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.
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!