A few decades from now, the U.S. is recovering from the recent Sino-Russian war, in which major metropolitan areas were bombed to ruins and the West Coast was occupied by foreign aggressors. The country is now controlled by President Vitnik, an authoritarian demagogue who’s not averse to enriching herself by selling ubiquitous (and tax-free) Vitnik-branded products. Income inequality has skyrocketed, law enforcement is corrupt, and life for the average citizen is nightmarishly close to something you’d find in a post-apocalyptic novel.

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The Future Will Be BS Free

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As The Future Will Be BS Free gets started, a group of gifted teenagers is close to finishing a prototype of a foolproof lie detector. There’s a vaguely scientific-sounding explanation for the technology behind it, which involves MRI machines scanning for activity in the anterior cingulate cortex—the part of the human brain that supposedly handles lying—but it probably would have made just as much sense to power the device with Handwavium and call it day. The technology isn’t the point.

Its effects, on the other hand, very much are the point, as the young inventors find out soon after they get their lie detector to work. They quickly realize, even during the first test run, that maintaining friendships is a challenge when every lie, big or small, can immediately be exposed. Soon after, they also learn that the Powers That Be might not be crazy about the concept either…

Will McIntosh has written a slew of dark, emotionally wrenching and often dystopian novels for adults, most of which I’ve reviewed for this site in the past, but two out of his three most recent novels have been geared towards young adult readers. While I always appreciate authors who flex their writerly muscles by exploring different genres, in this case I feel that neither Burning Midnight (2016) nor The Future Will Be BS Free really live up to the potential we’ve seen in McIntosh’s “adult” novels like Soft Apocalypse, Defenders, and especially Love Minus Eighty.

Part of the problem with The Future Will Be BS Free is that it deals with an incredibly complex concept in a somewhat limited, even simplistic way. James Halperin’s The Truth Machine (1996) wasn’t a great novel at all, but it dealt with the idea of a foolproof lie detector and its applications and effects in a much more thorough way. The Future Will Be BS Free takes a different tack, looking less at the sociological effects of the technology and more at the way it immediately impacts the main characters’ lives. That’s not surprising, given that this is a very different novel, but it’s hard not to be at least a little disappointed that the novel ends before it can extrapolate some more of this technology’s eventual impact on society.

Instead, The Future Will Be BS Free focuses more on the characters and the chaos that envelops them almost immediately after completing their invention. Narrator Sam Gregorious is a somewhat bland (and occasionally unlikeable) main character, but the others form a fascinating and diverse group, including the team’s visionary Theo, who has cerebral palsy, and a young man named Boob (really) who struggles with cripplingly low self esteem. Rounding out the team are Sam’s unrequited crush Molly and their friends Rebe and Basquiat. Reading about this group’s friendly and not-so-friendly bickering sessions (not to mention romantic entanglements and occasional minor rivalries) is probably the best part of the novel. The story also features several disabled war veterans, whose no-nonsense attitudes provide a refreshing contrast to the teenagers’ occasional awkwardness.

On a different note, this is probably Will McIntosh’s most political novel to date. Some of the parallels to current events and political figures would not be out of place in, say, a Cory Doctorow novel. As a matter of fact, you could draw a line straight from Little Brother (Doctorow’s YA novel for the Bush era) to its sequel Homeland (the Obama years) to McIntosh’s The Future Will Be BS Free, with its references to fake news and “deepfake” videos—not to mention the obvious parallels between President Vitnik and, well, I don’t have to spell it out, right? Suffice it to say that, if you prefer your science fiction free of politics, this novel should probably not be your first choice.

In the end, The Future Will Be BS Free was a mixed bag for me. For every positive, there’s a “but.” The story’s breakneck pace is perfect for a YA novel, but some plot elements are so improbable they’re borderline silly. (I’m being intentionally vague here to avoid spoilers.) The novel throws some genuine surprise developments at the reader, but it’s at times also painfully predictable. The foolproof lie detector is a neat concept, but its impact doesn’t get fully developed.

All of this makes The Future Will Be BS Free, while mostly enjoyable, a bit of a disappointment compared to Will McIntosh’s usually stellar output. Still, even a minor McIntosh work is worth checking out, especially for—but by no means limited to—younger, politically conscious readers.

The Future Will Be BS Free is available July 24th from Delacorte Press.

Stefan Raets lives in San Diego.

The post Cast No Shadow: The Future Will Be BS Free by Will McIntosh appeared first on Reactor.

Explaining what exactly is so wonderful about this series is tricky, partly because it’s so unique and partly because it’s hard to do without including huge spoilers, but at its heart it’s the story of Vlad Taltos, a human assassin living in the Dragaeran Empire, as well as the story of the Dragaeran Empire itself.

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Vallista

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Vallista

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At this point you may be groaning “not another assassin,” but let me assure you that Vlad is not your typical run-of-the-mill hood-wearing killer-for-hire that seemed to be on every other fantasy cover a few years back. Vlad is actually one of the most fascinating protagonists in current fantasy. At the start of the series, he’s a smart-ass, bon-vivant assassin and minor crime boss who enjoys good food and wine and has a great sarcastic sense of humor. A good part of the fun of reading this series is following the constant wise-cracks between Vlad and his reptilian familiar Loiosh. (“You’re pretty smart for a mammal, boss.”) As the series progresses, you learn more about Vlad’s past, putting his choice of occupation in an entirely new light, and you also see Vlad evolve into a surprisingly complex character. (On a personal note, as someone who’s been reading these novels for a couple of decades now, I find that my take on Vlad has evolved considerably as I’ve matured as a person and a reader.)

Dragaerans are basically tall humanoids who use sorcery and live for millennia. This may make you assume they’re like elves—and indeed some humans, like Vlad’s wonderful grandfather, refer to them as “elfs”—but the reality is far more surprising and unique. (This is where it’s very hard not to go into spoiler territory, so let’s just join Vlad’s “Noish-Pa” and think of them as elves for now.)

The Dragaeran Empire is an ancient society divided into seventeen Great Houses which all bear the name of, and some resemblance to, a real or mythical animal. So we have the Houses of the Orca and the Hawk, but also the Houses of the Dzur, Dragon, and Jhegaala. Humans aren’t part of the Dragaeran Empire, but Vlad’s father bought his son a title in the House of Jhereg, which is named after a reptilian scavenger and is basically the crime syndicate of the Empire. The Great Houses take turns running the Empire according to the Great Cycle; as the series begins, we’re just a few centuries into the reign of Empress Zerika of the House of the Phoenix.

Here’s the thing, though: I could go on for ages describing the more intricate details of this fantasy universe, but that’s only one of many reasons why these books are so much fun. Another reason is the way the series is structured, because the books weren’t written according to the internal chronology. The second novel (Yendi) takes place before the first one (Jhereg). The events described in Jhegaala, published in 2008, take place right between two books published over a decade earlier (Phoenix and Athyra), and if I understand correctly (not having read it yet), the forthcoming new novel Vallista takes place right before Hawk, which was published right before it.

If that sounds confusing, don’t worry: the details will fall into place as you progress through the series. Readers used to try to rearrange the novels and read them according to the internal chronology, but that became almost impossible when Dragon (1998) switched back and forth between separate branches of the timeline in each chapter of the novel. To preserve your sanity, I sincerely recommend just reading them in publication order.

Speaking of reading order: aside from the fifteen novels in the core series so far, there are also the “Khaavren Romances,” a trilogy (in which the third novel consists of three volumes by itself, so there are actually five of them) set several hundred years before the main series. Because Dragaerans live for millennia, several characters appear in both series, experiencing things that to Vlad (and most readers) will feel like historical events come to life. This is a very odd experience, only heightened by the narrator of the Romances, the esteemed Paarfi of Roundwood, whose incredibly verbose style (reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas, as the books’ titles suggests) takes some getting used to. There’s much more that can be written about these books—they really deserve a separate article—but just to return to the reading order: as with almost all prequels, don’t start with the Khaavren Romances. If you want to stick with publication order, the first one (The Phoenix Guards) was published between Phoenix and Athyra, or otherwise you can pretty much pick them up when you’ve read at least a few books in the main series. (For completion’s sake, there’s also The Brokedown Palace, a standalone novel set in Fenario, east of the Empire. I just now realize this may be the only novel by Brust I’ve never read, so I can’t really talk about how it fits into the series, but it’s clearly connected and I clearly need to read it.)

But back to the main series! Each novel (except, so far, Taltos) is named after one of the seventeen Dragaeran Houses, and in most cases, Vlad takes on some of the characteristics and attributes of that House throughout the novel, so e.g. in Dragon he ends up a soldier, and in Issola he becomes remarkably courteous. In Jhereg, Brust even applies this technique on the chapter level: each chapter begins with a quotation that connects back to one of the Houses, in the same order they appear in the Cycle, and Vlad does or says something that’s reminiscent of that House.

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The Book of Jhereg

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Brust also likes to play around with the internal structure of each novel in utterly delightful ways. My favorite example is Teckla, which starts off with a list of instructions for Vlad’s launderer-tailor. (“1 grey knit cotton shirt: remove wine stain from rt sleeve, black tallow from lft & repair cut in rt cuff.”) Each chapter starts off with a line from this (literal) laundry list and, at some point in the chapter, you find out how that item of clothing was damaged. Other novels in the series are structured around the menu for an elaborate meal (no one describes food as mouth-wateringly as Brust does, especially in the Valabar’s scenes in Dzur) or the various steps for casting a spell.

Now here’s the oddest thing about this series for me. Even though Brust is performing the literary equivalent of flying trapeze work with all his structural tricks and his convoluted chronology, the actual novels themselves are short (most of my ratty old paperbacks are around 300 pages), tightly written, and purely entertaining. You can read most of them in a few hours. Because the books are mostly self-contained, over the years they’ve started functioning similarly to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series for me: quick and entertaining novels that are still rewarding after multiple readings.

For a series that’s been going for over thirty years now (Jhereg was published in 1983!), it’s stayed remarkably consistent, so if all this enthusiastic rambling intrigued you, I recommend picking up The Book of Jhereg, an omnibus edition of the first three novels in the series.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. His (sadly neglected) website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Not Just Another Fantasy Assassin: the Vlad Taltos Novels by Steven Brust appeared first on Reactor.

What McKinley has always been brilliant at is the kind of close up detail that make the lands of “once upon a time” feel solid. She’s not writing in real Medieval Europe or Hollywood Medieval Europe (as neatly parodied in Diana Wynne Jones’s Fantasyland); she’s writing out on the borders of Faerie, where there are tiny blue flowers and long gold ribbons and red cloaks that grow heavy when you pour drugged wine into them and where kings and queens retire into the mountains. Everything is very clean and nice and well organized and beautiful, except the evil things, which are ugly and will be properly defeated and put back in the box at the end of the story. In this universe goodness and nobility are real, and kings just naturally possess them. The stories are charming rather than dark. But isn’t that charm part of what we always liked about fairytales? These are like children’s stories, except that the people are real, and actions have consequences.

This isn’t “Seasons of Glass and Iron” or Grimm for that matter—these stories keep well away from the horror that lurks in fairytales.  There’s a place where the traditional fairytale meets horror head on, and McKinley knows about that and went there in Deerskin. But Deerskin was ten years later, she wasn’t there yet, and neither were the rest of us.

It’s hard to remember, but when McKinley wrote these stories, princesses were not everywhere. It was before the Disney explosion, before little girls were deluged with pink sparkly princess tat. And McKinley was one of the first people to write empowered princesses. In one of these stories the princess saves the prince, and when I first read it in the early Eighties that was startling. We’ve come a long way since then, on a lot of fronts. That makes The Door in the Hedge seem a lot tamer. But part of the reason we have come a long way is because of books like this, because writers like McKinley brought us forward one step at a time, not always head-on into the unsettling but slowly, easing us along with charm and agency and little domestic details.

I picked this book up again now because it was available as an e-book at a low low price that, as has become my recent habit, made me buy a copy of a book already on my shelves, so that I can reread it wherever I am. You need to have one for a while before you realise an e-reader is a re-reader’s best friend. Everything is with you all the time; if something reminds you of a book, the book is immediately to hand.

The Door in the Hedge is a book from early in McKinley’s career, and not her best work. I had forgotten quite how princessy it is. All the same, reading it now, I found myself being charmed by it all over again.

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published a collection of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections and thirteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula winning Among Others. Her most recent book is Thessaly. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

The post The Power of Princesses: Robin McKinley’s The Door in the Hedge appeared first on Reactor.

Here’s my thinking on Best Novel, from 2010:

Looking at the Wikipedia article on 1955 novels, I think there are six other likely books that might have been nominees: Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (post), Frederic Brown’s Martians Go Home, Arthur C. Clarke’s Earthlight, Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s Gladiator-at-Law,  J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (post). All of these have since become classics, they’d all have been very worthy nominees. I don’t think any of them are better than Double Star, or likely to have been more popular.

In YA, there was C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew; two Andre Norton books, Sargasso of Space (under the name North) and Star Guard; and Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky.

Also clearly published as science fiction but I think less likely to have been nominated were: Alien Minds by E. Everett Evans, Address Centauri by F.L. Wallace. Star Bridge by Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn, and by Gunn alone This Fortress World, Stanton A. Coblenz’s Under the Triple Suns, and Robert Silverberg’s first novel Revolt on Alpha C.

And here’s the rediscovered actual list of nominees:

• Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein [Astounding Feb,Mar,Apr 1956]
• Call Him Dead, by Eric Frank Russell
• The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov
• Not this August, by Cyril Kornbluth
• The Long Tomorrow, by Leigh Brackett

Double Star is the winner. I was right about The End of Eternity, so I get one point. One. One of the commenters, “Bob”, mentioned Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow, so he also gets a point.

We didn’t even find the others never mind consider them—which shows the inadequacy of relying on Wikipedia’s list of books for a year! (I later switched to using the Internet SF Database, which was better.) Of my potential nominees, it’s interesting that The Return of the King didn’t get on the actual ballot. In those days fantasy wasn’t as highly regarded, and Tolkien didn’t become big in the U.S. until the paperbacks came out, but even so, it seems very strange at this distance.

Of the real nominees, the most exciting one is the Brackett. This is the first time a woman was nominated for a best novel Hugo—or indeed, any Hugo. Zenna Henderson, Katherine MacLean, and Pauline Ashwell were all nominated in novelette in 1959, and Marion Zimmer Bradley was, until now, believed to be the first woman nominated for best novel, in 1963. But in fact Brackett beat them all to it. So that’s great to know.

I think Double Star is still the best book of the year, perhaps Heinlein’s best novel, and the voters were absolutely right.

In the other categories I didn’t even try to find potential nominees, but here are the real ones, with new comments:

Best Novelette

• “Exploration Team” (alt: “Combat Team”) by Murray Leinster [Astounding Mar 1956]
• “A Gun for Dinosaur”, by L. Sprague de Camp
• “Brightside Crossing”, by Alan Nourse
• “Home There’s No Returning”, by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore
• “Legwork”, by Eric Frank Russell
• “The Assistant Self”, by F.L. Wallace
• “The End of Summer”, by Algis Budrys
• “Who?”, by Theodore Sturgeon

“The End of Summer” was one of the first adult SF stories I ever read, in the Brian Aldiss Best Penguin SF volume, and I continue to think it’s a terrific memorable story, and it would be my favourite out of these, and I’d definitely have voted for it above the Leinster. I also remember the Sturgeon, the de Camp, and the Eric Frank Russell without needing to look anything up, which means they are classics by the my definition. Any of them would have been good winners. Fascinating list.

Best Short Story

• “The Star” by Arthur C. Clarke [Infinity Nov 1955]
• “End as a World”, by F.L. Wallace
• “King of the Hill”, by James Blish
• “Nobody Bothers Gus”, by Algis Budrys
• “The Game of Rat and Dragon”, by Cordwainer Smith
• “The Dragon”, by Ray Bradbury
• “Spy Story”, by Robert Sheckley
• “Twink”, by Theodore Sturgeon

“The Game of Rat and Dragon” is pretty amazing, and so is “Twink” but… the voters were 100% right to give it to Clarke anyway. It really is one of the best SF short stories of all time, and the first as far as I know to be working in that particular subgenre.

Best Professional Magazine

• Astounding Science Fiction ed. by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Note: No shortlist of finalists was published in this category. The ballot instructions read “Pro mag names must be written in.”

Best Professional Artist

• Frank Kelly Freas
• Chesley Bonestell
• Ed Emshwiller
• Virgil Finlay
• Mel Hunter
• Edward Valigursky

Best Fanzine

• Inside and Science Fiction Advertiser, ed. by Ron Smith
• A Bas
• Fantasy-Times
• Grue
• Hyphen
• Oblique
• Peon
• Psychotic-SF Review
• Skyhook

Best Feature Writer

• Willy Ley
• L. Sprague de Camp
• Robert A. Madle
• Rog Phillips
• R.S. Richardson

Best Book Reviewer

• Damon Knight
• Henry Bott
• P. Schuyler Miller
• Anthony Boucher
• Groff Conklin
• Villiers Gerson
• Floyd Gale
• Hans Stefan Santesson

What a huge field! This really is a neat category, and it doesn’t overlap with any of our current categories—I guess it overlaps with fanwriter somewhat, but Knight and some of the others were being paid to review for magazines.

Most Promising New Author

• Robert Silverberg
• Harlan Ellison
• Frank Herbert
• Henry Still

And I still think they were right to give it to Silverberg, but Ellison and Herbert are also terrific choices, and have thoroughly fulfilled their promise. Henry Still, on the other hand, I don’t know, and Googling doesn’t seem to be making me any wiser—anyone?

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published a collection of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections and thirteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula winning Among Others. Her most recent book is Thessaly. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

The post Revisiting the Recently Rediscovered 1956 Hugo Awards Ballot appeared first on Reactor.

