Games

A host of cover art for forthcoming books. First up is The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson. This 30,000-word novella is a limited edition from Tachyon Press and sees a young woman use her forbidden magical skills to save the life of a dying emperor. The book appears to be set in Sanderson's unified Cosmere super-setting, but not on one of his established worlds. The book is due in December. Next up is the American cover art for The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks, his ninth novel in The Culture setting. This book is due in October. The American audience is also getting new covers for the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski. The Last Wish and Blood of Elves are being rejacketed and should be available soon, and will later in 2012 be by The Time of Contempt , which is finally hitting the stands after years of delays due to rights issues. Finally, there's the American cover art for Joe Abercrombie's Red Country (dropping the 'A', at least on this early...

Going through some old interviews, I was surprised to read that Brandon Sanderson is planning a 36-volume fantasy series. The good news is that, if you've read all of his adult solo fantasy novels to date, you're already six books into it. And 'series' is probably the wrong word, a more accurate term would be 'setting'. It's been an open secret for a while that Sanderson's fantasy novels share a common background setting and mythology, the 'Cosmere'. In his first five novels - Elantris , Warbreaker and the Mistborn trilogy - this took the form of a couple of easter eggs. Most notably, a character called Hoid plays a minor, background role in all five books, apparently observing events with interest. In The Way of Kings this background suddenly became more important to the plot: Hoid (aka 'Wit') now has a brief POV section and plays a larger role in events. We also meet three other people who can travel between the worlds, two of whom we...