Another perk to the independent bookstore community is that we not only have the option of reading advanced copies of unreleased books, we’re actually encouraged to. (One could even say it’s a rite of passage at The King’s English.) An entire box of rough edits and floppy, sloppy books was opened to me with the open-ended invitation to “have at them.”
Long story short, I managed to find two particular titles whose synopses sounded vaguely intriguing. Both were speculative fiction — and though I only delve into this genre on occasion, I’ve somehow been recruited as the “speculative fiction guy” at the store — and both titles promised to be morbid, bizarre, and, at the very least, odd. I figured I’d give them a try.
What I found, before even bending the covers, was that the titles had something else in common: They were both future releases under a new imprint called Discoveries, from the well-known “hobby gaming” publisher, Wizards of the Coast. You know: Magic and D&D and all that. Never having been a “gamer” myself — though several of my high school buddies could be seen in last-period senior year, huddled in the back of the classroom over stacks of cards or tossing unwieldy dice — I was unfamiliar with Wizards. I didn’t even realize that they’ve been publishing books under their own name, let alone this new imprint.
What interests me more about Discoveries than its parent is that they intend to stray a bit from their norm and focus more on speculative fiction than on straight sci-fi or fantasy. As many of my own novels could be said to tend toward the speculative, I suppose this was what piqued my immediate interest.
The books I nabbed from the store are (in order of reading) Richard Dansky’s Firefly Rain and J.M. McDermott’s Last Dragon. Both are due to be released in early 2008. Dansky has a comprehensive site (viewable through the above link), and McDermott’s blog (also linked) is hugely entertaining — particularly his soliloquy about drinking young wine. As far as their work is concerned, I intend to finish reading Firefly Rain within the next week or so (I’m already half finished), and the latter will soon follow. I’ve been instructed to write reviews on these titles for the bookstore. I may be moved to duplicate them here.
Though Wizards of the Coast’s new imprint doesn’t boast the presentation quality the debut novelist should hope for, it must be said that they’ve steered themselves in a direction that, I believe, is steadily becoming popular in today’s fiction market. If they can continue to feather in new writers (which is where their focus lies, praise the gods!) and keep their focus on speculative fiction, Discoveries may prove to become a ripe new addition to the publishing world. Oh — and did I mention that they accept unagented material? Though submissions are open all year round for those with agents, we’re free to submit on our own between the months of September and February.
I’d say it’s worth a look!
