iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

2027: short fiction editors now require that every submission must include a section that explains to the reader how to build a nuclear bomb and/or biological weapons

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Damien Lawardorn @damienlawardorn.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

New book review is up! This week, I'm recommending House of the Rain King by @gnipahellir.bsky.social. It's a tightly contained myth-fantasy infused with a hint of Australian worldbuilding. I found it really compelling. #BookSky medium.com/@lawardornd/...

medium.com

Should You Read: House of the Rain King by Will Greatwich

House of the Rain King would go down well with people who love fantasy but are maybe a little jaded with how tropey it can be.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I've got a new short story "Public Labyrinths for All" - a tale of liminal spaces and community organising - read it now in CRUX vol. 1: meridianaustralis.au

meridianaustralis.au

Meridian Australis

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Steph ✨ @thesenesx.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

just finished this and if you love mythic fantasy I cannot recommend this book enough!! 🤩 it has such a great blend of folklore and australiana, making it read like a fairytale

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Some of the most underappreciated fantasy novels of all time.

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Here, the ghost is me. @highway62.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

"In the Hills, the Cities" (Barker, 1984)

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Slow BOO!s Dave @wellingtonskeleton.space · 11/12/2025

Landing in the middle of a venn diagram that includes Piranesi, Black Company, and Alan Garner, but in a very Australian sort of way, I can't recommend this book highly enough. I loved it, and I hope you — who are reading this post — read it and love it too. willgreatwich.com/house-of-the...

willgreatwich.com

House of the Rain King – Will Greatwich

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

military theorists emphasise that even the best strategy will fall apart if the soldiers on the ground are not motivated to fight. that's because no plan survives contact with the anomie

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

The Night-Bird's Feather by Jenna Moran. would need to be a cartoon though

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

I really like the line in Aladdin when Robin Williams sings "who sent those goons to their lords? Why, Prince Ali" because it implies the film is set in a polytheistic universe where a range of different deities can take charge of the souls of the dead

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

easy... I'll simply attach a cage to my drone that releases a small pigeon, diverting the eagle's attention

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies Magazine @bcsmagazine.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Archives w BCS #432: "Another Tide" @gnipahellir.bsky.social, BCS #420, Aurealis Award winner. "situating myself in another’s cultural viewpoint. Yet, presented with a real enemy of the empire, I found myself sinking into the role of bourgeois scold." www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/anot...

beneath-ceaseless-skies.com

Beneath Ceaseless Skies - Another Tide by Will Greatwich

At the university I had studied radical repositioning: the art of situating myself in another’s cultural viewpoint. I considered myself an open-minded woman, an opponent of cultural hegemony. Yet, pre...

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Great deal! This book is awesome if you didn't already know!

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Reading 'Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City'. Buckets of fun

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

make a TV series out of Dancers at the End of Time you cowards

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tisane al-gaib @dallaninvictus.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

finished this the other night and it was an incredible read: beautiful, evocative (particularly if you like birds) and high stakes on a small enough scale that you can feel what the events are doing to everyone involved - especially as it becomes clear what's going on and the choices thereby forced

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Underwater Owlbear @underwaterowlbear.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Just finished the excellent #HouseOfTheRainKing by @gnipahellir.bsky.social. What an amazing debut novel. Anyone with an interest in mythology or #OSR #TTRPGs should go read it ASAP. Thanks for the recommendation @throneofsalt.bsky.social

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Aaron Jacobs @ajacobs.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

I read House of the Rain King over the weekend. Wonderful book. Feels like Gormenghast and The Black Company had a love child nannied by Name of the Rose, but it's also wholly its own thing. Tells a self-contained story well but left me wanting to hear more about the people and the world.

