The short list for the 2010 Sunburst Award has been announced, and once again I'm on it!  Here's what they have to say about The Sunless Countries:

Immediately captivating, this is equal parts great world-building and strong characterization. Wonderfully original settings and visual detail light up this richly imagined world. Leal, her friends and her enemies are vividly drawn and sympathetic. Particularly impressive is Schroeder's ability to make this, the fourth book in the Virga series, as accessible to readers as the first.

The complete list of shortlisted works:

• Charles de Lint, The Mystery of Grace (Tor, ISBN: 0765317567)
• A.M. Dellamonica, Indigo Springs (Tor, ISBN: 0765319470)
• Cory Doctorow, Makers (Tor, ISBN: 0765312794)
• Karl Schroeder, The Sunless Countries (Tor, ISBN: 0765320762)
• Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock (Tor, ISBN: 0765319713)

The short-listed works in the young adult category for the 2010 Sunburst Award are:

• Megan Crewe, Give Up the Ghost (Henry Holt, ISBN: 0805089306)
• Maureen Garvie, Amy By Any Other Name (Key Porter, ISBN: 1554701422)
• Hiromi Goto, Half World (Penguin, ISBN: 0670069655)
• Lesley Livingston, Wondrous Strange (HarperTeen, ISBN: 0061575372)
• Arthur Slade, The Hunchback Assignment (HarperCollins, ISBN: 1554683548)

I meet a lot of people who have been away from science fiction for a few years--or even a few decades--and wonder where to start reading it again.  One of the best ways to get reacquainted with the best in the field is to check out Locus Magazine's annual reading list.  Locus is a multi-award winning SF/F industry magazine that carries all the latest scuttlebutt, reviews, etc.  Their readers are some of the most savvy and well-rounded in the business, so when they pool their resources to compile a list of recommended titles, you know it'll be good.

Which, of course, makes the fact that every one of my novels has made this list truly puzzling.  Not that I'm complaining, mind you--especially since The Sunless Countries has made this year's list!

Russ Allbery has reviewed most of my novels on his site, and he's always provided an extremely good litmus test of how well I'm doing.  (Except of course for his giddy and utterly approving review of Lady of Mazes, which if not entirely objective was at least a great piece of ego-boo for me.)  As well as praising the strengths, he finds the weaknesses in my work with unerring precision and for this reason I always await his reviews with great anticipation.

What he has to say about The Sunless Countries is extremely positive, and his criticisms are fair.  I can learn from a reviewer like this:

 The Eternists are a bit over the top, though. Schroeder paints the politicians as manipulative, self-serving slime, and since the protagonist is an academic, the conflict follows stock fault lines and seems pat and cliched. He makes it work within the book, but the obvious analogies outside the book are too easy and a bit distracting.

Yeah, okay.  I'll try to do better.  On the other hand, this is his overall assessment:

The Virga series still falls a bit short of Schroeder's other work for me, but this is the most intellectually interesting entry. He moves away from steampunk set pieces and into more analysis of the nature of government and the perils and alliances of high technology. It's one of the better books in the series, although it still trails Queen of Candesce.

Fair enough, and thanks once again for a well-measured review.

Just when I thought life couldn't get any stranger, MacMillan starts releasing my books as iPhone apps!  This is very cool.  Since they apparently don't have the licensing rights to sell the app into Canada, I can't confirm its presence in the iTunes Store; however, you can find my latest Virga novel, The Sunless Countries, at appshopper.com.

Not only that, but The Year's Best Science Fiction: 26th Annual Collection is also available; it contains my popular Virga story, The Hero.  

And here's what they'll look like in your iPod or iPhone:

Nice review at Sci Fi Wire, full of words like "rich" "hectic" "dangerous" and "exciting."  Not to mention "enigmatic" "exotic" and "bizarre."  A book full of "perilous intrigue" that contains "revelations about Virga's place in the 'foam of worlds.'"

