I recently went on a trip, and before I left, I loaded up my kindle with a bunch of the really excellent free books that are on feedbooks. One of the best places to look is in their list sections, where you can search by such things as Hugo award winners, or Science Fiction, or Fantasy.
Somehow I ended up with this one in my list, and ended up reading it the whole time. It’s a little like George Martin’s Fire and Ice series, in that it’s a pseudo midieval setting with minor magic and a kingdom in the midst of both major and minor enemies. It’s quite good reading, coming back from my trip, our plane was diving and running the engines hard to dive out of thunderstorms. Instead of listening to the tower like the people around me, I was reading this book.
The Element of Fire was my first novel, written around 1990, when I was 26. It was published in hardcover in 1993 and paperback in 1994, by Tor Books. It was published in Italy in 1995, Russia in 1997, Poland in 1998, in France, by l’Atalante, in 2002, and will be published in Spanish by Bibliopolis. It was a finalist for the 1993 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award and a runner-up for the 1994 Crawford Award. And it’s almost impossible to find in the US, so I’m posting it here.