I'm that guy who never read Watchmen from the time it originally debuted all through my comics reading life. Now with the movie coming in two shorts weeks I'm finding myself really excited.

Of course I knew how popular a comic Watchmen is and how reverently some fans treat it. I didn't realize just how much some fans are upset at any minor change Snyder makes, especially when all but a handful of people have actually, you know, seen the finished movie...it's pretty interesting how fans react to a beloved property being translated into another medium. We had the histrionics over Michael Bay putting flames on Optimus Prime and this summers GI Joe revival has others up in arms because Baroness doesn't have the same type of glasses.

I can only imagine what the hardcore Watchmen fans are going to go apeshit over for changes made this time. The current issue of Wired has a great interview with a huge Watchmen fan who notices that Snyder has made some serious changes, including giving the Owlship chainguns. And then there's the change to the ending. Granted I haven't read the comic and will wait the final two weeks until I see the movie before reading the original, but really folks? This much consternation over a giant space squid being removed?

Even with Snyder saying the ending is different and the wonderful Dave Gibbons saying "No squid" at the fantastic NYComicon Watchmen panel some people still seem to be holding out hope that their beloved squid will make a surprise appearance.

For me having gotten to see the first 18 minutes I can say it surpassed any expectation I had. Snyder's signature slow down/speed up style was in full effect and the opening title sequence is nothing short of dazzling. I expect this to be a revolutionary movie that will further mainstream superheroes.

And I can't wait.

• Thank God they didn't make us wait all season long to get back to the Island.

• I'm getting really interested in the Lamppost station in LA and Mrs. Hawking's exposition about how the pockets of space-time work and the use of the pendulum to predict not so much whenwhere but willbe for the use of travel. That explains Ben and the polar bear ending up in Tunisia, as well as Hurley's seemingly extra-episode revelation that "Australia is the key to the game" in the fourth season show "The Shape of Things to Come." That episode has so many ramifications, we can see now: Ben's daughter Alex is killed, Claire's house is destroyed by an RPG with her in it, Vincent discovers the freighter's doctor's body on the beach before he's actually killed, Ben lets loose the smoke monster, and, of course, he wakes up in the desert wearing Halliwax' frozen donkey wheel parka.

Add all that to Hawkins' explanation about the island being one of several points possessing "special energy," and it seems Australia might really really be the "key to the game."

• And speaking of game, the lostisagame.com guy seems to be even more right about his interpretations as the show continues. Last night's episode not only had many call-backs to the pilot episode, but had many characters reversing the roles they held.

• Am I the only one concerned that Jack, the Man of Science, started his transition to a Man of Faith... whose belief in Ben after the fact is causing more trouble had he not believed in Locke initially? It seems to me his lack of faith in Locke causes Locke's "suicide." Which seems clear isn't really a despondent sort of act, but more of a fait accompli, as much as anything can be considered such in a show where time is so elastic. Dang, it's hard to get tenses and modifiers and objects and whatnot correct when discussing this show.

• I don't really want to get into the overt Biblical references in this ep, because other folks on the Internet with much more religious fervor than I are already covering it. And because the title of the episode clearly refers to John 3:16 "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." which, while giving comfort to many, just makes me think of Rainbow Man in the crowd of so many football games in the 70s. Which is the Dharma timeframe, come to think of it. Hmmm.

• But my favorite bit is that my man Lapidus is captain of the Ajira flight, since he was "supposed" to be the pilot of Oceanic 815. Not only do I dig the character because, as Mike Tattoo of MW once pointed out, he's "the Larry Young of the team," but because he's caught up with a bunch of accidentally time-travelling drama queens, and he just goes with the flow. Man, Mike Tattoo gave me just about the best compliment ever, there. Although I do wonder how Lapidus explained the Island-induced gap on his resume in order to get the commercial airline pilot gig.

• Lapidus also has the best line of the night: "We're not going to Guam, are we?"

This is a Matrixy promo shot from the new Wolverine movie coming this summer.

Wow.

• Well, that was awesome last night, eh?

• While most folks I know were very excited about finally seeing a Rousseau flashback, they seemed a bit disappointed that that was all we got. I can only wonder that we got anything at all. Just as most STAR WARS fans subconsciously reject the prequels because, really, STAR WARS doesn't start until Darth Vader shows up in the Tantive IV stepping over the dead bodies of his men... so, too, LOST doesn't really start until 815 crashes on the island. Sure, I guess, it's neat to know Boba Fett is a clone of his dad, who, in turn, is the initial template for the Imperial clonetroopers, but, you know, it's not necessary.

