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Channel: Orbit Books | Science Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy » Michael Cobley
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Humanity’s Fire Casting Couch

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As I’ve said elsewhere, writing a book is a bit like making a sculpture from the inside. You have a plan, an aim, and as you progress you have some notion of how it should appear to an onlooker when its all done. Except … creating something as big as a novel can have unintended consequences and many of those consequences reside within the minds of readers, an arena that we writers can only hope to influence in exactly the way we’d like.

Yup, reading is an interactive activity – the reader creates much of the world of the book within their own head, and much of that inner creation depends on the writer’s facility with evocative prose with all its cues of description and plot and character and dialogue…

Sometimes writers play games during the writing process – for example, while writing the Greg Cameron character I half-imagined him being played by David Tennant, on the cinema screen of my mind. Theo Karlsson I saw being played by Sean Connery (yeah, I know, Sean is Scottish and Theo is partly Swedish, but if SC can do a Russian sub commander then he’ll do for Theo). Kao Chih always struck me as a younger Jackie Chan, while Robert Horst could have been played by Joseph Cotten….or Rutger Hauer.

Of course, now that Audible have released the audiobook of Seeds Of Earth (with The Orphaned Worlds to follow once a minor prob has been sorted), we have David Thorpe lending his considerable vocal talents in his portrayal of the various characters. And in the weeks to come it is entirely possible that my readers may get to hear me narrating one of my own short stories – the intention is to do this as a kind of experiment, to see if I can actually do it in a listenable fashion and to see what the readers will think of it.

Of course, if readers have their own notions of which actors would be best for which part, I’d be intrigued to find out.

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