Author Archives: Michael

The Red Scholar’s Wake – Aliette de Bodard

A standalone novel set within her expansive Xuya universe, Aliette de Bodard’s sapphic space opera The Red Scholar’s Wake is a gripping, moving tale of pirates, sentient ships, murky political waters and complex, often painful relationships. When scavenger and talented bot-controller Xich Si is captured by cruel pirates of the Red Banner, rather than an agonising death she receives an unexpected proposition – a marriage proposal, in fact. The leader of the Red Banner has been killed, and her widow – the mindship Rice Fish – is offering Xich Si a lifeline: enter into a partnership together, help find who killed the Red Scholar, and Rice Fish will protect and provide for Xich Si. Seeing no option but to accept, she finds herself entangled in a lethal piratical power struggle, and quickly comes to question what her new partnership really entails.

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Sea Hunters: Shonisaurus – William Meikle

The first book in a new series of seafaring creature feature novellas, William Meikle’s Sea Hunters: Shonisaurus is a briskly-paced, action-packed blast of oceanic monster-hunting fun. Ex-Royal Navy lieutenant John Seton and his motley crew are international monster hunters-for-hire, and when they’re commissioned to hunt down the beast that destroyed a handful of multi-million-dollar yachts, it seems like a simple job given their skills and expertise. This beast might not be John’s great white whale, the obsession that has driven him ever onwards since his fateful departure from the Navy, but a job’s a job and the money’s good. It’s only once they’re in the thick of the action, however, that they realise their quarry might not make this an easy hunt after all.

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QUICK REVIEW: Lepidopterophobia – Dan Abnett

First released in the special edition hardback of Penitent and then included in the Inferno! Presents: The Inquisition anthology, Dan Abnett’s Lepidopterophobia is a slow, sinister tale featuring Medea Betencore, and a welcome addition to the large collection of short stories that support and enhance the Eisenhorn/Ravenor/Bequin trilogy of Inquisition trilogies. Best read after Pariah to avoid spoilers for that novel, it sees Medea scouring the city of Queen Mab for information that might help her and her master Gregor Eisenhorn understand or even locate the mysterious King in Yellow. When the discovery of an unusual tome in one of Queen Mab’s many book markets leads her into the maze-like stacks of a dark and dust-laden store, little does she realise she will soon have to face her oldest fear, amongst other things, simply in order to stay alive.

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Author Spotlight: Steven B. Fischer

Hello and welcome to this Author Spotlight interview where today I’m chatting to Steven B. Fischer, who may be familiar to Track of Words readers from his Warhammer 40,000 short stories in Inferno!, and his upcoming Black Library novel Witchbringer. With his novel still a little way off, I thought it was a good time to get to know Steve as an author – what he likes to write, how writing for Black Library compares to working on his own IPs, and what it is that appeals about grimdark fiction in particular. We also chat a bit about Witchbringer, just to give you a sense of what you can expect when it arrives later in the year!

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Matthew Farrer Talks Urdesh – Part Two

Hello and welcome to the second part of my in-depth interview with author Matthew Farrer, where we’re taking quite a detailed (but still mostly spoiler-free) look at his Urdesh duology for Black Library. In the first part (which you can read here) Matthew talked about the journey that these books went on (they weren’t originally commissioned as a duology!), and what it was like contributing novel-length stories to the Sabbat Worlds series. In this second part we’re going to look in a bit more detail at some of Matthew’s writing process for these books, from structure and pace (by way of the Discworld) and perspective-hopping to how to really portray the speed and power of Space Marines in motion (by way of Captain America), and what it was like collaborating with both the BL editors and fellow author Dan Abnett.

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Monthly Roundup – August 2022

Hello and welcome to August’s Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. To my considerable surprise, August was a pretty busy month for me in terms of writing and getting things posted, but I’ve just been going with the flow and enjoying being in a productive mood! I spent slightly less time reading than last month (albeit still plenty of time), but quite a bit more time writing, spurred I think by some nice surprises that I’ll talk about shortly. As always, I’ll recap all of the reviews and interviews that I’ve posted over the last few weeks, and then write up a few thoughts about the month as a whole for a general update later on.

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Queen of Eventide – Matthew Ward

First released in 2015 but with a nice new cover and an audiobook edition published in 2022, Matthew Ward’s Queen of Eventide explores the history, folklore and mythology of Nottingham in a bleak and mist-shrouded tale of the fantastical bleeding over into the real world. Returning to Nottingham in search of a fresh start, Maddie Lincoln finds only painful memories and unsettling dreams. Those dreams come to terrifying life when she finds herself drawn into a strange world of fearsome hunters and mythical figures, as the hidden realm of Eventide begins to overlap with her own comfortable reality. Nothing has prepared Maddie for being caught up in a magical conflict spanning centuries, but the strange laws and terrible truths of Eventide reveal in her a strength she didn’t realise she possessed.

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Matthew Farrer Talks Urdesh – Part One

Welcome to part one of this in-depth interview, where I’m genuinely delighted to be talking to author Matthew Farrer and going into quite a lot of detail discussing his Urdesh duology from Black Library. After something of a long gestation, Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint was released in June 2021, followed a few months later by Urdesh: The Magister and the Martyr. Between them these two books – telling a single overarching story, really – explore a crucial part of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade from a brand new perspective, as the Iron Snakes and Saint Sabbat lead the armies of the Imperium in the war for Urdesh against the forces of the Anarch. With both books now available in paperback, it seemed the perfect moment to chat to Matthew about the unusual journey that this story has taken and the books that are available now as a result.

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The Twice-dead King: Ruin – Nate Crowley

Having tackled necrons once already in his phenomenal Black Library novella Severed, it felt inevitable that Nate Crowley would turn his hand to a full-length novel exploring this lesser-seen (in BL terms) 40k faction, so it’s a welcome bonus that The Twice-dead King: Ruin is in fact the first volume in a necron duology! After three hundred years of exile to a dismal outpost of a once-great dynasty, necron lord Oltyx is mired in bitterness at his reduced circumstances. When a vast ork invasion turns out to be the sign of an even greater doom to come however, Oltyx realises that his only hope – for himself, and for the dynasty itself – is to return home and break his exile. Determined to at least make the attempt, he sets out to rouse his brother and father on the dynasty’s homeworld, regardless of the personal costs he knows he will incur.

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Outgunned – Denny Flowers

Denny Flowers’ second Black Library novel Outgunned takes to the skies with a tale of picts, propaganda, underestimated xenos and the aerial might of the Aeronautica Imperialis. On the agri world of Bacchus – famed for its wine production – an infestation of orks has rapidly progressed from a minor irritation to all-out war, and Imperial forces are making slow progress. When Imperial Propagandist Kile Simlex arrives on Bacchus, tasked with recording a motivational pict to inspire confidence and aid recruitment, he finds little as he expected. His intended subject – Flight Commander Lucille von Shard – proves not quite the dashing hero he imagined, while the orks are far from the mindless wretches portrayed in the picts he’s seen. As he wrestles with questions of how to capture his pict and how to craft a suitable narrative, the war for Bacchus becomes increasingly desperate.

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