In the absence of that PhD, this is another kind of graduation, he thinks, “in the sense that there’s a sense of accomplishment and excitement, I’m glad to have finished it, and I’m excited for what comes next. If I do go back to this world, it might be for the occasional one-off, but I like the feeling of being able to pivot more quickly from one idea to the other,” he says. “What started with The Lightning Thief ends with The Trials of Apollo. It’s the last book set in the world of Percy Jackson, although Riordan doesn’t rule out visiting the world again. The fifth and final book in The Trials of Apollo series sees the god, sent to Earth in the form of teenager Lester Papadopoulos, trying to regain his place on Mount Olympus. Riordan is speaking by Zoom from Boston, with a pile of copies of The Tower of Nero behind him. I’m guardedly optimistic.” All of the kids that I write about, at one time or another, have been in my classroom “So instead of learning Celtic languages, I’m now learning the language of the film industry, which definitely has its own lingo,” Riordan says. Both of them are now producers on the Carter Kane and Percy Jackson series, and are working on the script for the pilot of the latter.

Riordan and his wife, Becky, decided they “owed it to the fans to try one more time”.

They really wanted new adaptations, and they felt bitterly disappointed by the movies.” I could care less about TV and film, honestly. And I’m not a fan of Hollywood, I’ve never been starstruck. I had a plan for what the next few years would look like. “So we had to make kind of a soul-searching decision. There’s a new willingness to work with the content creators that perhaps hasn’t been present before,” he says. “Because of the streaming wars, there is a new sense in Hollywood that they need content badly. And Fox, which owned the rights to the Percy Jackson books, had been sold to Disney. But then Netflix was also interested in adapting The Kane Chronicles, in which siblings Sadie and Carter Kane take on the gods of ancient Egypt. Riordan was understandably nervous when Disney called. It had been 10 years since The Lightning Thief hit screens (it was a box-office success and spawned a sequel, despite mediocre reviews from fans and critics). (From left) Brandon T Jackson as Grover Underwood, Logan Lerman as Percy Jackson and Alexandra Daddario as Annabeth Chase in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief.

The trials of apollo the tower of nero