We’re on something of a roll this week for What The Author Says features – the excellent fantasy author (and now comics writer) Mark Chadbourn takes some time out of his hectic schedule to tell us a little about Jack of Ravens, his new book published this month. Jack of Ravens marks the beginning of a new series by Mark, the Kingdom of the Serpent, so if you’ve heard many of us telling you how good he is and thinking, which series to start with, here’s a chance to get on at the beginning of a brand new and rather intriguing sounding one. And for those who missed some of Mark’s earlier work, Gollancz are collecting three books in Age of Misrule this autumn.
“When I first started to write fantasy I set for myself the ambition of creating the biggest, richest universe in SF and fantasy, with enough levels of interaction that any reader could burrow right into it and never surface, if that was their wish. Bigger than the Star Wars universe! You get the picture. And while I may not have created the biggest, I’m certainly getting close to it with ‘Jack of Ravens’. The book reveals the true depth of the world I’ve been writing about in past novels. It deals with more than two thousand years of human history, five great mythologies, and three worlds – our own, the Otherworld populated with everything that ever surfaced in every myth, legend, fairy story dream or nightmare, and the world that exists after death. And that’s just for starters…
“And for anyone who thinks writing fantasy is just about making stuff up, I should point out that the research I’ve done for ‘Jack of Ravens’ is phenomenal. I’ve had to study six great eras over the last two thousand years to ensure all the detail is correct. And that’s merely the background. The real story is about a mystical war that has been waging across time. It’s a hugely ambitious book, and even if it fails there’ll be the spectacle of seeing my crash and burn on a grand scale!”
Mark Chadbourn
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July 4th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
[...] Fantasy novelist and now comics writer Mark Chadbourn has launched his own Jack of Ravens blog “partly to talk about the things that have inspired and informed the new book, but mainly to sound off about a whole range of things that interest me – from politics and music, to mythology, SF/F and all points in between.” We’re all cordially invited to swing by and have a look. You can also read some of Mark’s thoughts on the new book which he kindly posted on the FPI blog here. [...]
October 12th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
[...] As for writers, Mark Chadbourn and Frank Beddor are my two “new” writers to watch for from us. Of course, British fans probably know Mark Chadbourn from his series of fantasy novels in the UK and his work for the BBC TV (indeed we do, in fact an anthology of some of his earlier work – Age of Misrule – has just come out along with his new novel Jack of Ravens. He’s talked in the past to the blog about Jack and his comics – Joe G). He’s extremely talented. [...]
December 5th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
[...] So ladies and gentlemen, we kick off the first Best of the Year for 2007 with a man Joe Pruett once named as a writer to watch, Mister Mark Chadbourn, author and gentleman. Mark is well known to fantasy fans for a number of excellent novels, the most recent of which is Jack of Ravens: Kingdom of the Serpent Book 1, the paperback of which should be arriving in stores any day now (you can read some of Mark’s thoughts on the new book here on the blog), while the sequel, The Burning Man, is due out from Gollancz next April. As if this isn’t enough Mark has been involved in writing for comics with the Book of Shadows, winning the Best Short Story gong at this year’s British Fantasy Awards (for the tale “Whisper Lane”) and even found time to give a well-received lecture at Tate Britain, truly a renaissance man, which explains why he likes to sport doublet and hose and hang around Florence whenever he can. Without further ado, let’s see what was floating Mark’s boat in the last twelve months: [...]