Five-Twelfths of Heaven Available Again
I'm delighted to announce that Five-Twelfths of Heaven, the first book in the Roads of Heaven trilogy, is now available as an ebook from Crossroad Press. It's also up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, if you prefer shopping there. This is a book that has been particularly hard to find used, judging from the number of people who've asked me if I know where they could get a copy, so it's really nice to have it back. And I really like the cover!
I'm pretty fond of this book. Going over the galleys for the new edition, I was really pleased that I wasn't seeing thousands of things I could have done better - well, no more than one usually does when reading galleys! It's a younger voice, a denser style than I use now, but there are things that I still find very satisfying: Hermetic science fueling the spacedrive, the music of the spheres carrying starships to lightspeed and beyond, the manipulation of symbols to cross the void of space. I'd forgotten how much fun it was to write the main characters - Silence Leigh, a star pilot in a society that is rapidly closing off all possibility of female autonomy; and Denis Balthasar and Julian Chase Mago, captain and engineer of a somewhat dodgy transport ship in desperate need of a pilot, preferably female….
Yes, there are couple of things that I wish I hadn't done, one of which has become a cautionary tale in my worldbuilding classes. I needed an excuse to describe the homunculi, this society's version of robots, because they were so common that there was no reason for Silence to do more than note their presence. So I decided that she found them unnerving, unpleasant - and of course by book three, the most elegant solution to the problems I'd created for her would have involved creating homunculi, something I'd pretty much said she couldn't do.
But all in all, I'm still really pleased with this book. I'm glad to have it available again, with the rest of the trilogy to follow, and I hope you all will enjoy it, too.
I'm pretty fond of this book. Going over the galleys for the new edition, I was really pleased that I wasn't seeing thousands of things I could have done better - well, no more than one usually does when reading galleys! It's a younger voice, a denser style than I use now, but there are things that I still find very satisfying: Hermetic science fueling the spacedrive, the music of the spheres carrying starships to lightspeed and beyond, the manipulation of symbols to cross the void of space. I'd forgotten how much fun it was to write the main characters - Silence Leigh, a star pilot in a society that is rapidly closing off all possibility of female autonomy; and Denis Balthasar and Julian Chase Mago, captain and engineer of a somewhat dodgy transport ship in desperate need of a pilot, preferably female….
Yes, there are couple of things that I wish I hadn't done, one of which has become a cautionary tale in my worldbuilding classes. I needed an excuse to describe the homunculi, this society's version of robots, because they were so common that there was no reason for Silence to do more than note their presence. So I decided that she found them unnerving, unpleasant - and of course by book three, the most elegant solution to the problems I'd created for her would have involved creating homunculi, something I'd pretty much said she couldn't do.
But all in all, I'm still really pleased with this book. I'm glad to have it available again, with the rest of the trilogy to follow, and I hope you all will enjoy it, too.