Hosting an event with Peter F. Hamilton in late January

I'm hosting an event with SF author Peter F. Hamilton at Waterstones Book Store in Colchester, Essex on 21 January (in the UK).

I don't often host events, and almost never outside of a convention, so this will be a change of pace. I've also known Peter for a good decade and been reading his work for close to thirty years, so it'll probably be an interesting discussion.

The main focus of the event will the physical release of A Hole in the Sky and the other books in his Arkship Trilogy, which was previously an audio exclusive, but I daresay we'll cover the rest of his career and his current project, the Exodus duology, tying in with the forthcoming video game.

If you're interested in attending, the details can be found hither.

TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER 40,000 announced

Creative Assembly and Games Workshop have confirmed their highly lucrative alliance will continue into the grim darkness of the far future. Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is definitely a thing.

The game will see war raging unchecked across at least a star system, and possibly the whole galaxy, as multiple 40K factions clash in battle. Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Orks appear in the trailer, with Eldar in the promotional art, and more factions are likely to join the fray, if not in the initial release than certainly in the several thousand DLC that will follow. Armoured vehicles, aircraft and orbital bombardments will change up the standard Total War experience.

A significant change will be that the game with launch on PlayStation 5 and XBox Series X/S as well as PC. It's assumed that the game will target a 2026 release date but that's not confirmed so far.

Creative Assembly confirmed last week that Total War: Medieval III is also in early development.

STAR WARS: FATE OF THE OLD REPUBLIC announced

A new Star Wars video game has been announced at the 2025 Game Awards.

Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic is an action-RPG successor to Knights of the Old Republic I and II, and is directed by Casey Hudson, who was the project director on the original Knights of the Old Republic (as well as the Mass Effect trilogy). His new studio Arcanaut is developing the game alongside Lucasfilm Games.

In an interview, Hudson confirms the game is very early in development and is not a direct sequel to the existing games, but is a successor in a similar time period.

No release date has been set so far.

Brandon Sanderson hits 50 million sales

Brandon Sanderson has confirmed that he has now sold over 50 million copies of his novels. We only had confirmation earlier this year that he'd reached 45 million, so this is an impressive achievement.

Brandon's beard grows more powerful with every dollar you give him.

Back in January 2024, I assembled the latest incarnation of my "SFF All-Time Sales List," which had sales figures of 40 million for Brandon (in 29th place). These were very healthy figures.

The updated figures for Sanderson would move him up to around 23rd place, just behind Diana Gabaldon, Casandra Clare, Robert Heinlein, Richard Adams and Terry Brooks. Very healthy and impressive company to be in. Unsurprising as in the meantime he's released his long-awaited fifth Stormlight Archive novel, Wind and Truth, short novel Isles of the Emberdark, and is now working on a return to his perennially popular Mistborn sequence. He's also just published a short story collection, Tailored Realities, and has confirmed a new surprise novel for next year, The Fires of December.

Given a widely-reported decline in industry sales for secondary world fantasy, apart from legacy authors like George R.R. Martin and deceased legends like Tolkien and Pratchett, Sanderson's achievement is highly impressive, and likely to explode further when adaptations of his work are made.

Creative Assembly announce TOTAL WAR: MEDIEVAL III, confirm another game announcement for next week

Creative Assembly have held a showcase to celebrate twenty-five years of their Total War video game franchise, as well as confirming that two new games are in development.

Alongside new updates and heroes and villains for Total War: Warhammer III, the headline news was the confirmation that Total War: Medieval III is in early development. Medieval: Total War was released in 2002 and Medieval II: Total War in 2006, so this marks the first new game in the sub-series for well over two decades by the time it is released.

Like the previous two games, Medieval III will start in the early medieval period and unfold across centuries, with players taking their kingdom to glory or ruin. The game will apparently focus more on the impact of changing the course of history, with historical events occurring early or later depending on your actions, such as the Reformation or the unification of Germany. This may mark a swing towards the alternate histories created by player actions in games like Crusader Kings III.

The game is "very early" in development, which by Creative Assembly standards might mean two years from release or four or five, so when the game will arrive is unclear. CA have suggested they want player ideas and feedback to be incorporated from much earlier on than is normal in the process, though whether this hints at some kind of eventual Early Access model is unclear.

The game is also being developed on WarCore, a total revamp and rebuild of the existing Warscape engine, which has powered all Total War games since 2009's Empire: Total War. WarCore will allow for the use of vehicles on the battlefield and Havok physics for dynamic building destruction.

Creative Assembly also confirmed an additional game is in development and this will be unveiled with a full trailer at the Game Awards on 11 December (so a week today), where people are also hoping to hear news about Half-Life 3 and other rumoured titles. This additional game is believed, based on leaks, to be either fantasy or science fiction in nature and will represent a radical shift from any game that CA has made previously. There is speculation, fuelled by alleged insider information, that this game will be based on the Warhammer 40,000 or Star Wars IPs, though a 40,000 game would have to compete with next year's Dawn of War IV. In a documentary a few years ago, CA confirmed they had considered strategy games set in the Middle-earth, Witcher and Game of Thrones universes, but those titles are not being seriously rumoured at this time.

Tor Books passes on completing JV Jones's SWORD OF SHADOWS series, author to pursue self-publishing

Tor Books have - in my view unwisely - decided not to publish the last two volumes of J.V. Jones's long-gestating Sword of Shadows series. Jones completed the penultimate novel, Endlords, early this year and has since been working on the final book, A Sword Named Loss.

The decision is not altogether surprising, as the first three books in the series - A Cavern of Black Ice (1999), A Fortress of Grey Ice (2002), A Sword from Red Ice (2007) and Watcher of the Dead (2010) - had been published a significant amount of time ago and the series had gone on hiatus whilst the author battled a large number of problems that had destroyed her writing time. Work on the series resumed several years ago, but at a slow pace as the author had a day job. Once she was able to work on the book full-time, Endlords was concluded relatively quickly.

However, Tor themselves have form for resuming series that had spent many years on hiatus, picking up George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series after almost a decade on ice in 2008, and publishing the concluding volume of David Keck's Tales of Durand sequence over a decade after the publication of the second volume.

In addition to the completed Endlords and in-progress A Sword Named Loss, Jones was also able to offer Tor the reprint rights to the completed, million-plus-selling, Robert Jordan-approved Book of Words trilogy, but it seems they were not interested.

Somewhat bafflingly, Tor also suggested that "the market for the style of fantasy" may have moved on, which I'm sure will be news to the likes of Joe Abercrombie, James Islington, Mark Lawrence, Robin Hobb, Steven Erikson (who just had a new fantasy novel published by Tor!) and George R.R. Martin.

Jones has not yet heard back from her British publishers, Orbit UK, but I would not be surprised if they took a similar tack to Tor.

Jones has commenced the process of trying to regain the publishing rights to the existing books in the series, which would allow her to self-reprint the existing books and publish Endlords for the first time, probably much faster than if she'd had to wait for Tor to find a slot in their schedule for her. Hopefully this will be a smooth process.