Jesse Cullum works security in Futurity’s Tower Two, which is the part of the city open to 19th century “locals” who want to experience 21st century wonders like air conditioning and heated swimming pools or get a look at the dioramas giving a carefully edited glimpse of the future world. After Jesse foils an attempt to assassinate the visiting U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, Futurity’s management asks him to help in the subsequent investigation. The would-be assassin’s weapon was a Glock, which could only have come from the future. Jesse and his partner Elizabeth, a 21st century woman, must work together to figure out how a gun from the future ended up in the hands of a 19th century assassin…

The best way to think of Robert Charles Wilson’s new novel Last Year is as a reverse time travel story. The narrator isn’t a time traveler but instead Jesse Cullum, an inhabitant of the 19th century. The technologically advanced time travelers visiting the 19th century aren’t from the far future; instead they are, not to put too fine a point on it, us.

Culture shock is a common enough theme in time travel fiction, but in this case the culture that is so shocking to the 19th century locals is, well, ours. Jesse Cullum is a relatively open-minded guy for his time, but even he finds it hard to imagine a future in which an African-American man is president, women can vote, and same sex marriage is legal. The reaction of the average inhabitant of 19th century America to these facts ranges from shock to disbelief, which is why Futurity’s management provides basic cultural awareness training for its local employees, just to make sure they don’t inadvertently insult 21st century guests by using racial epithets or questioning why women wear trousers.

At the same time, it becomes increasingly clear that Futurity’s main purpose is corporate profit and that, ethically speaking, exploiting a past version of one’s own world is more than a little questionable, even taking Robert Charles Wilson’s unique solution to the grandfather paradox into account. I won’t go into further detail here to avoid spoilers, but let’s just say that that I wouldn’t be surprised to see Wilson explore some of the hints about the 21st century and the origins of the time travel technology in a future novel.

If this unique setting where past and present collide isn’t enough, Robert Charles Wilson populates the story with wonderfully complex characters. Jesse Cullum initially feels like an unassuming, steadfast security officer with an unusual predilection for Oakley sunglasses, but gradually evolves into a fascinating, multi-dimensional character. Elizabeth’s background story is less shocking only because it’s unfortunately so recognizable for contemporary readers, but the way these two very different characters help each other come to terms with their past demons is simply a joy to read.

Robert Charles Wilson’s excellent 2010 novel Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America  was a story set in a future reduced to 19th century levels of technology but dealing with political and social issues that are relevant today. Unbelievably, Wilson has now repeated this nifty trick but in reverse, by setting Last Year in the 19th century with future technology but still clearly —  and poignantly — discussing contemporary issues. Plus ça change?

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post The Future’s So Bright: Last Year by Robert Charles Wilson appeared first on Reactor.

The world of Fran Wilde’s new novel Updraft is a complex aerialist’s paradise, albeit a paradise besieged by monsters called skymouths. It is a single city, one subject to arbitrary-seeming laws, and its towers are living bone structures that grow ever higher. The hollow chambers within these spires shelter the citizens, but over time they grow cramped, closing on the lower levels, forcing the population into a perpetual scramble for altitude. Who you are, what you do, and where you’re located within your home tower are matters rigidly controlled by the Laws everyone is taught to sing in school.

As for people who defy this established societal order, they are given citations—tickets, if you will—that literally weigh them down.  The heavier a person’s crimes, the more likely that they will drag them out of the air and below the clouds, where certain death awaits.

Kirit and Nat both fall afoul of city Laws enforcement, aloof officials known as Singers, just days before their big exam. They are set an exhausting punishment: manual labor, the primary point of which is to wear them out so they fail the test. The reasons for the sabotage are complicated, but at core the issue boils down to the Singers wanting Kirit, who has an unusual if unlovely voice, to join their order.

The Singers are set apart from ordinary Tower life, essentially cutting their family ties in order to serve the city and its needs. It’s an honorable position and a job that demands tough sacrifices, but Kirit wants the freedom of the skies and the cut and thrust of trade, not life as some kind of cross between a monk and a flying police officer. Both kids work fiendishly hard to rise to the occasion, but, as often happens, the other side doesn’t play fair. The exam goes badly, and to protect her mother and Nat from Singer reprisals, Kirit joins them after all.

Her training confirms a certain aptitude for crucial Singer skills, particularly the control of the exceedingly dangerous skymouths. There’s also much for her to unlearn… because the civilians of the city are given, from childhood, a carefully edited version of their own history. It’s all for their own good, of course, and given that Singers put a stop to tower-versus-tower warfare, it seems reasonable enough. She trains in combat, too, learning to fight on the wing, and copes with a embittered rival who feels displaced by the tower’s newest apprentice.

As she begins to make her way within the rigid Singer subculture, Kirit glimpses less benign secrets moving the Singer agenda. Like any governing body, hers has become somewhat corrupt. How serious is the problem? Investigating carries her to the heart of a conspiracy tied to her long-lost Singer father, and perhaps to her mother, too. Soon Kirit must choose between family loyalty, supporting her order for the sake of its life-sustaining work, and the risk of breaking Laws so heavy they will plunge her into the abyss.

There has already been a lot of chatter about Updraft, particularly with regard to its worldbuilding, and every word is deserved. This universe of fabric wings and musical Laws that Fran Wilde has created is unique and vivid, imagined with conviction, and beautifully detailed.

Kirit herself will not escape comparison to Katniss Everdeen, I think, given her revolutionary bent and the fact that the government essentially abducts her from her home to do a job that requires, at least sometimes, hand-to-hand combat. At first her situation may not seem as dire as that of some random Hunger Games tribute, but at least a tribute knows the situation is kill-or-be-killed, and their enemies are clear. Kirit, meanwhile, can’t really be sure who’s engineered her plight: It might simply have been a faction of Singers, or it may be those she trusted most.

She is a determined and gutsy hero, capable of great compassion and courage, but also impatient and often defiant, even when it works against her.

Novels about political conspiracies can often be a little hard to follow. Their protagonists are, naturally, digging into things that people wish to hide; in Updraft, like many such stories, Kirit is exploring a mystery that stretches back well before her birth. Wilde does a good job of keeping it simple, but as readers untangle the past actions of now middle-aged adult characters, the story blurs from its otherwise sharp focus. But the aerial culture and duelling conventions of the Singers make it strangely plausible that a healthy young teen with good fighting skills could affect their government in a significant way. (This is something I find hard to swallow in a lot of similar works, including the aforementioned Hunger Games novels.)

Kirit doesn’t act alone, or without help, by any means—she is no single-handed savior of her people. What she is, instead, is believable. She starts out as something of a pawn, but she fights hard, creating opportunities to take action whose impact we can easily credit. This solidity in the plotting of the novel’s conclusion offers a nice counterpoint to its imagery, a dreamy portrait of a fragile society whose very nature is to blindly seek the stratosphere, and a people who flit from perch to perch without ever putting a toe on the ground.

Updraft is available September 1 from Tor Books.

A.M. Dellamonica has a book’s worth of fiction up here on Tor.com, including the time travel horror story “The Color of Paradox.” There’s also “The Ugly Woman of Castello di Putti,” the second of a series of stories called The Gales. Both this story and its predecessor, “Among the Silvering Herd,” are prequels to her Tor novel, Child of a Hidden Sea. If sailing ships, pirates, magic and international intrigue aren’t your thing, though, her ‘baby werewolf has two mommies’ story, “The Cage,” made the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2010. Or check out her sexy novelette, “Wild Things,” a tie-in to the world of her award winning novel Indigo Springs and its sequel, Blue Magic.

The post Catch a Rising Wind with Fran Wilde’s Updraft appeared first on Reactor.

You see, in the world of Shadow Ops, random people suddenly discover they have supernatural powers. Some can control fire, or water, or air. Some can control the dead or create portals between our dimension and the Source, a realm filled with alien creatures that also appears to be where all the magic actually originates from.

In the U.S., the government has put the military in charge of these new powers: because “magic is the new nuke”: people who discover they are “Latent” (have magical power) must report to the military or face persecution as “Selfers.” People who have the misfortune of manifesting one of the Prohibited schools of magic (necromancy etc.) are hunted down as “Probes” and usually never heard from again.

The result, so far, is a set of three excellent, action-packed novels that combine elements of contemporary magic and superhero fiction with the type of atmosphere genre readers usually only get in military SF. There’s so much military slang and terminology Cole includes a glossary, and you’ll end up knowing most main characters by rank and/or SOC call sign as well as by name. Imagine the X-Men recruited willy-nilly into the U.S. military and you’ll have a good idea of the direction and atmosphere of this series.

Important note: since this is the third installment in this series, it’ll be hard to avoid spoilers for the first two books in what follows. If you haven’t read the first two books yet, you may want to stop reading here and instead check out the reviews for Control Point and/or Fortress Frontier. In other words: spoilers ahead.

The reason for the spoiler warning, and also one of the main strengths of Breach Zone, is that this third novel brings the separate plot strands of the previous two books together. Control Point was (mainly) the story of Oscar Britton’s awakening, from motivated participant in the military/Latent system to fugitive to rebel. Fortress Frontier was (again mainly) the story of Bookbinder’s evolution from someone whose role in the military was primarily administrative to a “steely-eyed dealer of death” who, incidentally, also began to see the ugly side of the system towards the end of the second novel, when he found himself in charge of Forward Operating Base Frontier and abandoned to his fate. Woven through both was Scylla’s role as the Magneto of this fantasy universe, arguing for the complete overthrow of the system in favor of a new order with magic users on top.

Which brings us to the starting position of Breach Zone. In the wake of “Gate-Gate”, the world is now aware of the actions and policies of the U.S. with regards to Probes. As a result, the President has been impeached, and both Bookbinder and Harlequin have been promoted and put out to pasture, with Harlequin in the interesting position of being a hero to the public but a pariah to the government and military. Britton is still a rebel, hiding in the Source and biding his time. And Scylla, right in Chapter One of this novel, invades Lower Manhattan with an army of creatures from the Source.

I confess that I initially had trouble with this plot device: after all, the last two books repeatedly stressed the importance and rarity of Portamancers and how impossible it was to travel between planes. This was a fundamental building block of the previous two books: it made Britton unique and explained why Forward Operating Base Frontier was in so much trouble after being cut off. Now suddenly there’s a hand-wavy explanation of “thin spots” between the planes that Scylla can conveniently affect with her Negramancy to invade our realm.

However, if you think about it, all of this has been hinted at from the very beginning (see also: the Gahe in Mescalero), and anyway, once the invasion really begins, Breach Zone is such a tense and action-packed ride that it’s easy to forgive Cole for the somewhat convenient timing of Scylla’s discovery of this ability.

Did I say “tense and action-packed”? Why, yes. Breach Zone is full of desperate, back-against-the-wall combat scenes. Right from the start it feels like a “last stand” type of story, with the defenders dug into Lower Manhattan and doing everything they can to stop the inhuman hordes of goblins, rocs, Gahe and other assorted monsters from breaking through and taking over the city and the world. The few pauses for breath consist mainly of short flashbacks that, finally, tell the background story of Scylla. I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say that it’s surprising in many ways.

Another surprise are a few chapters from new point-of-view characters, including Swift, the former leader of the “No-No Crew,” and (cue the cheers) Sarah Downer, who really comes into her own in this novel with a few fantastic scenes and, going back to the very beginning, one of the most thrilling character arcs in the trilogy. Together with the background story for Scylla, this does a lot to alleviate the concerns about female characters I mentioned in my review of Fortress Frontier.

And finally, the word “trilogy” in the previous paragraph is maybe the biggest surprise about Breach Zone. As it turns out, Control Point, Fortress Frontier and Breach Zone form a trilogy, despite, as far as I know, never really having been marketed as such. (In this genre, it’s definitely rare not to see something like “the final book in the Shadow Ops trilogy!” splashed across the front cover.) Rest assured, there will be further novels set in this universe—the next one is apparently set earlier in the overall timeline—but, for now, Breach Zone wraps up this part of the story.

The way Myke Cole brings together the separate character arcs and story lines in Breach Zone is impressive. The series initially felt somewhat episodic, especially after the introduction of Bookbinder in the second book, but in hindsight it’s clear that Cole was building up all these stories from the beginning. Breach Zone is the culmination of all that set-up, and the payoff is more than worth it. This is the best book in what turned out to be an excellent, unique trilogy. I can’t wait to see what Myke Cole comes up with in the future.

Breach Zone is available January 28th from Ace Books.
Read an excerpt from the novel here on Tor.com

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post The Siege of Manhattan: Breach Zone by Myke Cole appeared first on Reactor.

She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She’s an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It’s that kind of story.

But before you get the chance to roll your eyes and maybe double-check that you are in fact holding the right book, things right themselves. The dame explains her troubles, and it soon becomes clear that this is not your standard noir P.I.:

I’m not so much an investigator as what you might call a consultant. Step right up; show me your life. I’ll show you the story you’re in. Nothing more important in this world, kid. Figure that out and you’re halfway out of the dark.

Call them fairy tales, if that makes you feel better. If you call them fairy tales, then you don’t have to believe you’re in one.

I believe it’s no coincidence that this story was chosen to open Catherynne M. Valente’s new collection The Bread We Eat in Dreams. It feels suspiciously like a mission statement of sorts. “Here’s where we’re going with these stories, folks. Get ready.”

In the (copious, wonderful, revelatory) story notes included in this collection, Valente repeats a few ideas that pop up in several of these stories and, looking further back, all across much of her previous output.

The first one of these, and the one “The Consultant” directly addresses, is the power of the fairy tale and the myth, how they are “real life, no different, no better and no worse, and how there is power to be found there, both in telling the tale and having it told to you.”

The second idea, and something she mentions several times in this collection’s story notes alone, may seem contradictory to the first one: “I always want everything to Have Been Real. Prester John’s kingdom, fairy tale creatures, the physics of the classical world.”

So are they real or not? Yes? No? Both, maybe. It’s the telling of the story that keeps the story going. It’s the repeating of the pattern that lays bare the fact that it was always there, all along, and will be there after the story ends. After we’re gone. It keeps going. It keeps us going.

What Catherynne M. Valente does better than, I think, almost anyone else in the genre today, is showing those underlying story patterns, cross-referencing them across cultures and historical periods and, for want of a better word, issues. At their best, her stories make you recognize their foundations and amplify their effect by pulling them, respectfully but firmly, into a modern narrative sensibility.

See, for example, “White Lines on a Green Field,” which is something like Teen Wolf meets Friday Night Lights, except Teen Wolf is the trickster Coyote, who plays QB for the Devils and has a thing with a girl called, yes, Bunny. When they play the LaGrange Cowboys, he says “I got a history with Cowboys.” Yeah.

Or, picking another random example, “A Voice Like a Hole,” about Fig, a teenage runaway whose nickname derives from an apocryphal Shakespeare fairy:

See, in eighth grade, my school did Midsummer Night’s Dream and for some reason Billy Shakes didn’t write that thing for fifty over-stimulated thirteen-year-olds, so once all the parts were cast, the talent-free got to be non-speaking fairies.

And yes, there was a stepmother, before she ran away:

She’s just a big fist , and you’re just weak and small. In a story, if you have a stepmother, then you’re special. Hell, you’re the protagonist. A stepmother means you’re strong and beautiful and innocent, and you can survive her—just long enough until shit gets real and candy houses and glass coffins start turning up. There’s no tale where the stepmother just crushes her daughter to death and that’s the end. But I didn’t live in a story and I had to go or it was going to be over for me.

I’ll let you ponder the layers of a story with a girl named after a non-existent A Midsummer Night’s Dream fairy saying it’s going to go badly for her because she’s not in a story. It’s really only the kickoff point for a gorgeous, moving piece of fantasy literature.

One of my favorites in this collection, although it took a little bit of research before I more or less got what Valente was doing here, is “We Without Us Were Shadows.” It’s a story about the Brontë siblings, all four of them, and the way they used to write elaborate, collaborative fantasy stories and poems set in crazily complex imaginary worlds. Valente takes this idea and sort of Moebius-strips it around to something truly special. Digging into why this story is so brilliant would probably need a separate post in itself. (Do some basic Googling about Angria and Gondal and the early lives of the Brontës if you’re not familiar. The actual history is utterly wonderful in itself, and being aware of it will make this story shine.)

Further on in the collection, you’ll find two powerful novellas, Fade to White and Silently and Very Fast. These are so different from anything else in the collection (and from each other) that it really drives home the point Lev Grossman once made to me about Valente in an interview: “there is nothing she can’t do with words.” So, briefly about these novellas:

Fade to White is something like an alternate history gender dystopia, set in a U.S. that lost (or, more accurately, is still losing) World War II. Large parts of the country have been nuked. Joseph McCarthy is President with Ray Kroc as VP. In order to keep the population numbers up, there’s an institutionalized forced-marriage system, although one that’s very different from what you’d maybe expect. (Hint: dads are encouraged to register for Father’s Day presents to avoid getting duplicate gifts.)

The novella intertwines the stories of young people who are about to enter this system with a series of notes on pitches for TV commercials that are blackly hilarious in the way they illustrate the world and try to put a positive spin on this broken society. (There are tons of examples in the actual stories too—see, for example, a throwaway reference to a breed of chicken called Sacramento Clouds, because they’re huge and orange and radioactive.)

I can imagine Valente setting out to write Fade to White and sort of gritting her teeth, mumbling “I’m going to out-dystopia ALL dystopias with this one.” It’s shockingly harsh, one of the darkest stories I’ve ever read, and simply unforgettable.

And then there’s Silently and Very Fast, the story of Elefsis, a far-future AI shown across the ages and generations of the family that created it. Elefsis grows from a basic house management routine to, well, you’ll see. It deals with machine intelligence in a way that’s quite unlike anything I’ve read in SF.

It’s an extremely dense little novella, hard to appreciate fully on a first reading because it’s so jam-packed with concepts and characters. In the notes Valente explains how it was originally planned to be a novel, and for my taste, as critically acclaimed as this story is, I feel that it maybe would have worked better in a longer format, if only because I wanted to read more about the human characters.

As it is, we see the story at the speed of a wholly unique artificial mind: lives flash by while its awareness grows. It reinforces a point briefly made during the narrative: is it unfair to require such a being to pass a Turing test to prove its worth? The test is a human concept—does this put the onus unfairly on a testee whose consciousness is inherently different?

