Swords & Dark Magic - Cover

This has already broken elsewhere, but I've been given the go ahead to show off the cover to my upcoming anthology, Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery, co-edited with Jonathan Strahan. Cover art is by Benjamin Carre.

And once again, the amazing Table of Contents:
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
Dapple 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

Swords & Dark Magic @ Amazon

Holy cow, look what's popped up for preorder at Amazon!
We'll be able to disclose the TOC very soon now too.

The Quiet War makes Clarke Shortlist

I'm thrilled for Paul McAuley, whose novel The Quiet War, just made the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist. The Quiet War was one of my favorite reads of the past year. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I acquired US rights to it, and Pyr will be publishing it in September, with a new cover from the magnificent Sparth (who just turned in his illustration last week; I'll debut the cover on the Pyr blog in a few.)

Meanwhile, the prize of £2009, along with a commemorative engraved bookend, will be presented to the winner on Wednesday, April 29th, at an award ceremony held on the opening night of the SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival. Congrats to all the nominees.

(And yes, those of you in the US should wait for our edition, as I'd really like to be able to publish the sequel, Gardens of the Sun, which I'm about to start reading shortly. If you can't wait, you could always read the UK edition, vote for it for the Hugo, then gift the US one when it comes out to that friend you're trying to get into smart, literate, award-calibre SF. It's just a suggestion...)

Artwork: Age of Misrule One

Mark Chadbourn's World's End (Age of Misrule 1)

Cover illustration © John Picacio
Cover Design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht

The Stormcaller, from Today's Publishers Weekly

Tom Lloyd's The Stormcaller: Book One of the Twilight Reign
Cover art by Todd Lockwood. Now, here's Publishers Weekly on the interior:

"British literary agent Lloyd begins this dense and involved sword and sorcery debut by introducing Isak, a penniless young man with no fixed home who serves as a slave to his resentful, unhappy father. Worse, Isak is a white-eye, born with distinctive eyes, a large frame, unusual strength and an exceedingly quick temper. Isak’s world changes in an instant when Aracnan, an immortal sorcerer, tries to offer Isak a mysterious scroll. Within a day, Isak has become heir to Lord Bahl of Farlan, and he learns that he is a nascent mage and the focus of a thousand-year-old prophecy. Whether Isak is willing or able to fulfill that prophecy is just the beginning of this tale. Lloyd pours enough testosterone into his high fantasy to power past a few inconsistencies, creating a fine start to a reported five-book series."

The Stormcaller - Free Online Reading

Check out this enormous excerpt from the soon-to-be-released fantasy epic, The Stormcaller: Book One of the Twilight Reignby Tom Lloyd.

I am really excited about this book. I'm not the only one:

"Magical creatures and high speed action scenes... packed with detail without being too heavy. The Stormcaller shows how high the bar has been raised with its sheer vision and inventiveness." —SFX

Fast Forward 2: The Full Jacket

The full cover for Fast Forward 2.Artwork by John Picacio. Design by Jacqueline Cooke.

The Stormcaller - Full Jacket

Full jacket for Tom Lloyd's The Stormcaller: Book One of the Twilight Reign.Art by the amazing Todd Lockwood. Design by Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger.

John Picacio to Guest Blog for Joe Mallozzi

Stargate: Atlantis executive producer Joseph Mallozzi kindly shows off John Picacio's artwork for my forthcoming anthology Fast Forward 2on his blog in a July 12 post "Bookly things and behind the scenes..." Mallozzi asked both Picacio and I for a quote, and then he turned around and asked John to guest blog. So he's now soliciting questions for John from his fans, who will post his response in a few days. Head on over and check it out.

Meanwhile, ever since my own stint guest blogging there, Mallozzi has had a steady stream of SF&F writers through, including Joe Abercrombie, Jeffrey Ford, K.J. Bishop, and Kage Baker. I've already turned in my WFC award nominations this year, but I think Mallozzi's going to get my nomination for Special Award Professional next year, for all the incredible work he's doing to get consumers of SF&F TV to read the literature. I've said before what a service to our genre this is, but get used to me saying it over and over, 'cause it's true.

Fast Forward 2: The Final Cover

Here it is, the final cover art for Fast Forward 2:

This is from illustrator John Picacio, and is quite a special cover for both of us, as it arose out of discussions we had on the state - and purpose - of science fiction, including science fiction's responsibility to engage the world around it. We also displayed the penultimate version of this cover (never shown online) to the attendees of the Pyr Presentation Panel at ApolloCon, and their feedback positively informed this final iteration of the image.

Moreover, John talks about - and displays - some of his inspirations on his blog On the Front. Well worth checking out.

Happy 4th!

Coming to America

Mark Chadbourn has some exciting news.

Update: This GalleyCat coverage is hysterical:

The deal was brokered by Ian Drury at Sheil Land in London and although Chadbourn can't talk cash, the deal will "keep me in curry and absinthe for a while."

You know, whenever I ask an author about their deal, it always comes down to being flush enough to buy beer and pizza for an indefinite amount of time, however in Chadbourn's case, you can tell he's British.

Update 6/03/08: John Picacio has some related news as well.

MultiReal: The Book Cover

The full jacket for MultiReal.Courtesy of illustrator Stephan Martiniere and designer Jackie Cooke. Nice, huh?

