Guy Gavriel Kay has made an interesting post on his forum, discussing how readers bring themselves into the reading experience, and why reactions to a scene, character, or novel can vary so widely from one reader to another. To some degree it’s elementary, but it’s a good thing to remind people of from time to time when they get into discussing their reactions to a work of literature.
Via Emerald City, we learn that Ian Cameron Esslemont, Steven Erikson’s collaborator on the Malazan Empire setting and author of the small-press-published Night of Knives (which tells the tale of Dassem Ultor around the time of the deaths of Emperor Kellanved and Dancer), will now be published through Bantam UK. They will be republishing Night of Knives in hardcover, and then will be releasing Esslemont’s next Malazan book, The Return of the Crimson Guard, something Malazan fans will definitely be looking forward to.
Press release below the cut.
As part of her April update (and no, its not a joke), Jacqueline Carey has put up the first chapter from Kushiel’s Scion on her website, providing a tasty sampling of the book that is due out in June.
Anne Bishop has posted to her sff.net newsgroup and two Yahoo Groups discussion lists dedicated to her books that her next project (following Belladonna, the conclusion of the Ephemera duology that started with Sebastian) will feature Surreal, Daemon, Lucivar and Jaenelle. In other words, we get to return to the Realms of the Blood, for a story that will take place after the stories found in the Dreams Made Flesh collection. This one will not be a collection, however, but a full-sized novel. As a bonus, the book will also contain a reprint of the Surreal short-story "By the Time the Witchblood Blooms".
As Patrick Nielsen Hayden recently suggested at Crooked Timber, it looks like a couple of Tor’s novel nominees—John Scalzi and Robert Charles Wilson—are joining Charles Stross in making their nominated novels available as e-texts. Unlike Stross’s Accelerando, these texts will be available only to members of this year’s Worldcon in Los Angeles.
Instructions can be found at Whatever, Mr. Scalzi’s blog.
Via Publisher’s Weekly, we’ve learned that Eric Shanower—writer-artist on the multiple award-winning Age of Bronze, a fantastic retelling of Homer’s Iliad—is considering serializing new issues of the comic on the web due to poor sales of the single issues (the trade collections are both doing well). Linda and I both enthusiastically recommend the comic—Shanower is a rare talent.
We only discovered this today, but on the 24th of February Stephen R. Donaldson’s official site was updated with the news that he has finished the first draft of Fatal Revenant, the second book in the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. However, he expects that it will take about a year more of rewriting and editing before the final draft is delivered and a release date is set by the publisher.
Stanislaw Lem, the influential Polish science fiction of author of such works as Solaris and The Cyberiad, has been reported to have passed away today at the age of 84.
We are saddened to report that all those foolish rumors of the past have now come to pass, as Robert Jordan himself writes to Locus magazine to report that he has been diagnosed with a rare, likely-terminal blood disease. All the details can be found in the linked letter.
Our thoughts are with Mr. Jordan, his wife, and his family. We hope he gets the 30 years he wants so as to be able to write all the stories he wishes to write.
Like Linda, I picked up a book or two at SF Bokhandeln‘s sale. Among them was Jo Walton’s The Prize in the Game, a book (and, indeed, a setting) that I had long written-off, despite the subject matter being interesting; the only reason I picked it up now was that it was a hardcover and it was selling for 10 crowns (that’s a little over a dollar), and I supposed that if I didn’t like it I could chuck it or perhaps get a good price for it as a used bookstore. I can’t quite recall the reasons for why I wrote it off, now, but I can only say after reading it that I was being an idiot.
Yesterday, we went to SF Bokhandeln in Gothenburg to check out what they had on offer for the annual book sale. We picked up a few things from the sale, and then I couldn’t resist also picking up Anne Bishop’s latest offering, Sebastian, even though I knew it would mean getting no work done once we got home. A prediction that turned out to be quite accurate.
It has been sitting on our bookshelf for quite some time now, but a few days ago I felt the need for a break from my current assignments for my classes, and so I picked up Mary Gentle’s 1610: A Sundial in a Grave. I figured I could stretch out the rather hefty-looking volume for a while, reading a bit now and then. From reading her earlier novel Ash: A Secret History, I thought this might be another fairly tough read that I would need to take my time with.
Boy was I wrong.
Ellen Kushner, the writer of the brilliant Swordspoint and other related work, is offering to sell fans her few remaining copies of A Distant Soil #28, which contains a Swordspoint-world short story titled "King Alexander the Stag" illustrated by Colleen Doran. Information on purchasing the comic (or a second comic with a recently-republished story, also illustrated by Doran), can be found here.
Continuing Newsarama’s publication of recent first issues of Image Comics series, Fear Agent #1 is now up for perusal in full. This is yet another excellent comic, an old-fashioned sci-fi pulp adventure with a dose of cynical humor, and it’s extremelly well put together by Rick Remender, Tony Harris, and Sean Parsons.
Newsarama has put the whole of Warren Ellis’s Fell, published by Image, up on its website. The preview of this excellent little comic, written by Ellis with art by Ben Templesmith, is a good way to get hooked. The format is just sixteen pages of story, stripped to the bone to tell a tight, self-contained narrative following our hero Richard Fell (a young detective) as he tries to deal with the utter weirdness of his new workplace: the wintery, gloomy town of Snowton.