Fresh out of a dentist's appointment, I will be launching Lockstep at Bakka-Phoenix Books on Saturday, March 29 at 3:00.  There'll be entertainment (me), copies of Lockstep to be signed and book-related ideas to be explained, and other novels to be bought (hint:  we'll be breaking into the vault to offer some out-of-print hardcover editions of novels like Ventus and Permanence).  

If you're really lucky you'll get to hear me do a reading with my mouth still frozen from the dentist.  Major fun!

You can get to or contact Bakka-Phoenix here:

84 Harbord St., Toronto, Ontario  M5S 1G5

Ph:  416-963-9993  

email:  info@bakkaphoenixbooks.com

web:  www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com

The mass market paperback edition of The Sunless Countries will be released tomorrow, May 8, 2012. This book starts a new storyline, but brings in some old friends and definitely begins tying up the loose ends (and there are many) from the previous three books.  

Ashes of Candesce will hit the shelves on February 14, but meanwhile,Tor.com has an excerpt you can read online! I hope you like it.

Ashes brings together all the disparate plot threads from the first four books, and wraps them all up in one epic adventure. You'll encounter all the main characters from the previous books, and some surprising new ones. And, we finally get to see more than just a glimpse of the strange posthuman world that lies outside Virga.

The Virga series has been a great ride, and I hope you enjoy reading the cataclysmic ending as much as I did writing it.

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.

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...

David Nickle notes on his blog The Devil's Exercise Yard that his book Monstrous Affections, among others, will be launched at Worldcon in a couple of weeks.  What's of note is that due to an organizational snafu, the bought-and-paid-for ad for the event won't be appearing in the Worldcon programme book.

So here's the particulars from David's blog:

The launch is taking place Saturday August 8, at Maisonette Suite 2802, Delta Hotel Centre-Ville, 777 University Street, Montreal, QC. The titles being launched are all represented in the collage to the right. Starts at 7:30 p.m. Ends when the Red Death shows up. The party will be the best one at Worldcon.