UK cover art for Richard Morgan's THE DARK DEFILES

An early look at the working cover art for Richard Morgan's The Dark Defiles, provisionally due in August 2013:

No, I haven't read the book: it's still being written. The quote is from my review of The Cold Commands and may not be present on the final version of the cover for The Dark Defiles.

Richard Morgan on THE DARK DEFILES

Richard Morgan has released an excerpt from The Dark Defiles, the third book in his Land Fit For Heroes series and the follow-up to the excellent Cold Commands.

He's also revealed that the book is becoming rather larger than he was hoping, and he and his publishers are now actively considering breaking it down into two slimmer volumes. This isn't set in stone yet and depends on the final page count and if there's a place where he can split the narrative satisfyingly.

"Currently TDD is planned as a single volume to wrap up the trilogy – but it’s looking to be a dangerously fat volume, and I’m not sure how happy I am about that. So we may be talking about two books rather than one, forming a Land Fit for Heroes quartet. But that again will depend on finding a decent narrative shape for each of the two potentially slimmer books – I hate cliff-hanger finishes with a passion, and want to avoid writing one at all costs. Have to see how it shapes up further down the road……"

No release dates have been given yet, but I suspect we won't see the third book until the latter part of 2013 at the earliest.

ALTERED CARBON film rights re-optioned

This is slightly older news (from February) but something that had managed to slip past my radar. Mythology Entertainment, a newly-formed production company, has secured the movie rights to Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's debut novel and the first featuring his body-hopping protagonist Takeshi Kovacs. The deal also includes the book's two sequels, Woken Furies and Broken Angels, though presumably not his 'fantasy' trilogy which is set in the distant future of the same setting.

The book was originally optioned by Matrix producer Joel Silver shortly after the novel was published, allowing Morgan to become a full-time writer after completing only just one book. This attempt to make a film came to nothing. A second attempt during the 2008 Writer's Guild of America Strike (when the studios were looking at using completed-but-unmade scripts to put into production to get around the lack of new scripts being written) also came to nothing.

Laeta Kalogridis, the executive producer of Avatar and scriptwriter of Shutter Island, will co-pen the script along with David Goodman. Interesting to see if this gets made or languishes in development hell for several years. I am particularly interested to see how they handle the problem of the film requiring several actors to play the hero (as Kovacs is 're-sleeved' several times in different bodies).