Alex Marshall (also known as Jesse Bullington) is the author of the Crimson Empire epic fantasy trilogy, which sounds like your typical door-stopping, grimdark affair (bloody battles, brutal villains, a quest for vengeance), until you look a bit closer and see what is there (a middle-aged female protagonist, a wildly diverse cast) and what isn’t […]
Cobalt Zosia, the former queen turned reluctant scourge, started the Crimson Empire trilogy on a simple quest for revenge: against the general, the queen, and the empire she blamed for the murder of her husband.
Science fiction and fantasy have a long history of authors writing under pseudonyms. Sometimes, it’s because they are so prolific, their editors fear they’ll flood the market. Others, chiefly women, have found it easier to break into the market with a gender-ambiguous name (if not one that is outright male), because, especially years ago, sales departments feared […]
Much has changed since April 2015, when A Crown for Cold Silver made a 700-page dent in the SFF world. At the time, we had only theories about the identity of the pseudonymous Alex Marshall. Who was the fantasy mastermind behind the first book in the Crimson Empire trilogy? We had no idea. What we did know: if subsequent […]