Aidan Moher's Blog, page 8

Guy Gavriel Kay announces Children of Earth and Sky

Few writers keep news of their upcoming novels as tightly under wraps as Guy Gavriel Kay. Today, however, the Canadian author took to Twitter and announced the title of his next novel almost a year ahead of release. It’s going to be called Children of Earth and Sky.

Little else is known at this point, but given Kay’s predilection for basing his fantasy world’s on the cultures and histories of our world, perhaps we could have some fun trying to put together the pieces and figure out where this one might be set?

Children of Earth and Sky will be released in Spring 2016.

The post Guy Gavriel Kay announces Children of Earth and Sky appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Cover Art for Fool’s Quest by Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb revealed the cover art for the UK edition of Fool’s Quest today, and it’s very pretty. I really like the way Jackie Morris‘ art has come into its own and helped to define this series. I wasn’t always a fan, but this is gorgeous and Hobb’s books are some of the most recognizable on UK shelves. Great all around.

The North American cover for Fool’s Quest was revealed in January.

The post Cover Art for Fool’s Quest by Robin Hobb appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominees

Buy Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The 2015 nominees for the Arthur C. Clarke Award were announced today:

The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (Orbit)
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (Canongate)
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)
Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta (HarperVoyager)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (Orbit)
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (Picador)

The Clarke Award is given to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK, and boy are there some doozies on this list. I’ve only read Mandel’s Station Eleven (which is sublime), but the rest of the list, such as Carey, North, and Itäranta, includes some of the best reviewed and critically acclaimed science fiction from 2015.

“This is a quintessentially Clarke Award kind of a shortlist,” said Tom Hunter, director of the award. “We’ve got six authors who have never been nominated for the Clarke Award before and while the subject matter may often be dark, when we think about what this list says about the strength of science fiction literature itself, I see a future that’s full of confidence, creativity and diversity of imagination.”

If you’re unimpressed by other 2015 award ballots, you can do a lot worse than starting at the top of this list and working down. Hunter believes that award shortlists should be viewed as an opportunity for readers, not a challenge. “A good shortlist isn’t a statement about what you should like,” he said. “It’s an invitation to go beyond the limitsof what you already know so you can experience and enjoy something new. Why limit an appreciation of a literature that’s built on the power of human imagination?”

More of Hunter’s thoughts on the award, and the list of panelists who determined the short list, is available on the Arthur C. Clarke Award’s official Facebook page.

The post 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominees appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Announcing Tide of Shadows and Other Stories

I am pleased to announce Tide of Shadows and Other Stories—a collection of several short science fiction and fantasy stories spanning from a star-faring military science fiction tale of love and sacrifice, to a romp through a the dragon-infested Kingdom of Copperkettle Vale. Tide of Shadows and Other Stories will be published by A Dribble of Ink as an eBook on May 5, 2015.

Pre-order Tide of Shadows and Other Stories

Table of Contents

“A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes”
“The Girl with Wings of Iron and Down”
“Of Parnassus and Princes, Damsels and Dragons”
“The Colour of the Sky on the Day the World Ended”
“Tide of Shadows”

In addition to the five stories (four originals and one reprint), Tide of Shadows and Other Stories also includes story notes for each tale. These give readers insight into the origins of the story and explore some of the ways they’ve impacted me as a writer.

Cover Art

The gorgeous cover illustration is by Kuldar Leement, a wonderfully talented digital illustrator and graphic designer based in Estonia. As my longtime readers know, I’m passionate about cover art, so I knew I had to get it right when it came time to choosing an illustrator and designing my first cover. As soon as I saw Leement’s artwork (which you may remember from a post on A Dribble of Ink last year), I knew immediately that he was the artist I wanted to represent “Tide of Shadows,” the collection’s lead story. Leement’s artwork is powerful and ethereal, and has the ability to transport you to the furthest edges of the universe-where boundless imagination lives.

A print of the original illustration is available through Kuldar Leement’s online store.

Design and typography was handled by me.

The Collection

The publication of Tide of Shadows and Other Stories is the culmination of several years of hard work, and a desire to expand A Dribble of Ink into other publishing mediums. With the rise of self publishing, and A Dribble of Ink’s continued evolution, the time is finally right to launch this project start on this new journey. The stories in this collection reflect highlights from my library of short fiction from 2010-2014, and each piece holds illustrates a particular side to my explorations as a writer. I hope you enjoy Tide of Shadows and Other Stories.