• And that's how I feel about Rousseau and her team. We didn't learn anything about 1988; at best, we just had things confirmed. The "crazy French woman" had seen and heard all of that crazy stuff; that the smoke monster was a security system for the Temple, one of her crew had his arm ripped off, that everyone came down with a "sickness" that made Donald Sutherland at the end of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS seem like a kindly old uncle. I particularly liked that she told Sayid that she had removed Robert's firing pin so he couldn't shoot her, and then four years later, audience-time, we see that play out. That's cool.

• I finally got a good look at what it said on the van that Sayid was driving last episode when Dan gave Ben the dope on Hurley (Sayid: "Who's that?" Ben: "That's my lawyer."): it said "Canton-Rainier Carpet Cleaners." Ever since that "Hoffs-Drawlor" funeral parlor thing, I've been looking out for anagrams, and "Canton-Rainier" is pretty clearly "reincarnation." Hopefully, that's just a joke what with them carrying Locke's body around and his eventual reanimation, and not some overt reference to all the spirituality going on in the show.

• Been thinking about the random Walt appearances throughout the show, his cryptic messages, his fluctuating size and height, and why the Island dismissed Michael and doesn't seem to need Walt back. In the second season, when Walt had been kidnapped by the Others for tests, they sent him time-travelling throughout the show to try to help where and when he could. That was his role, so the Island doesn't need him back. He's done what he came to do.

• And I don't think Faraday is his own father, and you should all be branded perverts for thinking so. Time-travel doesn't work that way on this show, anyhow. He's Charlotte's father. Duh.

• If anyone doesn't think that's Sawyer and Kate in the skeleton cave, I submit to you the difference between Sawyer from Season One and his complete distrust of everyone in general, the Season Two Sawyer who didn't much like Jin when in the Tailies' pit in particular, and the abject joy Season Five Sawyer had when he saw his friend Jin still alive. "Well, how about that!" That's a dude who now thinks nothing of jumping out of a failing helicopter to give his friends a few more minutes in the air to find safety, and will probably not even hesitate to stay behind to flip the switch that gets his friends all safely home.

• I really liked that the usually stoic, manipulative, unflappable Ben lost his temper this ep. Screeching the reincarnation van to a stop, he seems a little hurt that everyone wants to kill him all the damn time. "If you knew what I've done to keep you alive, you'd never stop thanking me." Respect!

• Jacob is Deadman from another dimension, able to use other people's bodies to communicate. So Jacob is Dead Jack's dad, and Dead Locke, soon. This show is just great.

• I also think that the drive for survival and food and even shelter is instinctual, because here's what my 19 month old son did all by himself, just before I wrote all this for you:

Brian Fracis Slattery provides a jaw dropping look at a post economic collapse US where a group of super criminals do their best to put things right.

The cities have largely fallen apart. Slavery is back in a big way, with some people going so far as to sell themselves into it so they can survive. It's a pretty harrowing future.

We first meet our lead character, the super ninjatastic hitman Marco, onboard a battered prison vessel that has been taken over by the inmates. The ship is making it's way towards Manhattan with Marco believing the group he has been a part of, The Slick Six, are the only ones who can put things right.

The novel is a tour across a very different America where a mystical force called The Vibe works through our characters to restore balance. It's a fairly trippy book full of amazing characters and settings. The crux of the novel follows Marco and former teammate Zeke as they search for and find their former cohorts in the Slick Six.

Hot on Marco's trail is an assassin who can follow people via ribbons of light in different colors. Obviously the book climaxes in a return of the Slick Six facing off with the Aardvark in his tower.

But how they get there and what comes next are a big part of the fun.

This book had me when Marco infiltrates Manhattan to rescue Zeke from the Aardvark's impenetrable super prison on a black hang glider like a superhero.

If that sounds like fun then this book is for you.

RBN returns to Comicon but this time as a spectator.

My con weekend actually started on Thursday night. Jim Hanley's Universe in Manhattan was host to a large creator signing including Jonathan Hickman, Gabrille Del Otto and CB Cebulski. I've recently become a fan of Jonathan's from his spectacular "The Nightly News" and think his newest Marvel work "Secret Warriors" is pretty great. I can safely say Jonathan seems as nice as he is talented. I only talked to him for a minute but he was super friendly and seemed happy to talk with fans.

First actual stop at the con was the Warner Brothers movie panel presentation. IGN is knocking themselves out with their movie panels each con and boy did they deliver this year. Dave Gibbons, artist on Watchmen, debuted the first 18 minutes of the film along with a later scene and wow was it impressive. I have yet to read the actual comic and have decided to wait until after I see the movie to read it. But I can safely say that I found the footage to be jaw dropping. Between the opening action scene and the absolutely brilliant title sequence this has "box office smash" written all over it.

