Steven Erikson to publish SF novel in 2014

There's been a bit of a change-around in Steven Erikson's schedule for 2014. In a Tor.com Q&A last week he confirmed he's still very early in the writing of Fall of Light, the second novel in the Kharkanas Trilogy, and is still wrestling with a major structural issue which he isn't fully sure how to resolve yet. This has led to the expectation that Fall of Light won't make its June 2014 release date and may instead fall later in the year or even 2015.

However, Erikson will still be publishing a novel next year. Willfull Child (its unclear if the incorrect spelling is deliberate or not) is a comic SF novel that riffs on Star Trek. The blurb is as follows:

These are the voyages of the starship, A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life life-forms, to boldly blow the...

And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback - a kind of James T Kirk crossed with 'American Dad' - and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through 'the infinite vastness of interstellar space'...

The bestselling author of the acclaimed Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence has taken his life-long passion for 'Star Trek' and transformed it into a smart, inventive and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-hi-tech-kit-along-the-way type over-blown adventure. The result is this smart. inventive, occasionally wildly OTT and often very funny novel that deftly parodies the genre while also paying fond homage to it.

The novel has a listed release date of 5 June 2014 and an estimated page-count of somewhere around 300 pages. Erikson published a longer excerpt from the book on Tor last year.