Here’s the cover art for the Pyr edition of The Burning Man, Book 2 of Kingdom of the Serpent, out shortly. Art by John Picacio.

It’s got a Hieronymous Bosch feel, I think.

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.

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.

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.

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…)

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.

I’ll be launching The Scar-Crow Men at Waterstone’s in Nottingham on June 2. It’s the first time I’ve done a launch since Nocturne way, way back (my second novel), but that was a private party for friends and publishers at the old Murder One bookshop in Charing Cross Road in London.

This is a public event. I’ll be talking about the novel, about fantasy, history, philosophy, magic, writing – hell, anything which comes to mind, probably – and I’ll be doing a short reading too, and signing as well.

The venue: Waterstone’s, 1/5 Bridlesmith Gate, Nottingham NG1 2GR.
Time: 7pm
Tickets are £3. No idea what the limit is, but it’ll be on a first come, first served basis. You can get them in-store in advance, or call the store on 0845 034 9516.

This may well be the only official signing for The Scar-Crow Men so get in soon if you want me to scribble all over your pristine copy. Happy to sign any other stuff you’ve got too.

Dark Fiction magazine has published an audio version of my short story, Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast, originally published in the Solaris Book of New Fantasy and Year’s Best Fantasy. It’s read by Marty Perrett.

You can listen to it here.

The story features Elizabethan spy Will Swyfte and a Christmas Eve siege of a country house by supernatural foces. It ties in to my current Swords of Albion series.

The Scar-Crow Men is published in the UK today.

Elizabethan spy Will Swyfte investigating the murder of his friend, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, and discovering a supernatural threat: revenge, love, loss and high adventure.

You can find a new review of it here, from Falcata Times.

And you can find a new interview with me here, talking about the creative process, and a lot of other semi-incoherent ramblings.

Here’s a brief review of The Scar-Crow Men. The book is out in the UK in May.

UPDATE:
The first UK review from Lizzy.

I’m currently hard at work on the third book in the series, The Devil’s Looking Glass, with an expected delivery date of late June for publication in 2012.

According to my old publisher, ebooks now account for a quarter of all sales in their science fiction and fantasy categories, and that rate is increasingly rapidly. It’s understandable with so many early adopters in this genre, though I could have guessed it with the number of ebook queries I’ve been getting lately.

So as a resource, I thought I’d list all my ebooks currently available and point to those about to be published. You’ll find that below.

I’ve also recently been talking to some colleagues about making out-of-print backlist books available. A quick skim of the files suggests I could do Lord of Silence, the British Fantasy Award-winning The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a bunch of short stories, possibly in an anthology, the dark fantasy novels The Eternal, Nocturne, Scissorman, Underground and the non-fiction paranormal book Testimony. If you want to register any interest in these, contact me through the usual channels, or comment here, and I’ll talk to some people…

In the UK we have the full nine-book Brothers of Dragons sequence:

Age of Misrule
World’s End
Darkest Hour
Always Forever

The Dark Age
The Devil in Green
The Queen of Sinister
The Hounds of Avalon

Kingdom of the Serpent
Jack of Ravens
The Burning Man
Destroyer of Worlds

(I’m reliably informed that all these are also available in ePub format from Waterstones.

In the US, we have:

Age of Misrule
World’s End
Darkest Hour
Always Forever

The Dark Age
The Devil in Green
The Queen of Sinister
The Hounds of Avalon

Swords of Albion
The Silver Skull

In the UK, The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men will be available shortly. In the US, The Scar-Crow Men, Jack of Ravens, The Burning Man and Destroyer of Worlds will be out in the very near future.

“If you are a fan of Elizabethan England, the Fair Folk, Christopher Marlowe, spy novels, dark fantasy, swordplay, daring heroics, adventure serials, or any combination of the above, I highly recommend both novels in this ravishingly exciting, heartpoundingly intense, and extremely intelligent series–one which will stimulate your brain as well as your heart.”

By Robert William Berg.

Order with confidence.

James Barclay, Jasper Kent and me answering questions about writing, fantasy, music and life.

There are ethical problems wrapped up in writing historical fiction. Should you use a real, once-living person as a character in your fiction? Their lives reduced to nothing more than plot points and themes? In essence, a human being’s existence shackled to the pursuit of the writer’s own ego?

Would you want some future author to make you the bad guy in their little story, the walk-on joke, the mumbling idiot, the obstacle?

And let’s face it, we don’t even know what the people around us are truly like, never mind those who existed hundreds of years ago. In those cases, we often only have a few scraps of paper to sketch out the things they did, with little hint to their motivation.

This becomes even more of an issue in fantasy, where the historical characters are divorced from the realities of their lives. It’s something I’ve certainly struggled with while writing the Swords of Albion books, which utilise a host of real people from the Elizabethan age. To be honest, even after writing I find it hard to decide if it was the right thing to do. I justified it to myself by my attempts to make the historical figures as true to how contemporary accounts described them, but that still leaves a great deal of psychological gap-filling.

The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men are set around the Court and Government of Queen Elizabeth, but she plays only a secondary role. I have less interest in the cosseted lives of Kings and Queens than I do in the men and women who do their bidding.

The stories concern spies, who had, for the first time, become a powerful weapon of the state in this era. And so in the first book one of the central characters is the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, a dour, puritanical man who suffered much personal misery in his life, but who gave his all in service to the Queen. His successor in The Scar-Crow Men is Sir Robert Cecil, a clever, cunning politician who battled against prejudice and mockery for his hunchback and short stature – the Queen called him her ‘Little Elf’. These two men represent different approaches to power and control, one quite honorable, the other self-serving. They act as counterpoints to the flawed, vacillating central character, the spy Will Swyfte.

Swyfte’s friend is the acclaimed playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine among other plays. He was something of a rising celebrity at the time. He may have been a spy (there is some evidence); he may have been gay. In the books, Marlowe is another counterpoint to Swyfte, a man slowly being destroyed by the dark business of spying and the demands placed upon him by service to the state. Marlowe allows the reader to see Swyfte’s strengths and flaws more easily.

Despite my antipathy towards the lives of Royalty, the fact that important people play important roles is inescapable in this era. The common man was mainly concerned with simple economic survival. And so, as Swyfte travels the known world in his spying, we encounter James VI of Scotland (and future James I of England), Philip II of Spain and Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV of France. Each one responds – and responded – in different ways to their regal status, and again, each one allows us to see Swyfte in a different light.

Dr John Dee is a key figure in both books, and the third, to come, and he really is the link between the history and the fantasy. Dee, who tutored the young Elizabeth, was both a scientist and an occultist, an inventor and mathematician who communed with angels and cast magic circles. Many of the themes I’m tackling have Dee at their centre.

There are others – Sir Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, the Earls of Leicester and Essex, the master criminal Laurence Pickering, the King of Cutpurses, who may or may not have been an invention of the Elizabethan equivalent of the tabloids. Each one was chosen carefully for what they said about Will Swyfte, in the same way that any writer chooses supporting fictional characters.

I hope I did them justice, but know in my heart I didn’t. No writer could.

If you want to announce your new book has just been published, this is the way to do it.

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Thanks to the always excellent John Anealio. And how many SFF books are on the shelves this month?????