We’re proud to announce The Best of Michael Swanwick, a 460+ page gathering of the finest stories by one of sf and fantasy’s foremost practitioners of the short form.

In these pages, Janis Joplin is worshiped as a god, teenagers climb down the edge of the world, zombies are commodified, a vengeful man tracks a wizard across the surface of a planet-sized grasshopper, dinosaurs invade Vermont, a train leaves New York City bound for Hell, and those lovable Post-Utopian con men, Darger and Surplus, seek their fortunes in Buckingham Labyrinth.

Please check out the book’s page for full details, including the table of contents.

The lettered edition of Ray Bradbury’s classic collection, I Sing the Body Electric! is now in stock and shipping, with a very few of the 26 copies left unreserved. The Lettered Edition contains a section of exclusive material not in the long sold out Limited Edition.

Also being packed up early this week and shipped are two of John Scalzi’s OMW-Universe novels, Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades. As we plan to produce limiteds of all of John’s OMW novels, if we can secure the rights, now’s your last chance to get in on the ground floor.

Alan Campbell’s dark fantasy novella, Lye Street, is flying out the door. On publication, we’ve sold more than 1700 of the 2000 copy print run, with interest sure to go up as his next major Deepgate Codex novel, Iron Angel, is due in April.

We can’t overstate just how well this book turned out, from Alan’s tight storytelling, to Dave McKean’s striking cover, to the myriad text ornaments and spot illustrations Bob Eggleton contributed. Lye Street is a perfect starting point to enter Alan’s dark fantasy world — familiarity with his novels isn’t necessary. At only $25, its one novella that’s a real bargain.

Update: We’re down to fewer than 50 copies of the 2000 copy signed edition.

There’s been a cover change for Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon. After Dominic Harman turned in the original and very well done cover, we all talked things over, and it seemed a little too intense and fierce, without conveying the Napoleonic setting. So we went back to the drawing board, and came up with the idea to use a variant of the original UK cover for the limited edition. This addresses all of the issues of the fierce cover, while still giving collectors something unique. We’ll continue on the series with the UK covers, or variant versions of them. As Naomi’s fans know, the UK covers changed direction with book 4. Our series won’t. We’ll commission Dominic to do new covers in the original style, to maintain a uniform look.

With the irregularity of small press publications, sometimes we run across a review long after the book in questions has been released. Such is the case with David J. Schow’s last collection, Havoc Swims Jaded, which Scott Connors just gave a most generous review to in Weird Tales: “Schow’s most recent collection, Havoc Swims Jaded, sports a title whose significance is apparently deliberately obscure and selected mostly (if not entirely) for its disquieting qualities… Schow continues to prove himself one of the genre’s finest stylists, selecting precisely the right word for the situation described so that its emotional impact on the reader is maximized. In fact each of the stories in this, Schow’s seventh, collection manage to subvert the reader’s expectations in a manner that ratchets up the impact of the denouement by at least an order of magnitude.”

Bob Eggleton has just turned in the cover to Worlds of Weber, the massive short story collection by military sf master David Weber. Included in the book is a 50,000 word Honor Harrington novel, as well as a ton of other great tales packed into over 600 pages.

Publishers Weekly has just weighed in with its review of Tim Powers’s classic novel of piracy and the supernatural, and it’s a star: “World Fantasy Award–winner Powers (Three Days to Never) demonstrates a precise control of complex narratives in this reprint of his rollicking and enchanting 1987 novel… This dark fantasy tale will appeal not just to pirate fans but also to anyone who appreciates Powers’s talent for blending the most unlikely elements into a brilliantly cohesive whole.”

Don’t forget, the limited edition is not only signed by Powers and Cover artist James Gurney, it contains a completely different cover design than the ultra-affordable trade hardcover ($18.95), as well as an extra sketch section featuring work by both the author and artist. The Lettered Edition contains everything in the Limited, plus one extra illustration by Powers.

Our Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg continues to draw acclaim, this time for the third volume, Something Wild is Loose. According to Booklist: “Silverberg wrote several novels and fewer short stories in the period this volume covers, during which losing his house in a 1968 fire and responding to the social and political turmoil of the 1960s affected his writing. Nevertheless, he produced such widely recognized classics as ‘The Feast of St. Dionysus,’ ‘Good News from the Vatican,’ ‘Caught in the Organ Draft,’ ‘Thomas the Proclaimer,’ and ‘Going.’”

At last, more than fifty years after the classic movie’s release, Ray Bradbury has allowed the original screenplay for his treatment of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to be published. Our edition, the only one in print, will feature an all original dust jacket by Jon Foster.

This is not the shooting script, which saw input from director John Huston, among others, but the version as Bradbury originally envisioned it, the pure tale before studio influence.

Subterranean Press is proud to present Moby Dick: the Screenplay in two unique editions to be released later this year:

Trade: fully cloth bound hardcover: $35

Lettered: 26 signed copies — the only version autographed by Mr. B — with an exclusive publication of his working notes toward the screenplay: $400

The last of the unpublished Robert A. Heinlein is getting ever so closer to publication. Bob Eggleton recently sent us the sketch for what will be a crowd pleasing wraparound dust jacket, and we’ve just received the fully designed version of volume one of the scripts, Project Moonbase and Others, completely re-typeset from the original manuscripts, and weighing in at a healthy 544 pages. Introducer John Scalzi is due to have his piece in to us in the next few weeks, so we’re right on schedule for a late Summer release. I must add what a great job our designers, Gail and Jen, have done with this book, making it look at once classy yet not fully polished, as the scripts reflect just one essential step on the way to filmed episodes.