Release Date & Pre-order

Tide of Shadows and Other Stories will be published by A Dribble of Ink on May 5th, 2015, and is available now for pre-order for $2.99.

Pre-order Tide of Shadows and Other Stories

The post Announcing Tide of Shadows and Other Stories appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Contributors announced for Speculative Fiction 2014 announced

Today, Book Smugglers Publishing announced the contributor list for Speculative Fiction 2014. This is the third volume of the Hugo Award-nominated series. Like its predecessors, the collection, edited by Renee Williams and Shaun Duke, aims to collect the best online SFF writing into one volume. The cover art has not yet been revealed.

The following writers are included in the collection (including your’s truly):

Abigail Nussbaum

Adam Roberts

Aidan Moher

Aja Romano

Alex Dally MacFarlane

Amal El-Mohtar

Ana Grilo

Andrew Lapin

Annalee Newitz

Anne C. Perry

Bertha Chin

brownbetty

Charles Tan

Chinelo Onwualu

Clare McBride

Corinne Duyvis

Daniel José Older

Deborah Pless

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Erika Jelinek

Foz Meadows

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw

Joe Sherry

Jonathan McCalmont

Juliet Kahn

Justin Landon




Kameron Hurley

Kari Sperring

Ken Neth

Mahvesh Murad

Martin Petto

Matthew Cheney

Memory Scarlett

Mieneke van der Salm

N.K. Jemisin

Natalie Luhrs

Ng Suat Tong

Nina Allan

Olivia Waite

Paul Weimer

Rachael Acks

Rebecca Pahle

Renay

Rose Lemberg

Saathi Press

Sara L. Sumpter

Shaun Duke

Tade Thompson

Tasha Robinson

The G

thingswithwings

Vandana Singh

Speculative Fiction 2014 will be released in May 2015 by Book Smugglers Publishing. All profits from sales of the collection will be donated to Room to Read.

The post Contributors announced for Speculative Fiction 2014 announced appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Cover Art and Details for The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

Saga Press revealed the gorgeous cover for Ken Liu’s upcoming short fiction collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, today. Liu, who’s best known for his award winning short fiction, is publishing his first novel this year, an epic fantasy called The Grace of Kings, which has been receiving some great praise from early readers.

The full Table of Contents:

Preface
The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
State Change
The Perfect Match
Good Hunting
The Literomancer
Simulacrum
The Regular
The Paper Menagerie
An Advanced Readers Picture Book of Comparative Cognition
The Waves
Mono no aware
All the Flavors
A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel
The Litigation Master and the Monkey King
The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

In an interview with Andrew Liptak of the Barnes & Noble Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog, Liu and Saga Press Editorial Director Joe Monti reflected on the collection’s award winning short fiction. “It’s great to be able to offer readers who are new to my fiction, or who have read only a few stories, a convenient selection of the best non-novel work I’ve done in a well-designed package,” Liu told Liptak. “[I] was surprised by how much I remembered of what I was thinking about at the time of writing them—memories that often are not obviously connected to the stories themselves, yet resonant in some way. It was like looking through an album of old snapshots of my mind.”

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories includes many familiar stories, including the title story, “The Paper Menagerie”, which won several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award – and “An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition,” a previously unpublished short story.

“This is not a ‘Best of Ken Liu,'” Monti told Liptak. “[It’s] more a representation of the themes and voices that his work has explored.” Liu’s back catalog of short fiction is impressive, all the more so when you consider that he has only been publishing regularly since 2010.

“I think it ranks up there with the greatest collections of the field, alongside Le Guin, Butler, and Sturgeon,” Monti said. “If you enjoy George Saunders, read Ken Liu.”

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories will be released by Saga Press on November 3, 2015. It is available now for preorder.

The post Cover Art and Details for The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Steven Spielberg to direct film adaptation of Ready Player One

Art by SharksDen

Legendary director Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Jaws, and Jurassic Park) has reportedly been brought on board by Warner Bros. to direct the film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s hit SF novel, Ready Player One. Spielberg is expected to begin work on Ready Player One after he completed The BFG, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book. Spielberg and several of his films are mentioned in Ready Player One, which could make for a fun cameo in the film.

