The Bone Ships
by R.J. Barker
🏆 Winner Best Fantasy Novel, 2021 British Fantasy Awards
The Bone Ships by RJ Barker is the first book in The Tide Child trilogy (the second book in the trilogy, Call of the Bone Ships, is also already out, as book prize awards tend to lag publication by a year or so).
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“In Whitby Museum, they have ships that have been carved out of bone by Napoleonic prisoners of war, and that stuck in my head: ships of bone, that’s pretty cool…So I wanted bone ships. Why would you build your ships out of bone? And the only answer is, because there’s no wood. So I needed to engineer a world without wood, which is how we get this world of vines that grow quite quickly during a season and then die back, and they’re not strong enough to make big ships. And then you get onto the question: how big does something need to be if you’re going to use its bones for ships? And the answer was: really big. So I had sea monsters. My editor was straight in with, ‘Let’s call them dragons.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think they really are dragons…’ But she said, ‘No, no, no. They’re dragons.’ So okay, we’ll call them dragons. And that was the starting point.” Read more...