The funny thing about both of these novellas is that they still contain that same thread of mythology and folklore, if less overtly. They still show how rituals create structure in life and help project it into the future. In Fade to White the symbolism is harsh and direct: the gospel of “pseudo-Matthew” used to manipulate the populace is as cynical as anything Valente has written. In Silently and Very Fast, as much as it may be grounded in hard science, the story of the AI who gained self-awareness and overthrew and enslaved its human masters is tellingly called a “folk tale,” and Elefsis itself develops on a diet of fairy tales. As one of its human owners (companions? progenitors?) says:

“I’ve been telling it stories. Fairy tales, mostly. I thought it should learn about narrative, because most of the frames available to us run on some kind of narrative drive, and besides, everything has a narrative, really, and if you don’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.”

The recognizability of Valente’s sources is one of the main reasons why many of these stories (and poems, for that matter) work so well. You don’t have to be a literary scholar to enjoy poems like “Mouse Koan” or “What The Dragon Said: A Love Story.” You know these icons, you know these stories, and so you can appreciate the artistry of Valente’s writing and her dazzling conceptual acrobatics without worrying that you’re missing some basic underlying bit of esoteric knowledge. (And the story notes are there to point the way otherwise, as with the Brontë story I mentioned earlier.)

Another example of this, by the way, is Valente’s brilliant novella Six-Gun Snow White, possibly my favorite work of fantasy published in 2013. Snow White in the Wild West: there’s a certain comfort in recognizing those elements. Six-Gun Snow White is not included in this collection, but one story and one poem that are somewhat connected to it are: “The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch over the Bride of the World” and “The Secret of Being a Cowboy”.

It’s impossible to give each of these stories the attention they deserve. There are brilliant conceptual exercises like “Aeromaus,” sweet contemplations on ritual like “The Wedding” and “Twenty-Five Facts about Santa Claus,”and the confession-like emotional wallop of “The Red Girl.” The range Valente demonstrates across The Bread We Eat in Dreams is truly astounding.

Even comparing simple images (e.g. the “Sea of Glass” from Fade to White and the “Glass Town” from “We Without Us Were Shadows”) can send you down a deep rabbit-hole. “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While” contains so many ideas both familiar (at the World’s Foul—not Fair, mind you: “Lamia’s Kissing Booth, No Refund!”) and weird (the Carriageless Horse!) that every sentence becomes a wonder.

I love this collection. I love how Valente consistently delivers the most gorgeous prose to be found in the genre. I love how she avoids using myth and folklore as mere tools, but instead incorporates them as naturally as breathing, bringing all their layers of meaning into play without diminishing their power. She seems to be able to do everything: fairytale, far-future SF, contemporary fantasy, bleak dystopia, poetry. Add to this a lovely cover and wonderfully appropriate interior illustrations by Kathleen Jennings, and you end up with The Bread We Eat in Dreams: a collection for the ages. Don’t miss it.

The Bread We Eat in Dreams is available now from Subterranean Press.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post The Fairy Tale Consultant: The Bread We Eat In Dreams by Catherynne M. Valente appeared first on Reactor.

All bureaucracies obey certain iron laws, and one of the oldest is this: get your seasonal leave booked early, lest you be trampled in the rush.

I broke the rule this year, and now I’m paying the price. It’s not my fault I failed to book my Christmas leave in time—I was in hospital and heavily sedated. But the ruthless cut and thrust of office politics makes no allowance for those who fall in the line of battle: “You should have foreseen your hospitalization and planned around it” said the memo from HR when I complained. They’re quite right, and I’ve made a note to book in advance next time I’m about to be abducted by murderous cultists or enemy spies.

[Read more]

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Yes, Wurts has published well over a dozen novels with major publishers over the course of her three decade career, but still, somehow her name rarely comes up whenever someone asks for epic fantasy recommendations.

Since I happen to believe that, once it’s completed, her Wars of Light and Shadow series will be counted among the great enduring classics of epic fantasy, I thought I’d take this opportunity to spread the word a bit.

Part of the problem is probably that, whenever the name Janny Wurts is mentioned in discussions about epic fantasy, the first thing people invariably bring up is the Empire Trilogy, which she co-wrote with Raymond E. Feist as part of Feist’s bestselling and ongoing Riftwar Cycle. All fine and good, but first of all, Wurts has written so much more. Secondly, you’d be surprised at how often her role in the creation of these books is miscategorized, or, thirdly, how often her name isn’t even acknowledged when the books are listed or discussed. At the time I’m writing this, just the first book in the Empire trilogy has over 13,000 ratings on GoodReads alone, more than the nine books that have been published in the Wars of Light and Shadows to date combined.

Janny Wurts has written so much more than those three books that happened to be co-written with a best-selling male author who probably has had more marketing dollars devoted to his works than all but a few female authors working in the genre. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start going on about gender disparity and voices being silenced and so on again (but believe me, this is a textbook case.)

One more data point: doing a quick search here at Tor.com, I could find only five articles that even mentioned Wurts, three in connection with Feist, and the two others were brief references by me. So. Let’s remedy this and talk about some of Janny Wurts other books, shall we?

First and foremost, there’s the Wars of Light and Shadow series, which currently stands at nine novels. Two more novels are in the works and will finish out the series. This is Epic Fantasy with capital E and capital F: the millennia-spanning tale of Paravia, a fantasy universe that, in terms of complexity and scope, rivals almost anything else in the genre, and the tale of Arithon and Lysaer, the two half-brothers whose struggles are tied to the fate of that world.

One of the most remarkable things about this series is that it doesn’t sprawl—it deepens. It doesn’t keep adding plot threads and characters. Instead, it continually adds layers of meaning and complexity to everything, from the history of the world to the background of the major players and factions. Wurts moves the markers from book to book, challenging the reader to reconsider previous assumptions at every turn.

This also makes it an insanely difficult set of books to discuss or review. It’s hard to describe exactly why e.g. Warhost of Vastmark, the third book in the series completely blew me away, not because I’m worried about giving away plot details but because part of the joy of reading this series lies in regularly recalibrating your understanding of its mysteries. (I still consider it something of a personal triumph that, over the years, I managed to write individual reviews for each of the nine books in this series without major spoilers and without repeating myself too much. Achievement unlocked!)

It’s impossible to encapsulate what makes this series so wonderful in a few paragraphs. It needs a post, or even better series of posts, all by itself. (It would actually make a great subject for a Tor.com reread, once it’s completed.) The books feature several completely unique modes of magic, all described in language that’s lyrical and precise and quite unlike anything I’d encountered in fantasy before. It covers a fantasy history that spans ages and planets. It features, to get specific about just a few favorite scenes, the single best description of a siege I’ve read in all of fantasy, as well as the single most hair-raising scene of dark magic. Once you’ve read these two scenes, similar ones in other fantasies feel like pale comparisons.

Part of the reason for this is the author’s remarkable prose. Janny Wurts writes in an instantly recognizable and, to be fair, somewhat challenging style—challenging because she uses an unusually broad vocabulary and complex, long sentences and paragraphs to explore every single nuance of meaning. It’s incredible dense prose, something to read slowly, to consider and re-consider carefully. I always have to adjust to Wurts’ style when I pick up one of her books: if your average reading speed is (to pick a random number) one page per minute, expect to spend several minutes per page here. Every word counts. Wurts will spend paragraphs, pages even, exploring one character’s changed perspective on an event, in a way that never feels spun out or repetitive but instead carefully explores every thought.

Another great example of this style is To Ride Hell’s Chasm, which is one of my single favorite standalone fantasy novels ever. Princess Anja of the tiny kingdom of Sessalie has gone missing on the eve of her betrothal. The foreign-born former mercenary Mykkael, one of the genre’s unforgettable characters, tries to find her. The novel covers only about five days in the course of its 650 or so pages, but it somehow never feels long-winded because every emotion, every visual detail, every nuance of meaning is hammered down in the richest, most meticulous prose you could hope to find in the genre.

To Ride Hell’s Chasm also is a nice example of another recognizable Janny Wurts hallmark: many of her novels feature something like a false resolution at the halfway point. You’ve got about half of the novel to go, and suddenly it feels like everything is coming together. The tension builds to a climactic peak, but instead of letting up, the author maintains and even raises the suspense until the actual end of the novel. The second half of this book is impossible to put down.

(Interestingly, by the way, Wurts uses the same trick in the Wars of Light and Shadow on multiple levels. This is planned to be an eleven book series, spread over five “arcs”: Arc One is one book, Arc Two is two books, Arc Three is five books, Arc Four is two books again and the final Arc is a single novel. One-two-five-two-one, a neatly symmetrical structure, with each book and each arc somehow having its own midway climax. It’s an impressive edifice, and for good reason considered the author’s opus magnum. It’s a crying shame that through the vagaries of the publishing world some of these books were hard to find in the US for a long time, but at least they’re all available in paperback again now.)

And there’s so much more to goodness to be found in the author’s bibliography. Another personal favorite is Master of Whitestorm, the tale of a former galley slave who becomes somewhat obsessed (to put it mildly) with gathering enough money to build an impregnable fortress. Initially feeling like an old-fashioned episodic adventure fantasy, the novel gradually reveals an underlying thread that explains the main character’s personality. Think Lethal Weapon in a complex fantasy setting. Master of Whitestorm was just recently re-released as an ebook after being out of print for many years.

I haven’t even covered Wurts’ full biography: there’s also the Cycle of Fire trilogy and her debut standalone Sorcerer’s Legacy (all written before Feist invited her to co-write the Empire books, by the way), and a major short story collection called That Way Lies Camelot. (Also, for the fans, there are some new Wars of Light and Shadow stories available on the author’s site.) I haven’t even talked about the fact that Wurts is also an accomplished artist who paints her own covers, and a talented musician.

I hope you’ll pardon my enthusiasm about all of this, but again, this author is so often ignored or miscategorized that it’s become something of a personal mission for me to spread the word. Still, if you won’t take my word for it, listen to Stephen R. Donaldson, who once famously said about Janny Wurts that it “ought to be illegal for one person to have so much talent.”

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Under the Radar: Janny Wurts’ Wars of Light and Shadow appeared first on Reactor.

The long-awaited new Gentleman Bastard novel The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch is definitely one of those books, so I hope you’ll forgive me for this very unconventional review of a novel I was extremely eager to get to.

Memoirs of a Con Man

“You’re not going to start rambling about that book again, are you?”

The Con Man took a step backwards, lowering the hefty hardcover he’d been about to thrust into the face of yet another unsuspecting convention visitor.

After studying his victim for a moment, the Con Man said: “Oh… I did you already?”

The man nodded, glaring from the well-read copy of The Lies of Locke Lamora to the Con Man’s face and back. “Yes! You went through your whole routine with me yesterday.” Switching to a very credible imitation of the Con Man’s voice, he went on: “Fantasy debut of the century! Irreverent humor! Spectacular action! Scintillating prose!”

Crestfallen, the Con Man mumbled: “Sparkling prose. Sparkling. I’d never say scintillating.”

“Whatever. I got it. Go bother someone else.”

The Con Man shrugged and started looking around for another potential convert.

That was in 2006. The Con Man had just read The Lies of Locke Lamora for the first time. From that moment on, he was on a mission, and that mission was spreading the Gospel of Lynch. Thinking of himself more as an “Itinerant SFF Scholar” than a “Con Man” (at least that’s what it said on the business cards he insisted on handing out to hapless conventioneers), he made a remarkably complete circuit of minor and major science fiction and fantasy conventions around the country, talking to anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t) about the novel that had consumed his life.

Nowadays, his presence at these events was frequently limited to whatever bar or watering hole convention-goers favored. Partly, this was because buying admission to every single convention was becoming financially impossible. Occasionally, it was because he’d been politely but firmly informed that his presence on the convention floor was no longer welcomed.

Case in point, in the summer of 2007, the Con Man was muttering to himself at the bar of an utterly depressing faux Irish pub attached to the Wyndham, location of this year’s Something-or-other-Con.

“They asked me to leave. Me! To leave!”

He was a bit vague on the name of this week’s convention. They tended to blur together after a while, much like the row of empty glasses that were arranged neatly in front of the two thick hardcovers he always carried around. The bartender gave him a weary glance, then went back to polishing glasses.

“‘Just don’t start talking about Red Seas under Red Skies again’, they told me. Well, I didn’t, and look where it got me. Here, Sabetha, I’ll have another one.”

The bartender glared as she poured him another shot. “For the third time, my name’s Joanne, not Sabetha.”

Things had gotten a bit rowdy during a panel discussion on Spirit Animals in Fantasy Fiction, a few hours ago. The Con Man had been forcibly removed from the half-empty room after holding forth, semi-coherently but at great length and with astonishing intensity, about Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. The panelists’ collective sense of relief that he’d finally stopped talking about the Falconer from the Gentleman Bastard novels had been short-lived. First, there was the Con Man’s insistence that Beagle’s unicorn did, in fact, have a spirit animal. Then he’d pulled out a multi-page paper he’d written that (so he claimed) would prove conclusively that said spirit animal was a wombat. When he couldn’t be dissuaded from reading the paper out loud to the room, security had been called.

“So, Sab—I mean, Joanne, have you read these books?” he asked, patting the little stack of Scott Lynch novels.

The bartender visibly hesitated before answering this question. Maybe it all came down to a sense of pity. The Con Man would think back to this moment many times over the next few years, waiting for the near-mythical third book in the series.

“Actually… I have.”

“You have? Both of them? Really? I mean, RSURS just came out a few weeks ago!” Somehow, the Con Man actually did a credible job of pronouncing the abbreviation of the second book’s title.

“Ruh- russurs? Oh, the new one? Yeah, I just picked it up last week. Fun book, isn’t it?”

The Con Man whispered the word “fun” to himself a few times in apparent disbelief. Then, visibly forcing himself to adopt a calm, level tone, he choked out, “I’d call it a legendary masterwork of fantasy myself, but yeah, sure… it’s. It’s.” Deep breath. “Fun.”

Joanne nodded enthusiastically. “The scenes at the Sinspire are just amazing. And Ezri is such a wonderful character!”

The Con Man blinked a few times, taken aback now someone had actually engaged him in conversation about the books, as opposed to the more usual reaction of backing away slowly.

“Although that whole setup with Stragos and the pirates is a bit far-fetched, if you ask me.”

The Con Man looked a bit taken aback. Finally a successful conversation about these books, and now it already strayed into criticism. “F-far-fetched?”

“Well, yes. I mean, Jean and Locke have no experience at sea whatsoever, right? You have to admit that there should be a hundred easier ways for Stragos to raise a pirate army and create unrest than by poisoning those two and sending them out to sea. It’s preposterous.”

The Con Man nodded weakly, taking this in, but after a moment, he regrouped. “I always thought that Lynch sending them off to sea was a perfect expression of his use of vertical space as a metaphor for social mobility.”

Joanne pondered this for a second, then nodded. “He does use heights a lot, doesn’t he? The Five Towers in Camorr, the Sinspire in Tal Verrar, the staggered levels of the cities… It’s like ascending levels of exclusivity.

The Con Man nodded, eyes wide, repeating the words softly to himself. “Ascending levels of exclusivity… Right! Even from the very start, the pickpocket kids live underground, then the Gentleman Bastards operate out of a basement, sitting on the steps of the temple to sucker money out of the people walking by.”

Joanne grinned. “And even all the punishments—the spider cages, the Midden Deep … It’s all playing with height!”

The Con Man seemed, by this moment, a little breathless. “Right, right… and so Jean and Locke ending up at sea is a metaphor for them starting over from scratch, on the same level as everyone else. You haven’t by any chance read my paper on this, have you?”

She shook her head, grinning. “No, I haven’t. And I think you’re maybe pushing it a bit with the naval stuff.”

He took this in for a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe. I guess. Still, you’re really into these books, aren’t you? Why didn’t you say something before?”

Joanne shrugged. “Well, you know. You have a bit of a rep. The business cards. The wombat thing earlier today. You should ease off the “Itinerant SFF Scholar” act. Maybe just chat about books with people, you know?”

The Con Man nodded, surreptitiously sliding the business card he was about to hand her back into his pocket. “Yeah. I guess. Hey, when do you get off work?”

About six years later. The Con Man had, given the circumstances, severely reduced his convention schedule. Joanne agreed with this decision, as did—somewhat less coherently but with equal enthusiasm—their two year old daughter Auri. (Getting the Con Man to agree to that name had taken surprisingly little effort, and if he sometimes affectionately called the toddler “Bug,” well, Joanne could live with that.)

The long-awaited third novel in the Gentlemen Bastard series was finally about to arrive. The Con Man had actually managed to score an advance copy a month or two ago, mainly thanks to his efforts at maintaining a book review blog. (He also occasionally posted additions to the growing body of Gentleman Bastard interpretative criticism he’d been working on over the years. The latest article, “Forbidden Fruit“ went on, at length, about Scott Lynch’s twisting of the Forbidden Fruit trope throughout the series: chewed oranges to simulate vomit, apple mash to fake a skin disease, pear cider to deliver poison. Joanne just shrugged. At least he wasn’t harming anyone with it.)

“So what did you think?” he asked when Joanne turned the final page on the hefty tome.

She pondered the question for a moment. “Well. Hmm. Structure’s not his best point, is it?”

The Con Man nodded. “It’s true. The books tend to ramble a bit. I don’t think I noticed it as much, before. It’s just always so exciting and fast-moving and funny, and the prose is—”

“—Scintillating?”

“Sparkling,” he said firmly, throwing her a look. “Sparkling. Plus, you know, he’s always liked to squeeze a lot of plot into each book. RSURS always felt like three novels mushed into one cover for me.”

Auri, recognizing the word, gleefully yelled “Ruhsurs! Ruhsurs!” She was wearing an obviously home-made t-shirt featuring a green cartoon pig glaring at an angry-looking red bird under the words “Nice bird, poopiehead.” Most of their friends didn’t get it.

Joanne nodded. “And always with the flashbacks. Half of The Republic of Thieves is flashback! I get what he’s doing, but in this case it was a bit much.”

“Yeah. I think this would have worked better if the flashback part had been done separately, as a prequel or something. Imagine if that part had been released three years ago. I know it’s not that easy, but the fans would have been dancing in the streets.”