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mouldwarp @mooncalfed.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

y'all this is one of the best books i've read in a long time, please check it out. stayed up until midnight finishing it out, it's that good.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Did an interview with Melbourne writers' collective Meridian Australis about House of the Rain King and my short stories: meridianaustralis.au/an-interview...

meridianaustralis.au

An Interview with Will Greatwich – Meridian Australis

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Made a little graphic to show what's in my novel. Some writers I know think these graphics are cringe, but I kind of like them. However, I wasn't keen on listing a bunch of tropes, so instead I listed some significant Objects that appear in the book. All Objects' significance is guaranteed.

The cover of my novel House of the Rain King. It shows a monastery surrounded by floodwaters and birds. Around the cover are little arrows pointing to words that say "Feather Cloaks" "A bloody spearhead" "The pinion-stone" "sacred books" "a skeletal hand" and "a bag of cockle shells"

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

lovely review of House of the Rain King from RPG blogger Throne of Salt: throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2025/03/book... "it’s D&D as fuck without being married to the trade dress of D&D... it feels like a book that a D&D adventure would be based on, rather than a book that is based on a D&D adventure."

throneofsalt.blogspot.com

Bookpost Special: House of the Rain King

(Disclosure: Author gave me an ARC and asked me to write a review.) House of the Rain King is a good fucking book. That’s the short versi...

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

House of the Rain King has been out for a bit over a week. The response has been way better than I'd hoped for. One reader called it a "tremendous first novel". Someone else told me they stayed up till 3am to finish it. I'm very happy.

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H.B. Tyson @hbtyson.bsky.social · 07/08/2023

Linocut from 2021

Scanned image of a black and white linocut print. A person with shoulder-length hair stands in the foreground. The figure's face lacks any facial features, but instead has a cavernous hole in its place. From this hole a mass of smoke flows out. Mountains and a speckled ground are visible in the background.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Just got an email from Apple Books saying they can turn my novel into an audiobook, for free, with "digital narration". Interesting thing is the email doesn't use the term "AI" anywhere. Almost like they know we fucking hate it!

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

afaik Saunders has never done any marketing for his books and only the bare minimum in terms of blurb and cover design. Yet the books still sell for one reason: the people who have read them never fucking shut up about them.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

Leftist fantasy author Graydon Saunders is taking down his Commonweal novels, as a principled stance against US companies. These are some of the most original fantasy novels of the past decade. Huge opportunity for a non-US indie press to pick them up dubiousprospects.blogspot.com/2025/03/come...

dubiousprospects.blogspot.com

Comes the day

Things being as they are, it looks like it's time for me to take my books down off of Google Play. (And Draft2Digital; they're a lot less ev...

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

HOUSE OF THE RAIN KING is here! You can get the ebook from all the major retailers: books2read.com/houseofthera... or buy direct from my website: willgreatwich.com/house-of-the... Print edition is coming in the next couple of days.

Promotional graphic showing the book HOUSE OF THE RAIN KING, with a cover featuring a monastery surrounded by flowing water, with birds circling overhead.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

RAIN IN THE DESERT, the free prequel to my novel, is now available. The mercenaries of Sparrow Company are trapped in the desert, bound by honour to serve a cruel master. But when a rain cloud appears in the distance, their luck might be about to change... Get it here: willgreatwich.com/subscribe/

Book cover "Rain in the Desert" by Will Greatwich. A silhouette of a sparrow leaps into the air against a background of desert dunes and falling rain. In the foreground, a series of swords are thrust haphazardly into the sand.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Dying Earth covers thru the ages

The Dying Earth by Jack Vance. Goofy fantasy art of a guy pointing a sword at a... portal? It looks like Van Gogh's Starry Night with tentacles coming off it

This cover is lush and dark, depicting a woman (?) riding a horse through a mysterious jungle

This is the oldest cover. A woman in a very revealing diaphanous gown stands before a group of grotty hooded cultists. The price of the book is 25c

This one is grotesque and fungal but also washed out and ephemeral. It depicts a weird alien landscape with a fleshy zebra-thing in the foreground. The style evokes pastoral scenes or perhaps Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

We need a Plex for ebooks, something that syncs to all your devices easily. Having DRM free books is better, but honestly it's a pain in the ass to load them onto my Kobo every time

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Jamedi @jamreads.com · 16/02/2025

It's my pleasure to help reveal the cover of House of the Rain King, a standalone literary fantasy written by @gnipahellir.bsky.social. Release date: 28th February Cover by Miblart. Full info: jamreads.com/reveals/cove...

