Here’s what you could win:

You want them all, don’t you? Oh, yes you do! (Click for a larger image and get your print-acquisition instincts all a-quiver…)

The competition is being run by SciFiNow and to be in with a chance of winning you’ll need to visit the SciFiNow website and follow the entry instructions. Usual sort of thing: answer an easy-peasy Empire State themed question, hand over your name and email address, then cross your little fingers for all you’re worth. Nothing you meat-sacks can’t handle, we’re sure. And the competition closes on February 15th, so you’ve got a whole four weeks to get your act together.

Also in the latest issue of SciFiNow (number #63 – the one with the survivors of the Great Being Human Exodus of 2012 on the front) you’ll find (on page 90) a review for Empire State in which Dan Howdle says things like: “What [Adam] Christopher manages so successfully is to combine the fast-talking wit of the likes of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler with the frayed super has-beens of Alan Moore” and “Empire State is highly recommended to those who like their sci-fi dark, pacey and woven tight by multiple threads of intrigue”. This Dan Howdle fellow is clearly a meat-sack of excellent taste and fine judgement.

There were some great entries (and some not so great). Where there were multiple entries based on the same novel we chose not to take the first entry, but the one we thought funniest or closer to the tone of the original title.

So, the runners-up (who all receive a copy of the ARC):

• @Pat_JG with A Scanner Darkly Dreaming Dexter
• @debutdrmag with Murder on the Orion Express and The Maltese Millennium Falcon
• @Stephenwest with Evil Under Twin Suns

and

• @erik_lundqvist with Murder She Blogged (yes, it’s not SF, but we liked it, and it’s our competition, so shut it!)

and the winner (who will receive a copy of the ARC plus something else from the Angry Robot cupboard of cool):

• @markhwilliams with The Girl with the Dragon Tatooine

Congratulations, everyone – your books should reach you before the weekend!

___

*Some international competitions, coming soon…

We asked Anne to choose the winner, herself.

And the winner is Psychomacologist with:
Too late, Christmas Tree realised her fairy lights were blinking “I want you inside me” in binary…

With honourable mentions to:

Alex with Angry Robot was confused by Traffic Light Tree’s mixed signals.
Ben Love with Red, yellow, green. You’re giving me mixed signals, baby.
and
Erin with You’re much fancier looking than the usual dead-tree editions.

A copy of the ARC will be winging its way to Psychomacologist (if that is your real name). Alex, Ben and Erin all win a consolatory grin.

A list of all the entries can be found in the comments, here.

Lovely Aliette de Bodard went deep, deep into the world of Acatl as she discussed the final novel in the Obsidian & Blood trilogy, Master of the House of Darts, with the Faster Times.

Aaand she made this lovely trailer for this latest Acatl novel too. Studio roll VT:

Aaaaaaaaand she’s running a really cool Aztec-themed competition on her blog. Check it out and win win win, as apparently they say!

Lovely Trent Jamieson talked all things Roil with the nice folks at Ranting Dragon.

Ahead of the concluding volume, King’s War, lovely Maurice Broaddus took a long, hard look at the extraordinary world of his Knights of Breton Court series for the Pudge Factor.

Lovely Lauren Beukes, modestly not mentioning much about her massive, massive new book deal (me and her mother, Mrs Harris, are so damn proud), was interviewed by Bruce Sterling. Yes, that Bruce Sterling.

Anne Lyle was lovely enough to share some advance secrets from her upcoming magical Elizabethan fantasy The Alchemist of Souls with Fran Terminielo.

The lovely KW Jeter was Guest of Honor at Steamcon III recently. Check out the pics and a great write up from Steampunk News. We think all our authors should get an official convention photo done with a girl with a boat on her head. No, just because.

And finally, no skateboarding puppies this week, but instead the lovely Lavie Tidhar gave great podcast for the Skiffy & Fanty Show in this discussion of his new novel Osama. It’s not by us, but it’s bloody great so fair dues and all that.