Joanne leafed back to the beginning of the book and glanced over a page. “And this plot with the Bondsmages and their election. What the hell? It’s like Stragos sending Jean and Locke off to sea all over again, except it’s Sabetha and Locke and now they’re political advisers?”

The Con Man winced. “I know. I… know.” He glanced at his laptop, his unfinished review of The Republic of Thieves on the screen. “I’m trying to word something about how Scott Lynch is one of the only authors I’d forgive for this much improbable plot-maneuvering, just because his books are so much fun. It’s… hard. I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did.”

Joanne looked sympathetic. “I know how you feel. Well, I still had a blast with, uh, are we calling it TROT now?”

Auri yelled “Trot trot trot” a few times and climbed on her mother’s knee for a horsey ride.

The Con Man sighed and nodded. “Yeah, TROT. I had a blast with it, too. I think maybe the anticipation built up a little too much, you know? It’s a fun novel, but it didn’t give me the same kind of rush as the first two.”

Joanne patted his knee consolingly. “I did like that scene where he said ‘More skullduggery, less skullcrackery’ or something like that? Remember that one?”

The Con Man grinned. “Hey, that would make a good title for the review! Or maybe for another paper… What’s the etymology of skullduggery anyway?”

“No idea. I think you should go with that other idea you had, you know, when you said Lynch adds some welcome whimsy to the grimdark genre and you called it “grimsy”? I liked that. Anyway, answer me this: are you still going to read Book Four?”

His eyes widened in disbelief. “Of course! It’s going to be a blast! I can’t wait!” He paused, then added soberly: “Let’s just hope he finishes it before Auri starts school.”

The Republic of Thieves is available October 8^th from Del Rey

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Memoirs of a Con Man: The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch appeared first on Reactor.

Antigoddess is the story of two separate groups of characters, told in alternating chapters. On one side, you have Athena and Hermes, two gods you may recognize from Greek mythology. (If not, there’s always Homer, or if all else fails, Wikipedia.) These gods are still alive in our present day, but Athena is ill: feathers keep growing inside her body and working their way out. Hermes is also wasting away. Clearly, some big changes are afoot in the world of the gods. Impossible as it seems, someone or something is threatening the lives of these seemingly immortal beings.

Athena and Hermes decide to set out and investigate. In the course of their journey, they learn that a war is brewing. Some of the ancient Olympian gods are attacking the others and stealing their life force in an attempt to prolong their own lives. They’re not shy about hurting or killing regular mortals in the process. And it appears that a girl called Cassandra may be an important asset for whichever side gets to her first.

Cassandra, the lead character in the second storyline, is a teenager in upstate New York whose oddest trait appears to be making occasional prophesies that always come true—much like the Cassandra in the Iliad. Nowadays, she isn’t even aware of the existence of the Olympian gods, let alone the fact that some of them are out to get her…

Antigoddess is, in some ways, a puzzle that slowly comes together as the two groups of characters slowly gain awareness of what’s going on. For Athena and Hermes, that includes discovering who is behind all of this and how they may be stopped. For Cassandra and her friends, it’s discovering that there’s anything supernatural going on in the first place.

As a result, the two storylines read very differently: one is tale of eternal living gods and a war that will change everything, the other a tale of almost run-of-the-mill American teenagers who go to hockey practice and worry about their grades. The characters in the teenagers’ chapters are much more relatable—understandable, compared to ancient, dying gods—but for most of the book, it feels like the really important action is happening in the gods’ chapters.

This creates an interesting sort of tension for the reader as the novel builds up to a climax when the two groups inevitably meet. That tension is really what saves this book, because otherwise this first installment of the Goddess War series often feels like setup for major events that are sure to follow in future volumes.

That setup includes lots of helpful info about the story’s mythological underpinnings, which god or goddess did what to whom (or should that be Whom?), and why the resulting grudge may have persisted across millennia. It also establishes the book’s signature environment: a dark, not to say gothy sort of atmosphere in which the dying gods walk the Earth. It’s a perfect fit for YA fiction: a Twilight-like moodiness in which teenagers find that they may just be key players in an age-old conflict of suddenly vulnerable immortals.

Antigoddess is a mix of familiar elements: take some mythology, add a dash of horror, stir in some fairly recognizable teen/YA plot elements and characters. The end result is a dark contemporary YA fantasy that feels like it’s somehow managed to mix American Gods, Percy Jackson, and any of several current Disney Channel teenage TV dramas.

And the oddest thing about all of it? Well, it actually works. Sort of. This is absolutely not my usual fare, and I started off being skeptical about the whole thing, but somehow, chapter by chapter, I found myself getting more and more intrigued. This opening volume is a bit too heavy on setup, and again it’s really not my usual cup of tea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this series turns out to be a huge success.

Antigoddess is available now from Tor Teen.
Read an excerpt here on Tor.com.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Twilight of the Gods: Antigoddess by Kendare Blake appeared first on Reactor.

If you follow short-form SF and fantasy at all, you’ll probably be familiar with the author’s name. If you’re like me, the possibility of owning a collection of her stories may send you into the same type of frenzied excitement most commonly seen in felines when people dangle catnip in front of their faces. (“Want. Want! Want NOW!”) And if you’re not familiar with the author yet, you’re in luck, because you can sample some of Swirsky’s finest work right here on Tor.com before (inevitably) purchasing the book. My personal favorite, out of the ones published on this site at least, is the stunning, Hugo-nominated “Eros, Philia, Agape.”

So, the abridged version of this review: I love this collection and recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who has an interest in intelligent, emotionally powerful and occasionally challenging short fiction. Not every story was a slam dunk for me, but taken as a whole, this is an excellent collection.

“My story should have ended on the day I died. Instead, it began there.” So starts the Nebula-winning novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” which kicks off this collection. It’s the stunning, winding tale of Naeva, a sorceress who involuntarily finds herself yanked from the peace of death into a bewildering series of futures that challenge her every preconception. As with many of Swirsky’s best tales, it forces the reader to question the gender and power roles imposed by society (or, in this case, several societies) without offering easy answers. There’s an odd but enjoyable contrast between the languorous, dreamy atmosphere of this story and its disturbing moral dilemmas. This is one of those novellas that offers more food for thought than many full-length novels do.

At this point I should probably mention that some of these stories—including the aforementioned novella, “The Monster’s Million Faces,” and “With Singleness of Heart”—feature or deal specifically with sexual violence in varying degrees of directness. It’s actually the first book I remember reading that has a trigger warning right up front, before the Table of Contents. Now, to be clear: Swirsky’s treatment of rape is thought-provoking and valuable and, well, more or less the direct opposite of those books that throw it out casually or brush it off or use it as a cheap plot device. This is deep, and deeply moving, fiction about a difficult subject.

Another favorite in the collection is “Heartstrung,” which pulls off the very difficult trick of literalizing a metaphor while still staying meaningful and deeply affecting. It explores a horrid rite of passage with suppressed but shockingly intense emotion, in a way that reminded me of Kij Johnson’s “Ponies.” This is simply an unforgettable gem of a story.

Further into the collection you’ll find my personal favorite, “Eros, Philia, Agape.” Thanks to the magic of Wikipedia I learned that the title lists three of the four Greek words for love. Makes sense: the story itself is an elaborate exploration of different expressions and components of love, alternating between the points of view of a rich, broken woman and the robot lover she purchased. It sounds crude, summed up this way, but it’s an unbelievably rich and complex tale that digs uncomfortably deep into exactly how big a part of a relationship is ownership. It’s a heartbreaking story that really deserves a full post/review in itself. (Coincidentally, I saw this tweet right after I finished rereading the story for this review. That ending… it just killed me.)

Lest you think it’s all doom and gloom in this amazing collection, I’d like to briefly mention a few stories that show off Swirsky’s quirky sense of humor (say that three times fast!). In order of appearance: the rat-filled pirate romp “The Adventures of Captain Black Heart Wentworth: A Nautical Tail” reads like a rum-soaked (yet at times disturbingly cute) Brian Jacques fever dream. “Marrying the Sun” is a Bridget Jones’ Diary-style rom-com mixed with mythology, about a contemporary woman marrying Helios. (Opening line: “The wedding went well until the bride caught fire.”) And “Again and Again and Again” is an awesome little tale showing a never-ending generation gap. And all three of these stories also present serious food for thought—about colonialism, gender relations, and evolving forms of various prejudices, respectively. So, layers, always more layers. This is a good collection to read and reread, and reread again.

The only negative I really have about this book (aside from a few stories that didn’t hit me as strongly as the others, though I suspect that may be personal preference more than anything else) is the lack of some form of author notes, an introduction or Afterword maybe. Something to help place these stories in context would have been great, especially given that this is the first time many of these stories have been collected. I respect the decision to present them without external info that might influence the reader, whether this was a conscious decision or not, but as a fan of the author, I’d have loved to at least have the option to read the author’s thoughts.

I haven’t even touched on half of the stories in the collection, because I fear that I’m already drawing this out too long. So, for completion’s sake, here are the titles of the stories I haven’t mentioned yet: “Monstrous Embrace,” “The Sea of Trees,” “Fields of Gold,” “A Monkey Will Never Be Rid of Its Black Hands,” “Diving after the Moon,” “Scene from a Dystopia,” “The Taste of Promises,” “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind,” “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth,” and “Speech Strata.” Altogether, Subterranean Press has delivered over 300 pages of Rachel Swirsky’s short fiction.

I suspect that what’s true for me will be true for many people who follow the SFF short story world closely: I’d read several of Rachel Swirksy’s stories before, because they appeared in markets I’m familiar with or because I caught them in anthologies. Still, it’s a special treat to read them grouped together like this. As with all great collections, the effect is cumulative, more than the sum of its parts. Highly recommended.

How the World Became Quiet is available September 30th from Subterranean Press
Read an excerpt from the collection here on Tor.com

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Magic Is a Little Bit Alive: How the World Became Quiet by Rachel Swirsky appeared first on Reactor.

But every once in awhile there’s a book that, I feel, just deserves more attention, a book that’s not getting read enough for some reason. In those cases, it’s wonderful that I can take advantage of the generous platform Tor.com gives me to introduce people to what I consider hidden gems.

Case in point, Linda Nagata’s excellent, independently-published military SF novel The Red: First Light, which, if I can just skip to the point for people who don’t like to read longer reviews, you should go ahead and grab right now, especially if you’re into intelligent, cynical military SF. If you want more detail, read on.

I remembered Linda Nagata from her successful Nanotech Succession novels in the 1990s: Tech Heaven, The Bohr Maker, Deception Well and Vast. Back in those days when I still made more impulse book purchases in physical bookstores, the neon framing around those Bruce Jensen covers was so effective that I picked them up almost involuntarily. I lost track of the author for a while after these (and she published a bunch of stuff I need to catch up on since then) but when I saw a mention of The Red: First Light, her newest SF novel, published by her own Mythic Island Press, I decided to give it a shot—and I’m ever so glad I did.

The tone of the novel is set right from the very first paragraph:

“There needs to be a war going on somewhere, Sergeant Vasquez. It’s a fact of life. Without a conflict of decent size, too many international defense contractors will find themselves out of business. So if no natural war is looming, you can count on the DCs to get together to invent one.”

The speaker is Lt. James Shelley, a highly cynical but competent officer who leads a high-tech squad of exoskeleton-enhanced, cyber-linked soldiers in the latest manufactured international incident, deep in the Sahel. (The location illustrates another one of Shelley’s axioms: “Rule One: Don’t kill off your taxpayers. War is what you inflict on other people.”)

The start of The Red: First Light is simply flawless. Shelley introduces a new member to the squad, and in just a few scenes, you know everything you need to know: the tight bond between the soldiers, their faith in the highly cynical but reliable Shelley, the Linked Combat Squad technology, the general situation. The exposition is perfectly delivered, and before you know it you’re in the thick of it.

“The thick of it” in this case means a series of intense, well-written scenes describing life and combat in a remote military outpost somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa: patrols, combat incidents, friendly interactions with the locals who are, in most cases, as war-weary as the soldiers. There’s an inexorable pull to this part of the novel: the soldiers live in a round-the-clock state of combat readiness, interrupted by brief chunks of drug-induced sleep. They’re monitored 24/7. There are no breaks. Once you’re into this book, it’s hard to put it down until you reach the shocking end of the first section.

It’s also full of examples of the plight of the common soldier, created by the faceless, immensely rich defense contractors who manipulate world politics to keep conflicts (and sales) going. High-tech combat equipment is recovered after a soldier’s death because it’s cheaper to train another grunt than build another robot. Lt. Shelley has his dad send medications for the squad’s dogs, and buys their food from the locals on his own dime. It reminded me of the saddening reality of teachers having to spend their own money on basic school supplies.

There are many more powerful illustrations of this “only a pawn in their game” theme (although a more appropriate Dylan tune to refer to here would probably be “Masters of War”). Drones relay the commands of faceless, codenamed Guidance officers down to the field. Most disturbingly, skullcaps worn by soldiers like Shelley allow their emotional and mental state to be monitored and altered as needed. Shelley is frequently aware that his true feelings are suppressed, and have been suppressed for such a long time that he’s become dependent. At one point, he notes drily:

The handbook says the brain stimulation [the skullcap] provides is non-addictive, but I think the handbook needs to be revised.

This emo-monitoring ends up highlighting the real issues: identity and awareness. Shelley occasionally has inexplicable, but always accurate premonitions. Where do they come from? Is it the voice of God, as one of his squadmates insist? Or is there something else going on? And regardless, how much of a person’s original identity remains if they are monitored and controlled 24/7?

Somewhere deep down in my mind I’m aware of a tremor of panic, but the skullnet bricks it up. I watch its glowing icon while imagining my real self down at the bottom of a black pit, trapped in a little, lightless room, and screaming like any other soul confined in Hell.

If my real self is locked away, what does that make me?

I know the answer. I’m a body-snatching emo-junkie so well-managed by my skullnet that the screams of my own damned soul are easy to ignore. But there is someone out there who can get inside my head. Am I haunted by a hacker? Or is it God?

Once the first “episode” of the novel is over, these become central questions. While that opening section is one long, intense, adrenaline-fueled rush, it focuses on what’s ultimately just a small part of the conflict. In section two, the novel takes a sharp turn when it starts exploring the broader issues. That also means things slow down considerably, for a while at least. Not that this is a bad thing—there’s a depiction of wounded soldiers’ rehabilitation that’s incredibly poignant, for one—but the change in pace is noticeably abrupt. Eventually, all of the pieces of the puzzle come together in a spectacular conflict that also sets up future installments.

Now, is The Red: First Light perfect? Well, no. As mentioned before, the novel abruptly loses some of its tension and pace when the scope of the story broadens in the second episode. There’s one character (Elliott) who keeps turning up in situations I found highly improbable. In fact, the whole “reality show” idea struck me as improbable too. And in the third section, the final showdown felt, well, just a little silly in a B-movie sort of way. I’m staying intentionally vague here to avoid major spoilers because, again, you must read this novel. Plus, there are also very many spectacular, memorable scenes in the second half of this novel that I’d love to talk about here. Very, very many.

Maybe most importantly, and in case it wasn’t clear yet, this novel wears its politics rather obviously on its sleeve. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially if you agree with some of the points the author implies—which I happen to, strongly—but I expect that there’s a good chunk of the public, including many people who habitually read military SF, who may take issue with some of the novel’s underlying ideas even as they cheer for its characters.

However, I want to emphasize again: this is an amazing novel, and if you’re into military SF at all, you really have to check it out. If you enjoyed the way an author like Myke Cole updated military fiction tropes (in his case in a contemporary fantasy setting), you definitely should grab a copy. The Red: First Light is a dark, intelligent, cynical take on military SF. It’s an excellent novel that deserves a much larger audience.

The Red: First Light is available now from Mythic Island Press
Read an excerpt from the novel here on Tor.com!

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Oh You Masters of War: The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata appeared first on Reactor.

And then there’s Steven Brust, who is not one of those authors. About 20 of his books are set in the same (Dragaeran) universe, but they still constantly surprise the reader in the way they experiment with form and style, switch narrators, juggle the internal chronology, and use a host of other tricks and techniques to keep things fresh and exciting. Outside of that universe, his books range from a retelling of the Revolt of the Angels to what’s possibly my favorite vampire novel ever to, well, just take a look at his bibliography to see how he has reinvented himself in the course of his career. Brust plays hopscotch with his readers’ expectations.

Case in point: The Incrementalists, the new novel co-written by Steven Brust and Skyler White. I’m not sure how to classify it (if such a thing is possible—or necessary—at all) but regardless, it’s a pretty sharp departure from Brust’s previous works. (I confess that I haven’t read anything else by Skyler White, so I can’t really comment on how this novel fits in with her work, or how it might be received by her fans.)

The Incrementalists is a contemporary fantasy about a secret organization of about 200 people that traces its origins back to the dawn of humanity. They pass on their experiences from person to person, in part by accessing an alternate realm where they “seed” and store memories. Their goal is improving life, and they do so by “meddling” with people in subtle ways, using sense memories to place them in the right frame of mind, then making suggestions to nudge them in the right direction, achieve the smallest incremental changes and, ultimately, make things better:

Small changes are just what lead to big changes. Can’t help it. That’s how nature works. Water gets a little hotter, and a little hotter, and a little hotter, and then you have steam, which is a pretty big change if you happen to be a water molecule. So even if you try to do something small, you’ll end up doing something big, and if you do something big, then people are going to get hurt.

All of this makes The Incrementalists sound like a secret history-type novel, and that’s definitely one way you could describe it. However, it also has a murder mystery (of sorts), and a strong romance component, and maybe most importantly, a ton of serious consideration about the nature of memory and reality and the implications of human consciousness acting on our world. Oh, and it’s mainly set in present day Las Vegas. Not easy to classify, but definitely an interesting mix.

The story kicks off when Phil, one of the oldest Incrementalists, tries to recruit a new person to the group, which involves, as close as I can explain it, having her become the repository of the memories of the most recently deceased member—Phil’s lover and long-time companion, Celeste. However, Phil and Celeste being somewhat senior within the group (the five oldest Incrementalists form an informal sort of guidance committee called, for reasons I don’t really understand, the “Salt”), the question of whether Celeste will still be Celeste or not has big implications. There are, as you’d expect, shenanigans going on here.

