Ever since the Lord of the Rings was released, many writers of epic fantasy (both good and bad) seem to have adopted Tolkien's world and races (made even more ubiquitous by the early Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying games) as a template for their own creations, a one-size-fits-all, ready-to-wear physical and cultural geography which they can tweak slightly to make their own. Most veteran fans of fantasy are familiar with the tropes of the fantasy genre, so viciously skewered by Diana Wynne Jones in "The Tough Guide To Fantasyland", and while it's still possible to create great stories using these archetypal worlds, it's hard to get that same sense of wonder when you're dealing with a setting that's basically "Middle Earth plus/minus element A". For epic fantasy fans looking for something new, I heartily recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Empire in Black and Gold".

It's an indication of how much I enjoyed the book, the first in the Shadows of the Apt series, that one of my main issues with it isn't found in the story itself, but the description found at the back of the book (and I'm not the only one). "The city states of the Lowlands have lived in peace for decades…" it begins, then continues: "But meanwhile, in far-off corners, the Wasp Empire has been devouring city after city…" and it ends predictably by describing the only person (in this case, artificer Stenwold Maker) who can stop the Empire. I must have picked up the book two or three times during the past few months, only to place it back on the shelf, unimpressed by what appeared to be just another epic fantasy. It wasn't until I heard it discussed in a December 2009 interview at the Dragon Page podcast (which featured Lou Anders of Pyr, which published the books in the United States) that I got my first inkling of what I was missing: one of the most unique and fascinating secondary worlds I've ever seen in an epic fantasy.