Centipede Press dropped a newsletter this week loaded with news collectors of classic science fiction and horror need to see. The Colorado small press, founded by Jerad Walters in 2001, has spent 25 years turning out limited editions built for people who actually want to own their favorite books rather than just read them. Over 200 volumes in, with a Horror Writers Association Specialty Press Award and nominations for the Bram Stoker, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards, Centipede has built the kind of reputation where a new announcement email is worth reading top to bottom.
John M. Ford fans have the biggest reason to pay attention. Centipede is finishing The Dragon Waiting, Ford’s Byzantine alternate-history novel widely regarded as his masterwork, in a three-piece orange-and-black cloth binding. Per the newsletter, “The three-piece orange-and-black cloth for The Dragon Waiting was assembled and stamped this last week.” The book will ship without a slipcase given its oversized format, but for a writer whose books have been maddeningly hard to find in print for years, a Centipede edition of his best-known novel is a real event for anyone who has been chasing his catalog.
Alfred Bester gets the same treatment. Masters of Science Fiction, a two-volume set collecting his work, is set to go to print this week with a target ship date in December. Bester wrote The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, two of the genre’s foundational novels, and still doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as contemporaries like Asimov or Heinlein. A dedicated two-volume Centipede set is the kind of release that could change that.
Fredric Brown is the third author worth circling here. Centipede’s six-novel Brown set collects The Screaming Mimi, The Deep End, The Mind Thing, The Murderers, One for the Road, and Night of the Jabberwock, pricing at roughly $475 for the set and targeting a November completion. Brown wrote across science fiction and hardboiled crime with equal skill, and the mix in this set reflects that. As Centipede put it in the newsletter, “Yes, I realize The Mind Thing is science fiction and not crime but that’s okay.”
Collectors who sit on the fence do so at their own risk. When Centipede reprinted Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks as a signed, numbered edition of 400 copies at $100 each in June 2026, the entire run sold out within 24 hours. Centipede editions do not sit on shelves waiting for buyers to make up their minds.
The rest of the newsletter is just as packed. Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean Mythos and Averoigne Chronicles are getting a reprint alongside a Bruce Pennington art retrospective, both targeted for October or November. Michael Shea’s The A’Rak and The Autopsy are moving through galleys and bindery. Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive are going to press in late October for a February or March ship date. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Lost Worlds of 2001 are in binding now. R.A. Lafferty’s ninth volume, Robert Sheckley’s complete short fiction, and Charles L. Grant, Shirley Jackson, and Katherine Dunn titles are all somewhere in the pipeline too.
Which of these is worth clearing shelf space for first: The Dragon Waiting, the Bester set, or the Fredric Brown collection?
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!
If I could only afford either The Dragon Waiting or the Alfred Bester set, not both...I would give serious thought to selling my house and moving into a refrigerator box.