Ricardo Pinto

Ricardo Pinto is a Portuguese fantasy author and former computer game programmer, born in 1961 in Lisbon. He is known for The Stone Dance of the Chameleon, a trilogy beginning with The Chosen (1999) that draws on the influence of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert's Dune to imagine a slave-owning civilization ruled by a god-emperor and a rigid caste system; he later substantially revised and re-released the series as a seven-volume second edition beginning in 2020. Pinto has said he deliberately included gay characters in his fiction as a reflection of his own life, and chose the fantasy genre over historical fiction for greater creative freedom. His other work includes War in Heaven (2013), co-written with Adrian Smith, and the novella Matryoshka (2018).