it's the principal source of his revenue
nostalgicI'm seven chapters into Max Gladstone's Full Fathom Five.
This motherfucker isn't even thirty yet, and he's writing like this?
I'm having him killed.
There's your blurb, Max: "I'm having Max Gladstone killed. He's too good already to be allowed to live. If this is early work, the rest of us are out of a job."
He writes like a bitter fifty-year-old poet with a sense of narrative, and I mean that as the highest praise.
The Craft Sequence books are all about ancient necromancers in charge of corporations; liches running litigation; court battles fought by means of sorcerous contests; deities dueling by means of legal proxies and stock trading souls.
It's fantasy as a metaphor for the full metastatic flower of late-stage capitalism, and it's both vicious satire and totally engaging adventure all at once.
The book comes out in July, so you just about have time to score and read the first two, Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise.
If you get a chance to play his Choice of the Deathless, it's a... choose-your-own-adventure set in that universe, basically. It's very well-worth the couple hours to play through. He's obviously thought about how interactive narrative works at a meta level, and he gives you access to the narrative at that level in the game without breaking the immersion. Immensely well-done.
Ahem: see also some guy's book titled "The Rhesus Chart", coming this July. (Just saying.)
Yeah, let's run a kickstarter for the assassination squad, m'kay?
Also on the hit list, Benedict Jacka. Similar age, British, sub-Jim Butcher but showing a lot of promise. We really need to kill these kids off before they crush us with their prose and expose us as the middle-aged hacks we are, yes?
I like books one and three best so far.
And maybe find a time pocket so I can read everything on my to-read bookshelf.