Next up was director McG and a look at Terminator Salvation. I'm a huge Christian Bale fan so I was pretty pumped for this. After warming up the crowd and calling Bale's home(we got to cheer for Mrs. Bale)we got to see about ten minutes of footage in various states of completion.

The film stock itself is pretty amazing. It's got a washed out color palette and has a metallic type of sheen. It's a great look. The movie looks like a blast. Bale kicks all kinds of terminator ass and we get to see tons of new terminators including the hydrobot and the mototerminators along with some footage of Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright.

This is probably the movie I am most looking forward to and the footage sealed the deal for me. Bale looks to have another hit franchise on his hands.

The day ended for me with getting the chance to finally meet author Dave Williams face to face. Dave is as nice as can be. He had a nice showing for the Bantam signing for his first novel "The Mirrored Heavens". We chatted for a bit and I hope we run into each other again.

All in all it was a great con weekend. I am thrilled that New York is getting it's own version of eight hundred pound gorilla SDCC. In it's fourth year it looks like the con is starting to seriously deliver the goods.

Joe Pitt Casebook author Charlie Huston breaks out a wild and oddly touching caper novel.

Web Goodhue is a slacker living off of the kindness of lifelong best friend and tattoo artist Chev. Web is pretty much an asshole, though a funny one. We learn early on that Web has gone through something pretty terrible. I won't say what it is but when that moment comes it hits like a ton of bricks. The emotional impact was so strong for me that I teared up on a plane full of strangers. It was the last thing I expected from Huston who is a much more gifted writer than I might have given him credit for.

Surrounding Web are a deliriously interesting cast of characters including the massive Po Sin, owner of a crime scene cleaning company and Web's soon to be boss, to the beautiful and beautifully screwed up Soledad Nye. The main focus of the book is Web at rock bottom taking a job where he cleans homes where someone either kills themselves or dies. It's fairly graphic and not for everyone, but there is a serious dose of Warren Ellis style gross out and voyerism. You learn what happens when someone takes a mouthful of water and then puts a gun in their mouth and pulls the trigger. Nasty stuff.

The book is also laugh out loud funny. Between some of the situations Web gets himself in and the his running commentary it's a fun read. The book is a caper gone awry at heart and our bumbling hero must figure out how to fix this mess and save the girl and himself. It ends with another emotional blast and I seriously hope Charlie feels the urge to give us another book featuring Webb and Po Sin.

I can't recommend this enough.

I'm telling you, if you just tuned in to catch a glimpse of that Wolverine-looking guy traipsing around with his shirt off, that little precis isn't gonna make any sense to you whatsoever. But for those of us watching our DVDs like Oliver Stone with his pause button the Zapruder film, ol' Hurley was right on. Honestly, he summarized his last four years more cogently than I could do mine.

Anyway, surely you've heard of the cosmic reset theory? How this whole thing is happening to get 815 safely to Los Angeles? And how the opening-on-the-eye motif signals a cosmic reset? The String Theory, too? How Faraday says time is a stream that you can move along? I think this explains things like Charlie's magical re- and dis- appearing sleeves on a shirt he swapped back and forth all the time:

and things like the regular Dharma logo:

and Ben's Orchid logo trigrams all being swapped around:

...seem to prove not that there's in attention being paid in the prop department, but extreme attention to detail otherwise ignored.

I don't know which world we're going to end up with, but I do know the LOST team is crafting a very rich entertainment for us. I can't believe they make one of these every eight days.

One of RBN's favorite debut's last year was "The Mirrored Heavens". Debuting in mass market paperback tomorrow, author David J. Williams drops in for a few minutes to catch us up on what he's been up to and gives a tease for his next "The Burning Skies".

DW: It's been quite a ride, and it's an incredible experience to have people you've never met reading your stuff and emailing you out of the blue. But you can't lose sight of the larger picture. Two years ago the goal was Getting Published; now the goal is Taking This To the Next Level. The Autumn Rain trilogy was always aimed at world domination, and these days all my efforts are focused on ensuring that all the cool kids succumb. : )

RBN: For readers not already familiar with your first book can you set the stage a bit?

DW: No problem: 22nd century espionage; no one trusts anybody; agents have their memories rewritten on a routine basis. Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets James Bond with spaceplanes and powered armor.

RBN: I'm not sure many people know the difference between something like a trade paperback which is how The Mirrored Heavens was originally released and a mass market paperback. How do the versions differ?

DW: Not by much. Trade paperback is just a larger, glossier type of paperback; mass-market is the type one tends to see the most of--and in airports/drug stores/etc., that's all you're gonna see. Trade paperbacks have been around for a long while, but increasingly, they're being seen as the "new hardbacks"; publishers often release a limited run in trade paperback and then a more extensive run in mass-market. So it's yet another fiendish plan to sell more books . .. .

