Gary Gibson author of the superb Dakota Merrick series to be concluded next year in "Empire of Light" was offered a three book deal by Tor.uk. From his announcement of this great news:

"I just got an offer for Tor for three new books, starting with Final Days, which I've blogged about in the past. The other two books are a sequel to Final Days, called The Thousand Emperors, and Core (very much a working title), a standalone story set in the same world as Stealing Light and its sequels."

One of Liviu's top six sf authors of the 00's - and that was before I was aware of new deal - this announcement confirms that Gary Gibson is a superstar in the making! One more reason to soon write the long announced dual review of Mr. Gibson early novels: Angel Stations and Against Gravity. Until then, read Robert's FBC review of Stealing Light and Liviu's FBC review of both Stealing Light and Nova War. We also have a dual interview with Gary Gibson - mostly done by Mark Chitty from Walker of Worlds with some questions from Liviu.

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In another deal, newer but also favorite author Jaine Fenn got an offer for two more books set in her Hidden Empire series in which already two books are out and one is due next Spring. They will be penned as JN Fenn since it seems initials are all the rage today. Here is the announcement from Ms. Fenn's website:

"finding out that Gollancz want to buy the next two Hidden Empire books, thus collapsing the waveform in a most gratifying way. There's a full press release on my agent's blog. In short, the fourth book will be entitled Bringer of Light and is due out in 2011, and the fifth will be Queen of Nowhere, due out in 2012. Like the first three, they will be self-contained stories that add to the overall picture, and will feature some of the characters introduced in the earlier novels. "

For now read Liviu's FBC Review of Ms. Fenn's Hidden Empire debut Principle of Angels and of the second installment that takes place in parallel with the first, Consorts of Heaven (FBC Review HERE). Book 3 Guardians of Paradise is another asap book and will be reviewed here when published.

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In a possibly first Gary Gibson is also running a publishing experiment for a friend of his Fergus Bannon. The book in question is called "Judgement" and is available for a very modest fee as a DRM-free multi-format ebook from Smashwords, the first half of the book excerpted for free and Mr. Gibson and Bannon are offering free copies under some conditions too. More HERE:

The blurb: 'It started with a few isolated incidents. A mob shootout in Las Vegas, a firefight in the Central American jungles - one apparently unconnected event after the other, hinting at a worldwide conspiracy of unprecedented proportions. But before long CIA computer specialist Bob Leith realises it's something much more than mere globalised terrorism, something literally not of this world ...'

The reasons for the experiment in Mr. Gibson's words:

Several days ago, I wrote about an excellent unpublished novel by a writer I've known for nearly twenty years. Fergus Bannon finished his book just in time for real life to scupper any serious attempts at placing it with either an agent or a publisher. As a result it wound up forgotten in a drawer for a long, long time until I asked to see it. I liked it so much I was determined that it shouldn't simply vanish. And since Fergus has zero time or opportunity to do anything about it, I volunteered to try and get it out there in some way.

Edit later: in the comments below Mr. Gibson indicated that now the novel is available online also on its dedicated site HERE which contains more material from Mr. Bannon.

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In a review related news, our friend Jeff from Fantasy Book News and Reviews is continuing his excellent index of fantasy novel reviews from around the blogosphere. A great resource that is quite time-wise costly in keeping updated, I strongly recommend it for a good overview of the main fantasy blogosphere review activity. Here at FBC we keep our own index of reviews but our focus is much more eclectic so for many well known fantasy novels that are not reviewed here, one place to find a bunch of reviews is to visit Jeff' site.