Looking back, my novel Against Three Lands is set in someplace that is not medieval Japan, neighboring someplace that is decidedly not medieval China, which faces invasion from folks who are not Scotsmen or Frenchmen. Not quite, anyhow.
The tale includes desperate hand-to-hand combat, romance, land battles, a naval battle, fireships, siege warfare, and great attention to the important matters of commerce, logistics, and supply.
Clan MacDonald is surrounded by enemies. Clan Gunn wants its lands. Mysterious pirates assail its shores. The All-Conquering Generalissimo suspects it of treason. Foreign trade is interrupted by barbarian invasions — or are they blue-skinned demons?
Angus Valentine Macdonald, seventh child of the One MacDonald, must travel to remote Mercia, where he must defeat the treachery of the Lunarian Empire, the corruption of the Langwadooran invaders, and the rapacious greed of the alien Trell to protect his homeland and win the hand of his lady-love.
Chris Nuttall writes: “I’ve known George Phillies online long enough to know that he is good at creating new and different universes. Mistress of the Waves features a world that is, in many ways, a work of art; a world governed by a system that subtly limits the technology available to its inhabitants in a manner that does not provoke resistance or outright rebellion. The One World features a female-dominated society that seems plausible; Minutegirls crafts a world shaped by high-technology and the long-term effects of a devastating war. In truth, George deserves to be known far better than he is.”
Authors’ aside: Against Three Lands is a tale of geographic alternative fiction, set on a world – The World of a Thousand Isles – broken into vast numbers of moderately large islands. Readers will recognize the extant technology as that found on earth in the early 17th century. There are gunpowder weapons, but they are not yet battle-winners on land. Unlike my novel The One World, you will search in vain for the magicians with their spark gap-coherer radios, and the accountants and their Babbage machines. The cultural settings of the Hundred Isles, Mercia, and their foreign visitors, are lifted from settings found on our world. I have quite deliberately interchanged lists of names, so, no, the Hundred Islers are not Scotsmen in disguise, and the Mercians and their Empire of the Stars are certainly not the Spanish Empire on which the sun never set.
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