…ttered Wings | Book 2. The House of Binding Thorns | Book 3. The House of Sundering Flames | Book 3.5. Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders | Book 3.6. Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances The Dominion of the Fallen Reading Order (Complete) 0.2. “Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship” | 0.5. “In Morningstar’s Shadow” | 0.6. “Against the Encroaching Darkness” | 0.7. “The Death of Aiguillon” | 0.8 “Court of Birth, Court of Strength” | 0.9. “The House, in Winter”…
…A story of feral AIs, flooded Vietnam, and the lands of the Spill… Locus Award finalist, 2020, Best Short Story It was a quiet stretch of the Red River: glistening waters that parted under my legs, and the damaged karst pillars rising on either side of me like fallen fortresses, and the remnants of the pre-Spill factories: the sharp fragments of faceted domes, the corroded walls, the forlorn ruins of the era of unbridled excesses….
…Came back from Brittany, slowly digging my way out of emails and various stuff. The novel is now at 68K words; I’m taking a brief break to research a city my main character has to visit, and hopefully I’ll swing back into the spirit of things. (I think I’ve figured out why Brittany works out so well for me: nothing to do but write, since there’s no Internet. New Year’s resolution for 2010: cut down on the WWW addiction…)…
…t be on another planet. On the phone, your aunt’s voice is breezy, telling you not to worry–that she’ll find a visa and a plane ticket, that she knows someone who knows someone who can give her a hand with the formalities of the High Commission for Refugees. Behind her, you hear the dull thud of bombs falling like rain on a tin roof–the same sound that swells and roars within your dreams until you wake up in a room that feels deathly silent. Where…
…to calm him down. He’s slightly nauseous, as when he’s had too much rice wine to drink—and he wonders why they never get easier, these carryings….
…th of Mictlan’s Well, caught that glint in her eyes–and stopped, watching the stranger approach, a growing hollow in her stomach. Beneath her were the vibrations of the Well, like a calm, steady heartbeat running through the ground: the voice of the rails that coiled around the shaft of the Well, bearing their burden of copper and bronze ever downwards. Er. An Aztec steampunk story, I guess? Written with what was clearly an excess of inspiration,…
Going into the mountains had never been easy. Even in Rechan’s first adult years, when the war was slowly burning itself to smouldering embers, every Spring Festival had been a slow migration in armed vehicles, her aunts and uncles frequently stopping in every roadside shop, taking stock of what ambushes or roadblocks might lie ahead. The war might be over–or almost so, the planet largely at peace, the spaceports disgorging a steady stream of Gal…
…A Xuya universe story, forthcoming in David Brin’s and Stephen W Potts’s Chasing Shadows. Domestic drama, children, and the price of the future… Where to Buy Indiebound Buy Now…
…veloped a rather… unorthodox method for testing people’s identities and credentials. The brief for Carbide Tipped Pens was to centre the story around a given science: I picked something I’m exceedingly familiar with, probabilities and applied mathematics. Expect… way too many probability distributions and goodness-of-fit tests, a mindship-human partnership, and funky things with memory encryption and advanced cyphers (also, the usual family/postco…
Quynh Ha had expected the Dust Queen to be… tall and large, filling the room with her mere presence. But the woman sitting before her was old and frail–breathing, it was clear, only with the help of the bots clinging to her throat; her skin as pale and translucent as the best jades; the skin of her hands bearing the peculiar tightness of too many rejuv treatments. A story set in the near future, dealing with the terraformation of Mars, the floodi…
