The Revolution Business, by Charles Stross

The Revolution Business
Charles Stross
Tor: 2009


The Revolution Business is the penultimate volume in The Merchant Princes, from author Charles Stross. This is a series which features multiple / parallel worlds and a family, a Clan, which has the genetic ability to walk between the worlds. One of the worlds is our own, circa 2001 / 2002. The others exist in our same timeframe, but with varying degrees of political, economic, and technological development. The true focus of the series is on Miriam Beckstein, a woman raised in our world but a scion of Gruinmarkt – the fulcrum of so much of the activity and societal change in the offering. Miriam is the grounding character of the series as she was set up from the first volume as the main protagonist, but Stross does tell the story of The Revolution Business from multiple viewpoints to give a wider perspective of what all is happening. The New Britain storyline does get short shrift, though, and there is a bit of a mess in figuring out what those events are and how they tie to the larger story of the novel and series.

The primary thread running through The Revolution Business is the impending war between Gruinmarkt and the United States. The United States government has known for two volumes that the world walkers from the Clan were responsible for a large portion of the drug trade and seeks to shut down said drug trade. That was before six nuclear devices disappeared from secure bunkers, with one bomb only recovered by mistake. In the eyes of the United States government, the Clan had gone from “nuisance” to “threat”. Threats will be dealt with. Threats with weapons of mass destruction, with nuclear devices stolen from the United States, will be dealt with harshly.

The cover of The Revolution Business prominently features a mushroom cloud over a castle. Unless Tor’s art department is guilty of false advertising, there is an expectation raised before the reader turns to the first page that one of those nuclear devices will be detonated. Whether it is one faction of the Clan against another, or the United States fighting back against the Clan, is not clear from the artwork – though I will say that within a few chapters it is clear which of the above two directions Stross chooses.

This cover creates a level of expectation and tension in the reader. Since this series takes place at least partly in our world, there is no getting around the fact that nuclear weapons have only been used twice in history as a weapon. Twice, and never again since the dawn of atomic weaponry. That there is a mushroom cloud is on the cover of this novel is significant and horrifying. As is the fact that the cover also shows modern buildings off to the side of the castle, suggesting that the threat is not simply against Gruinmarkt, but also against the United States. This tension pervades the entire novel and is one of the stronger aspects of The Revolution Business.

One of the weaker aspects of The Revolution Business is that the novel consists of a slow build towards one event, but despite some political maneuvering in Gruinmarkt on the side of Miriam and her supporters, not a whole lot actually happens in The Revolution Business. Not until the bomb, and after that, not until the end. The Revolution Business has a feel of Stross setting things up for the conclusion to this series, The Trade of Queens. It is difficult to say that a novel which features the detonation of a nuclear device and yet another cliff-hanger ending has a feeling of stagnation to it – not when Miriam’s status in Gruinmarkt changes with every volume, but The Revolution Business has a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

This is odd, because looking back at the novel I can identify more than a handful of moments that are significant in shaping the novel and what may come next. Identifying the moments would serve to spoil major development points, but there are serious developments in The Revolution Business. So why does the novel feel so flat?

My guess is that the more that Stross strips away the wonder of the world-walking and brings science into the bones of the novel, the more distant the story becomes. Decoding the knots is one thing, but the POV of the US operatives is rife with the ALL CAPS codewords of various operations and political figures. This is a staple of how Stross handles the Laundry novels, and in that context it works, but even there it is distracting. In The Revolution Business it is just out of place. It marks a change in the narrative focus of this series and this is not a positive. Yes, The Merchant Princes has never been a flat out fantasy series. It initially felt like a dual-world fantasy, but despite the low tech of Gruinmarkt, it was never exactly that. As the series progressed it has become increasingly clear that there is a science fictional basis to it. In itself this is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Merely a thing. How Stross handles the SF elements of this series would be the mark of how good the series can be. They are only tools an author can use, after all.

So, decoding the knots (the focus of the world walking) and having technology figure prominently in the series is not a problem. Up until this point I have appreciated Stross’s handling of it. Until this point.

