Causing Pandemonium
Sunday, June 03, 2012
June is the season for Pandemonium: an event, new books and our first ever audio! Plus, a round-up of reviews and rumours.
Forbidden Planet's Small Press Expo
We're delighted to be one of four featured presses at Forbidden Planet's upcoming Small Press Expo on Saturday, 30 June, 1.00 - 2.30 pm, hosted at their London store. Pandemonium (under our nom de dinosaur of Jurassic London) will be proudly represented by Sophia McDougall, Jonathan Green, Lavie Tidhar, Glen Mehn, Esther Saxey and David Thomas Moore. And hopefully we'll have even more guests to add in closer to the date... [Editor's note: Like the recently-confirmed Rebecca Levene!]
Also attending will be great writers from NewCon, Myrmidon and Snow Books, including Pat Cadigan, Christopher Priest, Nina Allen, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Paul Kane, Ian Whates and Marie O'Regan.
We'll have the last remaining hardcovers of Stories of the Smoke for sale at the event. These have been signed by several of the contributors in preparation for the day. We'll also have the first copies of our new novelette range – read on for details.
Smoke gets in your ears: a collaboration with Dark Fiction Magazine
Dark Fiction Magazine, the monthly short fiction podcast, has created a special edition issue around Stories of the Smoke – it just came out this weekend. It includes recordings of four stories:
- Sarah Lotz's "Inspector Bucket Investigates" (read by Jim Moon)
- David Thomas Moore's "Cuckoo" (read by the author)
- Lavie Tidhar's "A Brief History of the Great Pubs of London" (read by Emma Newman)
- Archie Black's "Uncle Smoke" (read by Charles Hunt)
These recordings are completely free. We hope you enjoy them – and please, recommend them to all your friends.
The new Pandemonium novelette series
We're also introducing our new range of collectible novelettes this month. Each volume features one of the longer Pandemonium stories (past, present and future) and comes in a signed, lettered edition of 26 copies. We'll be creating one for each anthology, plus a few extras as we go along.
The first three will be launched at the Small Press Expo:
- Sophia McDougall's "Not the End of the World" (originally from Stories of the Apocalypse)
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange) (from Lost Souls, with cover art by Vincent Sammy and an introduction from the editors)
- Adam Roberts' "An account of a voyage from World to World again, by way of the Moon, 1726" (a very early look at The Lowest Heaven)
The novelettes will go on sale for £6.99 / $10 each. We are accepting an limited number of pre-orders. If you are interested in purchasing one (or a set of) novelettes, please email us.
Just a friendly reminder, the best way to hear about these offers is through our mailing list - subscribers get all the news first.
Reviews and rumours
You may have spotted some love for Stories of the Smoke in the Guardian this weekend, as Eric Brown called the anthology's stories "consistently entertaining, with several stand-outs". Smokealso picked up glowing reviews recently from Rob Berg at Dreampunk.me ("a fantastic sampler of cutting-edge storytelling"), A Fantastical Librarian, Disinformed and Paperless Reading.
Stories of the Apocalypse is now over halfway towards out-of-printness – from the end of October, it will no longer be on sale. It isn't going quietly into the deep dark night, with recent (and lovely) reviews from Kaitharsharyr and A Fantastical Librarian ("a great first outing for this special press").
We're no longer taking submissions for Crossroads. Thank you to everyone who sent in a story. We're reading them them now, and hope to get back to you soon, but, er... there are rather a lot of them, so it may take a couple weeks. We are still accepting submissions for 1853 (stories due by 1 August).
Lost Souls is still on track for August. We'll share the process in excruciating detail at some point, but for now, we're delighted to be done with the rather exhausting "retyping all the stories from scratch" stage. It has been a long and (incredibly boring) process, but what's the point of tracking down lost stories if you don't do it properly?
Finally, Lauren Beukes' guest post revealed that celebrated cover artist Joey HiFi is "working on a secret project for Pandemonium". We deny this wholeheartedly. Dale Halverson a.k.a. Joey HiFi is not working on a secret project for Pandemonium. He's working on two secret projects for Pandemonium. We're delighted for this opportunity to set the record straight.
As to the other rumours (most of which we've started ourselves), including those of upcoming collaborations with Maurice Broaddus, Tricia Sullivan, Paul Cornell, Jonathan Green, Simon Morden and Kameron Hurley... we confirm or deny nothing. Yet.
(Psst. Follow us - as Jurassic - on Facebook for more Panda news.)