Juliet E. McKenna

I have two busy weekends ahead!

On Saturday 25th October,  I’m joining RJ Barker, Dan Coxon and Alex Pheby to discuss Dead Ink’s new non-fiction anthology of essays on Writing the Magic. Our panel is from 11am-11.45am at the Writers Block Stage, followed by a signing session from 11.45am-12.45am.

On Sunday 26th October, I’ll be at Bristolcon. After a reading at 12.50, I’ll join J A Mortimore, David Green, Jo M Thomas/Journeymouse, and Anna Smith Spark, to discuss Lost Cities and Legends at 1.00pm.

At 3.00pm, J E Hannaford, David Cartwright, Jonathan L. Howard, Carolyn Dougherty and I will consider possible solutions when Your planning application for a lair has been declined.

I’ll be arriving at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton on Thursday 30th October. My schedule is as follows:

Friday, 3:00 pm-4:00 pm : Reading, with Ai Jiang and Christopher Caldwell

Friday, 7:00 pm-8:00 pm : Meet the Author: Juliet Mckenna. Sign up at the Registration Desk

Friday, 8:00 pm-10:00 pm : Mass Autograph Session. Feel free to say hello if you’re passing on your way to get something signed by another author

Saturday, 11:00 am-12:00 pm : Writing Fighting With Anna Smith Spark, Steve McHugh, Miles/Christian Cameron

Saturday, 3:00 pm-4:00 pm : Launch: Wizard’s Tower Press. Wizard’s Tower Press are launching my new novel, The Green Man’s Holiday, alongside Of the Emperor’s Kindness by Chaz Brenchley and Wiz Duo Book 3 by Ruthana Emrys & Andrew Knighton.

Saturday, 4:00 pm-5:00 pm : Launch: Dead Ink Books launch two new anthologies: Writing the Magic and Unquiet Guests.

I will also be attending the British Fantasy Awards and the Aldiss Award presentations, from 7.30pm on Saturday. The Green Man’s War is a finalist for the Best Fantasy Novel, and I have a story in Fight Like A Girl Volume 2, a finalist for Best Anthology.

I’ve mentioned the epic fantasy I’ve been working on for a while now, and promised more information in the fullness of time. That time is now!

The Riven Kingdom will be published by Angry Robot next year. The press release says:

Angry Robot Books has acquired Juliet E. McKenna’s The Riven Kingdom, described as a “fresh and gripping fantasy” that “blends politics, religion, and a battle for a dead king’s throne, perfect for fans of the Realm of the Elderlings series.”

Commissioned by editor Simon Spanton Walker, the one-book deal covers physical, ebook and audio.
“After devising a world with eerie, hidden magic and winding lethal intrigues around characters as new to me as they will be to readers, I’m thrilled to be working with Angry Robot to bring this story to fantasy fans,” says Juliet.

Simon Spanton Walker, commissioning editor, says: “Juliet writes involved and involving fantasy of the very highest order. The Riven Kingdom is no exception: a nuanced and gripping tale that uses fantasy to give vivid life to both the rulers and the ruled of a fantasy world in crisis. We’re incredibly proud to be her publisher.”

And Juliet’s agent, Max Edwards, adds: “Juliet E. McKenna is a legend among fantasy writers, and for good reason. The worlds she builds, the characters who populate them, and the challenges they face, are truly epic in their scope. After several years away from her heartland, it’s thrilling to see The Riven Kingdom re-inventing the epic fantasy for today’s world.”

So what’s the book about?

When King Venais is killed before he can marry and father an heir, the kingdom of Arafaze is thrown into uncertainty. His sister Princess Idelina, too grief-stricken to assert her claim to the throne, finds herself circled by those with ambitions of their own: Princess Alriad, the dead King’s aunt, seeks endorsement from the Sun Goddess’ high temple to rule as regent; Earl Padran and Earl Debin are determined to see the rightful succession secured; King Tadiri of neighbouring Mervante, whose daughter was set to marry the King, senses an opportunity.

As the kingdom splits into opposing factions, Jadewin, an experienced Moon Priestess, and Alory, a young Sun Priest, discover cliques within the temples and shrines betraying their vows to stay out of royal rivalries. Priests and priestesses defend this world against terrifying incursions from the intangible realm. Amid the upheavals of a war of succession, who knows what malevolent creatures might gain entry into their reality…

The Riven Kingdom is a high fantasy that explores the harsh realities of hereditary power in a world where knowledge of magic and the supernatural are secrets too dangerous to share.

We have a stupendous cover and I will share that as soon as I get the nod.

This is also a Fela Kuti story, so here’s a quick review, because I wouldn’t want anyone interested in either of those two persons to miss this treat. I had the pleasure and privilege of reading an advance copy.

