The Author
Michael Dunn
Michael Dunn is an Australian fantasy and science fiction author who lives and writes in the Hunter region of New South Wales. He began his first series, The Fortress Saga, in 2013, and has since carried it through to a complete five-book epic.
His writing sits where fantasy and science fiction meet: prophecy and quest on one side, empires, alliances and the machinery of war on the other. The Fortress Saga follows Prince Dormal and the Questers from an ordinary life turned upside down by an heirloom amulet, through the courts and borderlands of the Fortress Alliance, into enemy territory, and finally to a conflict that decides whether the Alliance stands or falls.
The saga is published under Amenti Books, an independent imprint for Australian authors dedicated to high standards in Australian fiction, featuring science fiction and fantasy by Australian writers.
On fantasy and science fiction
A note on the genre, written for this site
Fantasy and science fiction earn their place by asking the oldest questions in the least familiar rooms. Move a story off the map — into an alliance five millennia at peace, or an empire that plans in generations — and loyalty, courage and cost stop being abstractions. They become decisions somebody has to make.
That is the appeal of an epic in particular: scale gives choices weight. Armies move, borders shift, and prophecy hangs over everything, but the story keeps returning to a handful of people who did not ask for any of it and go anyway.