Now that it’s being discussed in the New York Times, I guess we can talk about John Scalzi’s next project with Tor Books: a new Old Man’s War book called The Human Division. (Readers of The Last Colony and/or Zoe’s Tale will have an immediate inkling of what the title means; for those who haven’t, any explanation would be a spoiler.)
The Human Division will be an experiment: an episodic novel, released initially in digital, serialized form. Currently the plan is to publish these episodes weekly in, roughly, December 2012 through February 2013. Like the episodes of a good high-end cable drama, each one will have enough internal integrity to work as an enjoyable chunk of story on its own, but each will advance a “season”-long storyline as well.
Ultimately the entire work will be published as a normal printed book and a normal e-book, in the late spring or early summer of 2013. And we’ll be doing our best to make it so that buying the book in serial form costs about the same as buying the full e-book. There may be some small extra material in the full-length book, because we’re LIKE THAT.
(A digital cover by John Harris will accompany each individual installment.)
You’ll be hearing more from us about this project as it develops—including provisions for pre-ordering. Bear with us—this is all part of a broad front of Tor/Macmillan “Let’s Try Some Stuff” initiatives in digital publishing. What I can tell you as its editor is that I’ve read a bunch of what John’s written so far and ZOMG MFF MMF [redacted].
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a senior editor at Tor Books and, with Liz Gorinsky, one of the two fiction editors of Tor.com. Read more about him on the Tor.com About Us page.