The story opens with the diligently secretarial Miss Smith on her way to her increasingly unsettling, not to say exasperating job. Her employer is eccentric to say the least, and while her duties are hardly demanding, she’s too intelligent not to feel that something, somewhere, is amiss. Soon after she goes to a Fela Kuti studio session with her friend Doreen, the mists begin to clear…

One of the best things for me about reading Doctor Who fiction is finding an author who understands how words on a page can do different and interesting things with a story which a performance on the screen cannot. Tade Thompson definitely gets this, and has the skills to use these differences to full creative effect. Readers will swiftly realise who Miss Smith’s strange employer is at the same time as seeing him through Miss Smith’s eyes, and feeling the immediacy of her confusion and irritation.

Sarah Jane’s situation turns out to be tied to a seriously ominous threat which UNIT are struggling to understand during the UK’s memorably hot summer of 1976. Thompson recreates those days with telling details which will ring true for those of us who recall it, as well as creating a resonant atmosphere for those who were not there. Similarly, his portrayal of the Doctor rings true to the show of that era and simultaneously chimes with the programme’s current perspectives.

Bringing Fela Kuti back to the story, Thompson offers a strikingly alternative response to the Doctor and his interference in various times and places from those who have no reason to trust a white Englishman. Indeed, they have good reasons not to. Understanding these different reactions, as well as seeing some British colonial history from the other side, becomes crucial, if the current menace is to be contained. As the drama unfolds, Thompson extends one of the classic Who themes, specifically the importance of keeping an open mind, into today’s broader perspectives on decades and empires past. Thus the story is underpinned by both contemporary relevance and Doctor Who’s enduring strengths.

This is a story for both established and recent fans to thoroughly enjoy. That’s no mean feat.

Taking a quick break from revising my new epic fantasy novel* to be published by Angry Robot next year, here’s some news to please keen readers.

The Green Man’s Holiday will be published by Wizard’s Tower Press on 30th October 2025, and ebook preorders are now open. Paper editions will be available for preorder soon. Check with your preferred retailer and/or find the full roster of purchase links at the Wizard’s Tower Press website.

Incidentally, if you would like to read some early excerpts, do check out Book Quote Wednesday #BookQW on social media. For me, that’s Bluesky, Mastodon, and Facebook. We get a word each week to look for in our books and share what we find. All authors are welcome to join in, so if you browse the hashtag, you’ll find a wide range of genres and writers.

*details about the new fantasy novel will be forthcoming in due course. I can say we now have a title we like very much, and an excellent cover concept. I am very pleased with the new facets added to the original story by the shifts in focus discussed and agreed after editorial input.

Once this rewrite is done, I’ll hopefully blog a bit more frequently…

I’m often asked, since I’m on the board of the Society of Authors, why legal action isn’t underway in the UK to hold the big tech companies to account for their wholesale and blatant breaches of copyright in using authors’ work scraped from pirate websites?

Well, for a start, class action lawsuits are much more difficult and complicated under English law than in the US. Even relatively straightforward cases can, and most likely will, take years to reach a conclusion and cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Especially when the other side has more money to spend than many countries’ annual budgets, and every interest in finding procedural ways to drag things out, in order to exhaust the plaintiff’s financial and other resources.

What can make a significant difference to a defendant’s attitude to the threat of UK litigation, and indeed to the prospects for certifying a class action in the UK courts, are judgements elsewhere which have gone against them on the same grounds. This is why recent developments in the US are important, and not only for American authors.

Firstly –

“On Wednesday, July 16, bestselling author David Baldacci delivered powerful testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, laying bare the devastating impact of AI companies’ systematic theft of copyrighted works. “I truly felt like someone had backed up a truck to my imagination and stolen everything I’d ever created,” Baldacci told the subcommittee, describing his discovery that AI companies had pirated his entire body of work to train their systems.
The moment of recognition came when Baldacci’s son asked ChatGPT to write a plot that read like a Baldacci novel. “In about five seconds, three pages came up that had elements of pretty much every book I’d ever written, including plot lines, character names, narrative, the works.”

You can read the full article here, and I recommend you do so.

Secondly –

“A California federal judge ruled Thursday that three authors suing Anthropic over copyright infringement can bring a class action lawsuit representing all U.S. writers whose work was allegedly downloaded from libraries of pirated works.
The filing alleges that Anthropic, the Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor behind the chatbot Claude, “violated the Copyright Act by doing Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” It alleges that the company downloaded as many as seven million copies of books from libraries of pirated works.”

Article here

We have to keep in mind this is a marathon, not a sprint. Frustrating as that is.

I’m looking forward to these autumn events, and discussing the fiction and non-fiction I’ve been working on with readers and fellow writers. And perhaps I’ll have more to share about future plans?

20th September – Edge Lit, Derby.

