Just a Round-Up...

Orson Scott Card - who has milked his status as the writer of one of the most iconic SF novels of the 1980s (Ender's Game) for all it's worth - has released his newest book, Empire, in the USA and it's kicked up a bit of a storm. Essentially it's a near-future novel chronicling the USA falling into a civil war between the right and the left, and apparently Card paints liberals as evil weaklings who will lead the USA to destruction. Okay. The book has not had a good reception so far.

Robert Jordan's publisher, Tom Doherty of Tor Books, has indicated that they currently plan to publish the twelfth and final installment of The Wheel of Time, A Memory of Light, in early 2009. The longer-than-normal wait is due to the book's much greater length than the prior volumes (themselves of not inconsiderable size) and because of Jordan's serious illness. He is battling a very serious blood disorder called amyloidosis and has vowed to beat it, although it is not a curable condition at present. His fans have given large sums of money to the charities dedicating to beating this illness, and was the basis for a recent article on the Forbes website.

George R.R. Martin has confirmed that, as expected, he will not be able to finish A Dance with Dragons, the fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, before the end of this month. However, he does plan to finish it early in 2007. Publication will likely now slip until the autumn of 2007 at the earliest. However, comments by the artist Ted Nasmith (best known for his work on Tolkien) have suggested that the long-awaited The World of Ice and Fire companion book, co-written by Martin with the admins of the Westeros fan site and forum Elio 'Ran' Garcia and Linda Antonsson, may follow quite quickly in the spring of 2008. It should be noted that this date is not final, however.

PS Publishing have confirmed that Steven Erikson is writing a new novella set in the Malazan world, entitled The Lees of Laughter's End, to be published in early 2007, likely around the same time that Reaper's Gale, the seventh novel in the main series, is published by Bantam.