On Tuesday, I had the privalege to help host a chat between Terry Brooks, author of the Shannara series, and over 70 of his fans. It was a good time, and Brooks gave a fair bit of insight into his past as a writer, and what the future holds for him and his books. You might remember that he held a similar chat a few weeks ago with Christopher Paolini, which was overrun by trite questions about Paolini’s favourite snacks, or whether the next book in the Inheritence ‘trilogy’ will have more words than the previous volumes. This time around, Brooks gets hit with more interesting questions. If you’re a fan, it’s certainly worth checking out.
Botanica is an island, but almost all of the island is taken up by the Tree.
Little knowing how they came to be here, small communities live around the coast line. The Tree provides them shelter, kindling, medicine – and a place of legends, for there are ghosts within the trees who snatch children and the dying.
Lillah has come of age and is now ready to leave her community and walk the tree for five years, learning all Botanica has to teach her. Before setting off, Lillah is asked by the dying mother of a young boy to take him with her. In a country where a plague killed half the population, Morace will otherwise be killed in case he has the same disease. But can Lillah keep the boy’s secret, or will she have to resort to breaking the oldest taboo on Botanica?
Another astonishingly imaginative novel from the acclaimed author of Slights.
I’d never heard of Walking the Tree (or Kaaron Warren, for that matter), before stumbling across it on the Angry Robot Books website, but damn if that cover didn’t grab my attention right away.
With artwork by Greg Bridges, this cover just bleeds with magical atmosphere. This is a great example of how good art let’s a cover speak for itself. It’s also exactly the type of cover I’d love to have on my novel, Through Bended Grass, if I’m ever lucky enough to see it on bookstore shelves.
Amidst their enormous ‘The Top 10 Everything of 2009‘ list on Time magazines list, is their choice of the ten best novels of the year, regardless of genre. The only adult Science Fiction (or Fantasy) novel to make it? The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Top 10 Fiction Books
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
- The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter
- Swimming by Nicola Keegan
- Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
- Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
- Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
- In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
- Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
- The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
- The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
So, a big congrats to Paolo! Now I just need to get my hands on a copy of The Windup Girl!
Not really a proper trailer, but it’s still nice to get a look behind the scenes at Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I wasn’t a huge fan of the heavy-handed CG work in Half-blood Prince, nor the fact that they cut out important parts of the plot (like, um, the Half-blood Prince’s signifigance to the story!), but I’m a big fan of the series of films on the whole. Looking forward to this, and hoping they can speed up the slow-as-molasses middle of the novel.
Those stories you hear? The ones about things that only come out at night? Things that feed on blood, feed on us? Got news for you: they’re true. Only it’s not like the movies or old man Stoker’s storybook. It’s worse. Especially if you happen to be one of them. Just ask Joe Pitt.
There’s a shambler on the loose. Some fool who got himself infected with a flesh-eating bacteria is lurching around, trying to munch on folks’ brains. Joe hates shamblers, but he’s still the one who has to deal with them. That’s just the kind of life he has. Except afterlife might be better word.
From the Battery to the Bronx, and from river to river, Manhattan is crawling with Vampyres. Joe is one of them, and he’s not happy about it. Yeah, he gets to be stronger and faster than you, and he’s tough as nails and hard to kill. But spending his nights trying to score a pint of blood to feed the Vyrus that’s eating at him isn’t his idea of a good time. And Joe doesn’t make it any easier on himself. Going his own way, refusing to ally with the Clans that run the undead underside of Manhattan—it ain’t easy. It’s worse once he gets mixed up with the Coalition—the city’s most powerful Clan—and finds himself searching for a poor little rich girl who’s gone missing in Alphabet City.
Now the Coalition and the girl’s high-society parents are breathing down his neck, anarchist Vampyres are pushing him around, and a crazy Vampyre cult is stalking him. No time to complain, though. Got to find that girl and kill that shambler before the whip comes down…and before the sun comes up.
Charlie Huston writes some lean novels. Already Dead the first volume in Huston’s well known Joe Pitt series, comes in at a doorstopping 288 pages. And now, thanks to the Suvudu Free Library, you can get a copy of Already Dead for free.
If Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files is the WWE – big, flashy bubblegum for the masses – then Huston’s Joe Pitt series is the MMA – brutal, efficient and more than willing to leave you lying in a gutter by the end.
- Hugo Award
Winner
- About Aidan Moher
- Bibliography