25th October – MCM Comic Con, London – I’ll be here on Saturday morning…

before hopping on a train to get to …

26th October – Bristolcon, Bristol

followed by …

30th October – 2nd November – World Fantasy Convention, Brighton UK

If our paths cross somewhere, feel free to say hello!

It’s fair to say readers familiar with the Crater School will come to this fourth novel with expectations. A new pupil will arrive and find her place among women and girls who value each other’s skills and merits, even if the hierarchical, patriarchal society of Old Mars fails to appreciate them. Along the way, newcomer and established pupils alike will learn subtly unobtrusive life lessons. So far, so formulaic, but there’s infinite scope for variation on these themes as Brenchley crafts another note-perfect story inspired by classic science fiction and the English school story tradition.

Let’s start with the title. Useful things, prepositions, with their multiple meanings. “At” can simply indicate location. It can also indicate an action directed towards some target. Both are applicable here, and Radhika has plenty to be angry about. She hasn’t come to the Crater School by her own design, or through some benevolent twist of fate. She doesn’t want to be here, but she has no choice. Her father is a disgraced British officer from the Indian Army back on Earth, seeking anonymity on Mars. Living in not-so-genteel poverty, he must find his daughter an acceptable, chaperoned lodging when her mother, his Indian wife, is taken seriously ill and admitted to the Sanatorium across the lake from the school. He has already strained the tolerance of polite society by marrying outside the expectations of his class and upbringing, with the ominous, unspoken implications that has for his daughter’s future.

No one at the Crater School would dream of disparaging Radhika’s complexion. Mistresses and pupils pride themselves on welcoming newcomers, whatever their backgrounds. Readers have already seen girls from strikingly different cultures learn to rub along together here, as their sharp corners are knocked off. We see the widespread expectation that Radhika will leave behind the Hindi she has spoken with her mother, the childhood songs from a very different, non-European musical tradition, and the ruthless, competitive attitudes an army brat learned playing cricket on the Raj’s parched pitches. She will realise they’re not quite the thing, if she’s going to fit in.

Such comfortable, blinkered assumptions lay bare the school’s hitherto hidden flaws. If the Cratereans cannot see for themselves why Radhika rebuffs this pressure to conform so furiously, they risk failing their latest pupil without even realising. With this gulf between them, how can Radhika find a way to help herself?

Brenchley crafts an entertaining, thoughtful read which will more than satisfy returning readers and engage those new to the series equally well.

For a full roster of purchase links, visit the Wizard’s Tower Press webpage.

For thoughts on previous books
Three Twins at the Crater School
Dust Up at the Crater School
Mary Ellen, Craterean

A brief and very pleasing bit of news today. I’m delighted to share Ben Baldwin’s fantastic cover, along with the title of the next book in my Green Man series.

The Green Man’s Holiday will be officially launched in October at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton (with a sneak preview at Bristolcon).

Will Dan and Fin enjoy the relaxing break they’re hoping for? You’ll have to wait and see…

I hadn’t planned on a six month blogging hiatus. So what happened?

On the plus side, over the Christmas and New Year break, I found the ideas I had for the next Green Man book were coming together in new and interesting ways. As soon as the holiday was over, I started writing, and I kept on writing. After illness and other upheavals wreaked havoc with my work schedule last year, I was determined to get as much of the new book done as soon as I could, in case anything unexpected happened. I pretty much assumed it would.

I’m happy to say no crisis hit. I got the draft written fast and fluently. With the benefit of editor Toby Selwyn’s invaluable input, we now have the finished manuscript, ready well ahead of the book’s planned launch at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton at the end of October. Ben Baldwin has now worked his usual magic and given us a marvellous cover. Details will forthcoming soon.

Other things in the plus column include me contributing an essay to the creative writing handbook, Writing the Magic, edited by Dan Coxon. I decided to explore what Tolkien’s creative process could offer a writer today – and where following in his footsteps might not be the best idea. That was an interesting and illuminating exercise on many levels. And talking of Tolkien, Zen Cho’s memorial lecture on fantasy fiction was as entertaining as it was instructive, and is well worth a watch.

I have also been working with the team at Angry Robot to agree on some changes to a fantasy novel proposal. That was one of the other projects that got badly disrupted last year. We have reached an entirely satisfactory consensus, and signed the contract. That book will be published next year, and when I read the opening few pages at Eastercon, people were pleasingly intrigued.

As an aside, some people have been surprised when I’ve mentioned I’m reworking a novel to a fairly significant extent following editorial input on my proposal. I’m surprised that they are surprised. It’s not the first time I’ve done this after all, going right back to my early Tales of Einarinn days. Fresh eyes, especially experienced, professional eyes, can offer valuable new input at every stage of a book’s development. I’m simply telling the story I want to tell from a slightly different perspective. Shifting the focus on certain characters, and rebalancing different plot elements, is proving to be an enjoyable challenge.

