Yesterday, I reported on the rough customer service I received after a return of my Eye of the World leatherbound edition from Dragonsteel.

Last night, I made one more attempt to contact Dragonsteel after my dozens of attempts to contact them through their webstore form and emails that were met with no response. This time, I received a response.

By morning, I received another response, this time in the form of an email telling me my order has been shipped.

I still have questions, mainly why my return was marked as “rejected” and why none of my emails or tickets went through or got responded to, as well as why I’m blocked on the X platform. However, this is, as a customer, all I asked for, and Sanderson and his team have made this situation right, for which I have to give kudos to them.

I really appreciate whoever is on the end of the Facebook customer service who made this work. I certainly still have a lot of questions as to what happened the last 45 days, but we may never know.

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Kevin J. Anderson has broken his own crowdfunding record with a BackerKit campaign for The Complete Saga of Seven Suns, the space opera he has built over 25 years and 13 volumes. The campaign went live on October 14, and by the time of writing it had raised $164,413, more than double the $81,918 his previous best, the Terra Incognita Kickstarter, finished with. The complete limited set of 13 bespoke volumes sold out on the first day.

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A Record Broken in One Morning

Anderson announced the launch: “The Complete Saga of Seven Suns went live this morning and blew past ALL of my previous records! A huge thanks to all my supporters. As a special early-bird bonus, everyone who backs in the first 24 hours will receive a free ebook of my Nebula-nominated SF novel ASSEMBLERS OF INFINITY.”

The campaign on BackerKit, run through his WordFire Press, started with a $20,000 goal and runs until November 5. The set includes all 13 volumes, about 6,200 pages and two million words. Standard editions of the 13 books cost $400 in hardcover, $250 in trade paperback and $50 as ebooks, with the seven core novels offered for $225, $150 and $35. The Galaxy Set of the seven core novels is limited to 150 signed, hand-numbered copies at $400. A new novella, Roamer’s Wrath, is available on its own or in a Bonus Stars pack with Veiled Alliances and Whistling Past the Graveyard. Add-ons include a digital gallery of more than 90 paintings and a flash drive with 25 ebooks. Pledges above $200 can be paid in four monthly installments.

Of the campaign, Anderson wrote: “I have written nearly two hundred novels, but The Saga of Seven Suns is my magnum opus.”

What the Seven Suns Books Are

The Saga of Seven Suns is a space opera that Warner Aspect launched in hardcover on July 24, 2002 with Hidden Empire. Seven novels followed through 2008 from Aspect and later Orbit: Hidden Empire, A Forest of Stars, Horizon Storms, Scattered Suns, Of Fire and Night, Metal Swarm and The Ashes of Worlds.

The story begins when the Terran Hanseatic League, which governs humanity’s colonies in the Spiral Arm, uses a device left by the extinct Klikiss to ignite a gas giant into a small sun so that its moons can hold colonies. The planet was the home of the hydrogues, an unseen race, and they go to war with humanity. The Ildiran Empire, ancient and led by a Mage-Imperator, is the Hansa’s ally and gave humans faster-than-light technology. The Roamers are independent nomads who supply the stardrive fuel that both civilizations need. The green priests of Theroc use worldtrees to communicate across great distances. Other ancient elemental races, the verdani, the faeros and the wentals, are drawn into the conflict, and the Klikiss return later in the series to reclaim their worlds.

The saga grew beyond the seven novels. Veiled Alliances, a 96-page prequel graphic novel from WildStorm and DC Comics, appeared in early 2004 and shows human generation ships meeting the Ildirans. Tor Books published a sequel trilogy, The Saga of Shadows, with The Dark Between the Stars in June 2014, Blood of the Cosmos in 2015 and Eternity’s Mind in 2016. That trilogy is set twenty years after the elemental war, when the exiled Klikiss robots ally with the Shana Rei, a force of darkness that has awakened to destroy all sentient life. Whistling Past the Graveyard is the bridge novel between the two series.

Anderson says he spent years of wrangling to get the rights back and is now reissuing the Seven Suns library with new covers, new interiors and new paintings. He notes that some of the bonus books came from a small publisher that many fans of the series never saw. The campaign adds Roamer’s Wrath, a new novella about a mother’s search for justice after a tragedy the Hansa inflicted, with two standalone stories, “Feet of Clay” and “Hole in the Wall.”

How a Seven Suns Book Got a Hugo Nomination

The Dark Between the Stars, which opens the Saga of Shadows sequel trilogy, was a finalist for the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Anderson announced it on his blog on April 10, 2015, writing that he had published more than 120 books and been nominated for the Nebula, the Bram Stoker and the Shamus, but never for a Hugo, an award he grew up admiring. He said he couldn’t be more pleased that this was the book chosen.

The Man Who Wrote Star Wars, Dune and The X-Files

For those who aren’t familiar, Anderson was born on March 27, 1962, in Racine, Wisconsin. He has more than 120 books to his name by the count on his own blog, with more than 23 million copies in print worldwide and more than 50 titles on bestseller lists.

He’s most famous for his work with Star Wars, where he wrote the Jedi Academy trilogy in 1994 and Darksaber in 1996. With his wife Rebecca Moesta he wrote the 14-volume Young Jedi Knights series from 1995 to 1998, and with Tom Veitch he co-wrote the Tales of the Jedi comics for Dark Horse. He co-writes the Dune prequels with Brian Herbert, a deal that began with Dune: House Atreides in 1999 and has grown to seventeen novels. His X-Files novels Ground Zero, Ruins and Antibodies ran from 1995 to 1997, and Ruins was the first X-Files novel to reach the New York Times bestseller list.

He and Moesta founded WordFire Press in 2011 to reissue out-of-print books, including unpublished Frank Herbert novels. In 2012 he was elected Grandmaster of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. His 1993 novel Assemblers of Infinity, written with Doug Beason, was nominated for a Nebula and a Locus Award, and it is the book he is giving away to early backers.

If a campaign with a $20,000 goal can pass $164,000 in its first day with its deluxe set already sold out, did he maybe not print enough of them? Even I have massive FOMO!

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After months of problems with the bindings, foil stamping, and other defects, Brandon Sanderson’s Dragonsteel finally began shipping the new batches of its leather-bound edition of The Eye Of The World by Robert Jordan. Like many fans, I was excited to get my copy of one of my favorite series, hoping to get a full leather-bound collection of The Wheel of Time one day.

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The packaging left something to be desired, and there was a lot of room in the box, so the book moved around in transit and was damaged. I did the unboxing on YouTube, showing what happened exactly:

I immediately submitted a request for a replacement copy, sent pictures of the damage, and Dragonsteel seemed to do the right thing by allowing me to return the book (why they wanted the damaged book back, I’m unsure) and get a new copy that was pristine. I was happy with their prompt response, but now, 45 days later, things have changed, and Dragonsteel is no longer responding to me.

It looks a lot like Brandon Sanderson and his company have stolen my money, and here’s what’s happened so far.

When I first submitted, as soon as I recorded, they immediately sent an automated response that it was under review:

Everything went fine, and they accepted it, giving me a return label:

Note the tracking number, as it’s evidence that I did exactly as they requested:

Putting the tracking number into UPS, you can see that the package was delivered, with a handy picture showing that multiple packages like mine arrived this way. They must have had quite a few damage returns.

This is where it gets strange, as you can see this was delivered on September 8th, but on September 14th, I got a reminder to send the return:

I thought nothing of it, considering it an automated system, and figured it was a glitch so I ignored that first one.

Then, a week later, I got the email again:

I grabbed the email for questions in reply, store at brandon sanderson, because this said it was a no-reply email, and forwarded this to them:

I received no response.

On September 28th, I got another email, this time telling me the return label expired, and that they were closing my case:

I once again sent an email to the store email listed for questions:

At this point, I was realizing something was very wrong, so I started going to Dragonsteel’s website. They have places to put in tickets.

Every day for the last week I’ve been putting in tickets:

It keeps telling me a ticket gets created, but I don’t receive an email confirming:

It’s now 45 days after I mailed my return, and I still haven’t received any updates and no response.

Now, generally, I’d just think they’re really inundated, but this is a lot of emails on my part, and a lot of days have gone by. There’s another factor to consider: I’m critical of Sanderson’s recent content, and they really don’t like me over there. In fact, I’ve been blocked on social media:

Not just by him, but also by Dragonsteel, the business account, who I don’t even think I’ve interacted with

It makes me wonder if there is a corporate directive within Sanderson’s group not to reply to me, which is ridiculous, as I not only run the biggest news site in SF/F here (thank you all for reading!), but also I’m a customer who paid for a massive premium product.

I don’t know how to rectify this at this point, and this is enough money that I care about it, so I have no choice but to make it public, in hopes that Sanderson will get me my book!

UPDATE: I just went into my account with them through Shopify, and it says this:

It looks like someone internally might have flagged this.

Do you think this is them being too busy, or is it malice against me within the organization?

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Support my fantasy work and help me make back my $200! I write a good, clean series that anyone can enjoy:

Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Catch up on prior chapters:

Chapter 1:

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If you like Harry Potter or Japanese fantasy light novels, this is for you.

So without further ado, I left a sample for you in hopes it can get some good free subscribers on board. I appreciate the support as it takes a lot of work to run Fandom Pulse here and this is quite the undertaking on top of it!

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Chapter 1:

From the Register of Kept Places, St. Brendan’s Collegium

Merrow, Weston. Place held since birth. Ring setting: iron, as for his mother. Key to be sent on the day his stone ripens and not one day sooner. The Provost asks that the key not be delivered by gull, by cat, or by Mr. Corrigan, who has been told twice.

Every compass in Merrow’s Pawn & Loan pointed at me.

Twelve of them sat in the glass case by the register, brass and plastic and one Boy Scout model with a cracked face, and every needle swung my way the second I walked in from the back. I’d played it off as a trick for customers since I was eight. Most of them figured I had magnets in my sneakers. One lady from Victorville asked if I was a government experiment, and Aunt Delphine told her yes and charged her five dollars to see it again. They never pointed north like they were supposed to, not while I was around.

It was a hundred and eight degrees that Saturday, my fourteenth birthday. The swamp cooler on the roof made a noise like a dying goat. Even though it was my birthday, I still worked and didn’t mention it. It wasn’t like we were going to celebrate anyway.

Delphine sat on her stool at the end of the counter with a crossword and four pieces of nicotine gum going at once. She’d quit smoking the year I started kindergarten and had been chewing angry ever since. The aluminum bat leaned on the shelf behind her, next to the Bible and the box of rubber bands. All three got used about the same amount.

The bell over the door jangled at ten after eleven.

A trucker came in, or at least a guy dressed like one: mesh cap, Peterbilt T-shirt, a wallet chain that hung to his knee. He carried a hard-shell guitar case by the handle, out from his body, like it might bite him. Something was wrong, very wrong.

“Nice case,” I said.

“Nineteen-seventy Gibson inside.” He laid it on the counter and popped the latches. “Worth two grand, easy.”

It was a sunburst Hummingbird with a crack in the pickguard and somebody else’s fingerprints all over the frets. This was no fake. That part he hadn’t lied about.

I picked it up and he flinched, and I noticed something odd about the way he did. People flinch when you touch their stuff, but they flinch toward it. This guy leaned back, like he was glad to be rid of it.

I looked at his hands. They were big with sunburned knuckles, but he had fingertips as soft as a baby’s. Anybody who plays guitar regularly has calluses you could strike a match on. This guy had never played anything louder than a car radio.

“What do you tune it to?” I asked.

“Normal.”

“Normal what?”

“Guitar normal.” He scratched his neck. “Look, kid, is there a grownup I can talk to?”

Delphine didn’t look up from her crossword. “He’s the grownup. I’m the muscle.”

I strummed once. The tuning sounded in Drop D, a little flat. Another lie I’d caught him in. I turned it over. On the back of the headstock somebody had stuck a tiny sticker, a white dove inside a circle, the kind churches hand out at summer camp.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked.

“My uncle. He passed.”

His eyes went to the door when he said passed. They’d gone to the door on uncle, too.

