Hey, in case anyone’s interested, the first entry in R. Scott Bakker’s singularly excellent epic pulp fantasy series, “The Darkness That Comes Before”, is on US store shelves.
It’s a highly recommended, gritty read – it’s like Steven Erikson, but with a much higher level of internal consistency and narrative voice. ;) It also has the strongest world-building I’ve seen in any fantasy novel outside of Tolkein.
Read it!
I broke down and ordered this a couple months ago from amazon.co.uk and LOVED it. As cliched as the line is becoming due to his inability to actually put pen to paper, it’s as good as Martin. Very creative and different in feel. I’m re-reading it right now, in fact.
The second one- Warrior-Prophet- comes out in November in Europe. I’ve already pre-ordered. Damn all publishers who let the US market lag 6-7 months behind.
Yes, the book is quite excellent. Also very remarkable for the fact that all the characters are highly realistic, i.e. foolish, brutal, petty, just plain evil, or otherwise thoroughly unlikeable. :)
I see on amazon.ca that book 2 will be released June 18th. I have no idea how accurate that date is (Bakker’s website doesn’t say), but it’s worth keeping an eye open:
Between Bakker and Erikson I am spending a pretty petty on importing them from across the pond. Been worth it everytime so far though.
Why don’t you just buy them from Canada? Amazon.ca will ship to you for pretty much the same price as Amazon.com, and the ship times will be almost exactly the same.
Man I hope the new Bakker comes out this month. I have both that and Midnight Tides on order form Amazon.Ca, and I can’t wait to get my hands on them both. Then I’ll have to figure out which one ot read first. If Martin’s new book would finally come out, i’d be in fantasy nirvana!
Just pre-ordered the second book from Amazon.ca. The first book was amazing–great battles, political intrigue and some truly memorable bad guys.
Okay! Okay! I ordered a copy of the book already!
(Thanks for clueing me in…)
I heard about both authors from a Canadian, so you can bet your ass I tried amazon.ca first thing but they wouldn’t ship to me. That was quite awhile ago, I tried various other canadian stores with zero luck. For some reason I have much better luck with stores in England…
If you can order from amazon.ca now that’s awesome.
You won’t be disappointed. Bakker show’s a ton of potential. Amazing first effort.
Oh, and Stephen R. Donaldson’s first entry in The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, “The Runes of the Earth”, is out in October. The first chapter of the prologue is available at http://stephenrdonaldson.com/ – he’s really tightened up his writing style, mostly thanks to his recent efforts in crime fiction. Looks to be excellent.
New Covenant books? Awesome. Rumors were swirling around for years that Donaldson would write more, but I never believed them.