Here is where we get into a matter of taste. Stross’s science fiction is not to my taste. I find it cold and somewhat impenetrable, and thus dull. Stross’s science fiction is lauded by his peers and by readers. I can’t argue with this. He is recognized as one of the top writers of science fiction working today. However, his science fiction is a turn-off. There is still enough character and interest with the multiverse and inter-world warfare to keep me going, and I appreciate that the turn has taken this long to take effect, but the feeling that Stross is more an ideas man and less a character / story writer is strong right now and I fear that is the direction the series is taking. That’s fine for those who like it, but The Revolution Business did not work the way some of the previous novels.

On the other hand I have a theory about The Merchant Princes, and it is a reverse Bret Saberhagen theory. The odd volumes (1, 3, 5) have been somewhat disappointing. The even volumes (2, 4) have satisfied. The Revolution Business has held this pattern and I can only hope that volume 6 will continue the trend and conclude the series in a most satisfying manner. No matter what that is.

To shift gears…

This may be an odd statement to make about a series which is so obviously steeped in the politics of the alternate world of Gruinmarkt, but The Revolution Business takes a semi-unexpected step into the politics of the United States and has damning things to say about the George W. Bush administration. This would be almost out of place, except that Stross ties the activity of the Clan over the years into the politics of the United States and shows that the Clan has political savvy in workings to strengthen their position, even while keeping the US Government ignorant of their true identities. In doing so, Stross particularly damns the historical actions Vice President Cheney as well as showing how Cheney might respond to a threat like the world-walking Clan.

There is more focus in this novel about the power of VPOTUS, codenamed WARBUCKS, compared to that of the actual President. There is a throwaway line that the President is much savvier in private than he comes across in public, but the focus here is on the Vice President as the dangerous man.

It isn’t that this is all entirely out of place, because it does fit in with the changing nature of the series, but the bluntness of the conversations about the authorizations given by the Vice President and the power he wields does stick out a bit. It is noticed as more than just a story point. On the other hand, if the events of The Merchant Princes were factual, I could believe that this is how the Bush Administration would react. A political argument could be made about whether the Administration should (or should not), but that would be a discussion for another place and time. I wonder if one’s reading of The Revolution Business will be shaded by where one stands on the political spectrum. Very likely.

My final thought about The Revolution Business is that I wish there was a “The Story So Far…” pre-chapter at the start of this volume, because I had a difficult time remembering all that came before in The Merchant’s War (though I do remember the shape of the series). I don’t think that would have influenced by enjoyment of the novel, but it would have helped my comprehension. That’s just me.

In the end The Revolution Business is unsatisfying. It sets up the conclusion, but does not stand well on its own either as part of the series OR as a novel in its own right. It is part of a series which is still worth recommending (despite half of the novels being disappointing), but as an individual volume there is no need to rush out and read this one. On the other hand, longtime fans of Charles Stross may find much to appreciate here as he steps away from any hint that this might have been a fantasy series.


Previous Reviews
The Family Trade
The Hidden Family
The Clan Corporate
The Merchant's War

"Down on the Farm", by Charles Stross

I finally got around to reading “Down on the Farm” from Charles Stross. The story was published on Tor.com as one of the first two rollout stories for the new website / community that is being built there.

“Down on the Farm” is a Bob Howard / Laundry story (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, “Pimpf”, “The Concrete Jungle”) and follows Howard from his office at the Laundry down to a mental institution. The Laundry is the Bristish version of MI-6 focused on the supernatural, complete with absurd bureaucracy.

Have you ever wondered what happens to normal people who end up dealing with the supernatural and just can’t handle the mental strain of something so out of the norm? What happens to those who are actually possessed or damaged by the “other”? Well, if it happened to you or I then most likely we’d be put away in a public asylum or end up living under a bridge somewhere. However, if you happened to become so impaired while working for the Laundry, you will be put away at St. Hilda of Grantham’s Home for Disgrunteld Waifs and Strays, which is a long winded and obfuscating way of saying “government funded asylum”.

Something has happened at the asylum and Bob Howard is sent to find out exactly what happened and also to do some stuff that is never made explicit.

While I may have issues with the short fiction I’ve read from Stross and much of his longer fiction, for some reason the Bob Howard stories work for me. Stross can get overly technical in his other science fiction, but outside of his repetition of code words for covert projects, the Laundry novels are reasonably straight forward and comprehensbile, even if the reader doesn’t know exactly what is going on.

