Venetia Gosling, Editorial Director of Simon & Schuster Children’s Books in London, has acquired world rights in two teenage ghost novels by Curtis Jobling.  The first novel, entitled Haunt, will be published in 2013, with the sequel following in 2014. The agent was John Jarrold.

Curtis is the author of four Wereworld fantasy novels published successfully by Puffin on both sides of the Atlantic, with two more volumes already signed up.  He said, of this deal:

“I’m delighted to be working with Venetia and Simon & Schuster on Haunt. The book is ultimately about friendship, and how not even death’s bony fingers can tear it apart. I wanted to marry comedy and the supernatural together and write a ghostly tale from the point of view of a teenager whose life has been stolen away on the cusp of great things. Well, on the cusp of snogs from the girl of his dreams, anyway. I wondered whether an awkward, nerdy youth would draw on some profound inner power when faced with a limbo existence, haunting his best friend. As ill luck would have it, he becomes an awkward, nerdy ghost. I’d like to say that this isn’t semi-autobiographical, but who am I kidding?”

Curtis Jobling designed the BAFTA-winning Bob the Builder and is also the creator of Frankenstein’s Cat, the BBC’s hit children’s animation series based upon his book of the same name. In addition he has numerous shows in development with Disney, the BBC and others.

Angry Robot is delighted to announce a three-book deal with hugely talented fantasy writer Emma Newman. The World English Rights deal – negotiated between Angry Robot editor Lee Harris and Jennifer Udden of the Donald Maass Literary Agency – is for three books in Emma’s The Split Worlds series, starting with Between Two Thorns which is scheduled to be published in Spring 2013.

Emma Newman was born in a tiny coastal village in Cornwall during one of the hottest summers on record. Four years later she started to write stories and never stopped until she penned a short story that secured her a place at Oxford University to read Experimental Psychology.

In 2011 Emma embarked on an ambitious project to write and distribute one short story per week – all of them set in her Split Worlds milieu – completely free to her mailing list subscribers.

A debut short-story collection, From Dark Places, was published in 2011 and her debut post-apocalyptic novel for young adults, 20 Years Later, was published in 2012. Emma is also a professional audiobook narrator.

The Split Worlds is an urban fantasy setting with gritty noir, fantastical magic, evil faeries and people just trying to drink their tea in peace.

Dynastic families feud across the ages, furthering the agendas of their powerful supernatural patrons. Opposing secret courts wage clandestine wars to establish their control over humanity. Innocents are protected by monsters and the beautiful ones are seldom what they seem…

In the first book in the series, Between Two Thorns, something is wrong in Aquae Sulis, Bath’s secret mirror city. The new season is starting and the Master of Ceremonies is missing. Max, an Arbiter of the Split Worlds Treaty, is assigned with the task of finding him with no one to help but a dislocated soul and a mad sorcerer. There is a witness but his memories have been bound by magical chains only the enemy can break.

A rebellious woman trying to escape her family may prove to be the ally Max needs. But can she be trusted? And why does she want to give up eternal youth and the life of privilege she’s been born into?

Locus Online reports the death of artist / illustrator Leo Dillon who, along with his wife Diane Dillon, illustrated numerous SF novels including many covers for Ace Books in the 1960s. The duo are particularly well-known for their iconic cover and interior illustrations for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology.

They are the only artist team to jointly win a Hugo for Best Professional Artist (1971), and they received a joint World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.

An obituary for Leo Dillon can be found at Tor.com HERE

Photo (c) Andrew Porter shows Leo and Diane Dillon at the opening of Fusion Designs, the gallery run by their son Lee and his partner, Greg Schmitz

Angry Robot has scooped another fantastic debut author with the signing of Chicago-based science fiction writer Wesley Chu.

The World English Rights deal – negotiated between Angry Robot editor Lee Harris and Russell Galen of the Scovil, Galen and Ghosh Literary Agency – is for the first two books in The Lives of Tao: a high-octane sci-fi action series that mashes up Jason Bourne, Chuck and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Both books are scheduled for publication in 2013.

“The Lives of Tao follows out-of-shape loser and IT technician Roen, who finds his world turned inside out and upside down when a friendly alien hitches a ride inside his mind. Because this is no ordinary friendly alien: the entity in question is a secret agent, fighting an aeons-old war against the Genjix, a rival alien organisation hell-bent on destroying the Earth in their quest to return to their rightful place in the galaxy.

Roen has his work cut out for him. He needs to develop a stiff jab, make the grade as a covert operative and find a way to save the planet, all while being hunted by the deadly agents of the Genjix.”

The Zeno Agency welcomes South African author Charlie Human as a client with the news of a two-book deal. Charlie’s debut novel Apocalypse Now Now, plus an untitled follow-up, has sold to Jack Fogg at Century in a deal negotiated by John Berlyne of Zeno. Century will publish in the UK and Commonwealth (Excluding South Africa) in summer 2013. South African rights have been sold in a separate deal to Frederik de Jager at Random House Struik.

A sharp urban fantasy with a uniquely South African twist, Apocalypse Now Now has been described by fellow South African writer Lauren Beukes as ‘… mad and dark and irreverent and wonderfully twisted in all the right ways’. Here’s a taster:

“Baxter Zevcenko is your average sixteen-year-old-boy — if by average you mean kingpin of a schoolyard porn syndicate and possible serial killer who suffers from surreal nightmares. Which may very well be what counts as average these days. Baxter is the first to admit that he’s not a nice guy. After all, if the guy below you falls, dragging you down into an icy abyss you have to cut him loose — even in high school.

