The Liaden Universe Re-Read will begin next week, on Thursday, July 18.
The Schedule is divided into six Phases, and is expected to take approximately two years. (By which time, there may be new Liaden novels to read…)
Phase 1 Schedule
- 18/7 – “Dragon Tide”
- 19/7 – “Necessary Evils”
- 20/7 – Crystal Soldier
- 21/8 – Crystal Dragon
- 27/9 – “Eleutherios”
- 28/9 – “Where the Goddess Sends”
- 29/9 – “A Spell for the Lost”
- 30/9 – “The Wine of Memory”
- 1/10 – Balance of Trade
- 10/11 – Trade Secret
Availability
The novels in Phase 1 are Crystal Soldier, Crystal Dragon, Balance of Trade, and Trade Secret.
Trade Secret is due to be released on November 5 in print and ebook.
The remaining three novels are all currently in print in a Baen collected edition titled The Crystal Variation, which is also available as an e-book.
(Baen also offers the old separate e-book editions of Crystal Soldier, Crystal Dragon, and Balance of Trade.)
The short stories in Phase 1 are “Dragon Tide”, “Necessary Evils”, “Eleutherios”, “Where the Goddess Sends”, “A Spell for the Lost”, and “The Wine of Memory”.
“Eleutherios” may be read (free) on Baen’s website, or in the (also free) Free Stories 2013 e-book.
If you have some or all of the Adventures in the Liaden Universe® chapbooks put out by SRM Publisher, “Dragon Tide” is in #13 (Dragon Tide), “Necessary Evils” is in #11 (Necessary Evils), “Where the Goddess Sends” and “A Spell for the Lost” are in #2 (Fellow Travelers), and “The Wine of Memory” is in #4 (Certain Symmetry).
The chapbooks are out of print now, but they’re all available in e-book form via Pinbeam Books, whose Adventures in the Liaden Universe® page is also a convenient reference for which story is where.
Baen offers in e-book form the Liaden Unibus I and Liaden Unibus II, which collect #1-6 (including “Where the Goddess Sends”, “A Spell for the Lost”, and “The Wine of Memory”) and #7-12 (including “Necessary Evils”) respectively. If you don’t have any of the chapbooks already, these may be a more efficient option than obtaining individual issues.
#13 is included in the Baen e-book The Tomorrow Log and Dragon Tide, so that’s another way “Dragon Tide” can be obtained.
Baen is also working on updated collections, to be available in print and e-book form. A Liaden Universe Constellation, Volume One, out now, includes “Where the Goddess Sends”, “A Spell for the Lost”, and “The Wine of Memory”, among others. Volume Two, which will include “Necessary Evils” and “Dragon Tide”, isn’t due until next year, though.
For searching out second-hand print editions, the authors’ web site recommends Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore, The Missing Volume, and White Unicorn Books.
Unless there are two “Dragon Tide”s, that title can also be found in The Tomorrow Log and Dragon Tide from Baen. Both stories are in the Liaden Universe, but I’m not certain where to place “The Tomorrow Log”.
Well spotted. I’d overlooked The Tomorrow Log and Dragon Tide – which, it turns out, contains the entire Dragon Tide chapbook, not just the individual short story “Dragon Tide”.
I’ll update the Availability notes.
The Tomorrow Log, despite the protagonist having a superficially Liaden-sounding name, is that rare thing, a Lee-Miller science fiction novel that isn’t set in the Liaden Universe.
Two years? I can’t read that slow*. 😉 I blew through all 7 Potter novels in two weeks. Started Crystal Soldier on 9/25/13 and am well into Saltation and could finish up the extant novels by the end of the year (some days I don’t manage to get in any reading time, Kerbal Space Program has been a huge time sink lately), then I’ll go back and read all the short stories in chronological order to fill in the gaps.
Thanks for your earlier post with the full chronology. Couldn’t find a timeline list of the shorts, and publishers don’t help that when they put out apparently randomly bundled collections that are all out of order. Now to fire up Word and assemble the digital versions into one file, with notes as to when to break out and read a novel, with a hyperlinked TOC and conversion to Mobi format, same as I’ve done with all the Dresden Files short stories. (Which I’m not going to read until after I’m done with the Liaden series!)
*I read all of William R. Forstchen’s “Lost Regiment” books in one sitting each, of the close the back cover and ocrapit’ssixam variety. Most of those are 450~500 pages.
Definitely you should read at whatever pace is comfortable for you if you’re reading for the first time. I’m a pretty fast reader myself when I’m reading a book for the first time (some of the Liaden novels have been sixam books), and I don’t think I’d manage reading the whole thing this slowly if it was for the first time. (I’m having enough trouble just reading Trade Secret for the first time this slowly.) On the other hand, on a re-read it can be helpful to slow down and give the nuances time to register.
I’m glad you’ve found the chronology helpful. You might want to bear in mind, though, that it’s already out of date, since there have been a couple more short stories come out over the last few months.
(If memory serves, the collections are mostly in an order, but it’s order of first publication, which has its merits but isn’t that much help if you want to read chronologically.)
Enjoy your reading!