The result of all of this is an odd and initially confusing story. Brust and White follow the time-honored tradition of throwing the reader into the deep, especially in terms of the specialized vocabulary used by the Incrementalists to describe their interactions and processes. (Brust wrote a great post about this recently, tellingly titled “Making the Reader Work.”) You’ll be able to figure out some of it quickly because Phil has to explain at least the basics to Ren, but still, this is one of those novels where you occasionally just have to accept something that’s unclear and trust that it will get explained later.

Despite being a bit confusing early on, The Incrementalists is an entertaining and thought-provoking novel. Both Phil and Ren are fascinating characters who gradually reveal their layers, Phil the experienced Incrementalist and Ren the newbie who is just learning how all of it works. There’s a small cast of side-characters, mostly other Incrementalists with their own strengths, specialties, and individual agendas. The plot thickens steadily as more details about Celeste’s actions are revealed and as your understanding of the Incrementalists’ work increases. I’m keeping all of this vague, partly to avoid spoilers and partly because this is one of those novels where it’s just incredibly hard to explain things without also explaining a ton of the novel’s underlying concepts.

To be perfectly honest, though, the book didn’t work as well for me as I hoped. This was easily one of my most anticipated releases of the year, Brust being one of my favorite authors and the entire concept just sounding so bizarre and interesting. When all’s said and done, it didn’t blow me away the way I expected. The main problem, I think, is that the explanations of the Incrementalists’ concepts and techniques sometimes get a bit, well, wonky. The Incrementalists frequently feels like a book that’s more about showing off this incredibly cool and innovative fictional world and secret history than about telling a compelling story.

Another part of the problem may be that, aside from Ren, the characters are hard to relate to—as you’d probably expect from a millennia-old cabal of folks who have the ability to subtly manipulate everyone else. There’s also a strange sense of disconnect between what they are and how they act, partly because many of them display an oddly cavalier, almost casual attitude about what they do. This creates a weird, surreal atmosphere that doesn’t always mesh with the full meaning and impact of the Incrementalists’ actions: ancient, shadowy personalities who have walked among us for millennia and have ineffable powers, yet still bicker constantly and can’t agree on where to order pizza from. Fortunately this is balanced out by a sober dose of self-analysis later on in the novel:

Jimmy spoke softly. “It is evil, what we do.[…] We have good reasons, and we always hope to achieve good effects. But it is evil to meddle with people, to change who they are, to force them to our will, giving them no chance to even know we are there. It is evil. Perhaps the good we do makes up for it. I hope so. But we must never forget the violence, the violation, of our methods. And should we ever use them for even small things that do not make the world better, surely we deserve nothing but curses and contempt from those around us, and from ourselves.”

Despite my reservations about The Incrementalists, there are plenty of moments of magic here too. Ren is an amazing, memorable character. Towards the end of the novel, there’s a masterful scene of self-discovery that is just stunning in its breathless, all-encompassing honesty and gorgeous imagery. There’s also a funny scene involving popcorn, which is simply prime, grade-A quality Brust. There are too many beautiful, meaningful sentences and paragraphs to quote here, so I’ll limit myself to just one more to give you a taste of the beautiful romance that’s a big part of this novel:

I wanted to follow the thread of him into the labyrinth of days, to discover each next turn with him, to watch the walls of our baffling history slip by under his fingers, and to feel those fingers on my skin.

Despite some of my reservations, I can’t deny that The Incrementalists is a unique and surprising novel about the power of memory and the impact of even the smallest actions. Its occasionally breezy tone masks a spectacular amount of depth and history. When it allows that depth to shine through, The Incrementalists is at its best. I’m glad I read it, and I’m glad there are authors who still manage to surprise even their long-time fans.

The Incrememtalists is available September 24th from Tor Books.
Read an excerpt from the novel here on Tor.com!

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post It Is Our Discontent That Drives Us: The Incrementalists appeared first on Reactor.

In a conversation with Tor publisher Tom Doherty (and later in a separate blog post) Modesitt explained that his first attempt at the Palencar story ran to over 10,000 words with no end in sight. He decided to set this story aside and write a new one, which is the “New World Blues” story that was included in the Palencar Project. Later, in a break between novels, Modesitt went back and finished up the first story, which turned into his latest stand alone science fiction novel, The One-Eyed Man: A Fugue, with Winds and Accompaniment. (And yes, the gorgeous and distinctive cover illustration is the Palencar painting that started it all.)

Although I’ve never been able to articulate a solid reason for this, I’ve always been more partial to Modesitt’s SF than his fantasy. Because of this, and because I love the way this story got away from the author and demanded to become a novel, I had high expectations for The One-Eyed Man. I’m very pleased to say that those expectations were met.

Dr. Paulo Verano is a freelance ecology consultant who is just emerging from an unpleasant and financially disastrous divorce. When he is offered a consulting job on a faraway planet, he jumps at the chance to escape the ruins of his personal life, even though given the distance involved and the travel time dilation, it’ll be 150 years later if/when he returns home. The job itself is intriguing: Verano is tasked with studying the ecological impact of the human presence on Stittara, the faraway planet that also happens to be the main source for the anagathic drugs that have extended human life spans considerably.

The assignment is something of a mystery in itself: any results Verano finds would only reach the central government a century and a half later, and even if the human impact on the ecology is disastrous, will that really be allowed to affect production of the longevity drug? Is the whole thing just a political gesture, or is there more going on here? Regardless, Verano leaves behind the fragments of his old life and sets out for Stittara.

Once he arrives, he quickly becomes entangled in a complex net of political and corporate relationships. Stittara is a mysterious planet with many puzzling geological and ecological features, not to mention a colonization history dating back to well before humans first landed there. Mysterious creatures called “skytubes” that look like floating, translucent tentacles make their incomprehensible ways across the sky. Most of the official population lives in underground facilities to avoid the planet’s abnormally destructive storms.

In this very alien-seeming human environment, Verano must use all his personal and intellectual skills to try and uncover Stittara’s many secrets. He has to balance the necessities of his research with powerful political and corporate interests, not to mention his own personal safety. Some of Verano’s new contacts are helpful, some suspicious, and some clearly have alternate agendas. The planet itself is a mystery, from its strange geological history to its weather patterns and even the odd stability of its population. Strangest of all is Ilsabet, a seemingly young woman with gray hair who only speaks in cryptic rhymes and lives in isolation, only occasionally making a brief appearance outside.

Readers who are familiar with the author will find many references to Modesitt’s background in politics in The One-Eyed Man. Despite the novel’s clearly SFnal setting, the commentary on ecological exploitation for political and corporate profit has obvious roots in our times. Verano is the titular one-eyed man, king in the land of those who are blind to the consequences of their actions.

For me at least, there was a pervasive sense of cynicism in this novel: people never learn, profit always trumps awareness, patterns are doomed to be repeated. Verano knows full well that, for all his diligence and dedication, his work is unlikely to make a huge difference: “Every consultant knows that ninety percent of what they do is either give cover to doing nothing or to support a decision already made.”

Then again, later on Verano says “Cynicism is often the last refuge of the idealist,” attributing the quotation to “some early space-age writer whose name I’d forgotten.” (Modesitt fans may recognize the line from one of the author’s earlier novels, The Ethos Effect.) The author shows many different ways of approaching Stittara’s alien ecology, some more balanced and viable than others, but taking the long-term view, it’s clear that the planet abides, no matter what. Whether that should count as a ray of hope or an indication of the sheer inevitability of human folly, I’ll leave up to you. (The author’s thoughts on this are fascinating too, as expressed in a recent post on the Tor/Forge blog: Alien Ecology As Character—although I’d save this one for after you’re finished with the novel, the better to savour its mysteries)

The only negative point I can bring up here is the recognizability factor. The One-Eyed Man feels in many ways like a synthesis of elements Modesitt has been using for decades, from the recognizable consultant protagonist to the focus on the local restaurant scene (and the quality of the lager!) to, yes, the ecological and ethical themes. Depending on how much Modesitt you’ve read, you may get a slight paint-by-the-numbers feeling. Then again, it’s a pattern the author owns by now, and one this fan will gladly read again and again.

Most importantly, pattern or no pattern: when seen side by side with some of Modesitt’s other works, The One-Eyed Man is actually one of the more powerful and elegant expressions of Modesitt’s themes. I’m always excited when the author takes a break from his fantasy series to write a new science fiction novel, and out of the ones from the last five or so years—Haze, Empress of Eternity and now The One-Eyed Man—I would rank this one highest and gladly recommend it to fans and newcomers alike.

The One-Eyed Man is available now from Tor Books.
Read an excerpt from the novel here on Tor.com

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post The Words Are Hide and Seek: The One-Eyed Man by L.E. Modesitt Jr. appeared first on Reactor.

One example of such hyper-efficient compression was “Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh, originally published in Asimov’s in 2009. It was one of that year’s most memorable short stories, deservedly winning the Hugo for Best Short Story as well as the Asimov’s Readers’ Award. Will McIntosh must have agreed that the story’s starting concept was too good, and its emotional resonance too strong, to leave it unexplored further.

Reworking a short story into a full-length novel doesn’t always work, but in this case, Will McIntosh has pulled it off and then some. Love Minus Eighty, the author’s third novel after the excellent Soft Apocalypse and Hitchers (which I reviewed here and here), has turned out to be a beautiful, emotionally resonant tale.

Love Minus Eighty in a few words: cryonics and dating services meet in a post-collapse future. You can trace a direct line from the future shown in this novel to the one in McIntosh’s debut novel Soft Apocalypse: resources have run out, but life goes on. The gap between rich and poor has widened dramatically. The most affluent can afford to live in New York’s High Town, the neighborhood equivalent of a Central Park South penthouse. Others may need to walk a few miles from the train station to get home to the run-down suburbs.

Cryonics has become a viable industry, but of course only the rich can afford to have their bodies frozen and revived. However, if you happen to be a young woman with an attractiveness score at or above the required level, you may be eligible for a free period of cryonic preservation. The required account balance will be maintained by the fees of rich men who can set up expensive “dates”: you’ll briefly be thawed to be interviewed and inspected, and if you pass muster, you’re revived and returned to life. Colloquially, the (often involuntary) participants in this program are referred to as “bridesicles.”

Love Minus Eighty explores this concept by following the lives of people who are directly impacted by it. A young woman experiences the disorientation and terror of being thawed for the first time after her death while being propositioned by a stranger. A young musician kills a woman in a car accident and, torn apart by guilt, devotes his life to raising money for cryogenic dates with her so the company doesn’t pull the plug on her.

A second set of characters highlights the way omnipresent social media has affected life in this future, with people wearing Google Glass-like body systems that allow them to be online everywhere, all the time. A wealthy young woman will do almost everything to raise her number of online followers, including dumping her boyfriend in front of the camera. Another woman is this future’s version of a dating coach, feeding lines and suggesting Pickup Artist techniques to her clients in real-time.

The picture Will McIntosh paints here is an exceedingly grim one. Characters are powerless to escape the various levels of exploitation they live through, and even past death they risk becoming captive, frozen mail order brides whose only hope of escape is acting exactly the way rich, pervy bridesicle customers expect. The author explores the social and emotional ramifications of the original short story’s bridesicle concept with merciless clarity.

The only quality the owners of the bridesicle facility look for in their candidates is physical beauty, and again, this is actually quantified: if your score isn’t high enough, you’d better be rich. Mira, the viewpoint character who provides the initial, terrifying look at life as a bridesicle, is a lesbian—something the corporation is not aware of, and something she can never, ever reveal to the men considering her for potential wife material.

Ultimately, the implications of this story are grim. Becoming a trophy wife is not a choice—it’s life or death. For a novel that’s never explicit and always tasteful, it pushes the idea of objectification to its very extreme, well past pornography and prostitution. The exploitation has reached a new level: you must act out your life as close to the most popular profile on every dating site as possible, or face oblivion. Less poignant, but still: you must lead your life as if you’re on camera in a reality TV show, or lose followers and risk irrelevancy. It’s no wonder some people in this future escape into interactive virtualities to the point of reality disconnect.

And yet, surprisingly, there is also a sweet, romantic touch to Love Minus Eighty. Even in the bitter darkness of this novel’s future, there is love. One character has an unrequited crush; another’s love is so strong that it continues even inside the frozen terror of the bridesicle dating center. For all its existential terror, Love Minus Eighty is, on one level at least, a touching love story: beautifully romantic for a novel exploring the plight of cryogenically frozen mail order brides.

If there’s one feature of the novel I found lacking, it’s the surprisingly abrupt ending. It may just be that I wanted more, or that I kept looking out for the second major SFnal concept McIntosh introduced in the original short story, which was strangely missing here. The entire novel would have been different, had it been included, and I’m not saying it’s better or worse for it—simply that I expected it to pop up at some point. Instead, McIntosh introduces an entirely different new technology that feels, somehow, a bit shoehorned into the story: I’m not sure if it was entirely necessary to make the story work. (I’m being intentionally vague here to avoid spoilers, but if you haven’t read it yet, take a look at “Bridesicle” after you’ve read the novel.)

One other aspect of this novel must be highlighted: as a physical object, it’s a gorgeous book. Part of the cover illustration is on a semi-transparent dust cover, the other part on the actual book. Together, they give the illusion of seeing someone reach out through frozen glass. It’s a beautiful effect that works together perfectly with the novel’s content—a true triumph of book design.

More people should be reading Will McIntosh. I hope his excellent novels will receive the attention they deserve now he’s being published by Orbit after flying under the radar for years at the comparatively small Night Shade Books. In Love Minus Eighty, he has given one of his best short stories enough room to breathe, turning it into a dark, impactful novel.

Love Minus Eighty is published by Orbit. It comes out June 11.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Death Is Not The End: Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh appeared first on Reactor.

The bad news—I’m just going to go ahead and say it—is that The Blue Blazes is not the new Miriam Black novel. That would be Cormorant, due out at the end of this year from Angry Robot.

The good news is that, if you liked the Miriam Black novels (which I reviewed here and here), The Blue Blazes should be right up your alley: a dark contemporary fantasy that somehow manages to be fun and unnerving at the same time. (Bonus good news: another gorgeous cover by Joey Hi-Fi!)

From publisher Angry Robot, who also suggest to file this one under “Urban Fantasy [ Family Matters | When Underworlds Collide | Thrill of the Hunt | Chips and Old Blocks ]”:

Meet Mookie Pearl.

Criminal underworld? He runs in it.

Supernatural underworld? He hunts in it.

Nothing stops Mookie when he’s on the job.

But when his daughter takes up arms and opposes him, something’s gotta give….

So, yes, the main character’s name is Mookie Pearl. (I know. It took me a minute too.) Mookie is part of the Organization, a criminal enterprise that controls distribution of a new drug variously known as Peacock Powder, Cerulean, Blue Jay, or just “Blue.” The effects the drug creates (the titular “Blue Blazes”) include increased strength and toughness but also, significantly, the ability to see the various denizens of the Underworld as they go about their business, usually underground but also, frequently, above. People who aren’t in the know frequently dismiss these visions as hallucinations, but like many others, Mookie knows they’re very real and very deadly. As a matter of fact, the Organization’s power in large part derives from its ability to deal with the Underworld—and Mookie is an integral part of this.

As The Blue Blazes kicks off, two important events take place. Mookie’s estranged daughter Nora, who (unbeknownst to most of Mookie’s colleagues in the Organization) is an active figure in the criminal world herself, re-appears and asks Mookie (again) to join her side. Then, Mookie learns that, not only does the Organization’s Godfather-like Boss have terminal cancer, but he’s picked his own ineffectual grandson Casimir to take over the reins. Casimir tasks Mookie with a seemingly impossible task: find the mythical drug that’s similar to the Blue but supposedly has the ability to cure any disease, even reverse death.

All of this sets off a fast-paced story that’s set partly in New York City and partly below it, in the caverns and tunnels where the gobbos, snakefaces, trogbodies and other assorted monsters of the Abyss live. They’re horrific and not very friendly to humans (to put it mildly), but the Blue is a powerful draw, so the familiar world above and the terrifying one below must occasionally intersect. Think Neverwhere meets The Godfather, with a dash of Robert Rodriguez and a soundtrack by Tom Waits. (I can practically see an opening sequence set to “Underground.”)

The setting Chuck Wendig has created here is fascinating: a New York City that’s sitting on top of a chasm to the underworld, with a secret cabal of tunnel workers who know the truth and a criminal organization exploiting the edge of surreality that separates their world from ours. The author slowly teases back the curtain, describing the true nature and history of this world in faux-non-fiction excerpts from the “Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below” that start every chapter. It might not be the most elegant way to get this info into the novel, but it does allow the story to race along smoothly without needing too many breaks for infodumps.

Mookie is an interesting main character. His description in Chapter One of the novel is almost worth the price of admission in itself:

He’s a high wall of flesh stuffed into a white wife-beater stained with brown (once red), a man whose big bones are wreathed in fat and gristle and muscle and sealed tight in a final layer of scar-tissue skin. At the top of his ox-yoke shoulders sits a head like a wrecking ball with black eyes and shorn scalp and a mouth full of teeth that look like white pebbles fished from a dark river. […]

He’s built like a brick shithouse made of a hundred smaller brick shithouses.

The interesting thing here is that this big hulking bruiser of a man is actually, in some ways, a softie when compared to Miriam Black. He’s capable of violence, sure, very much so, but he doesn’t have the same biting wit and bone-searing cynicism. He’s more settled, with a place of his own and a job (of sorts), unlike the drifter Miriam who’s always on the periphery. He’s more connected to the world.

The prose in The Blue Blazes will be familiar to people who have read Wendig’s works before, but at the same time it’s also notably different from the Miriam Black novels. There are more short, fragmented sentences and one sentence paragraphs. This creates a tight, cinematic atmosphere in action scenes:

He hears a shotgun boom. Men yelling, though they sound so distant…

He can’t breathe. The creature sounds like fabric but feels like liquid. Davey tries to swing a fist, but it’s like thrashing around underwater—a slow-motion freakout.

