Before iron helmets and steel swords, when dragons roamed the world, was an age of bronze and stone, when the Gods walked the earth, and people lived in terror.

A scribe, a warlord, a dancer, a mute insect and a child should have no chance against the might of the bickering gods and their cruel games. But the gods themselves are old, addicted to their own games of power, and now their fates may lie in the hands of mere mortals . . .

By divine plan a plague of cannibals has been unleashed across the world, forming an armada which preys on all who cross their path. Meanwhile the people who allied against the gods have been divided, each taking their own path to attack the heavens – if they can survive the tide of war which has been sent against them. All they need is the right distraction, and the right opportunity, to deal a blow against the gods themselves . . .

An original, visceral epic weaving together the mythologies of a dozen pantheons of gods and heroes to create something new and magical, this tale of the revolt against the tyranny which began in Against All Gods is a must read from a master of the fantasy genre.

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I like to think of myself as a method writer. I come from a family of actors, and the term ‘Method actor’ was around the house throughout my childhood, and in addition, my dad, who was both a playwright and a prolific author of fiction, used to do things like building medieval handgonnes and making Tudor era clothing as part of his writing system. Let me add that this is great fun if you are a young person; everything was exploration and discovery, although I still remember the experiment with urine as a mordaunt for dyes, and my mother put her foot down on experimenting with seventeenth century poisons when dad was writing about the court of Louis the XIV…

Anyway, I learned from them. When I get stuck in to a book idea, long before the first word is typed, there are things I need to know. I’ve now done this often enough that I have a method within my method, so the learning process is structured, which I hope will still be entertaining. When writing fantasy, I get to pick and choose my cultural references, which is fun all by itself, and do. With my ‘Age of Bronze’ books, as the series title might suggest, I was picking and choosing from the Bronze Age, right across the world, from the Pre-Inca South Americans called we call Poche to the Indus Valley Culture in what is now India and Pakistan.

And finally, because I wrote what I call ‘immersive detail’ and may be considered ‘really boring detail’ by some, I want to know about cooking, dance, literature, architecture both grandiose and vernacular, music, trade, politics, religion, and martial arts. Probably other things too, but that gives you an idea of the foundations of my ‘method.’

How Bronze Age combat worked

I teach various forms of historical swordsmanship; sometimes I even compete in tournaments. Years ago, I stood at the display cases in Heraklion, on Crete, looking at the hundreds of bronze swords on display; looking at the damage evident on some of them, trying to imagine how they were used, and whether there was a system I could discern from forensic examination, but only while I was writing Storming Heaven did I finally come into possession of an accurate reproduction of a Mycenaean ‘Type G’ sword. I played with it for weeks, and I learned more than five things just from that one artifact; because I write fight scenes, and because I have some background in swords, perhaps I’ll go into too much detail, but here goes:

First, the grip of the type G is so modern that once a sword person grips one, he or she is likely to smile and comment. I’ve now seen this with a dozen trained people. What look like quillons, or ‘guards’ for the hand on the grip, are really spurs, like modern fencing foils have; a spur for your index finger, to make sure you grasp the sword exactly right each time.  The grip also orients you hand; this is a thrusting weapon, and it is now comfortably available for thrusting, although there’s also a nice area to rest your thumb on the widest portion of the blade, for small, controlled slashes, like under a shield.

I also cut a bunch of things with my bronze sword, and I thrust at others. Let me say that I do know a little about the metallurgy of bronze; bronze can be complex, and most modern bronzes aren’t very much like ancient bronze in their alloy. Regardless, what I learned was that with work hardening the edges, I could get the sword very sharp indeed; but that the edge was, compared to steel, somewhat fragile, and that I needed to keep my cuts very straight; I needed to deliver them (in mechanical terms) with my edge aligned with my arm and body structure, so that I didn’t bend the blade when I cut. That suggests to me that first, they didn’t make Hollywoodesque, round-house blows against each other’s shields, and second, that they were well-trained to use these weapons, because in this case, training could overcome most of the apparent fragility.

From the artifact, then, I was able to move a long way towards reconstruction of the martial art that it was produced to support. And that was fun. Speculative, resting on some questionable evidence, but luckily, I’m writing fantasy. 

There’s always new inspiration to be found, even in places you’ve been before

I love to travel to see the hard evidence of the past, and so the second thing came to me at the so-called ‘Treasury of Atreus.’ If you haven’t been, it’s a magnificent, enormous beehive tomb constructed of stone blocks, some of them so huge that even though I’ve been there five times I’m literally awed each time. The Lion Gate of the fortress town is impressive, but the tomb is… incredible.

I was just about to start writing Storming Heaven last year, and I had just completed a reenactment in Greece (the Battle of Plataea, and you can see some of our pictures at www.plataea2022.com) and I’d promised my daughter and her friend a few days on beaches. I had no pans to visit Mycenae again, but that’s how it worked out; a rushed visit on a Tuesday morning. There’s a great deal to see at Mycenae, but I found myself standing in front of the Treasury of Atreus, just looking at the lintel and the entrance way. I’ve read articles on how it was built, or how it might have been built. Then I walked inside, still in a state of awe, wondering to myself as to why this one monument had such impact; I peeked in the side chamber, and there was a smell…

I can’t say it was the smell of death, or mortality. But it was more than the smell of slightly damp earth; it was very evocative. Smell is, for me, one of the most important senses; maybe it is for everyone, but the smell of the side chamber wasn’t something I’d encountered before, and in that moment, the structure and narrative of Storming Heaven changed. I needed the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ in my book, and I needed… death. More than death. A grandiose God of Death.  Someone who might live in something like the ‘Treasury of Atreus.’ And I knew how he should smell.

