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.
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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