Jeff VanderMeer reports the sale of Finding Sonoria & Other Stories to Jacob Weisman at Tachyon Publications. The collection is not yet scheduled, but “will include some previously unpublished work as well as the best of my published fiction since 2004.”
He also says “I’m happy to report that, through my agent, I have sold my novel Finch to editor Victoria Blake at Underland Press in a very, very sweet deal.” Blake was formerly an editor at Dark Horse. VanderMeer expects to finish Finch by September, for publication in Spring 2009.
Finch, he says, “takes place before Zamilon File but incorporates part of ZF. In fact, I’m not yet sure if ZF will be subsumed by Finch or not. Fragments has been so pilfered from for Shriek and Finch that I’m now reimagining it as a kind of dying fall—the conclusion to the series, but probably more of a novella than a novel.”
VanderMeer provided this brief description of Finch:
A crime noir set in the fantastical failed state of Ambergris. The gray caps, mysterious underground inhabitants, have re-conquered the city and put the human inhabitants in camps, controlling them with strange addictive drugs. Remnants of the Resistance are scattered, martial law in place. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, his wife dead, must solve an impossible double murder while trying to make contact with the rebels and sussing out the real agenda of his mysterious girl friend, Sintra. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.
The cat is becoming something else.
The lizard watches intently from the windowsill.
Something is about to happen.
And they both want to know: who is Finch, really?