The covers to the final two volumes of the trilogy, The Well of Ascension and The Final Empire, have been released as well and are sure to be just as love-it-or-hate-it.
It’s interesting to see that they’ve moved into a more character-centric design, but I dig how each subsequent novel moves closer in on the figure’s face. I’ve got to say, I really dig what Gollancz is doing with these covers.
Though The Terror by Dan Simmons has been out for a fair time now, I thought this re-release by Subeterranean Press was just too cool to pass up.
In the spring of 1845, Sir John Franklin leads a company of two ships and 130 men on a hazardous voyage to the remote, uncharted Arctic. His goal: to locate and map the legendary Northwest Passage. Two years later, the expedition, which began in a spirit of optimism and high purpose, faces disaster. Franklin is dead. The two ships — the Erebus and the Terror — are hopelessly trapped by gigantic, shifting ice floes. Supplies are dwindling, and the crews struggle daily against lethal, unimaginably frigid conditions. And something — some Thing — is stalking the survivors, spreading death, suffering, and chaos in its remorseless wake.
The Terror is both a rigorously researched historical novel and a compelling homage to one of the seminal SF/Horror films of the 1950s. It is popular fiction of the highest order, the kind of intense, wholly absorbing epic only Dan Simmons could have written
As usual, a beautiful job by Subterranean Press. What do you think?
If you’ve been reading A Dribble of Ink for any period of time, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of The Shadow of the Wind, the first English-language novel by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
So, needless to say, I was excited to see that Rick Kleffel of the Agony Column Podcast had a chance to sit down with Zafon and record a podcast.
When I heard that Zafón was going to be in town, I found myself in the wonderful position of getting to read his novels back-to-back, to immerse myself in his wonderful prose, his delightful cityscapes and his insidious, inventive narrative style. Zafón writes the sort of books that you just don’t want to end.
I managed to catch up with him in his hotel in San Francisco. While I was setting up, I mentioned that I used to work at E-mu Systems, and then, for the next ten minutes we geeked out about the joys of the Proteus Modules (which he and I both still used) and the virtues of hardware with knobs and switches and instant sounds coming out of nice, neat one-rack space modules. It was only the beginning.
Zafón has a firm grasp on what he’s doing with literature and why he’s doing what he’s doing. If you think his books are entertaining (that is, if you’ve read them, in which case you almost certain do!), then let me confirm that the man speaking about his novels is just as entertaining as are the novels themselves.
I recently finished Zafon’s latest novel, The Angel’s Game, which is easily my favourite read of the year so far. Keep an eye out for a review soon.
