Max Gladstone
Head Judge, October & November 2021
Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus Award winning author Max Gladstone’s works include Empress of Forever, the Craft Sequence of fantasy novels and games, and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the internationally bestselling This is How You Lose the Time War. His interactive projects include the XYZZY-nominated Choice of the Deathless and Deathless: The City’s Thirst, which take place in the world of the Craft Sequence. Gladstone created the Serial Box series Bookburners, and the interactive television series Wizard School Dropout.
This Is How You Lose The Time War
From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future.
Hugo Award for Best Novella 2020
Nebula Award for Best Novella 2020
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.
Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?
Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.
–
Purchase from Amazon.
Empress Of Forever
Now a Locus Award Finalist!
A wildly successful innovator to rival Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, Vivian Liao is prone to radical thinking, quick decision-making, and reckless action. On the eve of her greatest achievement, she tries to outrun people who are trying to steal her success.
In the chilly darkness of a Boston server farm, Viv sets her ultimate plan into motion. A terrifying instant later, Vivian Liao is catapulted through space and time to a far future where she confronts a destiny stranger and more deadly than she could ever imagine.
The end of time is ruled by an ancient, powerful Empress who blesses or blasts entire planets with a single thought. Rebellion is literally impossible to consider—until Vivian Liao arrives. Trapped between the Pride—a ravening horde of sentient machines—and a fanatical sect of warrior monks who call themselves the Mirrorfaith, Viv must rally a strange group of allies to confront the Empress and find a way back to the world and life she left behind.
–
Purchase from Amazon.
THE CRAFT SEQUENCE
From Max Gladstone:
“The God Wars ended, and we’re living with the world they left.
I write the Craft Sequence series of books and games, set in a postindustrial (and post-war) fantasyland, where black magic is big business, wizards wear pinstriped suits and conduct necromantic procedures on dead gods, and day-to-day commerce rests on people trading pieces of their souls for goods and services. The Craft Sequence books are legal thrillers about faith, or religious thrillers about law and finance. Plus there are hive-mind police forces, poet gargoyles, brainwashing golems, nightmare telegraphs, surprisingly pleasant demons, worldshattering magic, environmental devastation, and that deepest and darkest evil: student loans.
So, they’re pretty much like real life!
Want more information? Here’s a big post with a lot of different pitches and introductions to the Sequence. io9 called them “cyberpunk fantasy,” and some people have thrown around “faithpunk.” I’m wary of -punk descriptions attached to things that aren’t actually, you know, punk; there’s a sort of inverse punk thing at play in my books, in that many of the characters are working within a deeply compromised system and trying (with varying degrees of success) to make it better. Who knows whether they’ll succeed?
I do, I guess. But I’m not telling.”
Last First Snow
The gods died forty years ago, on a night of thorned lightning and war machines. Dresediel Lex still quakes with the memory of that battle. But life (and unlife) goes on. The King in Red, revolutionary turned skeletal overlord, wants to reform his city—tearing out the last remnants of divine law. Temoc has left his days as an old guard paladin behind, preferring the life of a peaceful father and community organizer. He wants to protect his family, and save the poor district that took him in after the Wars. Elayne Kevarian, Craftswoman at the firm of Kelethres Albrecht and Ao, wants to keep the God Wars from coming again.
But you can’t always get what you want.
–
Read an essay about the book on Tor.com.
Purchase from Amazon.
Purchase from Barnes and Noble.
Two Serpents Rise
Shadow demons plague the city reservoir, and Red King Consolidated has sent in Caleb Altemoc—casual gambler and professional risk manager—to cleanse the water for the sixteen million people of Dresediel Lex. At the scene of the crime, Caleb finds an alluring and clever cliff runner, Mal, who easily outpaces him.
But Caleb has more than the demon infestation, Mal, or job security to worry about when he discovers that his father—the last priest of the old gods and leader of the True Quechal terrorists—has broken into his home and is wanted in connection to the attacks on the water supply.
From the beginning, Caleb and Mal are bound by lust, Craft, and chance, as both play a dangerous game where gods and people are pawns. They sleep on water, they dance in fire…and all the while the Twin Serpents slumbering beneath the earth are stirring, and they are hungry.
–
Three Parts Dead
A God has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart.
Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help is Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead God, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith.
But when the duo discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts—and their quest for truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and the city’s slim hope of survival.
–
Purchase from Amazon.
Four Roads Cross
In Four Roads Cross, the great city of Alt Coulumb is in crisis. The moon goddess Seril, long thought dead, is back–and the people of Alt Coulumb aren’t happy. Protests rock the city, and Kos Everburning’s creditors attempt a hostile takeover of the fire god’s church. Tara Abernathy, the god’s in-house Craftswoman, must defend the church against the world’s fiercest necromantic firm–and against her old classmate, a rising star in the Craftwork world.