I set the Gibson back in its case, gently. “I’ll give you sixty.”

His eyebrows went up. “Sixty bucks? For a Gibson?”

“Sixty for the case. The guitar I can’t take without paperwork.” I slid the ticket pad across the counter and clicked a pen. “State law. I need your driver’s license and a thumbprint, and it all goes to the sheriff’s database by Monday.”

That was true. It was also the point where honest people reach for their wallets and the other kind reach for their keys.

He backed away from the counter.

“Forget it,” he said. “This place is a joke.”

“Your guitar,” I said.

“Keep it.”

The bell jangled. A pickup with no tailgate tore out of the lot and fishtailed onto Main Street, and the dust hung in the heat a long time after.

Delphine turned a page. “Dove sticker?”

“Grace Fellowship, down in Hesperia. They did a car wash fundraiser in June. I bet they’re missing a band.”

“Call ‘em.” She snapped her gum. “And kid. There’s no reward in it.”

“I know.”

“Just so you know it.”

I decided to call anyway. Nothing at Merrow’s was free, and that cut both ways. If you didn’t pay for a thing, you didn’t keep it. Delphine had been teaching me that since before I could reach the till.

I found the church’s number on a flyer still pinned to our corkboard. A youth pastor named Ruiz picked up on the second ring and made a sound when I said Gibson, like somebody had handed him back a kidney. He said he’d drive up after lunch. He said God bless you, twice. I had no idea what to do with that. Nobody had ever blessed me over a guitar before. So I said you’re welcome, and wrote Ruiz, 1 pm on the back of my hand, and hung up.

When I set the phone down, Delphine was watching me over her reading glasses.

“Fourteen,” she said.

So she’d remembered. I shrugged. “Yep.”

“Huh.”

She went back to the crossword, but her pen didn’t move. She was looking at the compass case instead, at twelve needles all pointing at me, and her jaw worked that gum like it had done something to her.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. Go check the cooler pads.”

I went. Behind me, every needle in that case turned to follow, patient as a debt collector.

I didn’t know yet that I owed anybody anything.

###

Delphine’s swamp cooler sat on the roof like a tin doghouse, and every August the pads dried out faster than she could complain about them. I climbed the ladder out back with a garden hose and a new set of pads from the hardware store. The tar paper was soft enough to hold my footprints.

I unscrewed the side panel. A gecko shot out of it and down the drainpipe, and the panel’s edge of rusty sheet metal caught my palm on the way.

I yelped. It stung for about two seconds. Then it stopped.

Blood beaded along the cut. I sat back on my heels and waited, because I already knew how this went.

Cuts didn’t stay on me. When I was seven I split my chin open on the bike rack at school, and by the time Delphine got me to urgent care, the doctor couldn’t find anything to stitch. He said kids heal fast. Delphine said thank you and drove me home without a word. It was another of those little, weird things like the compass that didn’t make sense, but I’d learned not to question too much.

Watches didn’t stay on me either. There were seven dead ones in my desk drawer, every one from the case downstairs, every one stopped within a day of going on my wrist. Battery, windup, and a solar one Delphine swore was indestructible. None of them lasted.

And I had never been cold. Now, I lived in the California desert which was pretty hot during the summer, to be fair, but what most people don’t know is that Barstow nights drop into the thirties in January, and I still slept with the window open and a sheet.

I let the cut annoy me, which was a mistake. Under my sneakers, through the roof, the LOANS sign over the front door started to buzz.

The lights did that when I got mad. They’d done it since I was little. When I was nine, a kid at school called Delphine a crazy old lady. I came home so angry that every bulb in the shop burst at once. Delphine swept up the glass without asking what happened. Then she sat me on the counter and held my face in both hands.

“Nobody sees that,” she said. “You hear me?”

“What is it?”

“It’s nothing. It’s you being a pain in my neck.” Her thumbs shook. “Promise me.”

I’d promised her, and I’d kept it. When the lights started up, I did what I always did. I counted the till in my head. Once I got to dimes, the buzzing stopped.

The cut was a pink line. By the time I’d hosed down the new pads and screwed the panel back on, it was gone.

Even though I knew I was a freak, I wondered if it was hereditary, and that led me to thinking about my mother.

Her name was Elinor, and she died the night I was born, and that was the whole list of things Delphine would tell me. I found one picture of her when I was ten, digging in a dresser I wasn’t supposed to touch: a woman on the deck of a boat in heavy fog, laughing, one hand up to block the camera. She had a dark, plain ring on.

Delphine caught me holding the picture. She took it out of my hands, and I never found it again, but I remembered the ring.

Pastor Ruiz pulled into the lot at one o’clock on the dot in a minivan with a GRACE FELLOWSHIP magnet on the side. He was younger than I’d figured, thirty maybe, with a soul patch and a T-shirt that said JESUS IS MY CO-PILOT on the front and BUT HE DRIVES on the back.

“You must be Wes.”

“Yes, sir.”

He opened the case on the counter and went quiet. He touched the crack in the pickguard with one finger.

“Our kids saved for two years for this,” he said. “Somebody took it right out of the van in the Stater Bros. parking lot. I figured it was in Vegas by now.”

“The guy who brought it in didn’t play.”

“How could you tell?”

“Soft fingers.”

He laughed and pulled out his wallet. “Here. For your trouble.”

It was a twenty. I kept my hands on the counter.

“No thanks.”

“Come on. Take it.”

“I didn’t sell you anything,” I said. “If I didn’t sell you anything, I don’t get paid. That’s how it works.”

From her stool, Delphine turned a page of the crossword. “He’s like that. I raised him well.”

Ruiz looked from her to me, and then he put the twenty away and stuck out his hand instead. I shook t and his watch went dark.

He tapped it twice. “Huh. Battery, I guess.”

I put my hands in my pockets.

He left a flyer on the counter on his way out. Youth Group, Wednesday Nights, Free Pizza. “In case you’re ever down in Hesperia,” he said.

“Nothing’s free,” I said.

He grinned at me from the door. “Grace is. That’s kind of the whole pitch.”

The bell jangled, and the minivan pulled out, slower than the pickup had.

I meant to throw the flyer away. I folded it into my back pocket instead, and I didn’t think too hard about why.

When I went back to the counter, every compass in the case swung to meet me, same as always.

Across Main Street, in the shade of the bail bonds office, a man in a long grey wool coat was standing perfectly still, looking at our window. It wouldn’t have struck me as too strange, but this was August, and it was a hundred and ten degrees out.

###

By two o’clock it had climbed to a hundred and twelve, and the man in the wool coat was still standing across the street.

I’d checked on him four times. He hadn’t moved or looked at his phone or gone into the bail bonds office to get out of the sun. He just stood in that thin strip of shade with his hands in his coat pockets and looked at our window, and every time I looked back, he was looking at me.

Delphine had gone into the storeroom to fight with the inventory binder, so I was alone at the counter when he finally crossed Main Street.

He didn’t hurry. A truck honked at him, and he didn’t even turn his head.

The bell jangled. A breath of cold air came in with him. I started to suspect there might be something beyond normal-strange about him.

Up close he was grey all over. From his coat, to his flat-combed hair, even his eyes, and his skin. It didn’t look healthy. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on him anywhere, and I could tell, because I was looking for it.

“Afternoon,” he said. His voice was soft and polite. It had a radio quality to it, a sound that could lull a person.

“Hi. Can I help you find something?”

“I believe you can.” He stepped up to the counter and looked down at the glass case. “Those compasses. I’m told they do a trick.”

“It’s just magnets,” I said. “In my shoes.”

“May I see?”

The thing about working a counter is you don’t get to pick your customers. Delphine’s rule was that anybody polite got polite back, until they gave you a reason. He hadn’t given me a reason yet, except for the coat, and the cold, and the fact that he’d stood in a hundred and twelve degrees for two hours to watch me.

So I stepped closer to the case.

What usually happened was the needles would swing toward me, the customer laughed, and I sold them a compass for eight dollars. This time the needles swung toward me, and then they swung back toward him.

They did it twice. All twelve of them twitched between us like they couldn’t decide. Then they settled back on me and stayed there.

The man smiled for the first time in a manner I didn’t like one bit.

“There,” he said. “There you are.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re Elinor’s boy.”

I blinked, taken aback.

“How do you know her name?” I asked.

“Oh, a lot of people knew your mother. She was very well known where I come from.” He tilted his head and studied me, the way I’d studied the trucker’s hands that morning. “You have her chin. Did you know that? And her temper, I’d guess. Does the light flicker when you’re angry, Weston?”

He knew my real name. Nobody called me Weston except the school district.

Above us, the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling started to buzz.

I started counting the till in my head, fast. Twenties, tens, fives.

“Ah,” the man said, pleased, and looked up at the lights.

The storeroom door banged open.

Delphine came out of the back with the aluminum bat already in both hands. I’d seen her pull that bat on a meth head and on a guy who tried to pawn a stolen wedding ring, and both times she’d been loud about it. This time she didn’t say a word until she was standing between me and the counter.

“Out,” she said.

“Mrs. Merrow.” The man inclined his head to her, very polite. “You’ve kept him well. I’ll say that for you.”

“It’s Miss. And I said out.”

“Fourteen years is a long time to keep a promise.”

“Then I’m good at it. Get out of my store, or I’ll find out what color you bleed.”

He looked at the bat, and then at her face, and then at me. He didn’t look scared.

“Happy birthday, Weston,” he said, and he left.

The bell jangled behind him. He crossed Main Street at the same slow pace and walked off toward the train yard, and the heat shimmer swallowed him up before he reached the corner.

Delphine didn’t lower the bat until he was gone.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Nobody.”

“He knew Mom’s name. He knew my name. This isn’t normal.”

“I said he’s nobody, so leave it at that.” She walked to the front door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and turned the deadbolt. It was ten after two on a Saturday. She always kept the store open, even on holidays. Nothing could deter Delphine from the potential of making a buck. This was getting stranger by the second.

“Go upstairs and leave me be for an hour,” she said.

“I have questions, though.”

“You’re not getting answers. Do as I say.”

She leaned the bat against the door frame instead of putting it back on the shelf.

On the floor just inside the door, where the man had stood, there was a footprint. It was wet, which again didn’t make sense given the high heat of summer in the desert. I crouched down and touched it. It was cold.

“Off with you!” Her tone was much angrier.

I frowned at the footprint and trudged upstairs.

###

I’d spent the afternoon in my room pretending to read and listening to Delphine act strangely downstairs. She didn’t open the shop back up. Mostly she paced. Once she got on the phone in the storeroom and talked low enough that I couldn’t make out a word.

When she finally came up, she was carrying a Del Taco bag and a little white box from the Chevron on Main Street.

“Birthday dinner,” she said, and set it all on the kitchen table.

Inside the box was a chocolate cupcake with a plastic lid, the kind that sits by the register next to the beef jerky. She dug a birthday candle out of the junk drawer, stuck it in the frosting and lit it with a kitchen match.

“Make a wish,” she said. “Don’t tell me what it is.”

I wished I knew who the man in the grey coat was. Then I blew out the candle.

We ate at the table with the TV on mute. Delphine didn’t touch her burrito. She kept looking at the window, even though there was nothing out there but the parking lot and the sign for the bail bonds place.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“Eat your taco.”

“I”m not going to give up on this. He knew mom’s name.”

“Lots of people know lots of names.” She picked at the foil on her burrito. “Doesn’t make them anybody worth talking to.”

“He said she was famous where he comes from.”

“He says a lot of things, apparently.” Then she stopped picking at the foil, age lines showing on her face. “Your mother liked chocolate. Those cupcakes, especially. She used to eat the frosting off first and leave the rest for me.”

It was the most she’d told me about my mother in three years. I sat very still in case she’d say more.

She didn’t. Instead, she got up, threw her burrito away without eating it, and went to bed at eight o’clock.

I picked at the rest of my food before trying to go get some sleep myself. I found my mind racing, and that i couldln’t.