Ready Player One is set in a near future dystopia where the protagonist, a young man who dearly loves all things ’80s SF, lives the majority of his life inside a virtual world. A nostalgia trip from end-to-end, Deadline points out the challenges that Warner Bros. faces in regards to licensing for all of the various properties that Cline includes in Ready Player One. “The book is loaded with references of popular culture rich in 1980s video game icons. How will the studio handle that?” Deadline asked in their piece about Spielberg’s involvement.

“I think what we have to do is drill down to the best version of the movie and then see who wants to be a part of what will surely be a great film,” Greg Silverman, Warner Bros.’s President of Creative Development and Worldwide Production, told Deadline. “What we found with The Lego Movie is that when we went and talked to those having the rights, people got excited about being involved.” Interesting times ahead for the production company. A lot of Ready Player One‘s plot relies heavily on the properties it directly references.

The initial script was written by Cline himself and Eric Eason, with Avengers screenwriter Zac Penn brought on to pen (*ahem*) a rewrite based on their work.

There is no announced release date for the film.

The post Steven Spielberg to direct film adaptation of Ready Player One appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Explore the beautiful landscapes of John Hutchinson’s fantasy worlds

Sometimes you just want to let your mind wander to other worlds, to meander through the idyllic corners of a world full of wonder. UK artist Josh Hutchinson has opened a portal to those worlds and is illustrating their beauty one at a time. I like that Hutchinson’s art manages to be both cartoony and colourful, realistic in a way that reflects places and people that you could find here on our world, all while creating that sense of wonder and mysticism that makes fantasy worlds so compelling.

More of Hutchinson’s art can be found on his official website and his DeviantArt gallery.

The post Explore the beautiful landscapes of John Hutchinson’s fantasy worlds appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Cover Art for The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

Holy moly. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t generally expect great things from Roc Books covers. But this? This is just gorgeous. Eloquent and impactful, great little details all around. The House of Shattered Wings is one of my most anticipated novels of the year, and I’m glad to see it has a cover to match my excitement.

The first details about The House of Shattered Wings were released several weeks ago, but now we have a new blurb with more details about the story:

Multi-award winning author Aliette de Bodard, brings her story of the War in Heaven to Paris, igniting the City of Light in a fantasy of divine power and deep conspiracy…

In the late Twentieth Century, the streets of Paris are lined with haunted ruins. The Great Magicians’ War left a trail of devastation in its wake. The Grand Magasins have been reduced to piles of debris, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and rubble and the remnants of the spells that tore the city apart. But those that survived still retain their irrepressible appetite for novelty and distraction, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over France’s once grand capital.

Once the most powerful and formidable, House Silverspires now lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls.

Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen angel; an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction; and a resentful young man wielding spells of unknown origin. They may be Silverspires’ salvation—or the architects of its last, irreversible fall. And if Silverspires falls, so may the city itself.

The House of Shattered Wings, the first volume in a duology, is due out on September 1st, 2015 from Roc Books (North America) and Gollancz (UK).

The post Cover Art for The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

“From Up On High” by Courtney Schafer

I still remember the day I got my first sight of serious mountains. I was a student at Caltech, working at JPL as a summer intern, and one of the engineers on my project invited me along on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada. It’s a good thing I wasn’t the one driving to the trailhead. I probably would’ve crashed the car when we reached the Owens Valley and saw the Sierra’s stunning eastern escarpment. Jagged snowcapped peaks rise to 14,000 feet straight out of the sagebrush and alkali desert of the Owens Valley, which is one of the deepest in the world.

As it was, I craned my neck out the backseat window with my jaw hanging open and only one thought in my head: OH HELL YES. I yearned to climb those airy ridges and balance on those serrated pinnacles. But during my undergrad years I had to settle for occasional backpacking trips in the Sierra. As a student I had no money, no car, and most climbers I knew were rock jocks rather than mountaineers.

If you accidentally kick your gear sling off a ledge, you’d damn well better know how to come home alive without all those fancy bits of metal.

When I moved to Colorado for grad school and at last had some spare cash, the first thing I did was sign up for an 8-week mountaineering course taught by the Colorado Mountain Club. The CMC is a bastion of hard core, old-school mountaineers. In addition to modern techniques for multi-pitch roped climbs and glacier travel, we practiced historical methods like hip belays, pebble chocks, and body-wrap rappels. Our instructor said, “If you accidentally kick your gear sling off a ledge, you’d damn well better know how to come home alive without all those fancy bits of metal.” We climbed technical rock routes in hiking boots rather than specialized rock shoes, so we’d know how to ascend peaks without the advantage of sticky rubber soles. I went on scores of CMC trips and climbed every peak I could manage.

