Pax Britannia Goodness: Covers, Releases, Blogs, and Competition!

Wotcher all,

Well, it's a pretty busy time over in the parallel universe where Victoria is still Queen of England.

Let's see...

We've had The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus back from the printers (shown here with Pye Parr's gloriously grim Londinium Maximum skyline and the new Victorianesque layout), and it is beautiful. So much so that we've decided to use the same layout and design for all our future Pax Britannia books. That should be hitting the shelves in the next month or so, just in time to buy as stocking-fillers for the steampunkophile in your life.

Er, the other steampunkophile in your life. Obviously you're a steampunkophile. You wouldn't lie to us, would you?

(Pye has actually written a blog about creating the cover for this, and another one about putting the final touches to the artwork on the cover. Pop over to his blog and take a look.)

We've also just had Gods of Manhattan back from the press. Unfortunately too late to incorporate the sexy new formatting, although it does have Mark Harrison's awesome montage cover art.

(Fun fact: Al saw this art, concluded there were more hot women in the cover art than there actually were in his book, and immediately set out to add more hot women to the book. The final book has, I believe, two more hot woman in it than it initially did, wholly due to Mark's cover art and Al's OCD/whimsy. Thanks, Mark!)

Gods of Manhattan sees the Saint of Ghosts travelling to New York in the United Socialist States of America, where he encounters the impossibly heroic Doc Thunder and the dark and bloodthirsty Blood Spider, and helps uncover sinister plots and secret pasts and more evil Nazi goings-on.

We've just sent the next Ulysses Quicksilver adventure, Dark Side, off to press, with the new format cover.

Also very sexy. Particularly love Mark Harrison's dark homage to the famous "man in the moon" image from Georges Méliès' 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune (Okay, I had to look that up on Wikipedia; but didn't I look all informed and educated for just a second, there?), only slightly late, so you should be seeing that early next year.

This book sees Ulysses travelling to the Moon in search of his brother Barty, who's apparently (and fairly characteristically) fleeing gambling debts. Once he gets there, our intrepid dandy-adventurer encounters murders, conspiracies, secret bases, and all the usual shenanigans that he seems to find wherever he goes. It's as silly and fun as usual, but a bit... darker than the earlier books. Ulysses goes through the wringer a bit. You'll see.

(Also see a cameo by competition-winning Jared Shurin of Pornokitsch. He's well excited about this.)

...which brings me neatly to the next Pax Britannia competition! Jonathan Green loves Lego. Hell, who doesn't? He also loves steampunk. And we all love steampunk, or we wouldn't be reading/writing this blog post. And he's seen some steampunk lego that people have put together, and that's got him well-chuffed.

So he's offering another walk-on part in his coming Pax Britannia novel, Anno Frankenstein (Mark Harrison's cover shown right, although this will get redone with the new layout and text before it goes to press). Just send in a picture of your own Pax Britannia-inspired lego, and the one he likes best gets to be in his next book.

Check out his blog post about it.

Phew! That's a lot of stuff about Pax B. Might need a cup of tea and a sit down.

Cheers,

David