You will also be able to hear my dulcet tones as I’ve recorded my ‘Afterword on living life dangerously’, and shoot diaries as added extras. In early May I found myself in the beautiful Gloucester countryside recording in producer Peter Rinne’s start-of-the-art recording studio/garden shed…
The home studio that I want when I grow up…
The audiobook will also include the short story THE MEDIATOR PROTOTYPE, an abundance of stomping, clanking and blasting Robot sound effects from the film, and excerpts from Christian Henson’s magnificent score, so it’ll be a full-on audio treat.
Come and see a screening of ROBOT OVERLORDS this Sunday 24th May at 2.30pm!
As part of the Greenwich Book Festival, I’ll introduce the event with a ‘From script to screen’ presentation, followed by a screening of the film. I’m pretty sure this will be your only chance to see the film before the DVD release later this year, so do please come along!
STOP STOP PRESS!
I’m also delighted to announce that I’ll be joined by James Tarpey, one of the film’s stars! We’ll have posters to sign and give away to those who buy a copy of the ROBOT OVERLORDS novelisation.
Well, maybe not the whole occupying force… Okay, it’s just me.
As part of the Bradford Literature Festival I’ll be in conversation with awesome steampunk author David Barnett. We’ll be talking about how the film came about, and how it evolved into the novelisation. We’re hoping to be able to show some cool clips, concept art and behind-the-scenes stuff… it all depends on the availability of projectors and speakers and stuff… if not, I’ll have to do it via the medium of speaking and gesticulating. Don’t worry: I’m trained.
… a store I have very fond memories of as it’s where I first met Neil Gaiman. It was back in 1996 and I had dragged my poor wife halfway across the country to see what was then the only IMAX screen in the country at the National Media Museum to watch SPECIAL EFFECTS: ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN, a kind-of visual effects IMAX sampler complete with a colossal Star Destroyer and King Kong falling off the Empire State Building. Hey, it was before the internet took off and you had to travel to see the geeky stuff back then.
By complete coincidence Neil Gaiman happened to be in town signing copies of NEVERWHERE. I was kicking myself as I had a first edition of GOOD OMENS at home signed by Terry Pratchett and I wished I had brought it with me. Neil asked what Terry had written. “Burn this book,” I told him. So he scribbled a little retort on a Post-It note for me. I stuck it in the book where it still resides now…
In a couple of years I was working for Headline Publishing and selling Neil’s books into the trade and I got to meet him a few more times (he would greet me with a smile and the words, “Ah, the fanboy.”) and, more importantly, I got to read a proof of AMERICAN GODS before most of the reading public, and I would evangelise to booksellers about it until they caved and ordered a dumpbin.
So, yes, happy memories… I hope you can join us and maybe we can make some new happy memories of our own.
Then from 3-4pm I’ll be on a ‘From script to screen’ panel with Nvizible’s Dan Churchill. We’ll be showing how the film went from Jon’s initial idea through to the finished the film. There’ll be a Q&A afterwards and then hopefully we’ll be able to sign a few posters and there may even be a handful of those ultra-rare Robot Overlords T-shirts (for those bold enough to ask a question!).
The Birmingham MCM Comic Con was great fun, but because we filmed in Belfast I’m sure this will be an even bigger blast. I hope to see many of our crew and extras friends there!
If you’re coming along to Dysprosium 2015 (EasterCon to the rest of us!), then here’s what I’ll be up to on the Saturday and the Sunday.
Saturday 4th April:
10-11am Build your awesome robot – Wright room
Described in the brochure thusly…
Build Your Awesome Robot: Child-friendly activity. Priority is given to children 17 and under. Children under 16 must be accompanied by a responsible adult. Using cardboard boxes, egg boxes, toilet rolls, metal food trays, cereal boxes etc, plus some coloured card, tape, and glue, you can build your own ready-to-wear robot. Zandy has an incredible book that gives suggestions on things you can put on your robot. We’ll make sure to copy the relevant bits and people can draw their own signs on card. Zandy Hemsley, Mark Stay.
Yup, Zandy and me will be helping kids build their own robots. What could possibly go wrong?! Assuming that we haven’t all been enslaved by the children’s automations you can always come to…
12.30-1.30 Author reading (following Jaine Fenn) – Johnson room
10-11am Robot Overlords from script to screen – Bleriot room
This will be great fun. Myself and Paddy Eason (VFX supervisor on Robot Overlords) will take you on a journey from a page of script right through to a finished scene from the film. It’s also a great way to show just how an indie Brit sci-fi film gets made these days (with great difficulty, as it happens). This will be a multimedia tour de force with never-before-seen concept art and behind-the-scenes material.
11.15-12.15 Gollancz Room party
This will be where all the cool kids will be hanging out. So be there, or be a giant robot cube…
Robot Overlords shows us a near-future where Earth has been invaded and occupied by an overwhelming force of Robots from another world. Everyone has been confined to their homes, and while the Robots’ purpose here is a mystery, they’ve promised to leave after seven years.