But the reviewer (Paul Di Filippo) is careful to make the point that while Sunless Countries fills in the blanks on the map provided by the other books, it can also be read on its own:

It might very well serve as a good gateway for newbies into the fascinating Virga cosmos, an enormous, air-filled fullerene balloon in the Vegan star system containing worldlets of varying size that center around the "sun of suns," Candesce. It's a Boschian landscape, full of rich cognitive estrangement, and Schroeder gets the most out of his conceptual playground, with taut prose and wild plotting.

In short, a very happy, enthusiastic review for the fourth book of "the Virga trilogy." 

Coinciding with the launch of the paper edition of The Sunless Countries, MacMillan and Audible.com have released the audiobook version!  

As with the previous books, this one is read by the inimitable Joyce Irvine, with David Thorne.  They bring a great one-two punch to these stories; I'm very lucky to have such lively and entertaining readers.

I wish I could release the persistent massively multiplayer online role playing version on the same day as well, but that's a little harder to do.  But hey, if you have the coders and a server farm just sitting around idle (hint hint, Matrix Online), maybe we should talk.

Russell Letson has read all the Virga books, and so he's eminently qualified to compare them with one another in his review of The Sunless Countries.  Does this fourth book, which diverges so totally from the arc of straightforward adventure that tied the first three together, pass muster?  Apparently.

Science fiction is supposed to be the genre that melds the adventures of the mind and body into a single thrill ride, as though a roller coaster could be combined with the Discovery Channel and an advanced degree in speculative anthropology and experienced all at once.  This series, and this entry in particular, fulfills that promise.

This is an excellent first major review of the book, and especially good as it arrived two days before Worldcon starts.  In my usual way I had no idea whether I'd crafted a masterpiece or a doorstop; at least I can go to the yearly party with some confidence that I've done right by the other Virga books.

What do you do when you've created an open-ended universe of unmatched richness and potential?  You keep exploring it!  I'm very far from exhausting the possibilities of my world Virga, and here's The Sunless Countries to prove it.  This novel is connected to the previous three in the series, but doesn't require that you've read them.  It introduces new characters in a new setting while retaining enough links to the other books for fans of those stories.  It really is all one grand epic tale, but I've tried to keep the action local in each book, and that's definitely the case here.

Meet Leal Hieronyma Maspeth.  She's a history tutor at the University of Sere, in the nation of Abyss.  Leal's a curious mixture of discipline and unbridled imagination:  she works hard to get ahead in her cut-throat academic world, but nonetheless dreams of being swept away by the dashing sun lighter, Hayden Griffin, who has recently come to Sere to build a new sun for some other country.

As events conspire, she will end up meeting Griffin, but nothing is like she imagined it would be.  In particular, she never dreamt that something ancient and terrible might awaken in the darkness beyond Sere's streetlights--perhaps a fabled worldwasp, come to wreack vengeance on humanity for some long-forgotten slight.  Nor could she have anticipated that, in Abyss's current anti-intellectual backlash, she would end up being the only person who even knows what a worldwasp is, much less how to deal with it...

The Sunless Countries will be appearing on bookshelves within the next few days.  I've just received my first copy (and, by the way, on the actual book, the bands of colour on the top and bottom aren't lime green like they are in the above picture; they're indigo/purple, to go with the overall design).  In a couple of days, you too can meet Leal, and the worldwasps...

To promote the upcoming release of The Sunless Countries, we've decided to offer the Sun of Suns audiobook for free download.  There's a discussion about it going on right now at Tor.com; for the download itself, go to the Audible.com site.

Now, since I'm the author anything I say about the quality of the story itself is obviously biased; but I can say without reservation that the reader, Joyce Irvine, does an excellent job with my material.  If there's flaws in my prose she easily talks around them, and she's a great choice for the material.  (And if you like how she does this, you should try her dry and distantly amused rendition of Queen of Candesce!)

