Tag Archives: magic

Christmas is coming early for one of Mal Catlyn’s fans… One of the (many) cool things about Angry Robot Books is that they now publish an audiobook version of all their titles, simultaneously with the paperback and ebook. This is a great thing for both authors and readers, since there are a lot of fantasy  Continue Reading »

Babylon Steel is the eponymous heroine of Gaie Sebold’s debut fantasy novel, an ex-mercenary turned madam of a moderately up-market brothel. Desperate for an injection of cash to pay for her girls’ expensive tastes, Madam Steel takes on a commission from suave gambling-den owner Darash Fain to locate a missing girl, and unsurprisingly finds herself  Continue Reading »

About this time last year I reviewed the first volume in Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, The Blade Itself, having enjoyed it immensely. However with all the other demands on my time since I signed my own book deal, it’s taken me since then to get around to the second volume, Before They Are Hanged. Warning:  Continue Reading »

Dev is an outrider: a talented mountaineer who helps scout out potential rockslides and avalanches for merchant convoys crossing the Whitefire Mountains. He also has a nice sideline smuggling illegal magical items from the mage city of Ninavel across the border into Alathia. But when he’s asked to smuggle a person across the border—a young  Continue Reading »

Yesterday I came across an article about creating a magic system for your novel, and on impulse tweeted to say that I disliked the phrase “magic system” when applied to written fiction. This sparked a lively debate, and afterwards I thought it would be fun to codify my conclusions in a set of rules. OK,  Continue Reading »

Casket of Souls is the sixth installment in Lynn Flewelling’s long-running Nightrunner series of fantasy novels set in a roughly 17th/18th-century-esque milieu. Whilst recent books have seen protagonists Seregil and Alec travelling widely, Casket of Souls finds them back on familiar territory in the city of Rhiminee, and back to their old ways. Seregil, a very minor nobleman  Continue Reading »

Since I’m trying to read more books this year, I’ve decided to take these book reviews out of my weekly schedule (in which posts go out every Tuesday) and post them on an irregular Friday schedule as and when I finish a book. Hopefully that’ll be at least monthly, but it’s likely to vary. The  Continue Reading »

The White Road is the fifth installment in Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series, and concludes the story arc begun in Shadows Return. Having escaped the clutches of Plenimaran alchemist Charis Yakhobin, Alec and Seregil are faced with the problem of what to do about Sebrahn, the child-like alchemical being who can kill as well as heal. The  Continue Reading »

I like to vary my reading diet a little, and having come across the charming Ms Cooper on Twitter and discovered her to be a fellow aficionado of the blade, I couldn’t resist her debut fantasy novel, Songs of the Earth, published earlier this year by Gollancz. Gair has been raised by the Church to  Continue Reading »

This weekend I was lucky enough to attend BristolCon 2011, a small SFF convention in the lovely city of Bristol (where I went to university). There were a few reasons for going: to see my alma mater again; to catch up with convention buddies; and of course to honour the memory of the late Colin  Continue Reading »