Dan Willis

Dan Willis creates American fantasy by closely combining speculative inventions with historical settings. The Georgia Alchemist, written with Tracy Hickman, is the second Dragons of the Confederacy novel after Lincoln’s Wizard. Its alternate nineteenth-century story follows Union engineer Braxton Wright and intelligence operative Hattie Lawton as they travel south seeking the alchemist behind the opposing army’s unnatural soldiers. Willis also writes the Arcane Casebook books, which recast a 1930s detective world through magic, and he previously contributed to the long-running Dragonlance setting. Those interests in engineered systems, magic, and period adventure meet directly in The Georgia Alchemist. The 2023 novel continues the characters and political machinery established in its predecessor, so its mechanical figures, dragons, espionage, and alchemy form parts of one coherent alternate-history conflict rather than separate fantasy ornaments.