What is Selling Water...?
Chaz explains:
I've been calling it the Ottoman Empire fantasy, because that's what I do, I have shorthand descriptions that tend to baffle and bewilder real people (my favourite was always the Oscar Wilde book, which didn't have Oscar Wilde in it at all). This one does pull in material from the Ottomans (or possibly Ottomen), but only a sort of background culture, a touch of geography and a bit of pinched history; it's more a feeling than a description. It's certainly not so Ottoman as Outremer was Crusader. But it does - I hope - carry that sense of inherent corruption, the way the empire has been declining since the days of its foundation. And half the story takes place in harems... but it's also about military and mercantile cultures facing off across an unbridgeable river, where the merchants have the water-magic and so they keep control - until the day they wake up to find a bridge appeared in the night, and the legions marching over. I'm not giving anything away here, all that was twenty years ago; the book's about suppression and rebellion, and the prices people pay, and how hard it is to value what comes free.
[For more information, read what Chaz told The Alien Online.]