My Swords of Albion books get a pretty detailed analysis on Huffington Post, looking in particular at how an Elizabethan fantasy can have some relevance to the world we live in today.

Read it here, leave a comment.

Out now, from Bantam: ebooks of The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men.

Elizabethan spies, supernatural threat, and the forces of Faerie – just in time for Christmas (or the holiday of your choice).

Here’s artist John Picacio’s cover for the Pyr edition of Jack of Ravens, Book One of Kingdom of the Serpent. Out in March, with books two and three to follow in subsequent months.

For US readers, this is the final trilogy of the nine-book sequence that began with Age of Misrule. Jack Churchill returns, along with the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, Fabulous Beasts, Celtic gods, Ragnarok, the Otherworld and the wrapping up of every single plot-thread wound over the series.

Can I suggest to all the readers who have been complaining about Gollancz’s failure to reprint the long-sold-out UK version to pick this up on import. It should be available on both Amazon and the Waterstone’s site.

Experts have identified the precise location in Wales of some of the megaliths used in the construction of Stonehenge.

It’s a pretty major achievement to discover the location of the millennia-old quarry down to a few metres, but this also throws up some new mysteries. The rhyolitic rocks differ from all others in South Wales. The presumption is that they were chosen for a specific reason. How were they identified and why? There has been some interesting work done elsewhere into the acoustic qualities of particular stones at prehistoric sites. Is this important?

And this discovery has also kicked a hole in theories of how the stones were transplanted to Salisbury Plain. A consensus was growing that they were floated on rafts along the coast, but the exact location’s inaccessibility to water makes this unlikely. The old geologic theory – that the stones were pushed by advancing glaciers from Wales to Wiltshire during the ice age – is pretty flimsy as there aren’t any other Welsh rocks scattered around the Plain.

Here’s the cover of the new German edition of World’s End. An interesting approach – that appears to be the long-buried bones of a dragon…

I’ve set up a Google+ page for my writing. Feel free to add me to your circles:

Mark Chadbourn on Google+

Here’s the cover to the third Swords of Albion book, The Devil’s Looking Glass, which is published in the UK April 2012.

Artist tbc.

This new look at an old discovery is raising questions about whether ancient aboriginal culture had a deep understanding of the movement of the stars.

“They have discovered that waist-high boulders at the tip of the egg-shaped point along the ring to the position on the horizon where the sun sets at the summer and winter solstice – the longest and shortest day of the year.”

It’s been very quiet around here in recent weeks, mainly because I’ve been pulling 12-hour days, seven days a week to finish up the final draft of The Devil’s Looking Glass, the third Swords of Albion book.

It’s now been delivered to my editors at Transworld in the UK and Pyr in the US.

Publication is scheduled for April 2012 in the UK. Not heard a date from Pyr yet. So tonight I will be having a beer or two to celebrate. And tomorrow…

Back to work on a new project.

As I was finishing up the last draft of The Devil’s Looking Glass, I received news of the publication of the French version of Lord of Silence (see below). It got me thinking about how, although we live in a globalised world/economy, fiction is one area where the separations of the past are still quite evident.

The massed ranks of the internet love to pretend only one yardstick is necessary for books. Press this button for good, and this one for bad. Except, as the music industry has found out, the 21st century is all about nuance and complexity and mini-tribes. The mainstream is dead.

Some books just don’t travel well. That doesn’t mean they’re bad books, just that they’re not necessarily universal. Some novels work best when they’re communicating with a very narrow readership. Subtle, deeply-themed, with a great deal of unspoken communication because so much knowledge is already shared.

This is a long tradition of British fiction, and one reason why many UK writers have struggled across the Atlantic, but you can also find it throughout Europe.

Americans are much better at universal communication (unless the fiction is religion or sport-based when it hardly ever breaks out of their shores). I don’t know why that is, although I have a few ideas. The nation and its history is based upon the principle of Big Mythologies, and myth is a universal communicator with its symbols and archetypes. And film as an American art-form (okay, arguable, I know, but it has been embraced by the people as such) has infused the culture with its universal communication techniques.

