[Noeve]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone could help me with this. I remember reading a book a while ago, but I don't remember the author or the title. All I know is that it contained creatures called Salamanders, of which two ( brothers, perhaps ? ) stood out in particular in the story, and there were also creatures that were described as giant ants, but they had a different name.

I would like to find this book again. Does anyone know which it is ?

Thanks very much for your help !
Q

[Noeve]

Sorry for bumping...

I know it's a shot in the dark, but does anyone have any idea of which book this is from ?

Thanks again !
Q

[hawkwind]

I think you need to give a little more info than that. But off the top of my head was it a Warhammer 40,000 book? Possibly Warrior Brood?

[Noeve]

I don't think it was, I seem to remember it being more of an "adventure fantasy" book rather than a tech thing... I don't think I've read a W40K book from start to finish ( prefer the short extracts, Dark Angels FTW ) but I'll have a look. Thanks !

[Amaunette]

Sorry, I don't know which book it is, but since no one has quickly responded with the answer (which is the norm for "do you know this book" threads), perhaps we can narrow down what book it isn't. I've done a quick google search for "fantasy book salamander" and came up with these hits:

From Wikipedia:
Salamanders in Literature:
* In C.S. Lewis's fantasy book The Silver Chair, salamanders are said to be very wise creatures that live in the flames of Bism, and speak to the Gnomes there.
* In the Discworld series of books, salamanders are used by Iconographers to create flash for their pictures.
* In the Karel Čapek´s novel War with the Salamanders (or War with the Newts) the specie Andrias scheuchzeri plays the main role.
* In the Xanth novel A Spell for Chameleon, salamanders are lizards who breathe magical fire. The salamander's fire can burn anything in its path, but only burns in one direction. In this novel, the Evil Magician Trent transforms Bink into a salamander and uses him to breathe fire in a circle around a wiggle swarm so that it will put itself out in the center, thus saving Xanth from the swarm.
* The Elemental Masters series by Mercedes Lackey features salamanders as lesser Elementals of fire who may be commanded by mages of that particular element.
* In David Weber's "Honorverse" series of novels, the main character Honor Harrington is nicknamed "The Salamander".

Other hits:

Salamander Dream, by Hope Larson: "Hailey believes in magic. Or at least she tries to, when she visits the woods near her house where, as a young girl, she first meets the endearing Salamander, who tells her a tale to while away a summer afternoon. As she grows older, she meets Salamander again as an adolescent and then a young adult. This book is a collection of the stories the two friends take turns telling each other: of swimming with a minnow in the stream, of flying on the back of a hawk, of shrinking through the pores of the skin to raft on red blood cells and fly past electrons. These stories are told almost exclusively through images, in bold blocks of black, white and green. The drawings are surreal, the dialogue looping through the scenery and the limbs of the characters, stretching into the nature that surrounds them. Salamander and other animal characters are drawn as silhouetted human figures wearing representational masks, making Salamander and Hailey's journeys seem even more bizarre. A coming-of-age story about a girl learning to hold onto magic as she grows older, this is a also whimsical, dreamlike flight of fancy. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. "

Tears of the Salamander, by Peter Dickinson: "Mount Etna towers above the remote villa where Alfredo lives with his uncle after a fire wipes out his family. Deep within Etna swim the magical salamanders, and he must use his strange powers to protect them, destroy his uncle and control the explosive rage of the volcano."

Those are just the first few hits. Are any of those it? I also tried searching Amazon by narrowing down the category to SFF books and searching for "salamander," but I didn't get any other promising hits. You could try it yourself and see what you get.

Good luck!

[Noeve]

I guess I was searching with the wrong keywords, I now tried taking an approach like your own and I think I've found it :

Brian Stableford, Genesys Series, Serpent's Blood (1995), Salamander's Fire (1996), Chimera's Cradle (1997).

I'm going to try to find these books to confirm they're the right ones, but the names of books definitely ring a bell, even if the name of the author doesn't.

Thanks very much for your help !