As such, I liked “Down on the Farm”.

The Stross Formula

Jonathan McCalmont originally attempted to write a review of the new Charles Stross novel Saturn’s Children, but he quickly realized that the review (and the novel) would be better served instead by an article on the formulaic nature of Stross’s writing and why it is ultimately a bad thing.

McCalmont writes:

As a writer of spy stories, Stross is just as heretical as Le Carre in that both steadfastly refuse to write textbook thrillers. Le Carre’s heresy lies in his prioritisation of character not only as a motor for the plot but as the entire basis for the book. Stross, by contrast uses characters and plots as information firewalls, their points of view and pacing serving to dictate what idea the audience is introduced to at a given time. For example, when Freya from Saturn’s Children is upgraded from sexbot to assassin, it is simply a means for Stross to shift from conveying basic information about his world to conveying the kind of secret political information that only a trained assassin and political operative might have access to. In other words, Stross’ books are built around his speculation.

I want to quote larger and large chunks of McCalmont’s essay, but instead I’ll just say to read the essay.

Here is one more, though:

However, as more and more books have been produced it has become increasingly clear that Stross’ fondness for infodumping is not a flaw in his writing style, it is the result of a deliberate decision to convey certain kinds of information in certain kinds of ways. In short, Stross has a style of his own, he is not bad at plot or characterisation, he simply has no interest in either of them.

This, I think, is my basic problem with more than half of Stross’s fiction: The friggin information overwhelms “story”. While McCalmont recognizes that for Stross information = story, it’s a pain in my ass as a reader and something I don’t think I want to read very often. It’s why I’ve been pulling away from more and more of Stross’s work, except for the Laundry novels and the Merchant Princes. There is still a sense of character and plot, and perhaps a sense of whimsy or action. There is stuff going on that I’m still interested in reading about. Not so with something like Halting State or, damn me, Accelerando.

When reading a synopsis of a Stross novel there is a sense of an exciting story about technology and some sort of action. It sounds exciting. And then I start reading the book and I’m weighed down with information and the prose.

If you don’t want to read the whole article, go skip down to the last paragraph (not reproduced here) and if that’s not enough to make you want to go back and read from the start, I don’t know what is.

Charles Stross Sales

HALTING STATE author Charles Stross's 419, in which the Scottish police investigation of a serial killer who targets spammers uncovers a massive international "blacknet" conspiracy; ROGUE FARM, a short story collection; and THE FULLER MEMORANDUM, the third book in the Laundry supernatural thriller series, to Ginjer Buchanan at Ace, in a good deal, for publication in July 2010, by Caitlin Blasdell at Liza Dawson Associates (NA).

One of my favorite aspects of Colleen Lindsay's blog The Swivet is her round up of genre acquisitions, or, as I like to call them "sales". Just recently she posted the April sales and Charles Stross has three.

I'm not exactly high on Stross, but his stuff interests me in ways I can't quite explain given that I've quit on three of his books.

So, what do we have here? 419, something that I suspect I'm going to not like as much as Halting State, based on the description above. Rogue Farm, which makes me nervous because I haven't read much of his short work. And, finally, The Fuller Memorandum, which honestly and truly excites me because it is a new Bob Howard Laundry novel. The Fuller Memorandum has moved itself near the top of my 2010 MUST READ list. Those novels (Atrocity Archive, Jennifer Morgue) are damn good. I only wish it was sold to Golden Gryphon since they published the first two and in really nice editions. Plus, I could probably score an advanced review copy if the book was at Golden Gryphon.

Thoughts on Hugo Nominees 2008: Novels

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
The Last Colony by John Scalzi
Halting State by Charles Stross


When I first read The Last Colony earlier in 2007 I was quite enamored with the book. It was a chance to read about John Perry, Jane Sagan, and get another story in the OMW universe. Delightful. Time has been slightly less kind to my memories of The Last Colony than I am comfortable with. I need to trust my initial impressions, but unlike Scalzi’s other work (Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Android’s Dream), I have fewer warm fuzzies in retrospect. This is simply to say that I don’t think The Last Colony had quite as much meat as its predecessors. Or, maybe it is that the meat had a different flavor, because there was a bit more action and military interaction in the first two volumes, and this is colonists abandoned to their fate. But with everything that I am writing here about how my memory of The Last Colony does not hold up, I still need to go back to my initial review of the book last year. In that initial review, I was quite positive and full of praise.