All of the Virga books are available in audiobook format; The Sunless Countries will be as well.  And don't forget that Metatropolis, currently nominated for a Hugo Award, is also available from Audible.com

So I'm in my office going through the page proofs of The Sunless Countries, worrying that the pacing is off, and I decide to procrastinate by doing some ego-surfing--and what should I find but a review of TSC!  A favourable one!  And he doesn't even mention the pacing.

Schroeder evokes the slow, crushing drift into ideological nonsense in a distressingly compelling way, & puts Leal [Maspeth] in the heart of it; should she collaborate with the Eternists to try to salvage some representation of science & history (even if she has to teach it as heretical, along side accepted dogma) or should she make a meaningless stand?

Wow.  This is like getting a newspaper from next week.  It also suggests to me that the current practice of sending out Advanced Reading Copies this early needs to be reconsidered, because that practice is predicated on it taking reviewers months to get their reviews out.  I could literally tweak the book right now to solve some of the issues the reviewer, Mordecai, raises.  Luckily he hasn't found many.

Very timely and useful.

Weird, though.

I'm excited to announce that my next book is ready and will be published this summer.  The Sunless Countries is the fourth book in the Virga trilogy (let me explain).  It continues and expands upon the story begun in Sun of Suns, but is sufficiently stand-alone that you can still view the first three books as a single unit.  --That is, there's an arc and a set of characters that begins and completes in books one to three; Sunless Countries branches off from there, but contains some familiar faces, for instance Hayden Griffin.

There's a couple of reasons why I'm doing the series this way.  Firstly, I hate having to buy every book in a series in order to keep up with the whole storyline.  That makes it all one big book, so why not just publish it in one volume?  Missing a book in such series is rather like missing an episode of Lost.

So The Sunless Countries is its own thing.  Doing things this way lets me approach each book afresh, and I think you'll find it shows.  Start with Sunless countries if you want; it's just as good an introduction to Virga as the previous novels. 

The other main factor in my deciding to do it this way is that... well, this world is just so damn rich!  When I wrote Sun of Suns I discovered that there was much more to this setting than I could possibly encompass with a single novel, or even a single plotline.  One element that I hadn't fleshed out to my satisfaction was the nature of the world outside Virga.  With The Sunless Countries, we're finally doing that.

Finally, I'm continuing my ongoing experiment of telling a slightly different kind of story with each of these books.  The Sunless Countries focuses on Leal Hieronyma Maspeth, a history tutor in the sunless nation of Abyss.  When the famous sunlighter--Hayden Griffin--comes to town, she's both attracted to him as a real hero, and repelled by his association with the local, corrupt government. 

Yet at the same time that Griffin arrives, so does something else--a great voice issuing from the darkness, crying words that no one in Abyss, or Virga, wants to hear...

In the spirit of the DVD phenomenon, we've created a little easter egg for buyers of the audiobook version of Pirate Sun.  There's additional material here that provides clues to the plot and characters in The Sunless Countries, which won't hit store shelves until next August.

Extra paper costs; extra bytes don't.  There was some material at the end of Pirate Sun that wasn't absolutely necessary--"good to have" scenes that we ultimately decided slowed the ending of the paper edition.  Audiobooks have a different style of pace, though, and a little extra time costs us nothing.  It reallly is a lot like DVDs, where the "good to have" scenes not released in the theatrical version are included because, well, they can be.

A lot of people have assumed that I was writing a trilogy--and, in a sense, I have been.  Pirate Sun ends the main plotline begun in Sun of Suns, and in that sense completes the story.  There remained lots of dangling questions, though, as well as opportunities for setting and adventure that had to remain unexplored in the first three books.  Hence, The Sunless Countries.

Virga is a world of infinite possibility.  I'm currently writing a set of short stories set there, because there's just too much to say about the place.  I love to go there in my imagination, and I know a lot of other people do too.  The fun's not over yet.

So if you want a hint of what's to come, pick up the audiobook version of Pirate Sun and enjoy!