What is Ravenous Mother?

In the Sac, a thief has one earlobe cut off. If he steals a second time, he loses the other one too, and for the rest of his life every stranger he meets will know what he did before he even opens his mouth. If he is considered a threat, he is sent to the Last Fort, to forced labor. And if he commits a third infraction, well, nobody has three earlobes.

This is the world of Ravenous Mother: a grimdark saga with a biopunk setting, where humanity lives inside a vast living organism that it calls the Mother.

On the website, in the taglines, on Amazon, everywhere, you will hear me repeat: no metal, no stone, no mercy. Nice catchy phrase, right? But it is also the truth. I love the work of other grimdark authors, who doesn't enjoy reading Joe Abercrombie, I think anyone who doesn't has resigned from the human race, but by the thirtieth book with a medieval setting I want something different. Ravenous Mother is that something different.

Motherverse and Ravenous Mother: what is the difference?

I am organized to the point of boredom. Due to professional deformation, I put everything into categories, and I try to make everything easy to understand. So let's immediately sort out the two names.

Ravenous Mother, RM from here on, is one saga: novels and novellas that intertwine around the same Sac and the same people. When it has said everything it needs to say, it will close.

The Motherverse is the universe that contains it: the biological rules, the Mother. RM is the first saga to happen inside it.

In the Articles section you will find two types of articles: those about lore, which talk about RM, what the Mother is, how her society works, and the essays, where I talk about the research work behind it: grimdark and biopunk first and foremost, but also fantasy, science fiction, even horror.

Humanity lives in a single city, at the center of the Sac, in a society rigidly stratified into three levels:

• The nobles, exempt from the Selection, the mandatory end of life at forty for everyone else. They are recognized by their Bluebark clothing and pierced ears, not by the number of holes, but by their shape. A minor noble wears circular expanders one inch wide; at the top of the clans, the earlobes are cut into thin fringes that fall to the shoulders. Their tower stands at the center of the city, and it is the largest.
• The professions: the cartographers with crested heads, the healers and their crimson fingernails, the architects recognizable by their forehead tattoos, the guardians with serrated teeth covered in glyphs. Each has its own tower and jealously guards its own knowledge, passing it down from generation to generation. They are not exempt from the Selection: their towers outlive those who inhabit them.
• The commoners, the lowest step: no marks, no rights, only duties.

If you want to escape, please, there are the sewers. But being an outcast is even more dangerous than living on the surface.

If you are interested in going deeper, you have two paths:

Here you can find the novella An Artist for free, to deal with Ravenous Mother without spending anything, and here are all the other books.

You can explore the world before even reading: in the Articles section you will find the articles, select the Lore filter to jump straight to the worldbuilding.

The choice is yours. I hope you enjoy yourself.

Bon appétit.