We received a note from Last Dragon author J. M. McDermott who notes that you might have trouble finding certain books on Amazon.com; specifically, it seems that for some titles Amazon is not showing the latest editions in search results. Even worse, he says that some of the editions being presented as new are actually used.

Read on to see what McDermott found (reprinted here with his permission) and let us know if you can shed light on this…
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J.M. McDermott’s Are You Listening?, a book in The Fathomless Abyss cycle, is currently available as a free download for the Amazon Kindle reading platform.

Are You Listening? Is a new short story by J.M. McDermott, author of the Dogsland Trilogy, set in the evolving shared world of the Fathomless Abyss.

The Abyss has a top but no bottom. When you fall in, you fall forever. When the Crown closes, you make a new home for yourself among the captive population from a million worlds and a million epochs…or you die trying.

For a sentient plant, the Abyss brings only pain and slavery, until it learns to speak.

Are You Listening? is an introduction to an impossible new fantasy world from the creative minds of Philip Athans, Jay Lake, Mike Resnick & Brad R. Torgersen, Cat Rambo, and J.M. McDermott.

Fall in with them, and find your place in the Fathomless Abyss.

[via Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine]

J.M. McDermott is the author of five novels and two short story collections, including Last Dragon, Never Knew Another, Women and Monsters, and Disintegration Visions.

SF Signal had the opportunity to talk with him about shared worlds and The Fathomless Abyss, a shared world anthology featuring stories from McDermott, Mike Resnick, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, Mel Odom, Brad Torgersen and Philip Athans. In The Fathomless Abyss, a bottomless pit opens who-knows-when onto who-knows-where, just long enough for new people from a thousand different worlds and a million different times to fall in and join the fight for survival in a place where the slightest misstep means an everlasting fall into eternity. In this world, the laws of physics work against you, there’s no way out, and time means nothing…

CHARLES TAN: Hi Joe! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, how did you get involved with The Fathomless Abyss series?

JM MCDERMOTT: Thanks for having me, Charles! Mr. Athans contacted me after he and Mel Odom had the idea. I don’t get to play a lot with creatures most of the time. My work, in general, involves humans. The thing that excited me was an opportunity to work with, and invent, some creatures. The project reminded me a lot of an anthology I tried to do (and failed to get any traction on, once upon a time) involving mazes. It reminds me a lot of what I enjoyed so much about working with the novel I wrote, as a result of frustrations about the failed anthology idea, which is not out yet. When I learned about the Abyss, I was immediately interested. It reminded me of my favorite part of Forgotten Realms, the Underdark. It reminded me of the Labyrinth. It reminded me of the space between worlds. It reminded me of my short story Dedalus and the Labyrinth, from Weird Tales. I thought about what I loved the most about those different projects, and what I felt was missing from my creative muscle. Like I said, it is the making of monsters and creatures and fantastical beasts.

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