He’s writing a novel about a roving warband, and trying to figure out how such a thing would actually have worked historically.
He offered it to Tor and was enthusiastically accepted. (Which isn’t surprising, considering that Tor badly needs some kind of good news and popular author, after the black eye they’ve been giving themselves this year.)
Hopefully the boycott will be over by the time this book comes out, a few years from now.
I definitely don’t hate Tor, because I don’t hate its founder. I just think they have a serious personnel problem (ie, they hired jerks, or allowed nice people to become unprofessional jerks without reining them in).