…politics. Notable characters from Silverspires: Selene’s lover, the archivist Emmanuelle; Javier, the House’s priest (and resident Spanish-French) who acts as Selene’s right hand; Madeleine, the geeky alchemist who provides the House with its magical artifacts; and Isabelle, a newly arrived and naive Fallen. Previous iterations of this: 1. Meet nuked Paris 2. The Fallen 3. The Houses 4. The Immortals 5. The Colonies Read Chapter One! Read excerpt…

…hness and self-centredness, and negates the value of teams and of building communities around us, in a way that I find troubling. A corollary of this narrative is that, very often, the Chosen One can do no wrong: how could they, when they have been anointed by the plot? There are far too many Hollywood movies in which the hero does the exact same thing as the villain and isn’t lambasted for it because he’s the hero and the rules don’t apply to him…

…tions that we share on what, for want of a better word, I think of as the human continuum. And, given that a few centuries ago people of a different colour or gender or creed were thought of as no better than beasts, I’m certainly not going to complain at the impulse to declare us all part of the same species. At the same time… I think the main problem I have with the above sentences is that they’re too reductive: they go straight to what they see…

…haracter in the narration; and said male character can be a bachelor with distant/non-existent female relatives, and no one will blink an eye. Et voilà, you’ve just managed to handily remove women from the narration. There is also a very clear separation between our daily work spheres and what we get up to at home: compare this with the Sherlock Holmes stories, in which this line is more blurred. It’s not that people didn’t have day jobs (there ar…

…family rather than being linked to it by blood). So not quite what I want to be studying intensively… In other news, work has started again on the novella that wouldn’t die (complete redraft), so I’m going to be scarce this week. And, hum, the week after (which is Christmas anyway)….

…ually, I only learnt they were mindmaps after I started using them. I have downloaded Freemind on the computer (neat cross-platform tool), but for some reasons mindmaps work better for me on paper–one of the rare things that still does. So I take a huge A4, and draw little circles and little arrows, et voilà! Suddenly all my problems vanish. Ha, I wish. But what usually happens is that I get past whatever had me stumped (in this particular, a trou…

…Audible.com has released the audiobook version of Servant of the Underworld. You can download it here. The rest of the series is upcoming: Harbinger of the Storm on March 4th, and Master of the House of Darts on March 7th….

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…Nhi’s hands. The khi currents of water, faint lines of blue light, seemed undisturbed. They curled, lazily, along the wide paths of pockmarked gravel, around the wide trees whose trunks were flecked with fungus, and stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing wrong. Still nothing he could put his finger on. And yet … “Unka Thuan!” He forced a smile he didn’t feel. “Yes?” Ai Nhi’s aunt, Vinh Ly, was in Thuan’s retinue, part of the dragon court who had co…

…igger-scale than Chasm City. Who or what is moving the various factions around Sylveste? Why did the Amarantin die? And who is Sun Stealer, the shipbound entity that drives people mad? The end did feel like it dragged on for slightly too long, but the worldbuilding is masterful, and the plot is impressively constructed and orchestrated. And it was Reynolds’ first novel, too. I am in awe. (and will go look for subsequent volumes in the series). Val…