As soon as I finished writing the post I went and looked at a newspaper clipping (my mom is obsessed with those, I get new ones every time I visit) with a recent interview of CRZ for the release of Marina in French earlier this year and his plan is still for four books. He's still being very vague if the upcoming ones will be sequels or prequels and still answers "well, neither really and like the first two there will be both little treats and small disadvantages in choosing to read them in publication over chronological order.".

Can you believe I bought SOTW based on your review but haven't got to read it yet, then I bought the Angel's Game when it came out in French and added it to the pile. I think I'll read one of these two next, now that I'm 20 pages away from the end of (the immensely enjoyable and very well-crafted, but IMO not as "brilliant and original" as the spanish reviews made it) "El Mapa del tiempo". It seems it might have benefited from its mainstream success (a bit like Suzanna Clarke) and reviewers who aren't all that knowledgeable in what genre lit. already offers. It's fun, in a Jules Verne meets Victorian Steampunk meets Swift with a playful and slightly ironic narrator kind of way - and dividing it in three episodes going back and forth in time is clever, but masterpiece is pushing it (it would make a clever and funny movie, though).

NB: And this bit of review is especially over the top: "The Map of Time is a singularly inventive, luscious story with a core of pure, unsettling weirdness. With unnerving grace and disturbing fantasy, it effortlessly straddles that impossible line between being decidedly familiar, and yet absolutely new.”

I wonder what a reviewer well versed in the New Weird and Magical Realism like would have to say about "unsettling weirdness" and "disturbing fantasy" (reading that I could also not help but think the famous "map of time" has already been seen pretty much exactly as depicted, the cloth line with clippings, the color code and all, on Heroes. It reminds me a lot of the over the top reviews of Clarke, that saluted as deeply original her use of Fairy folklore, like the fairy paths, that we've seen over and over in all shapes and forms in post-Tolkien Fantasy (if rarely in her type of novel, which was its originality and charm).

Twenty pages to the end I didn't know Map of Time was the first volume of a trilogy, though (though I was starting to wonder how he would conclude it without a rushed ending...sounds like cliffhanger will be the answer).