The Sunless Countries
Mar 07, 2009
First review of The Sunless Countries
I'm not even done the book; how weird is that?
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.
Jan 27, 2009
The Sunless Countries
Coming August 4th, Book 4 of Virga
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...
Nov 20, 2008
Pirate Sun audiobook has bonus material
Bought the hardcover? Then you're missing a little hint of what the next novel, The Sunless Countries, holds
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!