Gods of Manhattan Book Giveaway!

Wotcher all,

Graeme Flory over at Graeme's Fantasy Book Review is giving away some copies of Al Ewing's Pax Britannia: Gods of Manhattan. All you have to do to take part is tell him you're interested. Head on over to his blog to enter the comp!

Check It Out Here!

Cheers,

David

Review Backlog: Gods of Manhattan

Hi all,

As I've just explained over at the Solaris blog, Jenni and I have been so busy - since, basically, the start of November - with our editing and proofing, that we've only really been able to occasionally jump on the blog. I know Jenni's been slightly more helpful than me at keeping you updated; I've been rubbish.

Anyway, inevitably, my "reviews" email folder has been spilling over in this time, with reviews and stuff we've found on the internet, and since I know you're faintly ambivalent always thrilled to hear about reviews, I've decided to try and catch up with them a bit - not in order, but grouped by title.

Second update: Al Ewing's Gods of Manhattan. All of the Pax Britannia books are a whole bunch of fun, and this is no exception. Pretty much everone who's read this book has loved it.

Here are some of the people who have...

SF Site's Nathan Brazil was "in luck" when he received the book, writing:

"The story is a curious coupling of the straightforward and the subtly devious, playing with archetypes and sometimes using them like blunt instruments, but also blending in conceptual complexities and cunning plot twists. Most of all, Gods of Manhattan is a book in which the characters are written in such a way as to make the reader feel as if one has always known them."

I get the feeling it wasn't entirely Total Sci-Fi Online's Brigid Cherry's cup of tea, but she still obviously felt it was well done:

"This is real pulp material, the stuff of brooding humour, gritty violence and all-out action, with rugged (super)heroes and sarky dames."

Emotionally Fourteen's Brad Harmer evidently thought it was a hoot:

"The action scenes are fantastically well written, and you can actually feel each and every impact as it strikes home. If this was a comic, it would be written and drawn by Mike Mignola. It plays into the conventions of the superhero story, without ever being hampered by them."

Finally, Graeme Flory of Graeme's Fantasy Book Review gave it an extraordinary 9 and three quarters out of ten:

"I can’t emphasise enough how much fun I had with Gods of Manhattan, a read with no pretensions other than to give its reader a ride like never before. Not only does it succeed but it does so in some style."

So lots of good responses there. What are you waiting for? Go and buy it!

David

Photoblog - The SFX Weekender

So, finally posting some of the great photos we got from the SFX Weekender! Okay, so you had to wait, but do you remember the days when you had to wait at least a week for your holiday snaps? Well, pretend this is like that, alright?

The SFX Weekender saw a great turn-out from the authors of Abaddon Books!

We had Al Ewing, Jonathan Green and Scott Andrews with us for the weekend, signing books, selling books, scaring away loyal fans, singing karaoke, (because as we all know, Abaddon has a fine history of karaoke) and generally helping us spread the Abaddon message to more and more people. What is the Abaddon message, you say? We think it's MORE ZOMBIES. But send us your alternative suggestions...

Scott Andrews wears his Serious Author Face while signing books.

Jonathan Green meets his biggest fan! This guy had all of Jon's science fiction and fantasy books, even ones Jon didn't have copies of himself!

Al Ewing scares away the children. Whe people talk about the New Weird, they're talking about this man.

Al Ewing and Jonathan Green were on a panel, 'Dual Britannia' with the illustrious Bryan Talbot, China Miéville and Kate Griffin, about creating alternate Englands. It was a great panel, and we had a ton of people rush up to the dealer's room afterwards to check out their books!

The Abaddon Pub Hour was a great hit - where fans and authors alike sat down, with drinks, to talk about how to create pulp fiction novels, and to have a laugh brainstorming silly ideas for new pulp novels. You could hear people inside giggling and shouting their ideas even from outside the bar!

The most popular idea turned out to be full of bad puns, enter Mortal Wombat, a world where the time-travelling Dr. Hoof fights evil wombats... or something. David's chart might explain it better than I can.

So, a great time was had by all, thanks to all the authors and to all the fans who made time to meet us to tell us how much they love Abaddon! We love you guys too.

-

Whee! Al Ewing Interview!

