Ascendant: Songs of Chaos

"Michael R. Miller’s book is an independently published book, self-published, but it’s available in audio, paperback and e-book – and I think it’s even in a few select stores, because it’s become so immensely popular. It’s a story of a traditional hero’s journey. The protagonist is a pot washer: his name’s Holt, and he’s very low down in the hierarchy of this world. He works in the kitchens, and doesn’t even get to cook himself, he just cleans the pots. In this world the dragon riders are the top echelon – they’re the warriors, they’re the nobility. They have quite a brutal practice, similar to the Spartans, where if there’s a dragon egg that’s damaged or disabled in some way they will destroy it. Holt is totally against this practice, and he saves an egg that looks like it’s going to be culled and keeps it for himself in secret. It results in Ash, a very rare white dragon, and a blind dragon. The blindness of his dragon actually becomes one of their strengths, because it gives them unique strategies with their magic, and a tremendously strong bond. Michael has cystic fibrosis and so was able to lean on his own experiences writing from Ash’s perspective, as well as using physiotherapy techniques that he does as part of his treatments to inspire the meditations used by riders in the book. In this world, there’s a growing threat called the Scourge. They’re an undead horde who are wreaking havoc across the world, and it’s up to Holt and his dragon to fight them. They end up becoming far more important in this battle between good and evil than anyone thought they would be. That’s the general plot, without spoiling too much! “Dragons have four legs; wyverns have two legs and two wings” What I find exciting is the uniqueness of the magic system. There’s a very interesting genre that’s been growing at a pace over the last three years, called the ‘cultivation’ genre. It’s got this huge audience, but it’s both niche and yet somehow so large that some of the books in this genre will hit number one on the whole of Amazon for weeks on end. Yet it hasn’t filtered through to the wider traditional print-book reading audience; it’s still almost entirely in the self-publishing space. My book Dragon Rider will actually be the first traditionally published cultivation novel. Cultivation fantasy is based on Eastern mythology and novels that have become more popular recently, and they feature an ambient magic energy or force around the world, and characters who are cultivators – although they might be called dragon riders, magic practitioners or wizards, whatever it might be. They are able to absorb this ambient energy into themselves, into a core inside them, which is often described as a metaphorical crystal that they have inside them. They have to meditate to bring this ‘mana’ or magic into themselves; their core is effectively a hollow crystal that stores this magic. And as time goes by, they do things to improve their abilities. So, they might expand their core to be larger; they might shape their core into a spiral so that when the magic goes in, it’s purified and becomes even more potent; they might grind their crystal to make it smooth on the outside, and that does something… Every cultivation book does it differently. It’s effectively about levelling yourself up. It’s progression fantasy in that sense. It might be you’re bronze tier to begin with, then you move to silver, then gold, then platinum, then jade… eventually the writer realises that they need to keep writing books, they’ve run out of tiers, and they start going with completely invented stuff – ‘Space tier!’ – and so on. So that’s the genre. And Michael has done what I’m also trying to do in Dragon Rider: taking the traditional westernised fantasy and melding it with this Eastern-inspired, very specific progression fantasy magic system. He puts them together really well. Yes, so it’s a conduit for them more than anything. So it’s slightly different to where it’s all on you – it’s more about the bond with the dragon."