure people know early on that you’re doing this multiple times. Protect your nuts. Even if you don’t have any.

2. Developing a character across multiple books is a LOT of fun

By the time you get to the end of your first book, you and your main character are like a couple who have just moved in together. You know each other’s habits. You’re reasonably aware of the little quirks and foibles that make up your respective personalities. But there’s still a lot to discover. The first chapter of your life together is over, and the second, more intimate one is about to begin.

Because if you think you’ve discovered everything about a character after one book, you’re living in a total dreamworld. Part of the fun of writing a series or a trilogy is getting to hang out with that character again. It’s about digging deeper into their mind (not literally, because ew) and figuring out what they’d do in a situation even more fucked-up than the one you threw them into the first book. It’s about seeing how they evolve, and grow, and surprise you.

This might sound a bit like raising a child. It isn’t. For me, living with Riley Hale as I wrote ZERO-G and later IMPACT was like discovering that the person I’d moved in with was a really good cook, and had killer taste in music, but had a terrible habit of leaving her clothes all over the place*. It was illuminating and enjoyable, and I wouldn’t change a single bit of it.

The person I live with in real life does not leave her clothes all over the place.

3. You won’t want to stop after three books

I thought I would.

From the moment I finished the first book, I knew that the Outer Earth series was going to be a trilogy. I saw the whole story, running the length of three books, and then wrapping up neatly. I knew what I wanted to tell, I knew how I was going to do it, and although I had a few dead ends and stumbles along the way, I knew that it would work out. Eventually. After some whiskey and a LOT of coffee.

But here’s something you discover after you’ve finished writing a series. The world you’ve lived in for so long doesn’t want to let you go. It’s nagging you to come back, to explore that corridor you didn’t run down, to find out some more about the little peripheral characters who populate it. It’s the same as getting a tattoo: at the time, the pain is intense, and you’re convinced you’ll never do it again. But the second you’re out of there, you start thinking about your next one.

Believe me, I speak from experience here. What the hell else do you think I spent my book advance on?

Fortunately, Orbit Books felt the same way I did. So after IMPACT comes out on August 25, we’re going to be releasing… something. I can’t tell you what it is. It’s not a new book, per se, but it’s something to do with Outer Earth. Hang tight.

4. George RR Martin Syndrome Is Real

This is the idea that the author will die, or go insane, or be otherwise inconvenienced before a series is complete. It’s the reason given by readers who don’t want to commit to the thing, named for the sixty-plus, very large Song Of Ice And Fire Author who is due to deliver number six in the seven-book series around 2025 or so.

Of course, I’m not going to die. I’m never going to die. I will be around for the heat death of the universe. But it still shocked me when I had people saying that they would read the trilogy when it was complete. I was like, but that’s ages away! A whole year! We could all be dead by then!

If you start writing a series, you will get to experience this, too. The good news is, as soon as you’re finished, you should see a big uptick in book sales. In theory. I’ll report back.

5. Continuity is HARD

“OK, so I know Riley did a cargo run down this corridor before, and I know there’s a power box about halfway down with some graffiti on it… no, wait, hang on, I got that wrong, the power box was in the corridor below. And come to think of it, it wasn’t a cargo run: she was being chased by someone who wanted to cut her liver out. I wrote about it in the first book. Or did I? Did I cut that scene? I’m pretty sure that that was the one my editor said would make the book unpalatable to people who didn’t like having their livers forcibly removed, for some weird reason. And was Riley wearing a jacket at the time? What colour was it? How long do I have to do this before I can legitimately have another cup of coffee?”

This happened to me. Do not let it happen to you. Create a series Bible. It doesn’t have to be an actual Bible (although how cool would that be?) It can be in notepad with things scrawled on it in increasingly erratic handwriting. But whatever you do, don’t leave this sort of thing to the copy editor. It takes more work, and they will be annoyed, and then they will cut out your liver.

6. Writing them gets easier…

You start writing a trilogy. You stumble around in the dark, equipped with a flashlight that works only intermittently. Maybe you have an outline, maybe you don’t, but either way, you’re going to bump your head on things.

And then you get towards the end of the first book, and you start the second, and the lights start coming on. You know the world by now. You don’t need to consult your map as much. Things come a little easier. YOU ARE THE MASTER OF ALL YOU BEHOLD.

7. …But the last one is the scariest

I can’t improve on what Pierce Browne wrote about this. In the acknowledgements to Morning Star, the final instalment of his terrific Red Rising trilogy, he said:

“For months I delayed that first sentence. I sketched ship schematics, wrote songs… histories of the families of the planets and moons that make up the savage little world I’d stumbled onto my room above my parents garaged almost five years ago. I wasn’t afraid because I didn’t know where I was going. I was afraid because I knew exactly how the story would end. I just didn’t think I was skilful enough to take you there…”

The final book in a series or trilogy is the hardest. You will have readers by now, even if it’s only your mom. The expectation will be increased. Your characters will be rocketing toward a conclusion, and the task of making the payoff worth it is more daunting than giving your teenage crush an orgasm (Now you see why I said I couldn’t improve on Pierce Brown).

The problem is, you gotta do it. There’s no choice. You’ve come this far, and you can’t quit now. This might be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but it has to be done. And once again, Mr Brown has all the motivation you need:

“Once I thought the writing [Morning Star] would be impossible. It was a skyscraper, massive and incomplete and unbearably far-off. It haunted me from the horizon. But do we ever look at such buildings and assume they sprung up over night? No. We’ve seen the traffic congestion that attends them. The skeleton of beams and girders. The swarm of builders and the rattle of cranes… everything ground is made from a series of ugly little moments. Everything worthwhile by hours of self-doubt and days of drudgery. All the works by people you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failures.”

Read the most explosive scifi trilogy around

I can’t provide all the links to every store on every continent, but trust me: your favourite retailer probably has it. For now, here are the Amazon links – they’ll take you to the right store for your country.

TRACER / ZERO-G / IMPACT