Born in Nova Scotia, raised in Edmonton, Alberta, and followed by stints in Logan, Utah and Prince George, BC, Derryl Murphy now lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with his wife and two sons. When he isn’t writing, Derryl referees and coaches soccer, and continuing the soccer theme cheers on his boys as they play. His first short story, “Father Time,” appeared in Tesseracts 4 in 1992. Since then, he’s sold numerous stories to magazines and anthologies. In 2005 his first book, Wasps at the Speed of Sound, came out from Prime Books. A collection of ecological science fiction stories, it holds ten reprints and one original short story. In 2009, Derryl co-wrote Cast a Cold Eye with William Shunn, a novella of ghosts and the Spanish flu which was released by PS Publishing. He has been nominated three times for Canada’s Aurora Award, once for a science fiction review column he once wrote, once for his short story “Body Solar,” and once for “Mayfly,” a short story he co-wrote with Peter Watts.
Napier’s Bones by Derryl Murphy
Imagine being able to manipulate numbers to do magic, just as so many fictional wizards manipulate words, as spells, to accomplish their ends. Imagine seeing everything as a number, with formulae streaming into the air from every physical thing, allowing you to bend and change them — using your abilities to smear a license plate into a new number, say, or blurring the serial numbers on dollar bills. It gives new meaning to the word “numerate.”
Derryl Murphy’s protagonist in Napier’s Bones is a numerate.
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I might say "formulaic" actually.
Your review made me curious, so I looked this book up. Sure enough: Tor. Tor seems to specialize in these…
It's a tightrope act for sure.
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yes, I mean, there are certainly lots of good sci-fi/fantasy novellas out there, so they aren't impossible to do, but…