Abaddon Books - Shared-World Series

Shared-World Series

Abaddon publishes "shared-world" novels set in a number of narrative settings, with two or more authors writing in each series. Abaddon's editorial team creates the worlds in collaboration with the authors, placing an emphasis on original and engaging ideas:

It's franchise fiction without a franchise. We’re giving writers the spark of an idea and asking, “can you do this?” But we’re not giving them an idea that is based on a game or a film, or anything... we’re just saying: “Wouldn’t it be cool if this kind of fiction existed? Could you write this kind of fiction for us?”

The imprint is currently publishing books in six series:

• The Afterblight Chronicles, a post-apocalyptic setting in which cults and warlords run rampant over the survivors of a global plague.
• The Infernal Game, an espionage series incorporating elements of urban fantasy and gothic horror.
• No Man's World, an exploration story about a company of World War I soldiers inexplicably transported to an alien world.
• Pax Britannia, a steampunk alternate history in which a 160-year old Queen Victoria still governs the British Empire towards the end of the twentieth century.
• Tomes of the Dead, not a single shared world, but a series of stand-alone zombie stories marked by subversion or reinterpretation of the genre.
• Twilight of Kerberos, a "sword and sorcery" setting on a small world orbiting the gas giant Kerberos, inhabited by the remnants of lost civilisations.

A seventh series was announced in 2010, with the first title expected to reach the shelves in early 2011:

• Malory's Knights of Albion, a series of Arthurian stories supposedly drawn from Thomas Malory's unpublished sequel to Le Morte D'Arthur.

A further two series were launched in the imprint's first year, but have seen no new titles in at least three years:

• Dreams of Inan, a science fantasy series set on a futuristic world in which magic acts as a nuclear-style deterrent. The series concluded with The Worm That Wasn't in 2007.
• Sniper Elite, an alternate history based in the world of the Sniper Elite game. The series included only a single book, The Spear of Destiny, in 2006.