Like our world, the world of Sleeping Dragon has a phonetic alphabet. However, given that world’s history, the words chosen are rather different. A – Amulet B – Bard C – Candle D – Dagger E – Elven F – Flame G – Griffin H – Hammer I – Ice J – Jade K –…

The cast of the Sleeping Dragon is an ensemble one, featuring five misfits bought together by circumstances beyond their understanding, who swiftly realise that only by working together can they work out just what the hell’s going on and, more importantly, just how the hell they can get out of it. In this post we…

“Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.” – M. John Harrison When writing a fantasy or science fiction novel, authors generally find themselves engaging in quite a lot of world building in an effort to create a world of depth and detail sufficient that the resulting story…

The cast of the Sleeping Dragon is an ensemble one, featuring five misfits bought together by circumstances beyond their understanding, who swiftly realise that only by working together can they work out just what the hell’s going on and, more importantly, just how the hell they can get out of it. In this post we…

The cast of the Sleeping Dragon is an ensemble one, featuring five misfits bought together by circumstances beyond their understanding, who swiftly realise that only by working together can they work out just what the hell’s going on and, more importantly, just how the hell they can get out of it. In this post we…

The world of Sleeping Dragon is an ancient one. For several tens of millennia, civilisations had risen and fallen, with each new civilisation built upon the foundations of the old. In times of old, adventurers would venture east over the World’s End Mountains and into the wild, untamed wilderness that lay beyond, in search of…

Like many a fantasy world before it, the Sleeping Dragon is an analogue of our own Europe. I could give some kind of academic style answer to that, involving much talk of metaphor and historic analogue, but the truth is that since the Sleeping Dragon has elements of a comic fantasy novel, one in which…

Sleeping Dragon’s world is a world of magic, not electricity, with the universal laws of magic explaining that universe in much the same way that physics explains ours. The devices that Sleeping Dragon’s civilisation is built upon are powered by magic, having been designed by mage-programmers and mass-produced in factories. In our world, one word…

The Sleeping Dragon, my third novel, is set in what I call a “post-Tolkienesque” world. Five hundred years previously, it possessed all the standard trappings of a typical fantasy setting – kings, wizards, warriors, magic, dwarves, dragons, and elves who’d been so pissed off at the rise of men that they’d sodded off over a…