K.J.says:

Most everything I write starts with a physical object, a thing I hold in my hand. Colours In The Steel began nearly forty years ago with a pitchfork. It was very old, handmade by some backwoods blacksmith, and I used it to help my father carry the hay from the orchard out back of the house. As I walked along with it on my shoulder, I saw my shadow and imagined it was a soldier; and once I’d called that soldier into existence, I felt under an obligation to him to provide him with a story. Thirty-odd years later, in a foul mood, I started writing it down. The rest, as they say, is bibliography.

The Engineer trilogy started with a Bridgeport universal milling machine, a seventy-year-old miracle of engineering with which a competent machinist could make anything from an earring-back to a battleship. Its owner, who was teaching me to use it, spoke a strange language, where the words seemed familiar but had new and radically different meanings.

To him, ‘tolerance’ wasn’t an abstract. You could stick a definite article in front of it, or make it plural. A tolerance to him was the degree to which you were allowed to deviate from an unattainable ideal, and it was quantified in ten-thousandths of an inch. One ten-thousandth this side of the line was OK; the other side, and the thing you’ve been working on for two days straight turns into scrap and goes in the trash. It’s not often you get three complete books handed to you on a plate like that. All I had to do was go away and shuffle the words around.

The Company started with the flying jacket my father brought back from the War. It spoke for itself. I just hope I was paying attention.

The Escapement, part three of K.J. Parker‘s Engineer trilogy, has just been published by Orbit in the UK in paperback and is also available in large paperback from Orbit in the US. Together with the first two parts of the series – Devices and Desires [UK | US] and Evil for Evil [UK | US], it tells the story of Ziiani Vaatzes, Engineer, and a whole lot more…

K.J.’s new novel, The Company tells the story of a group of war veterans trying to come to terms with peacetime (although of course, as with any of K.J.’s books, you can never assume that there’s just the one level of meaning in play). The Company will be published early next month by Orbit in both the UK and US.