Tor.com revealed the cover for Brian Staveley’s The Last Mortal Bond, and it’s gorgeous.
Like the first two volumes in the trilogy, The Last Mortal Bond features the artwork of the always awesome Richard Anderson. As much as I liked the first two covers, this one might be my favourite of them all. The blood red highlights and the morass of greys fits perfectly with Anderson’s impressionistic style. It’s engaging and visceral, and, in a sea of same-y covers, manages to use common fantasy cover tropes (wounded soldiers, menacing beasts, blood) but makes them interesting again. Bravo to Anderson and the art team at Tor Books.
“This is hands-down my favorite of Anderson’s three covers for the series,” Staveley told Tor.com. “It captures so many things that are central to the book: the desperation, the camaraderie, and the sheer skull-splitting badassery of the Kettral.”
The Last Mortal Bond is the conclusion to Staveley’s Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne trilogy, and wraps up the deadly struggles of the siblings, Kaden, Adare, and Valyn, around whom the series revolves.
The Last Mortal Bond will hit store shelves sometime in 2016.
“Guess how long the space ships are in this book!”
“Guess how long the space ships are in this book!”
The conversation often starts something like this. Sometimes it’s, “Guess how many different genders are in this world!” or, “Guess what Gwenna just discovered about Annick!”
I’m not the person asking. My husband poses these questions, and it is my job to answer them. If I don’t guess correctly, I’ll get another opportunity in a few minutes, a few hours, a day or two. When he’s reading a new book, each masterful bit of world-building is fodder for a conversation like this one. When he’s writing a new scene, each plot point or moment of character development is an opportunity for a pop-quiz.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Half a galaxy long?” I think this is a plausibly impressive size, given his enthusiasm, given the volume and intensity with which he has asked the question. He knows that I cannot tell a furlong from a parsec, but he refuses to believe that a person can live in the world without understanding basic measurement and scale. Read More »
“The thing is,” I pointed out, “It’s all work. This is work.”
“The thing is,” I pointed out reasonably, “I’m working even when my fingers aren’t physically pressing the keys.” I pointed helpfully at my head, trying to indicate the furious labor going on inside. “Writing is not a linear process. It’s all work. This is work.”
My argument might have been more compelling if I hadn’t been standing in my boxer shorts at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon drinking an IPA and watching the local porcupine trying to snag that last apple without falling out of the tree.
“You may be working,” Jo replied, “but I want to punch you really hard in the neck.”
It seemed like an uncharitable thing to say to a man who was hard at work writing his second novel. It seemed doubly uncharitable given that Jo is my wife, and that our division of labor – the very division that led me to be standing on the porch in my boxers in the first place – was something we had hammered out together, something we had both happily embraced.
I pointed this out. The things she said next were even less charitable. Read More »
Publisher: Tor Books -
Pages: 480 -
Buy: Book/eBook
As epic fantasies so often do The Emperor’s Blades, a debut novel from Brian Stavely, begins with the death of a ruler, and continues to follow the fall-out as it consumes his realm and children. This pattern should be familiar to readers of everything from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, to David Anthony Durham’s Acacia Trilogy. In this case, Staveley begins with three children — two male heirs, Kaden and Valyn, and a daughter suited to rule in all ways but her gender, Adare. The boys are gone from court, sent away by their father to learn at the feet of other masters, both to groom them for rule and protect them from the court’s conspiracies. Kaden, first in line for the throne, is a monk. Not the sexy D&D-type, with fists of stone, but rather a contemplative ascetic seeking to understand the world from a different perspective. Valyn lives a different life among the Kettral, the Empire’s special forces. Most of the Staveley’s narrative is concerned with the brothers’ conflicts: Kaden to realize a state of mind his father sent him to learn, and Valyn to find acceptance in an elite brotherhood. Of course, the impact of their father’s death resonates throughout their stories, but only in an overarching way. The Emperor’s Blades is very much a coming of age story, and less about the epic struggle for the Unhewn Throne and the fate of the world. Read More »
