Winter's Coming!

The title of this post is meant both figuratively and literally. We're heading towards autumn as I type this, and winter will follow. I don't like winter, even if I know I'd miss it, were I to move to a tropical climate. But this time, I have a reason to look forward to winter's arrival. Nightshade have finally announced the new Dread Empire book, A Path to Coldness of Heart, scheduled for January!

If you click on the link and read the blurb, it states that the conclusion to the Dread Empire series has arrived. It doesn't explicitly say that A Path to Coldness of Heart is the final book. I wonder there will be one more, to tie it all up, much like the "conclusion" to The Wheel of Time is actually three books. Regardless, more kudos to Raymond Swanland for another eye-catching cover.

Note that Amazon list An Ill Fate Marshalling for January 10. Nightshade books tend to appear several weeks ahead of their listed publication date. So I expect Reap the East Wind by mid-September, and An Ill Fate Marshalling by mid-December. A Path to Coldness of Heart then might follow by the end of January. All of this, of course, is just my best guess. At any rate, the wait for new Dread Empire material is almost over...

Glen Cook Update Time!

I again have bits and pieces of Glen Cook news that I haven't seen reported elsewhere. We begin with the picture attached to this post, by the great Raymond Swanland. He's been Cook's primary cover illustrator for the past five years, providing awesome pieces for the Instrumentalities of the Night series, and for the Black Company and Dread Empire reprints. The work seen here I found on his site, under the title "Surrender to the Will of the Night," and so it is presumably the cover art for the third Instrumentalities volume, which is due on November 23. Amazon now has the jacket blurb for that book available, it reads as follows:

Piper Hecht’s first and greatest secret is that he knows how to kill gods. What’s not a secret is that he knows how to win wars

Piper Hecht’s secrets make him dangerous, but his skill and his reputation put him in danger—from his enemies, who fear what he might do, or who want revenge for what he has already done; and from his friends, who want to use his military gifts for their own purposes. His sister Heris and his living ancestor Cloven Februaren, the Ninth Unknown, have made Hecht part of their fight against the return of the dark god Kharoulke the Windwalker. At the same time, the half-mad Empress Katrin wants him to lead the armies of the Grail Empire eastward on a crusade against his old coreligionists the Praman.

Meanwhile, all around them, the world is changing. The winters are growing longer and harder every year, and the seas are getting shallower. The far north and the high mountain ranges are going under the ice, and fast. The Wells of Power, everywhere, keep getting weaker. And the old evils, the Instrumentalities from the Time Before Time, have begun to ooze back into the world. As ever, the genius of Glen Cook’s storytelling lies in his common touch: in soldiers who are like real soldiers, in men and women who love and laugh and sweat, with real hopes and real fears, united only in their determination to face the oncoming night.


Meanwhile, speaking (or writing) of the Dread Empire, I saw at a chain bookstore today the recent Third Printing of the paperback of A Cruel Wind, the first Dread Empire omnibus. It was good to see that book reach a third printing, but more exciting was that Nightshade Books had edited the listing of Cook's works, found in the front. Previously, the forthcoming final Dread Empire omnibus, The Wrath of Kings, was shown to include The Wrath of Kings as the third volume (following Reap the East Wind and An Ill Fate Marshalling). This is the book that Cook is rewriting, to replace the manuscript stolen over two decades ago. It is now shown to have the title A Path to Coldness of Heart, which was Cook's working title for it back in the day (it comes from the final six words of An Ill Fate Marshalling). I think this is a good decision, to have different titles for the omnibus itself and for the new final volume.

Finally, as I discussed below, the latest Garrett book, Gilded Latten Bones, is also scheduled for release in November of this year. Perhaps this influenced Roc to finally reprint Angry Lead Skies, the tenth Garrett volume. Get it while you can, if you need it, as some of the recent reprints are again out of print. A couple of the older titles have still not seen recent reprints, and I wonder if Roc has any intention of making the entire series available when the latest one comes out in a few months. I certainly hope so, since, while I have them all, many other fans of the series still need to complete their collections. Regardless of how this shakes out, Glen Cook fans still have plenty to look forward to in the months ahead!

Glen Cook and the Dread Empire

I intend to give fantasy and science fiction author Glen Cook considerable attention on this blog. I’m a longstanding fan of his, and I’ve watched his popularity grow and decline. Currently, he’s on a new high, with the first omnibus of his Black Company books going through five printings in under year, and his latest Garrett, P.I. novel Cruel Zinc Melodies on its third printing just six months after release.

I’ll write about Garrett, and perhaps about the Black Company, on another occasion. Today I’m thinking about his earlier Dread Empire series. With a little online research, checking various websites, it can be found that the first Dread Empire novel, A Shadow of All Night Falling, was in existence as a manuscript as early as 1972. The original Dread Empire trilogy consists of it, followed by October’s Baby and All Darkness Met. The three books were published a few months apart during 1979 and 1980.