As if that weren’t enough, Cat and Raz, supporting characters from Three Parts Dead, are back too, fighting monster pirates; skeleton kings drink frozen cocktails, defying several principles of anatomy; jails, hospitals, and temples are broken into and out of; choirs of flame sing over Alt Coulumb; demons pose significant problems; a farmers’ market proves more important to world affairs than seems likely; doctors of theology strike back; Monk-Technician Abelard performs several miracles; The Rats! play Walsh’s Place; and dragons give almost-helpful counsel.
–
Purchase from Amazon.
Audiobook from Barnes and Noble.
Full Fathom Five
On the island of Kavekana, Kai builds gods to order. Her creations aren’t conscious and lack their own wills and voices, but they accept sacrifices, and protect their worshippers from other gods—perfect vehicles for Craftsmen and Craftswomen operating in the divinely controlled Old World. When Kai tries to save a dying idol, she’s grievously injured—then sidelined from the business entirely, her near-suicidal rescue attempt offered up as proof of her instability. But when Kai gets tired of hearing her boss, her coworkers, and her ex-boyfriend call her crazy, and starts digging into the reasons her creations die, she uncovers a conspiracy of silence and fear—which will crush her, if Kai can’t stop it first.
–
Purchase from Amazon.
The Craft Sequence Omnibus
“Stunningly good. Stupefyingly good.” —Patrick Rothfuss
Set in a phenomenally-built world in which lawyers ride lightning bolts, souls are currency, and cities are powered by the remains of fallen gods, Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence introduces readers to a modern fantasy landscape and an epic struggle to build a just society.
–
Purchase from Amazon.
The Ruin Of Angels
Max Gladstone returns with The Ruin of Angels, the sixth novel in the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, which The Washington Post calls “the best kind of urban fantasy” and NPR calls “sharp, original, and passionate”
The God Wars destroyed the city of Alikand. Now, a century and a half and a great many construction contracts later, Agdel Lex rises in its place. Dead deities litter the surrounding desert, streets shift when people aren’t looking, a squidlike tower dominates the skyline, and the foreign Iskari Rectification Authority keeps strict order in this once-independent city―while treasure seekers, criminals, combat librarians, nightmare artists, angels, demons, dispossessed knights, grad students, and other fools gather in its ever-changing alleys, hungry for the next big score.
Priestess/investment banker Kai Pohala (last seen in Full Fathom Five) hits town to corner Agdel Lex’s burgeoning nightmare startup scene, and to visit her estranged sister Lei. But Kai finds Lei desperate at the center of a shadowy, and rapidly unravelling, business deal. When Lei ends up on the run, wanted for a crime she most definitely committed, Kai races to track her sister down before the Authority finds her first. But Lei has her own plans, involving her ex-girlfriend, a daring heist into the god-haunted desert, and, perhaps, freedom for an occupied city. Because Alikand might not be completely dead―and some people want to finish the job.
–
Purchase from Amazon.
Choice Of The Deathless
Battle demons and undead attorneys, and win souls to pay back your student loans! At the elite demonic-law firm of Varkath Nebuchadnezzar Stone, you’ll depose a fallen god, find romance, and maybe even make partner, if you don’t lose your own soul first.
“Choice of the Deathless” is a necromantic legal thriller, entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and powered by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
- Explore a fantasy realm with a rich and evolving backstory, based on the novels published by Tor Books.
- Play as male or female, gay or straight, dead or alive (or both).
- Build your career on carefully reasoned contracts, or party all night with the skeletal partners at your firm.
- Navigate intrigue and mystery in a world of scheming magicians and devious monsters.
- Look for love in at least some of the right places.
- Balance student loans, sleep, daily commute, rent payments, and demonic litigation—hey, nobody said being a wizard was always fun.
–
Download from MaxGladstone.com
The City’s Thirst
You won the God Wars, killing the rain god and taking over his desert city. But now the city needs water, and it’s your job to make it rain. As a rising associate at a god-killing public service conglomerate, you can monopolize your city’s public utilities, or fight to keep water affordable for everyone. Build alliances with powerful necromancers, or help local farmers hold onto their land. Find love, or betray your friends. Overcome the trauma you suffered in the God Wars. Prevent murders, or commit them.
Just keep the water flowing.
• Play as male or female; straight, gay, or bi
• Match wits with master necromancers, real estate magnates, and journalists
• Drink with undead kings over the ruins of a destroyed civilization
• Betray trusted friends and their entire society
–
Download from MaxGladstone.com