Subterranean Press Featured Title

Our Jack Vance tribute anthology, Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R. R Martin and Gardner Dozois, is very close to its final shape. Two of the final stories are now in house, and have been sent to Tom Kidd to illustrate. We’re delighted that Neil Gaiman (”An Invocation of Incuriosity”) and Howard Waldrop (”Frogskin Cap”) are now onboard. As soon as one final story lands in our laps, we’ll be sending out to have Advance Reading Copies printed, and will be able to set a firm publication date. At over 600 pages, and featuring a major new novella by Dan Simmons among its many excellent tales, Songs may turn out to be the must-have anthology of 2009.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that all individual, retailer, and wholesale orders for Orson Scott Card’s fantasy novella, Stonefather, have shipped. We had far more orders for copies than the print run’s total, so you might want to track down a copy soon if you’d like one.

Next up for our shippers will be the trade edition of Barry Hughart’s omnibus, The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, which is also Sold Out on publication. We’ll keep you posted as copies go out. Please note that we’re still a good 4-6 weeks from shipping the limited edition, as we wait for the slipcases to be completed.

Noted Steampunk aviatrix Cherie Priest debuts what she calls The Clockwork Century (”Combat dirigibles skulk across the sky and armored vehicles crawl along the land. Military scientists twist the laws of man and nature, and barter their souls for weapons powered by light, fire, and steam.”) in the novelette, “Tanglefoot“, the story of a gentle, tragic mad scientist and his boy assistant.

Sfsite has just posted a highly complimentary review of John Scalzi’s gathering of the “best” from the first ten years of his blog, Whatever. According to them, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded is for you: “If you are comfortable reading something that is likely to lampoon at least one of your deeply held opinions then this collection is for you. If you are the sort of person who goes looking for things to be upset about then this collection is also for you. However, you should be aware that the grading of hate mail is something that the author no longer has time for, so make sure it’s your best effort.”

A couple of our higher end limited editions have just sold out, and are being pulled from the site as soon as our webguy can manage it. Robert E. Howard’s Kull: Exile of Atlantis met with even stronger sales than we anticipated.

The next Robert E. Howard volume, Crimson Shadows, is also selling well, and with a smaller print run than Kull.

Naomi Novik’s debut novel, His Majesty’s Dragon came strong out of the gate and continued to sell steadily until our stocks became depleted. All signs point to her sequel, Throne of Jade performing the same way.

Finally, the $38 trade hardcover edition of The Jack Vance Reader, which collects three of the Grandmaster’s best novels, is out of print. We still have a small supply of the limited and lettered editions.

The first review for Caitlin R. Kiernan’s debut science fiction collection, A is for Alien is in, from Publishers Weekly: “Known for dark fantasy that skates the edge of horror, Kiernan (Tales of Pain and Wonder) turns to science fiction with equally unsettling effects in these eight stories.”

We don’t have time this holiday season for our usual fall sale — be it a grab bag or 50% off special. Our shippers are far too busy for us to add that to the equation. Still, it didn’t seem right not to do something toward the end of the year, so we’ve decided to put single copies of most SubPress books up on Ebay with starting bids of only $9.95. This first batch focuses on limited and trade editions — and we’ve only posted about half of those we plan to auction. Keep checking back for more auctions over the next week, and again in a few weeks, as we put a number of lettered editions up on the block.

Enigmatic dark fantasy author K. J. Parker has just turned in her novella, Purple and Black, for publication next year. The novella, a series of missives between an adviser assigned to an outlying military outpost, and the emperor who sent him, consists of a number of official communiques (printed in purple ink) and back-channel communications (printed in black). Each set of letters is shuttled back and forth via sealed communication packets. As one would expect from Parker, the novella is darkly funny, gritty, and with a few twists along the way. (By the way, I’m reading her new novel, The Company, right now, her first standalone, and recommend it very highly.)

We’ve just finished typesetting Peter F. Hamilton’s GIGANTIC novel, The Reality Dysfunction, which came in at over 900 designed pages. Look for us to announce this one soon, once proofreading is underway. Tomislav Tikulin will be gracing us with a classic space warfare cover.

After copies of the limited edition of Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy had been packed up and shuttled to the post office, our shippers came to the horrible realization that our printer had failed to include one of the signature pages in the book, meaning that copies were only signed by half the contributors. They made a quick trip back to the post office and recovered the packages.

The good news is that we managed to get all of the books back before any had shipped. The bad is that all everything had to be unpacked, and the books ferried back to our printer, who will tip-in the sheet they should have included the first time through. This is going to delay the shipping of Dark Fantasy by a few weeks, for which we sincerely apologize to everyone who ordered a copy. It is, however, a much better alternative than if the mistake hadn’t been discovered and the books sent to customers with this unfortunate error uncorrected.

On a more positive note, our shippers are currently packing up copies of the limited edition of The Best of Lucius Shepard (complete with the extra volume, Skull City and Other Lost Stories) and sending them out to customers.

The first review for Elizabeth Bear’s Seven for a Secret is in, from Green Man Review: “Where New Amsterdam had a strong action element to it, here the pyrotechnics are emotional. And where New Amsterdam was in many ways about beginnings, Seven For a Secret is about endings, and last acts of defiance against the dying of the light… Either way, Seven For a Secret remains as enjoyable as its predecessor, while managing to be more thought-provoking. It is the shorter book of the two, but it is by no means the lighter one.”

As a reminder, the limited edition of Seven for a Secret comes with an 11,000 word chapbook, The Tricks of London, set early in the career of Deputy Crown Inspector Abigail Irene. It stands easily among the best of the New Amsterdam tales.