After reading from his new “mystery project” Skyward on every stop of the Oathbringer tour, Brandon Sanderson has officially announced that the YA science fiction novel will be available come late 2018. He also shared how the idea, which took five years to come together, was inspired by pivotal “a boy and his dragon” books like Anne McCaffrey’s The White Dragon and Jane Yolen’s Dragon’s Blood, but with a twist. With Skyward, Sanderson has mashed up that archetypal fantasy friendship with flight school stories like Top Gun and Ender’s Game, so that “a boy and his dragon” became “a girl and her starfighter.”
The official pitch, from Sanderson himself:
Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped on a planet that is constantly attacked by mysterious alien starfighters. Spensa, a teenage girl living among them, longs to be a pilot. When she discovers the wreckage of an ancient ship, she realizes this dream might be possible—assuming she can repair the ship, navigate flight school, and (perhaps most importantly) persuade the strange machine to help her. Because this ship, uniquely, appears to have a soul.
Gollancz has posted the Skyward prologue, for all those who didn’t get to hear it in-person, as well as the official title announcement:
According to Sanderson, Skyward is expected to be published in the US (by Delacorte Press) on November 6 and in the UK (by Gollancz) on November 15. Expect a cover reveal and preorder link (for the US) soon. You can already preorder Skyward in the UK.
