Is the Death's Head series cancelled? Multiple emails to the author and to his publishing house have gone unanswered. Those of you familiar with the series will know that
there is very little to know about David Gunn. He writes incognito and his brief bio on the back cover asks more questions than it answers.
In his last interview Mr. Gunn said that he planned a number of further installments to the series. Given the long delay and lack of news one can only speculate that the series is, at the very least, on hold. Fare thee well Sven, or are you just on vacation?
44 comments:
Since Sven's gone into stasis, I have turned toward Gavin Smith's Veteran for my quota of space violence...
Veteran is so blandly written and the characters so uninteresting that I stopped reading before I hit the halfway mark.
Give me Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs or Sven any day.
Gunn's agent is:
http://www.miccheetham.com/
You could email them
My email to the Mic Cheetham Agency was a slapback from their automated spam filter.
Subject title was What happened to David Gunn?
I got a spam mail slapback from their inbox within hours
Seems they don't want to answer any questions about David Gunn either.
Now isn't this interesting:
The Death's Head novels are copyrighted to Gunnsmith Ltd.
The Mic Cheetham Literary agency is David Gunn's agent.
At the same street address/offices of Mic Cheetham is another publisher; The Marsh Agency, and yet another publisher; Gunn Media.
Ali Gunn is listed as the Managing Director.
http://www.writersservices.com/agent/uk09/Mic_Cheetham.htm
http://www.writersservices.com/agent/uk09/gunn_media.htm
I think it's obvious that these 3 companies are all one and the same. I also think it's obvious where David Gunn got his pen-name from.
I'm also now starting to doubt quite seriously if the author who calls himself David Gunn is telling the truth about his background as a private military contractor.
The Mic Cheetham agency refuses to respond to inquires regarding David Gunn. Why is that I wonder?
Most inquires are only fans asking if further Death's Head novels are in the works.
I cannot fathom why the agency refuses to answer queries about David Gunn and his writings.
Unless A: One of the people at the agency wrote the novels themselves and for whatever reason has decided to write no futher books in the series.
B: They have no way to contact David Gunn, which seems unlikely.
C: David Gunn was indeed a PMC and some awful mishap has befallen him.
I think that the Mic Cheetham agency should respond to inquires about their author. Even if it's only putting up a small note on their website.
Due to the amount of time that has passed since the last Death's Head novel was published it now seems unlikely we will be getting any more. And what interest those first three novels generated has now waned so much that David Gunn will have certainly lost a lot of potential readers.
I urge all of you to email the Mic Cheetham agency (as I have now done twice with no response) and ask why they refuse to respond to inquires about one of their more popular authors.
Please do let the rest of us know if the agency doesn't reply to you within say; two weeks. I think that is ample time for them to formulate a reply.
Ok i have done some digging and the best I can discover is the director and secretary of Gunnsmith Ltd (now inactive) is one Samantha Jayne Baker who also holds positions in a number of companies one being JonCG Ltd which also has a director called Jonathan David Giles Courtenay Grimwood.
The Company JonCG is listed as an Artistic and Literary Creation company with the same company address as Gunnsmith Ltd, also Jonathan is listed as an author.
Jonathan again is a director in a number of companies including the British Science Fiction Association ltd. (previous directors have been Iain Banks and Arthur Clarke!)
Searching for Jonathan leads me to Jon Courtenay Grimwood also an author who happens to be married to one Sam Baker writer journalist and editor in chief of Red magazine and they divide their time between London and Winchester.
Jon's website alludes to travelling and growing up in various countries but doesn't mention a military career.
I would conclude that Jon Courteney Grimswood is David Gunn, given that he is married to a lady with the same name as listed on company records and Gunnsmith ltd owns the copyright to David Gunn's books. It appears that he is alive and well and he has been concentrating on a number of other works.
All the above information is freely available through company records and didn't need registration with any web page.
Thanks for the detective work. I've been wondering where Death's Head 4 was since, well, Day of the Damned!
I was beginning to think I was the only one anxiously awaiting the next Death Head. I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Gunn is overesas somewhere.
David Gunn is John Courtnay Grimwood.
All that secret agent, covert operator stuff is just marketing.
Hey at least we know who to go to now for more great novels. Even though there might never be a new deaths head whos to say his other novels arent just as good.
