Wiz Duos - Book 1

by David Gullen, Ben Wright

The God Road by David Gullen

The City of Flesh is falling apart. Food and resources are running out. With LucasAna's enemies gaining the upper hand, there seems little choice for him and his people but to leave the city and take their chances in the outside world.

But the God Road is a dangerous place, even for mighty six-legged warriors. Faced with deadly horrors at every turn, their survival skills and the bonds of love and friendship will be tested to the limit.

To Sail the Interstice by Ben Wright

Come, sail the interstice with us, from the coastal jungles where the ghosts of ancient factories walk and kill, through a portal in the ocean to an impossible cathedral built on song. To a desert, where a band of survivors from a crashed airship march for their lives, and a bereaved traveller must come face to face with himself…

224 pages, Paperback

Published May 22, 2025

About the author

My latest novel, The Girl from a Thousand Fathoms, was published in early 2020. Other books includes Third Instar from Eibonvale Press, and my alternative-present-day SF novel Shopocalypse. I’ve edited three anthologies, including Once Upon a Parsec:The Book of Alien Fairy Tales.
I’ve sold over 40 short stories to various magazines and anthologies. My short story, Warm Gun, won the BFS Short Story Competition in 2016 and other work has been short-listed for the James White Award and placed in the Aeon Award.
I’m also a past judge for the Arthur C. Clarke and James White Awards, and the current Chair of the Milford SF Conference.
I was born in Africa, baptised by King Neptune, and raised in England. I live in South London with the fantasy writer Gaie Sebold behind several tree ferns.

Reviews

[S. Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating : 4.5 of 5 stars

This new series from Wizard's Tower Press hearkens back to the golden age of SFF publishing, specifically the Ace Doubles that were massively popular between 1952 and 1978. However, whereas Ace had a tendency to mash together two (often massively) abridged novels, Wizard's Tower are giving us two complete novellas in each book. And this first volume is a damned good place to start.

First up is The God Road by David Gullen. It's an interesting tale of refugees fleeing a failing city. Except the city is a giant carcass, and the refugees are all insectoids. I really loved this one, and would be very interested in seeing more from this setting.

The second story, To Sail the Interstice by Ben Wright, is a novella made up of several shorter stories, with the protagonists visiting a few different worlds within a multiversal setting, with each story being told from a slightly different point of view. In that respect, it feels a bit like a short mosaic novel, and for me that made it particularly intriguing.

Both tales tell us stories of characters taken out of their usual environment and thrust into an unfamiliar, much bigger world, and the adventures they have there. And I've got to admit, both stories are strong on their own. Put them together, and you've got a book that's simply fantastic.

The second volume came out at the same time as this one did, and I'll be giving that a read at some point soon. And if that's as good as this one, I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more in the series going forward.

[Ben Jeapes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me all the way back to why I got to love the science fiction field. The Wiz Duo series consists of single volumes containing two novellas - a time honoured way of bringing good, short sf to the readers, as per the Ace Doubles of yore. And the stories themselves: the first, The God Road, has everything you could want to generate that tingling sense of wonder we all love. A non-human species surrounded by artefacts they don't understand of a greater, earlier age. I enjoyed the concepts of the second story more than the story itself, but still. The interstice is like a bigger version of C.S. Lewis's Wood Between the Worlds: a much vaster space that can be navigated by conventional sailing ships and airships. The problem was the author could never really decide whose story he was telling, and just as you think you're in a setting where the main story is going to happen, suddenly you're somewhere else. And then you realise there isn't actually a main story as such. The word is probably "picaresque". But for the aforesaid tingling sense of wonder and awe and for stories that engage the reader entirely, these two can't be beat.

[Runalong · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive start to this series of two novellas in one book and this one has a theme of showing us how fantastical the world can be from a city of a dead god to sailing ships that cross worlds it’s a lot of fun

Full review - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...

[Jerry]

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