Tor.com Publishing is proud to announce that it’s acquired World English rights to Saad Z. Hossain’s The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday.
When the djinn king Melek Ahmer wakes up after millennia of imprisoned slumber, he finds a world vastly different from what he remembers. Arrogant and bombastic, he comes down the mountain expecting an easy conquest: the wealthy, spectacular city state of Kathmandu, ruled by the all-knowing, all-seeing tyrant AI Karma. To his surprise, he finds that Katjmandu is a cut-price paradise, where citizens want for nothing and even the dregs of society are distinctly unwilling to revolt.
Everyone seems happy, except for the old Gurkha soldier Baan Gurung. Knife saint, recidivist, and mass murderer, he is an exile from Kathmandu, pursuing a forty-year-old vendetta that leads to the very heart of Karma. Pushed and prodded by Gurung, Melek Ahmer finds himself in ever deeper conflicts, until they finally face off against Karma and her forces. In the upheaval that follows, old crimes will come to light and the city itself will be forced to change.
Said acquiring editor Jonathan Strahan:
Last year I was reading Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin’s wonderful anthology, The Djinn in Love. It had a handful of great stories, some by names I knew, and some by names I didn’t, I fell for the story “Bring Your Own Spoon” by a Bangladeshi writer, Saad Z. Hossain. I’d not heard of him so I ordered his novel, Djinn City, which I also loved. The stories were not only smart, but thrilling and engaging at the same time. I knew I had to work with him if I could, so I asked him if he’d like to work on a novella. He came back with this incredible idea about a cranky old djinn and an astonishingly dangerous Ghurka wreaking havoc in a future Kathmandu governed by Karma. It had to happen. The team at Tor.com Publishing agreed, and then Saad delivered something incredible that exceeded all of my expectations. I can’t wait for everyone to read because I know you’re going to fall in love with Melek Ahmer and Gurung, the best team-up in science fantasy since I can’t remember when.
Said the author:
I wanted to create a story of old powers meeting the new, of an ancient, arrogant djinn waking up to a brand new world and trying to navigate it. It was supposed to be a grand fight: Djinn king versus cutting edge AI. At every turn, however, the human sub-characters kept intruding and hijacking the story until it became something else altogether. I don’t write outlines, or plots, so, in the end, this story surprised me too.
Saad Z Hossain is the author of two novels, Escape from Baghdad! and Djinn City. He lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
As they say, the golden age of SF was fourteen, and this is pretty much what I read at the time. It’s so long ago now, but I think that Chronicles was my gateway series to fantasy… probably alongside Eddings as well I think.
And gods was Rose of the Prophet something…to me, that was certainly their best series. Death Gate just went weird at the end, and Darksword was angst-y to the extreme. Rose of the Prophet however had some interesting world-building, and actually had diverse protagonists. As a teenager in Malaysia, there was only so much reading about various eurocentric characters (even in a world with dragons!) that I could take.
I find it oddly fitting that the killing of characters is what made their books good.
For those who don’t know, GEN CON every year. the Hickmans host the Killer breakfast. The ultimate goal is to have fun, and kill everyone who apears on stage over the course of 2 hours (easily 100 people). They play GM’s gone wild, and everyone elses goal is to survive a round or two with all the hilarious events happeneing around them. The event has becoe a staple at Gen Con and i hope it remains so for years to come.
As a kid in small town america, finding the Dragonlance novels for sale at my local library was a great moment, I read the first copies I had till the pages fell out
There’s a bittersweetness to knowing that my experience of discovering the Dragonlance Chronicles as a young kid, and it helping to launch me into reading, gaming, then fiction writing and game writing professionally. So yeah, I’m with you. I was fond of Sturm from the start, but I will agree that his arch was exactly as long as it needed to be.
Essentially, Dragonlance was my Harry Potter.
This was also my gateway series to fantasy. Sturm’s death was definitely a great one, but it didn’t affect me nearly as much as Flint’s death, which made me cry.
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Essentially, Dragonlance was my Harry Potter.
Hear hear.
I enjoyed the Death Gate cycle for Zifnab alone. If ever a character deserved to NOT be confined to a single trilogy.
And Sturm’s death, while I wasn’t a fan of his character(on a recent reread he REALLY bugged me), really hit me profoundly. At this point in my reading, never had a major character DIED like that. At the hands of another major character, no less. It really raised the stakes of the story.
A couple of interesting tidbits, from a behind the scenes book the friend who introduced me to these books had.
-Sturm was slated for death from the start.
-The effort to conceal the identity of the Blue Dragonlord was so in depth, they put a man’s figure on the cover of the first edition.
I loved loved loved Star of the Guardians. So what if it was a Star Wars ripoff? It was a better Star Wars ripoff that any Star Wars book I tried. And it became something more in the end, with two of the most memorable characters I’d ever read. And yeah, they died, most magnificently.
I reread the original trilogy recently (first time in many years) and the nostalgia, it runs strong although I certainly can see the imperfections. I’ll have to dive into Legends in the not-too-distant future.
I did like the first four Death Gate books, at least — after that it started to get a bit weird. And I actually like Starshield — the idea, if not the execution.
It’s amazing how fast it took off — I remember in the early 1990s going into bookstores and seeing an entire rack of nothing but Dragonlance.
Gah! Double post! OK, so I’ll change it to say: I remember when it all first began — there was Gary Gygax’ Saga of Old City, Douglas Niles’ Darkwalker on Moonshae and Weis & Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight (not necessarily in that order). Three surprisingly different takes on RPG tie-in fiction.
It’s great to see a post giving some love to Weis and Hickman. I often see their names associated with hack-fantasy. I think they deserve much more credit than that.
I wish someone would give some similiar love to R. A. Salvatore. I think his fantasy writing is really good, especially his description of battle scenes.