So what books would I grab to keep me sane during the occupation…?
As used by Connor (played by Milo Parker in the film) to identify edible mushrooms, this is the only book I know of with a chapter on how to survive a nuclear explosion, an essential bit of info when your enemy has defeated every army on the planet (though, to be fair, they do make it clear that the odds aren’t great for surviving a nuclear holocaust). Also check out the Homefront chapter, with excellent advice on food storage, rationing, vitamins and filtering and sterilising water. Of course, for when times are really bad, there’s the obligatory bit on drinking urine.
Also available as an App, not that you’ll have any use for that once the robots destroy your phone.
In Robot Overlords the Volunteer Corps are humans who have chosen to collaborate with the robots by delivering rations, making repairs etc. But these are exactly the kind of humourless sociopaths you find in every level of bureaucracy (best represented by Robin Smythe, Ben Kingsley’s character in the film), and so you don’t want to be relying on them to fix a leaky tap. I’ve had a copy of this for twenty years and it’s so clearly laid out that even an idiot like me can use it with only the occasional flood and mild electric shock.
There are many works of literature to inspire a burgeoning resistance against the invaders, but I can think of none finer than the seventh instalment in the Gaulish saga in which our heroes stage an enormous punch-up to save their village. A bit of genuine light relief in all the trauma.
When the Volunteer Corps deliver your weekly ration of unleavened bread, unidentifiable grey meat, and misshapen vegetables, you’ll need more than a little imagination to keep things exciting and varied at the dinner table. My wife bought me a copy of this when we first started living together and it set me in good stead when all we could afford was unleavened bread, unidentifiable grey meat, and misshapen vegetables.
And finally, something to keep you going through those long winter nights of the occupation. As a busking level guitarist (ie: a bit rubbish) I can select any one of over 170 songs from Keep The Home Fires Burning and We’ll Meet Again all the way through to erm… Careless Whisper and I Believe In A Thing Called Love. And if you do drive your fellow housemates mad with your caterwauling, then it’s big enough for them to beat you to death with, and makes for good fire fuel.
Those lovely people at Goodreads, in association with those equally lovely Geeks at Gollancz, are giving away – yes! Giving away! – ten copies of the Robot Overlords novelisation.
Ten copies! That’s (taps calculator)… lots of money I won’t ever see because of their insane generosity. It’s called “marketing” or something.
“But how do I stand a chance of winning?” you ask. Simple, just click here and then click on the ‘Enter to win’ button. Yes, it’s really that straightforward: two clicks… You’d be insane not to give it a try.
But hurry, it ends on the 1st of March!
This thing of beauty for no pennies!
PS. Be sure to check the Ts&Cs, as this offer is only available in Great Britain.
This week sees the release of what has been confirmed by the band Pink Floyd as their last ever studio album, The Endless River.
I have a long history with Floyd, and to be around when they’ve called it a day is both sad and curiously satisfying. The end of a great story. Like many of my generation, my first awareness of Pink Floyd came with the release of Another Brick In The Wall (Part Two) and I was all too eager to misinterpret the message “We don’t need no edjacashun!” I also recall poring over my uncle’s copy of the album, its gatefold festooned with Gerald Scarfe’s wonderful artwork.
But it wasn’t until my teens that they really made an impact. Back then, believe it or not, I was a football referee. Something I wasn’t terribly well-suited for, not being a massive football fan and just beginning to need to wear spectacles for my short-shortsightedness. I had to quit after a couple of years when I had no real comeback to the players’ cries of, “Ref, are you blind?”
Back then Wembley Stadium use to employ referees as stewards for football games and major events. My dad – a much better ref than I ever was – would regularly attend FA Cup matches and the like in this capacity. And in the summer of 1988 he asked me quite out of the blue if I wanted to be a steward at a couple of concerts. The first was the amazing Michael Jackson Bad Tour, the second was for Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Jacko was awesome, as you’d expect, but the Floyd gig triggered something inside of me. I found a sound that I hadn’t even realised was missing from my life, but I suddenly had to have more of, immediately. The bigness of Richard Wright‘s keyboard sounds, the ‘ting’ of Nick Mason‘s ride cymbal – a pleasing acoustic noise absent from all the electronica I’d been listening to that summer – and all of this led by David Gilmour‘s siren-like guitar. And not forgetting Roger Waters‘ lyrics… Ah, Roger! Not only had I found the perfect band, but one with a story that stretched back to a tragic figure called Syd Barrett, followed by an unprecedented success forged by a group living in the shadow of a genius, then torn apart again by that very success. There were lengthy magazine articles and books chronicling this epic odyssey, including Miles’ excellent Visual Documentary.
