Stephen Deas' The Thief-Taker's Apprentice: We Wants It, Precious

You’ve heard how married professors occasionally split a position, sharing both the work and the pay? Well, Stephen & Michaela Deas (in my humble opossum) share the position of All-Around-Coolest-Person-in-the-SFF-World. On my last trip to London they passed up an opportunity to share an evening with Viggo Mortensen to go pub-crawling with me (I may never get over the guilt).

So it’s with joy that I read Faren Miller’s praise for Stephen’s latest novel, The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice, in the September issue of Locus. You can’t read her review online, so here’s a taste for those non-subscribers:

Stephen Deas is “an electrical engineer working in the aerospace and defense industries” in his native Britain. So shouldn’t he be writing SF for Analog and Baen? Not Deas. He used his knowledge of aerodynamics and the military for the creatures and warriors of last year’s fine debut The Adamantine Palace, and this year’s equally impressive The King of the Crags: unsentimental fantasies of dragons subdued by men, where one violent species exploits the ferocity of the other.

Miller goes on to provide an irresistible glimpse of TTTA, noting that in writing his first YA novel Stephen “hasn’t compromised his stark vision or toned down his prose.”  I won’t try to summarize the story here, but suffice it to say that the two characters (master and student) evoked by the title both sound fascinating, multidimensional and utterly to be avoided in shadowy streets. For such a good guy, Deas does devilish like nobody’s business. That's why he looks like this: