Complimentary copies of World’s End, Darkest Hour and Always Forever (courtesy of Pyr), The Burning Man mass-market paperback and the hardback and tradepaperback editions of Destroyer of Worlds (courtesy of Gollancz) have all recently arrived and are now piled up in the middle of my study. And there’s still Lord of Silence to come from Solaris.

Latest book deliveries

I’m going to need a bigger study.

I’ve carried out a longish interview at the Fantasy Book Critic site, ostensibly about Lord of Silence, The Silver Skull and Age of Misrule, but also taking in some personal and writerly stuff too.

Last week, UK newspaper The Guardian had a series of supplements detailing Great British Walks. The one which appeared on day five will be of particular interest to readers of this blog as it focuses on Lost Worlds and Legends-themed walks.

Several of the trails are linked to sites featured heavily in Age of Misrule - Stonehenge, Loch Ness, Thomas the Rhymer’s Hills, Tintagel - and are a great way to soak up the atmosphere and discover more about these evocative places.

You can buy the whole set of walks supplements for a tenner here.

Always Forever, Book Three of the Age of Misrule has sold out of its first printing from Pyr before it even reaches the shelves. A second printing is on the way.

The demand came in at such a high level I even had to forego my complementary copies of this printing to ensure the stores were supplied. I’m very pleased with the US launch. Pyr’s team has done a great job of getting the books into the shops, and they’ve been well-received by the critics (for instance, here.)

And for the second extract of the day (as both books come out within days of each other), here’s one from Destroyer of Worlds, Kingdom of the Serpent Book 3.

Again, ordering details to the right.

You can find an extract from Lord of Silence here.

And you can order it to the right of this page if it piques your interest.

One final place to recommend if you’re journeying to Tenby in South Wales this summer: Caffe Vista in Crackwell Street, off the beaten track, but worth seeking out. For a start, it serves proper coffee (and cake) unlike the over-priced slop many cafes try to get away with in the UK. But if you head to the back, there’s also a sun-drenched balcony overlooking the sea that very few people know about. A good writers’ cafe, with free broadband too.

Fecci's ice cream

Okay, I’ve clearly not tasted every ice cream produced across the land, but the ones made by Fecci & Sons in Tenby are certainly my number one. The Italian family has been making ice cream in Tenby since the First World War and they’ve got several classic, traditional ice cream parlours around the town.

My favourite is in St George’s Street straight off the Five Arches as you go in. Another reason why I love the place, and certainly worth mentioning here at the start of the British summer. The ice cream really is that good. (Apologies for the hopeless photo, by the way.)

Tenby Harbour

Next month, Destroyer of Worlds, Book 3 of Kingdom of the Serpent is published in the UK, the final volume of my sprawling fantasy series which began with World’s End, Age of Misrule Book 1, nearly ten years ago. When the final edit was complete, it seemed only right that I return to the place where I first dreamed up the story, sitting by the side of the sea on the Celtic fringes of the UK.

It’s not like I’ve been any stranger to Tenby in Pembrokeshire, South Wales - I’ve been going pretty much on an annual basis since I was about seven, sometimes for a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks. For me, the place is damned near perfect for a writer looking for inspiration: winding streets with odd little shadowy alleys, colourful houses, medieval walls, a nearby castle (which featured, like Tenby, in World’s End) the best beaches in this part of the world, and a history of mystery and mysticism. It’s always been a place artists have visited, for much the same reasons - check out the great museum and art gallery if you don’t believe me.

As it’s the start of the summer, I thought I’d give it a mention here, and in a couple of posts to follow. If you’re ever down there, take a look - you won’t be disappointed.

I’ll be signing copies of Lord of Silence and Destroyer of Worlds at the Forbidden Planet Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, on July 9 between 6-7pm.

You can also meet fellow author James Lovegrove, who will be signing copies of his new Solaris novel, The Age of Ra, same time, same place.

It’ll probably be the only signing I do for both of these books, so if you really want me to scribble all over your prized copy, come along.

The Government has announced plans for a new £25 million visitor centre at Stonehenge.

Finally.

The entire ritual site around Stonehenge is pretty much an atrocity, and a mockery of its World Heritage Site status. Moving the visitor centre a mile and a half away is one small step to redressing the shockingly poor stewardship of such an important site, but the site is still criss-crossed with noisy roads and ruined at night by light pollution.

I don’t blame English Heritage - they do a good job under difficult circumstances. I do blame successive British governments. The next step should be to get rid of the roads, if necessary through long tunnels, which would then give the entire site some of the gravity and majesty it deserves.

The usual Government argument is that the cost would be prohibitive. Perhaps they should have used some of the billions spent sending Iraq back into the Stone Age for no discernible reason.

Here’s the final version of the cover to the Pyr US edition of Always Forever, Age of Misrule Book Three. Another fantastic piece of work by the artist John Picacio. Warning: don’t look directly into Balor’s eye…

There’s a detailed account of the process of creating all three covers for the US editions of Age of Misrule over on Tor.com, with contributions from John, editor Lou Anders, and a few of my own ruminations on how the original idea came to be.

And just so you can see how much thought has gone into the design of these editions, here are the spines for all three books:

People prize what they don’t understand at least as much as what they do.

