Swainston, Steph
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1974- ) UK author whose Castle sequence beginning with The Year of Our War (2004), though clearly understandable as Fantasy, does in fact inhabit a Multiverse some of whose iterations are clearly worlds understandable in sf terms. A hint of Medieval Futurism suffuses some of these worlds, and leads to the apprehension that the central story may itself be couched within a larger frame; but one of them is a Wonderland [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] where words, which are understood literally, create reality: to mispronounce horse as whore generates a whore horse. Ostensibly, the Fourlands, a world invaded by a relentless insect species, is fantasy: one of the protagonists is winged; others seem to be able to control Magic. But the Shift, a kind of multi-Dimensional portal to a wide range of extravagantly different worlds, evokes British sf since 1990 or so, with the influence of authors like M John Harrison and China Miéville beneficially evident. The series does not yet seem to have ended. Although Swainston announced in 2011 that – finding the isolation of a writer's life uncongenial – she was cancelling her current two-book contract with Gollancz and retraining as a teacher of chemistry, a fifth volume in the sequence, Fair Rebel (2016), has since appeared. [JC]
see also: Eastercon.
Stephanie Jane Swainston
born Bradford, Yorkshire: 1974
works
series
Castle
- The Year of Our War (London: Gollancz, 2004) [Castle: hb/Les Edwards as Edward Miller]
- No Present Like Time (London: Gollancz, 2005) [Castle: hb/Emma Wallace]
- The Modern World (London: Gollancz, 2007) [Castle: hb/uncredited]
- Dangerous Offspring (New York: HarperCollins Eos, 2007) [vt of the above: Castle: pb/Christophe Sivet]
- The Castle Omnibus: The Year of Our War, No Present Like Time, The Modern World (London: Gollancz, 2009) [omni of the above three: Castle: pb/]
- Above the Snowline (London: Gollancz, 2010) [Castle: hb/David Turton]
- Fair Rebel (London: Gollancz, 2016) [Castle: pb/uncredited]
links
- Steph Swainston
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: Wonderland
- Picture Gallery
previous versions of this entry