Michael J. Sullivan
Michael J. Sullivan is an author.
Sullivan came in from outside the system. He self-published, built the readership himself, and did it well enough that io9 named him one of the most successful self-published science fiction and fantasy authors in 2012, by which point the traditional houses had come looking. The Riyria Revelations, his debut series, has since been translated into fourteen languages, among them Japanese, Georgian, Czech, Russian and Turkish.
The appeal is unfashionable and entirely deliberate. Riyria is a two-hander about a thief and a mercenary, written as adventure rather than as epic: comic dialogue, plots that resolve inside their own volume, no thousand-page throat-clearing before anything happens, and two leads who actually like each other. Through a decade in which fantasy mostly went grim and enormous, Sullivan wrote something closer to a caper, and a large audience turned out to have been waiting for exactly that.
Books (3)
Where to start with Michael J. Sullivan
Theft of swords is the door. It gathers the opening of the Riyria sequence, and it tells you inside a chapter whether the register suits you: banter, a job that goes wrong immediately, and a plot that behaves like a heist rather than a prophecy.
Rise of empire continues straight on and widens the map without losing the two-hander at the center, which is the exact point most series lose their nerve and start adding viewpoint characters.
The Crown Tower was published later and is the other way in, an earlier-set companion showing how the pair first met. Some readers prefer starting there. I would not, because the pleasure of the first book is being dropped into a partnership that already works and having to catch up with it.