Hi all! Travel and related wonders kept me away from the keyboard for longer than I anticipated, but I’ve made it back just in time for this month’s r/CraftSequence AMA, focusing on RUIN OF ANGELS (or THE RUIN OF ANGELS, depending on which reality printed the copy you happen to be holding).

I’m reading Dreyer’s English. You wouldn’t think of a style guide as a healing text, or I wouldn’t have before now, but as I wander through this manic world I’m finding a particular joy in a book by a man who cares so deeply about the comma, en-dash, and semicolon. Much of modern media encourages us to think big in a way that’s deviously contrary to action: to keep our eyes locked on events, problems, and ideas so vast they seem impossible to affect with our own hands. Looking at those hands instead (where they rest on the keyboard, say), at the ground before our feet and the people to our either side, we may find opportunities and paths we would never have guessed at if we kept our eyes on the sky. The book is also extremely funny.

Here are some of the great questions that came up in the AMA thread. As always, thanks to the Hidden Schools and the mods of the r/Craftsequence subreddit for hosting the event. Can’t wait for next month’s session on DEAD COUNTRY!

Two great questions from Aspiring_Sophrosyne:

1. This feels like the first book where the “main” character is a foreigner to where the story takes place. (Tara was new to Alt Coulumb but still Kathic.) What drove this? Or maybe you don’t perceive it this way?

2. What did the French ever do to you that you decided to give them the servants-of-Cthulhu hat?

Ruin plays a special, transitional role the series, in part because of behind-the-curtain publishing factors and in part because of internal narrative logic—both of which forced my hand in some ways that ended up being helpful and justified. Though opinions may differ.

The story pressures of the first four books drove toward some sort of conclusion, and yet there were some important formal pieces missing. The series hadn’t yet visited a city wrestling with active colonial structures, and I felt that doing so was important for the project. There’s a sense in which every part of the Craft world has been reshaped, even terraformed - thaumaformed? - by the Craft / postindustrial capitalism; in that sense maybe the empire is everywhere and nowhere? But the same sorts of logics that inform the Craft inform the colonial and imperial projects. They’re projects of “legibility” in a sense. (I was very high on Seeing Like a State starting from Last First Snow and moving through Ruin at least.)

At the same time, Tara and Kai had to meet in this book, before the final arc began, and that meeting had to be central to the story. I’d enjoyed having Caleb sort of show up toward the end of Four Roads Cross and I think that meeting feels earned, but doing it like that definitely kept Caleb & Tara on parallel tracks, while Tara and Kai had a lot more to say to one another. Since I’d just come away from a Tara-centered book, I liked the thought of checking back in with Kai; Tara has a tendency to bull her way to the center of any story she’s in—a natural symptom of a surfeit of protagonismos, that humor which causes people to run toward screaming and the sound of explosions—so that meant keeping them in opposition for most of the book, which would give me more of a chance to explore their differences.

But that meant I had a substantial element of a book that I meant to engage with colonialism, from an outsider’s point of view! Not entirely, of course: Zeddig and Raymet play a huge role, and Izza is intimately connected with Alikand / Agdel Lex even though she’s not from there. At first I felt uncomfortable with this, but as I sat with the book, planned it, wrote it, and revised it, it became more and more a book about perspective and indeterminacy, at least as much as a book can be about these things and also contain a train heist and a pun about mailer daemons.

Because one huge question in a colonized space, is, who gets to say what’s true, what’s going on here? That’s a keen human question anywhere, but often the answer ends up being “we’ll all figure it out together” and in colonies the question is, to quote that old Lone Ranger joke, “who’s we”? A colonial presence tries to make the place it’s colonizing legible: creating new names and categories for just about everything from streets to population groups to the colonial power’s own use of violence. (And on that note, I’d encourage anyone reading this with a bit of money lying spare to donate to Gaza relief efforts, such as the

So everyone in Ruin of Angels is seeing a different city based on who they are, and the city becomes a—literally, thanks to the magic of, well, magic—contested space. Those different cities overlay and wrestle. Kai comes to the city with the particular perspective of a Kavekanese banker-priest who’s also the member of a secret revolutionary cell: she sees it through the eyes of international capital but also from a marginal perspective, and as a sort of reluctant insurrectionist. The Iskari colonial authority sees Agdel Lex, and by seeing it they try to build it. Izza the former street kid sees a different Agdel Lex / Alikand than Dr. Hasim does, and a very different Alikand than Zeddig, who’s more-or-less dispossessed royalty; Zeddig’s Alikand is very different than Raymet’s. Meanwhile you have figures like Gal, Vogel, even R’ok, members of that “expatriate” floating world that thinks of itself as separate from the city even though it’s not. Ley’s trying to save something she doesn’t entirely understand—which compromises her efforts from jump. Though it doesn’t mean she can’t help.

