Reviewing the Mail, Week of 6/28: Not Comics

Once again, the comics part of the mail is too big to fit into a reasonable-size post with anything else, so it'll be broken off by itself, slightly later. And what I have here is:

Brandon Sanderson's The Hero of Ages, third and final book of "Mistborn," coming from Tor in October in hardcover. This series has been acquired by an editor who's a friend, it's gotten excellent reviews, and Sanderson has even been tapped to finish Robert Jordan's last, unfinished "Wheel of Time" novel, which is about as big a vote of confidence as a writer can get. But I haven't yet read the previous books, so I can only give you hearsay -- people I trust say these books are good, and now the trilogy is complete, for those of you who wait for that.

The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks in mass-market paperback, July. The interesting story for me here is that it's a mass-market by Vintage, an imprint that's used for that format only very rarely. It's the second novel in a don't-call-it-SF series, which has not caught the Zeitgeist in quite the way it hoped to. (Though there's something mid-90s about this series, with people "off the grid" has the heroes -- that's more X-Files than 24; we generally prefer our heroes to be finding and torturing the people off the grid these days.)

The Last Realm Book One: Dragonscarpe is an absolutely immense piece of heavily-illustrated fiction by Pat McNamara, Michal Dutkiewicz and Gary Turner, published by what looks like a brand-new press, Angel Phoenix Publishing. I'm not sure if this Gary Turner is the same as Golden Gryphon's Gary Turner -- this one is described as a publisher and musician -- but it's possible. It's a very major, professional-looking thing to come out of nowhere, and I wonder what kind of distribution they're getting for it. I've only just started poking at it, and I'm really not sure what to make of it. There's a corporate copyright -- D.R.E.E.M. TV Pty. Ltd. -- which may indicate that it's being funded by someone-or-other's money in hopes of becoming a big media event. (Or it may just indicate that the three creators have incorporated to keep it all straight.) If any of you have the chance to look at this in person, take it.

I'll mention one book I got from the library just because: John Varley's Rolling Thunder. Varley's been writing vaguely Heinleineque young adult SF novels for the past few years -- which has felt a bit like slumming after his great '90s novels Steel Beach and The Golden Globe -- but getting a new Varley novel nearly every year is still a wonderful thing. This one is the third in the loose series with Red Thunder and Red Lightning; I'm not sure why nothing is read this time. (Perhaps he's referencing one of my favorite old video games? Stranger things have happened.)

And last is the book that excited me the most this week: Kage Baker's The House of the Stag, a new fantasy novel set in the world of The Anvil of the World. Tor will publish it in September. I don't know much more than that now, except that I want to read this if I can find any time at all.