Forget The Winds of Winter! There’s one book that fans have been awaiting fervently, for years, now—and it’s finally coming. David Gerrold tells io9 that A Method For Madness, the fifth book in his Chtorr series, will be done in a couple of months.


The Chtorr series, which tells of an invasion of Earth by an alien ecosystem that transforms the planet, has been on hold since 1993, when the fourth book, A Season for Slaughter, was published. (The first three books, A Matter for Men, A Day For Damnation, and A Rage for Revenge, came out in fairly quick order in the 1980s.) But now, it’s been over 20 years since Gerrold left us with a huge cliffhanger.

Fans started to get their hopes up when they saw A Method for Madness listed as coming out in September, according to Barnes and Noble and a few other sites. So we checked with Gerrold and he said that the book won’t be published in September, but “it will be finished by then.” Is this the final book in the Chtorr series? Nope, says Gerrold—“there are seven books in this trilogy.”


So what finally allowed Gerrold to get this book done, after 22 years of being stuck? Check out this video from a convention last month, where he explains that he’s had 250,000 words of this book finished for a long, long time. But there were just a handful of scenes (between seven and 10) that he couldn’t crack. “I didn’t even know what order they had to occur in, I had a vague idea.” He finally decided to do what Harry Harrison called “shitting bricks,” where you put words down as fast as you can—and then something clicked. Large chunks of the book are written in “first-person psychotic,” but he didn’t want to write those scenes that way. And then he figured out a way to write those scenes clearly and cleanly. And then all of the motivations, and the chain of events fell into place.

So now you can start asking when the sixth and seventh books in the series are coming out! [h/t Thomas]

Top image: A Matter for Men by Boris Vallejo