And of course the city is much much bigger than any one of them. Zeddig’s revolution has more than a trace of aristocratic revanchism in it; Raymet’s and Izza’s maybe a bit less so? Can a polity be multiple? Maybe not in a way that ever seems quite comfortable—but I don’t think there’s any other option.

Also I mean, one of serious villains in this book is literally named “Truth.” So there’s that.

And, yikes, that took a long time to write!

As for the French: in the way you only rib your good friends, if I didn’t love France I wouldn’t feel so comfortable giving it the Cthulhu hat! In its ugliest moments Lovecraftiana hinges on a colonial terror of subaltern religiosity: what if there are gods and they aren’t on “our” side? There’s also more than a little projection at play. Much great work has been done in the last 20 years exploring the “what if Cthulhu good actually” case, or at least “what if Cthulhu actually preferable to White Supremacist Cop-State Settler Colonial Modernity”—The Ballad of Black Tom, for instance. I thought it would be a fun spin to reverse the projection & paint the arch-civilizing colonial empire as the Cthulhu guys. This does unfortunately let Craft!UK off the hook more than is just or fair, historically speaking—though I think they come in for their own share of criticism in this volume and others, being ruled by undead oligarchs who SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER—but I’m afraid to admit that this may just be soft power at work, on the level of my having imprinted hard on Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Lewis, the Dr Who universe, and of course Tolkien.

TyGuy8 asks, artistically:

“What led to Ruin being the only book of the Craft Sequence with a different style to the cover art?”

This is where the publishing behind-the-scenes comes into play. Some hiccups interfered with publishing the sixth Craft book through Tor proper, and these were resolved by moving the book to the then-new-ish Tor Dot Com imprint. As part of that move, Tor Dot wanted to try a new cover treatment. I adore the Chris McGrath covers for the first five books, and I’m one of those people who really likes to have a shelf of the same edition of his favorite series—but I adored Goñi Montes’ take and it felt very right both for this book & for where the Craft books were going generally!

Also, for all their excellence the McGrath covers raised a small packaging / marketing challenge for the Sequence: his work became deeply identified with Urban Fantasy, which, as a commercial category, ended up coalescing around “were-ocelots in Pittsburgh” concepts, that is, supernaturals and shifters in a recognizable modern, our-world environment, as opposed to “Epic Fantasy in a Postindustrial Secondary World” in the vein of, say, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter or the old WEG Bloodshadow setting. You wouldn’t think this would mislead people, but it did, a bit! Some early reviewers went in without epic fantasy reading protocols, and bounced hard when they encountered the names of unfamiliar cities and invented gods. So we hoped that a different package might show people who’d had the series in the corner of their eye, that they should pay it a different kind of attention.

notpetelambert (but then who?) asks “Are you going to have Kai and Ley show up as perspective characters in a future book? If the Pohalas have one fan, I'm THAT ONE. If they have no fans, that means I'm dead.”

Well, with strange eons even death may die! Kai, absolutely. She’s in it to the end. And while I don’t see Ley as a central figure of the remaining books, I just wrote a scene with her the other day! I really like their sibling dynamic. It’s, um, relatable.

HiddenSchools asks: “The stacked cities are possibly my favourite setting in the Craft Series. Was Alikand and its location inspired by anywhere specific? I get Levantine vibes but I haven't personally visited so could be misconstruing.

The cities on top of each other thing feels like almost a literalising of the ideas about people experiencing different cities in one city - Abelard not thinking about the Craft side of AC, Izza knowing a different side of Kavekana than Kai etc. How did this location develop in the writing process? Was it a deliberate choice for this theme or a natural development from these ideas?”