That is until his girlfriend, Esmé, is kidnapped and Baxter is forced to confront a disturbing fact about himself — that he has a heart, and the damn thing is forcing him to abandon high-school politics and set out on a quest to find her. The clues point to supernatural forces at work and Baxter must admit that he can’t do it alone. Enter Jackie Ronin, supernatural bounty hunter, Border War veteran, and all-round lunatic, who takes him on a chaotic tour of Cape Town’s sweaty, occult underbelly.

What do glowing men, transsexual African valkyries, and zombie-creating arachnids have to do with Esmé’s disappearance? That’s what Baxter really, really needs to find out.”

Charlie Human is a writer from Cape Town, South Africa. His short story, The Immaculate Particle, appeared in Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, and Land of the Blind was printed in the UK version of Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town.

All other rights are with the Zeno Agency.

Bloomsbury has pre-empted world English rights in The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon in a major three book deal and will publish the first of the seven book series in print and ebook globally on 12 September 2013, after the author graduates from Oxford University. Bloomsbury Editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle moved to acquire the series from David Godwin at DGA during the London Book Fair, ahead of meetings with other publishers.

The Bone Season is a startling combination of a unique literary voice, a fully conceived, terrifying parallel world and a narrative pace that grips like a vice. It marks the arrival of an extraordinarily talented British writer set to challenge the worldwide bestseller list domination of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.

The Bone Season begins in 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of London, based at Seven Dials, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. She works as an envoy between secret cells: she drops in and out of people’s minds. For Paige is a lucid dreamer, a clairvoyant, and in her world, the world of Scion, she commits high treason simply by breathing. It is raining the day her life changes forever. Attacked, kidnapped and transported to Oxford, a city that has been kept secret for two hundred years, she meets Warden, a Rephaite with dark honey skin and heavy-lidded yellow eyes. He is the single most beautiful and frightening thing she has every laid eyes on—and he will become her keeper.

Born in 1991, the daughter of a policeman, Samantha Shannon grew up in Ruislip in West London and went to Bishop Ramsey School. One of the Harry Potter generation, Samantha Shannon devoured books and wrote her first 200,000 word novel while studying for her GCSEs. Her mother worried that that her obsessive 15 hours a day writing habit was damaging her health. Now halfway through her degree at St Anne’s College, Oxford, Samantha Shannon talks of the inspiration behind the series:

“The Bone Season came to me during my first year of university. I’ve always been fascinated by the supernatural. Reading John Donne’s poetry, I thought up the idea of there being a sort of ‘spirit trade’ in a world populated by clairvoyants. This came together with my love for dystopia, inspired by Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Early in the writing of The Bone Season, I realized it was a big story to tell but I know exactly what will happen to Paige and how it will all end.”

SFScope announces the death of horror author Michael Louis Calvillo on 30 April 2012 following his battle with cancer. He was 37.

A Bram Stoker finalist twice, with his 2007 novel I Will Rise and this year with his novella 7 Brains, his other books include Death & Desires in the Age of Women, Blood & Gristle, Bleed for You, and Blood Hunter. His final novel, Lambs, is scheduled to be published by Dark Fuse shortly. A tribute to him is featured on the Dark Fuse website.

SFScope reports that a number of Octavia E. Butler‘s acclaimed and award-winning SF novels will be published in electronic format for the first time by Open Road Integrated Media. These include the Nebula Award-winning Parable of the Talents and the Xenogenesis trilogy.

Butler, who died in 2006, was the first African-American woman to come to prominence as a SF writer, dealing in her writings with issues such as race, religion, gender and social structure.

Read the full story HERE

Gollancz has acquired a three-book fantasy series by Stephen Hunt.  The first novel is titled In Dark Service, while the trilogy is called The Far-Called.  The first volume will be published in 2013.

Stephen is the author of six fantasy novels published by HarperCollins Voyager in the UK and Tor in the US, as well as in various translation editions, and runs the SF Crowsnest news and reviews site.

Here is Stephen’s introduction to the world on which this series takes place:

“Plenas has two unique characteristics worth noting, the first – and most significant of which – is that it’s a world on a mind-boggling scale where peddler caravans can take a thousand years to complete a limited circuit of their trade territory, a land where the guild of radio signallers can relay messages between their stations for multiple lifetimes and still never make a clean circumnavigation of the globe.

It is a world where, should a youngster be gripped by wanderlust, they can simply head off and travel with merchant nomads for their entire lifetime, taking in thousands of exotic nations, strange races and mysterious wonders, while still only travelling across a minute fraction of the globe.

The second distinctive facet of Plenas is that the land has no mineral resources worth mining except around the stratovolcanoes dotted across the world, massive shield volcanoes that stand about three times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level. These vomit out great gobs of ore-bearing rocks into the air for harvesting by sky mines, and this wealth is always jealously hoarded by the empires that rise to pre-eminence around the stratovolcanoes, growing rich with their monopoly over metals, crystals and coals.

Reliance on sustainable resources means that most societies, races and nations on Plenas are throttled somewhere between a Roman and Victorian level of progress, with only the great empires of the stratovolcanoes reaching a higher level of development.”

The deal for World Rights was brokered by the John Jarrold Literary Agency.