Vernor Vinge's Children of the Sky, his long-awaited sequel to the Hugo-winning A Fire Upon the Deep, is coming out in October, according to Tor's Spring/Summer 2011 catalog.


According to a tweet from Tor's Patrick Nielsen-Hayden and Tor's latest catalog (PDF), Tor will be putting out Children of the Sky in October. First, in August, they'll be reissuing a new edition of A Fire Upon the Deep, for all you slackers who missed the classic novel the first time. (You can read Jo Walton's review of AFUtD, where she calls it "the book that does everything right, the example of what science fiction does where it works," over at Tor.com.)

Not much is known about Children of the Sky yet. Vinge told an interviewer from Norwescon that it was a "near-term sequel" back in October 2009. And he gave Norwescon a screenshot of the novel in progress, complete with all his annotations. (Vinge says he writes his novels in "GNU/Linux and the common tools therein. Most of my story notes are in the manuscript file itself – like comments in a computer program." You can see the screenshot, and read more of Vinge's thoughts about the Fermi paradox and science fiction generally over at the Norwescon site.




[Thanks to Fantasy Cafe for the catalog link]