The competition was fierce – we received over 65 entries to the competition, many of which were of the highest quality. We got beautiful line art, some Steampunk fashion drawings, a haiku or two, photos of you all dressed up in your gear, Steampunk conversions, tattoos…and even a photo of an Angry Robot decked out in a flying cap! Thanks to everyone who took part and who sent in pieces, I had great fun sifting through them all – you are very a talented bunch.

The judging team included Lee and I, as well as Roland (one of our UK sales team) and Sara and John (our US sales and marketing team) – and we had a very difficult job in front of us. After much debate we all went off into a corner and each selected our own top 5 list – which I then combined using complex algorithms (and an abacus) to work out who had won.

So without delay, here are the runners up – in no particular order – who will each receive a pack of our Steampunk books:

Darren – for his fabulous pictures of a very cool dirigible.

Aaron – for his pictures of two Steampunk weapons (a rifle and a pistol) along with some very ambitious concept art for his next couple of planned pieces.

Melanie – for her brilliantly constructed Steampunk guitar, shot in glorious detail, using a real guitar for a base and turning it into a fabulously realized piece of Steampunk rock!

And finally – drum roll please…..

The winner of a Steampunked Kindle is:

Michal – whose entry was a pop-up Steampunk birthday card. His entry melted the hearts of all the judges. It was cute, it was clever, it was unique and it was a brilliant idea. It stood out as a surprisingly minimalist entry when compared to the coils of copper and bolts that dominated some of the conversions. A Steampunked Kindle, pre-loaded with a bunch of our books is heading towards him now, on the fastest zeppelin in our arsenal! Congratulations Michal!

Over the next couple of days I will be posting up images of the winning entry and the three runners, so keep an eye out for some glorious Steampunk goodness!

We have a few ARCs of Hard Spell by Justin Gustainis and The World House: Restoration by Guy Adams left in the office.

Would you like one?

If so, here’s what we want you to do:

In the comments section of this thread, give us the URL of something robot-related. Could be an image, an article, a song, whatever.

The ones that meet our arbitrary guidelines for winning (which we will probably make up on the spot) will win. Along with your link, simply state which book you would prefer, should you win. You’ll need to put your email address in so we can contact you, but that won’t show up in the comments (unless you type it into the comments box itself, of course. Duh).

Because we realise that Restoration needs you to have read The World House before you can fully enjoy it, we’re going to throw in a copy of that, too.

Now go – find some ‘bots. Deadline is Monday 13th June, 8.00am (GMT, or BST, or whatever the hell it is at the moment – UK time, anyway).

To celebrate the book’s journey across the planet, she announced on Twitter today that she’s going to run a little contest:

The first person in each country to prove to Kaaron that they’ve got a copy of her book, will receive a small prize – direct from the good lady, herself.

Australia has been claimed, as has Burma.

If you’re somewhere other than these countries (or any of the others that might have been claimed by the time this blog post was written), then contact Kaaron via Twitter, Facebook or through the message system on her blog.

That clever Mr John Anealio and the equally-talented Mr Matt Forbeck are jointly responsible for the Angry Robot theme tune – John for the melody and Matt for the lyric.

Crazy cats that we are, in March we decided to run a competition to create a remix of the tune, and we had loads of entries. Mr Anealio is currently putting together a downloadable album of all the entries (which were uniformly great), but until then we thought you might like to hear the winners (who get to die horrific deaths in Matt’s next Angry Robot book, Carpathia).

Dale Chase.

Here are the best three, as judged by Matt, John and the robot overlord, Marc Gascoigne. The files will stream, but they’re quite large, so may take a fair few seconds to buffer.

In third place, David Ritter (MacMufasa).

In second place, Denis Cherryman

and the winner:

Dale O’neil Chase. (www.dalechase.com)

Send us your examples of cool Steampunk stuff – maybe it is a photo of you in your leather and copper get up, or a picture of a day-to-day item that you have converted into a glorious piece of Steampunk tech. Maybe it is a quick sketch you jotted down in a notebook. Hell – it could even be a Steampunk inspired song you have written and performed – or perhaps a Haiku that has been spinning round the inside of your skull for the last few months.