I love the big books with the ubiquitous themes, but I’d certainly miss those fusty, quirky little stories about forgotten parts of a country’s culture if they came under threat in the current publishing climate.

Here’s the great cover to the French version of Lord of Silence, published by Eclipse on September 23:

The artist is Jean-Sébastien Rossbach.

I’ll be signing books at Waterstones in Leicester’s High Cross shopping centre this Saturday August 20th from 12.30.

I don’t do many signings, so it’s a good chance to get a lot of books signed, or talk to me about what’s coming up – or even ask for tips about getting published, if that’s your thing. (But if you ask for a tip, you have to buy a book…)

I’ve done a new, detailed interview over at OneMetal where I get into a few new areas in both professional and personal arenas. Thank to Pete Allison for some sharp questions.

You can also find a new review of The Scar-Crow Men on the same site.

Here’s the cover to the French mass-market paperback edition of World’s End from Le Livre de Poche.

Always interesting to see how artists and designers interpret the books. No idea who created the image. I don’t have any say over these non-UK editions, by the way. Often, the first I find out about them is when the comp copies arrive on the doorstep.

Think the scheming and deception of the spies at the court of Queen Elizabeth I in The Scar-Crow Men is some historical novelty? Much of what I write about in the Swords of Albion books is relevant today. In fact, that’s why I write it…

A two-year Washington Post investigation has revealed the true extent of the top secret world created by the US Government over the past few years.

* one and a half times the population of Washington DC now have top-secret security clearances.
*In the last ten years, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence have been, or are being, constructed in the Washington DC area alone covering 17 million square feet or the equivalent of three pentagons.
* Fifty thousand intelligence reports are published every year, so many that a good number are ignored by time-pressed chiefs.

This hidden world has become so pervasive, so secretive and so unwieldy that “no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

New research suggests cephalopods may have developed consciousness before mammals – the first truly thinking creatures on the planet.

Scientists have found cephalopods – including squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses – can use tools, navigate mazes, learn from each other, mimic other species and solve complex problems.

Yet they followed a completely different evolutionary line to “smart” vertebrates like chimps, dolphins and crows.

New Scientist reports: “Octopuses make it notoriously difficult to get recordings from electrodes inserted into the brain, because they can selectively shut off blood supply to an area of their body or brain. That’s if they allow the researchers to insert electrodes at all. Jennifer Basil, a cephalopod researcher at the City University of New York tells the story of one colleague who took on that challenge: ‘He thought the octopus was anaesthetised, so they put the electrode in and the octopus reached up with an arm and pulled it out.’ That marked the end of his work with octopuses. ‘He has worked with lots of animals but he said “that animal knows what I’m thinking. He doesn’t want me to do this so I’m not going to”,’ Basil says.”

You have been warned.

The band that was, perhaps, the greatest influence on the Age of Misrule, all those years ago. The album, And Did Those Feet, mixed a contemporary world with ancient horrors, and captured, in its rhythmic, crazed-folk drive, the sound of rural England – cider-drunk locals stumbling through graveyards on the way home.

Lyrically, there was nothing like them. Any band who can start a song, ‘Unctuous, prattling pecksniffs quake and quail and quiver, as the Badger Boys come down the street like pike down an empty river’ have got to be worth a listen…

Following the TV success of Game of Thrones SF Signal”s Mind Meld has asked several fantasy authors – including me – what books would make an excellent weekly series. Some interesting responses…

Anyone who’s read The Scar-Crow Men knows that codes play an important part in the story, as they did for real spies in the sixteenth century…and today.

New Scientist has a great article this week on eight codes that still remain unbroken, from the famous Voynich Manuscript to the CIA’s Kryptos monument to one of the final messages from the Zodiac serial killer.

Worth a read. You’ll have to sign up, for free, but you only get a window of a couple of days to check it out.