I think it is a bunch of crap that more novels have not been written.
I think it's a bunch of crap as well.
Leave all your fans in limbo why don't you.
Sven's adventures could continue via eBook if no publisher is willing to pick up on the series.
I read one of JCG's Venice novels and found it utterly boring compared to the Death's Head books.
It's the same story with Richard Morgan...he writes 3 great Takeshi Kovacs novels, then says he's bored with the character and won't be writing any more.
Some of these authors need to learn what side their bread is buttered on.
I have been waiting for news about the fourth installment of Death's Head for quite a while now. I thoroughly enjoyed the first three books so far, and I am quite looking forward to additional adventures with Sven and the Aux. Here's keeping the fingers crossed for additional adventures!
I would like to start a petition to get more Death's Head books. If we had quite a few people donate to this cause, we could probably fund the book ourselves. I WANT MORE SVEN!!!!!
Interesting what you find when you start looking eh?
Who is David Gunn?
And as Swen might say "Where the fuck is my next book to read?"
Thanks to all the other Swen fans for putting in the hard yards. I'd have to agree for military sci-fi you don't get much better. Just the right amount of attitude, violence and bodily fluids.
I've had a crack at Neal Asher and Takeshi Kovac too, both are good but not the same.
My guess is the publisher didn't make enough on the series and the writer has other options.
Having said that: it must have been bloody good fun to write and that if nothing else might mean we get another instalment down the track.
Post up if you hear anything more.
Quote: "I would like to start a petition to get more Death's Head books. If we had quite a few people donate to this cause, we could probably fund the book ourselves." Unquote
There's really no need for fans to donate funds for another Death's Head novel.
An ebook is cheap to have formatted for the ebook platforms.
All David Gunn aka: JCG has to do is write another DH novel and upload it as an eBook and sell it for around $2.99.
This is what a lot of back-list or out of print authors are doing with their own works now.
I'm sure Gunn has thought of this himself.
I guess it just depends on how much one values the support of one's fans.
It seemed to me that Gunn was getting bored with the DH novels anyway...I say this because the ending of book three, where they go through a jump-gate and emerge somewhere else and the main bad guy is killed almost off-handedly smacks of rather lazy writing IMHO.
I'm sure we were all waiting for a showdown between Sven and him.
Plus, even though Sven's not quite human DNA is mentioned from book one, we're no wiser as to his origins or the reason for his peculiar genetic make-up.
One might think that by book three we'd at least be getting some explanations for his condition.
Again this is just my opinion, but I think Gunn was just making stuff up as he went along and didn't really have a clear idea of where he was going with the story or what was happening from one chapter to the next.
This works for some writers, but eventually one has to have a plan or the story just starts to wander all over the place.
Which is what I saw happening with book three.
The idea that there were 12 books planned for the series seems rather far-fetched; I just don't see the story as a whole being able to survive for 12 books.
But certainly another one or two books, to tie-up all the loose ends and let us know who and what Sven really is, and how he is linked to Octo-V would have been nice.
What's the difference who the author is? I just want to read next DH book... and the next one...
While you're waiting for another Sven book that will probably never happen check out:
ALF Warz: The Iron Sergeant on Amazon and Smashwords.
Military sci-fi action and adventure, written in exactly the same way as the Death's Head novels; First person, present tense.
Same fast paced, non-stop excitement from first page to last.
I agree. The Richard Morgan series that started with Altered Carbon was complex while being fun to read.
Gunn has has a somewhat similar style in that the pacing and action are non stop. I am trying to get the #2 and #3 books but the local store wants retail prices!
Are these books that rare?morning iderseu
Buy the print books from thebookdepository dot co dot UK...or dot com if you're in the USA.
Cheap cover prices and free postage worldwide.
Hey, to all those people bitching about the lack of the next book and the "all the author has to do..."
HAVE YOU EVER TRIED WRITING?
Sometimes, no matter how much fans love a series, the author has run dry on further stories for that character.
I'm also pretty certain he makes so little money from these books that it is NOT a question of "which side his bread is buttered on". Very very few authors make enough money to make a living from writing - do some math.
