Hiero's Answer

Publisher's blurb for the 2025 UK ebook states "Finally completed by Sterling Lanier's goddaughter Lucy Cummin, Hiero Desteen's legend reaches its epic conclusion, more than fifty years after he was first introduced to the world." A much earlier (2020?) comment on Tor.com/Reactor by Lucy Andrews Cummin states:

...I have recently finished a final edit of the last book, Hiero's Answer. Orion has expressed a strong interest in reprinting book one and the second and mine as e-books. (Tor (ahem) turned down the whole enterprise). No counting of chickens, etc. for by now Orion may have changed their minds as this edit took an unconscionably long time. ... From him I had seventy pages and a very very sketchy bit of what can't be quite called an outline, more like ... thoughts, but I took what I had and ran. Sterling had a more or less eidetic memory and great imagination so one of the challenges for me was reading through his reference library for ideas, inspiration and information.

Data from Amazon UK, Kobo (GB) and publisher's site as of 2025-11-04; updated as of 2025-11-11. Print length of 813 pages listed by Amazon UK. Price is RRP as listed at publisher's site; price at Kobo (GB): £5.99. This Reddit post indicates an originally solicited publication date of 2024-09-12. As of early November 2025 it was listed with a publication date of 2025-11-06, however as of 2025-11-11, Amazon UK states that it is "Currently unavailable", and Kobo (GB) returns an error for the URL it was previously at. This Twitter post indicates that Amazon cancelled preorders on that scheduled day of publication. The publisher's website subsequently listed a publication date of 5th February 2026. The product listing metadata has the authors as Sterling E. Lanier and Lucy Andrews Cummin, but the cover image only shows Sterling Lanier (no middle initial).