This is an intensely personal story of a woman who masterminds the fall of the emperor who imprisoned her and the people who gave up everything to help her cause. It’s a brilliant short novella that tells an epic story of revenge and the fall of empire, as a historian and cleric interviews the one remaining witness who was in the room where it happened. And I’ve been heavily influenced in the last several years by writers writing epics, but at shorter lengths or using structures that aren’t typical for epic fantasy in western fiction.įor me, probably one of the best examples of epic storytelling at a shorter length is The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. The influx of new writers and new voices and established writers employing a greater range of storytelling styles and subjects has generated a lot of brilliant and original work. One of the things I love about the last decade or so in science fiction and fantasy is the way it has broken out of restrictive categories and storytelling conventions. I know I couldn’t have written this book ten years ago and I know it certainly wouldn’t have found a publisher. Then I realized the past and the present storylines were intertwined and equally important, to tell a story about found family and betrayal and fighting to preserve the world you fought so hard for. But to tell that story effectively, I realized I needed to show at least part of that past. The main characters are immortals with a deeply personal stake in their world, and even though the war is over, they find themselves in a deadly political battle to keep the alliance that defeated that empire from turning into an empire of its own. In the past of Witch King, a conquering genocidal empire has invaded a group of civilizations who had been living together in peace. Like The Cloud Roads, where Moon finds his people and the home he’s always been searching for, but that’s just the start of his problems. I’ve always liked stories that start after the classic happily-ever-after. What happens after the evil empire is defeated. When I started writing Witch King, I thought I was writing a story set in the aftermath of a multi-volume epic fantasy. But the secret is, you can write epic fantasy and science fiction at any length, using any structure you want. The typical image of an epic is a set of thick multi-volume novels.
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