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JANUARY 2008
Dear Readers,
 It's January. It's winter. And I am a master of the obvious. What else is new? The year is new. The moon might even be new. I'm not sure.
I am sure, however, that it was recently Sir Arthur C. Clarke's 90th birthday. It is an honor for Del Rey to publish his work, especially his latest collaboration with Stephen Baxter, Firstborn, the third book in A Time Odyssey, which revisits the mysterious alien race Sir Arthur introduced in 2001. The series began with Time's Eye and was followed by Sunstorm, both of which are now available in paperback. Our sidebar this month is a very interesting piece by Stephen Baxter on his work with Firstborn. Please do have a look.
Other books of interest this month are Fall of Kings, the late David Gemmell's final novel in his series about the battle of Troy. It is a crowning achievement in a truly remarkable career. We also have the latest vampire-noir novel from Charlie Huston with Half the Blood of Brooklyn, and an original novel set in the world of television's top-rated series Heroes.
And it is Del Rey's pleasure to introduce Gregory Frost's fantasy novel Shadowbridge, the first in a duology that Jeffrey Ford calls "beautifully written and realized." The book has received very good advance praise from the trade magazines as well. Publishers Weekly calls it "a sparkling gem of mythic invention and wonder," and Locus speculates that "Frost could be on his way toward a masterpiece." If you're going to read one new author this year, read Frost. "Because if it's not love, then it's the bomb."
Enjoy yourself,
Fleetwood
frobbins@randomhouse.com
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DEL REY NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
AUTHORS ON TOUR
ELIZABETH MOON, author of the new Vatta's War novel VICTORY CONDITIONS, will be appearing at the locations below.
2/19 @ 7:00pm
Barnes & Noble
14709 US Hwy 31 North
Carmel, IN 46032.
2/20 @ 7:30pm
Borders Books & Music
5871 Crossroads Center Way
Baileys Crossroads, VA 22041
2/21 @ 7:00pm
Barnes & Noble
Johns Hopkins University
3330 St. Paul Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
2/23 @ 2:00pm
Joseph-Beth Booksellers
161 Lexington Green Circle
Lexington, KY 40503
2/28 @ 7:00 PM
BookPeople
603 N. Lamar Blvd
Austin, Texas 78703
NEW PROJECTS
This month we have two illustrated projects to talk about!
First, for all of the myriad fans of Diana Gabaldon, we're happy to announce a lush, full-color graphic novel containing an original story set in the universe of Gabaldon's New York Times-bestselling Outlander novels, described by Salon magazine as "the smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a background in scripting 'Scrooge McDuck' comics." Diana is scripting the book herself (using that comic-writing background of hers!) and illustrations are underway by award-winning artist Hoang Nguyen. The book will appear sometime in 2009.
Also, as announced at the New York Anime Festival, Marvel Entertainment and Del Rey Manga will partner to produce two new manga series based on Marvel Entertainment's highly popular X-Men series.
The manga, created with the cooperation and consultation of Marvel editors, will take the classic characters from the X-Men series and re-imagine them in a manga style. The first project, scripted by the husband-and-wife team of Raina Telgemeier (writer and illustrator of The Babysitter's Club graphic novels) and Dave Roman (creator of the comic Agnes Quill), will focus specifically on the X-Men team. Indonesian artist Anzu will illustrate the two-volume series, which will go on sale in Spring 2009.
A second manga series will follow the adventures of Wolverine, a breakout member of the X-Men team known for his attitude and unbreakable adamantium claws.
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with Aury Wallington
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 Interview with Aury Wallington, author of Saving Charlie
Question: You're both a novelist and a TV writer. Which of these modes of writing is most fulfilling for you, and why?
Aury Wallington: Both types of writing are fun and fulfilling, albeit in completely different ways. I love the camaraderie and collaboration of a TV writers' room, while novel writing can feel really solitary—just you, alone, at your kitchen table, day after day, for hundreds of pages. But there are freedoms that come with writing fiction that you don't have in TV—novels have fewer rules about page count and structure, so there's more room to explore, to really dig into the story and the characters' pasts, to go off on side tangents, etc. I've been really lucky so far, in that I've been able to switch back and forth between TV and novels—it's really the best of both worlds!
Q: Then writing the first novel based on a breakout TV hit that's still growing in popularity must have really been a dream job for you.
