Additional Richard Morgan update

Richard Morgan has issued a further update on the status of the sequel to The Steel Remains, clarifying an earlier update. After a period working on his computer game projects (such as Crysis 2), Morgan is now working on the book once more and has agreed to try to deliver the book this Autumn for publication in April 2011. Morgan feels this goal is achievable.


Interestingly, it now also sounds like that the book will be reverting to its working title of The Cold Commands.

If Morgan achieves his goal, it sounds like Gollancz could be releasing four of its biggest fantasy titles of 2011 within just a couple of months of one another. Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes, Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear and Scott Lynch's The Republic of Thieves are all pencilled in around the same time. Impressive if they they manage it.

Richard Morgan update

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.