He sees those eyes. Just the eyes. Gleaming buttons. Coins in black water.

On the other hand, the staccato narration occasionally feels a bit forced during the less fast-paced parts of the novel. When it works, it really pulls the reader along, but in other instances it feels so unnatural that it may actually pull the reader out of the story. The slang some of Wendig’s characters use has the same problem: it’s frequently right on target but occasionally seems a bit overdone.

The entire novel has an over-the-top feel to it that sometimes veers close to being campy. I don’t want to keep sounding the same note, but really, if The Blue Blazes ever gets filmed, Robert Rodriguez would be the perfect choice to direct—when he’s in From Dusk Till Dawn/Machete-mode, not in Spy Kids-mode, that is. It’s violent and funny and noir without taking noir too seriously. Its main character seems to live on (and for) high-end charcuterie. It’s got an all-female roller derby gang and possibly the most insane stunt car getaway scene I’ve ever read.

There’s something gloriously unhinged about the crazy mix of fantasy, horror and crime-fic that is The Blue Blazes. It’s dark and darkly funny, full of outrageously gory scenes and larger-than-life characters. Its only weakness is that it’s occasionally in danger of becoming a B-movie version of itself, which diminishes the impact of its originality and depth somewhat. Still, in the end it’s an incredibly entertaining novel, and another winner for Chuck Wendig.

The Blue Blazes is published by Angry Robot. It is available on May 28th, 2013.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post A Rumbling Groan Down Below: The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig appeared first on Reactor.

In other words, you may want to stop reading this review if you haven’t at least read the first three Quaeryt novels: Scholar, Princeps and Imager’s Battalion. If you’d like a refresher, you can find my reviews of those novels here, here and here. (You can also find my look at the initial Imager trilogy here.)

So, in summary: if you’re not familiar with this series yet, please check it out because it’s excellent—but stop reading this review here to avoid spoilers.

The curve of Quaeryt’s influence and power continues to rise as the series progresses. No longer a humble and mostly broke scholar, he has by now become a powerhouse with experience in government and military command. His uncommonly strong imaging skills are finally out in the open. The Telaryn ruler Bhayar, who is working towards the unification of Lydar, tends to listen closely to Quaeryt’s advice and wishes. Those wishes happen to include a scholarium-type organization for imagers. Given that we know more or less where the world is heading from the first Imager trilogy, it’s clear that Quaeryt’s power is on the rise.

On the other hand, with great power comes great responsibility—and it’s becoming abundantly clear that Quaeryt is affected by the load on his shoulders. He’s not quite losing it like Rand al’Thor circa Lord of Chaos, but his frequent nightmares do indicate something akin to PTSD is setting in after his lethal role in some of the last novel’s major battles. Keep in mind that, despite the length of this series, it really hasn’t been that long in terms of internal chronology: Quaeryt’s been through a lot in a relatively short time. He’s clearly internalized what he says towards the end of this novel: “The worst of acts are often justified by the best of reasons.”

On top of that, Vaelora is now pregnant and, understandably given that she’s also along for the ride in a military campaign, she’s not always in the best mood. There’s something incredibly amusing about the couple’s bickering in the middle of these world-shaking events, with Quaeryt constantly doing his best not to upset his wife by either over-taxing or over-coddling her. The balance between these two characters, which has always been fascinating and delicate, becomes something truly special in Antiagon Fire.

As mentioned before, the Quaeryt portion of the Imager Portfolio is, in a sense, one huge prequel to the first three novels in the series. Especially Imager’s Battalion felt like “history in the making,” with the author slowly putting together a puzzle that should show, when it’s all finished, a world that’s much closer to the starting position of Imager. Antiagon Fire continues this pattern, with Bhayar setting his sights on the as-yet unconquered portions of the continent and dispatching Quaeryt and Vaelora to handle matters.

The main difference this time is that Bhayar is aiming for diplomacy rather than military conquest. Quaeryt and Vaelora are awarded the status of envoys, so they can try to convince one area’s rulers that it’s in their best interests to join Bhayar. As you’d expect from L.E. Modesitt, Jr., the geo-political and sociological lay-out of the situation is incredibly detailed and plausible, maybe something only an author with Modesitt’s professional background (which he discussed in detail during a recent conversation with publisher Tom Doherty) could develop to such an extent.

While I love this series, I’d consider Antiagon Fire one of the weaker installments thus far, if only because it’s so clearly a transitional book. Despite the complexity of this series as a whole, you can summarize the main developments of Antiagon Fire in just a handful of sentences. In addition, the main thrust of the plot is more or less identical to Imager’s Battalion: province X needs to become part of Bhayar’s lands, and Quaeryt’s again in the thick of it. He strong-arms the powerful, navigates the internal politics of Bhayar’s army, and contemplates ethics. Combine this with a significant amount of travel, and you end up with a novel that sometimes feels like it takes a long time to get where it’s going.

Then again, if you’ve read this far into the series, you’re probably not averse to any of this. The level of detail Modesitt brings to his world-building is, as always, both uncompromising and astonishing. The characters may not evolve as much as they did in previous installments, but they do continue to gain depth. Maybe most importantly, the intricate look at the history of Lydar/Solidar is unique and fascinating as always. L.E. Modesitt, Jr. combines legends, current politics and the future (as portrayed in the first three novels in the series) into one of the most complex depictions of the evolution of a fantasy universe ever.

While Antiagon Fire isn’t the strongest installment in the series, it does set up what could be a spectacular resolution in Rex Regis. Before that, in September 2013 fans of the author can also look forward to The One-Eyed Man, a standalone science fiction novel based on the same painting as his Palencar Project story “New World Blues.”

Antiagon Fire is published by Tor. It is available on May 28th, 2013. You can read an excerpt of the novel here.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post The Worst Of Acts, The Best Of Reasons: Antiagon Fire by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. appeared first on Reactor.

It’s not that there aren’t any hooks or approaches; it’s more that there is such a bewildering number of them that, as a reader or reviewer, you feel somewhat like you’ve wandered onto a hitherto undiscovered island full of skittery, unfamiliar species that keep turning out to be something else than what you initially expected. More than a review, Conservation of Shadows needs its own monograph. Towards a Taxonomy of Yoon Ha Lee’s Short Fiction, maybe.

Yoon Ha Lee’s first professional sale came in 1999—to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, no less. Since then she’s released about thirty pieces of short fiction into the wild, in markets such as F&SF, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and here on Tor.com, among others. Her works have been included and honorably mentioned in annual “best of” anthologies, and two of her stories (“Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” and “Ghostweight”) were finalists for the Sturgeon Award. Conservation of Shadows includes sixteen of the author’s best stories, as well as a great introduction by Aliette de Bodard and extensive story notes by the author herself. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first collection of Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction.

I’m going to take the opening paragraphs of the very first story in this collection as an example to develop some ideas. This quote is from the astonishing “Ghostweight,” originally published in Clarkesworld in 2011:

It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.

What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts.

Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.

So, obvious first observation: Yoon Ha Lee’s prose is gorgeous. It’s the kind of prose you want to read out loud. Every word counts, although that’s not always obvious upon first reading. Sometimes what’s left unsaid is equally meaningful, as the last sentence of the quote already suggests. As a rule, the author manages to evoke and/or imply a wealth of information in these relatively short tales: theories, histories real and imaginary, races, concepts you’ve never seen in the genre.

There’s a striking contrast between the gentle images Yoon Ha Lee uses and the all-but-gentle objects to which they refer. The kite in that quote from “Ghostweight” is a war-kite: a far future interstellar battle ship. Other stories feature swanships and ships powered by mothdrives. In one story, music is used as a weapon; in another, a book. Paper dolls. Each word in the title “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” refers to a different gun.

Likewise, there’s a strange, pleasing dissonance created by the simple, naturalistic bent of these same images and the science level they refer to. Sometimes this turns out to be “technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic,” sometimes actual magic. (There are both interstellar empires and necromantic mecha to be found in Conservation of Shadows.) The most advanced concepts—also frequently the most terrifying ones—are often expressed using single words that could be found in any child’s vocabulary.

This is, obviously, deceptive. Note the author also uses “diagram” and “axiom” in that brief origami quote above. These stories frequently build out from (but rarely make explicit) theoretical starting points that might please fans of hard SF. Warfare is waged by means of competing calendars. One clash of civilizations appears to be taking place almost entirely in probability space. I imagine the author wincing at these clumsy summaries, but in my defense, she recently summed up every story in Conservation of Shadows using just a handful of words each on her blog. A few examples: “theorem magic,” “quantum chess warfare,” “tactical linguistics.”

In a recent interview on Clarkesworld, Yoon Ha Lee explains some of her thinking behind all of this: much like a proof, she builds her stories towards a pre-established conclusion. There’s a didactic methodology to this: extraneous elements and unnecessary arguments are left out. Of course, as readers we don’t know the destination beforehand. In the same interview, Yoon Ha Lee frames this technique as an assassination: “I don’t want the reader to see the short sharp point clearly from the beginning, but I want it to make sense afterward as the angle of attack.”

All of this explains, at least in part, the reason behind these stories’ notable economy of words, their usage of deceptively recognizable imagery and innocent-seeming vocabulary. To be clear, the point is (usually) not a “gotcha”-type surprise revelation; rather, the author uses the stories’ meticulous construction to guide the reader towards understanding. If there’s any disorientation, it serves a point, which is frequently building a unique atmosphere and implying a much broader fictional universe than what’s glimpsed in the stories.

The purest examples of the author’s unique narrative approach may be those stories that start out by deviating from traditional storytelling technique. “Iseul’s Lexicon” begins with a fictional lexicon entry. (She really wasn’t kidding about the “tactical linguistics” thing earlier.) “The Black Abacus” includes an exam question with dizzying implications, and is structured around chess moves. “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” is something like Calvino by way of Borges and Moorcock. The author’s notes for this story (which was, by the way, originally published on Tor.com) made me happy: “I am aware that there is an egregious amount of arrogance involved in the idea of pastiching Calvino, but […] I figured it wouldn’t tear a hole in the universe for me to have a go.”

The rare missteps in this collection occur when the author indulges in prose that’s just a shade too flowery. In the story notes, she refers to this as “overwhelming the material with tinsel” and admits that she’s “already prone to that fault.” If so, this is very much an exception rather than the rule: most of the time, Yoon Ha Lee is incredibly efficient in her expression of ideas and plot.

Because of this efficiency, the highly informative story notes included at the back of this collection are more than welcome. Read story, read notes, re-read story. Rinse and repeat. As an example: Yoon Ha Lee, who is Korean-American, makes a few references to Korean history, something I suspected but didn’t fully understand during my first reading. Those stories have broader application and meaning, but learning about their origins definitely added a new layer to my appreciation.

The highest praise I have for this collection is simply this: in a genre that all too frequently works within the same old patterns and strictures, Yoon Ha Lee’s stories are unique. After reading Conservation of Shadows, I believe I could pick any future story by this author out of a blind line-up. That’s not because the collection is monotonous or repetitive—far from it—but because the author’s genre sensibility and writing style are completely sui generis. Conservation of Shadows is an excellent collection of stories: filled with beautiful puzzles of thought and emotion in which math and magic frequently walk hand in hand. Highly recommended.

Conservation of Shadows is published by Prime Books. It is available now.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post The Axioms Of Your Thoughts: Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee appeared first on Reactor.

Ten year old Hubert Anvil is an incredibly gifted soprano, but as puberty approaches, his voice will break, inevitably destroying his ability to sing in the higher registers. Hubert’s superiors are considering an “alteration”: removing the offending parts of his anatomy before hormones ravage his angelical voice….

The Alteration is a 1976 alternate history novel by English novelist, poet and critic Kingsley Amis. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. This new edition, out on May 7th from NYRB Classics, also features an insightful new introduction by William Gibson.

The world portrayed in The Alteration by Kingsley Amis is a meticulously constructed and plausible dystopia that accounts in large part for the fascination this novel still holds. The Catholic Church has controlled life for so long and in such a complete way that most characters take it more or less for granted. The novel’s title is very effective in the way it implies multiple meanings: not just Hubert’s proposed castration, but also the larger alteration of history.

Amis mentions many of these historical changes in passing or simply implies them, which may make it tricky for readers who aren’t very familiar with (real) history to fully appreciate some of the many clever references. Just the first few pages contain a list of visiting dignitaries whose titles imply a completely different history of Europe (no unified Italy, for one) and vastly different roles for some historical figures (as evidenced by the last names of Monsignors Henricus and Lavrentius). You don’t have to be a historian to appreciate this novel, but as William Gibson indicates in his introduction, a basic familiarity with the concepts of the Reformation is probably helpful.

In the world of The Alteration, science has literally become a dirty word. Progress has more or less been stopped for a few centuries. Electricity is unknown after having been banned. As a result, vehicles run on Diesel engines (which don’t require an electrical spark for ignition) and intercontinental travel by steam train is common. At least in terms of technology, there’s something steampunk-like about this novel.

Another consequence of the Church’s opposition to scientific progress is that science fiction has become forbidden literature. There’s an underground circuit for people who enjoy TR, or Time Romance, as the genre is known in this reality. The most controversial of TR’s subgenres is dubbed CW, Counterfeit World, which imagines worlds and histories different from the one portrayed in the novel, such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle—an alternate history that exists inside this alternate history and portrays a world in which the events that led up to the reality portrayed in The Alteration never happened. Other genre classics have been changed to fit into the Church’s proscribed worldview, such as Lord of the Chalices and The Wind in the Cloisters.

For me, The Alteration is at its best when it explores its setting and its premise by showing both subtle and overt changes to established history. Finding the references to real history is somehow both exhilarating (at least for history geeks like me) and utterly depressing (in all its implications). In terms of plot and characters, the novel is not the author’s best work, but like William Gibson in his introduction I’d rather not go into too much detail here, so you can approach the story without preconceived notions.

The Alteration is both an interesting take on alternate history and a broad indictment of the way religious dogmatism can impact people on the most personal, intimate level as well as on a society-wide scale. If you’re a fan of alternate history, definitely check out what Gibson calls this “most admirably foul counterfeit world.”

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post A Most Admirably Foul Counterfeit World: The Alteration by Kingsley Amis appeared first on Reactor.

As the title of this new collection indicates, Shepard approaches aspects of his own life and personality from five different directions.  Calling these stories “autobiographies” is as meaningful as it is deceptive. “Pseudo-autobiographies” or even “meta-autobiographies” would be more appropriate, but it’s understandable why Shepard and Subterranean Press avoided those horrible mouthfuls.

First things first: Five Autobiographies and a Fiction contains, as you might expect, six stories: “Ditch Witch,” “The Flock,” “Vacancy,” “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life,” “Halloween Town” and “Rose Street Attractors,” varying in length from short stories to full length novellas.

Before you get to the stories, however, there’s an introduction by Shepard that’s as essential as the stories themselves, because it places the entire collection in the context of the author’s life. Shepard describes his troubled adolescence in a way that’s so frank and open that reading it borders on the uncomfortable. He mentions that the genesis of this project was a realization that the two main characters in the story “The Flock” may represent “two halves of my personality that had not fully integrated during my teenage years.”

In “The Flock” and other stories in this collection, most notably the stunning “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life,” Shepard examines his personality “from the standpoint of an essential divide, sensing perhaps that some mental health issues remain unresolved.” There are similarities between many of the protagonists, some easily identifiable as parallels with the author, others less obvious. Taken on their own and without the overarching “autobiographies” moniker, it might not have been as clear that Shepard is dissecting his own life, or at least alternate versions of his life. Seen together in the context of this collection, there’s no getting away from it.

All of this makes reading Five Autobiographies and a Fiction an odd, thrilling process. Yes, they’re instantly recognizable as Lucius Shepard stories, full of interesting twists and gorgeous prose, but there’s also something voyeuristic about the reading experience. Shepard makes it clear that these characters are potentialities, near-hits (or near-misses?), versions of himself from some parallel dimension that could have been real if his path had been slightly different.

Most of the main characters in these stories range from “annoying” to “spectacularly unpleasant.” Many of them treat women like objects and other cultures like caricatures, even when it’s clear that they have the mental and emotional capacities to step beyond this. They’re stuck in the ruts carved by their inglorious pasts. They coast along because it’s easier than reaching for something new, until they’re bumped out of their paths by some confrontation or realization.

Some examples: Cliff Coria, the main character of “Vacancy,” is a former actor turned used car salesman whose past misdeeds come back to haunt him. He self-describes as “an affable sociopath with no particular ax to grind and insufficient energy to grind it, even if he had one.” One of the main characters in “The Flock” reflects, after sleeping with his friend’s girlfriend, that “Getting involved was the easy way out. Not the easy way out of Edenburg, not out of anywhere, really: but with Dawn and a couple of squalling kids in a double-wide parked on my folks’ acreage, at least my problems would be completely defined.” The main character in “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life” describes himself as follows: “I knew myself to be a borderline personality with sociopathic tendencies, subject to emotional and moral disconnects, yet lacking the conviction of a true sociopath.”

If you tried to make a Venn diagram of these people’s characteristics, the areas of overlap would be clear. If you’ve read Shepard before, you can probably add some examples from past stories, but in this case the stories are offered as “autobiographies,” contextualized and dissected in the introduction. Some autobiographers self-mythologize, casting their lives in a more pleasing light. Shepard is, at least indirectly, doing the opposite. I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced anything similar in fiction.

“Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life” adds another fascinating dimension to the collection by having its main character Tom Cradle (a bestselling author) come across a novel by another Tom Cradle, one who took a different path in a number of ways, including the fact that Cradle Two didn’t listen to some advice an editor gave him early in his career: “long, elliptical sentences and dense prose would be an impediment to sales (she counseled the use of “short sentences, less navel-gazing, more plot,” advice I took to heart.)” I don’t think anyone who’s read Shepard before can work through that tangle without grinning, but just to make sure, he concludes the paragraph with “It was as if he had become the writer I had chosen not to be.”

