While fans wait patiently for The Doors of Stone, the third volume in Patrick Rothfuss’ massively popular Kingkiller Chronicles, the author has been busy on several projects, including work on the final volume, The Doors of Stone. The most imminent of these, due for release in November, is The Slow Regard of Silent Things, a novella announced by Rothfuss in April, 2014.
If there’s anything that Rothfuss wants to make clear about The Slow Regard of Silent Things, however, it’s that the novella is not the third volume in the Kingkiller Chronicles. “It’s not a mammoth tome that you can use to threaten people and hold open doors,” Rothfuss explained in his announcement post. “It’s a short, sweet story about one of my favorite characters. It’s a book about Auri.”
In the announcement post, Rothfuss revealed an early synopsis for the novella:
The Slow Regard of Silent Things is set at The University where the brightest minds work to unravel the mysteries of enlightened sciences, such as artificing and alchemy. Auri, a former student (and a secondary but influential character from Rothfuss’s earlier novels) now lives alone beneath the sprawling campus in a maze of ancient and abandoned passageways. There in The Underthing, she feels her powers and learns to see the truths that science—and her former classmates—have overlooked.
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Voting for the 2014 Hugo Awards opened on Friday, June 6th. I’m using this opportunity to reprint the introduction to A Dribble of Ink’s collection included in the voter packet provided to all eligible voters. Whether you’re a voter or not, you can download the collection below -ed.
Over the past several years, vast change has come to many of the fan categories at the Hugos.
The “Best Fanzine” category has seen a dramatic shift in the past two years, since SF Signal’s first nomination, and traditional zines are being replaced by blogs and online magazines. “So never the twain shall meet…,” said Mike Glyer, of the many-times nominated File 770, describing the seemingly impassable gulf that exists between the online community and the traditional fan community. I don’t believe Mr. Glyer. While this divide between the two fan communities is undeniable, genre fandom is ripe with opportunity for creating a global fan community that embraces diversity—of voice and publishing platform—and challenges readers, authors, and publishers to become more inclusive and welcoming than ever before. Read More »
Surf’s up, boys and girls! Here’s the US cover art for Half the World by Joe Abercrombie, sequel to his soon-to-be-released YA(ish?) novel, Half a King. Just remember to apply a healthy layer of sunscreen chain mail before hitting the waves.
What a weird cover.
After I finished writing Cold Steel, the third and final book in the Spiritwalker Trilogy, I knew I wanted to add a coda. The trilogy is narrated in first person by Cat Barahal, but her close friendship with her cousin Beatrice is the central relationship in the series.
Bee happens to be an artist who carries a sketchbook with her everywhere, and I conceived of the idea of writing a journal as from Bee’s point of view, in which she relates the adventures she had as she sees them, since in the trilogy everything is seen through Cat’s eyes. Such a journal would necessarily need illustrations “as drawn by” Bee.
Because the story is set in an alternate history 19th century, the illustrations would need to have a realistic style (rather than a comics or manga style) of art. To that end, I commissioned Julie Dillon to create a set of 29 illustrations to accompany the story I wrote. Read More »
Life is a game of chance, a series of lucky breaks and coincidences, cause and effect.
But fuck if we want to talk about it that way.
No, we’re humans. We like patterns. We like stories.
I careened into adulthood while bumbling around at a night club in South Africa, drinking whiskey and puffing endlessly at Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes. I sat at a table of people far more witty and interesting and worldly than I, and I tried and failed, in my young, drunken stupor, to understand how some rural hick fleeing a narrow little town and a failed abusive relationship had somehow ended up here on the other side of the world. I felt like a fake. A poser. A white American girl running around the world for the opposite reason most folks did.
See, I wasn’t running away to find myself. No. Indeed. I knew exactly who I was.
I was trying to run as far and as fast from myself as possible. Read More »
