Richard Morgan has
let us know on the Westeros.org forum about the current status of
The Dark Commands, the follow-up to 2008's
The Steel Remains. Bantam US had put the book in their Fall 2010 catalogue despite the UK publishers, Gollancz, pushing the book's release date back to 2011. Morgan clarified the situation for us, explaining that it has taken some time for
The Dark Commands to come together as a book and his time to work on it has been reduced by
a new gig advising Electronic Arts on some of their forthcoming games.
The good news is that
The Dark Commands will be fairly substantial in size (the first book was about 350 pages in hardcover, so at half again in size the follow-up should be in the 500-page margin), but the bad news is that it might not appear for a while.
The cover above is the American one. The UK cover, without title, can be seen
here.
Funny, I was thinking about this book earlier on and googled for any potential artwork, with no luck. And yet as usual the Wert-Meister has delivered the goods. :)
ReplyDeleteFrom reading Morgan's blog, it sounds like this book has been a bit of trouble. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
Indeed. Morgan said a while back that his original plan had been to write THE STEEL REMAINS followed by a new SF novel (possibly set in the BLACK MAN universe) followed by THE DARK COMMANDS and so on. His editors suggested that he do the trilogy in one go and he agreed, but had to reverse and do some thinking on the fly as he hadn't been planning to write THE DARK COMMANDS straight away. Hence some of the issues involved.
ReplyDeleteA small picture of the UK cover (with title) can be seen here:
ReplyDeletehttp://library2.risingshadow.net/images/books/7862.jpg
This is from the Gollancz catalogue:
http://orionbooks.co.uk/content/download/16449/317038/version/1/file/GollanczNewBooks_Jan2010-July2010.pdf