Around midnight, I went down the back stairs to the shop in my socks. I revert to counting tills when I’m uncomfortable, whether I’m angry in my head, or physically doing so when I can’t sleep. It’s not that I think Delphine got it wrong. It’s that money is the one thing in the building that always comes out the way it’s supposed to, and I like that. I counted it twice. It came out the same both times, eight hundred and forty dollars and fifteen cents.

Before I went back up, I stopped in the living room and looked at the music box.

It sat on the top shelf above the TV, where it had been my whole life. It was small, about the size of a loaf of bread, made of dark wood with brass corners, and it had a keyhole in the front and no key. Delphine said it was my mother’s, and that the key was lost, and that if I ever pried it open with a screwdriver, she’d sell my bike. There was a design carved into the lid, a looping shape like a letter from an alphabet nobody uses.

On the way back to my room, I put my hand on the door to push it open, not remembering having closed it in the first place. This day kept getting odder, but I hoped tomorrow would go back to some semblance of sanity. Inside, my old canvas work jacket hung on the hook, which I hadn’t left there either. I didn’t wear my jacket during the summer.

I put my hand on it. The left pocket was warm, like something in there had been sitting in the sun.

I reached in and pulled out a key.

It was brass, about as long as my finger, with an old-fashioned round bow and a single tooth. It wasn’t from the shop. I found myself glancing around the room, but it was quiet, and no one was there.

I went back down to the counter, turned on the little lamp, and got out Delphine’s jeweler’s loupe from the drawer. There was no maker’s mark anywhere on it. But on the round part of the bow, so small I’d have missed it without the loupe, somebody had carved a design.

It was the same looping shape as the one on the music box lid.

My heart beat hard enough that I could hear it. I went back upstairs, pulled a chair over to the shelf, took down the music box and tried the key.

It didn’t fit. The key was twice as big as the keyhole.

I sat down on the floor with the music box in my lap and the key in my hand and tried to figure out what kind of person sneaks into your room and leaves you a key that doesn’t open anything. It had to be the man in the grey coat. There were too many coincidences otherwise. But how did he get inside?

I put the music box back exactly where it had been. Then I went to the top of the back stairs and looked down into the dark shop.

The compass case was right there at the bottom of the stairs. Most of those compasses had glow-in-the-dark needles, and in the dark they showed up as twelve little green lines.

They were all pointing up the stairs. They moved with the key. I tested it a few times. Shaking my head in confusion, I took the key into bed with me and closed my fist around it, guarding it with my life. It had to mean something.

Continue to Chapter 2:

By the end of the 1960s, Mary Stewart had settled into a rhythm that suited her publishers. Every year or two she delivered a romantic suspense novel, sending an ordinary person to the Greek islands or to Damascus and dropping them into a car chase or a locked room. Disney had filmed one of them. When she began a novel about the wizard Merlin, her publishers did not want her to write it, she said years later, because her thrillers were selling too well to risk.

The book was The Crystal Cave, published in 1970. It opened a five-novel Arthurian series, won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has rarely been out of print since. Stewart died in 2014 at 97. This month Centipede Press began selling a collector’s edition of the novel, priced at $165, from October 11. The story starts in Sunderland in 1916, with a vicar’s daughter named Mary Rainbow.

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A Scholarship Girl From Sunderland

Mary Florence Elinor Rainbow was born on September 17, 1916, the daughter of a vicar, Frederick Albert Rainbow, and a New Zealand-born primary school teacher, Mary Edith Matthews. At eight she was sent to boarding school in Penrith, where she was bullied, and she later said the experience left a lasting mark. At ten she won a scholarship to Skellfield School in Ripon and excelled at sport.

Oxford, Cambridge and Durham all offered her a place. She took Durham, which came with the largest bursary and the least travel. She graduated with first-class honours in English in 1938. A first-class teaching diploma in English and art followed in 1939 and a master’s degree in 1941. During the war she taught in primary and secondary schools and part-time at Durham School, and at the university she worked as an assistant lecturer from 1941 to 1945. After the war she returned as a part-time lecturer, mostly in Anglo-Saxon literature, from 1948 to 1956.

At a VE Day dance she met Frederick Stewart, a young Scottish geology lecturer. Their engagement was announced a month later, and her father married them in September 1945. An ectopic pregnancy in her thirties left her unable to have children, and she began writing novels.

Thrillers by the Year

Stewart said she had been writing stories since she was three, and in 1955 the habit paid off. Her first novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, went to Hodder & Stoughton and sold at once. The next year she and her husband moved to Edinburgh, where he became professor of geology and mineralogy. He was knighted in 1974, which made her Lady Stewart, a title she never used.

The books kept coming every year or two. Nine Coaches Waiting appeared in 1958 and My Brother Michael in 1959. The Moon-Spinners followed in 1962, This Rough Magic in 1964 and Airs Above the Ground in 1965. The settings ranged from the Greek islands and Damascus to rural England, Spain and Austria. Stewart liked to drop ordinary people into stock thriller situations such as the car chase and the locked room, and she wanted their fear and outrage to push them into physical courage without turning them into conventional heroes.

This Rough Magic and Airs Above the Ground earned Edgar Award nominations, and My Brother Michael was a Gold Dagger nominee. Disney adapted The Moon-Spinners in 1964, with Hayley Mills and Eli Wallach starring. The Agatha Awards later gave her a lifetime achievement honor. By the end of the decade there was no obvious reason for her to change anything.

Merlin, Against Advice

The pull came from outside the thriller shelf. By the late 1960s readers had rediscovered T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Arthurian stories sold again. Stewart had always wanted to write a historical novel. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain gave her a place to start, and she chose Roman Britain for the setting. She kept away from Mary Renault’s novels while she worked, because Renault’s influence on her was so strong.

The book was largely her own invention, she told Raymond H. Thompson in a 1989 interview, with little taken from tradition. Her publishers had not wanted her to write it, she said, because her earlier books were selling so well. She added that she would never have written it if she had thought about markets, and that she had no plan for a series.

Merlin tells the story himself. He is the illegitimate son of a Welsh princess, growing up at the court of Maridunum under an uncle, Camlach, who has reason to want him gone. An old scholar named Galapas teaches him natural lore and leaves him the crystal cave of the title. Merlin prophesies before the High King Vortigern, escapes to Ambrosius and serves him, and then serves Uther Pendragon. The book ends on the night Arthur is conceived, so Arthur himself has not yet been born.

Stewart made Merlin the narrator instead of Arthur and set the story in the fifth century instead of the twelfth. Her Merlin is a prophet and an engineer more than a wizard. Some critics scorned her use of Geoffrey of Monmouth as a source, and she never claimed scholarship for the books. She said she was content to sit among the historians Gibbon called embellishers of fragments and fables. Kirkus Reviews took a harder line in July 1970: “Period play, ripe and windy, for ladies easily lulled.”

The publishers who doubted the project watched it sell, and it brought her an entirely new readership.

Each Volume the Last

Stewart wrote the sequels one at a time, and she said she wrote each volume believing it would be the last. The Hollow Hills arrived in 1973 and The Last Enchantment in 1979, completing what HarperCollins later issued as the omnibus The Merlin Trilogy in 2004. The Wicked Day followed in 1983 and turned to Mordred, whom she wrote as a tragic figure instead of a plain villain. The Prince and the Pilgrim in 1995 closed the saga at five novels.

The Crystal Cave won the Frederick Niven Literary Award, and it and The Hollow Hills each won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. In 1991 the first novel reached television as Merlin of the Crystal Cave, directed by Michael Darlow, with Robert Powell and Jon Finch in the cast.

The Last Novels and the Last Years

Between and after the Arthurian books she wrote for younger readers. The Little Broomstick appeared in 1971, Ludo and the Star Horse in 1974 and A Walk in Wolf Wood in 1980, and all three were adapted for Jackanory. Ludo and the Star Horse won a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Little Broomstick became the 2017 animated feature Mary and the Witch’s Flower, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi. A poetry collection, Frost on the Window, came in 1990. The suspense novels continued at a slower pace, among them Touch Not the Cat in 1976 and Thornyhold in 1988. Rose Cottage, in 1997, was her last novel.

The Royal Society of Arts made her a fellow in 1968. The Scottish Parliament gave her a lifetime achievement award in 2006, and in 2009 Durham, the university she had chosen for its bursary, awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters. Frederick Stewart died in 2001. She lived in Edinburgh and near Loch Awe, where she gardened and kept a black and white cat named Tory that lived to eighteen.

Mary Stewart died at home near Loch Awe in Argyll on May 9, 2014. She was 97. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography added her entry in 2022.

Where She Fits in the Legend

Stewart did not work alone in the field. Rosemary Sutcliff had published Sword at Sunset in 1963, a historical novel of a Roman-British Arthur who narrates his own story and has no magic. Stewart worked the same early period from Merlin’s side and added the Sight, Merlin’s gift for knowing things before they happen. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon appeared in 1983, the year of The Wicked Day, and told the legend through its women.

The Merlin books have rarely been out of print since 1970. Medievalist Gillian Polack has written that Stewart’s novels shaped how many recent fantasy and historical fiction writers picture Merlin and Arthur.

Centipede Press, which has also published collector’s editions of Michael Shea and Fritz Leiber, lists its The Crystal Cave as sewn, on acid-free paper, with a dust jacket. It costs $165 and went on sale October 11.

Stewart’s publishers wanted another thriller and got a fifth-century Merlin instead. Which working genre writers are sitting on a book their publishers have told them not to write, and what would it take for a publisher to let them?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Royal Road has deleted Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Tsundere, the Malfoid rewrite by the X writer known as GuardBro (@GuardTm), and the site’s own rules back the removal. Most of the fiction is J.K. Rowling’s text, and Royal Road requires authors to hold the rights to what they post.

GuardBro now hosts the work in a Google Doc, where he says more than 100 people have had it open at the same time. He says a chapter was reported before the deletion. He has not said that Royal Road gave him a reason.

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What the Writer Said

On the removal and the report, GuardBro said: “Royal Road seems to be taking umbridge with some chapters containing “minimal” changes, so there may be chapters missing from the website. As well, the offending chapter was reported, so there’s some wild turkey out there thumbing their ticklers through my s***. Anyway, you can find the chapters in the link above as we wait for other websites to start working agian.”

On why he leaves out chapters: “I’m trying to keep the chapters in-line with the original story as much as possible so people aren’t lost as s*** when the read the fic, why I completely omit unchanged chapters. I tried just doing my changes in little blurbs in the earlier chapters of the book but people were completely lost as to when and where they were in the story, which was getting frustrating.”

Then the deletion: “Royal Road deleted the whole thing, lol. Ah well. Still gonna keep plugging away at updating, changing, and deviating the story with Malfoid, y’all are just going to have to use the google doc until AO3 shoots up.”

He has since said the Google Doc has gone viral, with more than 100 people accessing it at one time.

The document opens with his own label for the work: “The following fanfiction is obviously parody, if not outright satire due to internet memes.”

Royal Road’s Fanfiction Rules

Royal Road allows fanfiction, and its content guidelines set these terms:

• Authors who post represent that they hold the necessary rights and are not infringing a third party’s rights. Content that infringes another person’s intellectual property is removed.

• Work based on another author’s setting, characters or terminology must be tagged as fanfiction, with credit in the description.

• Fanfiction cannot add donation links or buy internal advertisements.

• Titles cannot be “infringing on someone’s intellectual property rights.”

• Fictions are checked against the guidelines, and one that breaks them can be deleted and the account banned.

In a June 2024 post, the site called fanfiction “a legal gray zone” and said its lawyers advised against allowing monetization of it.

Those terms give Royal Road grounds to remove a rewrite built on Rowling’s own chapters. GuardBro’s own phrase, chapters containing “minimal” changes, is the issue the site’s rights clause is aimed at.

What Is in the Document

The Google Doc runs about 204,000 words across Books 1 to 3, plus a Book 4 stub that points to a second document. It says the story deviates “at the exact point in which Harry meets ‘Draconia Malfoy’ during their robe fitting,” and that chapters where nothing changes are omitted.

The chapters it keeps run for thousands of words each. Fewer than one paragraph in ten mentions Malfoy, so most of the page is the surrounding narrative of Rowling’s books with Draco’s pronouns and some added lines and thoughts. The title also reuses the structure of Rowling’s first book title.

