Lynch/Rothfuss London signing

Last night I attended a joint signing by Scott Lynch and Patrick Rothfuss at the huge Forbidden Planet store in central London. I'd met Pat before, four years ago, but this was my first time meeting Scott.

The signing table looms into sight at last, like Mount Doom after Frodo's long journey. Or something.

The signing was packed out. I mean, huge. The queue snaked around the entire store back and forth like a slow-moving conga. Fairly late in the process someone counted the number of people in the queue and came back with 300, but I think it was a fair bit more than that. Forbidden Planet is used to hosting massive signings from movie stars, but the size of this queue for two fantasy authors whose names don't have the initials 'R.R.' or 'J.K.' in them seemed to take the staff by surprise. I arrived at the store at 5.30 (the signing was due to start at 6.00) and finally got to the signing table at around 8.15pm. It turns out S.M. Stirling was also doing a signing upstairs and I contemplated getting one of his books to get signed, but he was long gone by the time the Lynchfuss signing was done.

A Gentleman Bastard and myself, yesterday.

Following the signing, we repaired to a nearby hostelry where Pat and Scott chatted with fans and did a bit of a double act discussion talking about their books and writing process. It sounds like we shouldn't be holding our breaths about seeing The Doors of Stone in the near future, but things sounded a lot more hopeful about The Thorn of Emberlain (though neither author, with wisdom born of experience, offered up potential release dates).

Myself, Pat Rothfuss and Pat Rothfuss's beard, which had its own hospitality suite. We should really be charging Tad Williams for free advertising here as well.

It was a bit of a slog to get through the signing process, but Pat and Scott were good speakers and the evening was fun. In the future, however, I think I'll make sure I get to the signing a bit earlier.

The Queue. Long will it haunt my dreams.

UNFETTERED gets UK book deal

Fantasy author (and well-known fantasy webmaster) Shawn Speakman's fantasy anthology Unfettered has been picked up by Orbit Books for a UK release next year.

 
Unfettered features short stories by Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Jacqueline Carey, Tad Williams, Naomi Novik, Peter Brett, R.A. Salvatore, Daniel Abraham and Carrie Vaughn, amongst many others. It was released last year in the United States to a good reception. Speakman created the book to help pay for his medical bills after suffering from cancer, with the writers making money back from foreign rights sales.

The UK edition of Unfettered will launch on 20 February 2014. Speakman is also working on a sequel to the book, currently untitled but planned for release in 2015.

Patrick Rothfuss's NAME OF THE WIND optioned for television

It has been announced that New Regency Productions and Fox Television have optioned the TV rights to Patrick Rothfuss's novel, The Name of the Wind. If successful, the series would also adapt the other two books in The Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy, The Wise Man's Fear and the forthcoming The Doors of Stone.

Eric Heisserer will be writing the script. Heisserer's previous credits include Final Destination 5 and the unnecessary prequel to The Thing, as well as the reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

There is no word on what network or channel this will air on yet. It's also only an option. A script will need to be written and then greenlit before it moves into production. Given Rothfuss's well-known love of the works of Joss Whedon, which have had 'problems' with Fox in the past, it is surprising that he's agreed to sell the rights to them. Some have suggested that Fox may be intending this project for their FX channel (which is more forgiving of low ratings and usually givest its shows a fairer shake than Fox itself), though that is pure speculation.

It will also be interesting to see how the story is translated to TV. Most of the story is from Kvothe's POV, and in fact there are strong hints that Kvothe is colouring his story for his own ends. How this would be translated onto screen remains to be seen.

Rothfuss recently said that The Doors of Stone should be published some time in 2014.

Neil Gaiman to publish a new NEVERWHERE story (with some help from George R.R. Martin)

Way back in 1996, Neil Gaiman penned the BBC mini-series Neverwhere, adapting it into a novel a year later. Almost immediately after the story first appeared, fans noted a continuity error where the character of the Marquis de Carabas recovered his coat after it had apparently vanished forever. Gaiman promised to explain all in a short story, enigmatically entitled 'How the Marquis Got His Coat Back', but got a bit side-tracked with other projects.

The Marquis de Carabas as portrayed by Patterson Joseph in the original BBC TV series of Neverwhere.

It's been a while coming, but the story will finally appear in a new anthology entitled Rogues, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Rogues - the thematic sequel anthology to 2010's Warriors - will likely be published some time in 2014.