RBN: There are some extras in the mass market paperback. What are they?

DW: Well, you've got a map and a glossary, but the really cool stuff is the agent dossiers. I've hacked into the Praetorian files to bring readers actual data on the book's characters. Hopefully it'll help in keeping everybody straight, but there's some clues and unresolved issues buried here and there as well for folks who *thought* they knew what was going on.

RBN: We are still a short while off from your sequel "The Burning Skies". What can you whet our appetites with?

DW: My personal guarantee: Burning Skies will feature the most insane space battle ever seen in science fiction. George Lucas and the rest of those punks are going to be wondering what hit them.

RBN: I hear you may be attending NYComicon. Are you looking forward to that?

DW: Absolutely, but my five-month old kitten, Spartacus, is chafing with frustration that he will be left behind, which is proving to be the source of no little tension round here. So if you see anything on my blog while I'm up in NYC that reads something like lkjaklsjdfklafjklafjklaskldf jakfjklasjklfakjljk3jrFUCKALLHUMANS, you know who to blame.

Thanks as always to Dave for giving us some of his time. For those of you yet to experience Dave's book which I tell potential fans is sort of like "Jason Bourne meets Iron Man" here's a chance to grab the paperback from Amazon.

LOST is full of that sort of thing, so I'm going to talk about the weird stuff. Weird even for LOST, like the characters with the changing eye colors and shirts with dis-and re-appearing sleeves and whatnot.

(Here's some links to some massively large photos which show Jack's eyes two different colors, and then a later version which shows him with two same-colored eyes, but now Locke's are two different colors:)

http://www.lostisagame.com/Pictures/S3_poster_large.jpe

http://www.lostisagame.com/pictures/S3_feb07_large.jpg

Last night, though, I was happy to see Ana Lucia again. When she stopped Hurley, she pointed out something that's been out right in front of us for a while, but no one seems to consider.

Not only do the dead appear to the living, but the dead are self-aware of their own non-living circumstances. That's kinda weird, isn't it? Hurley sees Dave, Kate sees her horse, Jack can't stop seeing his father. Locke is told by the mathematician that he knows he's not making sense because he's been dead for twelve years. Of course, Hurley seems to be a nexus of this sort of thing, what with Dead Charlie hanging out with him, and Mister Eko playing chess with him. And of course Ana Lucia asking him "What if I were real?"

I'm not sure anyone in the show has an answer for that one, as reality seems quite fluid around them. Not just time, as shown last night, but reality itself. Which may explain the characters with the changing eye colors and shirts with dis-and re-appearing sleeves and whatnot.

But I'm glad the show is really letting its freak flag fly. There's no denying it now; this thing is as hard-core science fiction as BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, thanks to all the embracing of time travel. Sure, we've had Desmond bouncing around since the end of Season Two, and some suspicious things here and there. Like the time-travelling bunny experiments and all... but with last night's Faraday-in-the-Seventies, Sawyer's "Son of a*FLASH* ...bitch!", all the quantum physics and machinations and all. Honestly, if Kier Dullea shows up in a red spacesuit at some point I would not be surprised.

Here's some fun stuff:

• Frogurt: dead! Also, he was wearing a red shirt. Classic!

• Faraday introducing String Theory to middle America via expository dialogue.

• Doctor Chang Candle/Halliwax/Wick is wearing a Swan logo even though he's shooting the training film for the Arrow.

• After all the WE HAVE TO GO BACK emphasized in the last few episodes, what's up with Walt? Why doesn't Walt have to go back, too? I mean, I see why Des or Frank don't have to... but Walt was on 815 like everyone else.

We'll be starting slow and seeing where this goes. Hope to see some of you folks back here with us...

RBN chats with author Tobias Buckell on his rousing new novel Sly Mongoose.

TB: The three books so far are each books that illuminate a bit more about a series of worlds all connected via wormholes. In Crystal Rain I explored one world, Nanagada, settled by people from the Caribbean. In Ragamuffin I opened things up by showing that there were 48 worlds all connected by wormholes, all ruled by the Satrapy: Satraps being large, trilobyte-like aliens with strong colonialist ethics. Humanity is one a handful of alien races that the Satraps consider themselves Patrons to, and in Ragamuffin the book is about how humanity deals with their place in the universe. In Sly Mongoose I've shown some of the consequences to what people chose to do about the Satraps, and also focused on exploring a world and people who are caught up in the middle of all that.

MC: The buzz on this book has been pretty big. What's that been like for you?