Compared to The Last Colony, Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Rollback benefited from a much fresher perspective. I finished Rollback on May 5, and all the warm fuzzies I feel for Rollback are still fresh in my mind. This was the first novel from Sawyer I have read and despite having encountered negative opinions of both Sawyer and Rollback (along the lines of it being another damn Sawyer novel), I was quickly engrossed in the novel. Basically, Rollback is two stories in one. First is that of an elderly Don and Sarah Halifax. Sarah Halifax, 38 years ago, was the first to decode the first contact message from another planet 18.8 light years away. Now that Sarah is in her eighties, Earth has received a response to their reply. The man essentially bankrolling SETI believes that Sarah should continue to be involved in the communication, but she is nearing the end of her lifespan. Wealthy Man recommends a rollback procedure, and extremely expensive and relatively new procedure which can quite literally reverse the aging process and give the recipient another 60 years of life. Sarah insists that her husband Don, not a scientist, also receive the procedure. The procedure works on Don, but not Sarah. Now what? The other half of the story is Sarah’s first decoding the original response. There are big ideas in Rollback dealing with science, morality of aging, ethics, what sort of communication we would really receive from another planet, and family responsibility. While what the novel is about is important, it is less important than how Sawyer tells the story. Let me tell you that Sawyer tells it well. Rollback is smooth reading, flowing from chapter to chapter, idea to idea, until before you know it, you’re halfway done with the novel. Oh, and Rollback barely clocks in at more than 300 pages. Not only was I impressed with Rollback on its own terms, now I want to go find more of Sawyer’s work because I like what he’s doing here and I want more of it.


Usually, if I only read two of the five nominees in a category, I won’t write about that category. This is why I skipped the Novel category for my Nebula reviews. The Hugo Novels are different. I may only have finished two of them, but I attempted another two, and that gives me enough to discuss.


I previously posted about why I stopped reading Halting State and why I quit The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The more I think about it, the less I want to go back and read Halting State. I knew I was done with that book when I closed the cover. I like maybe half of Stross’s work and this doesn’t fall into the half I appreciate. I still believe I need more time before I go back to The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. There have been books I came back to later and appreciated more the second time around, though, to be honest, I can’t remember when this occurred. Given that I gave both Halting State and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union a fair shake and came up empty on both, I’ll move on to the fifth and final book in the category.

Brasyl: How I shall never read thee.

Over the last couple of years I’ve read a couple of Ian McDonald stories due to the man’s frequent inclusion on award lists. The stories have so turned me off from reading one of McDonald’s novels that just about the only way I will ever read Brasyl (or River of Gods, or anything else) is if the book shows up in my mailbox for a review. I’ll finish any book I owe a review for, but otherwise, McDonald is out. The only other author with a single story that turned me off so much was Paolo Bacigalupi (“Yellow Card Man”), but his entry in the Wastelands anthology helped me to be receptive to more Bacigalupi stories. Ian McDonald? I’m on strike.


My choice: Rollback. I wonder if I had read both Rollback and The Last Colony a year ago if I would have the same opinion, but given that Rollback is fresh in my mind and my good vibes on The Last Colony are fading a bit, I have to go with the Sawyer. It’s a good read. If, among the Big 3 SFF awards, the Hugo is the award voted on by the masses (such as 500 Worldcon voters can be considered the masses), I think that Rollback plays well to a larger audience (as does The Last Colony, but my vote is still Rollback).


Previous Thoughts:
Novellas
Short Stories
John W. Campbell Award

Why I Stopped Reading Halting State

Halting State is nominated for the Hugo for Best Novel and is yet another generally well regarded novel from Charles Stross. So why did I pull out my bookmark around page 85, close the cover, and place the book on the pile to return back to the library?

Well, first, because it is due in three days and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to finish the book given that I spend the last week and a half reading the first 85 pages.