The work contains no explicit sexual content.

The Malfoid Backdrop

Female Draco fan art, called “Malfoid,” has been spreading since September. A Sept. 22 post from @redteneri has 21.9 million views and 174,000 likes, Know Your Meme added an entry Sept. 30, and a Weeknight explainer on YouTube has 249,000 views. Fandom Pulse’s earlier report covers the trend and the reaction.

The backlash has reached artists. yunayu deleted a drawing from Bluesky and apologized. The attention on GuardBro’s rewrite comes from the same wave, and the Google Doc that replaced his Royal Road page now holds about 204,000 words built from Rowling’s books in front of readers who arrive a hundred at a time.

With Royal Road’s rights clause behind the deletion and a Malfoid craze sending a hundred readers at a time to a Doc full of Rowling’s pages, how long before the Google Doc goes the way of the Royal Road page?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits landed October 6 in a deluxe hardcover from Union Square & Co. The book weighs 2.82 pounds, runs 480 pages, and costs $40. Every page is premium glossy stock, the edges are colored, a ribbon bookmark is sewn in, and the cover has a textured finish. It is a handsome object, and the stories inside it need no defense.

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The cover has a pedigree. Tim Kirk said in a comment that its design is based on a carved presentation box his brother, Steve Kirk, built for a 40-copy limited edition of Ellison’s Stalking the Nightmare. Steve Kirk also designed and fabricated the “Lost Aztec Temple of Mars” facade at Ellison Wonderland, the author’s home. Limited deluxe editions were a habit with Ellison, who liked to see his work in collector formats. This edition brings that tradition to a trade-priced hardcover.

The collection first appeared March 12, 2024, edited by J. Michael Straczynski, who took over Ellison’s literary estate. Nineteen stories run across five sections: Angry Gods, Lost Souls, The Passage of Time, The Lighter Side, and The Last Word. Ellison is an eight-time Hugo winner, and the table of contents reads like an awards ledger. “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman” took the Hugo and the Nebula. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” won an Edgar. “Jeffty Is Five” took multiple awards, and “Paladin of the Lost Hour” became a Twilight Zone episode. The themes are universal: time as a tyrant, machines that torment, cruelty toward the helpless.

The front matter is where the book goes wrong. Straczynski’s preface turns to rants about racism and feminism before the first story begins. Cassandra Khaw’s introduction is worse, because it is about Khaw all about.

Khaw opens the personal turn with a line about being a “closeted queer kid raised by very traditional parents.” The paragraph goes on to describe parents shaped by trauma and conservative upbringings, beatings for the smallest infractions, and a childhood in which Khaw was told they existed to serve. Whatever happened in that house is Khaw’s to tell. A memoir is the place for it. The introduction to a Harlan Ellison collection is not, and the reader who bought the book for “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” gets a sexual identity essay in which conservative parents play the villains.

Khaw is a Bram Stoker Award winner and a USA Today bestselling horror author, and a name that carries a small weight in that corner of publishing. It carries little with an Ellison audience. The selection reads as a signal to the industry, not a service to the reader.

Straczynski has said he wants to keep Ellison’s progressive politics in circulation, and Ellison was a man of the 1960s left. That left was once the counterculture. Today its positions are the house positions of mainstream publishing, and the people at Union Square who green-lit these introductions would never acknowledge the real counterculture, the writers and readers working outside their approval who reject all of it. Ellison understood the instinct, and if you look at his Dangerous Visions vs. the Straczynski edited final one, he contains viewpoints from hard right authors at the time such as Poul Anderson and Gene Wolfe, whereas Straczysnki’s sanitized edition does not dare to publish such viewpoints. One must also remind that Harlan told a Boston University crowd in 2005, “The whole concept of political correctness is over my head.” He complained elsewhere that the pressure to avoid insulting anyone meant a writer could not put an unpleasant woman or a character with a deformity on the page.

The deluxe edition also drops Neil Gaiman’s foreword, which opened the 2024 book. In January 2025, eight women made allegations against Gaiman in a Vulture report, including Scarlett Pavlovich, who worked as a nanny for him and his then-wife, Amanda Palmer. Gaiman denies all of it. Dark Horse announced it would stop publishing his work. Pavlovich’s federal suit was dismissed on forum non conveniens grounds, with the court sending the dispute to New Zealand, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed on June 29, 2026. No court has ruled on whether the allegations are true, and no criminal charges have been filed. The foreword that sat in the 2024 book is gone from the deluxe edition. It looks like a soft cancellation, and the edition lists two introductions in its place, one credited to Ellison.

Would Ellison have folded? His record says no. At the 2006 Hugo ceremony he grabbed Connie Willis’s breast on stage, which was wrong. Afterward he complained that Willis had not acknowledged his apology and lashed out at the fans who criticized him. He escalated every fight and sued over Usenet postings of his stories. A man who handled pressure that way is hard to picture scrubbing a friend’s foreword to keep a publisher comfortable.

None of this touches the stories, and the stories are why the book exists. Should a collection built on Ellison’s fiction open with writers who use the pages to talk about themselves?

Contents

Angry Gods

• “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman” (1966): Hugo Award, Nebula Award, 2015 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award

• “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967): Hugo Award

• “The Deathbird” (1974): Hugo Award, Locus Award

• “Chatting with Anubis” (1995): Bram Stoker Award, Deathrealm Award

• “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” (1973): Edgar Allan Poe Award

Lost Souls

• “Jeffty Is Five” (1977): British Fantasy Award, Hugo Award, Nebula Award, 1999 Locus Poll Winner for Best Short Story of All Time

• “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” (1967): Hugo Award nomination, Nebula Award nomination

• “Shatterday” (1980): Nebula Award nomination, Twilight Zone episode

• “Mefisto in Onyx” (1993): Bram Stoker Award, Locus Award, Hugo Award nomination, Nebula Award nomination, World Fantasy Award nomination

• “On the Downhill Side” (1972): Locus Award nomination, Nebula Award nomination

The Passage of Time

• “Paladin of the Lost Hour” (1986): Hugo Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award nomination, Twilight Zone episode

• “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (1969): Hugo Award

• “I’m Looking for Kadak” (1974)

• “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” (2010): Nebula Award

The Lighter Side

• “Djinn, No Chaser” (1983): Locus Award

• “How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?” (1977)

• “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet” (1976)

• “Eidolons” (1989): Locus Award

The Last Word

• “All the Lies That Are My Life” (1981): Hugo Award nomination

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

Bruce McAllister sold his first story to Worlds of If in July 1963, at 16, and he has been publishing ever since. About 140 stories later, two of them have made the Hugo ballot, in 1988 and 2007, and a third landed in The Best American Short Stories 2007 under guest editor Stephen King. Ask most science fiction readers to name a McAllister book and they draw a blank.

The record is documented. The shelf presence is thin. His earlier story collection did not appear until 2007, 44 years after the debut.

A Navy Family and a Teenage Sale

Bruce Hugh McAllister was born in Baltimore on October 17, 1946, the son of a career Navy officer and an anthropologist. The family moved through Washington, D.C., Florida, California and Italy. He went on to earn degrees at Claremont McKenna and UC Irvine.

The first sale came well before the degrees. “The Faces Outside” ran in If in July 1963, and Judith Merril picked it for The 9th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F, published in 1964. Project Gutenberg hosts the story free.

That same year, in San Diego, the 16-year-old mailed a four-question survey about symbolism in fiction to 150 authors. He wanted to settle an argument with his English teacher. Seventy-five wrote back, and 65 of those replies survive. The Paris Review revisited the survey in December 2011.

Paperbacks, Anthologies, and a Classroom

Humanity Prime came out from Ace in 1971 as an Ace Special and his first novel. Earth loses a war with the alien Cromanths and is destroyed. One starship gets away carrying colonists, who settle a distant world called Prime, adapt to an aquatic existence and forget most of what they knew of Earth. Then a Cromanth ship lands. Wildside Press and Borgo Press reissued it decades later.

It landed as the Ace Specials line was fading. The short fiction that followed scattered across magazines and original anthologies, and much of it took on hard subjects.

McAllister worked as an editor in those years too. He assembled the anthologies SF Directions in 1973 and Their Immortal Hearts in 1980, and he served as an associate editor on Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss’s Best SF series. His stories ran in If and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in original anthologies such as Universe.

He taught as well. He built the creative writing program at the University of Redlands and left in 1997, and he has coached writers privately since 1998. Somewhere in the 1990s he stepped back from writing. He returned to it in 2003.

Dream Baby

The story that reached the ballots grew out of a war McAllister did not fight. He told French Fries Magazine that he and his college peers avoided service in Vietnam and that survivor's guilt followed. To understand the war, he says, he spent roughly 15 years interviewing about 200 veterans, and about 30 of them became consultants.

“Dream Baby” first ran as a novelette in In the Field of Fire, a 1987 anthology edited by Jack Dann and Jeanne Van Buren Dann, and Asimov’s reprinted it that October. Gardner Dozois put it in his Fifth Annual Collection. It made the 1988 Hugo ballot for Best Novelette, where Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” won, and it drew a Nebula nomination as well. The 1987 Nebulas were presented on May 21, 1988, and Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love” took the award. In the 1988 Locus poll the novelette finished fifth of 29.

The NEA awarded McAllister a creative writing fellowship in 1991. The title story of his later collection, “The Girl Who Loved Animals,” ran in Omni in May 1988.

In 1989 Tor expanded the novelette into a 434-page novel. Mary Damico, an Army nurse, dreams soldiers’ deaths before they happen. A covert CIA unit recruits her, and the team goes into North Vietnam. CreateSpace reissued the book in paperback in December 2010.

Publishers Weekly called the novel a “stunning tour de force.” The book was a nominee for the 1990 Locus Fantasy Award, which Orson Scott Card’s Prentice Alvin won. The 2011 reissue went out with Lucius Shepard’s comparison of the book to Robert Stone and Tim O’Brien.

A Second Hugo Slot and a Stephen King Pick

The 2000s brought a second round of notice. “The Boy in Zaquitos” ran in F&SF in January 2006, and Stephen King, guest editing The Best American Short Stories 2007, picked it. “Kin” followed in Asimov’s that February and made the 2007 Hugo ballot for Best Short Story, where Tim Pratt’s “Impossible Dreams” won over a field that included Neil Gaiman.

“Kin” follows a boy who tries to hire an alien to save his unborn sister from a government order. Escape Pod ran the audio as episode 108 on May 31, 2007. Ten years later LeVar Burton made it the first story on LeVar Burton Reads, which launched June 13, 2017.

“The Crying Child” was a finalist for the 2012 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette, which Karen Russell’s “Reeling for the Empire” won. Glimmer Train placed his “White Heron” third in a 2005 contest for very short fiction.

Golden Gryphon Press published The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories in 2007: 17 stories, 310 pages, with an introduction by Harry Harrison and an afterword by Barry Malzberg. Aeon Press followed with The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic in 2013, which made Locus’s Recommended Reading List that year, and with Stealing God and Other Stories on June 17, 2022. That one runs 18 stories and 262 pages, with an introduction by Paul Di Filippo, and Kirkus gave it its “Get It” rating.

The Anthology That Answered Pournelle

In November 1991 Tor published There Won’t Be War, a 309-page paperback that McAllister edited with Harrison. McAllister wrote the introduction and Harrison the afterword, “The End of War.” The title flips There Will Be War, the series Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr edited for Tor.

Pournelle and Carr ran nine volumes from 1983 to 1990, mixing fiction with essays and poetry on military history and strategy. Castalia House reissued them beginning in 2015 and published Volume X in December 2019. The series drew controversy, and the Harrison and McAllister book was the response. Pournelle later recalled Harrison putting together a competing anthology, but didn’t appear to be fazed by the competing future history.

The two projects answer the same question about war from different directions. Harrison, a World War II veteran, had already lampooned military life in Bill, the Galactic Hero. His and McAllister’s lineup included Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, J.G. Ballard and Joe Haldeman, whose story was “Beachhead.”

