The Bookman Histories: Cover Reveal!

Well the guys at Angry Robot kept this quiet! Art by John Coulthart.

Stranger than Fiction

Via E.J. Swift (whose debut novel, Osiris, you really need to get!) I got this link, uncannily echoing the lizard boys in The Bookman…

And if you thought the Bookman itself was far-fetched, it turns out there’s a real-life Bookman in Indonesia, a shadowy assassin who murders people with… yes, boobie-trapped books.

Can’t make this shit up.

The Bookman Histories – now in audiobooks!

The full set of the Bookman Histories have now been released in audio book form by Audible.

The Bookman, narrated by Jonathan Keeble, 20 hours, 50 minutes.

Camera Obscura, narrated by Karen Cass, 11 hours, 20 minutes.

The Great Game, narrated by Jonathan Keeble, 10 hours, 22 minutes.

Hayakawa’s Steampunk Issue

This is very cool, though I can’t help shake out Alphaville’s Big in Japan from my head!

Hayakawa, Japan’s premier SF magazine, has recently released a special Steampunk issue, including my Bookman Histories story “The Stoker Memorandum” (which you can read in English, for free, at Daily Science Fiction).

This is my first Japanese publication! And I have to confess I dreamed of being in Hayakawa for years. Many, many thanks to Yoshio Kobayashi for making this possible.

Contents:

• The Mad Scientist’s Daughters by Theodora Goss (trans. Junko Suzuki)
• Reluctance by Cherie Priest (trans. ?)
• Silver Lining by Tim Pratt (trans. Yoshio Kobayashi)
• Clockwork Fairies by Cat Rambo (trans. Hiro Takasato)
• The Stoker Memorandum by Lavie Tidhar (trans. Yoshio Kobayashi)
• The Age of Miracles, The Age of Wonder by Aliette de Bodard ( (trans. Yoshio Kobayashi)

The Bookman released in Germany!

I’m delighted to say the German edition of The Bookman is now out! Bookman: Das Ewige Empire 1 (Bookman: The Eternal Empire 1) is now out from my German publishers, Piper Verlag, translated by Michael Koseler.

For German readers, The Bookman is reviewed in The Daily Steampunk by Marcus Rauchfuss, who says: Ein faszinierender, vielschichtiger Steampunkroman, der in keiner Sammlung fehlen sollte. 10 von 10 Zeppelinen.

Five-book deal to Audible

I’m delighted to announce the audio rights sale of five novels to Audible.com, the Internet’s largest publisher of audio books. The sale was negotiated by my agents, John Berlyne and John Parker, of the Zeno Literary Agency.

Coming soon to audio, then!

• The Bookman
• Camera Obscura
• The Great Game
• The Tel Aviv Dossier (with Nir Yaniv)
• Osama

Very excited about this, obviously!

New reviews for Gorel and The Bookman

A couple of new reviews have just appeared. First off, Pornokistch review Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God:

Lavie Tidhar’s Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011) is a self-styled “guns and sorcery” novella. Mr. Tidhar, as previously noted, is one of the great masters of the pastiche. In this instance, however, Mr. Tidhar has created something uniquely his own – a delightfully Weird pulp tale that could easily sit on a shelf alongside Leiber, Vance and Moorcock. – continue reading or buy the book.

Second, Red Rook Review reads The Bookman:

The Bookman, a mesmerizing tour-de-force, refreshes Steampunk, while adhering to its basic elements and demonstrating the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of the genre and his endearing love of literature. Its major theme is myth; however, its subsidiary theme is books or, more, precisely literature. – continue reading or buy the book.

Get The Bookman for just 99p!

Angry Robot Books have gone craaaaaazy! You can now get The Bookman for the Kindle for just 99p!

That’s right! 99 pence!

What are you waiting for!

And if that’s not all, you get a set of steak knives absolutely free!!*

Get The Bookman for just 99p now!

* no you don’t.

Camera Obscura – now on the Kindle!

You can now get Camera Obscura in a Kindle edition – $7.99 US, or £4.48 UK.

You can also get The Bookman for the Kindle now – £4.48 (but currently on £3.58) UK, or $6.79 US.

On Bad Reviews

Everyone gets bad reviews. Some of my personal favourites for The Bookman – the 1- and 2-star reviews on Amazon UK – include:

• Utter tripe.
• I no longer need worry about a cure for insomnia.
• It made my head thump trying to read it.
• This novel is so slow that I tended to drift away thinking about other things, like washing-up or something.
• Totally unreadable.
• Whilst you may have the ingredients to bake a cake, it does not follow that you will end up with something edible.
• I could be kind and say the author has recreated authentically some of the poor writing of the period, but that’s not really an excuse.
• [an] aimless and absurd book.
• Yuk.
• I’m not getting the next book, it’ll just irritate me, I’ll start moaning to my wife about it and she’ll start Tutting at me…..it’s not worth it.

Some of them are great! Anyway it awakened my competitive streak – why should other people have all the fun? – so here’s my own put-down of The Bookman, with an appropriately obscure reference to boot!

Reading Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman made me want to smash my head against the looking glass repeatedly, all the while screaming ‘How’s Annie! How’s Annie! How’s Annie!