TB: The buzz has been strong online and with early readers, yes, I still haven't made that leap into regular media buzz that an author so cherishes. So far people who encounter the book seem to really dig it, so I'm hoping word of mouth continues to spread.

MC: The setting in Sly Mongoose is fantastic. You have a world where the atmosphere and the surface are deadly to humans so they live in floating cities in the clouds. How did you come up first with Chilo and second the amazing floating cities that populate the planet?

TB: I have Geoff Landis, NASA scientist and science fiction author to thank. He gave a speech about Venus that basically inspired me to create Chilo. Geoff had figured out that Venus, at 100,000 feet, is somewhat more habitable for people if you build a floating city, thanks to air being more of a lifting gas on Venus than here on Earth.

MC: I really enjoyed the unique take on the human cultures populating Chilo, How does your background, being born in Grenada, influence that aspect of your novels if at all?

TB: Well, for one thing, I enjoy books that have lots of different cultures in them, showing the diversity and vibrancy that the future can have. Growing up in the Caribbean where you have a lot of world travelers and varying island backgrounds encouraged me to try and represent this in my books.

MC: You literally begin this book with a bang. All around ass kicker Pepper is blazing through the atmosphere in a space suit and a man made heat shield. That's a hell of a way to start the book. What can you tell people about your lead character Pepper?

TB: Pepper is as much an archetype as a character. I usually use Pepper to herald the immense change that's about to come and kick a society's ass, or upset people's lives. He's something of a harbinger, from a literary standpoint. He's also a hell of a lot of fun to write, and I get a lot of fan mail about him.

MC: You also quickly introduce two other interesting leads. Let's start with Timas. He's a young man with literally the weight of the city on his shoulders. Can you talk a bit about Timas and the role he plays in the story?

TB: I've been thinking a lot about how children bear the weight of their parent's mistakes and decisions. In this novel, Timas's ancestors made choices about technology without even thinking about it, and the result is that Timas has to get into a pressure suit and be lowered to the ground of Chilo to work the mining machine down there, or the city suffers. And since only children like him can do this, it forces him to grow up early.

MC: Next is Kat, an avatar from the technologically advanced Aeolian society. What role do avatars play and what kind of society are the Aeolians?

TB: The Aeolian society is a bit of a techno-democracy. They believe government should not be embodied by professional politicians, but be the result of decisions by the community as a whole in real time. As a result, the idea of an ambassador doesn't fly with them. They pick someone at random who then has to 'represent' the nation by acting as an avatar to the will of the nation's citizenry. The end result is pretty odd, but the civil society it works for is interesting.

MC: You have honest to goodness zombies in Sly Mongoose. How much fun did you have in mashing the two genres together? And talk a bit about what the Swarm actually is...

TB: The Swarm comes about in part from an old Arthur C. Clarke piece about distributed swarm intelligences and with a nod to Bruce Sterling's Swarm in his Schismatrix series. But mainly it came about because Peter Watts created a hard SF justification for vampires in Blindsight, and I wanted to do the same for zombies before the idea occurred to him. The Swarm is passed on by biting, and it harnesses the brain power of its individual units like individual processors of a Beowulf Cluster. And the larger the Swarm gets, the more intelligent the Swarm becomes. That's the ticking clock. Unlike zombies, when the Swarm goes critical, it will start messing around with you by having individual units pretend to be okay, or by sending out messages saying 'everything's all good here, no worries.'

MC: I got a definite steampunk vibe from this book similar in some respects to Crystal Rain. Is that a genre that you think you might ever fully set one of your future novels in?

TB: I have a fondness for steampunk, so the aesthetic is fully creeping back into my work, particularly with Sly Mongoose. The excuse for blimps and floating cities makes it hard not too. The floating Straandbeest creatures powered by wind and gears, and using analog operating systems out of gears to emulate minds are the result of a full on steampunk ethos I can't shake. But the novel is essentially also science fiction. Jamming steampunk and space opera together seemed like a lot of fun. In Ragamuffin, the previous book, I also had a space ship powered by human beings doing hand computations in a steampunk way as well, though that book is all spaceships and space opera.

MC: Aside from Sly Mongoose being a rousing action/adventure story it also touches on some pretty serious issues. The price of duty and responsibility, the divide between rich and poor, eating disorders, slavery...how important is it for you to address issues like that in your writing?

TB: The action and adventure comes first, I have this terrible fear of boring people, that comes from my own short attention span. I try to pack a lot of fun into each page. But usually underneath that is this layer of issues I fold into the book. Every once in a while I get a reviewer or reader who mentions reading my books twice, once for the sheer dash and fun, and the second time paying closer attention to this stuff under the surface, and being pleasantly surprised at all the things I'm touching on because they were distracted by all the fun.