Where to Find Him

Escape Pod’s audio of “Kin” is free to check out, and so is “The Faces Outside” on Project Gutenberg. He’s got Dream Baby and Humanity Prime available on Amazon, and is still doing coaching work. McAllister is listed as a guest at the upcoming 2026 World Fantasy Convention.

McAllister collected two Hugo slots and a Stephen King pick over six decades, and most readers still can’t name one of his books. What would it have taken for the field to build a shelf around his work: a series, or a publisher with more reach?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

As this is the second book in the series, it includes some spoilers about the events of the first book. You can read the review of the first book Transmutation Texas: Watcher of the Damned Here.

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Spoilers from here on out.

Six-Gun Shiva does not bring us back to the two main characters, Saul and Rose, right away. It introduces us to a new primary character entering the scene: Evangelo, the Ranger. Evangelo is part of the System that once kept Saul, aka The Watcher, as a glorified guard dog for his particular survival community. Now, the events of the previous book have seen Evangelo’s leader and lover, Shaney, sending him out to investigate a beacon signal activated at the end of the first book.

Here he runs afoul of The Watcher, chained in the basement of a church waypoint thanks to the seductive wiles of Rose, who knocked him on the head post-coitus to escape. None of this is told to Evangelo, who sets Watcher free and is convinced to join him in searching for Saul’s “missing fugitive,” aka Rose.

Much like the first book, a game of cat-and-mouse between Watcher and Rose continues, though the stakes are far more serious as the consequences of the epic climax of the first book see other agents and Rangers of the System tracking down both Watcher and Rose, with Evangelo being drawn into their drama as an unwitting third party. Rose, for her part, is a crafty and resourceful survivor, but flawed in that she still answers to deeply ingrained indoctrination to a cultish order.

The three come head-to-head with the opposing force of Rangers, and shocking revelations end up driving Rose and Evangelo both into a desperate escape across the Texas wasteland with Watcher in tow, facing rogue Rangers, packs of bear-sized beasts called Chupacabras, dangerous wildlife, treacherous terrain, and crumbling ruins, all in the hopes of reaching a safe place while their personal issues try not to clash harshly enough that it breaks their cohesion as a trio.

The inclusion of Evangelo brings a welcome addition to the cast, turning the duo into a trio. Watcher is a hulking individual who is fast, strong, and stoic. He is masculinity personified, a man of action over words, though he is also pensive and thoughtful when there’s no shooting to be done. Evangelo, then, is more the Sensitive Young Man™ to Watcher’s Strong Silent™ type. He’s smaller, but no less capable. He trains horses for the Rangers to use, a premium privilege in the System. He is caught between his duty to Shaney and his adoration of her, his oath to the Ranger code and wanting to help Watcher and Rose after the shocking revelations send them hurtling across the Texas wasteland.

Evangelo makes a great partner for Watcher, a well-needed friend to help watch his back. Rose was a perfect foil to Watcher, a complement to Watcher and no less lethal or crafty as a survivor. But Evangelo brings a male camaraderie component that wasn’t in the first book, as well as someone else for Watcher to talk to. (Via his ring, as the character is mute). They make a formidable trio together.

It does bring up an issue with the prose and narration that’s impossible to ignore: switching between POVs within the scenes. In most books, the POV switches between chapters, sometimes with scene breaks in the same chapter to establish another POV. In this book, the author often has all three characters’ perspectives in the same chapter, switching back and forth with single-line spaces between paragraphs where the perspective changes.

It’s unorthodox, but for this book’s dynamic it seems to work. Whether or not it works for different readers will be up to the individual, but for my part it was not distracting because I was so invested in the events of the book. I got used to it very quickly. In terms of quality, the book is a big step forward over the first book, which gave its readers a large mental stack. The Watcher of the Damned books have unusually long chapters, closer to acts than actual chapters. In the first book, it was 84 pages before you reach the end of the first chapter. It doesn’t lend itself to “One or two chapters before I head to bed.”

Regardless of these critiques, Six Gun Shiva is a phenomenal follow-up to its predecessor, building on the events of the previous book to give us a full scale western across the ghostly ruins of post-apocalyptic Texas. I recommend giving the appendix a glance to see just how much research and consultation RH Snow put into helping describe Texas–which I detailed is a character in and of itself in the first book. From the flora and fauna to the accurate description of firearms to the history of the state. Everything page bleeds love for the Lone Star instead of just copy-pasting western tropes into a post-apocalypse setting.

The post-apocalyptic setting adds another layer of personality to the setting. Similar to its inspiration in Fallout, the apocalypse didn’t happen until after a few more decades of technological advancement, so the tech level on display is more advanced. Watcher acquires an energy weapon. All three characters use a WeeSpeex Ring, which functions like a powerful personal computers that project HUDs directly into the vision of one's eye and allows for silent person-to-person instant messaging and contact. Helpful for Watcher, who is mute and can only “talk” to Rose by docking their rings by holding hands. (A narrative element I consider one of RH Snow’s most clever inventions). The world of Watcher of the Damned might be dead, but its bones still glow neon.

As with the first book, it features occasional drawings of black-and-white pencil art from RH Snow herself, giving occasional glimpses into the world she’s authored. It’s one of many personal touches that give her work its unique personality.

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The book ends on a promise of a heroic continuation of the adventures of Watcher, Evangelo, and Rose. Doing so on a cliffhanger that screams for its reader to jump into book 3 immediately.

Six-Gun Shiva: Watcher of the Damned is a perfect follow-up to the first book of the series building on well-established events and relationships in a unique setting to bring readers what continues to be one of the most unique indie book series available. A recommend.

You can follow RH Snow on Twitter and Substack

Grab a copy of the Watcher of the Damned and Six-Gun Shiva

Let me know what you think in the comments. And Remember: We Will be Free

John A. Douglas is an independently published author and the author of the Age of Adventures fantasy series including its two starter books: The Black Crown and The Lionheart: Icon of Justice.

He can be found every Monday at 7:00pm Central on the Knights Watch livestream with Shad Brooks of Shadiversity

Articles every Monday and Reviews every Friday over on Substack and Twitter.

Vox Day’s recent book, Probability Zero, argues that the mathematics of evolution by natural selection don’t add up. The response from the “evolution scientist” community has been remarkable, as they’ve all but gotten themselves into a panic over people reading it.

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YouTube creator Gutsick Gibbon, joined by Dr. Hanson, released a video running roughly three and a half hours that responds to Day’s case. Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) said on camera that she hadn’t read the book and was responding to a presentation by Will Duffy. Within days, she announced she would read it, assemble friends with relevant training, and take it apart at a roundtable. She also asked anyone with a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate who had reviewed Day’s work to post their credentials and a “favorite blunder” for use in a coming video. A headcount of degrees isn’t a rebuttal, but it seems to be more of an abject panic as she doesn’t seem to have the confidence to simply rebut the material herself: the effort is going into organizing a response before the argument itself has been engaged. This isn’t the way science is supposed to be conducted; she’s urging the community to create consensus that the theory is wrong before even reading it, to come up with reasons why later. It shows how corrupt the scientific field is in real time, something Day has been demonstrating for years and now has solid proof that this is how they act because of his book.

Day’s answer was good-humored. He cast himself as Sauron, alone in Mordor against an army of credentialed foes, and told his readers to hold off on the comments and wait for the roundtable video before responding.

He has also gone after the scholarly side of the debate. In “The Best They’ve Got,” he reviews Jason Rosenhouse’s Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism, published by Cambridge University Press, and argues that its account of the 1966 Wistar Symposium, where mathematicians challenged biologists over the numbers behind natural selection, omits key exchanges from the transcript. He notes that the book doesn’t address his own mathematical argument, and a second installment on whether the Wistar challenges were ever answered is promised.

To commemorate this, he made a music video which is very entertaining. “An Intelligent Groove,” from the Vibe Patrol, packs his fixation-rate argument into a funk track, and the comments show it landed. One viewer couldn’t believe he’d see King Julien, Earth, Wind & Fire, and “150 IQ-level mathematics” in one song. Another joked that the science had just lost its entire furry division. It’s funny, it’s catchy, and it gets a technical argument in front of people who would never open a paper.

The pattern is what stands out. A skeptic of the mainstream account of evolution publishes a mathematical argument, and the answer is marathon videos, credential drives, and organized reading groups. That level of mobilization suggests the other side is rattled by the mere existence of the argument, or at least knows the audience is paying attention.

The core claims are specific and testable: generations per fixation in the long-term E. coli experiment, and how that scales to human-chimp divergence. The data is public, so readers can look for themselves.

Probability Zero is a provocative read, and the music video is the best place to start. Have you read this critique of the theory of evolution by natural selection?

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Centipede Press has opened pre-orders on William Gibson’s complete Sprawl trilogy, collecting Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive as three illustrated volumes in a clothbound slipcase. Publication is set for April 2027, and the announcement lists shipping in late April, about five weeks after Apple TV airs the finale of its Neuromancer series. The signed edition is limited to 500 numbered sets. Fandom Pulse could not locate a premium collector edition of Count Zero or Mona Lisa Overdrive before this release.

Who Signs the Set

Gibson is not among the signers. Each volume carries a new introduction and new artwork, and the signatures come from those contributors:

• Neuromancer: introduction by Eileen Gunn, art by Dave McKean, signed by both.

• Count Zero: introduction by Bruce Sterling, art by Jaime Jones, signed by Jones.

• Mona Lisa Overdrive: introduction by John Shirley, art by Feifei Ruan, signed by both.

Sterling and Shirley came up alongside Gibson in the 1980s cyberpunk movement. McKean is the illustrator known for his Sandman covers. The listing does not say whether Sterling signs Count Zero, so collectors should read the signature line closely: the Count Zero volume carries only Jones’s signature.

The Physical Edition

Each book is wrapped in black Brillianta cloth with a printed panel on textured paper on the front board, spines stamped. Centipede ships the dust jackets already wrapped in Mylar, and one clothbound slipcase holds all three volumes. Every book is illustrated in color throughout and measures 6⅜ by 9⅝ inches. Neuromancer runs 376 pages. Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive run 344 pages each. The ISBNs are 978-1-61347-292-7, 978-1-61347-293-4, and 978-1-61347-294-1. [PRICE.]

Centipede builds small-run editions, and its titles rarely return to press once they sell out.

How Centipede Pitches the Books

The publisher’s description opens with a claim about the first novel: “Few novels have changed the look and language of science fiction as decisively as Neuromancer.” It describes the three books as “three novels that helped define cyberpunk and gave the approaching digital age a vocabulary and a visual identity.”

Two Novels Without a Collector Edition

Neuromancer has been through the premium market before. Easton Press issued a hardcover in September 1990 with artwork by Byron Taylor and an introduction by Bruce Landon. The Folio Society released a limited edition at $600 that sold out, then returned to stock in 2025.

The sequels have a thinner record. Arbor House published Count Zero in hardcover in 1986. Gollancz and Bantam Spectra published Mona Lisa Overdrive in hardcover in 1988. Fandom Pulse found no premium edition of either since. Buyers who wanted a serious copy of the sequels bought original printings or went without.

The Books and Their Record

Neuromancer appeared in 1984 and became the first novel to win the Nebula, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine serialized Count Zero across its January, February, and March 1986 issues. Mona Lisa Overdrive closed the trilogy in 1988, and Thomas Disch gave it a mixed review in the New York Times.

The Apple TV Calendar

Apple TV premieres its Neuromancer series on Friday, January 22, 2027. The ten-episode season opens with two episodes, then releases one each Friday through March 19. Apple revealed the date at its Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2026.

Callum Turner plays Case, and Briana Middleton plays Molly. Mark Strong, Joseph Lee, Peter Sarsgaard, and Clémence Poésy are also in the cast. Graham Roland is showrunner, and JD Dillard directed the first three episodes. Apple greenlit the series in February 2024, and principal photography began in July 2025. Reports differ on Gibson’s credit, with some outlets listing a consulting producer role and others an executive producer role.

The season adapts one novel. Viewers who want the rest of the story have to find the sequels, and Centipede’s set is positioned to meet them.

