realthog | Entries tagged with keith brooke

A couple of new e-book anthologies are of some interest, at least to my relatives and those hoping to borrow money/scrounge free drinks from me.

First up is the e-book edition of Mike Allen's celebrated anthology Clockwork Phoenix, which won all sorts of accolades despite including my story "All the Little Gods We Are". The digital Clockwork Phoenix can be found (so far) at Amazon and in the Mythic Delirium/Weightless Books store.

The other just-published e-anthology to contain a story of mine is called Past Future Present 2011, is edited by Helen E. Davis (or should that be Helen e-Davis?), and is a great big bumper volume of sixteen -- count'em, sixteen! -- hitherto-unpublished stories by the likes of Keith Brooke, Vera Nazarian (

norilanabooks), Mike Allen (him again), and Catherine Mintz. My own offering, so as you know what to avoid amongst all this good stuff, is a longish novelette (~10,500 words) called "The Girl Who Was Ugly"; unusually for me, it's a piece of straightishforward SF rather than fantasy or slipstream or noir or genre spaghetti or . . .

UPDATE: UK Kindlers can download Clockwork Phoenix here and Past Future Present 2011 here.

Current Music: Dussek - Piano Sonata #4 in A op 10 #1, since you asked

Keith Brooke, whose Infinity Plus Ebooks bought my Warm Words and Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews for publication (just last Monday!), has written some very kind words about the project -- and about how he went from "You must be nuts" to "What a great idea" -- on his blog, All Things Keith Brooke and Infinity Plus. So that's started my day in the way I hope it continues.

Current Music: Michael Haydn: Symphony #2

Quite a few years ago I published in the late, much lamented magazine The Third Alternative a fantasy novelette called "Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie?" Some of its readers loved it, some of them hated it (too erotic), a couple said it was "a great Edinburgh story" (which filled me with joy), and so on. I've always loved it, because it seemed to me a good portrayal of a man, filled with guilt that it might have been his own shallowness that caused the suicide of his first wife, finally learning how to absolve himself and carry on living.

You know, typical Grant angst. But with lots of rude bits.

Anyway, Keith Brooke at Infinity Plus Ebooks is starting up a line called Infinity Plus Singles, epublications of single longish stories designed to appeal to the emerging Lunchbreak Market -- i.e., readers who want to find something they can download for 99c to read in their lunchbreak. I'm lucky enough that he's asked for three of my stories to be in his launch package; other authors who've so far signed up include Kit Reed, Neil Williamson, Anna Tambour and Sarah Ash, so I feel (a) that I'm in heady company and (b) that should this venture fail it'll probably be because of the weak link in the chain -- i.e., moi.

Today Keith sent through a couple of cover roughs, and I'm thrilled as can be about them. Here's the one for "Kristie":

Natty, huh? It has a sort of Faber & Faber coolness to it. All of the Infinity Plus Singles are apparently to have this same basic design. I think this endeavour shows every possible promise.

Current Music: just the background noise of torrential rains, again

Many will fondly recall the website Infinity Plus, which offered an astonishing array of free online fiction, plus reviews, interviews and suchlike stuff. (It's all still there as an archive, if you have a few months' reading time to spare.)

More recently, Keith Brooke -- the Infinity Plus supremo -- has founded Infinity Plus Ebooks, which has been publishing with some success since just before the start of the year . . . even though two of the books concerned are by moi.

Now the first Infinity Plus Ebooks sampler is available. Called Infinities, it has a contents list as follows:

Keith Brooke: "The Man Who Built Heaven" (short story)
Eric Brown: "Venus Macabre" (short story)
Eric Brown: extract from novel A Writer's Life
John Grant: "Wooden Horse" (novelette)
Garry Kilworth: "Phoenix Man" (short story)
Kaitlin Queen: extract from novel One More Unfortunate
Iain Rowan: "One Step Closer" (short story)

Anna Tambour: extract from novel Spotted Lily
Linda Nagata: extract from novel Memory
Scott Nicholson: extract from novel The Red Church
Kristine Kathryn Rusch: extract from novel The Disappeared
Steven Savile: extract from novel The Immortal

Infinities is available for FREEEEE download in .mobi (Kindle) and .epub formats at the Infinity Plus Ebooks site and in these and some other formats from Smashwords.

Just to repeat in case of misunderstanding, it's

!!!FREEEEE!!!

(Classy, eh?)

Current Music: CPE Bach: Oboe Concerto

I've done a guest blog about my short novel Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi for All Things Keith Brooke and Infinity Plus. I chat about the circumstances under which the book was written (over a weekend at the first of the Groucho Club's One-Day Novel Contests), what the various bits and pieces of it meant and mean to me, and so on.

My piece is called "Of Spatting Gods, Extraordinarily Heavy Laptops, Flights, Quests, Contests, Archetypes, Stuff Like That" and can be read here.

Current Music: Bax: From Dusk Till Dawn

I've just signed the contract with Infinity Plus Ebooks for the reissue in ebook format of my short novel Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi, which was first published in 2002 as half of a "double" (the other half being Colin Wilson's The Tomb of the Old Ones) although written some years before that.

As an added bonus, the ebook will contain also my novella "The Beach of the Drowned", which was first published a couple of years ago in Dave Hutchinson's bumper anthology Under the Rose.