Wotcher,

Well, we're pretty excited here at Abaddon Towers today. It's taken a lot of pleading, a certain amount of cajoling, a libation of raw meat, and your reporter... entering into certain offices he would rather not discuss openly, but we have finally persuaded notorious manimal Al Ewing - beloved 2000 AD comics writer, jobbing DJ, humorous Youtube movie maker, renowned star of karaoke and four-times critically-acclaimed Abaddon author - to emerge from his isolated fortress in Yorkshire to answer several questions. Rejoice!

Al graciously agreeing to an interview.

Abaddon: Hi, Al. Thanks for making time out of your busy schedule.

AE: Thanks, Dave, and sorry my schedule’s been busier than intended - I should have done this for you weeks ago.

Abaddon: It’s all good. You are, after all, a national treasure. Comics, novels, karaoke, short animated movies on Youtube. Is there no end to your talents? Do you sculpt? Dance the Rumba?

AE: I’m occasionally a panel guest on the Freaky Trigger show, Lollards Of Pop, on Resonance FM, as well as on its occasional ancillary shows. I’ll likely be a guest on the current season, so London listeners and visitors to freakytrigger.co.uk might want to keep an ear out for that. Plus I’ll be doing some DJ-ing at this year’s Thought Bubble in Leeds, along with Phonogram creators Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie and a bunch of other folks.

Not to be confused with the fourteenth-century
followers of John Wycliffe.

Abaddon: You DJ-ed at Thought Bubble last year, didn’t you? Ever gone (or considered going) pro with the DJing? Or is it strictly cons and socially?

Taking a well-earned break from DJing to dance

to Take That at Thought Bubble 2009.

AE: All cons all the time at the moment - I occasionally DJ friends’ weddings, but there aren’t any on the immediate horizon, and since Poptimism breathed its last earlier in the year (hopefully to withdraw into a healing cocoon and evolve into something new and fresh) I’ve been lacking an opportunity to pretend to take requests for Disco 2000 into consideration with my lying face while cuing up yet another Robyn track.

Poptimismism.

Abaddon: So. Books. After six years’ writing credits for 2000 AD, you wrote your first novel for Abaddon, El Sombra. Talk me through that. Had fiction writing previously been a major ambition?

Cover One: Shirtless Zorro vs. Nazi steambot.

AE: In a way – I’d tried to do a couple for Black Flame, including a great idea for how to handle Chopper that I touched on in the 20th Anniversary Judge Dredd Megazine story I wrote recently, and one that eventually became my first entirely-written-by-me Dredd story. But I always figured writing novels would be boring, so I never gave them much thought. Two things changed - Sue Fletcher, an old friend from University, wrote a brilliant and critically-acclaimed novel called Eve Green that made me realise how much fun writing a novel would be, and secondly it became very clear to me very quickly that I can’t write novels at all to save my life. So what I do is write comics without any pictures in them, and pretend they’re novels, and don’t tell anyone the truth. And that seems to make all the difference.

Abaddon: But you’ve told us now. I guess you’ll have to kill me! Heh, heh.

...Ahem. So, er... what led you to put forward an idea for the Pax Britannia world, rather than any of the others? Did you start with Zorro and Nazis, and then work it into a steampunk world, or start with steampunk and populate it with Zorro and Nazis?

AE: The former. Originally, it was going to be a fantasy setting, with winged creatures preying on normal humans inside a giant Eyrie, and then I took a look at the bible for the fantasy world and realised that wouldn’t fly (Ba-dum tissch). Anyway, it kind of fitted better into the steampunk world – I’m not really a fan of steampunk as such, but out of the four possibilities, the four universes, that Jon Oliver was offering at the time, it seemed like the one where I could most easily explore that kind of pulp-action sensibility.

Abaddon: Then we had I, Zombie. In the foreword to the omnibus edition, you mention that John Doe first took shape in an unwritten comics epic called Bountyman that you outlined in your angst-ridden teenage years. Did Zombo spring from the same roots? Are talking zombies your “thing”?

Cover Two: Zombie gumshoe.
...Weird insect-guy thing.

AE: Zombo sprang from Henry – you’ll have to pick up the first TPB*, Can I Eat You Please, for an in-depth chat between me and Henry on the subject of his creation, but when you do you’ll see that Henry was the God figure who created the garden of Zombo and I’m the Satan who corrupted it and brought it around to my way of thinking.

