Blog, books, stories.
The Peacock Cloak was officially launched in Bradford on Friday. This is just a reminder that it will be launched again, along with Ian Whates’ Growing Pains, at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Ave, London, this Saturday (April 6th), at 1 – 2pm, just to make sure both books are properly afloat. Details here.
I’ve posted some reviews of The Peacock Cloak here.
Broadway Books (part of the Crown Publishing Group) has acquired US rights in DARK EDEN and its sequel (MOTHER OF EDEN aka GELA’S RING). I’m very pleased!
Full press release:
PRESS RELEASE – MAJOR US DEAL FOR CHRIS BECKETT
Julian Pavia at Broadway Books (part of the Crown Publishing Group) has acquired US rights in the science fiction novels DARK EDEN and GELA’S RING by Chris Beckett from Michael Carlisle at Inkwell Management and Vanessa Kerr, Rights Director at Grove Atlantic in London, for a high five-figure sum in US dollars.
DARK EDEN was published by Atlantic’s Corvus imprint in 2012 and is shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Best SF Novel of the year, as well as being mentioned in several national papers as 2012’s best SF novel. The sequel, GELA’S RING, will be published by Corvus in spring 2014. The agent who did both world rights deals with Atlantic was John Jarrold.
‘Ravi Mirchandani is in New York and both he and Michael Carlisle have obviously worked their magic in regards to this offer,’ said John Jarrold. ‘Chris and I are delighted. He is a major author, whose talent is now being recognised both inside and outside the UK.’
Contact John Jarrold for further details.
The first review of The Peacock Cloak is in today’s Financial Times.
It’s nice to be compared to Ray Bradbury, though I’ve never read The Martian Chronicles (or ‘The Pedestrian’ either as far as I can recall). But these things become part of the aether after a while. Bits and pieces of them find their way to us via the imaginations of many people, and we reassemble the fragments.
You can order the book now, in paperback or kindle, from Amazon (right now Amazon haven’t linked the two versions up, but they’re both there somewhere if you look.)
If you’ve read the book, and would like a little more background to the stories, I put a little link for each story here, with sundry thoughts and comments. It’s like the patter between songs at a concert, I suppose.
Aethernet is a new on-line magazine specifically devoted to serial fiction, developed by Tony and Barbara Ballantyne The first issue will be available for sale on March 30th, subsequent issues going on sale on the first of the month from May 1st onwards.
Aethernet is where Gela’s Ring (the sequel to Dark Eden) will first appear, in 12 monthly installments, from Easter 2013 to Easter 2014.
Also in the first issue: The Ties that Bind by Juliet E McKenna, Murder of the Heart by Philip Palmer, Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky and The Smallest of Things by Ian Whates.
You will be able to buy the issue direct from the website, or via Amazon.
Newcon Press (and me) will be launching The Peacock Cloak at Eastercon at Bradford.
Just to make sure it is well and truly launched, we’ll also be launching it at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Ave, London, on April 6th, 1-2, along with Ian Whates’ new collection, Growing Pains.*
I went up to Edge Hill University this week to give a talk to creative writing students there. I’ve never been on a creative writing course personally, but I see myself as a sort of honorary graduate of Edge Hill, because winning the Edge Hill Short Fiction Prize has proved a turning point in my writing career. It was good to see Ailsa Cox again, a great short story writer herself, who’s done a huge amount of work over the years keeping the Edge Hill prize on the road, and also Carys Bray, whose excellent collection I wrote about here. Good to meet the students too.
I’d been asked to talk about my career as a writer, and what I could glean from it in terms of advice for would-be writers. What I think I have learnt boils down to this:
(1) You do actually have to write stuff, and you need to be prepared to write a lot of embarrassing rubbish before you find your own style, voice and subject-matter. This entails taking a huge gamble, because there’s no guarantee that you will ever find these things, or that they are even there to be found. (There were times when I wondered whether my ambition to write was simply deluded, a cancer in my life, draining energy from other goals.)
(2) Some of us are drawn to writing in part because it allows us to hide away in our rooms and not deal with the messy and worrying world of OTHER PEOPLE. But it is a big mistake to look at it this way. Writing is a job in which, as with most jobs, you need a network of colleagues and contacts to get on.
This last point has really only dawned on me in fairly recent years. A turning point for me was accepting an invitation Roy Gray, of Interzone, to participate in an event at the Eastercon SF convention, only about 8 or 9 years ago. He introduced me to some other writers, and in due course, at subsequent Eastercons, I met more. One of them was Neil Williamson. Neil introduced me to Andrew Hook, who at that time ran Elastic Press, and Andrew was to publish The Turing Test and enter it for the Edge Hill Prize. When I won the prize, this enabled my agent John Jarrold (who I’d met in a similar way) to interest Corvus in publishing my novels The Holy Machine and Dark Eden.
There’s a lot of luck here of course, a lot of contingency – another set of judges might well have chosen another book – but you have to create opportunities for luck to happen. (You can’t be sure of winning a lottery if you buy a ticket, but you can be sure you won’t win if you don’t buy one.) Without those kinds of chains of contacts, I might well not have got much further than publishing the occasional story in magazines. It’s not just that I wouldn’t have got books published: I might not have written them.
One of the students has since blogged about my talk here. He says that I gave the same advice as everyone else does. I find this quite reassuring for some reason.
I enjoyed myself: I like having to think about the business of writing. And I loved the train journey there and back. Peace, warmth, comfort, a plug for my laptop, the world passing by outside.
And no OTHER PEOPLE at all.
Dark Eden is shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA award for best novel. I’m pleased pleased.
Si Scott is also in the Best Artwork shortlist for the beautiful dark cover he made for the book.
The other four novels shortlisted are:
Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)
Intrusion by Ken Macleod (Orbit)
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
2312 by Kim Stanley-Robinson (Orbit)
More details here.
Signed hardback limited edition of The Peacock Cloak now available for preorder.
Pbk and e-book to follow.
Dark Eden is on Daily Mail’s books of the year list too. Harry Mount writes:
“I reviewed this first novel [sic] in January and it has haunted me all year. It’s set on Eden, a horribly ill-named distant planet that is freezing-cold and sunless, lit only by the stars and weird trees that give off a little light and heat.
“Humans have colonised Eden by accident after two astronauts were marooned there. Now, 163 years later, their descendants eke out a desperate existence, hemmed in by forbidding mountains, trapped by fear and the cold and the loss of centuries’ worth of knowledge and technology.
“Our hero is John Redlantern, a bold teenager who breaks away from the rest of his hopelessly maroooned tribe and heads off to explore the frozen wilderness that lies beyond the mountains. His expedition, the plight of the rest of the tribe and Eden’s alien landscape and fauna are all marvellously well done in a book that’s assured and truly memorable.”
Slightly more arcanely, it’s also on the Lowy Institute’s books of the year list here.
I’ve just found out, two days late, that Dark Eden was The Sunday Times’ SF novel of the year for 2012. I’m very pleased.
Alison Flood, the Sunday Times’ SF reviewer wrote:
“…Written in an extraordinary vernacular, this is a stunning novel and a beautiful evocation of a truly alien world. I have thrust it on countless people this year and they’ve all loved it.
