Guide to Gladstone: What to read after the Craft Sequence
This article was written by Malda Marlys - you can find eir collected writings here, and follow em on Twitter here.
So you’ve made it through the scarred and staggering world left by the God Wars, whichever chronology worked out for you. You’re still picking the shards of Ruin of Angels out of your teeth or you just snapped up Dead Country and it’s not enough. Where should you go next?
Lucky for you, Gladstone has a wealth of other writing and each project hits on a different part of what makes the Craft Sequence great - so keep scrolling to find out what you should read next.
Checkpoint: Have you played the games yet?
Gladstone’s created two Choice Of games set in the world of the Craft Sequence. Choice of the Deathless and Deathless: City’s Thirst let you explore new corners of the world as interactive fiction where your decisions open and close possibilities and decide your stats (look, I like a good graph, and I like it even better when it’s made of broken magic and too many feelings). Both are spectacular, with infinite replay value.
The games are tonally pretty distinct, in keeping with the books. Deathless is a rewarding hero’s journey where you can happily be a villain protagonist if you like. Thirst will grind your soul out and you’ll be the better for it. I can best compare the two to the experience of playing Dragon Age: Origins and then DA:II back in the day, a gleeful power fantasy and a chance to maybe claw something like forgiveness for yourself in quick succession.
[Note from the editor: keep an eye out for some game related articles coming soon!]
If you want adventures and battles across time and space…
If you liked the wild adventures, contending/allying with creatures beyond and outside mortal ken, battles across time and space: try Empress of Forever. Unabashedly wild space opera with cheerful, pulpy absurdity growing around its barbed thorns. Trust me, you’d rather face the King in Red than Viv on a bad day. (Please forgive the blurb comparison to Elon Musk. It was unwise, but it was 2019, I suppose.)
If you want urban fantasy and a twist on religion…
If you liked the urban fantasy twists, practical blasphemy, and sense of being swept along: try Bookburners! Neatly collected as ebooks now, Bookburners originally came out through Serial Box (rebranded to Realm Media) and season three was recently released as a podcast.
Gladstone wasn’t the only writer on this one. Just. Go check out this out. A lot of spectacular writers have worked with this project.
If you want lyrical prose that claws its way to your heart…
If you liked the soul-stripping prose, clawing after identities and truth in a world hostile to both, and the dream logic of the magic: try This Is How You Lose the Time War, co-written with the inimitable Amal El-Mohtar (also a Bookburners contributor!), a feverish prose poem that leaps through time, universes, and lives in pursuit of a reality-cracking love story.
Special note if you got here from Time War, either by getting memed very effectively or just because: you’ll probably like the Craft Sequence, too, but be aware it’s a much more traditional narrative, and the first few books are, while very good of their kind, pretty much just urban fantasy procedurals. They get wilder, I promise!
If you want gritty, excruciating worldbuilding and mythologized reality…
If you liked the world-trotting, the striving, and all the times the narrative lingered extremely lovingly on a glass of whisky: try Last Exit. The Craft Sequence is about being such a spectacular magical disaster you can spit in god’s face and walk away, but it’s also about the truly excruciating detail. I’m just saying. You can kinda tell Gladstone is married to a lawyer. (Maybe it’s just me. I was raised by one.)
That sense of place and purpose and a world so alien yet so concrete is central to the experience of Last Exit, even if the suffocating, vivid landscapes are Walmart parking lots instead of the douchiest cocktail party imaginable. Travel a gritty yet mythologized America the same way you did the dream-ruins of Alikand.
[Second note from the editor: check out our LAST EXIT review here]
And a quick summary to finish it off…
If you want more adventures in the Craft Sequence world, try the in-world games Choice of the Deathless and Deathless: City’s Thirst
If you want adventures and battles across time and space, try space opera Empress of Forever
If you want urban fantasy and practical blasphemy, try multi-authored series Bookburners
If you want soul-stripping prose leaping through time and space in pursuit of a reality-bending love story, try NYT bestseller This is How You Lose the Time War co-written with the incredible Amal El-Mohtar
If you want a gritty yet mythologized America and a group of friends trying to save the world against the odds, try Last Exit
HUGE thanks to Malda Marlys for writing this article - a perfect addition to the site. Check out Malda’s website here!
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