MC: Pepper is a character who you have featured in short stories as well as him being a secondary character in your other novels. This time Pepper takes center stage. What is it about Pepper that keeps you coming back to him and what's coming up for him?

TB: As I mentioned above I use Pepper to humanize the changes that are coming. He works as a harbinger. As a character, he's very much modeled after the 'man with no name' from the Clint Eastwood movies and the Japanese Samurai movies those are based on.

MC: What's next for you Tobias?

TB: I'm wrapping up a HALO novel for Bungie/Microsoft and my publisher Tor. It should be a lot of fun, showing off some corners of the HALO universe that haven't been explored. The big action and big ideas of my first three books got the folks at Bungie psyched about my brand of adventure, and I'm psyched to be working with them.

So I had a relationship with my lcs. We were good together for a while, you know? I'd go in and the assistant manager who had become my friend and occasional binge-drinking partner would be filled with recommendations that would make me spend money and have fun. It was a win-win situation. Six years went by like this, me making the occasional foray into recommended superhero books before retreating back to indie-land.

You read that right. My relationship with my friend and the store was so amazing that I bought the X-Men. Not, like, the cool ones, either. A crossover with Ultimate Spider-Man. I KNOW. I even stuck with this store after moving to a little burg about 40 minutes away. It was kind of a hike and ended up with me cutting my visits down to about once a month. Tragic but satisfying - like eating the ENTIRE container of Ben and Jerry's. Mmm.

Then came along manga. Seductive little half-inch thick books with delicious ice-cream colored covers, gooey-eyed heroines on the front. It was furtive at first, buying them and slipping them into the middle of my stack, scheduling runs for when my buddy wasn't working. (I later found out that he was still sorting pulls and had put them into my box, totally ruining my cover, but forcing me to come out into the light, so to speak.) At some point during all of this, due to a moment of brief pettiness on my friend's behalf, I also lost my constant ten percent discount. That rankled a little. C'mon. I'm a faithful shopper, make this trip worth my while. Then came The Incident.

I hadn't gotten my manga fix for a while, it seemed. I understood that they had to be hand-pulled, so to speak, but had they not come out? Being an Oni Press sort of girl, I know about delay, so I vowed patience. A while turned into a few months and, curious, I asked about release dates the next time I was in for a visit. The hipster running the counter pulled up dates as one of the owners came over to investigate. It turned out that they had missed the latest release of all of them. Every single book I was pulling.

A little frustrated, I asked when they were going to be coming in and they assured me it was a few days. So, a few days later when I made a special trip, the same owner who had been standing there chuckled and told me "They all came in at once!"

What. Seriously? Dude, I was there. You were there. We were both there. Don't play me like that, okay? But I persevered and stuck with it. Then I got four copies of the same issue, same cover of Doktor Sleepless. We all know how I feel about my boy, Warren, but this was a little excessive.

A few weeks after I got the fourth copy of Doktor Sleepless, my friend, Steve, and I went on a grand tour of another little town's comic book shops. And, frankly, I wasn't impressed. No love here. But then he mentioned another store that we weren't going to have time to run to. I said I would pop by and check it out. I was looking for a back issue, after all. I was on a quest. No stone would be unturned!

On the way, my husband mentioned that maybe this store would be kind of cool since it was mere minutes from my house. The seed was planted but then I walked in. There was a game room and a wall of manga and Firefly toys and a nice guy behind the counter offering to tell his people to look for my book. I might have started to make a crack about the gamers because I'm mean but I was told that there was a place for everyone at Fantasy Books. I swear, I felt guilty and welcomed at the same time. I got a form to start my pull list but didn't fill anything out. I didn't want to be a cheater, you know? I asked friends the best way to do all this. They all agreed that it might be time and just to make a clean break.

So I dumped my old store. Admittedly, I had to have a few drinks before I could go in to do the deed but I walked right in there and told them we were through. The whole thing was anti-climactic, though, for all my whiskey and coke courage - the girl at the counter was new and made all of my pulls inactive without a blink. I walked out, cheerful, and emailed my pull-list to Fantasy Books the next day.

Fantasy Books, located in practically downtown Belleville, is my dream-store. I get my ten percent back, which is kind of a big deal when you're laying out some cash for books. They're cheerful and involved in the process, dealing with my constant requests for new books with aplomb. There aren't any intimidating people wearing shapelessly cool clothes. These are comics people, not ultra-cool cats with computers. Last Wednesday, Mike stayed open a few minutes late so I could pick up my pulls. He was, naturally, wearing a Superman shirt. I sent a request for some pulls the next morning with apologies for adding stuff every week and Steve said it was awesome that people got so involved in the hobby instead of just sending a confirmation. They're so cool. I get the big magazine Previews for free (because I order all sorts of crazy stuff out of there) and it exposes me to all sorts of shiny stuff I might otherwise be missing.

