These Huns can sing the Mongols’ origin legends, and the Turkic epic Manas. I think he has drawn on Attila’s later distant cousin, Genghis – both for Attila’s life story, and for this grand conception of conquest east and west. Two is the steppiest book, by far, thus guaranteed my fave. Napier’s other sin is against history and occurs in book Two. Neither sf nor the greats are known for rules. If that’s left me with a pref for the unconventional in hf, or an attitude of ‘rules? what rules?’ then, fine. I grew up on speculative fiction and great books of the past. But I’m not here to talk about my techniques, that’ll only get me into trouble.

My narrator has been known to, because I do zoom out to an ‘I’ that’s me, now and then. It’s radical, and again I’ll mention, my Tchingis doesn’t express himself in Percy Bysshe Shelley, much as I like the old poets. If that’s how the words come to him, and sound to his ear true. I’ll live with him giving Attila quotes from William Blake, if that’s what the author needs to do to say what he has to say, spontaneously. Maybe I’ll write another book freestyle.” In his trilogy William Napier oscillates between freestyle and conventional. “I can’t do this because action/adventure doesn’t let me. I’m wary of fiction that… is self-limited, is from a part of the writer. – I just thought up that argument, on his behalf. If he excised that – the phrases spontaneous to his lips – then what’s he doing? Writing from a front, a censored front. He’s an old Yeats PhD and he can’t keep Yeats out of his fiction – or other 19thC poets, or Shakespeare. Beyond what I’d do, although I defend him in my reviews (the ‘right to write’). He’s an uneasy cross between action/adventure bestseller-style, and a fiction that I see as more ambitious, and that takes artistic licence such as removes him from the mainstream. I’ll be terribly honest about him: I thought his trilogy an opportunity lost. Right, that’s honest.īut I read William Napier. I come with an inbuilt distrust of bestsellers, and when the subject is dear to me, I expect to be dismayed and upset. To start off: I mostly avoid the more commercial fiction on steppe topics. On my blog I can be more personal than I am on Goodreads. I was interested enough to read these three books in a month, and they deserve a spot here as steppe fiction.

Attila by william napier