Early Signs of Reader Interest

VidIQ’s YouTube search data shows “Neuromancer” at roughly 74,700 searches a month, down about 48 percent from its 30-day baseline after the trailer spike faded. Searches for “Neuromancer audiobook” are up about 85 percent over the same baseline. Those figures cover YouTube searches only and do not measure book sales.

What the Aftermarket Shows

Raptis Rare Books lists a set of first British editions of all three novels, each signed by Gibson, at $12,000. That is a dealer’s asking price for the original printings, and it describes a different object from Centipede’s set, which carries no Gibson signature.

Buyers who plan to resell face a narrower question than the Apple TV timing suggests. The run is 500 sets, the signatures belong to contributors and not the author, and the sale price will have to cover marketplace fees, insured shipping for a heavy slipcased set, and the months a pre-order locks up.

Pre-orders are open now at Centipede Press.

With 500 numbered sets, five signatories, and no signature from Gibson, will collectors treat this edition as a reading copy of the trilogy or as an investment in the contributors’ autographs?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

Variable Star, the 2006 Tor novel Spider Robinson wrote from an unfinished Robert A. Heinlein outline, remains a single book. Robinson announced three sequels in 2009, and none has been published. The raw material Heinlein left for the whole project was seven surviving pages and fourteen handwritten index cards.

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Robinson dates the outline in his afterword to the novel. On November 14, 1955, he writes, Heinlein sat at his desk in Colorado Springs and wrote an outline for a book he first called The Stars Are a Clock. The pages ran single-spaced in ten pica type, with almost no margin on any side and very few strikeovers. Heinlein later wrote in half a dozen alternate titles by hand, including Doctor Einstein’s Clock, and settled on none of them. Then he filed the work in a drawer and left it there.

The timing puts it in the middle of Heinlein’s Scribner’s juvenile run. Tunnel in the Sky came out in 1955, and Double Star won the 1956 Hugo. Time for the Stars followed in 1956. One Heinlein fan database argues the outline predates Time for the Stars because that book appears to borrow elements from it. Robinson says only that Heinlein put the outline away for reasons he never gave. One reviewer reads the afterword as saying John W. Campbell talked Heinlein out of it, but the portion of the afterword available for this piece does not contain that claim.

Robinson describes the surviving pages as establishing the ficton, Heinlein’s term for the time and place of a story. Joel and Jinny get the most detail, and Jinny’s grandfather gets nearly as much. The pages lay out the conflict that sends Joel off Earth and the economics of interstellar colonization, then sketch his first adventures. They stop mid-sentence. Robinson adds that the full outline may have run fifty pages for all anyone knows.

There was no ending, and Robinson found one in Heinlein’s voice. After a week of staring at the pages, he writes, his music player rolled past the last Ray Charles album and landed on Heinlein: six short audio clips from a 1987 radio interview in Butler, Missouri, recorded a year before Heinlein died. The first clip sent him upright in his chair. A Slashdot review summarizes the afterword as saying the climax extrapolates from Heinlein’s stated views on humanity’s future.

The outline surfaced after Virginia Heinlein died in 2003. At the 2003 Worldcon in Toronto, researcher Robert James told a panel on rare Heinlein works that an outline for an unknown novel existed. A woman in the back of the room called out, “You should get Spider Robinson to finish that novel.” Heinlein’s literary agent Eleanor Wood, who also represented Robinson, and Heinlein Prize Trust trustee Art Dula were both on the panel. Robinson received the outline soon after, with permission to write two sample chapters and a proposal for Dula.

The Plot (Spoilers Ahead)

Joel Johnston is an eighteen-year-old musician and composer from Ganymede, on Earth to study. He is poor and an orphan, and he is in love with a fellow student named Jinny Hamilton, who is also poor and also an orphan. When Jinny decides the relationship is ready for marriage, she tells him her real name is Jinnia Conrad. Her grandfather, Richard Conrad, is the richest man in the solar system.

SFF180 reviewer Thomas Wagner places the revelation at a family hideout inside a glacier. Conrad has already mapped out Joel’s future: a role in the family business and children to carry on the dynasty. Joel refuses. With help from Jinny’s seven-year-old cousin Evelyn, he flees the Conrad estate.

To get beyond Conrad’s reach, Joel signs on to the RSS Charles Sheffield, a colony ship with a crew of 500 bound for a star dozens of light-years away. The voyage takes twenty years aboard ship. At near-light speed, one review puts the elapsed time on Earth at about 90 years.

Aboard, Joel works as a farmer, using what he learned on Ganymede, and plays music for the crew. A shipboard psychologist helps him through the breakup, and the National Space Society’s reviewer notes that the treatment draws on Zen Buddhism and yoga. Telepathic twins on the ship keep contact with their siblings on Earth, and through them Joel stays in touch with Evelyn.

Six “relativists” run the Sheffield’s quantum ramjet drive with their minds. Each can take the strain reliably for only six hours a day, and at relativistic speed the drive is nearly impossible to restart once it stops. Five years into the voyage, one relativist dies and another is mentally incapacitated, which leaves no margin for error.

The next year the ship’s telepaths report that the Sun has gone nova and killed everyone in the Solar System. A wave of gamma radiation is expanding at lightspeed toward the colonies, which are all that remain of humanity. The Sheffield can warn one colony in time. The nova contradicts every astrophysical theory, and more than 90 percent of the Sun’s mass converted to energy, so characters suspect an alien cause. The relativist team breaks down, the drive shuts off, and the Sheffield is left to coast past its destination at 97.6 percent of the speed of light.

Then a ship overtakes them. Jinny has married a scientist who built a faster-than-light drive. Only one experimental vessel exists, and it carries ten people, among them Jinny, her husband, Richard Conrad, and Evelyn. Time dilation has aged Evelyn to nineteen. Conrad proposes to shuttle the Sheffield’s people to their destination nine at a time. Joel works out that Conrad is lying: he came for supplies, has no plan to return, and wants control of the colonies. Conrad is defeated, and the faster-than-light engine is transferred to the Sheffield.

Joel and Evelyn marry and join the mission to warn the remaining colonies. Joel chooses to stay in space with his wife and child rather than settle on a planet. The book closes with lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” the poem that gave Heinlein’s last published novel its title, To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

The Heinlein Callbacks and Robinson’s Winks

Robinson sets the book in a divergent offshoot of Heinlein’s Future History and fills it with references. Nehemiah Scudder, the Prophet of Heinlein’s American theocracy, gets a mention. So does LeCroix, the first man on the Moon in Heinlein’s alternate history, according to the NSS review. Joel’s Ganymede farm echoes Farmer in the Sky, the telepaths echo Time for the Stars, and the moving walkways echo The Roads Must Roll, as an SFFWorld review points out.

The chapter epigraphs carry a different kind of tribute. Chapters seventeen and eighteen open with quotes credited to Anson MacDonald, one of Heinlein’s pseudonyms, on “Anson MacDonald Day.” Robinson’s afterword says the words are Heinlein’s, taken from the 1987 Robert Heinlein Day radio interview in Butler, Missouri, the same Butler radio clips Robinson describes finding while he searched for an ending.

The winks run in other directions. The ship is named for the late science fiction writer Charles Sheffield. The colony’s governor-general, Lawrence Cott, plays on the name of Laurence van Cott Niven, and Cott’s lifemate, Perry Jarnell, plays on Jerry Pournelle. George R.R. Martin is a tuckerization target as well. The pop-culture references include The Simpsons, with Jinny calling Conrad’s major-domo “Smithers,” and the Canadian series Trailer Park Boys, whose characters supply names for two troublemakers and their lawyer. Joel meets a shipboard date when she accompanies his playing without his seeing her, a setup that echoes how a character meets his wife in Robinson’s Callahan stories.

Robinson’s version is also more open about sex and drugs than a 1955 juvenile could have been, according to Wikipedia, and the NSS reviewer counts references to 9/11 and the War on Terror among the touches no 1955 manuscript could have carried.

How Critics Received It

Reviews split. Wikipedia’s summary calls them mixed, and its Robinson entry says critics praised how he handled a difficult assignment and the lively story while faulting unlikely plot twists and weak romantic scenes.

The opening chapters drew the most complaints. Nicholas Whyte of Strange Horizons wrote, “This is, frankly, not a great book,” and Wikipedia says SFF World and SF Reviews voiced similar complaints, with SF Reviews calling the plot twists contrived and absurd. Quill & Quire found the early pages slowed by heavy scene-setting but called the book compelling once the story left Earth. Thomas Wagner of SFF180 argued the novel would have worked better if it had started with Joel boarding the Sheffield and skipped the Conrad setup.

Wagner praised the saxophone scene as some of Robinson’s most effective character writing. He also read the nova disaster as a 9/11 allegory. He wrote that Heinlein might frown at some of Robinson’s political conclusions, and that he himself agreed with them.

The ending split reviewers. Wagner called it one of the most risible he had read in years and compared its banality to the film Pearl Harbor. SFFWorld’s Mark Yon found it “one coincidence too far,” though he allowed that a need to end on a positive note is a Heinlein trait. A 2021 blog reviewer said the climax, with returning characters in a showdown, worked, and praised Robinson’s reading of the audiobook while finding the one-liners relentless. Publishers Weekly said old Heinlein hands might be disappointed because the book is “all journey and no arrival.”

The larger argument was whether it reads as Heinlein. Publishers Weekly called it a mostly credible pastiche of a 1955 Heinlein young adult novel. It said a contemporary author’s nonaggressive view of the future, set against Heinlein’s more militaristic one, left traces and some unexplained role reversals. The National Space Society’s Bart Leahy put the plot at perhaps 90 percent Heinlein, then wrote, “Variable Star is fun, in the way Heinlein juveniles were meant to be.” Wagner said Robinson captured Heinlein’s virtues and his faults, gave the book two stars, and filed it under “writers who love too much.”

William Stoddard made the sharpest structural objection. He called the book fan fiction by a much more skilled writer than usual and noted that its plot is essentially Time for the Stars again. The outline dates to 1955 and Time for the Stars appeared in 1956, so Stoddard asked whether Heinlein would have drafted a second near-identical book. Readers who want original Heinlein-era science fiction, he concluded, should look for authors telling their own stories.

The favorable notices came from several directions. Sci-Fi Dimensions called it a worthy continuation of Heinlein’s legacy and a good Robinson novel in its own right. Booklist found it “serviceably entertaining” while noting that the source material was a fifties outline rather than a lost masterpiece. Tor’s paperback carries Entertainment Weekly’s “An enjoyable read.” and a San Diego Union-Tribune line calling it a Robinson novel that also happens to be a new Heinlein novel. The New York Times line printed there, “I’d nominate Spider Robinson as the new Robert Heinlein,” appears to be the 1982 Times Book Review remark that the book’s editor cites, so it predates the novel. David Crosby also gave the book a cover comment, and the book’s website carries a video interview with Robinson and Crosby.

Reader ratings run wide. A Goodreads listing for the hardcover showed 3.86 across 5,374 ratings, and the Kindle edition showed 4.28 across 429. Amazon reviews from late 2006 range from five stars to a one-star review titled “Heinlein Pie: a Travesty.”

Editions and the Heinlein Prize

Tor published the hardcover on September 19, 2006. Blackstone released an unabridged audiobook on June 1, 2007, narrated by Robinson, running 10 hours and 46 minutes. Tor’s mass market paperback followed on November 27, 2007, an Italian edition titled Stella variabile came out in February 2008, and Tor reissued the book in paperback on January 15, 2019. The publisher’s listing says profits from the book help fund the annual $500,000 Heinlein Prize for innovation in commercial manned spaceflight.

The Series That Heinlein Never Wrote

Heinlein wrote his juveniles as standalone books, and no source reviewed for this piece reports sequel notes for this one. The series case comes from the structure. Joel ships out on a colony vessel for a 20-year voyage that takes about 90 years on Earth, according to one review. Time dilation at that scale sets up sequels almost automatically, since anyone who returns finds a changed Earth.

Robinson saw it. His website announced in 2009 that Wood had sold Tor three sequels, to be called the Orphan Stars Trilogy, with Pat LoBrutto editing.