AW: I'd been a gigantic fan of Heroes from the beginning, and am lucky enough to be friends with one of the show's writers, Aron Eli Coleite. Aron had read and loved my novel POP!, so when the show decided to do a novelization, he suggested me for the job. It was definitely a labor of love; they had a pretty tight deadline for when they needed the book to be done, so I basically spent six weeks immersed in the story 24 hours a day. I'd wake up in the mornings already thinking about it, spend fourteen hours every day at my computer writing, then go to bed and dream about Hiro and Charlie all night. I usually have a million projects going at once, so it was amazing to set everything else aside for a month and focus exclusively and wholly on Charlie and Hiro's story.
Q: Is Saving Charlie a straight novelization of the three episodes from the TV show that featured Hiro's relationship with Charlie, or does it break new ground?
AW: The set-up of the story stays true to the show—Hiro meets Charlie, goes back in time six months, has his first kiss with her, then accidentally teleports away—but from there the story takes off running through completely new ground. The book shows what really happened during those six months, follows all of Hiro's adventures going backward and forward through time as he attempts to save Charlie, and really delves into Hiro and Charlie's growing relationship (both the emotional and physical sides!). It also explores in depth Hiro's own past, his childhood and relationship with his father, and his time-bending superpowers. There are a ton of surprises, and lots of cool, funny, sometimes-tragic secrets get revealed—not just about Hiro and Charlie's time together, but about Hiro himself.
Read more. . .
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Author Stephen Baxter on Firstborn
Firstborn is the third book in our Time Odyssey series. The second Odyssey started from the same premise as the first, Sir Arthur's Space Odyssey - the intervention of the alien "Firstborn" in human development - but this is an intervention of a devastatingly different kind. So, we like to say, these books neither follow nor precede the earlier Space Odyssey books, but are at right angles to them: neither sequels nor prequels, but "orthoquels."
While we've been working on Firstborn I've gone back to reread the four books of the original Odyssey series, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), 2061: Odyssey Three (1987) and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997). I've been very struck by the development of their visions of space. Though the books were obviously written well within the span of a single lifetime, they date from different ages.
In particular there is an immense gulf between the first two books. As Sir Arthur notes in his foreword to 2010, "2001 was written in an age that now lies beyond one of the Great Divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong set foot upon the Moon [in 1969]."
Although the movie 2001 was first screened in the year Apollo 8 circled the Moon, its vision was a sort of summary of older dreams of spaceflight. The space clippers and great rotating space wheels were straight out of a blueprint Wernher von Braun had been developing for NASA since the 1950s, while the beautiful, elegant, roomy nuclear ship Discovery was an almost pulp-era vision of how the solar system should have been won.
But the lunar dreams soured quickly. By the time 2010 was published in 1982, Apollo was already a ten-years-gone memory, and the space shuttle had only just begun flying. In the novel a new spacecraft called Leonov goes to Jupiter to retrieve the lost Discovery, and to further mankind's relationship with the monolith-builders. There are new wonders; the book was inspired in part by the Voyagers' revelations about the Jupiter and Saturn systems.
But the contrast between the spacecraft old and new is very striking. Leonov is an expression of the reality of spaceflight as it had been experienced: it is cramped, uncomfortable, squat, ugly - and there's no gravity-inducing carousel. When the two spacecraft are docked, it's a collision of post-Apollo reality with pre-Apollo dreams, as if two universes are overlapping.
Remarkably however some of the older dreams of spaceflight by Sir Arthur and others are, sometimes after painfully long gestations, approaching reality. Take the space elevator, for instance, as dramatised in Sir Arthur's The Fountains of Paradise (1979). The concept has recently come closer to engineering feasibility, thanks to the discovery in the 1990s of "fullerenes": carbon molecules which can be used to make cables with extremely high tensile strengths, just the thing for building a cable-car to orbit. And so in Firstborn we depict a space elevator built according to the best modern understanding, a twenty-first century update of Sir Arthur's 1970s fiction. Elsewhere scientists are seriously studying Star Trek-style "inertial drives" of the kind Sir Arthur depicted in 3001.
Space has turned out to be a lot tougher to conquer than anybody imagined when the first Space Odyssey book was published. But as our latest Time Odyssey book appears, some of those old science fiction dreams are at last turning from fantasy to engineering.
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