Read page 3 for a mad Puritan worldview you probably thought died out 200 years ago, and page 4 for the nuts.

We’re going to be getting a lot more 2012 apocalypse meanderings in the weeks and months to come…

Here’s the cover for the Pyr edition of The Silver Skull, by Chris McGrath, published in the US this October.

From the blurb:

A devilish plot to assassinate the Queen, a Cold War enemy hell-bent on destroying the nation, incredible gadgets, a race against time around the world to stop the ultimate doomsday device…and Elizabethan England’s greatest spy!

Meet Will Swyfte – adventurer, swordsman, rake, swashbuckler, wit, scholar and the greatest of Walsingham’s new band of spies.

But Swyfte’s public image is a carefully-crafted façade to give the people of England something to believe in, and to allow them to sleep peacefully at night. It deflects attention from his real work – and the true reason why Walsingham’s spy network was established.

A Cold War seethes, and England remains under a state of threat. The forces of Faerie have been preying on humanity for millennia. Responsible for our myths and legends, of gods and fairies, dragons, griffins, devils, imps and every other supernatural menace that has haunted our dreams, this power in the darkness has seen humans as playthings to be tormented, hunted or eradicated.

But now England is fighting back!

Here’s the cover for the mass-market paperback publication of The Burning Man, Book Two of Kingdom of the Serpent, which is out in June.

You can see it’s quite different from the hardback and trade paperback editions - the figure is less stylised, the fire not so harsh. Personally, I prefer the old image…

… but the powers that be at Gollancz think this one is more effective. Opinions?

You can buy the new paperback version here or order it from any good bookstore.

The first three chapters of World’s End, Age of Misrule Book One, are now up at the Pyr Sample Chapters blog.

A couple of nice reviews are in on the US publication of World’s End:

Chadbourn takes the reader on a wild ride through lands where modern Britain connects with the ancient past.

Chadbourn writes a tale that twists the tropes of fantasy into something unrecognizable.

Also nice as they come from bloggers who I read and respect. I won’t be doing a Joe Abercrombie (Hi, Joe!) and obsessively detailing every mention of my name across the internet, but I wanted to put these two up to mark the moment, as it were, of World’s End appearing in the US.

For all you sword and sorcery fans, here’s some rare footage of fantasy great Michael Moorcock joining space cadets Hawkwind to intone his Elric poem/lyrics on stage.

Moorcock was a part of Hawkwind for several years, and the band’s Chronicle of the Black Sword album was heavily influenced by his work. Cherry Red records recently secured the rights to release all of Hawkwind’s material, which had been unavailable for many years. More details at the Cherry Red site.

I come from a long, long line of coal miners (certainly on one side of my family - there’s some strange blood on the other, to be sure). Coal dust is in my veins, as it is in the area where I grew up in the English Midlands. The houses round here used to be black with the coal embedded in the brick from centuries of the stuff being transported from the mines. The landscape was apocalyptic - slag heaps rising to the sky, and palls of smoke from where the seams underground had caught alight.

Against the grim outside world, there was a powerful sense of community. The miners existed alongside death and disability on a daily basis, and lived life to the full whenever they came back into the light. I remember pubs packed with thick-armed, tattooed men, downing pints of bitter and singing raucously, the wives joining their husbands on Saturday nights for singalongs and dancing at the working men’s club, the tall tales, the ghost stories and underground mythologies, and most of all the laughter that bound everyone together.

It’s all gone now. In the early 1980s, the Conservative Government decided to break the back of the troublesome miners’ union and close the pits, including my local ones. The ensuing strike was furious and hard-fought. It tore apart families, villages, friends. Eventually the union lost and the mines were closed. No one round here has forgotten it. Children are told tales of the wicked witch Margaret Thatcher who threw all the men on to the poverty line, brought depression and suicide, left families hungry and killed off the villages. Killed the communities dead.

On the one hand, it’s better round here now. The slag heaps are gone, replaced by green parks and forests. The houses are clean. Work has gradually crept back, but only after years of pain. But that sense of community was gone. The pubs all seem strangely empty to me. Not enough laughter, not enough joy in living. I miss that old world.

A friend of mine, David Bell, has written a book about the strike - The Dirty Thirty - Heroes of the Miners’ Strike (Five Leaves). It celebrates the struggle of the thirty Leicestershire miners who showed great courage in standing up for their beliefs and coming out on strike when many around them argued against it.

Dave interviews the surviving members of The Dirty Thirty, and also talks to the womens’ support group. On the blurb, Tony Benn says this book “is of the greatest importance”. You can order it directly from Dave and get it signed or pick it up from Amazon, Borders and Waterstones.

Book collectors in the US are racing to snap up Pyr’s first edition of World’s End, Book One of the Age of Misrule, I’m told. A printer’s error resulted in the Pyr logo being left off the spine. It will be corrected for the forthcoming second edition, making those first Pyr-less copies unique and - apparently - collectable.

Cover artist John Picacio has written about it here and here.

If you do want a first edition, you’ll need to hurry. Only a few remain in the warehouse - and that’s a whole month before the official publication date. You can get it here.