Furthermore, they have a Hello Kitty figurine dispenser at the door. I think it's love.

Arthur C. Clarke Award winning author Richard Morgan drops by RBN to talk about his latest novel "The Steel Remains".

RM: Well, I’ve always quite liked good old traditional hack-and-slay fantasy, and the mythological sources it draws upon. As a teenager, I read an awful lot of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion stuff, some Karl Edward Wagner and a couple of seminal fantasy novels by Poul Anderson, most notably the very brilliant The Broken Sword. And that’s without mentioning the huge amounts of Norse, Greek, Roman, Slavic, you name it mythology I was reading as well. So, in some senses I’ve always had a vague hankering to write something along those lines.

More recently, in the five years since I got published, I’ve spent a lot of time advocating a kind of “sword and sorcery” noir, something that would in effect import the sensibilities of the Kovacs books into a fantasy landscape – so it just seemed like time to stop talking and actually do the work, put my money where my mouth is if you like.

Oh, and as to that website list – it’s light-hearted, but definitely not tongue in cheek. I don’t want to sell anybody anything under false pretences, and there do seem to be some genre readers who get very angry when a book doesn’t live up to their (often quite narrow) expectations. I don’t want that to happen again, the way it seems to have done with Black Man/Thirteen.

RBN: When you knew that you were really going to make a go of this how did your publisher react?

RM: With huge enthusiasm, in fact. My UK editor read the character vignettes I’d written and immediately offered me a three-book deal. And my US editor was right behind him with the same level of enthusiasm, so I’m signed up in America as well.

RBN: Was their any trepidation on your part? Obviously your previous work is still "sci fi" but it's more of a hard sci fi, or post cyberpunk. This is quite a change for you.

RM: Well, actually not so much – part of the brief for these books was always going to be a very noirish tone, and I really haven’t made any concessions at all to the new territory in terms of style and dialogue. Anyone who liked the Kovacs universe is likely to feel pretty much at home with The Steel Remains, and that also applied to me while I was writing it.

RBN: What about your fans? Are you worried about them not following you?

RM: Yeah, I suppose it’s possible, probable even, that some readers will just be so resistant to fantasy tropes that they really can’t stomach the change of scenario – though as I said, Kovacs fans should feel right at home. But then there is also the possibility that the book will pick up a whole new audience who like fantasy but won’t touch SF. And who knows, maybe I’ll even persuade some of those readers to cross the divide the other way and read my SF.

In the end, though, I don’t think you can afford, as a serious author, to worry too much about your potential audience. Good writers write for themselves, and if they’re lucky they find an audience. That’s certainly what happened to me with Altered Carbon, and I have tried to stick with that dynamic with every subsequent book. I write for myself and just hope the readership will come along for the ride. From time to time, of course, concerns about market will creep into your mind, you wouldn’t be human if they didn’t, but like the movie says, you got to fight through that shit. Like Altered Carbon, The Steel Remains is very much the book I wanted to write – I’ll just have to hope that, like Altered Carbon, it finds its audience.

RBN: Let's talk a little bit about the actual first book in the series, "The Steel Remains". If you can, give us the lay of the land for this new world you've created...

RM: Right. The genre shorthand for this, I guess, is to imagine a fourth volume to The Lord of the Rings – the war is over, the land is devastated from end to end, the harvests rot in the fields because all the people who should be farming the land are dead or crippled in one way or another, surviving populations starve and whole economies are on the floor; roving bands of orcs and other renegades are still a problem, though most are now interned in concentration camps or simply murdered and shoveled into mass graves; Gondor and Rohan have gone back to squabbling over territory now that there’s no-one else to fight; the veterans of Pelennor Fields and the Gates of Mordor are home but fucked up, drug addicted, homeless and living rough, can’t or won’t fit in; in other words, a total fucking mess. Of course, The Steel Remains is a social and geographical (and sorcerous) landscape all my own, it doesn’t really resemble anything Tolkeinesque, but that sketch I’ve just given you captures the spirit of what I’m trying to do; I don’t like war, I don’t like the overly romantic perspective fantasy often gives to violent conflict, and while violent combat itself may be sickly exhilarating and intense, I’m not going to pretend, whatever genre I’m writing in, that war is a cool or noble or beautiful thing. So rather than charting the war itself, its glorious victories et tedious cetera, we skip all of that and start with the aftermath, the stuff that no-one ever likes to talk or think about, the stuff that’s never commemorated in speeches or monuments or epic poetry.

RBN: The cover for the book is a beauty. Who designed it?