Later on in this story, the (fictional) author quotes one of his fans (who strayed in from a parallel universe) while she cuts apart postmodernist fiction, in a way that feels very much like quotes taken from real reviews. It doesn’t get much more meta than that. It’s also hilarious, especially when the author wishes the woman would turn back into her previous, hypersexual self rather than this “pretentious windbag” who’s over-analyzing his fiction. (Writing some of these quotes down as a reviewer is, by the way, a great cause for reflection.) Elsewhere in the story, Shepard/Cradle rips apart a number of SFF fan and author archetypes in a gloriously misanthropic, multi-page rant that will probably piss off as many people as it amuses.

Even though “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life” gets a bit muddled towards the end, it’s my favorite entry in the collection because it crystallizes the ideas from the introduction and the other stories in one dark, hallucinatory Heart of Darkness-like journey. It’s a novella that deserves a full-length review in itself, but then so do most of the other rich, thought-provoking stories in Five Autobiographies and a Fiction.

The “fiction” mentioned in the book’s title refers to the final entry, “Rose Street Attractors,” a twisted ghost story set in the underbelly of Nineteenth Century London. It’s a great story, but I felt that it took away somewhat from the impact of the preceding five stories. In itself it’s perfectly fine, but there’s a sense of disconnect between it and the others. I don’t think the collection would have suffered if it had been titled “Five Autobiographies,” or (as I somehow thought before reading this book) if the title’s “fiction” had referred to the introduction, making explicit the idea expressed at its very end: “[…] it has every bit as much reality as the fiction I am living, a narrative that becomes less real second by second, receding into the past, becoming itself a creation of nostalgia and self-delusion, of poetry and gesture, of shadows and madness and desire.”

For fans of Lucius Shepard, this collection will be revelatory, but I wouldn’t call it his best work. Several of the stories follow a pattern that’s maybe a bit too obvious. Some of the endings feel too similar, some are a bit rushed. Maybe most importantly, some of these stories work mostly because of the context they’re in: without the introduction and the instant additional layer of meaning it imparts, I wouldn’t rank them with my favorite Lucius Shepard stories. Even an average story by this author is worth reading, but I’d still steer new readers to some of his previous works instead, especially last year’s collection of Griaule stories (review).

I wrote down so many quotations from Five Autobiographies and a Fiction that I might have been able to compose this review using quotes only, communicating in the way the soldier who told a story using only slogans did in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. To conclude, let me add one more quote. This theory from “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life” offers one possible explanation how one author can write five vastly different autobiographies: “[…] our universe and those adjoining it were interpenetrating. He likened this circumstance to countless strips of wet rice paper hung side by side in a circle and blown together by breezes that issued from every quarter of the compass, allowing even strips on opposite points of the circle to stick to each other for a moment and, in some instances, for much longer; thus, he concluded, we commonly spent portions of each day in places far stranger than we were aware.”

Five Autobiographies and a Fiction is published by Subterranean Press. It is available April 30

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Places Far Stranger Than We Were Aware: Five Autobiographies and a Fiction by Lucius Shepard appeared first on Reactor.

Inexorably pulled into this odd black tunnel, Ransom’s mind enters the body of a young man who has just been given a drug overdose in an attempt to make his death seem like a suicide. While inhabiting this unfamiliar reality and body, Ransom discovers that the initial investigation he was contracted for has much farther-reaching implications than he could have possibly imagined….

Tunnel Out of Death is a spectacularly bizarre realities-within-realities story. The obvious comparison is Philip K. Dick: the down-the-rabbit-hole structure, the frequent doubt whether the reality the main character perceives is real, the combination of vaguely defined technology and paranoia, the androids who are almost indistinguishable from humans. Even the title sounds like it could be a hitherto undiscovered work by the grandmaster of existential alienation.

Unfortunately Tunnel Out of Death falls far short of that level. As an exploration of the nature of reality it’s interesting. Jamil Nasir actually pushes the envelope here, taking some of these metaphysical concepts as far as I’ve ever seen in SF. As a novel, however, it has too many flaws to work.

On the plus side, Jamil Nasir skillfully evokes an interesting future by throwing small but significant references to new technologies into the story. Early on, a character discusses a new religion saying “they have their services in a lovely half-size replica of St. Peter’s Basilica in a sub-basement of the Bank of China building,” effectively forcing readers to scale up their imaginations in just a few words. When Ransom’s assistant chides her employer for taking an emergency appointment, she says: “You’re supposed to get your blood exchanged and your lymphocyte firmware upgraded this afternoon.” Jamil Nasir understands how to use small details to paint a big picture.

It’s a shame that the implications of endovoyancy and Ransom’s travels between various realities are never explained with the same economy of words. Instead, the author frequently attempts to explain them in rambly sentences, such as: “If the substrate of your consciousness were not a meat creature full of evolutionary tropisms and aversions, would consciousness still be better than unconsciousness? Without the impersonal biological urges that used you as a disposable tool of species proliferation, would you still use being over non-being?”

This type of wandering, vaguely stoned-sounding discourse even creeps into the dialogue:

“I don’t know what it was, but what it seemed like was—I don’t know. Nothingness—but as if everything and its opposite had come together and canceled each other out, leaving just absolute absence of anything anywhere.

“Except that everything and its opposite combined is also everything—everything in potential form, do you see? That’s what I saw. Everything and nothing together, pure empty potentiality.”

I confess that I found it somewhat reassuring when, after another handful of sentences in this vein, the speaker concludes with “Does that make any sense?”, and the reply is a simple, one word “No.”

To be fair, the concepts Nasir explores in this novel aren’t easy to summarize. The whodunit-like plot that sets off the story is mainly a vehicle to get to a place where the author can explore an almost mystical understanding of reality that touches upon religion, science, psychic abilities, artificial intelligence, human mutation, alien lifeforms, and much more.

The main problem is that, as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that that exploration of ideas takes precedence over everything else, and that telling a good story sort of fell by the wayside. The mystery that starts off the plot drops from the radar for a while when it becomes clear that there’s a much farther-reaching plot, but that plot is so utterly bizarre and incongruous that it practically invalidates what came before.

The novel wraps back around to the initial mystery, but by then it’s clear that it wasn’t the real point anyway. Towards the end, the story dissolves into the mystical insights quoted earlier in this review, making it feel as if entire sections and plot points were incidental to the academic noodling about the nature of reality.

This impression is reinforced by the fact that the only character whose background is explored in any kind of detail is Margaret Biel, the target of Heath Ransom’s investigation. Even the main character and narrator, Ransom himself, lacks depth and mainly feels like a vehicle for ideas and lecture-style dialogue. All others are basically props and, in a few instances, are treated like props: one character has an almost human-seeming android girlfriend; a not-quite-living sex doll, basically. There’s something incredibly icky about the way she’s described: her status lies somewhere between human, animal and object. This aspect of the novel left a bad taste in my mouth.

Still, there are also moments that are truly memorable. There are a few instances where Nasir effectively pulls the rug out from under the reader, calling into question everything that came before, creating the spine-tingling sense of doubt that Philip K. Dick excelled at. There’s a tremendous scene set in a parking lot that’s also a transitional reality of sorts, in the style of the hellwalks in Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. There’s a section where the protagonist ping-pongs back and forth between two realities for such a long time that my head was truly spinning. Jamil Nasir stretches this type of story and setting to new limits, which is admirable in itself.

If you’re in the mood for a novel that explores the same kinds of concepts Philip K. Dick frequently dealt with (and that occasionally feels like the product of PKD’s mind around the time he thought a sentient pink beam of light was sending him messages), Tunnel Out of Death will scratch that itch. It’s not every day you read a novel that casually throws in sentences like “You reified an astral sensorium” or “It had been years since he had last died, and it was shocking.” I enjoyed the high-flying metaphysical concepts Jamil Nasir explores in Tunnel Out of Death, but in the end the novel felt like a missed opportunity.

Tunnel Out of Death is out on May 7th from Tor. You can read an excerpt here.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post “You Reified an Astral Sensorium”: Tunnel Out of Death by Jamil Nasir appeared first on Reactor.

Reading this book was an odd experience for me, because the one story by Rivera I was familiar with, which I also thought to be his best known story, is possibly the one that’s least representative of his general style: the World Fantasy Award-nominated “Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect Us.” Maybe that’s why it was placed towards the end of this collection: it forces the reader to experience Rivera’s entire range before hitting that spectacular, shocking story. Of course regular readers of Interzone, where the author contributed a number of these pieces, will have a different experience. For me, Across the Event Horizon was somewhat of a revelation.

In his introduction to this book, Terry Bisson makes the one crucial point that describes Mercurio D. Rivera’s fiction: the presentation of “weird, wonderful and thought-provoking ideas” is central to these stories. (Rivera was a student in Bisson’s Writing SF course at the New School in New York.) As a matter of fact, you can boil down almost all of these pieces to one premise, one innovation or twist or evolution. Just like in the best classic science fiction, everything derives from one point of speculation.

These echoes of classic SF are reinforced by the names in the first two stories included here: “Dance of the Kawkawroons” and “Longing for Langalana.” Those alien names are so melodious and smooth they instantly remind of a bygone age, evoking echoes of old-fashioned, straightforward planetary adventure. There’s a sense of romanticism to them, reinforced by the patterns of exploration and colonization that will immediately ring familiar to genre fans.

This immediately proves to be deceptive, of course. Mercurio D. Rivera gradually introduces a surprising level of ambivalence and complexity into these two first stories. What initially seems benevolent becomes quite the opposite, before evolving again. There are twists followed by more twists, heightening a powerful sense of alienation and menace. The conceptual and ethical switchbacks in these stories are dizzying.

“Snatch Me Another” and “Dear Annabehls” are more obviously connected. A new technology allows people to reach through a portal, into a parallel universe, to pull objects into our reality. Rivera squeezes an amazing amount of this idea’s implications into the first story: comical, economical, societal, existential. The end result is thought-provoking and emotionally gut-wrenching. What should remain unique versus becoming a commodity? What happens when we confuse material comfort with emotional connection? What does “do unto others” even mean when the chances of retribution are inversely proportional to the number of possible universes?

In “Dear Annabehls,” the author then further explores these ideas in the form of a series of gradually escalating “Dear Abby” letters that combine the comical (she recommends intoxicants as the solution for almost everything) with the poignant (watch her automatically put a heteronormative spin on the first story).

A third pair of stories have a less overt but equally interesting connection. Both “Rewind, Replay” and “Naked Weekend” play on the themes of escapism and self-deception, one of them in the context of dealing with a personal trauma, the other expanding the idea to a regulated, society-wide scale. One of them allows editing memories, the other editing emotions. The inability to cope with reality is a theme running through this entire collection, but never so overtly as in these two excellent stories.

Another major theme that pops up in almost all of the stories in Across the Event Horizon is alienation and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of effective communication. “Scent of Their Arrival” is the most literal exploration of this idea (and another great example of using a classic SF format to explore much more modern concepts.) The two interlocutors in “Bargonns Can Swizzle” are separated by time rather than species. The main character of “The Fifth Zhi” is maybe the most tragic example: the loneliness of a clone who discovers there’s a vast gulf even between himself and his clone-brethren.

“Missionaries” is one of my favorites stories in the collection. It explores faith in what I can only (rather lamely) describe as a quantum context. It’s an incredibly moving piece of fiction that reminded me somewhat of Ted Chiang’s excellent “Stories of Your Life.” As evidence of Mercurio D. Rivera’s range, compare this with “Sleeping With the Anemone”, a story that uses blunt comedy to explore some of the same themes as Kij Johnson’s “Spar.” It’s perversely (in more than one way) just as horrific.

And then, maybe just to put a final spin on the entire collection, after all the twists, all the failures of communication, all the ideas that seem to confirm Paul Kincaid’s The Widening Gyre, there’s that final story “Answers from the Event Horizon”: a surprising grace note that’s confusing for its sheer optimism. I glanced at the page for a while, somewhat suspiciously, wondering if I’d misread. In the end, then, a ray of hope—if only, maybe, one that emphasizes the darkness of what came before.

My only reservation about some of these stories is that Mercurio D. Rivera’s tendency to explore a single concept occasionally feels almost too straightforward. The thematic wealth of these stories is sometimes masked by the simplicity of the narrative. This is, of course, deceptive—hence “masked”—and also makes these stories instantly memorable. Still, I’m eager to see how Rivera would carry over and expand on some of these ideas and concepts in the longer format of a novella or even a novel.

Rivera put me on the wrong foot several times throughout this collection by mixing traditions, themes, and ideas. As a reader, I was forced to reconsider initial impressions in several ways. Across the Event Horizon manages to be both accessible and challenging, which is not an easy feat. Recommended.

Across the Event Horizon is published by NewCon Press. It is available now.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Dizzying Switchbacks: Across The Event Horizon by Mercurio D. Rivera appeared first on Reactor.

Adamat conducts his investigation while Tamas begins the brutal work of purging the country’s nobility and pacifying the capital during the inevitable civil war. His first priority is hunting down an uncommonly powerful member of the Royal Cabal who managed to escape the palace during the coup. Tamas assigns this duty to his son Taniel, a talented powder mage who has just recently returned to the city with a mysterious young savage named Ka-Poel. Gradually it becomes clear that the overthrow of the monarchy was just the start of a series of events that will change the world forever….

Promise of Blood is the first novel in the Powder Mage Trilogy by debut author Brian McClellan. In terms of style and concept, it seems to be aimed straight at the same readers who enjoy Brandon Sanderson’s novels. While it’s by no means perfect and doesn’t have the same polish as Sanderson’s better works, it does show promise for the future.

The most obvious parallel between Promise of Blood and, say, the Mistborn novels by Brandon Sanderson is its magic system, or, more accurately, one of its magic systems. The concept of the “powder mage” combines the ideas of flintlock fantasy with the basics of Sanderson’s allomancy: not only does this world have both guns and magic, but powder mages can consume gunpowder to heighten their senses and give them additional powers. This allows them to do things like see a faraway target, float a bullet for miles, or even change a bullet’s direction.

Just like the metals in allomancy, gunpowder becomes a consumable ingredient that gives its users an edge, but it also adds weaknesses that can be exploited, e.g. one powder mage can cause someone else’s supply of gunpowder to explode, often with catastrophic results. In an interesting twist, gunpowder is also highly addictive: at least one character in the novel is on the verge of needing a Twelve Step Program.

By itself, this concept would merely feel like Sanderson Lite, but McClellan places it in a context that makes it somewhat more interesting: the Royal Cabal, which traditionally has supported the monarchy, uses a different, more traditional type of magic that involves manipulating the “Else” to control the elements. This has created tension throughout history and right up to the start of the novel. This fantasy world is in flux, going through a change similar to the advent of gunpowder in our own history. McClellan then adds political and economic factors to the mix, with a variety of factions interested in tipping the balance of power. There’s still a degree of simplicity to this fantasy world that doesn’t entirely thrill me, but dismissing it as just “allomancy with gunpowder” would be unfair.

In terms of structure and pace, Promise of Blood is uneven. After the initial coup and subsequent civil war, the novel takes off in a different direction. At that point, it feels like the story stops, reboots, and then lurches off again, but despite the heightened stakes it often lacks the tension of the initial section. The perspective changes frequently: coup leader Tamas, his son Taniel, investigator Adamat, a young laundress. Some of the threads feel unnecessarily drawn out, while others are rushed. Some sections simply lack any kind of tension. Promise of Blood frequently feels a bit directionless.

McClellan’s prose is basic and straightforward, perfectly functional but rarely interesting or surprising. The only exceptions to this are a few clumsy sentences like “The Kez had executed Tamas’s late wife” or “The fight was fast, violent,” things that maybe should have been fixed in editing. Aside from blips like those, Promise of Blood is a competently written fantasy story, especially for a debut. That’s definitely promising for Brian McClellan’s future.

Less promising: when Adamat is sending his family to safety, he thinks: “Damned woman. What he’d give for an obedient wife.” When Tamas is dealing with the aftermath of the coup, part of his battle plan includes this: “Then my soldiers will funnel them towards the Samalian district, where they can loot the nobility’s houses and rape their daughters[…]” Taniel’s former fiancée Vlora (she cheated on him) is one of the only female powder mages in the novel, but spends most of the novel silently off-camera. I expect this may change in the next book in the trilogy. Still: strong, positive female characters are few and far between in Promise of Blood.

Despite the novel’s flaws, I’m fairly sure that Promise of Blood will find its audience. It combines some of the grittiness found in the works of Joe Abercrombie with the type of structured magical system that Sanderson does so well. Brian McClellan doesn’t have the chops of either of those two authors yet, but you can sense that he has the potential to get there. I’m not entirely sure yet whether I’m interested in reading further into this trilogy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many readers feel differently and make this a highly successful debut.

Promise of Blood is published by Orbit. It is available April 16.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Gunpowder and Grit: Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan appeared first on Reactor.

Banks’ statement, which you can read in its entirety here, also mentions that he will be cancelling all public appearances in order to spend his remaining time with loved ones, friends, and family. Fans and friends can now check in on his progress and leave messages at Banksophilia: Friends of Iain Banks. In the meantime, our hearts and best wishes go out to Iain and his partner Adele.

The post Sad News from Iain M. Banks appeared first on Reactor.

Come back. Stop laughing.

In my defense, so far Piccirilli seems to have written mostly (though not exclusively) in the horror and thriller genres, which aren’t really my bailiwick. The ARC for What Makes You Die came in from Apex Book Company, a relatively small press. It’s a short little book, just 150 pages in my Epub review copy. The blurb somehow yelled “autobiographical first novel” at me. Obviously, I’d somehow never heard of Tom Piccirilli, and of course I assumed that must mean he’s new.

So after about 30 pages, I’m sitting here thinking “whoa, this guy can write,” and I decide to fire up the ole Google. Turns out Tom Piccirilli has written over twenty novels and a gabillion short stories. He won a number of major awards, including the Bram Stoker Award on more than one occasion, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award. I was so shocked at my own painful ignorance that I decided the only way to atone for it was to display it in grand fashion at the start of this review.

If everyone’s done laughing, we can now move on to the actual review.

This book grabbed my attention because of one deliciously weird sentence in its publicity blurb. See if you can spot it:

What Makes You Die is about Tommy Pic, a screenwriter who fell hard from Hollywood success and landed in a psychiatric ward, blacked out from booze and unmedicated manic depression. This is not the first time he’s come to in restraints, surrounded by friends and family who aren’t there.

