Cynthia Ward

In the city of Astreiant, the Dog Moon races are about to begin. So Nicolas Rathe, a senior adjunct point (police officer) in the Point of Dreams district, finds it odd to receive a missing person’s notice for Aardre Beier, an astrologer who specializes in canine horoscopes. Rathe suspects foul play, but can’t investigate. Jurisdiction belongs to the Fairs’ Point station, whose points see no cause for alarm, and have

This month, the Lethe Press project to reissue the classic Astreiant series reaches Point of Dreams, written by Melissa Scott and the late Lisa A. Barnett, and first published in 2001. Like prequel volumes Point of Hopes (1995) and Point of Knives (2012), the Lambda Literary Award winning Point of Dreams is a genre-bending police-procedural novel set in a secondary world in which astrology, alchemy, and necromancy are working

by Cynthia Ward

Over a decade ago, the science fiction writer Melissa Scott and her partner, the writer/editor Lisa A. Barnett, released Point of Hopes (1995) and Point of Dreams (2001), a pair of police-procedural novels with a twist: they were set in a fictional city. That imaginary setting was Astreiant, dominant power of a world in which the technology is Renaissance level, the sciences are magical, the society is

The season of rising summer has come to Astreiant, throne-city of the queendom of Chenedolle. The winter-sun shines until midnight, the Midsummer Fair will soon begin, and the merchants are hiring for journeys to the Silklands, the League, and other queendoms. In short, it’s the time unhappy adolescents run away in search of a better life.

Just another normal fair season, thinks Nicholas Rathe, a low-born, scrupulously honest Adjunct Point