Well, another year over, and a new one just begun. (Hmm, sounds familiar…) So I poked our Lee and our Chris to get me a Top Cool Things of 2008 list or three, and rattled one off of my own. Then I flung them together with some pictures off the interweb. As you’ll see, we all took somewhat different approaches to this one. Anyway here they all are. Sorry. More →
Xmas opening hours
Our remote snowbound outpost will be unmanned between Weds Dec 24th and Monday Jan 5th. However, we’ll be picking up and replying to email sporadically, so feel free to drop us a line if you need us.
When we return, we will have details of our first season for you. Oh yes.
Happy holidays, flesh-covered lifeforms.
All we want for Xmas is world domination
Here comes Halloween
As Marc’s been looking towards our first batch of acquisitions (news coming soon!), it’s been very clear there’s a brewing trend for a next wave of horror writers out there. It’s something that mills around in publishing circles, where we keep on waiting for the great resurgence of commercially successful horror writing after the halcyon days of the 80s. And we keep on talking about it, but still it doesn’t come back!
And here we are, of course on the one day per year when everyone’s thinking horrific thoughts in the glorious pagan-capitalist tradition that is Halloween.
So where
Hot or Not?
I admit it, I’ve watched Ghost in the Shell too many times.
I was never a BladeRunner fan – something about it always made me want to fall asleep, though that may have been perpetually watching it half-cut at 3am when I was younger. But Ghost in the Shell? That got me, with it’s “past man, past machine” schtick. But when you see the prosaic reality underneath the philosophising, it’s both deeply disappointing and MORE disturbing than any movie. This Actroid female robot is like some kinda botox freak out of LaLaland done as only Japan can –
Nods head repeatedly and cries “Yes yes yes”
It’s rare at the moment to read a debate about science fiction and agree so wholeheartedly with most of it, but SF Signal’s current mind-meld on “The Future of Written Science Fiction” had me nodding so vigorously I almost sued myself for whiplash injuries. The question of what happens to the literature of the future when the future actually arrives seems to be exercising some writers and editors rather a lot at the moment. For some, that means writing SF gets harder (Charles Stross recently opined that for him it now verges on the impossible); for others, that
Simon & Schuster head east for genre kicks
a pre-emptive six figure sum
The emerging BRIC economies should be fertile territory for genre – there’s stuff taking place in the wildfire of those hyperspeed capitalist environments Western writers have barely dreamed of. And it needs telling, or re-telling into amazing parables of the future or the mythic
Fable II, and the genre genius of Peter Molyneux
Peter Molyneux is one of the games industry auteurs people have been slowly been learning to think of in the same way we think about Film boys like Spielberg: commercial geniuses whose talent comes in large part from organising and enabling other peoples creativity as much as expressing their own. So when Molyneux, who these days runs Lionhead, turns to Fantasy themes to place his games, we should be interested (and are! Well, I am anyways…).
Fable II, released yesterday is a big moment. Partly because Fable I, as Molyneux himself admitted, was a disappointment; partly
What is the sound of an Angry Robot?
It’s important to set a context for the trip ahead, and whilst this business is all about words, it still needs a soundtrack.
So what would an Angry Robot listen to? We know that just plain ol’Robots dig Kraftwerk, the man-machine metronomes. And we can assume that self-hating Robot’s Rage Against the Machine. But if I was an Angry Robot right now, I’d be optimistic, and excited about the trip ahead, channeling the Angry-ness – so who better than the mighty, wide-eyed and wonderful Yeasayer to set the tone?
I saw this on Pitchfork this morning, and as we start thinking about
Push the button!
So yeah, here we are. All a bit new around here at the moment – a lot of Angry Robot is still cellophane-wrapped for your protection. Protection from what, though, we’re not sure yet…
Until we have some books to announce formally, we’re going to use the blog format for our website. That should mean we can rattle away about the various headline topics that come up as we turn Angry Robot from a crazy idea that might just work… into stark, terrifying reality.
A few of our friends
