Richard RS Ford Books in Order

Richard Ford is a British writer of fantasy from Leeds, in Yorkshire. He writes epic fantasy as R.S. Ford and historical fiction as Richard Cullen, two sides of a career that share a taste for danger, hard choices, and characters who rarely get an easy way out.

He has said that he wanted to be a writer from around the age of eleven.

Some of his earliest influences came from comics, especially tough, hardboiled stories such as Judge Dredd and Slaine. That background shows in the speed and blunt energy of his fiction. Ford has also written short stories and worked on the Elite: Dangerous computer game, experience that helped shape his comfort with imagined worlds, conflict, and a cast of characters under pressure.

His first novel, Kultus, arrived in 2011 under the name Richard Ford. It introduced Thaddeus Blaklok, a mercenary and demonist sent after a dangerous key in the smoke-choked city of Manufactory. The book is compact, violent, and darkly playful, mixing steam-powered machinery, gangsters, cults, and infernal trouble. It also set out a pattern that runs through much of Ford's work: ordinary loyalties are scarce, the people with power have ugly plans, and survival often depends on nerve as much as strength.

Then came the Steelhaven trilogy, beginning with Herald of the Storm. The series moves into a larger epic-fantasy setting, but keeps its attention on a city under strain. Steelhaven is a busy southern cityport whose uneasy peace begins to crack as an enemy warlord, old magic, political pressure, and its criminal underworld close in. Across The Shattered Crown and Lord of Ashes, the story turns toward siege warfare, contested rule, and the cost of defending a place that may already be coming apart.

No one gets to sit safely on the sidelines for long.

Ford returned to a different kind of ruined world with the War of the Archons trilogy. In A Demon in Silver, magic has been absent for a century until a young farm woman named Livia shows powers that many people would kill to control. The later books, Hangman's Gate and The Spear of Malice, widen the map and the danger, following human leaders, soldiers, mercenaries, and rulers as ancient gods begin shaping mortal wars. These are stories with shifting viewpoints, armies on the move, uneasy alliances, and plenty of room for a bad decision to become a disaster.

His Age of Uprising books take the scale up again. Engines of Empire begins in Torwyn, a nation powered by industry, guild rule, and pyrestone, a magical resource that drives its machines. The Hawkspur family sits near the center of the story, but the larger conflict reaches from military frontiers to dangerous mines and the capital's political machinery. Ford uses the family to make a broad rebellion feel personal.

Under the Richard Cullen name, Ford also writes historical adventure. That second byline makes sense beside the fantasy work. Whether the setting is a walled city, a battlefield, an industrial empire, or a version of the past, he returns to people caught between competing powers and forced to act before they have all the answers.

Ford has lived in Wiltshire, near the Thames. His books show a fondness for big conflicts, but they tend to stay close to the people doing the fighting, bargaining, running, and trying to make it through another bad day.