House of the Rain King, by Will Greatwich

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

My fantasy novel HOUSE OF THE RAIN KING is now available for preorder! It's got: 🔔 scheming monks 🗡️ deadbeat mercenaries 🌊 floodwaters 🦘 Australian landscapes 🦜 birds. so many birds Sounds interesting? Get it here: books2read.com/houseofthera...

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

Thanks Delilah for this wonderful first review!

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

I can finally show off the cover of my novel! HOUSE OF THE RAIN KING is a standalone fantasy novel about a young monk who comes face to face with his god amidst the rising waters of a mythic flood. It's available for pre-order now, publishing on the 28th of Feb: books2read.com/u/mekdKR

Book cover "HOUSE OF THE RAIN KING". A stylised flat colour illustration depicting a medieval monastery surrounded by floodwaters, with birds circling overhead.

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Isabel Köster @iotasubscript.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

"The American celebrity Audubon’s important travel documents that he had been copying and gave to relatives for safekeeping were eaten by mice. He was extremely sad but tried again, and after just three years, his boxes were once more full of paper." Another hit from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social

publicdomainreview.org

Japanese Prints of Western Inventors, Artists and Scholars (1873)

A set of Japanese prints depicting famous Western inventors and scholars - including Audubon, Carlyle, Watt, and Arkright - beset by various difficulties.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

part 3 in my ongoing quest to read every Clark Ashton Smith story: paperback-picnic.ghost.io/the-mystic-s...

paperback-picnic.ghost.io

the mystic syllables yop, yeep, and yoop

reviewing every Clark Ashton Smith story, part 3

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

When I write about classic sci-fi and fantasy, it isn't to indulge in nostalgia for a lost golden age, but to explore what the past can teach us and what we have lost along the way.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

It's not about highbrow vs lowbrow, but about curiosity vs predictability. Do you want to read books that surprise you? Or that comfort you through repetition?

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joanne mcneil @jomc.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

related: I wrote a little about reviewers who fear their own taste and the checkbox-style approach to evaluating fiction jomc.substack.com/p/where-do-m...

Screenshot of the text “ There is always a sense of judgement day looming over hustle culture. That after you take your last breath, the Harvard admissions committee in the sky will review all your achievements and failures. The ultimate verdict—the ultimate review—is in your hands right now. (“Sorry dude, no passing through the golden gates. You gave four stars to William Friedkin's The Bug (2006), when clearly it only deserved two and a half or—at most—three. Off to the the B minus aesthete afterlife for you.”)

Where I care about this stuff is, well, I wish there would be more good readers. That more people would turn to work with a sense of expansiveness rather than moral accounting. Art is created with work but our enjoyment and appreciation of it isn’t work. Well, it doesn’t have to be.”

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

If the reason you read fiction is that you have a list of your "favourite tropes" and your aim is to find books that reuse these tropes over and over, then I think there is an unbridgeable gulf between us. Though we are both "reading", we're really doing different things for different purposes.

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MythologyBot @mythologybot.boodoo.co · 31/01/2025

A1151 Theft of the seasons.

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

Watched YES, MADAM (1985) last night. Absolutely insane fight scenes and amazing outfits for Yeoh and Rothrock. Adding this to the canon of "live action movies where people act like Looney Tunes characters", alongside Lemonade Joe and Hundreds of Beavers

2x 80s action movie women in cool outfits ready to fight a bunch of guys with swords

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Will Greatwich @gnipahellir.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

Holy shit. Charles Fort was right after all

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