A bit of up to the moment news:

We’ve just reached agreement to produce signed limited editions of China Mieville’s breakout novel, Perdido Street Station, as well as Richard K. Morgan’s The Cold Commands, the follow-up to his acclaimed fantasy debut, The Steel Remains. Look for ordering information on both books soon.

As a reminder, we’re in the homestretch on China’s mammoth new novel Kraken, which will head to the printer as soon as we have the signature pages in hand, and have a chance to input the final round of corrections.

We’ve hit a very slight lull in shipping new releases this week, so our shippers are taking the opportunity to assemble the grab bags we sold a few weeks ago. Packages should be going out to customers over the next two weeks. (We sold a greater number of grab bags than usual because it was the first time we had offered the special since 2008.) Thanks to everyone for their patience. We think you’ll all be pleased with what you receive.

Just days ago, Alexander Preuss turned in the final illustrations (including full color endsheets) for Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, one of the best epic fantasy debut novels of the past decade.

The novel itself is completely proofed, and ready for the printer. All that remains is for us to have ARCs printed, let them circulate so word about our edition will build, and then we’ll publish later this fall. At this point, we’ve sold roughly 300 of the 500 numbered copies, and all of the lettered copies. We’re certain that sales will again pick up now that we’ve posted the cover, and will again when we post more of the full-color interiors to the book’s page.

We’ve just finished giving Philip Jose Farmer’s first posthumous collection, Up the Bright River, its final proofing, and have posted Bob Eggleton’s dust jacket art for the book. As you may notice, this book looks a piece with several of our earlier Farmer titles, including Venus on the Half-Shell and Others and The Other in the Mirror.

Up the Bright River contains tales out-of-print for decades, representing every aspect of Farmer’s multi-faceted career, including Riverworld stories being collected for the first time.

We’re in the homestretch of sending out copies of Cherie Priest’s Clementine, the new Clockwork Century Short novel (and sequel to her breakout novel Boneshaker). We’re likely to declare the book sold out sometime this week.

As soon as Clementine is finished, our shippers will turn their weary hands to assembling and sending out the Grab Bags we sold a couple of weeks back. Because we hadn’t run one of these specials in two years, we sold a larger than usual number of them, so shipping will take a good week or more.

What’s on the horizon?

The next new releases to ship will be the wholesale and large online retail orders for Terry Dowling’s Amberjack, and the remarkable new novella by Ted Chiang:The Lifecycle of Software Objects.

Thanks to everyone who has made our latest short story collection by Jack Vance such a success. We’re down to the last 200 copies of Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, and expect those copies to move over the next month or two.

We’re equally excited because we have a couple of other Vance projects lined up over the next two years, including a second volume gathering some of his early sf tales. The other project, which we’re already working on, Dangerous Ways, collects three rare mystery novels by Jack. We’ve just sent the book off to be designed and are discussing likely candidates to essay the dust jacket art.

Over at Subterranean Online, we’ve just posted what may be the most important entry in Lucius Shepard’s Dragon Griaule series of stories to date. Certainly, it’s the most revelatory. If you’ve been following these tales through the years, from “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” to “Father of Stones”, “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter”, and the beyond, you’ll not want to miss his latest novella, “The Taborin Scale“.

The sharp-eyed among you will notice that we published The Taborin Scale as a small hardcover not long ago, and have a very few copies left in inventory.

The satellite packing, done from our office proper, is a bit ahead of the warehouse at the moment. We’ve packed up all individual preorders for Amberjack (Terry Dowling) and Clementine (Cherie Priest), and sent the books over to the warehouse to have postage applied.

The warehouse is currently catching up on some large retail and wholesale orders and will be applying postage and arranging pickup for the individual orders shortly.

Not five minutes ago I set pen to paper on three different contracts for projects with Lucius Shepard. They include:

– A collection gathering all of his Dragon Griaule stories and novellas, including “The Skull,” a novella original to the volume.
– A collection which will feature four uncollected novellas, including one, “Repairman” written especially for the book.
– A Dragon Griaule novel, titled Beautiful Blood, on which Lucius is already working.

We’ll announce more details and post ordering info as appropriate.

In other news, we’ve also signed the contract for Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson’s Worlds, to be edited by Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois. We’re expecting the same level of production as for the Jack Vance tribute anthology, Songs of the Dying Earth.

Finally, we have a pair of editors at work on a top secret sf/fantasy anthology which will feature top names and SubPress favorites. This will be one of the major anthologies next year.

We’ve packed up all individual orders for Dan Simmons’s new spooky historical novel, Black Hills, an epic (184,000 words) centered on a young, then aging, Lakota Indian, and the ghost of George Armstrong Custer. As Publishers Weekly noted in its starred review, “In his ability to create complex characters and pair them with suspenseful situations, Simmons stands almost unmatched among his contemporaries.” Now that the books have been packed at our office, we need to ferry them to the warehouse, where postage will be applied, and they’ll be en route to customers later in the week.

In other Simmons news, we’ve reached agreement with all parties to produce a signed limited edition of his just completed novel, Flashback. We’ll post ordering info later in the year.