The full story list is as follows:

George R.R. Martin “Everybody Loves a Rogue” (Introduction)
Joe Abercrombie “Tough Times All Over”
Gillian Flynn “What Do You Do?”
Matthew Hughes “The Inn of the Seven Blessings”
Joe R. Lansdale “Bent Twig”
Michael Swanwick “Tawny Petticoats”
David Ball “Provenance”
Carrie Vaughn “The Roaring Twenties”
Scott Lynch “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane”
Bradley Denton “Bad Brass”
Cherie Priest “Heavy Metal”
Daniel Abraham “The Meaning of Love”
Paul Cornell “A Better Way to Die”
Steven Saylor “Ill Seen in Tyre”
Garth Nix “A Cargo of Ivories”
Walter Jon Williams “Diamonds From Tequila”
Phyllis Eisenstein “The Caravan to Nowhere”
Lisa Tuttle “The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives”
Neil Gaiman “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back”
Connie Willis “Now Showing”
Patrick Rothfuss “The Lightning Tree”

TORMENT update: Rothfuss and Avellone in

The Kickstarter for Torment: Tides of Numenera is roughly halfway done, with 14 days to go before the end of the appeal. However, the game is already funded: having asked for $900,000, inXile Studios have actually received $2.9 million. The game is now deep into what Kickstarter calls, 'stretch goals', that is additional incentives for people to keep funding in the form of added content to the game.

First up, if the game hits $3.25 million then the writing team will be expanded to include bestselling fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man's Fear). Rothfuss will be adding about 10,000 words of content to the game in the form of dialogue and characters. He won't be doing any more because of his commitments to finishing off The Doors of Stone, the third and concluding volume of The Kingkiller Chronicle.

Much more enticing (to this blogger, anyway) is that at $3.5 million, inXile will add Chris Avellone to the writing time. Avellone was the primary writer and designer of the original Planescape: Torment (to which Numenera is the spiritual successor), as well as Fallout 2, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer and the forthcoming Project: Eternity. He also worked on Icewind Dale and its sequel; Fallout: New Vegas (including leading the design of several of its DLC episodes); and Alpha Protocol. He has also done some writing for inXile's previous Kickstarter game project, Wasteland 2. He is often cited as the finest writer of Western CRPGs. Exactly why Avellone still hasn't written a novel, I don't know, as I suspect it would be awesome. Avellone will be creating a new NPC character for the game and writing their dialogue, but will also be serving as an editor and a fresh pair of eyes on the work of the rest of the team as well.

With still two weeks to go, I suspect this Kickstarter will breeze past both targets and probably end up somewhere on the other side of $4 million when all is said and done. It's shaping up to be a very interesting game.

Official: WHEEL OF TIME has sold lots of books

Tor Books have put up an interesting - if rather hyperbolic - video discussing the Wheel of Time sequence and its impact and influence on the fantasy genre. Obviously as a marketing release from the publisher, it's a bit of a fluff piece (the considerably mixed reception WoT has had in the wider world is not mentioned), but it does feature some interesting new info on the sales figures of the series.

Yup, the oft-quoted figure of 44 million sales, it transpires, refers to the United States and Canada alone, not a worldwide figure. This is surprising news and since it comes straight from the horse's mouth (in this case Tom Doherty's, the head of Tor Books), must be taken as fact. Given the normal ratio of North American sales to the rest of the world is about half of the total sales, that should put worldwide sales of Wheel of Time in the region of 80-90 million. Which is a lot, and considerably more than previously thought.

There's some interesting stuff in the rest of the video (which includes soundbites from Brandon Sanderson and Pat Rothfuss), although I think we can take the claim that 'lots happens on every single page' as a slight exaggeration of the amount of incident in the late-middle volumes of the series.

For comparison's sake, worldwide sales of A Song of Ice and Fire are closing rapidly on 20 million (of considerably fewer books) worldwide, whilst Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (which has considerably more) recently passed 70 million.

Quick Hits: GRRM, Rothfuss, Abraham, Scholes, STAR TREK

Locus has published its publication list from now until next summer, revealing some interesting information:

Expect the new Dunk and Egg story in 2013.

George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois's anthology Dangerous Women, including the fourth Dunk and Egg Song of Ice and Fire prequel novella, is now listed for release in May 2013. Amazon Germany is reporting that the book collecting all four Dunk 'n' Egg novellas into one volume will come out in May 2014. Whilst we have to take that with a grain of salt, that does tie in with the new story having a 12-month exclusivity contract before it can be reprinted anywhere else.

The same list confirms that the third Dagger and Coin novel by Daniel Abraham will be called The Tyrant's Law and that both it and Ken Scholes's long-awaited Requiem will be out in June 2013.

Meanwhile, Pat Rothfuss has sold a new fantasy trilogy to DAW Books. Despite speculation that this might be the rumoured sequel series to The Kingkiller Chronicle, there are also hints that this might be an urban fantasy trilogy consisting of notably shorter novels by Rothfuss's normal standards. He may also have already written (or partially written) the first book, meaning we might see it before The Doors of Stone (the final Kingkiller book). Hopefully Rothfuss will clear this up on his blog soon.

Finally, the new Star Trek movie allegedly has a title. It's Star Trek Into Darkness. Without a colon, which is apparently a deliberately stylistic choice. Hmm. Not sure about that one.