Things move quickly in the ebook world! I gather publication in the first format, Kindle, should be achieved by next week, possibly even sooner. The "cover" is already being finalized; I'll post a copy here when I can -- plus a link, you betcha.

Meanwhile, it seems the Infinity Plus edition of my collection Take No Prisoners is continuing to do well.

I'm hoping to have some more ebook news shortly . . .

Current Music: Trio Mediaeval: A Worcester Ladymass

I've been up to my eyes trying to get Denying Science finished, and therefore not posting here much -- not doing anything much, really, except batter away at the keyboard and panic.

One thing I haven't reported is that my 2004 story collection Take No Prisoners has been reissued for Kindle by Infinity Plus Ebooks. I'll put the Product Description below the fold for them as might be interested.

This morning I had a note from Infinity Plus supremo Keith Brooke to say Take No Prisoners was at #6 on the Amazon bestseller list in the Fantasy Anthologies category. Astonishingly, this proved actually to be true . . . although when I checked the link just now I discovered it had slipped to #7; someone must have returned their copy in disgust, or something.

I must make sure all my future book covers bear the words AMAZON BESTSELLING AUTHOR. Big. In gold foil lettering. And embossed.

( Read all about it! )

Current Music: too early in the day

Here's a press release I received today, and it has a morsel of exciting news (more later) about

MOI

embedded within it:

Announcing the new infinity plus ebook imprint

www.infinityplus.co.uk/books

December 2010:

The infinity plus ebook imprint launches with six titles:

The Angels of Life and Death by Eric Brown, a new collection of short fiction
the collected short fiction of Keith Brooke, in five volumes (Liberty Spin, Embrace, Faking It, Segue and Memesis), with two original stories and specially written afterwords for each story

Each book is available in the Kindle ebook format, priced $3.44 / £2.18. Covers for the first six books are by Dominic Harman and Debbie Nicholson. Soon to follow the launch titles will be books from Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Molly Brown, Garry Kilworth and others.

Founder of infinity plus, Keith Brooke, says: "We settled on the Kindle format because it has emerged as a market leader and we want to test the market. If the infinity plus ebook imprint proves to be viable we'll move into other ebook formats and possibly even good old-fashioned hard copy publishing. We'll also be putting out work by other authors who have been associated with infinity plus over the years, publishing new books and making older titles available again."

Last Christmas the Kindle was the number one bestselling item at amazon.com, and sales are set to be far greater this Christmas. Kindle ebooks can also be read on PCs, Macs, smart phones and other devices.

About infinity plus:

infinity plus is a science fiction, fantasy and horror showcase that ran from 1997 to 2007 and remains online as an archive
the site holds more than 2.1 million words of fiction, 1000 book reviews and 100 interviews
authors featured on the site include Stephen Baxter, Mary Gentle, Peter F Hamilton, Gwyneth Jones, Vonda N McIntyre, Michael Moorcock, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, Michael Swanwick, Jack Vance, Connie Willis and Gene Wolfe
there have been three infinity plus print anthologies
Praise for infinity plus:

"looks great. And it's good to find quality fiction on the web" (Ellen Datlow)
"one of the Internet's most valuable resources for intelligent science fiction of high literary quality" (Gardner Dozois)
"the best place for genre fiction on the web" (SFX)
"first-rate" (Locus Online)

Further information:

www.infinityplus.co.uk/books
for any further information, interviews, review copies, etc, contact Keith Brooke: keith@keithbrooke.co.uk

Current Music: Poulenc miscellany

Much of my energy the past few months has gone into writing an essay on time-travel fiction for a scholarly book Keith Brooke is editing for publication by Palgrave Macmillan next Fall: The Sub-genres of Science Fiction: Strange Divisions and Alien Territories. Since I'm no academic, whenever I do something like this there's definite anxiety as I wait to hear the judgment of its adequacy . . . or, as I usually convince myself during the waiting period, of its many and profound inadequacies. This was especially so in this instance since Keith has otherwise assembled a very distinguished bunch of contributors.

Here, although the running order may well change, is the contents list:

Foreword - Michael Swanwick
Hard Science Fiction - Gary Gibson
Space Opera - Alastair Reynolds
Alternative History - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Topian Science Fiction - Keith Brooke.
Aliens - Justina Robson
Planetary Romance - Catherine Asaro and Kate Dolan
After the Apocalypse - James Lovegrove
Religion - Adam Roberts
Time Travel - John Grant
Cyberpunk and the Human-Machine Interface - James Patrick Kelly
Special Powers - Paul Di Filippo
Post-Human - Tony Ballantyne
Afterword: Picking Up the Pieces - Keith Brooke

My own chapter proved to be a monster. The first draft was nearly 15,000 words long -- somewhat over the target figure of 5000. After much painful amputation, I got it down to 11,000 words and asked Keith for advice. With the help of his suggestions, I finally submitted at just over 8000 words . . . and then the waiting began.

Well, the waiting's over, and: Phew! My piece apparently passes the mustard. Er, cuts muster. Something like that.

And now commences another -- but this time much more pleasant -- period of waiting: waiting to read the other essays in the book, to which I'm very much looking forward!

Current Music: Chapin Sisters: Two

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Page Summary

e-antho extravaganza!
warm words
has anyone here seen Kristie?
Infinity Plus is desperate to give you a FREEEEE book!
new guest blog
sold: Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi
bestsellerdom beckons?
new ebook imprint
phew!

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