I devoured everything, and while my contemporaries were discovering rave or grunge I was stuck firmly in the ’70s and became a boy obsessed. I made compilation tapes for all my mates and even successfully converted a fair number of them, dragging them to gigs at the ghastly London Arena, glorious Knebworth and Earl’s Court. Even the lovely, patient woman who was to become the love of my life was not immune, having to endure my guitar practice as I learned to play their songs (having all but given up on the instrument a few years earlier). I even studied the lyrics of The Wall as part of my GCSE coursework, discovering how to stretch out my thesis “It’s about alienation, innit” to 1500 words.
One of the most significant decisions in my life was dictated by a Floyd connection. At the time I was a sales rep for a publisher, driving all over the South East of England and writing plays in laybys in my lunchbreak. I was in a happy little rut. Then I bumped into a fellow rep who said there was an account manager job going at Orion Publishing, and was I interested. At first, I refused: I loved the freedom of the open road, and working in an office would mean regular hours that wouldn’t allow me to put on plays. Then something occurred to me, “You guys are publishing that Pink Floyd book by Nick Mason, aren’t you?”
“Yup.”
“WHERE DO I APPLY?!”
And so I ended up in an office job, gave up on the theatre, and started writing screenplays instead. And see where that got me.
Oh, and I got to meet Nick Mason. A lovely, lovely man who put up with my fanboyish tendencies with the patience of a saint. Tangentially, I also got to meet David Gilmour, Richard Wright, Gerald Scarfe and the wonderful Guy Pratt, whose brilliantly funny book My Bass And Other Animals was published by Orion and should be read by everyone and anyone with a passing interest in music.
I missed out on Live 8 and with the passing of Syd and then Richard it seemed like it was all over, and now it really is. I’ve played Endless River on an endless loop today. It’s arguably the boldest album the band have released in thirty years, and all those things that had me fall in the love with the band are present and correct, but now it sounds like the distant echo of something passing into time, fading into the past. A fitting farewell from a band bigger than the sum of its parts. And that’s a beautiful end to their story.
First of all, let us gaze upon the awesomeness of the cover art…
It’s a robot… a big one!
The Sentry robot was kindly donated and posed by the good folk at Nvizible (laser weapon, model’s own), and the rest was co-ordinated and designed by Nick May of the Orion art department and the wizards at Blacksheep Design, who’ve won awards for all sorts of cool covers, not least Adam Roberts’ JACK GLASS, one of my favourites of last year.
The book has been huge fun to write and, in the tradition of my favourite tie-in novels, will expand on scenes and characters from the film, as well having plenty of new material completely original to the book. My hope is that the book and film will complement one another, so if there’s a moment in the film that leaves you wanting to know more, you’ll find it in the book.
Tie-in novels are usually a late addition to a publishers’ schedule, often written in a rush by an outside writer. So I am very grateful that Gollancz took a punt early on in the process, and gave the go-ahead to this while we were still shooting the film. It’s given me the time to write the book I wanted to and, thanks to the brilliant editing of Gillian Redfearn and the copy-editing skills of Lisa Rogers, it’s become a much better book than I could have hoped for.
It’ll be available in paperback and eBook, and there might even be an audio edition. The publication date will be as per the release of the film. We’re saying February 2015 at the moment, but that will almost certainly change. There might even be a special edition with some top secret added extras. I’ll be sure to update here with any news as soon as I get it, and be sure to follow @Robot_Overlords on Twitter for news about the film.
A version of this first appeared over at the Gollancz Blog.
I was delighted to hear that classic game ELITE was making a comeback this year, and even more delighted when I learned that Gollancz would be publishing a trio of tie-in novels. But what is thing you call ELITE, you cry? You mean you don’t know?!
Well, I had a similar reaction from some of m’learned (or not) sales colleagues at Orion Publishing, so I put together the following to help them sell it in…
Morning all,
It has come to my attention that some of you are struggling to get your heads around the Elite books, so here’s a quick guide for you norms…
Elite was a space trading game launched in 1984. The player could pootle around the universe, going from space station to space station, buying and selling goods. Of course, after a while this got boring and the player would be tempted to sell weapons and narcotics to make more money to buy cool stuff like docking computers (docking was really bloody hard), but this would usually get you blown up by the space fuzz.
It was massively addictive, and I, like many others my age, spent hours hunched over my BBC B computer staring at simple graphics like this…
That triangle thing is a spaceship, the dodecahedron thingy with the letterbox is a space station.
It was a huge influence on gaming, and for years afterwards men (mostly) of a certain age would talk whimsically of Elite and the hours of pleasure it gave them (this was years before internet porn).
Well, of course, nothing stays dead forever these days and now Elite is coming back. Only now it looks like this (click to enlarge for the full cor blimey experience)…
Holy crap! Explosions!Big space stations! Space ships!More explosions! More spaceships! Where do I sign??
The new game has been brought to life via Kickstarter – that is, paid for by fans who will get first dibs at the game.Gollancz saw this and, as part of the Kickstarter, bought the rights to the books. The books are all set in the Elite universe and are quite different:
Mark Stay Writes 