Pretty much anything Steampunk is eligible. Except – and this is important – for novels or short stories. We already have enough to read with all the submissions we got in March. After all we did get 990 submissions in four weeks!

Send your Steampunk awesomeness to 
steampunk@angryrobotbooks.com

The best submission will win the Kindle (with a steampunk skin from Gelaskins). We’ll also include 5 eBooks for you to start your collection – Kell’s Legend, King Maker, Servant of the Underworld, Crown of the Blood and The World House.

Three runners-up will also get copies of all of the books that feature in our steampunk month.

The competition closes at midnight on May 15th 2011 (wherever you are in the world).

OK, so first there were our wonderful monthly podcasts, conducted by Mighty Mur Lafferty (no really, that’s her full three-word name – check her passport if you don’t believe us). To help give her broadcasts a proper opening, our Mur commissioned the uncontainable talents of John Anealio to create the Angry Robot theme tune. And lo, toes were tapped most verily and heads they did nod.

Its life-changing twenty-two seconds were enough to lead into whichever of our intrepid authors were braving Mur’s piercing questions, but unbeknownst to us mere mortals, minds immeasurably superior to ours were beavering away behind the scenes on something far grander. For yes indeed, that man Matt Forbeck was plotting away with the selfsame Anealio to produce a version that had, oh my, verses… containing, gasp, lyrics, no less. And thus it became lead track on John’s recent Robots EP, still available for ** free ** download over at Bandcamp.

But that busy Mr Anealio couldn’t resist fiddling about. Typical human. So this week he debuted the following gentle mood manipulator, the unplugged version of “Angry Robot”, via the primitive broadcast system known as YouTube:

But why should the composer have all fun, you cry! Where’s our chance to dick around with this song, you demand! Well hush yo mouth and listen up, sparky, cos that’s what we’re getting to.

For yes, we can proudly announce our next frankly mental contest. Unlike your average genre publisher, Angry Robot has a theme tune. Now it’s time for you guys to REMIX THE THEME TUNE. Here’s all you have to do…

1) Follow the link of your choice below to download the multitracked parts of John and Matt’s full length Angry Robot song.

2) Slice, dice, layer, shuffle, remix, scratch, burn, weld, rip, belay and flense them into a totally different form. Or use these as inspiration for your own band’s version. Or get out comb, paper and vastly expensive sampling software now inexplicably available on your iPhone for only 59¢ and make the ultimate bootleg mash-up. Whatever it takes, make us a new version of the Angry Robot song and rock our metal souls.

3) Send us the resultant magnificent octopus as an MP3, by the end of April 1st.

Assisted by the astute brains of Mr John Anealio and the very Reverend Matt Forbeck we’ll pick our favourites and host them here. If we get enough good tracks, we can probably be persuaded to sort out a Bandcamp EP of all of them, for one and all to download until the robot cows come home.

And of course the very best one will win something as demented as the song: you’ll get a role in Matt Forbeck’s next novel for Angry Robot – and a very nasty death is guaranteed too!

The various parts you need are no longer available, because the competition has closed. Sorry.

John said to tell you muso types that the original files are in D minor, at 116 bpm. Yeah, like, back in the lab, professor! Anyways, send your entries as an MP3, preferably inside a .zip file, to us at incoming@angryrobotbooks.com

Don’t forget sensible stuff like your name and email address, and remember to ask your parent or guardian before using any scissors.

THE SMALL PRINT
All samples are provided as is. All samples are freely usable in any way you see fit, under Creative Commons. You are allowed to chop these samples into pieces, loop fragments, blow them up, timestretch them out, do whatever. If you use any samples from *other people’s works* for some demented mash-up and they come after you with swanky lawyers, we don’t know you. If somehow you have a top ten hit with these and are suddenly neck-deep in floozies and fast cars, ours is a pint of champers and a Ferrari. Each. You agree that we can post your mad remixes on the internet for humans to hear.