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

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.

You can download/listen to the podcast HERE.

Starting today around noon (Eastern Standard Tribe, of course) and through January 2010, Tor.com will be serializing Makers, Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, which goes on sale from Tor Books in October. We’ll be serializing the entirety of the novel, with a new installment every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each installment of Makers will be accompanied by a new illustration from Idiots’Books, each one a kind of tile that will interconnect with the other illustrations in the series, offering limitless possibilities for mixing and matching. In a week or so, after we’ve posted a number of tiles, we’ll release a Flash game in which you will be able to re-arrange the illustration tiles on a grid and create your own combination of layouts and designs.

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Each segment of the story will be illustrated by a square illustration that relates, at least in part, to the theme or content of that segment. While each illustration will function as a standalone “illustration,” each one will will be drawn in such a way as to share common crossovers along all four sides, which means that any of the illustrations may be placed alongside any other illustration (and in any axial configuration) with guaranteed “crossovers”. [These] will form a coherently-designed 8 x 9 grid of illustrations when the thing is fully assembled. There will be one “right” way for the illustrations to be assembled; in this configuration, an uber-illustration with visual coherence that stands as the “cover” of the Makers book will be revealed. However, the chunks can be recombined into a vast number of other [9 x 9] grids. Or it could be assembled into a [3 x 27] grid. Or it could be assembled as a [81]-panel horizontal “comic.” Or it could be made into a sprawling, multi-tentacled beast of surprising crossovers that resembled a crossword puzzle in its grid-based unpredictably.”

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We’re all really excited about Makers at Tor.com—we think it’s a good and important book, just like Little Brother was before it. We also think that this is a fun and interesting way to send a novel out into the world, and we’re looking forward to hearing what you think. As the year progresses, and we get deeper into serializing the book, we’ll make other announcements about things we may do with this book as we explore alternatives to traditional publishing. Cory is an awesome guy to work with, and in keeping with his overarching philosophy in regards to creative works, has been very supportive of our playing around with his baby. We hope you enjoy what we’ve come up with.