Master told us that the earth was hollow, and that we lived on the inside of it, clinging to the top of the crust. Below us was another world, a world inside the world, a glowing bright sun of a place. What Master called the summerlands. That is where the dead live, he said. That is how we can talk to them, he said. They send us signals across the air, and the mediums pick them up and drink them in.

And when the words came in, we had to speak them. We cannot deny the dead our voices–the dead would be angry if we did. And nobody wanted the angry dead to fly their zeppelins up from the sun and attack us crust dwellers.

That wouldn’t do anyone any good.

Master knew this because he is an ambassador to the land of the dead. At night he walked through the door of the dead, and it beamed his body down above us, into the summer sun inside of the earth. That is where he talked to them, worked out trade between our two peoples.

The dead have a lot to offer the living.

He came back with schematics.

Ways of building circuit boards.

Ghost technology from the sun.

Maribel ran along the top boards. The planks went from roof to roof, along the ridges, with a jumping-space to reach the peaks of the round huts. She didn’t have the skill of a danseuse, nor the grace of the best of the girls from the stone city below her, but among the woodkin, she was often accounted the most lithe and best.

The Tower Wander was ahead, with Shrike House clinging to its neck like a collar. The old wall had long since been swallowed by the spread of the stone city, gone from defense to landmark to landform in the space of a few generations. The Duke of Copper Downs had forbidden the woodkin to enter the abandoned towers, but their exteriors had never been under such a rule.

So the seven surviving towers acquired names, and superstructures, and held the long, narrow village that ran from the Broken Gate to the Tower Harbor. The towers were part of the stone city, but the houses were the woodkin’s memory of another time and place.

She slipped through the roof of Shrike House, dropping to the floor in a shower of dust and straw.

There was no one there, of course. Shrike House had been empty since Maribel’s mother’s childhood. Seven towers, seven houses, but in every generation more went down to the stone and found lives among the city. None returned.

Word of Ember blazed across the land, and the town of Torchlight flared to life.

Ember is the essence of magic and the keystone of alchemy; it lures the restless with promises of power and riches. Miners burrowed deep beneath the dirt streets of Torchlight, discovering veins of the ore richer than any found in living memory- but they were not the first to covet these mines. The miners broke through into the buried past, a dangerous labyrinth of caverns and ruined civilizations, twisted creatures and the bones of those who came before. Evil bubbles up from the depths and threatens to overrun this town as it has so many others. The heart of a villain has infused the Ember, and his darkness seeps through the veins. To survive, the townspeople must break the cycle of destruction; they need a champion who can destroy the evil at its root. Removing the source of the rot may purify the Ember, but it is a long and perilous journey. The champion must battle through rock and fire, through lost cities and ancient tombs, into the palace of the villain himself.

The adventure is set in the mining settlement of Torchlight, a boomtown founded on the discovery of rich veins of Ember – a rare and mysterious ore with the power to enchant or corrupt all that it contacts. This corruptive power may have dire consequences however, and players set out into the nearby mountains and depths below to discover the full extent of Ember’s influence on the civilizations that have come before.

This is a great, great cover. Stephan Martiniere is responsible as usual. I can’t count the number of times I see a cover and think to myself, “Wow, I wonder who did that” and then go on to find its a Martiniere. The computer circuitry gives a subtle touch to an image that otherwise appears fairly timeless. I also really dig the text box and the way the horizontal banners and building interplay with the sharp angles of the title and author borders. Sometimes great cover art is ruined by bad font choice or placement. This is not one of those times.

In the sleepy Istanbul district of Eskiköy stands the former whirling dervish house of Adem Dede. Over the space of five days of an Istanbul heatwave, six lives weave a story of corporate wheeling and dealing, Islamic mysticism, political and economic intrigue, ancient Ottoman mysteries, a terrifying new terrorist threat, and a nanotechnology with the potential to transform every human on the planet.

