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The Fantastic Elite Fiction collection arrives!

For the past year, Fantastic Books Publishing has been working with nineteen authors to create five pieces of Official Elite: Dangerous fiction, written under the same licence as the Gollancz books Elite: Docking is Difficult by Gideon Defoe, Elite: Nemorensis by Simon Spurrier and Elite: Wanted by Gavin Deas. On hearing the harrowing statistic that only 1-7% of all new releases ever get published in a format that the blind and partially sighted community can enjoy, CEO Dan Grubb set about creating Fantastic Books Audio in order to turn these Elite books, and eventually the entire Fantastic Books backlist, into…

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Elite: The Dark Wheel by Robert Holdstock*

*We are delighted to replace the original blog post with this update, corrected by eyewitness and participant – the marvellous Malcolm Edwards, who is a LonCon Guest of Honour – to some of the events cited within. The first two people to correctly identify all of the corrections will win copies of the new Elite novels when they’re published in physical form in Autumn 2014. The original Elite, released in 1984, was one of the reasons I became a fan of science fiction. The game itself had no storyline or characters, but it did have a fair bit of worldbuilding: the…

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Elite- Docking is Difficult

Gollancz is thrilled to welcome guest blogger Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone back to the blog. Adam discusses just how difficult docking really was in the Elite games.  They say that docking is difficult, and they’re not kidding. I was six years old when my dad came home from work one night, excitedly brandishing a copy of a new computer game he’d picked up. We’d had our computer – a mighty BBC Micro Model ‘B’ with a vast 32K of memory – for a few months at that point. In theory it was for my dad to manage the household…

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Gideon Defoe on Elite Dangerous and the illustrious history of video game tie-in novels

We are delighted to share with you a a special post from Gideon Defoe on his brand new book Elite Dangerous: Docking is Difficult.  There comes a point in any writer’s career when, if we want to be taken seriously as an Important Author, we must tackle the trickiest form of our craft, the Blue Riband event of letters: the officially licensed video game tie-in novelization. The French call this genre ‘le petit mort’, which translates as ‘Super Mario’s book curse’. So when Victor Gollancz, over expensive drinks at The Ivy, pointed at me with his big, weather-worn finger and…

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Exclusive interview with Gavin Deas author(s) of Elite: Wanted

So Elite: Wanted by Gavin Deas is out on the 15th of May. Gavin Deas is the cunning pseudonym of fantasy author Stephen Deas (The Adamantine Palace, The Black Mausoleum, Dragon Queen et. al.) and science fiction author Gavin Smith (Veteran, War In Heaven, Age of Scorpio and Crysis: Escalation). To better understand the process behind writing a collaborative novel Stephen and Gavin decided to interview each other. The results were not terribly helpful: Stephen:  So, Gavin, what interested you in working on Elite: Wanted? Was it really just because you wanted to write about space pirates? Gavin:  SPACE-PIRATES! Well…

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