Al corrupted this.

I prefer talking zombies to non-talking zombies, but zombies generally aren’t really my deal – both I, Zombie and Zombo take the idea of zombies and turn them around into something else that the average zombie punter might not recognise so easily. Again, it’s using the genre on offer to talk about the ideas I want to talk about.

Abaddon: I think most of the authors on Tomes have subverted the genre. Forty years after Romero, you sort of have to. To be honest, I’m always surprised at how much very traditional zombie fiction (both prose and film) is out there.

So, third book and third protagonist: Death Got No Mercy’s Cade. Forgive me, but you’re just about the mildest, most contemplative man-mountain I have ever had the pleasure to meet. What made you decide to write about a force of unstoppable human carnage, and how do you feel you relate to him?

Cover Three: A Man! Punching! A Bear!

AE: I really wanted to write something incredibly violent, to be honest – I wanted to write the most violent thing I could imagine, and just have a load of fun with that. I don’t think it’s necessary for an author to relate completely to their character – you can see shades of my politics in Cade, but I certainly wouldn’t agree with how he handles most of his problems. It’s probably the least sympathetic protagonist I’ve written – he’s more of a spectacle than a character, really.

Abaddon: That helps. But why exactly did Scooby Doo have to die?

AE: He’s solving the Ultimate Mystery now.

Abaddon: Right. Er... And now you return to the scone of your first crime with Gods of Manhattan, the steampunk-superhero pastiche follow-up to El Sombra. Tell us a bit about it.

Cover Four: Super heroes and totty.

AE: It’s going back to El Sombra’s pulp roots. I basically got a little bored with the character – everything to say about him had been said in the first book, unless I wanted to cure him, which I didn’t. So I made him part of an ensemble cast.

In the third book – working title: Pax Omega – which I’m plotting as we speak, that ensemble cast is going to widen even further and I’m going to basically go to war with those nasty steam Nazis once and for all, so get ready for the final battle between man and mecha-fuehrer. There are possibilities beyond that - is it still steampunk in the year 1,000,000? How about the year 1,000,000,000? (Remember when a billion was a million million? I feel the humble billion has been devalued over the years, not to mention the trillion.) These are thoughts that have occurred to me. I’ll either take care of them in this book, if me and editor Jon Oliver can work out a way to make it sing, or I’ll chat with Jon Green about it in depth for an upcoming fourth volume. I’m still in plotting mode at the moment.

Today, the plight of the poor billion
is more relevant than ever...

But back to the second book, on shelves now! It’s all the wonderful energy of New York wrapped up into a high adventure package, with superheroes, pulp-noir detectives, dazzling ingenues, breakdancing, polygamy, BMX detectives, just a taste of pulp-cover naughtiness and what happens when Ebony White grows up… my own little attempt to grow a Wold Newton universe in Jon Green’s backyard. Buy it!

Abaddon: Excellent plug, and neatly worked in. So... Ah, yes. Noted reviewer Smashy McFace recently quashed (largely imagined) rumours about you by insisting that you have proven yourself a “real human man.”** Care to comment?

AE: Smashy is secretly one of my oldest friends and he’s well known for that sort of talk. He’s quite wrong, as the fleshy ones will soon discover - to their regret. Lock your doors.

Abaddon: Thank you. And I’ve just realised I have something I have to do, so we must wrap up. Any final comments?

AE: Thanks to anyone who’s written a glowing review, or even a semi-tolerant one. Like all writers, I pretend not to read my reviews while secretly craving the smallest scrap of appreciation and being crushed by the tiniest criticism. So please, don’t crush me! Love me! Love me, I beg of you!



At this point, Mr. Ewing had to be physically restrained and sedated, signalling an end to the interview. Out thanks go to him for very kindly providing these words.

Gods of Manhattan is out now in the US, and will hit the shelves in the UK in January. It will also be exclusively available at the Thought Bubble convention in Leeds on the 18th - 21st November, at the Travelling Man stand (if you track Al down while you're there, you can get him to autograph it right after you buy it!).

