The Scourge

In the wake of the Black Death and the Peasant's Revolt, 14th Century England falls under a new shadow. The Scourge is a pestilence that transforms its victims into shambling revenants, hungry for flesh and highly contagious. Sir Edward of Bodiam sets out across the plague-infested land with two companions, the impious Sir Tristan and the devout Sir Morgan, in defiance of the bishops and in search of his wife, stranded in St Edmund's Bury.

The Scourge is a mediaeval zombie road movie, a bit like Mad Max on horses, as Sir Edward and his party make their way north, encountering rogues, profiteers and the petty fiefdoms or renegade lords along the way. It is by turns darkly humourous and desperately tragic (Sir Morgan's attempt to save a village with the guaranteed blood of the Virgin Mary is heartrending in its irony,) and Calas makes excellent use of repetition (as Narrator, Sir Edward harks back to certain phrases: the moment of realisation, in times of madness only madness can save) in what was originally a serial novel released through Amazon in installments.

The audiobook narration is a little unsteady in places, but thanks to Kindle Unlimited I didn't pay for it and it is mostly well done.

Calas obviously has some fun with his history as he weaves a zombie apocalypse into the general bleakness and horror of 14th Century life. It's a little short on decent female characters (most are in need of rescue and, as seen through Edward's eyes, idealised figures of virtue, and the one that isn't is a veritable monster,) but is otherwise an engaging adventure yarn.

Enchantress

The Empire exists in a state of balance. The Emperor and the Houses each have their own magical Lore, and the Order is the only source of the Essence which powers that Lore. But this is an unstable equilibrium, and when the Lexicons which are the source of each Lore begin to be stolen, and Houses to fall under a unifying banner, the peace of the Empire is set to be replaced with tyranny. Luckily Ella and her brother Miro, being orphans and thus prodigally talented beyond advanced students of their chosen fields of study (the Lore of enchantment and stabbing people a lot respectively) are there to take a stand.

Enchantress has a pretty good set up, and a number of impressive features. I like the fact that the Federal Republic of One Hat States is shown to be an artificial construct created by the hoarding of what was meant to be shared, and that the omnipresence of magic has stifled technological growth, from medicine to archery science and the use of horses.

Unfortunately, it is let down by its characters, especially stock mysterious orphans who rise through the ranks and turn out to be the children of someone significant after all. The fact that pretty much everyone but them seems to be well aware of their heritage from the get-go is especially egregious. And as to their love lives...

Ella assiduously avoids romantic entanglements until she falls completely under the spell of a man with especially dreamy eyes, who betrays her but ultimately is redeemed by love for her, after like a dozen people have died messily because of their actions. Still, he's a gentleman, and so she ends the book not only a heroine in spite of her many screw ups, but also a virgin, because how could she not. Miro on the other hand has shagged his way across a continent, but blows off the woman he truly loves (and who loves him) rather than interfere with her arranged marriage, because that way he can have angst to go with his peculiar absence of venereal diseases.

Enchantress has interesting ideas and an epic story, but the characters feel in dire need of a collective slap.

The Dystopia Chronicles

In his sequel to The Atopia Chronicles, Matthew Mather gets apocalyptic.

The artificial island state of Atopia is rapidly securing a place at the centre of the US-led Alliance, and pushing for war against its corporate and ideological enemies. Those enemies believe that there is something more than merely human in this malice, that an ancient enemy is reaching out from prehistory to snuff out civilisation. Caught in the middle, Bob and his friends struggle to restore order to a world seemingly gone mad.

The Dystopia Chronicles is a relatively decent techno-apocalyptic thriller, but I was disappointed that Mather abandoned the multiple narrative structure which was one of the main strengths of The Atopia Chronicles. Given the conspiracy-driven nature of the plot (the specific technological aspects are far less important than in the first book) the presence of an omniscient narrator is much less effective than a collective of unreliable voices would have been, not least because the book's final twist was so perfectly placed to provide a meta-fictional justification for that model.

As with the first, I listened to this book in audiobook form, thanks to Kindle Unlimited. The performance was good, but I missed the multi-voice recording of Atopia.

Not a bad book then, but ultimately not as good as I had hoped.

The Nameless One

I was in the library with my daughter when I spotted The Nameless One. A new Edge Chronicle? Count me in!

In the Third Age of Flight, Cade Quarter is a refugee from Great Glade, one of the three major cities of the Edge. The nephew of Nate Quarter - and thus similarly a descendant of the sorry bastard sons of destiny who shaped the Edge in the First and Second Ages (Quint, Twig and Rook) - he is hunted for his father's heresy in seeking to learn what lies below the Edge. His flight takes him aboard a mighty skytavern, and thus to the heart of the Deepwoods, where he struggles to find a place amid the beauty and peril of the wild Edge.