RM: The cover art is by Laura Brett, an in-house designer for Orion. She’s previously done covers for Joe Abercrombie and Patrick Rothfuss among others, and as you can see she really is something special; in fact I’ll readily confess that I tweaked the last section of the book when I saw that cover. There’s a verbal description at the start of one of the later chapters which pretty much is that image from the cover, and I’m not ashamed to say that Laura was there first with the image, not me!

RBN: What can you tell us about your protagonists?

RM: Oh, they’re a much-bloodied, weary, cynical lot – perhaps as you’d expect, given my track record so far. One of them at least has a drug problem, with the second it’s harder to tell to what extent his drug use is part of the problem or part of the solution, and the third major character deals with his frustrations and day-to-day requirements through other strategies which, to twenty first century western sensibilities, probably aren’t going to seem any more socially acceptable than the drug use he eschews. I guess by the time anyone reads this, it’s going to be no secret that the main character of the book is gay – well, suffice it to say he’s not the only one. And leaving sex aside for a moment in favour of violence, the characters are all brutally competent at killing and destroying, though some of them are more comfortable with this than others. All of them feel cheated and betrayed in one way or another and none of them have more respect for authority than you can scrape off your heel on a curbside. I think you’re going to love them.

RBN: You talked openly about wanting to apply noir tendencies to a fantasy novel. How did you find putting that into practice?

RM: In the end, it was actually surprisingly easy – turns out, the standard fantasy landscape is crawling with opportunities to go that route. In standard fantasy, there is pretty much always war, always intrigue, always an abuse of authority, always a class structure, always people killing each other with bits of sharp steel. I mean, how much darker and more underbelly-focused can you get? The trick was simply to think about the genuine human implications of all those things and then start laying down the detail. To the extent that The Steel Remains is in any way a departure from the bulk of the epic fantasy out there (and I’m really not informed enough to know if it is or not), I think it’s been a case not of dumping or changing any of the staples of the genre, so much as simply not turning a blind eye to what those staples imply.

RBN: One of the things I always look forward to in your books are your inventive gadgets and weaponry. Will we see this continue in The Steel Remains?

RM: Errrm - to some limited extent, yes, I suppose so. There are a couple of nice surprises in that line coming up in the book, but to be honest the weapons tech (if you want to call it that) is more by implication than by actual demonstrable capacity. One way of looking at this would be to say that I’ve done with some of the weaponry what I did in the Kovacs books with the Martians – it’s more about what you don’t see, what you can (maybe) infer, than it is about anything concrete. That in itself has been quite a fresh and fun dynamic to play with.

RBN: Now that you gone through revisions, how do you feel about the process?

RM: There actually weren’t any revisions to speak of – The Steel Remains is pretty much the same in its finished form as the original manuscript I turned in. Couple of stylistic tweaks here and there, one short sentence added to underline a subtle point of plot that I’d maybe left a little too subtle – oh, and in the final draft, I’ve taken eleven instances of the word fuck out of the text. It’s a fairly intense book, but you can overdo these things.

RBN: Will this book be coming to the US?

RM: Absolutely. As I said, my US publishers (Del Rey/Ballantine) were right behind me with this from the start. The US copy edit is winging its way across the Atlantic to me even as I type, and there’s been huge personal enthusiasm from the people who’ve read it in house. The book’s slated to come out in February next year, six months after the UK release, but that’s largely my fault because I overran a fairly tight deadline by six or seven weeks. There’s some question whether the title will be the same – my US editor was rather keen on the original, working title A Land Fit for Heroes, and they may stick with that. But apart from that, it’ll be the exact same novel.

RBN: What comes next for you?

RM: Good question. I think The Steel Remains was something of a leap in the dark for all concerned, and we’d always left it flexible as to whether I’d complete all three fantasy novels and then go back to SF, or alternate genres for a while. Now the book’s in, however, my UK editor is pretty keen to see two more like it as soon as possible. The Steel Remains is a standalone in as much as it wraps up fairly cleanly, you’re not left with any cliff-hangers; but there is of course a whole world sitting there only fractionally explored, and any characters that got to walk away at the end obviously have the remainder of their lives to live, and decisions to make as to what they do with that time. There’s also a certain amount of ambiguity contained in the ending (though no more so than in any of my other books) and I think the general sense is that readers will want all that stuff explored right now (or as soon as humanly possible). And I’ve had a great time with this book, so I’m quite happy to serve up a sequel. So right now it looks like I’ll do the whole fantasy trilogy thing, do my exploring, get it out of my system, and then head back to SF waters a couple of years from now. Feel like some Victorian arctic explorer saying that, but….yeah, that’s the plan.