Cheers,

David


*For “Trade Paperback.” Al is part of the “Comics World,” and they have all kinds of cool acronyms and slang. I guess it’s hip, or something.
**No, seriously. Search for him now.

Reviewspamelot

Hola,

Quick spot of reviewspam for you...

The Falcata Times has weighed in to the spate of brilliant reviews of Scott Andrews' The Afterblight Chronicles: Children's Crusade with this glowing review:

Great characters, and some intriguing plots... Scott’s writing fits this set up to a tee, it’s got great characterisation, it has some serious pace and above all else the way in which the story’s lead character interacts with the reader makes them someone that you really care about. Great stuff.

And in the meantime, Jared over at Pornokitsch just loved Pax Britannia: Gods of Manhattan:

Ewing has written, in just shy of 250 pages, one of the best superhero pastiches I've ever read. From his dry take on the old pulp heroes stories to his disturbingly sinister version of Marvel's flagship hero, this is not something I ever expected to find outside of an Alan Moore graphic novel. He's used prose to describe comics (already something tricky), done so with a great deal of rewarding satire, and, most importantly, written a bloody enjoyable book. Gods of Manhattan is a terrific, inescapable book - in which absolutely anything can happen and, quite often, does.

Awesome.

David

Gods of Manhattan

“You’re in New York. Protocol went out the window the second you arrived.
This isn’t a protocol kind of town.
This is a town that breeds monsters and heroes, geniuses and madmen.
This town makes gods, and heaven help you, you wanted to be one of us.”

I've just finished editing Gods of Manhattan. I'm rather sad that I've finished, I had so much fun editing it, but hey, I can console myself with the fact that, very soon, our readers will get to enjoy it! It'll be out in shops at the end of July.

Book reviewers, bloggers, friends, (Romans, countrymen) and other editors who're on my personal Twitter and Facebook feeds will know that, while editing, I just Could Not Shut Up about how good this book was. I kept on quoting from particularly brilliant passages, telling people much fun it was, even declaring myself Queen of the Leopard Men at one point, after the fantastically pulpy character, Maya, Queen of Zor-Ek-Narr and girlfriend of the superhero Doc Thunder.

Well, just one blogpost about it, and then I'll find something else to talk about, I promise...

Maya frowned at Doc Thunder, irritated.
“You were flirting with her, weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t flirting, she’s an evil–”
“Oh, please! Like she’s not your type! Chain you to a dungeon wall and you’re anybody’s, I should know. Let me guess – did you tell her that beneath her iridescent beauty her evil shone cold and hard as a diamond?”
“Well, I didn’t say that exactly…”

Gods of Manhattan is set in Jon Green's steampunk universe, an alternative 20th Century where Britannia never did stop ruling the waves, and where Queen Victoria is still kept 'alive' by steam technology: our Pax Britannia line of novels. However, whereas Green's books focus on Ulysses Quicksilver, the most dashing secret agent the British Empire has ever employed, Gods of Manhattan takes us over the pond, to the good ol’ United Socialist States of America (By the way, you certainly don't have to have read the Ulysses Quicksilver novels to enjoy Gods of Manhattan, but they are very good).

NEW YORK, USSA - The steam-powered city of tomorrow where psychedelic beat-poets rumble with punk futurists in the rain-drenched alleys, and where mad science colludes with the monstrous plans of the Meccha-Fuhrer!
NEW YORK, USSA - City of dazzle and danger. Only here could we find The Blood Spider, Doc Thunder and the saint of ghosts known as El Sombra!
NEW YORK, USSA - The setting for a bloody battle of steel will and science gone wild in a contest to save the city of tomorrow - or end it!

If you like superhero comics and secret identities – and you love stories like Watchmen and Astro City that play with the genre – you'll want to read this book.

If you like steampunk and alternate histories, if you want a writer who's really thought about what steampunk and alternate histories actually mean, you'll love it.

If you want a story about heroes wrestling with human and superhuman problems, about what happens when characters' moral codes collide, about being on the right side of the wrong side of the law, you'll love this book.

And if you just want a story about some guys and gals beating up Nazis who really, really deserve it, this is also your book.

Doc Thunder says all true patriots will read this book. And you wouldn't want to make him mad, would you?

[click picture for larger, high-def version]

-