Later, during 1984 and 1985 (at the same time the original three Black Company books were released) Cook issued two prequels, The Fire in His Hands and With Mercy Toward None. While the original trilogy was published by Berkley, the first prequel came out via Pocket Books, and the second via Baen. Perhaps in an attempt to capitalize, Berkley reissued the original trilogy in 1984. Finally, in 1987 and 1988, Tor released two sequels to the original trilogy, Reap the East Wind and An Ill Fate Marshalling. There was to be a third sequel, but the manuscript was stolen from Cook’s home by a visiting “fan.” Cook has indicated that each book was accepted for publication by same editor, as he moved from company to company, but that the series never found the mass audience of some of his other series.

I discovered the Dread Empire series in early 1988, when I saw the sequels in stores. I noticed them immediately because the covers were painted by Ken Kelly, one of my favorite cover artists. Both books were labeled “the new Dread Empire novel,” which I found puzzling, since I could recall no previous Dread Empire novels. In looking through the books, they seemed fascinating, as they portrayed realistic characters who seemed far removed from the stereotype of “a farm boy discovers he has secret royal blood, and leads an overthrow of the evil lord with the help of an unlikely group of companions.” The military aspects of the Dread Empire sequels rang true to me, and the characters seemed particularly haunted by the memory of a battle fought in an earlier book at Palmisano. I bought the sequels and became eager to seek out the original trilogy and catch up on the back story.

Even in 1988 the first three Dread Empire books were difficult to find. I was in Albany, New York that summer, having just graduated from high school and preparing to head west to Colorado to begin college. A thorough scouring of the used bookstores in Albany and Fort Collins finally turned up all three original volumes, and I then realized that I had seen October’s Baby in the stores, without paying it any special attention.

I then quickly read through the five Dread Empire books in my collection, following Bragi Ragnarson from mercenary captain, to general, and finally to a kingship, as he fought many battles and usually had luck on his side. I enjoyed them immensely. Indeed, they were a powerful influence on the fantasy stories in my head, as I realized that flowery pseudo-old fashioned language was unnecessary, and real-world motivations for the characters was acceptable. They didn’t need to aspire to saving the world, wanting to survive the next battle was good enough. I’m not the only one to feel this way about the books, Jeff VanderMeer and Steven Erikson have written recent essays (for the Dread Empire omnibus series) in which they confess to very similar feelings of awe. They and other writers also took such inspiration from other Cook projects, such as the Black Company, and as I write this in late 2008, it has become common to find “gritty, realistic” military fantasy. However, 20 years ago and beyond, it was a revelation to read stories told in this way, and I’m glad Cook is getting his due for his early work.

By 2005, Cook had many popular books in print, but none of the Dread Empire novels had been available for many years. Nightshade Books decided to get most of Cook’s back catalog back into print, and announced their intention to collect all of the Dread Empire material into four omnibuses. The first, for 2006, would be A Cruel Wind, which would include the original trilogy. This was to be followed in 2007 by A Fortress in Shadow, which would have the two prequels. Both volumes were published as scheduled, originally in hardcover, and with a trade paperback following the next year.

For 2008 was supposed to be The Wrath of Kings (the two sequels), and then the set would conclude in 2009 with An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat (with the several short stories that Cook wrote in the Dread Empire universe). But something changed in early 2008. Suddenly, The Wrath of Kings was on hold, and the short story collection became the next volume. The schedule was pushed back by six months or so, and now An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat is due in the last weeks of 2008 (and will probably become available from stores in early 2009). This got me and others wondering at the reason for the postponement and rearranging of The Wrath of Kings. Someone asked on the Nightshade Books message board whether the lost third sequel manuscript had been recovered, and he was never given a meaningful reply. I raised the same question myself on a Glen Cook fan email discussion list, and got no answer from any of the people there who are in contact with Cook. This lack of denial anywhere suggests that the third sequel will indeed be part of The Wrath of Kings, but that the announcement is being kept under wraps. Teasingly, the trade paperback of A Fortress in Shadow, which was released during September of 2008, seems to list three books as part of the The Wrath of Kings omnibus, as under the omnibus title heading it mentions, “Containing Reap the East Wind, An Ill Fate Marshalling, and Wrath of Kings.” Hmmm…

I bought the trade paperbacks of A Cruel Wind and A Fortress in Shadow a few weeks ago, and have already read the former. I again found those stories enthralling, even as I can see that they are an earlier stage in Cook’s development. I think each Dread Empire book in the original trilogy and the sequels is better than the last. I desperately hope that the lost manuscript of the third sequel has been recovered, because An Ill Fate Marshalling ended on a sort of cliffhanger, and I want resolution for the story!

I actually never read The Fire in His Hands and With Mercy Toward None. It’s often the case with series that I like, that I’ll leave a book or two unread for a long while, so I know that in the future I’ll have something I can expect to enjoy. I expect to read the A Fortress in Shadow omnibus of these two books in the near future.

If you like Erikson’s Malazan Empire novels, or Robert E. Howard’s tales of medieval warfare (see Lord of Samarcand, for example), or Cook’s Black Company and Instrumentalities of the Night series, then don’t hesitate to give the Dread Empire books a try. They may be marginally less polished than what he wrote later, but they are darned good none the less, and they give the reader hundreds of pages of time in that unique atmosphere that Cook always creates through his writing.

Thought of the day: I recall the immortal words of Nuke LaLoosh, who pointed out years ago, “I like winning…you know, it’s like…better than losing…” Congrats to Colorado State Volleyball on their win today, and best wishes for success on Saturday against Florida!