Catastrophe’s Spell, although extremely humourous is also an engaging, interesting story and an excellent start to the Dance of Gods series. I would very much like to see this book back in print.

Why was The Dance of Gods such a hard sell when it came out? Some possible reasons:

• Too much plot and too many characters: the books are built around a sprawling crowd of raffish characters, too smart by half for their own good and more than a little self-reflective, in a series of overlapping and colliding storylines. Some of the cast members who appear in the first book in the series, Spell of Catastrophe (originally published as Catastrophe’s Spell), include:

Maximillian, the Vaguely Disreputable – free-lance adventurer and nostalgic technologist

The Creeping Sword – hard-boiled nom-de-plume

Zalzyn Shaa – physician, occasional bureaucrat, and man with a curse

The Great Karlini – research thaumaturge

The former Lion of the Oolvaan Plain – retired barbarian

Jurtan Mont – youth with an unusually melodic seizure disorder

Haddo – animal wrangler and pilot

Assorted gods, revolutionaries, insurgents, servitors, and cataclysms – the traditional cast of thousands

• Insufficient reverence for traditional tropes: for example, many of the characters are less than impressed by the use of magic. Rather than experiencing a sense of wonder, they’re more likely to respond to a spell casting with a muttered “yeah, whatever,” and try to bang you over the head with a skillet while your invocation is still taking shape.

• An approach to magic more suited to engineers or programmers than mystics: more procedure-based than object-oriented, perhaps, but communing with nature is usually the last thing on these practitioners’ minds. For that matter, I’m not sure the combination of magic-code hackers, molecular nanotech, and network-mediated consensual reality of the gods is something that could ever be summarized on a back-of-the-book blurb.

• No grand battles between good and evil: more of a struggle between self-interest and unintended consequences.

• Too funny to be serious and too serious to be funny: it’s the characters, really, not me! Not my fault they approach their roles with a jaundiced eye and a sarcastic streak…