The Night of the Swarm – Robert Redick

night of the swarm“I can’t remember when I’ve been so enthralled” Terry Brooks

Today we publish the mass market paperback of The Night of the Swarm by Robert Redick. This is the fourth and final part of The Chathrand Voyage, one of the most purely imaginative and original fantasy epics it has ever been my pleasure to publish. If we’re absolutely honest it hasn’t had quite the commercial impact that we were hoping for. Something that I find both sad and puzzling. Why puzzling? Well take a look at the reviews the series has garnered in its time:

“Masterful storytelling…a delight” Los Angeles Times

“If any ambitious TV producers are looking for a multi-part fantasy to adapt after the success of HBO’s Game of Thrones…Robert Redick’s impressive Chathrand Voyage series has it all” SFX

“Exciting…enough plot twists and double-crosses to satisfy the most demanding lovers of suspense” Publishers Weekly

“Fantasy at its best…crazily inventive with great characters…superb action. One of the most exciting voices in fantasy” Fantasy Book Critic

“Astoundingly impressive stuff…one of the most imaginative and exciting fantasy writers around” SciFi London

“Redick pulls of epic fantasy with a great deal of style, giving his readers everything they want along with a big bag of surprises” Starburst

“Robert Redick has taken the most hackneyed of fantasy staples and turned it into something special” Sci Fi Now

“A richly drawn, highly original and superbly executed fantasy” SFREVU

“Redick joins the ranks of writers challenging the fantasy genre and making it exciting again” The New York Review

“Robert Redick is an extraordinary talent” New York Times Bestselling author Karen Miller

“The adventure is non-stop, the characters powerfully endearing, and the world building meticulous” Paul Di Filippo

“I can’t remember when I’ve been so enthralled. Maybe when I first read Philip Pullman. Wow! This was one terrific read” Terry Brooks

I first fell in love with this series on the basis of the Chathrand herself. A bewitched and haunted sailing ship. 600 years old, the size of a supertanker she is a world all her own, yet sets sail across a beautifully imagined, vast world, richer and more varied than virtually any other I’ve come across. But just as the Chathrand catches your attention it is the people she carries on her epic voyage that keep it. Whether it be the mad captain, the tarboy, the lost girl, the spymaster, or the mage these are richly made, always surprising characters. And that is before you meet the Ixchel. In a genre where too often the fantasy grows from a tired, medieval alternate Europe, Robert Redick sets his diverse cast of characters out across an exotic and vividly rendered world of sweeping oceans, vicious reefs, lost cities and jungles. It is a world where time stretches, where animals are finding a new way of being alive and where humanity  is in danger of losing its own.

This is a fantasy series like no other, which manages to be what fantasy is all about. And now it’s complete. It’s an awesome achievement.