The Stone Dance of the Chameleon was initially published as a traditional fantasy trilogy with traditional fantasy covers. I have now republished it in a new revised Second Edition with my own covers

It is fantasy but perhaps not what is generally expected from that genre. Some reviewers have even described it as science fiction and, in some ways, it is that too

The Stone Dance is a tale of love and a coming of age story. An epic set in a world of wonder and terror, it is an adventure that tells of the struggle to overcome a terrible oppression. At its heart are many of the issues that threaten us today; our time and history appear in it from an oblique perspective. Grim and bloody and cruel, it seeks to demonstrate how compassion can become the most terrible weapon of all

Once upon a time I said in an interview that there was only a single word that I wanted to change in the whole of the nearly 700,000 words of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon. That I could say anything so ludicrous and pretentious says a lot about who I was then. How things change

By hacking away the excess verbiage, I reduced the text of the First Edition by a quarter. The Second Edition is a much cleaner, leaner and more vital affair

Beyond and above this I took the opportunity to sort out all kinds of problems that I knew were there, and many more that I discovered along the way. In places, where I had compromised, I have restored my original, instinctual vision. Prime among these is that Fern has become Blue—indeed, the desire to rewrite him niggled at me for years, and it was Blue—that he be put right—who helped draw me back to the Stone Dance

I have broken the Stone Dance into seven rather than the original three. There are practical reasons for this, but the artistic ones were the clincher. To effect my new vision of the work, I had to write new material, most specifically the four new ‘hinge chapters’: if the First Edition was a triptych, the Second is a heptaptych