Rope of Silicon is reporting that The Hobbit: There and Back Again has been delayed by Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema. The final instalment of the trilogy is now targeting a December 17th, 2014 release, five months later than its original release date of July 14th, 2014.
Certainly disappointing news, but maybe not so surprising given the long-troubled production of the trilogy. It’s hard not to wonder if this is also the result of the studios deciding to expand the series of movies from two to three just months before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey came to theatres. This new release schedule will mirror the three-movies-over-two-years schedule that The Lord of the Rings followed.
The second volume of Brandon Sanderson’s oh-crap-Tor-needs-someone-to-fill-the-hole-left-by-the-end-of-the-Wheel-of-Time series, The Stormlight Archives, now has a name and a release date.
Sanderson speaks a bit about the project and the title:
The Way of Kings was Kaladin’s book. He will have a lot to do in Book Two, of course, and you can expect some great sequences within his viewpoint. However, the flashback sequences in Book Two belong to Shallan. In my notes for the series, I had planned for Shallan’s book to be named after the tome she is given at the end of the first novel: The Book of Endless Pages. On Roshar, that is a book of knowledge that can never be completed—because people should always be learning, studying, and adding what they’ve learned to it.
[…]
Lots of people weighed in with their feelings on Stormlight Two. For a while, I toyed with titles that still had “book” in them, as I liked how that fit with Shallan’s scholarly nature. The Book of Lies was one of these, as was The Book of Dusk and Dawn. (As a side note, being a fan of Magic: The Gathering makes naming things harder sometimes, since the creative team over at Wizards has named A LOT of cards—and the titles I think of sometimes sound too much like things they’ve done. That’s why Book of Fact and Fiction was dead the moment it occurred to me.)
[…]
In the last few months, the title that has really been sticking with me is Words of Radiance. (Admittedly, “radiance” is a synonym for “light,” but at least it’s a step away.) With “words,” it still has a slight tie to my original desire to have “book” in the title, and I believe it’s significantly meaningful for people who have read the first novel. It also works very well for reasons that I can’t tell you now without spoiling the story.
Hey, it’s not cover art (or even news about who the artist will be), but we all pathetically salivate for even the smallest drop of information about our favourite authors, don’t we? Words of Radiance is set for a tentative November, 2013 release.
Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 1008 -
Buy: Book/eBook
In my last commentary, I commented about how one of the major reasons why I decided to do these re-reading projects was to learn more about myself as a reader and critic and to explore how my takes on various novels had changed over an intervening period of several years. For the first three Wheel of Time novels, my overall attitude had shifted only slightly. I still liked the first book, The Eye of the World, better than the second and third volumes, The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn. What I liked and why, however, had changed, sometimes drastically.
In particular, I found even the first three volumes to contain several annoying features. Among them, average, pedestrian prose, laziness in using quirks and invented stereotypes to describe characters and imagined cultures, and the beginnings of what author/critic Adam Roberts has referred to as “decor-porn.” Despite these annoying narrative features, I was able to enjoy those three volumes as long as I focused on viewing the books as a sort of quest narrative. If I had devoted more time to looking at the numerous “prophecies” and their ilk and tried to predict as-yet-untold events rather than concentrating on the story at hand, I suspect I would have grown bored quicker than I have. Read More »
Seems alright. Inoffensive, at least. The trilogy (Wards of Faerie (REVIEW), Bloodfire Quest) as a whole has a nice continuous look, including the screaming red I’m-not-a-sticker sticker. Still, we all know it’s the big, juicy name of the author that will sell these books, not the cover. In all, I’d say it’s a wash with the US cover.
On Friday, February 22nd, it was announced my Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, that the well-regarded Speculative Fiction magazine will be adding a new reprint section, headed by Gardener Dozois, an equally well-regarded anthologist.
The official press release details the additions:
Clarkesworld Magazine, a leading science fiction and fantasy magazine, has named award-winning editor Gardner Dozois (pronounced “doe-zwa”) to helm its new reprint department. In his role as reprint editor, every month Gardner will draw upon forty years of experience to select two exemplary science fiction stories published during the last three decades. The first of these stories are scheduled to appear in the April 2013 issue of the magazine’s online, digital and print editions.
“Since my heart attack last year, when readers responded with encouragement and support, I’ve been trying to find a way to say ‘thank you’,” said Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld Editor-in-Chief. “The reprint department had been on our wish list for some time and when the opportunity to work with someone of Gardner’s caliber arose, I knew I had found the perfect way to express my gratitude.”
Clarkesworld has long been one of my favourite SF magazines and it’s wonderful to see them joining together with someone like Dozois. With John Joseph Adams at Lightspeed, Ann VanderMeer and Ellen Datlow at Tor.com, and Johnathan Strahan at Eclipse, it’s interesting to see some of today’s best short fiction editors continuing to become as important to online markets as they are to the long-running tradition of print anthologies.