To be fair, I also learned that the beehive tomb at Mycenae was the largest arched vault in the world for over fifteen hundred years; I learned that no one knows for whom it was built; I learned that its construction was unique among the hundreds of beehive tombs in Bronze Age Greece. I also stared in wonder at the artifacts in the museum; there’s something about Linear B tablets, which are quite small and were only preserved because everything ended in flames, routine documents of a modestly efficient bureaucracy; something very real. People really lived then. They really paid taxes. They really had babies.  The gold artifacts don’t bring that to me like the linear B tablets do.

Practical and sensory experiences can add to your understanding

I’ve already mentioned that I was at a reenactment of the Battle of Plataea. Now, Plataea happened in 479BCE according to our best evidence, and that’s long after the collapse of the Bronze Age, which is set variously in the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. Nonetheless I learned something there, in my bronze panoply and my wool chiton in forty-degree Greek heat. I learned that light wool is very comfortable in high heat; I learned that it doesn’t seem to pick up sweat like cotton or even linen, and I learned that a big, but light, wool ‘gown’ made an excellent layer under bronze armour. All of that was interesting, but what I really learned was, again, olfactory.

I learned that bronze armour has a smell. It’s not a good smell; its coppery, and it resembles the scent you get in your nose when you break it or have a nosebleed. Interesting? To me it was fascinating, because is my ‘style’ is immersion, the more scents I can include, the better, and the idea that bronze armour smells like spilled blood was virtually thematic. I’m pretty sure I amused my tent mate, Giannis, standing in the evening light, with half my thorakes in my hands, smelling it. 

Violence isn’t always the answer

Very early in the research for Storming Heaven I discovered the ‘Indus Valley Culture,’ one of the most interesting of all the Bronze Age civilizations I examined, and I’m ashamed to say that before I stumbled across it while looking up something on Babylon, I’d just barely heard of it. So my fourth thing might be the whole of the Indus Valley civilization, but one thing sticks out, and that is something worth everyone’s attention: there are very, very few weapons associated with the Indus Valley Culture. There are so few weapons, in fact, that some theorists have proposed that they were pacifistic, or even proto-Jains. Amidst the cloud of spears, swords, sickles, axes, arrow points and chariots of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt and Mycenae, the paucity of weapons really stands out. 

I was lucky enough to be an a Fantasy Con last year where a group of us, all writers who like writing a good fight scene, all began to discuss the purpose of violence in any literature; the over-representation of heroic violence in fantasy, and the sheer difficulty of representing heroism and epic without resort to violence. I won’t pretend I hadn’t thought about all this before; I’ll just say I walked away determined to show some heroic pacifism, and here, before my eyes, was a whole culture that at least archaeologically speaking seems to have eschewed violence. Maybe that was the most important thing that I learned while writing Storming Heaven. Maybe.

The Big monuments weren’t built without a price

I was almost done writing Storming Heaven, which, if you don’t know, is about a group of mortals banding together to overturn some particularly loathsome (but sometimes funny) gods. I had all my cultural references in order, pages of outlines and notes, and I’d written about three hundred pages. For Christmas, my partner gave me a copy of a new book by two anthropologists called The Dawn of Everything. 

Let me be brief; I read it and discovered that I don’t know anything. It’s a wonderful book; I’m sure it is full of flaws, and I saw a few things that, even as an amateur, I saw as questionable, but the authors’ contention that the growth of government and kingship and tyranny and war is not inevitable, and that early societies managed quite well without, thanks, and that some civilizations have turned their backs on the excesses of oppression as firmly as the Japanese turned their back on gunpowder in war, all of that was new to me. And wonderful, and allowed me to reexamine everything I thought I knew about Egypt and Sumeria, Babylon, and the Mayans. A single thought will encapsulate what I learned…

All the archaeological monuments that we use to symbolize ancient cultures, every pyramid, every temple, and every obelisk, is dedicated to someone’s ‘great project,’ that involved forced or at least coerced labour by thousands of people under the direction of a few or a single person; whereas successful communal cultures mostly leave uniform small houses, and maybe a public bath, difficult to date and not particularly imposing. Academic and popular history are drawn to the great monuments; who goes to see an early Bronze Age seaside trading town like Thermi on Lesvos? There’s almost nothing to see!

Bonus thing

I went to Thermi on Lesvos. There’s very little to see except the outlines of some private houses set in modern concrete; it’s nothing like visiting the great fortresses of Orchomenos or Mycenae, the Pyramids of Giza, the magnificent ruins of the Mayans or the Inca. But it does tell a story; small houses, close together; people living together, and choosing to do so, without much in the way of gold, or weapons (one copper knife, I believe) or statues, or temples. It looks like a nice place to live.  For everyone.

Storming Heaven: Bookshop | Amazon