Friday Link Update: Hunter, Hurley, Russell and Bennett

A couple of new book reviews since my last round-up/update, a guest post, and a new installment of my Completist column at SF Signal.

Last week I posted my review of Sylvia Izzo Hunter's magical debut, The Midnight Queen, a Regency-era inspired fantasy:

Set in an alternate England somewhat reminiscent of the Regency era, where Magic is taught to young men at Oxford’s Merlin College, Sylvia Izzo Hunter’s debut novel wastes no time introducing the protagonist, Graham (nicknamed Gray) Marshall, and the situation which propels his plight through The Midnight Queen. Specifically, some of his college friends encourage Gray to join them in a night time escapade, a heist of sorts, which ends in tragedy and Gray receiving a forced dismissal from the school. Gray is taken by Appius Callender, the Professor who sent Gray and his friends on the ill-fated mission to Callender’s estate where Gray is something of a prisoner and indentured servant. The only thing that gives him respite during his dreary days is young Sophie Callender, the Professor’s middle child.

...to suggest that The Midnight Queen is merely a period piece / fantasy of manners / romance / conspiracy mystery is selling the novel and Hunter quite short. Sure, it is essentially a mash up of those four things, but there’s quite a bit of character development, world building, and fun storytelling throughout its short, but densely packed pages. It isn’t even in the explicit details of the world and magic that provided for the depth of the world but rather those elements only hinted at by the characters and the narrative. Although superficially, the church depicted in the story initially has a vaguely Catholic feel, there are actually multiple gods worshipped as the Roman and Celtic pantheons/religions dominate.

Earlier this week, I posted my review of what will likely take the #1 spot of 2014 books, Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs:

Set in the imagined city of Bulikov, the novel is the first Bennett has penned which does not take place in a version of our world (although the parallels and echoes are there), but rather a fully realized secondary world. The gods (Divinities as they are referred to in the novel) have been driven from the Continent (where Bulikov is situated), having been pushed out by the Kaj – a legendary figure of the past. The “now” of the novel is filtered through the eyes of protagonist Shara, a spy working in Bulikov for her home land of Saypur with her “secretary” Sigurd, a hulking nigh-indestructible Dreyling, a humanoid race of the world. Saypur is drawn to Bulikov to investigate the murder of a prominent figure of Bulikov, setting the early portion of the novel as a mystery story after the murder of historian Dr. Efrem Pangyui. With the gods having been driven from Bulikov, the city has lost a great deal of its luster. Even with the milieu of a secondary world, Bennett frames the initial plot to lull the reader into the story with a murder mystery which possesses some spy elements
...
Few writers’ have been able to make me think deeply about their work while also entertaining me as has Bennett’s work. I loved the world-building in this novel, how the gods could be brought down by men (or a lesser set of beings) which I found to have some echoes of the Greek Gods toppling the Titans while the city of Bulikov itself had more of an Eastern European feel. The characters felt plausibly real, flawed and imperfect. The implied history to the characters in the narrative is just as powerful as the implied history to the world itself. I want to hang out with these people more, I want to read about this world.

Speaking of Bennett, in a bit of a response to a recent blog post of Bennett's, Kameron Hurley's Blog Tour for The Mirror Empire at SFFWorld spoke to the idea of genre.

There is No Genre, Only Story

Lastly, my latest Completist column features a duo of books, The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell:

Nearly twenty years ago a debut novel took the genre world by storm, at least in terms of awards. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, BSFA, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and author Mary Doria Russell received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. It was a novel that walked a fine line in its themes between science and faith. The intersection between the two is not always a comfortable one and if anything can be a one-word apt descriptor of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Children of God it is the word uncomfortable. In trying to come up with a “completed” series of books for this column, I pored over my reading logs and it wasn’t long before these two books shouted to me from deep within my memory banks. So again, I’m stretching the definition of completed by including a book and its sequel, but these are excellent books that people should be reading even today — nearly 20 years after The Sparrow first published.

SFFWorld Weekly Round-Up: Harris, Bach, McAuley, D'Lacey

Lots of good content (reviews, author guest posts) were posted to SFFWorld this week, here's the rundown...

