S. M. Stirling

S. M. Stirling is a Canadian-American science-fiction and fantasy author, best known for his own Emberverse and Draka alternate-history series, who co-wrote Jimmy the Hand with Raymond E. Feist as part of the Legends of the Riftwar trilogy. Jimmy the Hand sends a young Jimmy the Hand — not yet the polished courtier of Feist's later Riftwar novels — on a rescue mission through the criminal underworld of the city of Krondor, one of three standalone side-adventures in the trilogy, each co-written by Feist with a different collaborator and following a different cast of soldiers and mercenaries caught up in the war's margins. Stirling's own fiction is known for unusually detailed, plausible worldbuilding grounded in real historical and technical research, whether reimagining a world after an alternate American Civil War outcome in the Draka books or depicting a post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest rebuilding itself without modern technology in the Emberverse series. That same grounded, street-level attention to how a criminal underworld and a city's power structures actually function carries through Jimmy the Hand, giving Krondor's thieves' guild and back alleys a texture consistent with Stirling's broader reputation for meticulous worldbuilding across his solo career.