This site has now received almost 9000 visitors, a similarly large number of downloads, and many, many emails. Thank you to everyone who visited, sent words of encouragement (mostly), or contributed typos, proofreading, and other suggestions. I've already received orders of magnitude more feedback than I did during the entire time the books were being published, and an actual fanbase is apparently coalescing. I take this very seriously, which leads to the main topic of this post: Spell of Apocalypse.
Several days ago, I received an email from reader Nick, from Canada. He read the pdf of Catastrophe and then was lucky enough to land actual paperback copies of Intrigue and Fate, which he had just finished devouring. This meant he had now encountered the absolutely-everything-up-in-the-air cliffhangers at the end of Fate - and now was completely unable to locate a copy of Apocalypse. Not a surprise at all; Apocalypse sold something fewer than 500 copies, if I recall correctly. (When they were published, the big bookstore chains, led by Crown, were very active in tracking book sales using their computerized inventory systems, and without a promotional push from the publisher, would order no more copies of any succeeding titles than had already been sold by that author. This was obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy trap, especially when coupled with the "perishable goods" approach to stock management; when the new book in a series came out, it was difficult - outside of the SF specialty shops - to get the previous volumes, so why would a browsing shopper bother? This explains why the third and especially the fourth book are fairly expensive and hard to find. Update: here's a column by Norman Spinrad which updates the BookScan sales tracking trap with a modern example.)
But I promised Nick I would take some (limited) pity on his desperate state, and post the first chapter of Apocalypse without waiting for all of Fate to appear. (As it turns out, I'm still sorting through corrupted backup files, and on top of that I temporarily managed to misplace my original printouts of Fate and Apocalypse - too tedious to say more, really, other than tearing the garage apart for the second time today resulted in the manuscripts being reunited with my workspace, at least.) Anyway, one chapter of Apocalypse is now up, and the early sections of Fate should begin appearing later in the week, as the plot thickens even further...
