Queen of the Night, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is one of my favourites, of the kinden stories I've posted up here, although it is something of a change of pace. There are three people in particular I should acknowledge, on the road to Queen of the Night. The first is a Mr Mozart, of whom you may have heard, whose contribution to the story is, hopefully, […]

Moth-kinden by David Mumford

    The Moth-kinden were once the dark masters of the Lowlands, holding the lesser races as their slaves. Then the revolution came and their power was broken by the new weapons and machines that their former subjects devised, and that they could not understand. Now, centuries later, they plot and argue in their mountain […]

Sacrificed to the Insect God (1)

Religion and Belief amongst the Kinden   They have no gods. This is the first thing. To the certain knowledge of the Lowlanders there are no insect churchs, no spider-priestesses or weevil-popes. Oh, perhaps there are savage peoples at the very edge of civilisation, ekeing out a living in the harsh places that history has left […]

Cradle of Civilisation

The dominion of the Moth-kinden before the revolution was mostly referred to by its masters as “ours”, but by the other old Inapt powers as the Shadowlands or the Darklands after the Moths’ nocturnal habits. After their fall, and the rise of the Beetle and Ant-kinden free city-states, the term “the Lowlands” began to be […]

Hammer and Sickle

Some more Empire backstory The slaves found their voice. This was five hundred and thirty-seven years before the main action in Empire (1), and we know this because the main action in Empire takes place in the year 537. The slaves had never had a calendar, while they lived under the boot of their masters. Their masters’ […]

Dark Days

All this was prehistory. The unspoken pact with the monster insects that ensured humanity’s survival, and the subsequent development of the Art, is all lost to the mists of time. Not even the longest memories, not even the most complete records, bear witness. What is certain is that, having chosen a side, mankind collaborated in the […]