I have no published fiction as yet, working on it, but have published multiple technical articles and one book over the years. My opinion comes from having casually researched the income and marketing process for SF writing and followed people like John Birmingham who write about the process.
@Nano
Great. The well may have run dry. But do we KNOW that? No.
What do we know? We know that 5 years ago we were promised between 6 and 12 more books in the series. A series that had released a book roughly once per year.
Then nothing.
No apology, no explanation, no reason. It all just stopped. We'd supported the series, paid for the books and invested in the character.
And he can't even write a simple message explaining what happened, where he went or who he really was.
He wrote a story that he shared with us but thought we didn't deserve any explanation or closer.
That's pretty shitty.
Mr Gunn unfortunately has Dementia, hence the reason for no more books
If that's true, it's a great loss to us sci-fi fans. My sympathies to him and his family.
Mr Gunn has dementia?
Some of you have dementia, for sure, or an inability to read previous posts and understand their content.
There is no Mr Gunn.
David Gunn is a pen name for Jon Courtnay Grimwood, award winning UK sci-fi author.
Any more news? Will there be a fourth book? I've just finished the first and looked forward to more. Then I read that there's no news at all about even a fourth book , much less the nine to twelve total expected.... and no news whatsoever from the author or publisher. That's extremely odd and disappointing. Does someone know something?
David Gunn AKA Jon Courtenay Grimwood AKA Jonathan Grimwood wrote a book called red Robe in 2000 about a guy and his sentient gun. He gave up on Sen and wrote a book called The Final Blade and followed by multiple books of that series. So, read The Final Blade.
Correction! The book is called Fallen Blade
Sorry to resurrect this thread bud since it doesn't look like we'll be getting anymore of Sven, what are you folks falling back on to get your fix of violence and psychopaths in the sci-fi universe? God I miss Sven. Takeshi Kovacs is the only thing that comes close.
Wikipedia lists his birth as 1912, which means he began writing the weries at about the age of 85. I hope it's only a joke, part of his pseudonym as David Gunn, or else I doubt we'll be seeing any more.
Still wondering about Sven in 2017!
2018 and I've just finished rereading my three Deaths Head novels...really bummed that I never got a 4th...
just re reading the DH novels for about the 4th time maximum offence. Rachels just been whipped by Haze for abandoning her position. Easy exiting reading that you don't need a PHD to understand like with some authors.
Great stuff.
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned or how relevant it is to the production of another book, but, Ali Gunn who set up Gunn Media died in February 2014.
I would also speculate that the SS like motifs of the fictional Death's Head units might have gotten push back in Europe, where there are a lot of laws about that stuff.
and Gavin Smith's 1st book was OK, then it just got stupid in the book.
Today, after reminiscing about the Death's head trilogy, I decided to try and email Jon Grimwood. And ask him about any further plans for Sven and the Aux.
If I get a reply, I will let you know.....
I love this series fuck I hope we get more
I read a blurb in a Sci-fi magazine back in 2015? that said David Gunn had taken his own life.
Anyone hear back from Jon Grimwood or can confirm if he was the true author of these books?
Anyone heard back from Jon Grimwood?
Anyone heard back from Jon Grimwood?
We still want Death’s Head #4!
Ive read the 3X books numerous times cuz the characters are great. WHERES THE 4TH / 5 & 6TH AS PROMISED DAVID GUNN !!!
Hello all!
Is SAD! That there's no more Death's Head Novels! [Than the 3 ]
And since the last Novel was published? We could had half a dozen, or more to Read, and I Truly wish it Were So!
All of us fans have been left hanging since! How many Years has it been? ! ??
It seems like we would know more, about the Mysterious Author, and what his Future Intents, 🤔 & Novels would be!
It is true!
That He took our monies, and has promised Us all, many more Books for all to read! !
What the Heck!
So very disappointing TO HAVE NONE of HIS PROMISED FUTURE NOVELS, in this Sci-Fi Series!
Hopefully the Author is about to cut loose with a Dozen, or More, E-BooXx for our Reading Enjoyments! Amen!
Glad to see, that there are still some others equally hopeful for Adventures of Sven, and his Illegal A.I. Pistol, and OctoV, and FarLight, & the Empire!
WAITING IS........
DO YOU GROK..........? REMEMBER THE FORCE!
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