Why It Stopped

Jeanne Robinson, his wife and Stardance co-author, died of biliary cancer on May 30, 2010. Years later Robinson told a Vancouver-area reporter that he sat at the computer for hours on the sequel and nothing came: “I just stopped getting science fiction ideas.” In 2013 his website still reported that Orphan Stars was moving, slowly. That year he also suffered a heart attack. His daughter Terri da Silva died of breast cancer on December 5, 2014. Wikipedia states he has not published a novel since 2008.

His most recent collection, My Favorite Shorts (2016), is a reprint volume. A reader review on Goodreads says nothing in it is new beyond links to four songs. The listing adds a new introduction and a reminiscence about Jeanne and meeting Robert and Ginny Heinlein. He also co-edited the 2017 anthology Compostela.

The 46-volume Virginia Edition has no volume for the outline, and no source reviewed for this piece shows its text published in full. If the Heinlein Prize Trust released the seven pages and fourteen cards, would readers want to see Heinlein’s version of the story, or is Robinson’s ending the last word?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

Blaine Pardoe has written more BattleTech fiction than almost anyone alive. For nearly three decades, he shaped the Inner Sphere’s most important factions, created some of the setting’s most enduring characters, and put his name on technical readouts that defined how a generation of players understood the universe’s ‘Mechs. This week, Catalyst Game Labs’ official #Mechtober promotional graphic, celebrating the franchise’s authors, left him off entirely.

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WarGate Books, the military science fiction and military fantasy publisher behind “Galaxy’s Edge” and “Forgotten Ruin,” has been acquired by Aethon Books. Co-founder Jason Anspach announced the deal to WarGate’s authors in an email obtained by Fandom Pulse:

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“I’m excited to announce that WarGate Books has been acquired by Aethon Publishing.

Aethon’s success in publishing is exactly what WarGate needs to grow and reach larger audiences. They are second to none at finding success in the modern publishing world.

It is my firm belief that all of our authors will benefit from this move.

There are no changes to your existing WarGate contracts. Aethon is WarGate, moving forward. For convenience, you will still receive royalties from the old WarGate account through the end of the year.

If you have a work in progress, please send your manuscripts to [redacted]. We’ll keep those titles moving without a pause.

If you have any questions about the process, please reply to this email. I will be assisting Aethon with the full transfer of existing titles and with setting up new titles for success.

Best of luck, and thank you for your part in building WarGate to what it has become.
God Bless,
–––––
Jason Anspach”

What Aethon Brings To The Table

Aethon Books was founded by Rhett C. Bruno and Steve Beaulieu as a digital-first publisher built around science fiction, fantasy, and LitRPG titles, driven heavily by data analytics and targeted marketing rather than the traditional publishing playbook. The strategy produced some of the genre’s biggest independent hits, including “He Who Fights with Monsters,” “The Primal Hunter,” and “Drop Trooper.”

The company has expanded well beyond text publishing. Aethon became one of Webtoon’s largest Western publishing partners, producing original webcomic series including “Return of the Runebound Professor,” “Defiance of the Fall,” and “Beware of Chicken.” In May 2025, Aethon acquired a majority stake in Vault Comics, a Montana-based comics publisher backed by investors including Jeff Ubben, UTA, Crush Ventures, and Metallica’s Black Squirrel Partners. Vault CEO Damian Wassel and Chief Creative Officer Adrian Wassel kept their roles after the deal, with Bruno and Beaulieu joining Vault’s board. Wassel said the merger would bring “additional product categories and a significantly expanded marketing budget” to comics and graphic novels under the combined companies.

What WarGate Brings To Aethon

WarGate Books built its catalog around military science fiction, military fantasy, and biographies and memoirs, describing itself as “unapologetically pro-liberty, pro-2A.” Anspach co-founded the company with Nick Cole, and the two write the bestselling “Galaxy’s Edge” series together along with “Forgotten Ruin.” The catalog also includes Mark Sibley’s “Mongol Moon” and Blaine L. Pardoe and Brent Evans’ “LAND&SEA” trilogy.

Pardoe, who joins the Aethon fold through the acquisition, has built a career across multiple genres over several decades, best known for his BattleTech and MechWarrior: Dark Age novels, including “Hour of the Wolf,” Catalyst Game Labs’ bestselling BattleTech title. He has also written true crime, military history, and political thrillers, co-authoring the “Tenure” series with comic artist Mike Barron and writing the “Blue Dawn” alternate history series. His nonfiction work “Lost Eagles,” on Lafayette Flying Corps pilot Frederick Zinn, won the Military Writers Society of America’s Silver Medal in 2011, and he has spoken at the National Archives, the Smithsonian, and the U.S. Navy Museum.

Fandom Pulse reached out to Pardoe to see what his thoughts were on the new acquisition and the coming changes, and his only response was, “no comment.”

A Consolidation Play In A Market Where Few Are Growing

Aethon has spent the past year building outward through acquisition rather than organic growth alone, first into comics with the Vault Comics stake and now into military fiction with WarGate. For WarGate’s authors, Anspach’s email promises continuity on existing contracts through the end of the year, with manuscripts in progress routed directly to Aethon’s editorial team going forward.

The deal puts two of indie genre publishing’s more aggressive growth stories under one roof at a moment when much of traditional publishing has struggled to find its footing. Anspach framed the move as a scale play for WarGate’s authors rather than an exit. Whether Aethon folds WarGate’s military fiction catalog into its existing marketing machine the way it did with Vault’s comics line, or runs it as a separate imprint, will determine how much actually changes for the authors whose contracts just changed hands.

Do you think this kind of consolidation among independent publishers is the model that out-competes legacy publishing going forward?

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl has raised more than $16.5 million on crowdfunding platforms across two campaigns. Its author started out drawing pet portraits at cat shows.

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The larger campaign ran on BackerKit for Renegade Game Studios’ Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG and Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable, a card game. It launched April 14 with more than 65,000 followers already signed up, cleared its $250,000 goal within minutes, and closed May 19 at $13.29 million from 55,972 backers, about $237 apiece. ICv2 reports it is the most funded game in BackerKit history and the third most funded tabletop project on any platform, behind Cyberpunk TCG and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG. It passed Frosthaven’s $12,969,608 Kickstarter total. Backer fulfillment begins in October, with retail release in late November.

The second campaign was Dinniman’s Kickstarter for limited edition hardcovers of Books 2 and 3. From October 14 to November 14, 2025, it pledged $3,263,462 from 13,428 backers against a $49,000 goal, roughly 67 times the target.

The author’s path to those numbers ran through a newspaper obituary desk. Dinniman grew up an Army brat, settled in Tucson, and later wrote obituaries at a Yakima, Washington paper. He then made his living traveling to cat shows and drawing pets for their owners. Princess Donut, the series’ cat, came from a tortoiseshell Persian he saw at one show. He had published earlier books, including the Shivered Sky trilogy in 2003.

He began serializing Dungeon Crawler Carl on Royal Road in 2019. When the pandemic canceled the pet shows, he self-published it on Amazon in 2020. Jeff Hays narrated the audiobook, released in 2021 through Soundbooth Theater. Dinniman told Variety that when he finished Book 3, “I had maybe 500 people, 1,000 people reading it.” He now expects over a million readers for Book 8.

The premise: Carl, a Coast Guard veteran, and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, are pulled into an alien-run dungeon that turns Earth’s collapse into a televised game show. Carl enters wearing no shoes or pants. Eight novels are out: Dungeon Crawler Carl (2020), Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook and The Gate of the Feral Gods (all 2021), The Butcher’s Masquerade (2022), The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (2023), This Inevitable Ruin (2024), and A Parade of Horribles (May 12, 2026). Two more books will close the series. Book 9 has no release date as of September 20.

Penguin’s Ace imprint acquired print rights in 2024, after the audience existed. Dinniman kept the ebook and audiobook rights. No Film School reports sales above 10 million copies by mid-2026. Books-A-Million named the series its first-ever Book of the Year in November 2025, and it made the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist.

The franchise now runs past the page. Vault Comics began a webcomic adaptation in July 2025. Universal International Studios and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door are developing a TV series with Chris Yost attached, and Dinniman told Variety in March that he had read the first scripts. Playmates opened pre-orders September 24 for a $29.99 six-inch Carl and Princess Donut figure, due in October.

Ace came to Dinniman after his readers did. What does a publisher offer an author who already owns the reader list?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

Katherine Kurtz published Deryni Rising in 1970, then spent the next 44 years writing the two and a half centuries of history behind it. The Deryni saga now runs to 16 novels, 15 shorter works, a poem, and four companion volumes, and almost none of it came out in the order the events take place. This guide lays out the internal chronology, from a Deryni king’s court in 888 to King Kelson’s wedding in 1128, for readers who want to follow Gwynedd’s history the way its characters lived it.

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Where New Readers Should Start

Newcomers should still likley start with Deryni Rising. Kurtz wrote the Camber books for readers who had already finished the original trilogy, and she built much of their dramatic elements on that knowledge. In the Kelson-era books, Saint Camber is a banned cult figure, a Deryni saint whose name the Church has scrubbed from the calendar, and a hooded apparition tied to him turns up at key moments for Alaric Morgan. A reader who meets Camber MacRorie first as a living nobleman in Camber of Culdi loses that mystery.

The chronological path gives something back in exchange. Readers watch the persecution of the Deryni take shape from its first cause to its last consequence. Camber helps overthrow the Deryni Festillic dynasty and pulls Cinhil Haldane out of a monastery to take the throne. Cinhil’s anguish over abandoning his priestly vows runs through all three Camber novels, and the Church councils that follow, culminating in the Statutes of Ramos, bar Deryni from the priesthood and set the legal machinery of persecution in motion. By the time Kelson takes the throne in 1120, a reader following this order knows exactly how Gwynedd arrived at its hatred of Deryni and why Kelson’s Church still enforces it.

Kurtz steeped the whole series in liturgy, sacraments, and ecclesiastical politics. Priesthood, penance, and canonization drive the plots. Reading chronologically makes the Church the constant through-line across 240 years of kings.

The Reading Order

Before Camber

• “Lay of Lord Llewellyn” (poem, undated; the bard Llewellyn died around 850). First published inside Camber of Culdi, 1976.

• “Catalyst” (888). Collected in The Deryni Archives, 1986; first published in Moonsinger’s Friends, 1985.

The Legends of Camber of Culdi (903 to 918)

• Camber of Culdi (903 to 904), 1976

• Saint Camber (905 to 907), 1978

• “Healer’s Song” (914), in The Deryni Archives

• “The Examen” (undated, likely a few years before “First Session”), in Deryni Magic: A Grimoire, 1991

• Camber the Heretic (917 to 918), 1981

• “First Session” (set during Camber the Heretic), in Deryni Magic

Tip: “First Session” takes place inside the events of Camber the Heretic. Read it after finishing the novel.

The Heirs of Saint Camber (918 to 928)

• The Harrowing of Gwynedd (918), 1989

• King Javan’s Year (921 to 922), 1992

• The Bastard Prince (928), 1994

The Long Quiet (977 to 1052)

• “Vocation” (977), in The Deryni Archives

• “The Green Tower” (1052), in Deryni Tales, 2002

A century and a half passes here with only two short stories to cover it. Readers jump from the aftermath of the regency straight into the late eleventh century.

The Childe Morgan Trilogy and the Reign of Brion (1082 to 1106)

• In the King’s Service (1082 to 1091), 2003

• “Venture in Vain” (1089), limited edition chapbook only, 2001

• Childe Morgan (1093 to 1096), 2006

• The King’s Deryni (1099 to 1106), 2014

• “Bethane” (1100), in The Deryni Archives

• “The Priesting of Arilan” (1104 to 1105), in The Deryni Archives

• “Swords Against the Marluk” (1105), in Flashing Swords! 4, 1977 but reworked into the novel

• “Legacy” (1105), in The Deryni Archives

Tip: All four short stories fall inside the span of The King’s Deryni. Finishing the novel first and then reading the four stories in order keeps the novel’s plot intact. “Swords Against the Marluk” was Kurtz’s first published Deryni short fiction and has been reprinted several times, most recently in Paula Guran’s Swords Against Darkness (2017). “Venture in Vain” never appeared outside its 2001 chapbook, so completists will need to hunt the collector market.

