Since its launch in fall 2015, the serialized storytelling platform Serial Box has delighted readers with its blend of television and book styles: easily digestible weekly episodes dreamed up in a writers’ room made up of beloved authors (including Max Gladstone, Ellen Kushner, Malinda Lo, Cassandra Rose Clarke, and many more), the pieces fitting together into well-crafted tales. While audiences have been able to read the various serials through Serial Box’s app, ebook, and audiobook platforms, now Simon & Schuster’s SAGA Press has obtained North American print rights. SAGA will publish the first three serials in 2016 and 2017.
“We’re very excited to be working with Serial Box,” said SAGA Press Editor Navah Wolfe, who will be editing the print editions. “Their serialized novels are fantastic reads, and the writers’ rooms include some of the very best writers from across the spectrum of the science fiction and fantasy genres. We’re thrilled to be working with them, and to be publishing the print editions of these books on SAGA’s list.”
The first serial to be released in print form will be the urban fantasy adventure Bookburners (written by Max Gladstone, Brian Francis Slattery, Mur Lafferty, and Margaret Dunlap) in fall 2016:
Magic is real, and hungry—trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Freshly awake to just what dangers are lurking, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.
Then will come Tremontaine, a fantasy set in Ellen Kushner’s Riverside universe and the prequel to Swordspoint (written by Kushner, Joel Derfner, Malinda Lo, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Racheline Maltese, Patty Bryant, and guest author Paul Witcover), in spring 2017:
A Duchess whose beauty is matched only by her cunning; her husband’s dangerous affair with a handsome scholar; a foreigner in a playground of swordplay and secrets; and a mathematical genius on the brink of revolution—when long-buried lies threaten to come to light, betrayal and treachery know no bounds with stakes this high. Mind your manners and enjoy the chocolate in a dance of sparkling wit and political intrigue.
Summer 2017 will see The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, a magical Cold War espionage thriller (written by Lindsay Smith, Max Gladstone, Cassandra Rose Clarke, Ian Tregillis, and Michael Swanwick):
The Cold War rages in the back rooms and dark alleys of 1970s Prague as spies and sorcerers cross murky lines to do battle for home and country. The fate of the East and the West hangs in the balance right along the Iron Curtain—and crackling beneath the surface of it all is a vein of magic, raw and waiting to be tapped.
