Woo-hoo! Thanks for the alert, just went and bought it!
You’re welcome. For some reason, I never get the Bujold new publication alerts, though I get all the others I’m signed up for.
Is there any chance Bujold will publish her more recent stuff in real books? I don’t care for ebooks, but that’s all she publishes in anymore. Well, some are in extremely limited (i.e. expensive) books, but I’m looking for MMPB.
I’m afraid you may be looking in vain.
Oh, and after I finished Falling Free, I faced a dilemma. It was published in the same volume as Diplomatic Immunity. On the one hand, I’d be reading all of them eventually anyway, and it came from the less-convenient library system, that I have to go out of my way to pick things up and wait for inter-library loans, so I didn’t want to have to return the book and then pick it up again sometime later. On the other hand, though, Diplomatic Immunity isn’t even remotely close to the next book, in either internal chronological nor publication order.
Eventually, expediency won, and I read it, but yow, that was a lot of spoilers. Like, Miles is now happily married. And he apparently spent some time dead for tax purposes. And it sounds like it might have been Bel Thorne who did it, for some reason?
I did, though, like seeing a view of what Quaddie society had evolved into.
Boy did you spoil yourself.
It doesn’t matter though, the books are good enough that it will not affect your experience of them the slightest bit.
Anyway I guess we are all old enough to remember the time when you read series books in the order you could get them.
I’d be fine with a mass market hardcover.
Why has Bujold apparently decided that her new works will only be sold via Kindle? I understand why Amazon pushes Kindle; it’s more profits than they get selling books. Does Bujold get a similar money bump from keeping her works out of physical media?
I realize that her new stuff is sometimes sold in a very limited edition hardcover. Those are always bought up by resellers, who then charge outrageous prices. In this Ticketmaster is the business model.
As publishers lament the death of the print industry, have they consider it’s a self-inflicted wound?
This is why I recommend reading the books in publication order.
In my case, it was a necessity as I read them as they were published.
When in doubt, always read anything in publication order. That’s always been my guiding principle, and it’s never let me down.
Which my local libraries might actually get.
Not really what happened. That is, some portions did, but not in that fashion. So you’re not quite as spoilered as you think.
That said — while I can see why someone not thinking of that issue might have put them together, it’s a really unfortunate combination for somebody trying to read all the books in that universe, but who hasn’t read the other Miles ones up to that point. It would be useful for someone who had read the Vorkosigan books to that point, but hadn’t read Falling Free.
Bujold said on goodreads:
Not sure what’s going on with Baen these days. The first Penric collection, Penric’s Progress, came out in January 2020 and did well, but the second, Penric’s Travels came out in May 2020 when all the bookstores were closing for Covid, and so suffered in sales. It’s hard to tell how the somewhat more recent 3rd, Penric’s Labors has done, as paper royalties run so very late.
Then some stuff about how publishes decide how many books to print, and then
And Baen hasn’t chosen to reprint the mmpbs of the first two. Which suggests they calculate it wouldn’t be profitable. One can’t ask one’s publisher to lose money on one’s book, after all.
And
For foreign rights submissions we did devise a 4th collection, which we called Penric’s Intrigues and contained the novel The Assassins of Thasalon and the novella “Knot of Shadows”, which made up about the same word count as the prior volumes. I’d need one more novella to make up a 5th volume at this point (2024). No promises…
Also, you asked why they are only sold on Kindle. They aren’t. They are also available in other e-book formats. (Like Kobo, which matters to me, as that’s what I’m using, now.) But they aren’t very available in hardcopy, for sure.
I gather that it was Bujold herself who chose to bundle those three stories together, and yes, the thematic connection is obvious. Given that they’re bundled together that way, though, it would have made sense for someone attempting to read the series in order (any sort of order) to put off reading Falling Free until they were ready for Diplomatic Immunity. Which probably would have occurred to me, had I thought about the issue before ordering that book from the library.
Bujold has published a recommended reading order, and she puts off the first quaddie book until quite late, probably so you can read the others immediately after.
I was cheated by the publisher of the Narnia books. And there are still box sets with the “chronological” volume numbers Amazon.com.au : the chronicles of narnia box set.
Faugh.
I think that was the fault of Lewis’ heirs.
Thank you for reposting this. Now that I have a title to search for, I was able to find that Penric’s Intrigues is on the way. In fact, it’s scheduled to be released this week.
This is good news!