Before the Crown Passes (1115 to 1118)

• “The Knighting of Derry” (1115), in The Deryni Archives

• “Trial” (1118), in The Deryni Archives

The Chronicles of the Deryni (1120 to 1121)

• “The Dream That Became Deryni” (undated), in The Deryni Archives

• “Lords of Sorandor” (undated novelette, the early version of Deryni Rising), in The Deryni Archives

• Deryni Rising (1120), 1970

• Deryni Checkmate (1121), 1972

• High Deryni (1121), 1973

“The Dream That Became Deryni” and “Lords of Sorandor” record how the series began on Kurtz’s side of the page. Readers can take them as a preface to Deryni Rising or save them for after the trilogy to compare the draft against the finished novel.

The Histories of King Kelson (1123 to 1128)

• The Bishop’s Heir (1123 to 1124), 1984

• The King’s Justice (1124), 1985

• The Quest for Saint Camber (1125), 1986

• King Kelson’s Bride (1128), 2000

Collections and Companions

Most of the short fiction lives in two books. The Deryni Archives (1986) collects stories set from 888 to 1120, and Deryni Tales (2002) is the anthology holding “The Green Tower.” Deryni Magic: A Grimoire (1991) explains the mechanics of Deryni powers and carries “The Examen” and “First Session.” The two volumes of Codex Derynianus (1998 and 2005) work as encyclopedias for the setting and suit readers who want a reference open beside the novels.

A reader following this order will also move back and forth across Kurtz’s career. The first novel in the chronology dates from 1976, the last book written (The King’s Deryni, 2014) lands two-thirds of the way through the timeline, and the 1970 debut does not appear until near the end.

Happy reading!

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

C.S. Friedman is one of the most commanding voices in modern fantasy, a writer who has spent decades proving that the genre can be as dark, intelligent, and serious as any literature on the shelf. With Black Sun Rising and the Coldfire Trilogy, she built a world where the very forces of nature answer to human fear, then populated it with Damien Vryce, a warrior-priest wrestling with faith and doubt, and Gerald Tarrant, one of the most magnetic and unforgettable anti-heroes ever put to page.

Her fantasy pairs rich, inventive worldbuilding with characters of real moral weight, and it is no accident that readers and fellow writers still name her work as a standard-bearer for the field. The Magister Trilogy and the Dreamwalker series extended that gift for atmosphere and character into new territory, and Feast of Souls showed she could reinvent her approach to dark fantasy without losing an ounce of her power.

You can find more of her work at http://www.csfriedman.com, and you can support her directly on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/csfriedman.

Additionally, she has a new special edition out with Grim Oak Press for her book Black Sun Rising, which is on pre-order and shipping this year. It is an honor to sit down with a writer whose books have shaped so many of us who followed.

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Grim Oak Press is producing a special edition of Black Sun Rising with interior illustrations by Jeszika le Vye. When you were writing that book originally, did it ever cross your mind you’d one day have fans treating it as a collectible art object?

When I was writing the book, I was still in the mode of “wow, I’m a published author!” and just seeing my work in print was exciting. 😊 Later on, I would dream about all the forms this trilogy might take, but I have to admit, “illustrated collectible edition” was not one of them. I didn’t know such things existed. I am beyond thrilled to learn that they do and that my work was deemed worthy of becoming one.

It is currently being made into a Roblox game, which is yet another medium I had not considered, mostly because when I wrote the trilogy, nothing like it existed. Very exciting!

What’s it been like working with Grim Oak on this? How involved do you get in art direction, or do you let the illustrator run with it?

Shawn and I go way back, to the days when he was running a bookshop specializing in signed editions. I stopped by on a book tour to sign all the C. S. Friedman books he had in stock. So when he approached me about this project, we already had a good rapport, and I was the one who recommended Jeszika Le Vye as illustrator and cover artist. She is a phenomenally talented woman, with a gift for the kind of intense, moody art that the trilogy requires. She did the cover for my last novel, Nightborn. You can check out her work at Jeszika.com.

An author’s ability to offer artistic input to an artist depends entirely on her relationship with that artist. If I feel there is a detail that needs to be tweaked, I try to come up with a suggestion of how to do it that will involve as little change as possible. Respecting an artist’s time is as important as respecting their art. Some artists will choose to involve the author. I have a background in art, and that definitely contributes to my ability to evaluate a work and possibly offer helpful suggestions. Or just kvell with suitable terminology. 😊

Are there other titles in your backlist you’d love to see get the Grim Oak or high-end collectible treatment next?

Well, obviously I’d love the whole Coldfire Trilogy to be done, so everyone should go buy a copy of Black Sun Rising to help make that happen. I think my other work that is worthy of such treatment is This Alien Shore, which is my most popular SF novel. In addition to being a great story, it explores the concept of neurodiversity—hopefully from a new angle—and is deserving of a place in posterity.

What current projects are you working on?

So many things, they get hard to juggle! I have finally decided to write another novel in the Coldfire universe that will take place after the great Sacrifice that changed the world. The Trilogy asked what would happen if regular people suddenly had to deal with a force akin to magic. After the trilogy, the big question is, what would happen if that force suddenly became inaccessible? I hesitate to call it a sequel because it will not deal with the main characters from the trilogy (no Gerald Tarrant, sorry), but the characters are rooted in that story, and I think Coldfire fans will really enjoy it.

I have two AI stories I want to write that were on the back burner for a while (most short story ideas simmer there for a year or two before I figure out how I want to approach them), but AI is changing so rapidly these days; I think I need to get them out soon. So I am trying to work those into my schedule.

And I am launching a series of short stories set in the Coldfire universe, exploring key moments in Erna’s backstory. These are primarily for fans of the trilogy, to flesh out the history that was hinted at but never explored. The series is tentatively titled Coldfire Chronicles, and the first one will feature Gerald Tarrant as a young boy, coming into power in a world where adepts were one in a million and sorcery was not yet a household word. Future stories may include the Rakh War—which brought the Canopy into existence—the first appearance of the Iezu, and of course the great war between the forces of light and darkness, which the army of light so famously lost. They’ll be shared with my Patreon followers first, so do consider joining them.

Gerald Tarrant is one of genre fiction’s great morally compromised figures. Was there a point writing him where you worried you’d made him too sympathetic, or not sympathetic enough?

I once had a reader tell me that the reason he loved Gerald Tarrant as a character was because he was not an evil figure who was really a decent person deep inside, whose fall from grace could be understood and even sympathized with as he struggled towards redemption, as so many dark figures in fantasy literature are. Indeed, at this point the “sympathetic monster” has become something a cliché. Tarrant, by contrast, is consciously, deliberately, and unapologetically evil. People like to read about him because he embodies a darkness hidden deep in the human soul that we fear to confront, holding up a dark mirror that is both compelling and terrifying. It takes Damien two books to develop anything akin to “sympathy” for him, and I think that is the reader’s journey as well. I focused on making his story interesting, emotionally compelling, and morally chilling, and never thought in terms of how “sympathetic” he was to the reader.

When you’re building a character meant to blur good and evil, how do you know where the line is that keeps a reader invested instead of alienated?

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Subterranean Press is reprinting Penric’s Demon, the novella that started Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona series, as a signed hardcover run of roughly 1,000 copies. SubPress announced the second printing on September 13 and said the book is already at the printer. Bujold confirmed the details on her blog the next day.

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Her post gives the size of the run in one line: “Still limited to about a thousand copies, unnumbered.” The price is $60 from SubPress’s site or select stores, and Uncle Hugo’s and DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis will carry copies once they ship. Bujold said the secondary market currently asks about double that when a copy turns up at all. Non-library copies have listed at $300 or more on eBay, which put the first book out of reach for readers who bought later volumes such as Demon Daughter at $45 and The Assassins of Thasalon at $48.

SubPress explained its reasoning. The first book in a series is the hardest to find on the secondary market and can slow sales of the volumes after it, and the publisher called current prices “unattainable at anything approaching an affordable price.” The reprint keeps Lauren Saint-Onge’s original cover art. Bujold said a complete uniform set of the hardcovers can be built again, fifteen volumes now with a sixteenth coming. She added that she saw Saint-Onge’s preliminary sketches for the Darksight Dare cover last week, and that sold-out later titles may still surface through Uncle Hugo’s or DreamHaven.

Bujold released Penric’s Demon as an ebook in 2015 through Spectrum Literary Agency. SubPress issued the first hardcover on July 6, 2016, as a 250-copy signed numbered leather edition alongside a cloth trade edition. The novella was a Hugo finalist for Best Novella in 2016, and its sequel Penric and the Shaman was a finalist in 2017. In 2018 the World of the Five Gods won the Hugo for Best Series.

The story opens with Lord Penric, a younger son of an impoverished noble house, riding to his betrothal. He finds an elderly Temple divine dying after a riding accident. She serves the Bastard, the fifth god, and with her last breath she passes her demon to him. Penric becomes host to Desdemona, a chaos demon roughly two centuries old, and ends up sworn to the Bastard’s Order. The series follows him from there as a sorcerer and divine who trades commentary with Desdemona in silent speech.

That world is the link to Chalion. Penric’s Demon takes place in the setting of The Hallowed Hunt and the two Chalion novels, The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. By Bujold’s internal chronology, the novella falls about 150 years after The Hallowed Hunt and about 100 years before The Curse of Chalion. The Curse of Chalion won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and drew Hugo and World Fantasy nominations. Paladin of Souls won the Hugo and the Nebula in 2004, along with a Locus Fantasy Award. The five gods of that world (Father, Mother, Daughter, Son and Bastard) act only through people, and the Penric novellas center on the Bastard, the god at the heart of Paladin of Souls. Chalion itself is modeled on Reconquista-era Castile, and scholars have read the Quintarian faith of the series as an analogue of medieval Catholicism. Readers who arrive from Chalion find the same gods, the same theology and a setting a century earlier.

Baen Books has kept the stories in print through collections. Penric’s Progress arrived in January 2020 with the first three novellas in order. Penric’s Travels and Penric’s Labors followed, and Penric’s Intrigues came out in May. Many collectors still prefer the SubPress first printings, with Saint-Onge’s covers and a uniform shelf that the Baen omnibuses do not replace.

The gap in that shelf after this reprint is The Assassins of Thasalon. SubPress published the 456-page hardcover in 2022 as the first novel-length Penric story, in 1,250 signed numbered copies, and never sold it through large online retailers. It was more than 90 percent sold out when it shipped, and the publisher’s site now lists it as out of print. Baen’s Penric’s Intrigues carries the text, paired with Knot of Shadows. Bujold has said in a reader Q&A that the story aged out of its SubPress license period, which makes a reprint contractually possible. SubPress has announced none.

Bujold has also published Darksight Dare, the sixteenth Penric story, as an ebook on April 23. Blackstone released an audiobook narrated by Grover Gardner on June 2. In it, a mutilated Cedonian cavalry captain and a dying hedge sorceress in Orbas each bring Penric and Desdemona a problem. It has no print edition yet, and Bujold has said the SubPress hardcover is on the publisher’s slate for early 2027. She has kept up a roughly yearly pace of new Penric stories.

The slate has a deadline. Founder Bill Schafer announced in June that SubPress will close permanently after publishing through the end of 2027, a schedule he said “may bleed into 2028 as we wrap things up.” He also said the plan is to finish ongoing series or place them with other presses in the same style, so long-time customers can complete uniform sets. Fandom Pulse covered the closure in June.

A reader asked Bujold about that in the comments, and she answered that the two remaining Penric novellas sit in SubPress’s pipeline and will publish before the doors close. She said Schafer has floated passing her work to a comparable house, but until she writes something new the question is moot. She called her independent ebooks her main outlet and income, with SubPress, Blackstone audio and foreign-rights sales as add-ons.

If SubPress hands the series to another publisher as Schafer describes, will collectors accept a matching seventeenth volume from a different house, or does the uniform set end with Darksight Dare?

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If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!