Mark reviewed Joanne Harris's The Gospel of Loki over the weekend.  Mark is one of many folks signing the praises of the author's first novel for adult readers: 

Joanne writes this story with panache and skill, infusing it with humour and a wry smile throughout. As I’ve said before in these reviews, humour’s very difficult to pitch right, but this one worked for me. It’s clever and literate, yet surprisingly still accessible. Through Joanne’s writing Loki becomes something tangible, at times liked, at others strangely melancholic.

This is not easy. The difficulty in telling the traditional tale (for me, anyway) is that there are aspects of the Norse pantheon that are usually a bit hard to swallow, never mind the fact that some of the names have always been a bit of a personal difficulty, frankly. Just trying to get your reading head around terms such as Yggdrasil has always seemed to be more effort than its worth. Here Joanne/Loki cleverly sidesteps this difficulty for me by mentioning some of the more imaginative (some would say outlandish) parts of the traditional tale, but then explains them away as mere exaggerations, the sort of tall tale often bragged about over beer.

On Tuesday, I posted my review of Rachel Bach's second Paradox novel, Honor's Knight. Rachel Aaron/Bach is becoming a go-to author for me, as I connect with her work very well. This particular book was a great cure for a reading lull I hit. Some thoughts:

Bach ratchets up the politics in Honor’s Knight and dials back the romantic element a bit. There’s also an ongoing discussion in the novel about the price of security and safety, in that can the fate of humanity be measured against the life of innocent girls who lose their identity and humanity? A difficult question to answer, and sometimes the easiest answers prove to be the incorrect answer in the long run. In other words, war breeds difficult moral choices, which leads to drastic consequences. The black ink-like substance afflicting Devi also happens to be like kryptonite to the phantoms, but Devi has little control over it and when it comes out on her skin.

There’s more action in the novel and Bach opens up the universe to a greater degree, bringing the phantoms more into the folds as the most alien creatures thus far encountered. At times described like bright firefly like creatures and other times, the larger creatures seem like something out of a Lovecraftian nightmare. In fact, what comes to mind are the Drej, the blue alien creatures from the animated film Titan A.E. (An animated film with the classic Don Bluth look and feel that deserved a much better fate at the box office than it received.)

Yesterday, we had a guest post from Paul McAuley on revisiting and touching up his popular Confluence trilogy in preparation for an omnibus publication of the series:

The three novels, published in 1996, 1997 and 1998, were caught up in corporate takeovers in the UK and the US; when Gollancz agreed to republish them in a fat omnibus, the original files used to set the books were long gone. So I resurrected my old WordPerfect 5.0 files and read through them, and then went over them again to remove a few niggling inconsistencies in the narrative and to give the prose a further polish. My younger self didn’t need my help move a story through its twists and turns. He’d learnt from Robert Louis Stevenson how landscape can shape and reveal the actions of the characters, and to keep action scenes short and sharp. He’d crammed plenty of eyekicks and estrangement into the narrative. And Yama’s story, his discovery of the costs and obligations of escaping from his mundane fate and becoming a hero, and the sacrifices he must make to find a way of saving his world, was fixed by the course of the river he follows.


So in its omnibus incarnation, the story and almost all of the narrative of the trilogy remains the same. Revision was mostly a question of tightening the focus of sentences and paragraphs, and sharpening certain passages

Lastly, we published a guest post from Joseph D'Lacey wherein he attempts to answer the question I threw at him:

“Do you see Post Apocalyptic fiction as a great way to explore Horror elements in a setting more associated with the Science Fiction branch of the Speculative Fiction tree?”

My ‘visible’ work categorises me as a Horror or, more specifically, Eco-Horror writer. But, like most authors, what I have ‘on display’ represents a fraction of the whole. There’s also the almost published, the limitedly published and, of course, the unpublishable – tons of that!

So, when a question comes up about exploring Horror elements in a Post Apocalyptic world, from my particular, and probably quite odd, writerly point of view, there’s no simple answer.

It’s partly because I write in such a naïve and uncalculated way. I’m instinctive (haphazard, an overwriter, rarely plan anything), lazy (avoid research, reality and work of any kind – especially writing), whimsical (whimsical, basically) and my work is organic (I write the bits I feel able to write first and the bits I feel unable to write just before the deadline).