On January 16 I posted the very exciting news, here, that The Heir of Night has been nominated for the Gemmell Awards in both the Morningstar (Best Fantasy Newcomer) and Legend (Best Fantasy Novel) categories.

The Gemmell Awards have been established to honour heroic fantasy author David Gemmell—and to celebrate excellence in the heroic/epic fantasy genre.

As epic/heroic fantasy is very much The Heir of Night—and The Wall of Night series—heartland territory, I thought I’d talk a little bit today about why I consider it a great honour to be nominated for these awards.

It’s pretty simple really: I have loved David Gemmell’s epic fantasy writing for a very long time and consider his work one of the formative influences on my own enthusiasm for this style of fantasy.

You might say: how so? And that is a fair enough question, since someone picking up Legend or Waylander, for example, and putting it side by side with The Heir of Night might say: ‘But they’re quite different stories.’ In fact, I hope they do—but I still believe there is an influence there.

Because from the moment I first picked up Waylander and began reading (Waylander was my very first Gemmell) I was utterly absorbed: by the sweep of the story and by the sense of contending light and dark, but also because there were so many shades of human fallibility in between those extremes. And because David Gemmell wrote heroism—not larger than life remote heroes, but real, caught-in-the-moral-and-conflicting-value-system-crosshairs human beings who have to make difficult choices. And some of them, occasionally, make the right choices and that leads them—willingly or unwillingly—to being in the place and time that will also make them “heroes.” And they really are heroes, only grounded in that base of realism and struggle.

I also liked that sense, always present in Gemmell, that right and wrong is a choice we make, but that it isn’t always straightforward and it certainly isn’t easy. And I really liked the way that the characters’ choices are often around sacrifice and duty—The Thirty exemplify this, but it is a continuing theme for Gemmell characters. But David Gemmell’s stories also touch on the importance of friendship and love and their ability, in rare circumstances, to transcend the pressures of ambition and self-interest. The example that always stands out for me in this respect is the friendship between Tenaka Khan and Ananais in The King Beyond the Gate (which is possibly my favourite Gemmell novel.)

The grand sweep of story and adventure, difficult choices around right and wrong, sacrifice and duty—and the frail barques of friendship and love set against the  overwhelming seas of ambition and self interest: this is heartland David Gemmell territory. But it is also, I believe, heartland The Heir of Night territory as well. And that is why I feel so honoured that Heir has been nominated for the Gemmell Awards: because it was David Gemmell who showed me, through his writing,  that it was possible to tell great stories of this kind—and inspired me to write such stories myself.

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The "kitty"

I believe it is traditional, at this juncture, to exhort you to vote for Heir “else the kitty will get it.” But the said kitty being now in his 20th year, with days centred on a deeply ingrained pattern of regular sustaining snacks, much sleeping, the occasional leisurely stroll around the desmesne, and quality peeps time ‘on demand’—I am just not sure I could put his wellbeing at risk in so cavalier a fashion!

So instead I shall simply reiterate what I posted on January 16, which is that if you feel you can in good conscience do so, then I would love it if you felt able to click on the following links and vote now for “The Heir of Night.”

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The Morningstar Award:  to shortlist The Heir of Night for Best Fantasy Debut—vote here

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The Legend Award: to shortlist The Heir of Night for Best Fantasy Novel—vote here

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With respect to the Legend Award, I do note that my very good friend and fellow author, Mary Victoria, also has not one but two books on the list—Samiha’s Song and Oracle’s Fire, which are the second and concluding novels in her The Chronicles of the Tree trilogy. You can only vote once and obviously I can’t help hoping that you will vote for Heir. But Mary’s books are also very worthy contenders, so if you haven’t checked them out already then you should definitely do so—right away!  (I also note that both books are also eligible for Sir Julius Vogel and Hugo Award nomination this year—so you might like to have a wee think about that as well.)