Rumours of the Marvellous by Peter Atkins contains fourteen brilliant stories by a master storyteller, plus an introduction by Glen Hirshberg and with a cover painting by Les Edwards. This is a limited edition hardcover (250 numbered copies), signed by Peter Atkins, Glen Hirshberg  and Les  Edwards.  Published by The Alchemy Press/Airgedlamh Productions at £19.99. The book will be launched at FantasyCon 2011 – with wine and cakes for each customer.

Watch the video: Rumours of the Marvellous

The October Birmingham Science Fiction Group meeting welcoms author David Wingrove. “Born in 1954, in south London, David Wingrove gave up a career in banking to return to college, graduating with a First Class Honours degree in English and American literature. It was whilst working on his subsequent doctorate (on the works of Hardy, Lawrence and Golding) that he set about researching and writing the eight massive novels which, between 1989 and 1997, were published as Chung Kuo.” The meeting is scheduled for 14th October at the Briar Rose Hotel on Bennett’s Hill, Birmingham (just 5 minutes walk from New Street Station) at 7:30 p.m.

The organisers promise, ‘A Feast for the imagination’. Imaginary, supernatural and magical worlds in literature feature in Glastonbury’s first Conference for the Fantastic, Saturday 3 September, from 10.00am-6.00pm, at The Grail Centre in Chilkwell Street.   

The Write Fantastic ‘will offer inspiring and thought-provoking talks, evocative art, and beautiful, unusual books. Speakers include guest of honour, best-selling fantasy author Freda Warrington; Liz Williams, a well-known Glastonbury figure and popular fantasy novelist, who will be bringing occultist and author Dion Fortune back to life; writer Kari Maund, an expert on Celtic Britain, will shed light on the colourful Arthurian tradition; and local author Paul Weston will explain the work and philosophy of John Cowper Powys.’

Conference tickets are ’20 and numbers are limited. Contact Liz to book on mevennen@hotmail.com.

“Hari Kunzru was introduced to science fiction aged 10 – and was hooked. After years of fandom, he went to meet master of the genre Michael Moorcock at home in Texas, where they discussed his 15,000 word a day habit, taking acid with his friend JG Ballard and writing a Doctor Who novel.” Read the interview on the Guardian website.

Michael Moorcock is scheduled for surgery. He writes on his website:

“I’m scheduled to have the surgery Thursday. There’s a rumour, apparently, I’m losing my whole foot. Not so. Just the rest of my toes. Which are useless now anyway. I, too, am mostly concerned about liking the dream gurneys so much I won’t want to leave them…

Any further surgery would be my leg below the knee coming off, which is why the toes are coming off to stop the ‘rocket effect’ of infection travelling rapidly up the bone and infecting the rest of me. Bone’s now exposed, putting me in the danger zone. So it needs to be done as quickly as my doc can fit me in. I like the guy a lot and trust him to do a good job. The last balls up wasn’t his fault but an OR nurse’s. Linda’s asked him to supervise the bandaging and he’s promised to do so.”

The BFS wishes Michael Moorcock all the best for a successful operation. 

“Sometimes you know when you’re onto something big. It was the same year that ‘Ender’s Game’ appeared in Analog – my first sci-fi publication. I was working with Ben Bova, and the stories I was selling all had spaceships and rivets and machines. But in my heart, what I loved was fantasy.

No, let’s be more precise: What I loved was Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and George Macdonald’s The Light Princess and C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead and Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd and John Hersey’s White Lotus and Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Crowley’s The Deep and Peake’s Ghormengast.”

Read more of Orson Scott Card’s essay — plus many other items — on the Tor blog.

From Reuters: “A US judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit accusing Harry Potter author JK Rowling with copying the work of another author when writing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The estate of late author Adrian Jacobs had said that the plot of the book, the fourth of seven in the wildly successful series that has been turned into a multi-billion-dollar film franchise, copied parts of the plot of his book Willy the Wizard, including a wizard contest, and that Rowling borrowed the idea of wizards traveling on trains.”

Read more on the Reuters website.

Rod Rees’s debut novel, The Demi-Monde: Winter (Quercus) hits the shelves this week. Louise Morgan was despatched to interview the author. This interview is extracted from a longer piece, which will be published in a future issue of the BFS Journal.

The obvious questions: not so much, “Where did the idea come from?” but rather, at what point in the planning did the idea become recognisable as The Demi-Monde? Was there one character or situation which defined it? And as it’s such a complex novel, how long did it take to go from that “What if…” moment to feeling ready to start writing?

Long answer: as an admirer of the writers of Classic SF and fantasy, I have always thought that attempts to update, or, as Tim Burton would have it, to re-imagine these stories have invariably been poor. But the nadir had to be the BBC’s Jekyll which managed to eviscerate the story whilst simultaneously making it risible. Worse: it didn’t ‘honour’ the story. Sitting watching this muddled mish-mash I had the same feeling every writer since the dawn of time has had at one time or another: I could do better than that! The result of that piece of hubris was a book called Dark Charismatic. DC must have had something because it persuaded John Jarrold to become my agent, but that ‘something’ wasn’t enough to entice any publishers to sign it (fools!). So I decided to try again but having done so much research on the Victorian world and on psychotics I was loath to leave this particular milieu.

Therefore I needed a story platform which encompassed both a Victorian feel and which allowed me to populate it with vicious madmen (or as they are in the DM, Singularities). Of course, it also had to be convincing enough to allow the reader to suspend disbelief. The solution I came up with was for the DM to be a virtual world, but again to make it credible this world had to have a purpose and the one I set upon was that its function was to prepare US Army grunts (my ’neoFights’) for the horrors of Asymmetric Warfare.

Concept decided upon before I began to write I needed to define the parameters of this virtual world and I did this by producing ‘THE DEMI-MONDE®: A Product Description Manual’: a faux brochure written by the company constructing the DM (ParaDigm CyberResearch Limited) when it pitched the DM to the US Armed Forces. This defined the purpose of the DM, set out all its parameters and described its idiosyncrasies (you can read it on the DM website. It was my constant reference throughout the writing of the book. The Product Description and the design of the DM map took me a month, background research on the ‘Pre-Lived’ characters, on fascism and other bits and pieces another month, so it was two months from ‘idea’ to writing the first line.

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Artist Glenn James has announced his new FaceBook shop where you can purchase prints, postcards and fridge magnets for very reasonable prices. Pop over to the website and check out the merchandise. Alternatively, for those not on FaceBook, visit James’s other website.

Charles Stross is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 and 2010 Hugo awards for best novella, Stross’s works have been translated into over twelve languages. Read an interview with Stross on the Bar to Bar website.