Second, because once again I find a Charles Stross novel to be far more exciting for its ideas than for the actual writing. I loved the concept of the police being called in to investigate a theft that took place within an online video game and the further explanation of exactly why this was a serious crime and what the real world repercussions were. Fantastic idea. The actual execution of that idea? Not so fantastic. Halting State is told in Second Person Perspective (where the reader is the character and the word "you" is used frequently...think the Choose Your Own Adventure books). Again, another great idea and actually well done, but somewhere in the midst of the Second Person narration I got a little bit lost. 85 pages, three viewpoint perspectives, and no real clue how it all fits. Yeah, Stross was beginning to bring things together and I know that I missed the real story of Halting State, but I felt that 85 pages was a little bit too long to get into it for Halting State. My other problem? The use of Scottish Dialect. At times it was damn near incomprehensible. The language might be English, but I had to work to parse sentence containing dialect.

But the real reason, and the main reason I stopped reading Halting State is because no matter how much I was interested in the idea of Halting State, the reality of Halting State was not a satisfying reading experience. I had copies of George R. R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag, Justina Robson's Selling Out, a couple of Elizabeth Bear novels, short stories from Lucius Shepard, Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen: Book of Ambergis, a zombie western from Joe R. Lansdale, and however many thousands of great books I've never read....and I really didn't want to spend the time reading Halting State and be frustrated by what I consider is not the man's best work.

I have something of a love / hate relationship with the fiction of Charles Stross. I believe his two Bob Howard / Laundry novels are absolutely fantastic. His Merchant Princes series is hit or miss, but is still overall fun to read. And then there is his more technical SF, I didn't finish Accelerando, I forced myself to read all of Singularity Sky, and I gave up on Iron Sunrise.

I know that Stross is extremely well regarded in the SF community, and I know that I am clearly not his target audience, but I really wanted to like Halting State and sign songs of praise about it...and I can't. I may be a bit simplistic in my reading and it may be that Stross just runs at a level way over my head, but I can't recommend that folks pick up the book.

Now...if Stross writes a third Laundry novel (following The Atrocity Archives, and The Jennifer Morgue), well, I'd be all over that.

The Merchants' War, by Charles Stross

The Merchants’ War
Charles Stross
Tor: 2007

I want to start out by saying that pretty much everything that Jonathan McCalmont said in his review of The Merchants’ War is spot on – starting when he states “In effect, this reset the series.” What McCalmont is referring to is the ending to the previous volume The Clan Corporate where the King, Egon “The Pervert” attacks a party for the unwilling engagement of Miriam Beckstein (our world walking heroine) and Egon’s brother, “The Idiot” and kills most everybody in attendance. Miriam escaped, as did a few others, but this was near wholesale slaughter. What this does, as McCalmont points out, is change the focus of the forthcoming novels. No longer is Miriam following the path from A to B that was laid out in The Hidden Family. Instead Miriam is on the run in one world, Egon and the Clan are each plotting in another world, the DEA and the FBI are working to attack the Clan’s drug trade in OUR world, and oh yeah, a FOURTH world has just been discovered. The game has changed.

One thing that I disagree with McCalmont about is that Stross has written a much more action packed adventurous novel which begins to get away from the heavy idea driven conversations which attempt to explain what just happened. Not so. The plot explaining info dumps of conversation are still there, but what Stross has added to the conversation (and to the novel) is a bit more tech speak and a bit more spy-speak. Like his Bob Howard novels (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue) we are now graced with special operation codenames of GREENSLEEVES and the like. In all caps. Sometimes multiple codenames to a page. While this was vital to the Bob Howard novels, I feel that Stross has turned a corner and moved from what was predominately a fantasy of technology clash with world-walking between different versions of the world, and shifted to a combination run of the technology minded, espionage minded novels of his earlier work. A move closer to the Bob Howard novels is not a bad thing, but if this shifts too hard to earlier work like Accelerando and Singularity Sky, as praised as those novels are, I can’t help but feel that is a step in the wrong direction as I found those novels much less accessible and more frustrating to attempt to read. What is happening is that The Merchants’ War is providing a hint that things well be LESS fun in the future, and not MORE fun. For the reader. Bad stuff happens to the characters all the time.

