The Scorpion God

The Scorpion God collects three historical novellas that place familiar ambitions inside societies governed by very different assumptions. The title story is set in Egypt at the time of the earliest pharaohs, where royal succession, ritual and the ruler’s sacred body determine the fate of a princess and the people around her. Clonk Clonk follows a physically impaired youth in a prehistoric matriarchal community who finds an unexpected means of overturning the contempt directed at him.

Envoy Extraordinary moves to Imperial Rome, where an emperor favours an imaginative but impractical grandson over the competent heir expected to succeed him. The young inventor’s machines promise technological transformation but also expose the political limits placed on innovation. Together the novellas use comedy, cruelty and estrangement to show that ideas about gender, authority, religion and progress are products of particular historical cultures rather than universal truths.