So I have been busy, and not only with writing. I was re-elected to the board of the Society of Authors last autumn, and we have been extremely busy. The onslaught on copyright law led by tech companies, hell bent on monetising their parasitical Large Language Models, has only been our most high profile challenge. A whole lot of things are making life difficult for writers at present, from the fragmentation and degradation of social media to bad practise and sheer incompetence by some publishers. You’ll notice I’m not naming names or mentioning specifics. I have a duty of confidentiality to the Society and its membership. That precludes me blogging about the publishing industry outrage of the day/week. Even without that, I haven’t had time to spare to get into debating and exploring the details of extremely complex situations.

Then there’s the ongoing everything else; in society, in politics, in the climate crisis, and international affairs. You don’t need me to tell you we live in perilous and unhappy times. I’ve balanced keeping current with the news with not letting it overwhelm me, which has meant spending less time online. Yes, I absolutely recognise the social and financial privilege I have which allows me to do that. I use that privilege where and when I can, to do what I can, mostly offline. Then there’s been family stuff; nothing dire, I’m glad to say, but everything takes up time. All this has added up to me limiting my social media to Bluesky, Mastodon and Facebook, disinclined to post longer form blogs, even about unrelated things.

So what has changed? Mostly, I’ve got the new Green Man book completed without a crisis. This time last year, I was scrabbling to get back on track, still recovering from a serious illness. Currently, I’m ahead of the game. I realised this when I looked at the calendar this morning. Don’t ask me why, but that flipped some sort of switch. Today was the day to dust off the blog.

I like to wrap up each year with a few reflections before Christmas, then take a break from social media until the New Year when I look forward. This year, looking back, my overriding thought is ‘Really? Seriously​?’ Because these past twelve months saw us hit with one disruptive (and often expensive) thing after another… That’s all I’m going to say about that, partly because I choose not to live my life online, and partly because I’m choosing to focus on the positive aspects of the year. Not burying my head in the sand, but making sure to balance the scales.

2024 saw the publication of my novel, The Green Man’s War, from Wizard’s Tower Press, a short story collection, Different Times and Other Places, from Newcon Press, a novelette, Unseen Hands, from ZNB, and three original short stories, A Civil War, in the anthology Fight Like a Girl Volume 2, from Wizard’s Tower Press, along with The Green Man’s Guest, and A Stitch in Time Saves One, both in Different Times and Other Places. I think there are possibly years where I’ve seen more words in print, but I think that’s a new high water mark as far as range and variety of writing in a single year is concerned.

August saw me attend the Worldcon in Glasgow, then there was Fantasycon in Chester, Bristolcon in Bristol (where else?) and lastly but by no means least, Fantastika, where I was a Guest of Honour this year’s Swecon in Stockholm on the first weekend of November. That was an excellent convention which I thoroughly enjoyed. All these events offered me opportunities for friendly and supportive conversations with fellow writers and readers, on panels, over meals and drinks. Some of these were planned, plenty more were unforeseen good fortune.

Since the disruptions mentioned above meant we hadn’t managed any sort of holiday to that point in the year, my husband and I stayed on in Stockholm for a week’s break. We had a splendid time. The weather was decent, we found some good restaurants, the city’s museums are excellent, and at that time of year, not too busy. The Vasa is as astounding as everyone says, and the Wreck Museum offers an up-to-date perspective on underwater archaeology which is very well worth seeing. The Viking exhibit at the History museum was fascinating, and the Army museum gave us a very interesting and different view of historical events. The ABBA museum is extremely well done, though we still find it hard to accept Waterloo won Eurovision 50 years ago!

As an added bonus, we spent time with local friends, including Jonathan, SF fan and historical guide, who showed us rune stones and painted churches on the outskirts of the city, and intriguing corners of Stockholm’s old town which we would never have found on our own. If you’re planning a visit to Sweden, do check out the tours and walks on offer at the Sweden History Tours website. You may then be able to see details and ideas which I picked up through the week appearing in my writing in the year to come.

And since Jonathan is a SF & Fantasy fan, we made sure to visit the deservedly renowned SF Bokhandeln bookstore in Stockholm. One of life’s great pleasures is strolling around a well-stocked bookshop comparing notes with a like-minded friend, finding out what you both have read, what they recommend that’s new to you, and introducing them to books you have really enjoyed. Finding your own books on the shelves is a bonus thrill.

Which brings me to my conclusion for the year. There’s a lot that’s wrong in the world at the moment, and far too many people are having far too hard a time of it, near and far. So alongside doing what I can to help out, I have realised that taking respite as well as pleasure on a personal level, when and where that’s possible, is more important than ever. Friendships are invaluable for doing these things. Those are the thoughts I’ll be taking with me to the end of this year and into the next.

With all good wishes to you and yours, as you celebrate this season as you choose.