Gabe Robinson at HarperCollins’ Morrow bought US rights to the first two novels in Rod Rees’ upcoming Demi-Monde series: Winter and Spring. The sale was handled by Rights Director Emma Thawley at Quercus (the original, UK publisher, who purchased world rights via agent John Jarrold.
Jarrold describes the books: The Demi-Monde is set in a wonderfully imagined virtual world—the Demi-Monde of the title. Originally conceived by the US military as a training ground for their troops in the twenty-first century facing street fighting and enemies who use guerrilla tactics, rather than modern technology-based armies, the Demi-Monde was created by the world’s first quantum computer. Young singer Ella Thomas is sent there to rescue a VIP (she ticks all the boxes to blend into the world, which has a late-Victorian technology base) and discovers the world and its thirty million inhabitants, or “avatars”, are all too real. Especially those who run the world’s city-states, based on famous human monsters such as Reinhard Heydrich, Shaka Zulu, Empress Wu, Godfrey de Bouillon, Selim the Grim, and Lavrentii Beria, with whom the world was seeded to make it more of a test… and that is only the beginning.”
Related articles previously published on SFScope:
Rod Rees’ Demi-Monde gains a Russian publisher (5 October 2010)
Rod Rees sells German rights to The Demi-Monde (13 October 2009)
Rod Rees sells four book Demi-Monde series to Quercus (16 September 2009)