My new novel, Quillifer, has received its first review, or at least the first review that anyone’s bothered to tell me about.  From Publishers Weekly:

09/11/2017
In this sprawling, lively episodic adventure, Williams (Angel Station) returns to his swashbuckling historical fantasy roots while exploring new territory. Eighteen-year-old Quillifer, a butcher’s son and legal apprentice, lives a life of ease and pleasure in the city of Ethlebight, in the fictional realm of Duisland. When Ethlebight is sacked by a foreign fleet and his family is killed, Quillifer embarks on a journey that encompasses bandits, illicit affairs, royal intrigue, and civil war. The primary magical element is a (sometimes frustratingly) capricious nymph who frees Quillifer from captivity. Quillifer’s wit and cleverness get him into almost as much trouble as they get him out of, but well-placed friends and plenty of good luck serve him well. The setting often feels more like a thinly disguised version of medieval Europe than a truly original world, but Williams excels at setting up conflicts and other entanglements, skillfully maneuvering Quillifer across the landscape and into increasingly engrossing situations. (Oct.)

Replace “medieval” with “Tudor” and I can’t disagree (much).

Quillifer’s official release date is October 3.  You can pre-order it at your friendly local bookstore, or find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, iBooks, and Kobo.

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Hope you’re all having a pleasant weekend, doing pleasant weekend-like things.  Like sailing.

This isn’t my boat, unfortunately, but I snapped its picture during my Northern jaunt, as it sailed past a bastion of Suomenlinna, also known as Sveaborg, the gigantic island fortress outside Helsinki harbor.  Despite being known as the Gibraltar of the North, the fortress was the site of a number of military disasters that culminated in its surrender to the Russians.  It didn’t do so well for the Russians, either.

The fortress survives in its beautiful setting, and is now demilitarized and full of tourists.  It also has at least one first-rate restaurant, where I had a very fine lunch.  Unfortunately nobody offered me a ride in a sailboat.

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Looking back on my summer of travel, I found these photos of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg.  Commissioned by Alexander I, the cathedral took 40 years to build, and produced a saying in Finnish: “Rakentaa kuin Iisakin kirkkoa,” “to build like Isaac’s Church,” meaning to take forever to complete some vast, ungainly, overdesigned project.

Like St. Petersburg, the building of which cost the lives of tens of thousands of serfs, St. Isaac’s is build on the bodies of its workers: 60 alone died from mercury poisoning while gilding the dome.  No doubt they died willingly, and are now rejoicing in Heaven.

Everything inside is slathered with ornament: gold leaf, frescoes, precious marbles, bronze doors, huge pillars of red granite and malachite.  As is usual with Orthodox churches, there are no freestanding statues inside (a remnant of the Iconoclastic Controversy), but there are plenty of angels and whatnot on the exterior.

The church cost 1,000,000 gold rubles, a fabulous sum for the time, much of it spent on ornament.  The building is so over-ornamented that it verges on bad taste, and the only thing I’ve seen to compare is St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which seemed to me less a church than God’s Football Stadium.

I found the frescoes to be an uneasy mixture of Byzantine and Western styles, as if Rafael had taken up painting ikons.  It didn’t work for me.

There was a service going on in one of the side chapels while I was there.  The choral singing was nothing short of magnificent, and the small devout crowd knew the words and joined in.  If I were to be converted to Orthodoxy, it would be the singing that would do it, not the lashings of gold.  The service itself featured a lot of bowing and kissing of the Scriptures, rather repetitious.

A few days later we dined at Gastronomika, a trendy fusion restaurant, the sort that serves tom yum, borscht, Texas-style BBQ, and pizza all on the same menu.  Gastronomika is on the roof of Gazprom, a striking modern glass cathedral dedicated to the extraction and sale of natural gas. The restaurant is essentially across the street from St. Isaac’s, and put us on the same level as the golden dome and the gilded angels guarding it.

I don’t remember my meal, except that it was expensive and I enjoyed it, but I remember the view, and the golden angels glowing in the light of the sun that, in July, hardly set at all.

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The Book of Swords, edited by Gardner Dozois and with my story “The Triumph of Virtue,” is now available for pre-order.  You can order the book at your favorite local bookstore, or via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or (for ebook only) Google, Kobo, or iBooks.  The release date is October 10, but why wait?

You might actually want to have a hardback of this, because of who’s in the table of contents.  Me, certainly, but also George RR Martin with a new Ice and Fire story, plus  Robin Hobb, Ken Liu, CJ Cherryh, Kate Eliot, Elizabeth Bear, Daniel Abraham, and Many, Many More.

My own story, “The Triumph of Virtue,” is adapted from a few chapters of my forthcoming novel Quillifer, itself available on October 4.  Since Quillifer is a book with a fairly tangled plot, the adaptation ended up being far from straightforward— I had to chop a lot of material that didn’t have to do directly with the excerpted story, shift the cast of characters, alter emphasis here and there, and make the ending more, well, more different.

Reading the two side-by-side would be instructive for anyone needing instruction in that sort of thing.

But in the meantime, feel free to pre-order the book.  Because It Is There, and Awesome.

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