My initial take on the overall series of The Merchant Princes is that Stross is pulling off a record like Fred Saberhagen did pitching for the Kansas City Royals in the 80’s. Every other book is good. I was turned off quite early in The Family Trade and while the pacing was swift and easy, the novel was a big let down for me. For some reason I still picked up the second book, The Hidden Family, and stranger still – I liked it. A lot. So I read The Clan Corporate and it suffered from what McCalmont pointed out earlier in his review: Miriam spent nearly the entire novel unable to act and the novel was claustrophobic (this may be McCalmont’s term) with little of the adventure of the first two novels. The Merchants’ War was a step back in the right direction and was a novel which left me wanting more and wanting to know more...but I don’t think it was nearly as good as it could have been. The series IS going in a more Science Fiction sort of way and technology is becoming MORE important, but I suspect that Stross’s writing is going to reflect this and that there will be a more insular feel to Book 5, that we are going to get more shop talk and less shop work. Based on my theory the book won’t be that good ANYWAY, but despite how interested I am in how Stross is going to put things together and how things will work out, I am fearful that he will take the series in a more technological Geek-Speak which will not serve the story.

The bottom line is that I am drawn to The Merchant Princes like a junkie to crack. I know it’s not good for me, and I know that ultimately the work isn’t as satisfying as I want it to be, and as I other people tell me it is. And yet, The Merchant Princes (in general) and The Merchants’ War (in specific) are highly readable, usually entertaining works of fiction.

SF Diplomat and The Merchants' War

SF Diplomat reviews The Merchants’ War

McCalmont writes:

I was a huge fan of the first two novels in the series. I happily reviewed The Family Trade and The Hidden Family and gave both books solid reviews. Seeing as the two books were originally written as one novel, it is perhaps unsurprising that they should be of similar quality. However, when the third novel appeared, I quickly devoured it but could not help but feel a bitter taste in my mouth. I suddenly had the horrible feeling that the series has lost it’s way and, despite the series since earning Stross a Sidewise Award for Alternate History, I imagine that a number of other people might have been put off by the third novel too.

Actually, I have an odd feeling for this series. I was put off by The Family Trade, but thought The Hidden Family was solid and really got me going with the storytelling. The Clan Corporate was another turn off and I would agree with McCalmont in the series losing its way. It brings me to the beginnings of a Fred Saberhagen theory (1980’s pitcher for the Kansas City Royals). For a number of years Saberhagen would have outstanding years in the odd years. Even years he was merely a good pitcher. Books 1 and 3 were weak, I though (and I still can’t get over that awful opening of The Family Trade where Miriam “dives into her closet” and “rips open a bag of clothing with her teeth”. The quotes may not be exact, but Miriam dove and ripped and this is an accurate representation of the opening. So, if The Merchants’ War turns out to be the best of the series so far, then my Saberhagen theory (flipped to the “Even” books will begin to hold up.

McCalmont continues:

This cerebral approach to story-telling explains Stross’ attraction for what are essentially spy stories but given the amount of action that does go on in The Merchants’ War, you can tell that it’s a pattern he’s trying to break. As a result, the book is arguably the best the series has seen since the first book and it is miles away from the frustrating and introverted The Clan Corporate. The Merchants’ War is a proper adventure story and it’s a load of fun to read as a result.

God, I hope so.

And I also find myself wanting to quote larger and larger blocks of McCalmont’s review. He’s got me excited for the new book and the new directions Stross is taking the series, but also just because I love how McCalmont clearly lays out salient points about the novel / series without slipping into simple plot description. This is a review I aspire to write one day.

Forthcoming Fiction from September to December 2007

I'm flat out stealing this idea from Andy Wolverton's recent post where he listed out a few books coming out in the near future. From the Locus listing of Forthcoming Books, here's what has my interest in the last four months of the year.


September:
The Elves of the Cintra, by Terry Brooks (Del Rey)
The Bonehunters, by Steven Erikson (Tor)
The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie (Pyr)


October:
20th Century Ghosts, by Joe Hill (Harpercollins)
The Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
The Merchants War, by Charles Stross (Tor)


November:
Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon (Del Rey)


December:
Not a blessed thing.



Interestingly enough, Terry Goodkind's Confessor is not listed on Locus and near as I can tell still has a sale date of November 13. I would like to see how Goodkind closes The Sword of Truth out. Also missing is Mike Resnick's Starship: Mercenary from Pyr in December. Highly anticipated.