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

Read it here, leave a comment.

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

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.

Mark Chadbourn on Google+

Artist tbc.

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.

The artist is Jean-Sébastien Rossbach.

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…)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Robert William Berg.

Order with confidence.

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.

[

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

Spain was the sixteenth century equivalent of the US, a global superpower influencing geo-politics at many levels. Under King Philip, the country ruthlessly pursued power and wealth, invading Portugal and putting pressure on France and the Low Countries while exploiting the New World’s resources of gold and silver. Though a devout man, Philip was not averse to using religion as a cover for some of Spain’s more aggressive actions and thereby keeping his subjects firmly behind him.

Beside Spain, England was a small nation with ambition and pluck, but little real power and no great wealth. Thanks to Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic church, the nation lived in a near-constant state of fear of either retribution from the Catholic powers of Europe or insurrection within from Catholic agitators. Young priests were being trained in foreign seminaries and sent to England to foment revolution and to spy. The Government feared Philip’s expansionist policy and rumours of an invasion of England began long before the Armada set sail.

This was a dark time of terror and sweat and deceit. Yet in a sequence of stories that were essentially about duality, I could also look to the other, more positive face of the time. This, too, was the English Renaissance, with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Bacon and other writers blazing a trail, alongside composers like Tallis and Taverner, and architects like Inigo Jones. There was a great deal of enlightenment after long centuries of moral repression. Brothels were tolerated, including one composed entirely of young men. London was growing at an astonishing rate – faster than it could truly cope – and had become one of the great cities of Europe. So it was an exciting, vibrant time too.

The stories were to be about the point where fantasy collided with reality, but the more I researched, the more comparable and contextual collisions I found – socially, culturally, religious, political. Any fantasy – any story – needs a rich world and plenty of innate conflict. It was all here.

And while England was increasingly embracing what would come to be science, it still had the supernatural fears of past centuries at its back. The Elizabethan era was really the point where the country was caught between reason and unreason, hope and fear, past and future.

With the idea of a country trying to move forward while held back by the hooks of a superstitious past came the opening for my antagonists, the otherworldly Unseelie Court. Their existence was encoded in every myth and legend and folktale; the English had always lived in fear of the Fair Folk. But under Queen Elizabeth, England wanted to break free of their shackles and move into a new, brighter age.

Next time I’ll look at some of the historical characters who populate The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men and why I chose them.

Writing historical fantasy – to adopt the broadest label – has its own peculiar demands. We’re talking about an alien world here, with its own customs, clothes, politics, transport, weapons, social classes, art, music and economy and every aspect needs to be fully realized for the reader to settle into it.

To say this entails a massive amount of research, doesn’t begin to do the job justice. The writer needs to understand everything, both as its own thing and in context within the time period. This involves more than the invention of a secondary world fantasy, more than looking out of the window or Googling or location research for a contemporary fantasy (both of which I’ve written in the past).

Our knowledge of history degrades the further back we go. Characters walk on stage and then disappear. Our understanding of events is based on often-biased accounts. And sometimes there are vast parts of life that are simply missing in contemporary accounts.

The Elizabethan Age is reasonably well-documented, particularly with regard to affairs of state. The lives of the common men and women are there too, but the information is scattered widely. While writing this sequence, I sometimes had to embark on three different strands of research for a single sentence.

The Scar-Crow Men unfolds in the shadow of the murder of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, a killing that has all the mystery and intrigue of the JFK assassination. The previous volume, The Sword of Albion (or The Silver Skull in the US), is set at the time of the Armada and the Spanish invasion of England.

Over a few posts here I’m going to be writing about what goes into creating these historical fantasies, looking at the places, the people, the milieu, not only setting the context but also underlining the basic premise that the more reality you get, the more effective the fantasy.

Edit: make that three: The Eloquent Page also listed it, as Paul mentions in the comments…

You can pre-order the UK version here.

Or the US version here.

Under it’s French title, La Nuit sans fin, the novel was published by Orbit towards the end of 2009.

The other nominees are:

Ceci n’est pas un jeu – Walter Jon Williams (L’Atalante)
Cygnis – Vincent Gessler (L’Atalante )
L’Empire ultime – Brandon Sanderson (Orbit)
Le Nom du Vent – Patrick Rothfuss (Bragelonne)
Nuigrave – Lorris Murail (Robert Laffont/Ailleurs & Demain)
L’Odyssée du temps 1 – Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter(Bragelonne)
Rien que l’Acier – Richard Morgan (Bragelonne)

I’m answering questions on my contribution to the superhero anthology Masked over on Stargate Universe producer Joe Mallozzi’s blog.

The anthology compiled by editor supreme Lou Anders has been massively well-received, and features stories from both prose and comics authors, including Paul Cornell, Gail Simone, Mike Carey, Bill Willingham, Ian McDonald and more. Many of them are answering questions over on Joe’s blog (where he also has a little fun and identifies each of us as well-known super-heroes. Guess who I am?)

My story, By My Works You Shall Know Me features the debut of the hero Nox and the villain Styx.

Oh, yeah, you can buy it here.

For American readers, those books will finish off the massive story that began with World’s End in the Age of Misrule, a trilogy of trilogies covering more than two thousand years of human history, three worlds – this world, the Otherworld and the world beyond death – and our greatest mythologies.

Maybe I’ll stop getting all those emails now.

And a Writing For TV panel at the alt.fiction literature festival with me, Rob Shearman, Stephen Volk and Bill Boyes has just been made available as a podcast.”