Shadows of the Apt

Humankind wears the aspect of insects. Each kinden carries the Art of its totem: Beetle-kinden build and endure, Wasp-kinden sting and conquer, Mantis-kinden dance with blades older than any empire, Spider-kinden spin webs of court and intrigue, Ant-kinden think as one mind across a battlefield. This is the world of Shadows of the Apt, a Lowlands of quarrelsome city-states sliding faster than anyone reckons out of the age of sword and sorcery into one of crossbow, engine, and airship. The whole cycle is one author's work. Adrian Tchaikovsky writes ten novels running from Empire in Black and Gold to Seal of the Worm, with the short fiction of Tales of the Apt filling the margins. The engine of it is a single division: the Apt, who grasp machinery but cannot feel magic, and the Inapt, who wield the old powers yet cannot make a latch turn. When the industrialised Wasp Empire marches on the free cities, it falls to Stenwold Maker, Beetle spymaster of scholarly Collegium, to wake his neighbours before the black-and-gold tide reaches their walls. What sets it apart is that clash worked all the way through. This is a fantasy of an industrial revolution, where progress is itself a weapon and the losing side is the beautiful, arrogant, dying age of magic. Combat scales from a knife in an alley to fleets contesting the sky, and the cast widens book by book across a whole continent. Read it in publication order: begin with Empire in Black and Gold and go straight on, since each novel carries into the next.