Aug 5, 2019 | news
Step into the Xenowealth with us
by Pablo Defendini
I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that Fireside has acquired the rights to re-publish Tobias S. Buckell’s Xenowealth series of books: Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose, and The Apocalypse Ocean.
The Xenowealth has a special place in my heart. The first book in the series, Crystal Rain, had just come out when I started out working in publishing, as a cover designer at Tor. It was the first time that I saw our people — Caribbean people, and specifically Caribbean people in a diaspora — represented in science fiction. I was blown away, and became an instant fan of Tobias’ work.
Crystal Rain was followed up by Ragamuffin, which I fondly refer to as ‘Rasta fights zombies in space’ and Sly Mongoose, which, aside from being a great read, has one of the most kickass, high-octane opening scenes I’ve ever read. After I left Tor, Toby hired me to do some design work on the fourth installment in the series, The Apocalypse Ocean, which he kickstarted as a self-publishing project, successfully funded by popular demand from die-hard Xenowealth fans.
Toby has always straddled the line between indie publishing and traditional publishing — he’s an O.G. ‘hybrid’ author — and one of the reasons Fireside is a good fit for these books is because we’re interested in exploring those spaces as well. So you can expect us to do some non-traditional stuff with these books.
The first thing we’re doing is we’re going to re-master them. The Xenowealth books are some of the first in Toby’s career, and he’s grown so much as an author and craftsman since — we want to put out the best possible version of these stories. Additionally, now that the series of fully formed, Toby can take a holistic approach to all four books in a way that wasn’t practical when he was writing the first few, and he didn’t know if he’d get to write the subsequent ones. So we’re working to re-edit all four books. The Fireside editions of these books won’t be reprints — they will be different from what’s been published before. Consider them the director’s cut, if you will.
We’re expecting to publish the remastered and repackaged Xenowealth books in 2020. Naturally, we’ll publish the Xenowealth books as ebooks and print books, including as Fireside Print+ebook bundles. But we also have a few surprises in store — more on that, later.
In the meantime, I hope you’re all as excited as I am to see these books take on new life.
© 2019 Pablo Defendini
About the author
