Harbinger of the Storm - By Aliette De Bodard Page 0,139
Burgis and Patrick Samphire, Seb Cevey, Andy Cox, Electra aka starlady38, Emmanuel Chastellière, Tom Crosshill, Pat Esden, Roy Gray, Dave Gullen, Rob Haines, Colin Harvey, Caroline Hooton, Chris Kastensmidt, J. Robert King, James Maxey, Lucas Moreno, Cara Murphy, Nik aka Loudmouthman, Gareth L. Powell, Stefan Raets, Julia Reynolds, Roxane aka edroxy, Angela Slatter, M.J. Starling, Rob Weber (alias Val online), Sean Williams, Russell Wilcox, Maria Zannini at Online Writing Workshop, the T-Party writers’ workshop, Danie Ware and the Forbidden Planet staff involved with my signing and bookselling there, and to everyone else who talked about the book, reviewed it, or was kind enough to let me blather about my writing in their corner of the web. In the promotion department, special thanks go to Janice Hardy, who in addition to having a sharp eye for structure and conflict, is also an awesome graphic designer and provided me with Servant of the Underworld bookmarks and business cards.
As always, many thanks to the AR crew, Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris, and to my agents John Parker and John Berlyne at Zeno Agency for the enthusiasm, the responsiveness, and for putting up with my more naive questions on the world of publishing and deadlines.
And finally, to my family: to my paternal grandparents, whose house was always a treasure-trove of books; to my maternal grandmother, my bà ngoai, who took care of me as a child, and still does; to my parents, for always being there; and to my sister, who promoted the book to all and sundry across Europe, from Spain to Finland. And, last but not least, thanks to my husband Matthieu, who, not content with being dragged to London to see a (wonderful) exhibition on the Aztecs, cheerfully suggested suspects, brainstormed rituals and plotted bloody murders with me, in addition to reading the first draft of this with his usual critical eye.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
French by birth, Aliette de Bodard chose to write in English – her second language – after a two-year stint in London. Though she has trained as an engineer (graduating from Ecole Polytechnique, one of France’s most prestigious colleges), she has always been fascinated by history and mythology, especially those of non-Western cultures. Her love of mysteries gave her the idea to write a series of crossgenre novels which would feature Aztecs, blood magic and fiendish murders.
She is a Campbell Award finalist and a Writers of the Future winner. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and Fantasy magazine, and has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction. She is now hard at work on her third novel – the next in the Obsidian and Blood series.
She lives in Paris, where she has a job as a computer engineer.
As I mention in the afterword to Servant of the Underworld, writing a book set in Aztec times carries with it a number of challenges, not the least of which is reconstituting a history we know little about. As usual, any egregious mistakes are my own, and not those of the sources I consulted.
The other challenge is how to make the civilisation intelligible for modern readers. Most Aztec names are long; for the longer the name was, the most prestigious it was. They are also replete with a number of phonemes barbarous to English ears such as “tz” or “tl”. Accordingly, I took the decision to simplify matters somewhat. The inhabitants of the city of Texcoco are in fact the Acolhuas (much as those of the city of Tenochtitlan are the Mexica-Tenochca); but given how little they were referred to, I used the word “Texcocan”, which has the merit of having a clear common root with “Texcoco”.
Similarly a number of names were simplified. I chose to refer to the She-Snake by his title rather than by his name, the rather long and unwieldy “Tlilpopoca-tzin”; and Nezahualtzin’s full name is in fact “Nezahualpilli-tzin”, quite a mouthful. Most other names chosen were deliberately short, useful for us but something that would have been highly disrespectful in Aztec times.
I twisted history in several respects, perhaps the most notable being the addition of the High Priest for the Dead to the highest level of religious hierarchy. The histories only mention the High Priest of Tlaloc and the High Priest of Huitzilpochtli as supreme religious authorities, but I needed a triumvirate in order to justify Acatl’s presence at Court.
And, while it is true that the Great Temple, the centre of religious life in Tenochtitlan,