Books

Ethan Vale was born to be a farmer. His parents work the land outside Lowstone, a grey-stone village on the quiet edge of the Lesser Continent, and nobody there expects much more of a farmer’s son.

But the Mana Core inside Ethan is not a farmer’s son’s core, and it does not sit easily with the rest of him. So with his best friend Sam, the blacksmith’s boy, he takes the long road to the Royal Academy in the capital to find out what he is: into a world of old noble houses, magic academies and knight schools, where power decides almost everything, and a talent like his does not go unnoticed for long.

His parents sold him to pay their debts. That is where Kent Varren’s story begins.

He was nineteen, a commoner from the slums outside Karlberg with scarred knuckles and a self-taught gift for the sword, when the local lord came to collect and his family paid with him. The Gallerian Army took him, and sent him to a place its own soldiers call the Camp of Death.

Told in Kent’s own words, Broken Steel is a grim, unsentimental story of soldiering in a world where the strong enslave the weak, and of what one debt-sold boy does with the only thing he has: a sword.

James Kingsley, twenty-two, orphaned, overeducated and bored stiff, is on the train home when a message appears in the air that only he can see. His soul, it says, is compatible with another world. Would he like to go?

He says yes. Arcania is a world without gods, run by an invisible System that grants every living thing a Status Screen, and it is a brutal one, where the strong take what they want, people included. James arrives with more raw mana than anyone should have and not a single spell to use it with, which makes him either the most dangerous man in the kingdom or the most valuable thing in it.

Aeras, 1742. The Drachenstahl Empire has made itself the most powerful nation in Europia, and it did so on the back of the Ironwalker: a ten-tonne, one-man walking war machine designed by Grand Duke Peter von Graff. Across the sea, Britannia rules the waves and the skies, and it has not forgotten.

Dietrich von Graff is twenty, and heir to all of it. Now he is going to the War Academy that made his father a legend, to walk the same near-impossible path his father once did, among rivals who would love to see a von Graff fall, friends worth keeping, and a war that everyone can feel coming.

Jake Smith, eighteen, from Manchester, dies pushing a child out of the path of a truck, and wakes up as somebody else.

Kray Latze is a minor noble in the Immortal World, blessed with a divine body and one of the finest spiritual roots anyone has seen, and completely unable to use either: his uncle crippled his meridians when he was a baby. The real Kray has just worked himself to death trying anyway, and his fiancée’s family is on its way to call off the engagement.

Jake decides that this will not do. In a world of endless continents and a Neverending Sea, where the greatest cultivators become gods, being underestimated might be the best weapon he has.

Luther Tollsby, twenty-three, has spent his whole life being walked over: at work, at home, and on the grim Croydon street where the landlord treats his tenants like cash machines. Then a lorry hits him.

He wakes up in hospital with a screen in front of his eyes that nobody else can see. It is a World Domination System, and it has one rule: it can change Luther, but never the world. Everything else he will have to take with his own two hands, starting with the street he lives on.

Dry, very British, and much funnier than a story about world domination has any right to be.

Tendor III is a rust-red frontier world where no two clocks agree and the town of Cinder Wells lives by the boom of the ice-cracking plant. Lawrence Vega, nineteen, fixes ships for a living and has never really expected to leave.

Then comes Census Day, when the United Systems tests the frontier’s young people, and Lawrence’s results break the machine. Somewhere very far away, something very old and very patient begins to tick a little louder.

When the Veyra Strain kills more than a billion people, the cure turns out to be in the blood of one ordinary 23-year-old from Leeds. Taking it will kill him. Arthur Wexter says yes.

He wakes in a white void, in front of a Reincarnation Panel that has never seen a score like his. The reward is godhood: an empty world of his own, a God System, and Pip, a blunt little pixie assigned to keep him on track. Arthur names the world Terra. What he does with it, with all the time in the universe to do it in, comes down to patience, logic, and how much he is willing to let go.

Odo is three times the size of Earth, lit by three moons and a river of spirit light across the night sky. Its people live in small tribes and survive by making pacts with the Anima, the great spirit beasts of the wild, whose strength they carry as tattoos on their skin.

Varn of Ion is fifteen, and every morning he trains alone at the post where his father used to train. His parents were Spirit Warriors, and they died defending the village. Now it is his turn to go up the mountain and earn his first mark, in a world far older, larger and more dangerous than a boy from a small tribe can imagine.

Athas is a hard, fourteenth-century world of kingdoms, churches and old monsters. Archas De Sangre is a farmer’s son from the kingdom of Lorentzé, born with a rare shock of white hair and not much else to his name.

Then, exploring a cave, he finds an ancient corpse seated on an ancient throne, and the corpse calls to him. The blood of the Progenitor, the first of all vampires, has slept for two hundred thousand years. It has been waiting for someone to wake it.