io9.com holds our upcoming anthology, Son of Retro Pulp Tales, in mighty high esteem: “With four or five the stories being quite excellent and great fun to be had all the way through, Son of Retro Pulp Tales is way ahead of the curve and a mighty satisfying read… In every one of these stories you sense the pure glee the writers had in shaping these cheap thrills from their own fond memories. This has the sense of wonder, adventure, and just plain fun that should never go out of style.”

Shipping is nearly caught up, which is very good news, as we have another batch of new books arriving in the next week.

Our shippers have just finished sending out all individual, retail, and wholesale orders for Hazards (Mike Resnick), as well as The Women of Nell Gwynne’s (Kage Baker); and This is Me, Jack Vance! (Jack Vance). In addition, we received orders for another 150 copies of Songs of the Dying Earth. One more such order, which is likely to arrive in the next week, will put the Vance tribute anthology out of print.

Next up, our shippers will be packing hundreds of orders for Ray Bradbury’s short but spectacular chapbook, The Shop of the Mechanical Insects, which features design and art by Dave McKean throughout. All individual orders — we’re not making copies available to our wholesale or large retail accounts — should be packed up and en route to customers by the beginning of next week.

If you’re a high traffic blogger or review site, feel free to drop us a note and request an Advance Reading Copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles: the Complete Edition. This one came in at nearly 750 oversized pages. We’re putting it through a second round of proofing right now, with the screenplay material slated to be looked at a third time. The book itself should go to press in September, with an eye toward shipping in December.

(The usual disclaimers on ARCs apply. We expect far more requests than we have spare ARCs, so only those who will be sent copies will receive an email.)

We’ve just added two new Lucius Shepard titles to our online store. First up is The Taborin Scale, another of Lucius’ forays into the world of the dormant Dragon Griaule, a series begun decades ago with “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” and continued through stories such as “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter”, “The Father of Stones”, and, most recently, “Liar’s House”. Those who read The Taborin Scale will come to realize that it is likely the most important, revelatory, and thrilling novella in this series since the first tale. (We’re also pleased to announce that Lucius is working on a short 40-50k words dragon novel for us.)

Our second Shepard announcement is a large new collection from PS Publishing. Viator Plus contains not only the title novel — 20,000 words longer than the US edition published a number of years ago — but a raft of uncollected short stories, including a number that appear here for the first time under Shepard’s name. Just like Dagger Key and Trujillo, it’s a hefty gathering of tales not to be missed.

This week’s story at Subterranean Online is “Snow Dragons”, a sharp but short fantasy tale by SubPress favorite Elizabeth Bear. It’ll only take a few minutes to read, so why not head over and take a look.

While we have you, don’t forget that we still have copies of eBear’s most recent novella, Seven for a Secret, in stock, in both limited and trade hardcover editions. The limited comes with an 11,000 word bonus tale, “The Tricks of London.”

The following titles are all at the printer, and due to start shipping in the next 2-3 weeks.

– Purple and Black (K. J. Parker);
– Crystal Nights and Other Stories (Greg Egan);
– The Onion Girl (Charles de Lint);
– The Evil in Pemberley House (Philip Jose Farmer and Win Scott Eckert);
– The Ebb Tide (James P. Blaylock);
– Metatropolis (edited by John Scalzi).

Our shippers have been working double time of late, and will have shipped all customer orders for the following titles within the next few days.

– The Women of Nell Gwynne’s (Kage Baker). Note: We’ve received a huge number of orders recently, and are down to fewer than 250 copies remaining.
– This is Me, Jack Vance! (Jack Vance);
– Hazards (Mike Resnick);
– Songs of the Dying Earth trade hardcover (ed. Martin and Dozois). Note: We have fewer than 250 trade copies left, and expect these to disappear in the next batch of retailer/wholesale orders.

In addition, we now have the following in our warehouse and will be shipping copies later this week:

– The Shop of the Mechanical Insects (Ray Bradbury). Note: We will not be making copies of this title available to large online retailers or our wholesale accounts.

The Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer Jones is back for his first book length foray in nearly two decades in Mike Resnick’s Hazards. As Publishers Weekly noted, “The likable scoundrel’s mix of lust, chicanery and naïveté moves the action along nicely, and though Resnick pokes fun at pulp adventure tales and the arrogance of early 20th-century imperialism, he never lets mockery interfere with good storytelling…Jones’s engaging narrative voice will endear it to fans of lighthearted adventure stories.”

Signed HC:

$35

We’re down to our last four signed sets of The Day It Rained Forever and A Medicine for Melancholy by Ray Bradbury. As you may recall, the retail price on these is $375, but we’re able to offer them to our customers at $200 per set, including US Shipping.

If you’re interested in snagging these nifty PS Publishing hardcovers, please drop me an email (subpress@gmail.com) for ordering instructions.

Here at last, the trade edition of stories honoring Jack Vance and his singular creation, the Dying Earth. The limited and lettered editions are already sold out, and as I type this, we’re down to the last 250 copies of the trade edition, with several large wholesale and retail orders still expected. As Library Journal noted in its starred review, “From Dan Simmons’s new novella about a wild search for the Ultimate Library (’The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderoz’) to Walter Jon Williams’s tale of an architectural student caught up in a war between two great powers (’A brizonde’), the 23 stories not only capture the unique feel of Vance’s dying universe but stand individually as one of the strongest gatherings of writers to pay homage to one of their own.”

Trade:

$40