A quick follow on about Shaun Tan, who has a website here. In October Hachette Livre Australia will published Shaun’s next book, The Arrival. It’s literally like nothing he’s done before. I’ve seen some pieces from it – and he’s said he’s going to bring the rest over to the house in the next few weeks – and it’s basically a 128 page graphic novel with no text. He’s been working on it for nearly four years, at one point throwing out a large chunk because the style didn’t quite fit, and redoing it. If it’s as good as I think it’s likely to be, it’s going to be astounding. I’ll post more on it when I have more from Shaun. In the meantime, I don’t think there’s an edition currently slated for outside Australia (though that’ll probably happen). Were I coming to World Fantasy I’d bring a box of copies and sell them myself. As I’m not, you might want to try pre-ordering it here or here.

At last! A calendar I’d really love to have! I don’t know whether it’s being released in Australia, but you can get an official 2007 Shaun Tan Calendar from amazon.co.uk, if nowhere else. I’ll be ordering one.

What exactly is The New Space Opera? Following a comment from RobB, I realised that I may not have updated you all on what this project is, and when it’s headed your way. The short version is that it is an original science fiction anthology co-edited with Gardner Dozois that will be published by HarperEos in the United States and HarperCollinsVoyager in Australia. We don’t have a definite publication date yet, but it should be Fall 2007 (so probably August or September of that year).  

Where are we at with it? Gardner and I have been reading submissions for the past few months, and are pushing towards having 200,000 words of really topnotch new science fiction stories for the book. So far we’ve got some terrific stuff by Dan Simmons, Peter F. Hamilton, Robert Silverberg, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, Alstair Reynolds, Gwyneth Jones, Mary Rosenblum, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, Tony Daniel, Robert Reed, Ken Macleod, and a handful of others. If all goes to plan, we’ll be handing the book in soon-ish, so I’ll have a final list of contributors soon-ish. And, if Gardner and I have our way, we hope to be able to work together on a New Space Opera 2 at some point.