The Ordinary

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The Ordinary is a powerful and entrancing tale of magic, science, and the mysterious truth that binds them together.Jim Grimsley’s novels and short stories have been favorably compared to the works of Samuel R. Delany, Jack Vance, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Now he unleashes an ambitious and audacious collision between science and magic.
The Twil Gate links two very different realms. On one side of the portal is Senal, an advanced technological civilization of some thirty billion inhabitants, all cybernetically linked and at war with machine intelligences many light-years away. On the other side is Irion, a land of myth and legend, where the world is flat and mighty wizards once ruled.
Jedda Martele is a linguist and trader from Senal. Although fascinated by the languages and cultures of Irion, she shares her people’s assumption that Irion is backward and superstitious and no match for her homeland’s superior numbers and technology. But as the two realms march inevitably toward war, Jedda finds herself at the center of historic, unimaginable events that will challenge everything she has ever believed about the world–and herself.

JIM GRIMSLEY is the author of the acclaimed fantasy novel Kirith Kirin, which won the 2000 Lambda Literary Award. His short stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He is the award-winning author of Winter Birds, Dream Boy, My Drowning, Comfort and Joy, and Boulevard, as well as a number of successful plays.
Jim Grimsley lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

“The Ordinary is an important novel. . . . Think of high-quality anthropological SF where antithetical societies meet, as in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.” —Locus“Jim Grimsley is one of the most exciting new voices in science fiction. I expect great things from him.” —Robert Silverberg“An audacious, ambitious, and highly-literate author with a unique, inventive, and exotic vision of the future, and a profound understanding of the human heart.” —Gardner Dozois, editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies“Besides magic aplenty, there is a beautifully developed spirituality in Grimsley’s spare, poetic sf debut, and a compelling love story, too, making it a quiet sort of page-turner that elegantly evokes a reader’s fascination and wonder.” —Booklist (starred review) on The Ordinary

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