Climbing is a strange, insular, addictive pastime. For many, it’s not a hobby, it’s a lifestyle. Long before I sat down to write my first novel, it had struck me that certain parallels existed between climbing and the way magic and mages are sometimes portrayed in fantasy. So when I did write The Whitefire Crossing, I thought it would be interesting to contrast the viewpoints of two protagonists: one a climber who well knows the lure of dancing with death, the other a mage attempting to reject the deadly style of magic he’s been trained to cast.

More, I knew right away what real-world setting would inspire my story’s landscape. Even after all my years in Colorado, the Sierra Nevada remain the mountains of my heart. It’s not just the stark beauty of the Owens Valley and eastern Sierra that fascinates me, but the region’s wild and woolly history. After all, what brings people other than explorers to areas so remote and arid? One word: profit. In the real world, this meant water – the Owens Valley was the site of the fiercest battles of the California water wars, immortalized in the movie Chinatown. Though the Sierra Nevada are rich in minerals and gems, the logistical difficulties of the Owens Valley terrain made large-scale mining efforts there impractical – most of the gold rush folks went much farther north, where the mountains are gentler.

“Earth Colossus” by Chase Stone

What if a similar landscape existed in a world with magic?

But, I thought, what if a similar landscape existed in a world with magic? Especially if raw magical power welled up along fault patterns, so that a fault-and-graben geological area like the Owens Valley might result in a deep reservoir of magic pooled within the valley confines? A clever, amoral opportunist might then conceive a scheme to reap untold wealth from the mountains: build a city, and send word to every mage he could find saying so long as they helped provide water and didn’t interfere with his mining operations, he’d let them cast whatever spells they wanted, no matter how dark their methods. Kind of like how the mafia turned Las Vegas from a tiny cow town into Sin City and made a zillion dollars in the process.

Better yet, what if the mobsters of Las Vegas were only a single mountain range away from the Mormons who founded Salt Lake City? Both in such remote, resource-poor areas they’ve got to trade with each other to survive? So I took my lawless city of Ninavel, and on the far side of my Whitefire Mountains, I put a country that views mages with deep suspicion and regulates the hell out of what magic they don’t outlaw.

All that makes an interesting stage to play on, but for me, characters are the true heart of a story. While I’ve certainly had fun drawing on my wilderness experiences to tell Dev and Kiran’s story, the climbing and all the worldbuilding are tools to explore issues of trust and partnership, of safety vs. freedom.

But as far as the climbing goes, I don’t like to repeat the same ground. In The Whitefire Crossing and The Tainted City, adventure scenes took place in the mountains. But in the final novel of my trilogy, The Labyrinth of Flame, I’ve switched things up a bit. As a climber, mountains aren’t my only playground. I also love the slickrock desert canyons of Utah, where phantasmal spires loom above slots so narrow and deep the sun never touches their depths.

Buy The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer: Book/eBook

Utah’s red-rock desert is a land of secrets. Hidden seeps, surprise slots, labyrinths of fins and domes that entice you to explore ever deeper. You can feel the weight of eons in the silence; the desert is ancient in a way that mountains are not. What better setting for a story in which my characters are in a desperate race to uncover truths hidden deep in the past? To add a little spice, canyons have their own specialized set of dangers: flash floods, keeper potholes, hypothermia. (Yep, hypothermia. The air temperature in the open desert above may be 100F, but water lurking deep in slot canyons is often cold enough to send even wetsuit-clad canyoneers into hypothermic shock if they can’t move through the canyon quickly enough.) People think rock climbing is dangerous, but canyoneering takes a far higher toll among its enthusiasts.

Perhaps I should have taken that as a warning! The Labyrinth of Flame has certainly had a bumpier road to publication than its two predecessors. After my publisher Night Shade Books’s near-miss with bankruptcy, I decided to put out the book myself rather than risk further publisher problems preventing the book from reaching reader’s hands. Thankfully, that’s led to a happy ending. My Kickstarter to fund production of the book has exceeded its goal: I’ll be able to publish an edition as professional in quality as the first two books in the series. Maybe even pay for interior art, if the Kickstarter does well enough before the end (which is tomorrow!). Knowing the book will be a reality feels as amazing as my first sight of the Sierra Nevada all those years ago; a milestone I will look back and forever treasure.

The post “From Up On High” by Courtney Schafer appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.