Structura: The Art of Sparth

The mail just arrived with my contributor's copies of Structura: The Art of Sparth, a beautiful, 127 page book for which it was my honor and privilege to have written the introduction. Nicolas "Sparth" Bouvier is an amazing talent, working in both cover illustration and concept art, his work familiar to anyone who has seen or played Assassin's Creed. His style seems to fit comfortably at the midpoint of such greats as Stephan Martiniere and John Harris, while remaining completely his own.

Sparth did the cover of our own The Martian General's Daughter(which you can see on page 120 of the book), though if you look at page 26 at "Dune 1" you can see why I thought of him for Theodore Judson's book to begin with. I love his work, and hope & expect it will grace another Pyr cover coming your way again soon. Meanwhile, for more of his amazing artwork, go buy his book.

Feast Your Eyes...

Because I can't talk about artwork enough, here are the covers of three forthcoming Pyr books. On the left is Chris Roberson's End of the Century,as envisioned by Dan Dos Santos. (Full illustration, sans text, is here.) This is a tale of a young woman named Alice Fell, a teenage American punker who has been having visions of the London Eye all her life (and before there was such a thing), so follows her vision to the UK and falls into a conspiracy that moves through secret societies (and shadowy assailants) all the way back to the origins of the Holy Grail myth. One part urban fantasy, one part secret history, there are also odd parallels with a completely different Pyr book that was being written at the same time. No I won't say which one. But I will say this is the best thing Roberson has written thus far, and he's a damn good writer.

Then over here on the right we have Stephan Martiniere's cover for Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days, a collection of all the stories that have sprung out of the brilliantly-realized future India he crafted for River of Gods.There's a Hugo winner, a Hugo nominee and a 25k original novella here, so what's not to love, right? I don't think it's unfair to say that this is going to be a talked-about book in 09.

Then back on the left is a cover by Todd Lockwood - our first time working with Todd, who was wonderful - for a really interesting debut fantasy novel, Tom Lloyd's The Stormcaller: Book One of the Twilight Reign.This is a tale of Isaak, a "white eye" - a person born with more charisma, more strength, and more anger than average people, created by the gods to be leaders of men, but limited by those gods as well, who is thrown from humble origins into courtly politics (and courtly intrigues, and, of course, killer battles replete with trolls and dragons). It's a really intricate, lush, fully-realized fantasy world, of the grim and gritty variety, a sort of Elric set loose in Middle Earth, that I am VERY excited to be releasing in the States. Todd's full cover is a wrap-around too, so this is only a taste.

More covers starting to appear on our forthcoming books page too. And here's a handy Amazon list too. Please also note that John Picacio's utterly fantastic cover for Fast Forward 2 is still being worked on, so as great as it is, it isn't final (and hence not reproduced here).

Getting It Off My Chest

This weekend, I heard from one of my authors that someone had said to them that their sale of an original novel to Pyr was doubly-impressive because, "Lou Anders pretty much only buys stuff that's been previously published in England and Australia." And then, a day later, a friend of mine asked me a question about editing that began, "[since] it seems like the majority of books Pyr prints are US releases of previously published books in the UK and Australia..."

The proximity of these two conversations got me thinking. So I pulled out our catalog, and I counted. We launched Pyr in March, 2005, and we have officially confirmed and announced our publication schedule through August 2008. So looking at those 52 titles:

• 23 are original works, never published anywhere before the Pyr editions.
  
• 23 titles debuted in the UK or Australia first.
  
• 6 titles are reprints (of US originals)

So we've actually published exactly the same amount of original fiction as US reprints of overseas debuts. (And quite a lot of it too, for just around two and a half years.) And the "majority" of our books are US in origin, whether original or reprint. We have original fiction published and forthcoming from the very talented likes of Fiona Avery, Michael Blumlein, Keith Brooke, David Louis Edelman, Charles Coleman Finlay, Alan Dean Foster, Theodore Judson, Kay Kenyon, Alexis Glynn Latner, Scott Mackay, Ian McDonald, Michael Moorcock, Mike Resnick, and Chris Roberson.

Ian McDonald? you say. But isn't he British, living in Britain and publishing in Britain first? Here it should be pointed out that while we followed the initial UK publication of River of Gods by some time, his latest novel, Brasyl, is a first edition original. We bought directly from McDonald, he delivered to us, we published 1.5 months before the UK edition, and the UK edition was set from our copy edits, which we provided as a courtesy to the UK publisher. So I'm counting that one as original to Pyr.

Which is not to say that I don't love me my UK and Australian speculative fiction novels, or that I won't continue to bring the best of it across to a deserving American readership, because, well, this stuff is good and it should be published over here. I strongly believe doing so has real value. But I'm a little rankled that there is a perception that that's all we do, as it gives short shrift to our equally great original talents. David Louis Edelman's Infoquake was nominated for the Campbell Memorial Award. Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky was chosen by PW as one of the Best SF&F Books published in 2007. Alan Dean Foster's Sagramanda was proclaimed by Asimov's the best novel he has yet written in all his long career. Statements like the ones above don't do them justice.

'sall I'm saying.

Spring Summer 2008

Want a sneak peak?