This time, though, he also awakes to a message from his agent. The first act of his latest screenplay is their ticket back to the red carpets.

If only Tommy could remember writing it. Trying to recapture the hallucinations that crafted his masterpiece, he chases his kidnapped childhood love, a witch from the magic shop downstairs, and the Komodo dragon he tried to cut out of his gut one Christmas Eve. The path to professional redemption may be more dangerous than the fall.

After reading that Komodo dragon sentence a few times, I decided to give this book a shot. Even then, it languished in my to-be-read queue for a relatively long time, because it didn’t really seem to mesh with my usual reading preferences and, again, the whole thing sounded like a semi-autobiographical attempt at a first novel.

Well, I’m not sure if it’s autobiographical or semi-autobiographical. I sort of hope it’s not, because protagonist Tommy Pic is a mess: a neurotic, suicidal alcoholic whose creative peak is disappearing in the rearview mirror fast. He lives in his mom’s basement. He does actually believe the spirit of a Komodo dragon lives in his abdomen. As What Makes You Die starts off, he’s just waking up in a psych ward after a prolonged blackout, strapped to the bed and surrounded by his pitying family. This man is not doing well.

Because the novel is told from Tommy’s perspective, and he’s not exactly the most mentally stable guy, it’s never entirely sure whether the apparently supernatural aspects of the story are real or just the products of a deranged mind. Tommy sees his dead father standing by his hospital bed. He also believes the orderlies in the mental ward set up death matches between the patients and sell the harvested organs on the black market. And of course, there’s that Komodo dragon.

The novel’s title is also the title of a screenplay by Tommy. He supposedly wrote the first act during his latest blackout. When he gets back home, he finds an enthusiastic message from his agent, claiming this new work will revitalize Tommy’s career. The thing is, he doesn’t remember writing any of it. He can’t even seem to read the printout. (Hysterical blindness?) The notes his agent made in the margins don’t ring any bells. (Amnesia?) Whatever it is, his agent wants Tommy to write two more acts by Monday.

The end result is a hallucinatory weekend during which Tommy tries to get back to the same state of mind that somehow led him to write his best work in years. He revisits old haunts, pursues old ghosts, considers his past, meets new people. He’s frequently drunk. His sanity is questionable. I mentioned the Komodo dragon, right?

The oddest thing about this novel is that, despite the utter despair of Tommy’s life, it’s somehow frequently hilarious. Tommy’s a sharp observer who mercilessly dissects everyone’s perceived shortcomings, including his own. He’s both brutally offensive and touchingly insecure. He’s losing grasp on his life, but he has enough forward momentum to not only keep the show going but also to narrate it like a grand, insane adventure.

Tommy’s narrative voice is what carries this novel. His combination of hopelessness and hilarity is perfect. (That combination is also expressed as the closest thing to his creative philosophy during an unlikely cinema appreciation meeting, told in the form of—what else?—a screenplay that anchors the middle of the novel.) It’s a bizarre experience to find yourself laughing out loud while someone is describing the complete breakdown of his life and psyche, but somehow Tom Piccirilli manages to create that kind of dynamic.

Another surprising facet of this novel is the loving way Tommy describes his family members. There’s something incredibly touching about the portraits of his mother and sister, their home life, the genuine compassion they have for each other. The memories of spending time with his long-dead father are equally moving. These scenes are like islands of reliability during all the madness in Tommy’s life.

Is What Makes You Die perfect? No. Despite everything, the constant introspection sometimes feels self-indulgent. The hallucinatory aspects of the story occasionally stray into absurdity. The ending feels rushed. Very little is resolved. That’s probably the point, but it feels like a major letdown after the intensity of the first 90% or so of the story.

Still, the fact that I wanted more is probably a sign that something good was happening here. What Makes You Die is a short and entertaining read full of bizarre contradictions. I had trouble putting it down. Now I finally figured out who Tom Piccirilli is, I should really try to hunt down some more of his works.

Postscript: I learned since writing this review that the publication
date for this novel (originally March 19th) has been pushed back due
to the conditions of the new Apex Early 50 program. The book is
available for preorder on the Apex website and will be available from
major retailers soon.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Hopelessness and Hilarity: What Makes You Die by Tom Piccirilli appeared first on Reactor.

I have to admire the decision to place this quote at the very top of this book cover, because there is no other way that an almost sixty-year-old historical novel set mostly in 14th Century France would cross over to fantasy fans as successfully as this one is about to. (The fact that fantasy is being used to market historical fiction also speaks to the way popular culture has changed in the last decade or two, but that’s another discussion.)

So. The Iron King is the first novel in a seven book series of historical novels entitled The Accursed Kings (“Les Rois Maudits”) by French author Maurice Druon. The first six novels were originally published between 1955 and 1960; a seventh one, which to my knowledge has never been translated to English, appeared in 1977. The series has been adapted into two separate mini-series, once in the 1970’s and more recently in 2005, although these are supposedly only available in undubbed, unsubtitled French versions. “Very frustrating for English-speaking Druon fans,” as George R.R. Martin says in the Foreword.

The novel’s titular “iron king” is Philip IV, dubbed “The Fair” on account of his legendary good looks, not because he came to be known as a particularly fair ruler. Quite the opposite, actually: he was known for putting the needs of the nation before those of his subjects in spectacular ways: taxing or extorting large chunks of the population, bloodily putting down the ensuing rebellions and riots, expelling the Jews, and crushing the Knights Templar. He’s also the monarch who installed Clement V as the first Avignon pope, thereby not improving his popularity in certain other parts of the world at all.

It’s the Knights Templar affair that provides the impetus for the series’ plot and, at least in Druon’s version of history, the eventual downfall and ruin of many Capetian kings and other power-brokers. For when Philip IV causes the final remaining leaders of the order to be burned at the stake after years of relentless persecution, the Grand Master curses him: “Accursed! Accursed! You shall be accursed to the thirteenth generation!”

And so it goes. The Iron King follows the story of Philip the Fair and several members of his extended family and court during an eight month period in 1314. Many of the major events described by Maurice Druon in the novel are based in historical fact. Druon supplements this with several pages worth of notes at the end of the book, providing more details about the actual events of the age. You can argue with the author’s interpretation of history (as I expect some people did and will, vehemently) but regardless, you can find the skeleton of this novel’s plot—as well as several “spoilers” for those unfamiliar with the period—by doing a few simple searches on Wikipedia.

However, despite being based on history, the tone of the novel does actually resemble novels like A Game of Thrones somewhat. Its pages are filled with betrayal and blackmail. Torture and violence abound. Lives are ruined to advance a claim on a territory. The concept of nobility is treated with huge cynicism. (At one point, someone actually says “we have been present today at the demise of Chivalry.”) Everyone looks out for themselves first and foremost. It’s best not to get attached to too many characters. You could possibly argue that this is a grimdark historical novel.

At the same time it’s only fair to warn you that, in many other ways, The Iron King is a very different beast. Characters are much less well-defined than readers of modern fantasy may like, for one. A few of them are sometimes referred to by name, sometimes by title, and sometimes by the territory they control, which may have you paging back to the list of the characters at the front of the book to double-check who is who more than a few times. Even then, you’ll be hard-pressed to find the same well-rounded and fascinating characters as in, say, A Game of Thrones. They’re historical figures defined by their historical actions, and few if any of them ever become real, relatable people.

The book’s narrative voice is also considerably different. Sure, The Iron King switches perspective from chapter to chapter, a technique writers like Martin use with great success to show complex intrigues from various points of view. What’s more jarring is that The Iron King occasionally uses an ominous-sounding omniscient narrator (“But new events were on their way which would change the destinies of them all.”), and this immediately makes it sound more dated. The occasional tendency of characters to explain past events to people who don’t need them explained has the same effect:

“My dear Monseigneur Robert,” Tolomei went on calmly, “when you brought a law-suit against your aunt Mahaut for the inheritance of the County of Artois, I paid the costs. Well, you lost the case.”

“But you know very well that I lost it through dishonesty,” cried Artois. “I lost it through the intrigues of that bitch Mahaut. May she die of it! A thieves’ market! She was given Artois so that Franche-Comté should revert to the Crown through her daughter.

The fact that the language is a bit tame, especially when compared to the subject matter, doesn’t help either: one of the worst insults in the books is “You are an unmitigated rascal!”. Also problematic is the occasionally clunky translation from French, leading to Google Translate-worthy paragraphs: “He was one of the most powerful bankers in Paris and had the manners of a bishop. At all events he assumed them on this occasion because he was speaking to a prelate.”

There’s one more aspect of this novel that may have some readers scratching their heads and/or gnashing their teeth: the level of misogyny on display here. This goes beyond the usual “women are subservient because that’s just how it was in those times.” Actually, several of The Iron King’s female characters are rulers (Isabella, Mahaut) or at least independent agents (Beatrice). It’s just that women are always plotting, or causing the downfall of good men by adultery, or if they haven’t reached that point yet at least actively contemplating it. By my count, there’s only one female character in this novel who‘s not involved in some nefarious scheme at the expense of a man, and that’s a 16 year old girl who is swept off her feet at the sight of the first attractive man who is not one of her brothers. As a whole, The Iron King fails the Bechdel test in such a spectacular way that it’s actually borderline comical. (It also doesn’t help that the attractive physical features of several female characters are alternately described by comparing them to a hound, a cat, and a piece of fruit, or that you occasionally encounter a chestnut like “She found herself fighting an unexpected enemy: tears.”)

So, take The Iron King for what it is: an old-fashioned historical novel written in the 1950’s, not a modern gritty fantasy novel. It’s a child of its time. If you pick this up on the strength of that “original Game of Thrones” quote, you’ll have to make some mental adjustments. Still, the novel features some of the same dynamics as A Song of Ice and Fire, and as Martin says in the Foreword, “the Starks and the Lannisters have nothing on the Capets and the Plantagenets.” If you’re willing to make those mental adjustments, and especially if you’re interested in this historical period, definitely check out The Iron King.

The Iron King is published by HarperCollins UK. It is available March 26.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Grimdark Historical Fiction? The Iron King by Maurice Druon appeared first on Reactor.

This puts them in direct conflict with the religious powers of the day, at a time when the Counter-Reformation is on the verge of sweeping over England and making life for heretics of various persuasions extremely unpleasant. Parris and Sinclair strike out for Horizon, an island on the edge of the world where the Inquisition won’t be able to reach them and, more importantly, where they may discover more about the quintessence….

David Walton’s Quintessence (excerpt) combines elements of alternate history and fantasy in a fast-paced adventure full of intriguing ideas and bizarre magical creatures. Despite a few noticeable flaws, this is an enjoyable novel. Whether it’s a worthy follow-up to Walton’s Philip K. Dick Award-winning debut Terminal Mind will probably depend on your personal taste (it’s very different) and on your level of tolerance for the aforementioned flaws.

To be fair, it’s possible that I’m giving this novel the benefit of the doubt because I’ll read almost anything set in mid-16th century England—or, in this case, a dramatically different but still recognizable fantasy version of that period. The religious controversies of the time and the contested succession of the short-lived Edward VI are kept intact and play an important role in the events portrayed in Quintessence.

It’s the structure of the universe that’s very different: the world is flat, for one, rather than round. The heavens are a bowl encompassing this flat Earth. The sun is created anew each day in the East and dissolves in the ocean to the West. It’s as if Ptolemaeus and Copernicus reversed roles. As you get further out to the edge of the world, magic gets stronger and stronger. Even though no one has made it back alive, it’s believed that untold riches and wonders await explorers there.

Quintessence is a nicely compact novel with three distinct phases. The opening part is set in England and introduces the world and the major players: Sinclair, Parris and family, and a few supporting characters. The middle section is set at sea, during the long voyage to Horizon, and the final third takes place after the expedition reaches the magical New World. (I don’t doubt that some authors would have turned each of these into a separate novel, by the way. It’s a pleasant surprise to read a book that covers so much ground in just over 300 pages.)

The characters are a bit of a mixed bag. Sinclair the alchemist is the most fascinating one, a ruthless and somewhat maniacal genius who will sacrifice everyone and everything to conquer death. His personality and sheer unpredictability make his sections of the novel by far the most interesting ones. Parris is much more placid and less captivating, partly because of his personality, and partly because his motivation (the recent death of his young son) feels somewhat tacked on.

From the start, Parris’ daughter Catherine is clearly being set up as a mold-breaker for the period’s brand of sexism: “If she had been a boy, he could have included her in his work, taught her a physic’s profession. But because she was a girl, the best thing he could do was keep her safe.” Unfortunately, Catherine’s evolution is all too recognizable. What’s worse, she feels like a Smurfette for most of the novel. (This is somewhat painfully highlighted when the young man who is obviously set up to be her love interest mentions something to the effect of “there aren’t exactly many other women around here.”)

Most other characters don’t have much depth. Sinclair’s partner Maasha Kaatra (“the darkest African Parris had ever seen”) and Catherine’s maidservant Blanche have background stories straight out of a B-movie. Vaughan and Tavera, the two villains in the story, are much too stereotypical to be convincing. For all its original ideas, some of this novel’s characters feel much too recognizable.

Thank goodness Quintessence is a fast-paced novel. Even the many sidebars explaining alchemical or scientific ideas (occasionally in the form of lecture-dialogues) aren’t enough to slow down this briskly moving adventure. Unfortunately, there are several iffy plot devices and twists along the way: people keeping major developments secret from others for no good reason, people easily able to sneak by guards when necessary, then escaping through inexplicably unguarded side doors. Even the entire reasoning for who’s going on the expedition and how it’s financed is a huge stretch. It frequently feels as if characters are mainly doing what they do because the author needs to advance the story in a certain direction.

While some of Quintessence’s plot pushes the boundaries of believability, this is a bit easier to forgive because of the sheer amount of interesting ideas it offers. By this I don’t mean just the neat magic items and creatures that abound later on (although some of those are very cool) but also the exploration of how alchemy can affect the world as we know it. In a time when the scientific method wasn’t exactly common practice yet, the characters of this novel are empirically trying to work out the underlying rules of the seemingly limitless magic discoveries they make on the island.

The juxtaposition of the rationalism of medical science, the mystery of alchemy, and the two competing strands of Christianity may be the most interesting aspect of this novel. Even better: most of this isn’t presented in a stark black and white, “enlightenment vs. religion” way. Everyone judges everyone else unfairly. The main characters, who are mostly trying to get away from religious rule for a variety of reasons, are sometimes as ruthless as their adversaries. The representative of the Spanish Inquisition may have no redeeming qualities, but other religious characters show a more open-minded attitude towards the wonders they discover.

This melding of spirituality and scientific discovery is a theme that appears time and again throughout the novel:

After the liquid boiled into vapor, it would condense in the tube and then drip into a trough as a liquid again. Through this process, it would leave its impurities behind in the flask and reappear again purer than before.

Distillation was the heart of what he loved about alchemy: this slow, silent ritual, ripe with philosophical musings, in which a gross material vanished into its spiritual form and returned again, better than before. This was true religion. The subtle spirit liberated from gross matter.

Some characters in Quintessence feel that “the study of science is the study of God’s character, creativity and purpose,” as the author wrote last year in an interesting blog post titled “How can a Christian write science fiction?” The reasons for their urge to discover the secrets of the universe vary from hubris to guilt to genuine, basic curiosity, but all of them lead to the interplay between science, magic and religion that makes Quintessence an interesting novel, despite its flaws.

Quintessence is published by Tor Books. It is available March 19.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post Magic at the Edge of the World: Quintessence by David Walton appeared first on Reactor.

It’s best to think of The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince (excerpt) as a prequel to the Farseer Trilogy, and like almost all prequels, it’s better to read it after you’ve read the books that take place later in the internal chronology. So, if you’re new to the Realm of the Elderlings, grab a copy of Assasin’s Apprentice instead.

Fans of the Farseer Trilogy will remember some of the enduring legends in the Six Duchies that are mentioned throughout the books. The Pocked Man is referred to several times, as is an almost equally reviled figure in the realm’s history: the Piebald Prince.

In this new novella, Robin Hobb moves back in time to describe the historical origins of the Piebald Prince’s legend. The story is set entirely inside Buckkeep Castle in the Duchy of Buck, and focuses on a few members of the royal Farseer line, most notably the (willful) Princess Caution. It’s Caution’s doomed romance that forever alters the history of the Farseers, echoing down the years until FitzChivalry’s tale gets started in Assasin’s Apprentice and beyond.

Robin Hobb uses a familiar but effective technique to put a spin on this story: the narrator is not one of the relatively powerful title characters but instead young Felicity, the lowborn daughter of Caution’s cunning wet-nurse who becomes a privileged servant and close confidante of the Princess. The most interesting aspects of this novella are the increasingly complex relationship between Felicity and Caution, and the twist Felicity’s narration puts on the story.

After all, history is written by the winners. In The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince, we get a different look at the Six Duchies, one in which Witted ones weren’t yet reviled for their “beast-magic” but instead appreciated for their gift. The story shows how we got from this point to the way things are at the start of Assasin’s Apprentice—and Felicity, Caution and the Piebald Prince play an integral part in that transition.

Their tale is a grim one. Everyone manipulates everyone else. Love leads to ruin. Calculation only has slightly better results. Rulers setting aside their own feelings and happiness for the sake of the realm isn’t a new idea, but in this novella even common folks make utterly ruthless decisions. Robin Hobb has never been known for her cheerful stories, but this one feels particularly bleak—maybe because, being a prequel, we know more or less where things are heading.

The author’s prose is as beautiful and stately as ever. Felicity’s slow, formal narration of the historical events she was witness to is, for the most part, enjoyably subtle, with maybe just one exception: her increasing tendency to emphasize that her description is true to the facts. Towards the end, after the third or fourth time in as many pages of her repeating this, Robin Hobb’s point becomes a bit too obvious.

But still. The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince is, all in all, a lovely addition to the Realm of the Elderlings universe, a dark but enjoyable take that fills in an intriguing part of Six Duchies history. Recommended for fans of the author.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

The post History Being Written: The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince by Robin Hobb appeared first on Reactor.