Click for a much larger, printable version.

So look, we were talking in the office, and as a joke, purely as a joke, I said – or maybe Lee said – words to the effect of: why don’t we turn Angstrom, the Angry Robot logo droid, into a mask and give it away for Halloween? We chuckled for a few moments, shook our heads, and went back to rejecting seventy more urban fantasies in which the Celtic Wild Hunt somehow rampage around Chicago, putting the willies up several characterless cardboard-cutout students.

Only… the other evening over too many beers I mentioned it to the nice people at our design agency, Argh! Nottingham. They laughed the sort of laugh that says, “You gotta be kidding.” and their eyes went all panicky. I reassured them that despite the earliness of the hour, I was deadly serious. They went away, they came back again, and thus…

Either print it onto as thick a piece of card as your printer can handle or glue a flimsier printout onto thicker card. (Note to self: Insert something here about A3 paper for people with scarily big heads, but don’t make any reference to one particular Angry Robot author, oh no.) Then cut around all the dotted lines without severing your fingers, do something clever with some thin elastic cord or glue it directly to your forehead, then go scare the bejeezus out of the neighbourhood. Slightly less comprehensive instructions are on the mask too.

And yes, we are serious. “Best” photos of you or unsuspecting child-units in full AR mufti will win prizes. Who’s up for an Angry Robot flash mob in the bar at World Fantasy? Now that’s terrifying!

Send your pics to: incoming [AT] angryrobotbooks.com

And the reviewers seem to agree. Here’s Walker of Worlds for starters:

“An entertaining read in an unforgiving environment. Following Karl Allman as he crash lands on a forgotten and primitive colony world where the terraforming looks like it’s going backwards, Winter Song is a novel that has more than a few surprises up its sleeve. I was expecting to walk into this with a more typical human vs. alien world theme where there were many strange and wonderful creatures. What I got was a story focused on human characters who developed and grew with each situation they face. If you enjoy a character-driven, intelligent and thoughtful novel then Winter Song is one you should be picking up. Highly recommended. 8/10″

Look left – I’m sure you’ll agree this one looks particularly angry. Well, I wouldn’t want to cross him!

The winner was Devin Harrigan and his magnificent creation, “Atomic Robot and the Thing From Beyond WorldCon”.

Devin wins a copy of every one of our books in our first year of publishing, an Angry Robot trophy and our undying admiration!

We’ve been beavering away behind the scenes for many months (well, I have for two, but Marco and Chris have a significant head start on me), and you can now read copious details of our first books and our authors.

Tomorrow we receive our first ARCs, and they’ll be sent out over the next week or so to UK-based reviewers – we launch in the UK in July (actually, our July books are out on June 25th) and in the US and the rest of the world in September. Ebooks of each title will debut worldwide alongside our British editions.

That’s not to say that overseas reviewers will be left in the lurch for the first few months – far from it! We’ll still be sending out electronic review copies, and news about forthcoming titles, and building our Robot Army – a taskforce of bloggers, genre site owners and others. There’s plenty still to do!

There will be plenty of things happening here at AngryRobotBooks.com, too, so remember to set your RSS feed, or join the Robot Army.