In terms of the books that have gone before it, The Nameless One is oddly sedate, reading more like a fantasy version of Little House on the Prairie (or more accurately, I suppose, Little House in the Big Woods) than the swashbuckling adventures of the other Edge Chronicles. That being said, change is not automatically a bad thing, and Cade Quarter's travails are no less gripping for his enemy being the unwitting hostility of nature rather than a guild of corrupt merchants or a dodgy skyship quartermaster.

As ever, the real star of the show is the Edge itself, with its fantastical flora and fauna and array of strange people. Strangest of all is the titular Nameless One; a 'half-formed' giant from the dark lands around Riverise, this powerful, yet pitiful creature is the emotional core of the novel. More than any other installment, The Nameless One feels like the introduction to a story, incomplete in itself, and I am definitely intrigued to see where it will go next.

The Atopia Chronicles

Kindle Unlimited is slowing me down by offering free audiobook readings. I like audiobooks, but they go slower than reading a book myself. On the other hand, I'll probably drop Unlimited in a few days when the free trial expires, and it's been a nice interlude.

The most recent 'read' from my list is Matthew Mathers' The Atopia Chronicles, a complex novel of interweaving narratives set largely on the artificial floating island state of Atopia at the dawn of an era of synthetic reality. A fusion of AI and VR, synthetic reality is intended to save the world by giving everyone everything they could want at a fraction of the material cost of real-world equivalents. While adults struggle to adjust to the new technology - skins which overlay and filter reality, a proxxi alter ego to control your body while you explore the metaverse, and even the ability to distribute your consciousness into dozens of subjective viewpoints simultaneously - the first generation to have had access from birth are reaching maturity on Atopia.

The Atopia Chronicles begins as a series of interweaving narratives, each exploring aspects of the PSSI (poly-synthetic sensory interface) technology against the backdrop of a world on the brink of ecological collapse. An advertising executive filters out everyone who annoys her and ends up virtually isolated from humanity in a story reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode. Atopia's security chief and his wife adopt simulated children to try to save their ailing marriage; one of the pssi kids struggles with his relationship with his brothers while another misplaces his corporeal body; a millionaire fights for his life at the heart of a web of predicted future deaths; and the commercial launch of the system becomes intertwined with a plot to destroy Atopia.

The first two-thirds of the novel are the most successful, with the increased presence of the arc plot and the emergence of an almost cartoonish villain diminishing the core strengths as a speculative technological SF story. In a lot of ways, the distributed narrative is strong enough not to need the arc, and certainly not to need a villain, and there is a curious parallel with the fictional universe, with the more interesting technique ultimately being subjugated by conventional narrative devices even as Atopia's ideals are subjugated by a self-made monster.

The Wretched of Muirwood

Lia is a Wretched in the service of Muirwood Abbey, one of the great centres of learning and craftsmanship where the privileged and gifted come to learn the ways of the Medium, the guiding principle of the universe. When an injured man, Colvin, is brought into the kitchen where Lia works, her decision to hide him pitches Lia into an adventure filled with loss and heartache, but one which will unlock her true potential and reveal her heritage.

The Wretched of Muirwood is the first in a fantasy series that has some good ideas and some gaping flaws.

The Medium is a bit like the Force, but more overtly magical rather than psychic. It is inherited in families, and family is everything; if you don't know who your family is, you are a Wretched, one of the worker caste, forbidden to learn to read and engrave (words being too precious to this culture to consign to mere paper) or to train in the use of the Medium, even if the Wretched in question is self-evidently a magical powerhouse.

Lia is, naturally, a magical powerhouse, being as she is a superspecialsnowflakegirl. Despite this, and despite secretly knowing her identity and caring deeply about her and having the wherewithal to create a false identity - given that the Abbeys are apparently the repositories of genealogy as well as general scholarship and wizard school - the Aldermaston refuses to let her learn 'for her own safety'. The Aldermaston, the caring Dumbledore figure, is a dick, which would annoy me less if Lia were less of an insufferable brat.

The art of using the Medium is to let yourself flow with it, like the Force. Attempting to control the Medium leads to suffering, tainting the body and soul and either creating or calling the Myriad, demons of the psyche who feed on pain and suffering and especially fear. The enemies of working with the medium are fear, envy and pride. One of the reasons that Lia is so strong in the medium is that she is not envious or prideful, we are told, although in fact she spends half her time bemoaning the fact that she can't read or learn, hiding her tears from people or acting as if she knows better than everyone else. One of the more powerful Medium users in the book is a sneering jerkass who constantly berates Colvin for being a prideful peasant and points out repeatedly that he could totally kick his ass. Colvin himself isn't much better, being a scary Puritan with a heart of gold, who basically terrifies and infuriates Lia by turns. Naturally, she falls in love with him, and probably vice versa.

The book is interesting in parts, but basically something of a mess in its execution. Its merging of fantasy and real-world elements - Jedi and mediaeval abbeys, non-deistic mystery religions and maypoles on Whitsun - is only partially successful, and it suffers from a fundamental misapprehension of what pride and envy look like.