Most of the research I did to prepare for writing this book settled on northeastern Africa, specifically Morocco and Algiers, and Alikand has a bit of childhood speculation on “what if Carthage never fell” in its DNA, but I get where the Levantine impression is coming from. It’s one of the few books I wasn’t able to travel for (or for which I couldn’t draw on previous travel), so I read a lot more than usual to prepare—travel narratives, anthropology, academic history.

As for the cities on top of one another, I owe a huge debt to Mieville’s The City and the City, which envisions ‘stacked’ cities in a way that provided a powerful new angle on the questions of legibility and “whose city is it” that run through the Sequence—and to Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, in its treatment of different contiguous realities connected through sense experience (in a way that’s very true to the experience of writing fiction). Cities are multiple, contested, unstable: that’s their wonder and strength, and that’s what I wanted to show here.

From HiddenSchools, again: “At what point did you know you wanted to go to / investigate space in this series? Denovo mentions in 3PD striding out among the stars, but I think Ruin is the first time that going to space is presented as a scientific thing one can do.”

Very Tim Curry-in-C&C Red Alert-Voice: SPAAAAAAACE!

Honestly, I knew I wanted to go there from the moment that Denovo mentioned space in that conversation with Elayne. I’d already spent some time in and around posthuman and TESCREAL ideas when I sat down to write Three Parts Dead, and they intrigued me and wigged me out and seemed so of a piece with the Craft / metastatic capital that, when Denovo made that connection, I almost gasped. Of course these guys are going there. The eyes of Craft draw boundaries but respect none; there’s nowhere for eternal growth to go BUT exponentialism in space. I didn’t have a full sense of the skazzerai yet, but that moment in 3PD is the seed of them.

“Also from a friend! What degrees did Raymet, Ley and Zeddig pursue? Am I right in saying Raymet has a doctorate? Do you have a title for her thesis?

(From me - did they all meet in Chartegnon?)”

God, I love this question. They all met at university in Chartegnon. Raymet absolutely has a doctorate; I don’t have a title for her thesis yet, and don’t want to invent one on the fly, but now I might need to find a way to squeak it into a book. Ley studied art, I believe, which in the particularly odd Craftworld context means she has an art degree that is also a computer science degree. I think Raymet and Zeddig were in the same program, some kind of history or archaeology, with Raymet’s focus being more technical. Zeddig ended up with an M.A.. Possibly because she didn’t want to go into research, possibly because she was (already?) getting into too much trouble with Ley.

And this, from ragingrage, prompted a fun digression: “When you wrote this, did you plan to do more post-Sequence semi-standalone novels? Or did you know that next you were going to launch into the Craft Wars?”

Thank you! I'm so glad to hear.

When I wrote this, I was balanced between the two options. I felt that the more I put off writing the Craft Wars, the less likely it became that I'd ever get to write them; on the other hand, there were definitely more standalones that I wanted to write. In the end, I decided to follow the core principles: write, and finish what you write. If I hadn't been developing an overplot I would have written more standalones, but the overplot was there, and the characters I'd written demanded closure. I grew up waiting for many of my favorite series to find their landing; I decided to start the approach.

To which they followed up: “Awesome! Thanks for sharing! Were there any of those standalone you wanted to write that you thought were particularly fun? Have you been able to use a lot of the ideas in Craft Wars, or will some were there stories that will (necessarily) go untold?”

There are three books I wanted to write, for which I had various levels of concept.

One was a Dhisthran novel, centered in Craft!India--for this one I had little more in mind than the setting, but it's the one I most wish I'd written, and which I feel is the most notable absence in the series. There's just so much to do there.

The other two standalone books I had sketched out are both heavily implied in Wicked Problems and Dead Hand Rule. I wanted to write a sort of contemporary thriller set in the Shining Empire, featuring Caleb and, probably, Temoc--this is the book Ran's from, and another character we'll meet in DHR; Mal might have shown up here too, though obviously she didn't in the present continuity. The other is... well, it's utterly unnecessary and has nothing to do with the overall project but I could not for the life of me get out of my head the notion of writing a sort of antic high-octane Lawyers, Guns, and Money infused lesbian pulp 80s action movie in which Teo (during one of her rocky on-the-outs-with-Sam periods) ends up on the run from the Mafia with Zolin, the star ullamal player on the Sea-Lords. Can I defend it? No. Do I want it? YES.