A Portion of Dragon and Chips

When a battered old robot washes up on the shores of the Old Kingdom, it signals the end of a fragile alliance between the four ancient Houses. It turns out dragons are really tasty, and having filleted, boned and baked their scaly allies to the very brink of extinction, no single House can hope to win out against the other three.Into this shaky impasse steps the mechanical man, impervious to crude weapons, magic, suspicious wedding feasts, poisoned wine, and fire of any colour, be it wild, angry or just slightly annoyed.Each House stakes their claim to the mechanical marvel, convinced the mysterious creature will lead them to a crushing victory against the others once they teach it to fly. And breathe fire. And, you know, ignore the Three Laws.It's just a pity none of them thought to ask the robot what it wants.Featuring Clunk - the beloved robot from the Hal Spacejock series - as well as the oddball protagonists from The Desolator and Thonn!This is the first novel in a three book series. Each book in the series continues plot lines and character arcs from the previous title, with everything wrapping up in book three. Simon Haynes lives in Western Australia, where he divides his time between herding deadly spiders, dodging drop bears, and making up wildly inaccurate sentences like this one.By day he's an author. By night he's also an author.He loves wry, dry humour, and his hobbies include daringly inserting the letter U into words where -- in some parts of the world at least -- this simply isn't the done thing.As for his genre-spanning novels, they include epic fantasy (with robots), scifi comedy (also with robots), middle grade humour (featuring robots AND the wanton use of the letter U), as well as a series of historical mystery novels set in 1870's London. (No, of course there aren't robots in those. He's not completely out of his mind.)When he's not writing Simon is usually renovating his house, sim-racing online, using twitter (@spacejock), gardening, tweaking his book covers, pondering the meaning of the universe and reading, and if you think it's easy doing all that at the same time you should see what he can do with a mug of coffee, a banana and a large bag of salt.When he's not making outlandish claims he likes to count how many novels he's written, and how many genres he's written them in. (Lots and too many.)Finally, if you want to hear Simon reading one of his award-winning stories, you'll find an enticement to join his newsletter here: spacejock.com.au/ML.html Fantasy comedy from the author of the Hal Spacejock series. The first three novels form a trilogy, with each book continuing the previous one.