Gateway Essentials: Michael Scott Rohan
In the middle of last week, we let you know about the exciting news that a roleplaying game of Michael Scott Rohan’s Winter of the World series had been develeoped and is now available. That is, of course, excellent news for those of you who know and love the Winter of the World series, but what about everyone else?
In a rhetorical manoeuvre that hitherto undiscovered tribes in the Peruvian Andes will have seen coming: we’re glad you asked!
Born in Edinburgh in 1951, Michael Scott Rohan has written both fantasy and science fiction. Whilst studying law at Oxford, Rohan joined the SF group and met the president, Allan J Scott, who started him writing for the group’s semi-professional magazine SFinx alongside names such as Robert Holdstock and Ian Watson. His first novel, Run to the Stars, was published in 1983 and he collaborated with Allan J Scott on The Hammer and the Cross, a non-fiction account of how Christianity arrived in Viking lands. Rohan is best known for his acclaimed The Winter of the World sequence, an epic fantasy set in an ice-bound world.
Volume one of The Winter of the World is the acclaimed The Anvil of Ice, which available as a Fantasy Masterworks paperback and a Gateway eBook.
The chronicles of The Winter of the World echo down the ages in half-remembered myth and song – tales of mysterious powers of the Mastersmiths, of the forging of great weapons, of the subterranean kingdoms of the duergar, of Gods who walked abroad, and of the Powers that struggled endlessly for dominion.
In the Northlands, beleaguered by the ever-encroaching Ice and the marauding Ekwesh, a young cowherd, saved from the raiders by the mysterious Mastersmith, discovers in himself an uncanny power to shape metal – but it is a power that may easily be turned to evil ends, and on a dreadful night he flees his new home, and embarks on the quest to find both his own destiny, and a weapon that will let him stand against the Power of the Ice.
His wanderings will bring him great friends but earn him greater enemies, and eventually they will transform him from lowly cowherd to a mastersmith fit to stand with the greatest of all men.
The series continues across another five titles – all available as Gateway eBooks – which we’ve selected as Michael Scott Rohan’s Gateway Essentials:
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| The Forge in the Forest (1987) |
The Hammer of the Sun (1988) |
The Castle of the Winds (1998) |
The Singer and the Sea (1999) |
Shadow of the Seer (2001) |
You can find more of Michael Scott Rohan’s work via his Author page on the Gateway website and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