The Natural History Museum’s prize exhibit – a giant squid – suddenly disappears. This audacious theft leads Clem, the research scientist who has recently finished preserving the exhibit, into a dark urban underworld of warring cults and surreal magic. It seems that for some, the squid represents a god and should be worshiped as such. Clem gradually comes to realise that someone may be attempting to use the squid to trigger an apocalypse. And so it is now up to him and a renegade squid-worshiper named Dean to find a way of stopping the destruction of the world as they know it whilst themselves surviving the all out-gang warfare that they have unwittingly been drawn into…

The first realisation of The Culture in cinema will be an adaptation of the brilliant short story A Gift From the Culture.

Screendaily report that Dominic Murphy will direct, and co-script with Shane Smith, his collaborator on the ‘psychobilly thriller’ White Lightnin’. It’s just one of a few projects Murphy has on his slate including Jesus Christ Airlines, about daredevil pilots delivering aid to Biafra through hostile Nigerian airspace, and an as-yet untitled film about the Bronte children and their shared world of play and fantasy.

Wrobik, a citizen of The Culture, a society which abhors violence, has been living in exile for eight years, having renounced The Culture, her gender. Now a man, in return for cancelling his gambling debts, he agrees to destroy a starship using a gun which can only be fired by a member of the culture. But disgusted by the thought of murdering innocent people, he decides to flee the city. However, before he can leave, his boyfriend, Maust, is kidnapped and Wrobik is forced to choose between following his conscience and rescuing his lover.

Following its well-received comic book adaptations, Stephen King’s beloved The Dark Tower book series is expanding further to another new media form — video games. According to a video posted on the author’s site, a new project titled Discordia will debut on November 30th.

Those expecting an action title that has Roland firing away at Mutant lobsters or an RPG taking your Ka-tet across All-World will likely be disappointed, as the project looks like an online interactive game (my guess) centered around the Tet Corporation’s secret war with North Central Positronics and Sombra Corporation, both companies under control by Insomnia/The Dark Tower villain Crimson King.

The game also focuses on a new character, NCP’s CEO Arina Yokova, a Russian national with mob ties and the leader of the Crimson Crescent. While the posted trailer doesn’t indicate whether the books’ heroes — Roland, Susannah, Eddie, and Jake (and Oy!) — will act as playable characters in the game, their portraits appear briefly in the clip.

Whatever releases this November, it will probably be the first in a series, as suggested by the “Chapter One (For Callahan!)” note toward the end of the trailer.

…

Robin Furth, King’s personal research assistant and the author of The Dark Tower: A Complete Concordance, is listed as director for the game, which is promising considering she also worked on the comic book adaptations with Peter David. Metro DMA is handling Discordia’s production.

“Introduction: Check Your Dark Lord at the Door” – Lou Anders & Jonathan Strahan
“Goats of Glory” – Steven Erikson
“Tides Elba: A Tale of the Black Company” – Glen Cook
“Bloodsport” – Gene Wolfe
“The Singing Spear” – James Enge
“A Wizard of Wiscezan” – C.J. Cherryh
“A Rich Full Week” – K. J. Parker
“A Suitable Present for a Sorcerous Puppet” – Garth Nix
“Red Pearls: An Elric Story” – Michael Moorcock
“The Deification of Dal Bamore” – Tim Lebbon
“Dark Times at the Midnight Market” – Robert Silverberg
“The Undefiled” – Greg Keyes
“Hew the Tint Master” – Michael Shea
“In the Stacks” – Scott Lynch
“Two Lions, A Witch, and the War-Robe” – Tanith Lee
“The Sea Troll’s Daughter” – Caitlin R Kiernan
“Thieves of Daring” – Bill Willingham
“The Fool Jobs” – Joe Abercrombie

While there’s always someone else who could be in a book like this, we’re delighted with the quality of the stories we received, grateful to the authors for being involved and to our publisher for supporting the book. It’ll be out next July and is fabulous! Oh, and there’ll be a limited edition done by Subterranean Press too, which should be awesome in its own right.

Seriously, if you’ve ever been curious about the Sword and Sorcery subgenre, this looks like the prefect place to dip your toe in. Oh yeah, and according to Ander’s (via Facebook), the tome clocks in at 155k words (which means ‘pretty bloody long’, for those of you who aren’t sure about word counts). So, June 22, 2010. Mark your calendars.