'Malazan' Author Announces Next Novel for October 2026
The next novel in Steven Erikson's *Malazan* universe, *Legacies of Betrayal*, is now slated for release in October 2026. This book is part of the *Witness* series, which the author previously confirmed has been expanded from a trilogy into a quartet to accommodate the story's scope.
- The *Witness* series begins with *The God is Not Willing*, which was released in 2021, followed by *No Life Forsaken* in 2025. *Legacies of Betrayal* will be the third installment, with a fourth, *The Last God*, planned to conclude the series. - The main ten-volume *Malazan Book of the Fallen* series had sold over 1 million copies worldwide by 2012, with that number growing to over 3 million by 2018. - Author Steven Erikson shifted his focus to the *Witness* series after the first two books of his preceding prequel series, the *Kharkanas Trilogy*, experienced unexpectedly low sales. - The *Witness* series is set approximately a decade after the conclusion of *The Crippled God* and centers on the legacy of the popular character Karsa Orlong, though Orlong himself did not appear in the first book. - Erikson's initial publishing contract with Bantam UK for the nine books following *Gardens of the Moon* was valued at £675,000, which at the time was among the largest advances ever paid for a fantasy series. - The Malazan world was originally co-created by Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont in the early 1980s to serve as a setting for a GURPS tabletop role-playing game campaign. - The first Malazan novel, *Gardens of the Moon* (1999), was initially written as a screenplay in 1991-92 but failed to sell, leading Erikson to rework it into a novel after nearly a decade of rejections. - The series is published by Tor Books in the United States and Bantam Books in the United Kingdom. Limited, signed editions are also produced by specialty publisher Subterranean Press.
