Children of Hurin
Gee, I did not even know this book was in production. Christopher Tolkein is publishing a new book cobbled together from his father’s notes. You can pre-order it today! For fifty bucks. My native thrift (read “cheapskate”) urges me to wait until I hear glowing reviews for I shell out that kind of lucre for a hardback.
http://www.amazon.com/Children-Hurin-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618894640
Maybe I will wait for the paperback version.
Note to all loyal readers: MY BOOKS of course, read much better in hardback, because in the paperback version of each story, I remove at least one major character or plotline. For example, people who only read THE GOLDEN AGE in paperback, do not know about the astonishing plotline involving Phaethon’s evil twin brother, Black Phaethon, who uses a biotechnological virus to turn Daphne into a laurel tree in chapter eighty, to get her out of the way so he can marry the robot penguin. Phaethon and Blackie duel with antimatter sabres on the hull of the burning ship Phoenix Exultant, as that ship massively carreens into an active volcano of Io, a moon of Jupiter; the moon is jarred out of orbit by the cataclysm, and falls into the burning atmosphere of Jupiter, which, in turn, falls into the sun. Blackie falls from wrecked ship into the inferno, vowing that he will be restored from tape backup and live again. Phaethon then uses his sixth-order rays to wipe out the evil Fenachrone with an atomic warhead of activated copper. It’s a great scene.
(note to my younger readers: this is SUCH a lie. Don’t listen! There is no such scene. It is a cheap trick to try to get you to buy my wares in hardback.)