Suciul is a lot more reliable than amazon, of course, but amazon does also list Weeks' The Blinding Knife for September. Along with the rest of Orbit's titles out to November -- so I was wrong, though I won't count it as quite real until we see a catalogue. Nothing much of note for me, except of course Abercrombie's Red Country in November, though we are graced with the UK editions here in the Frozen Northlands. Couple boxed sets, Seeds of Earth, the last Rachel Arron book, oh, and a new Kate Griffin. Sadly absent thus far is Kate Eliot's Cold Steel, the last Spiritwalker book.
As wonderful as Abercrombie often is, and as varied as his plots are in their execution, I'm kind of hoping he finds some new thematic tunes to tap out on his drum sometime soonish. "Life is a gigantic cesspit of suck and so are people and they never ever change and the best you may hope for is for things to not actually get worse" will always be a classic, I'm sure, but it is also starting to smell of rotting flesh a little.
Thanks for the reminder about the new Mary Gentle. I've never read her before, and what with the silly four-book version of Ash published in NA being apparently somewhat hard to find I'd decided to start with this one. Sounds quite cool.
I don't think I had taken on board just how short the new Robin Hobb book, City of Dragons, really is. I haven't actually seen it, but my local library claims the NA edition contains under 350 pages with actual book on them. Good things come in small packages, of course; I have no objection to the novel's length whatsoever, except that it's a split book. I was defending Hobb's publisher in this very thread not so long ago, and I still do think that it's reasonable for them to balk at printing a massive tome by an author who sells very healthily but not near Jordan or Martin levels, but I didn't realize just how short we were talking about; if the second half is no longer than the first then the split really does seem a bit excessive.
I wonder what Tor's lead title will be for the fall, now that A Memory of Light is moved to winter? Perhaps the new Goodkind which is supposed to be coming out in August but will inevitably get bumped. I could see Tor having a fairly epic fantasy-heavy fall/winter: There's AMoL, the new Erikson [I'm assuming they are publishing this in the States], the new Goodkind for those as like that sort of thing, hopefully Jones' Endlords, Glen Cook's Working the Gods' Mischief, which is on Tor's IOU list and I understand has now been done for a while, almost certainly Jay Lake's Calimpura, and possibly Requiem by Ken Scholes. I don't know if they've got much in the way of debuts or pleasant surprises, save for Tina Connolly's debut Ironskin [Jane Eyre with faeries], which they're supposed to be publishing in the fall.
Catherynne Valente's The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There is now listed for October, which means there is once again a forthcoming Valente novel and the world is right and good. Ya in general is looking good this year, and I may end up spending a healthy amount of my time there.
