Upcoming: “The Crimson Campaign” by Brian McClellan (Orbit)

Despite the first book in Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage trilogy still a few weeks away (I’ll get a review up ASAP), Orbit have unveiled the artwork for its sequel, THE CRIMSON CAMPAIGN:

I really like this, too. McClellan’s debut series may end up having some of the nicest covers in a long while. Or, since Joe Abercrombie’s and Mark Lawrence’s… The Photo-Illustration is by Michael Frost and Gene Mollica, and the design is by the ever-excellent and super-talented Lauren Panepinto.

No synopsis for the novel is available just yet, but The Crimson Campaign will be published by Orbit in February 2014.

Also on CR: Guest Posts by Brian McClellan “My Favorite Novel” & “Protagonist Ages in Epic Fantasy”

Upcoming: “Wolfhound Century” by Peter Higgins (Orbit/Gollancz)

In the first of this week’s Upcoming news posts, I give you Peter Higgins’s Wolfhound Century. It appears to be a Russian-set Urban Fantasy, which will be a nice alternative to London- and/or US-based UFs. It’s another title I heard about a while ago (when the artwork was first revealed earlier in the year), and I think it sounds really interesting:

Inspector Vissarion Lom has been summoned to the capital in order to catch a terrorist — and ordered to report directly to the head of the secret police. A totalitarian state, worn down by an endless war, must be seen to crush home-grown terrorism with an iron fist. But Lom discovers Mirgorod to be more corrupted than he imagined: a murky world of secret police and revolutionaries, cabaret clubs and doomed artists. Lom has been chosen because he is an outsider, not involved in the struggle for power within the party. And because of the sliver of angel stone implanted in his head.

On Orbit’s blog, back in March, their article about the book was entitled “Golems, Gulags, and Sentient Rain”… How can that not grab your attention?

Lauren Panepinto designed the excellent cover art.

Wolfhound Century will be published by Orbit US in March 2013.

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Update: Just noticed that Wolfhound Century will be published in the UK by Gollancz, also in March 2013.

Artwork: THE BLINDING KNIFE by Brent Weeks (Orbit)

It’s done the rounds around the biblio-net, but I really wanted to share the cover for Brent Weeks’s next novel, The Blinding Knife, on here as well. I love Weeks’s novels – his Night Angel trilogy was one of the first fantasy trilogies I reviewed on the blog, it’s prequel novella was superb, and The Black Prism (book one in this latest series) I thought was also superb, with a pretty great, original magic system to boot.

Isn’t it awesome? Certainly eye-catching, and I like the colours in the sky, and the fact that it has a semi-Roman aesthetic. I don’t really know why. It’s probably the columns. I like columns. (*Cough* Uh, paging Dr. Freud…). Massive kudos to Lauren Panepinto & the Orbit art team who worked on this.

The Blinding Knife will be published by Orbit in September 2012.

The synopsis is below. [after the break. Warning: Contains a major spoiler for The Black Prism]: