The Green Rider

Merchant's daughter Karigan G'ladheon is on her way home, having been expelled from school for whipping one of the posh kids in a fair fight, when she meets a dying royal messenger; a Green Rider. Entrusted with his last message and gifted with his horse and a golden brooch which grants her the power to become invisible, Karigan sets off on a desperate mission to deliver the message and protect King Zachary against a sinister plot, itself but a first move in a larger scheme against all that is good and right.

Some accuse fantasy, as a genre, of being too black and white, and Green Rider isn't about to change that. It's a tale of the virtuous against the vicious; a plucky young girl, a good and idealistic king and his loyal, courageous servants, against a soul-eating, monster loosing sorcerer, the king's selfish, sadistic brother, a gout ridden misogynist warlord and their drone-like soldiers. Karigan is a largely likable protagonist; if anything, too likable. An instant hit with anyone who isn't a complete and unmitigated villain, her path is largely untroubled by misunderstandings and even her sudden and unannounced mystical appearance in the throne room is soon glossed over. Very few characters are more than what they seem (two, I think) and the plot is pretty much a to b with detours at c, d and mortal peril at e.

Green Rider isn't a terrible book, and there are some interesting bits of world-building, but overall it lacks nuance and too much of Karigan's success is due to chance rather than wit or skill, despite establishing her as a capable fighter and survivor. It would have been good to see her working things out rather than being handed them in a machina.

Also, cream in tea. What the hell is wrong with you people?

Ellen Archer is a very capable reader, although I found it an odd choice to slip from narration in her slightly transatlantic New York accent to present the characters in faux-British of various stripes. Where is it written that fantasy belongs to Europe?

I sound really damning, and that's probably not fair, but I find I'm always less forgiving of a near miss than a total disaster.

Music in the Bone

I received a free Kindle copy of this book for review purposes.

A musician seeks the perfect sound through the perfect collaboration, no matter the cost to his partner. Seals sing on remote coasts and fiery elementals walk among the people of a shrouded, sunless land. Men dance with ghosts and gods live in cupboards, and aging cowboys sing their sad, sad songs.

Folk rites, ancient religions, horror, fantasy and science fiction blend in this collection of short stories by Marion Pitman. It's a very mixed bag, veering from the bleak and joyless 'Indecent Behaviour' to the mock-Gothic folly of 'Amenities', and from the phantasmagoria of 'Washing of the Waters' or 'Overnight Bus' to the dystopian SF Of 'Sunlight in Spelling'.

The most successful are the stories - including the titular 'Music in the Bone' - inspired by music, and in particular folk music, which rock an effective horror of identity and perception which feels linked to the modern culture of folk clubs and the intense yet transient connections with people encountered briefly and periodically in an emotionally charged atmosphere. I was also very fond of the more humorous vignette 'Amenities', in which a housekeeper shows the new owner the Gothic horror trappings of a house, and 'The Cupboard of the Winds', in which a woman negotiates with the goddess in her junk cupboard. I'm always a sucker for down-at-heels urban deity.

Other stories are less effective. 'Dead Men's Company' feels like an critical response to The Pirates of the Caribbean, but perhaps answering too much for its length, while 'The Seal Songs' has an evocative set-up, but doesn't do anything substantially new with its premise. I describe 'Indecent Behaviour' as bleak and joyless, and it is only the author's acknowledgement that it is a nasty piece of work that restrains me to that. If you miss one story in the collection, I recommend it be that one.

Overall, Music in the Bone and other stories is a little hard to quantify, given the mix of styles, subjects and tones. It's definitely worth a look for lovers of British folklore and folk music, although hardcore horror aficionados should look elsewhere.

The Barest Branch

In the late 9th century, Danish fisherman Dagfinn leaves his village to join one of the Viking crews sailing for England to join the great army of Guthrum in the conquest of Wessex. He finds England to be a strange land, and is never quite at home among the English, or indeed among the other Danes. Then, on a tax raid to the coast of East Anglia, Dagfinn and his mates encounter a village with an absurd fortune in gold. Where does it come from and how did they get it, and what price did they pay?

James Holloway is perhaps the greatest, possibly the only, proponent of the Gonzo style of history, which consciously abandons any attempt to portray people in history as basically like us but with better hats. At the same time, Gonzo history embraces the modern vernacular as preferable to coarse or flowery approximations of antique language or the dry language of science.In his own words:

"...fuck all attempts to portray the past in this reassuring light, because your ancestors were not just like you. They were in some ways, but in other ways they were huge fucking weirdoes, and the sooner you begin the process of trying to get your head around that, the smarter you’ll be, especially if you’re able to come to the conclusion that you also are a giant weirdo and half of what you do makes no sense whatsoever."

And that's basically the same approach Holloway's first novel takes, not just to history but to its other influence, the work of HP Lovecraft. Holloway's Vikings are brutal killers and - in some cases - casual rapists, but speak in a rugged modern dialect, while the first person narrative eschews the intellectual asceticism of the Lovecraftian voice in favour of the same tone, while maintaining the thematic hallmarks of alienation, isolation and identity.

While at first glance an axe-happy, weatherbeaten, foul-mouthed Viking sailor seems as far from Johnny Lovecraft-Protagonist as you could get, Dagfinn's origin as a beardless, slave-born bastard set him apart as much as a sense of obsessive historical romanticism, and the early sections of the book in which he contemplates with awe the cyclopaean relics of the Romans (not that Holloway resorts to using any of the touchstone words - cyclopaean, squamous, non-Euclidean) are actually more effective in terms of creeping, cosmic dread than the later sections with the actual monsters, although in the latter he does a good job of maintaining the appropriate sense of desperate futility in the face of armed and physically capable protagonists.

The Barest Branch is not going to be for everyone. It will not appeal to anyone who likes their Vikings pseudo-Shakespearean or their history clean, and it defies both of the predominant classes of Mythos protagonist - the wilting victim and the muscular hero. It is also very seriously not for anyone who has a problem with the word fuck. It could also use a final pass from an editor, but that's the nature of self-publishing. With those provisos, it is a well-written novella which manages to be effective both as Lovecraftian horror and as Gonzo history, and it's only a couple of quid on Amazon or DriveThru.

The Aeronaut's Windlass

With the surface of the world a lethally hostile place, the civilised nations of humanity live in towering spires of imperishable stone while bold aeronauts ply the skies between them. Captain Grim, privateer of Spire Albion, is caught up in the machinations of an ambitious rival Spire when he is retained to transport a team of inexperienced young guards, a cat and a mad Etherialist in search of saboteurs. Unfortunately, war is just the tip of the iceberg, with a swarm of lethal surface monsters and a sinister rival Etherialist manipulating events while being manipulated herself by... something else.

I've read a few of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I quite liked them, but I hit them at the last wind of my paranormal mystery period and there just seemed to be so many of them. The Aeronaut's Windlass is the first book in a new series (like, super new; I had no idea how new and now I'll have to wait if I want to read the next one) so doesn't have the terrifying prospect of trying to catch up with a jillionty titles, which is an advantage. Loosely it's somewhere between actually steampunk and conventionally steampunk, with Spire Albion (Britain) on the brink of war with Spire Aurora (clearly Spain, but also a bit Napoleonic France) in a world of titanic towers and technomagic. Oh, and intelligent, insufferable cats.

There is a lot to like about The Aeronaut's Windlass. Butcher writes good action and has created a neat system of technomagic in the etheric crystals and Etherialists which power the plot. There's a satisfying self-contained plot and plenty of hints at the longer arc story. The aerial combat scenes in particular showed both a deep love of naval extravaganzas and a fair degree of thought as to the implications of taking such a battle to three dimensions. The cats are brilliantly written; insufferable bastards the lot of them, but very convincingly cat, especially in their diplomacy. On the downside, Butcher is a bit patchy on the subject of tea - I will accept a world where the same pot is used for heating and brewing, but the idea of anyone, especially the pseudo-British, putting cream in tea is just wrong - and I began to regret after the first quarter that I wasn't keeping a tally every time someone ground their teeth (I do know that it happened a lot.)

I've caught a few fairly so-so audiobook readings, but Euan Morton (you may know him as the male Sith inquisitor in SWtOR) did an excellent job with this one.

I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd's Crown

In 'I Shall Wear Midnight', Tiffany Aching is the fledgling witch of the Chalk, but the ancient revenant of hatred known as the Cunning Man is stalking to her. Born of twisted zeal and thwarted desire, the Cunning Man is the malevolent spirit of the witch hunt and hatred and strife follow in his wake. He brings the burning, and Tiffany will have to learn not to fear the fire and how not to fear the fire if she is to defeat him. And in 'The Shepherd's Crown', the death of a friend leaves Tiffany with too much to do and an old enemy pressing at the walls of reality trying to get in.

There's something decidedly melancholy about the conclusion of the Tiffany Aching series. Released in 2010, some suggested at the time that 'I Shall Wear Midnight' had something of the goodbye about it, but 'The Shepherd's Crown' is the farewell. It's Terry Pratchett's last completed novel - although the afterword notes that 'completed' is a strong term and it does feel as if Sir Terry had yet to perform the final pass at the last - and, taken with the later volumes in the main Discworld series, ushers in the last stages of a sea change on the Disc, the final transition from its roots as high fantasy parody in The Colour of Magic to something more akin to Downton Abbey with wizards. Cohen the Barbarian never met Granny Weatherwax, but it's certainly hard to think that his brand of unstoppable masculine senility would cut much ice with Tiff.

It's almost as if the Discworld has at last grown up, which is perhaps ironic for books aimed at younger readers, or perhaps not. The faeries are gone, the vampires have all taken the pledge and the barbarians are dealing with their problems like grownups. It's not just the setting either. 'I Shall Wear Midnight' opens with Tiffany intervening to prevent first the lynching and then the suicide of a man who has beaten his pregnant daughter so hard that she miscarried. The Discworld of Tiffany Aching is a tough, earthy place and Tiff is a tough, earthy girl.

And then 'The Shepherd's Crown' deals a great deal with loss, and in its way with the loss of its own author. The death which begins the novel leaves a gaping hole in the Discworld, as if the whole crazy place can't sustain without a rational centre, and it probably couldn't.

Am I rambling? Perhaps so. Perhaps I don't want to finish this review, because it feels so final. Perhaps I don't want to say that I felt that the rough edges showed a little too much in 'The Shepherd's Crown', or perhaps I only felt that way because I wanted it so much to be something sublime and it was only good.

Acolytes of Cthulhu - 'The Dunstable Horror', 'The Crib of Hell', 'The Last Work of Pietro De Opono', 'The Eye of Horus', 'The Cellar Room' and 'Mythos'

It's like an extreme version of ninjas vs. pirates.

Another batch from Acolytes of Cthulhu, this time mostly from the 1960s.

'The Dunstable Horror' (1964) by Arthur Pendragon follows a palaeontologist looking for the written records of a Native American tribe and running into an ancient smallpox rape-revenge curse. It's a feature of Lovecraft's work that humans are essentially helpless before the enormity of the universe. Very rarely is the author of a supernatural horror human, and for that to be the case rather diminishes the cosmic horror aspect. Fear of the mysterious powers of wronged Native American shamans is somehow less potent than fear of an unknowable, alien intelligence. The accessibility of 'you raped my wife and wiped out my people with smallpox' as a motive makes it less monstrous, be the vengeance ever so supernatural.

'The Crib of Hell' (1965), also by Arthur Pendragon, is more of a kind, with a family secret lurking in a sealed room and growing slowly to monstrous maturity. While the threat is more alien and lurks beneath the veneer of normality, there is a distance here, and in 'The Dunstable Horror', in that the narrators are mere observers, rather than finding the alienness in their own family. A point of interest is that Pendragon sets both stories in the same fictional area of New England, the rural equivalent of Lovecraft's Arkham County.

'The Last Work of Pietro De Opono' (1969) by Steffan B. Aletti is a standard 'don't read the manual' tale, in which an inquisitive student delves into the wrong historical manuscript and accidentally turns himself into the vampiric thrall of a demonic entity and rues the absence of white magicians in a world of reason. Also by Aletti, 'The Eye of Horus' (1968) is a mummy's curse yarn packed with killer hawks. Both of these have a protagonist in the thick of things, although the threat is once again external.

A third Aletti, 'The Cellar Room' (1969), concerns spiritualism and the threat of things beyond mortal ken, and 'Mythos' (1961), by John Glasby, continues that thread, as an archaeologist probes into the mythology of Easter Island looking for the prehistoric origins of the maoi and finding more than he bargained for. In fact, it's an aspect which appears in all of these stories; it's not an uncommon theme in Lovecraftian fiction, but it seems to have been especially popular in the 60s. Most of these stories also employ the theme of the civilised world against a more primitive one that knows secrets, but unlike Lovecraft they tend to romanticise the earlier cultures; Lovecraft had almost a horror of past civilisations.

Acolytes of Cthulhu - 'Out of the Jar', 'The Earth-Brain', 'Through the Alien Angle', 'Legacy in Crystal', 'The Will of Claude Ashur' and 'The Final War'

See. Generic.

It's time for a second round of stories from Acolytes of Cthulhu (2014 revision).

'Out of the Jar' (1940) by Charles R. Tanner is a book number, with the narrator recounting the story of a friend who bought a mysterious jar, only for another friend to open it and release a djinn, which definitely didn't net him three wishes. It taps the theme of 'what you think you know is not what you think it is' that pervades much of Lovecraft's work, and which is pretty much the mantra (probably in catchier form) of all cosmic horror history and prehistory.

'The Earth Brain' (1932) by Edmond Hamilton is on the surface a boreal answer to Lovecraft's own 'At the Mountains of Madness', being an account of an Arctic expedition to explore the interior of an ice-covered mountain (being the 1930s, no-one had yet established definitively that the Arctic has no mountains, nor land of any kind,) but it is distinguished by the scale of the threat in both directions. The explorers pierce the chamber of the brain of the Earth itself, and as a result the Earth unleashes a series of devastating quakes in pursuit of the surviving explorer. The combination of worldwide destruction and a very personal beef from the cosmic is unusual, and in many ways makes the cosmic explicable in a fashion which significantly reduces the horror of it.

'Through the Alien Angle' (1941) by Elwin G. Powers is another book number, by which I mean that it is a classically Lovecraftian tale the point of which seems to be solely to be Lovecraftian. A palaeontologist is lured into a trap by the promise of rare volumes, hypnotised and sent through an unnatural angle in the corner of a room. Arriving in an alien city, he strays into the territory of a shoggoth, which pursues him back through another angle to Earth. It has a certain commonality with Lovecraft's 'The Dreams in the Witch-House', but seems almost in a rush to get its weird in and get done.

Next up is a little oddity called 'Legacy in Crystal' (1943), by James Causey. A grasping woman inherits from her dying cousin, but his crystal signet ring brings a strange curse. I call it an oddity because this particular entry reads less like a Mythos story and more like an episode of The Price of Fear or The Man in Black. The cousin's chattels are reclaimed by Satan - like, the actual Satan - and the familiar in the ring is repelled by the name of God. It's not a bad story, but not very Lovecraftian.

'The Will of Claude Ashur' (1947) by C. Hall Thompson on the other hand is hella Lovecraftian, being the last statement of a man who claims to not be who people think he is, but to be trapped in the leprous body of his diabolical brother. There's more romance than the average... than pretty much the sum of all Lovecraft's works, but like hope and goodness it comes to naught in the end.

And then there is 'The Final War' (1949) by David H. Keller MD, in which Cthulhu, God-Warlord of Saturn, gloats over his plans to invade Earth, but is thwarted when some dude deciphers an ancient prophecy and persuades the UN to arm a fleet of airships and build a giant crushy hand to squish Cthulhu's ultimate sexy femme fatale form. I shit ye not. It's about as cosmic horror as Radar Men from the Moon.

The 5th Wave and The White Tree

First wave: Lights out
Second wave: Surf's up
Third wave: Pestilence
Fourth wave: Silencer

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Cassie Sullivan feels far from fine. When the aliens came, they didn't send ships that could be shot down, didn't land an army of war machines that could be overcome by plucky rebels or exposure to the common cold. Instead, they just parked in orbit and began to take over. First they killed the power, then they dropped massive projectiles into the oceans and drowned the coasts; then came the plague, and once there were just a few handfuls of survivors, the Silencers. Now, there is a 5th wave, and it might well be the last.

Rick Yancey's novel The 5th Wave takes as its first principle that alien invaders are smart; that humanity will never be able to go toe-to-toe with anyone with the capability to travel between stars. At the start of the story - the first part of a trilogy - no human has ever even seen an alien, just the mothership that has slaughtered billions from afar. The narrative is divided between Cassie (voiced by Phoebe Strole) and her unknowing high school crush, Ben Parrish (Brandon Espinoza.) Cassie is a lone survivor, desperate to find her lost brother and forced to trust Evan Walker, a stranger with abnormally dreamy eyes. Ben - aka Zombie - is a child soldier in the last army of resistance, who must question whether he can rely on his messianic CO Colonel Vosch.

The 5th Wave is a pretty creepy book, with Walker setting new standards for creepy behaviour even post-Twilight and both Cassie and Ben forced to become something far darker and colder than their youth should demand. The child army is especially grim. The earliest sections of the book, juxtaposing Cassie's recollection of the first four waves with her struggle to survive, are the most effective, although Ben's part of the narrative plays well with the reader's expectations for alien invasion. Overall, it's a good set up for the rest of the trilogy, although it is sometimes hard to feel for the characters, so shock-hardened have they become.

The book has been optioned for a film. The fact that Liev Schrieber has been cast as Vosch tells you most of what you need to know about Vosch, while the fact that a Nordic blonde has been cast as the specifically Asian child-soldier Ringer tells you as much as you might care to know about Hollywood.

-

The White Tree is the first volume of The Cycle of Arawn and tells the story of Dante Galland and Bleys Buckler, a young scholar struggling with a strange power and his swordslinging bessie struggling with a rather silly name*. Dante has stolen a book, 'The Cycle of Arawn', and through its philosophical and religious discourses learned to manipulate the shadow-force of creation, the Nether. With the outlawed worshippers of Arawn fomenting rebellion, Dante and Bleys are directed to travel to the dead city of Narrashtavik** in order to bring down the head of the order and prevent the release of the god himself from his celestial imprisonment.

The White Tree escalates fast, with Dante in particular going from sneak thief to major player on the world stage in the space of about five months. It's a self-consciously 'ordinary' fantasy narrative, replete with coarse language and common concerns, and its strongest point is the friendship between the two boys (although given the absence of any other female protagonists - the only female character of any note is the antagonist - I was disappointed when the beardless, oddly young looking yet surprisingly well coordinated for his age Bleys didn't turn out to be a slightly older girl in drag.) The reader, Tim Gerard Reynolds, manages the dry humour very well indeed, although its hard to escape the conclusion that both Dante and Bleys are borderline sociopaths who leave a procession of corpses in their wake with only occasional twinges of anything approaching conscience.

Many on Goodreads have criticised the use of modern colloquialisms in a fantasy setting, but I figure what the hell; it's not like they're speaking English. On the other hand, there are a few references to specifically primary world things - most glaringly the Olympic games - which are a bit jarring.

* No, really; it's part of the narrative, not me being snarky.
** Having only the audiobook, I can not swear to the spelling.

Acolytes of Cthulhu - 'Doom of the House of Duryea', 'The Seventh Incantation', 'From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy', 'The Jewels of Charlotte', 'The Letters of Cold Fire' and 'Horror at Vecra'

This cover is adorable. The one on my Kindle edition is so much more
generic.

So, given that we had the anniversary of HPL's birth a few weeks ago, I figured I'd review some more Yog Sothery. As I was still tapped out on 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' type stories, I opted for Acolytes of Cthulhu, another multi-generational collection, with the stories bearing copyrights from 1932 to 2014 (the date of the updated and slightly altered Kindle reissue.) It's not particularly concerned with Cthulhu himself, the title rather referring to 'acolytes' of Lovecraft's work.

We begin with 'Doom of the House of Duryea' by Earl Pierce Jr (1936), a neat inversion of Lovecraft's beloved 'you are not whom you thought you were' trope, in which the last heir of the House of Duryea discovers that everything he ever heard about his family is true. Separated by his father for years, when they are reunited he binds his father against the slightest risk of the family curse - that alternate generations turn into somnambulant serial killers around their relatives - being true, only to discover that he is the cursed one. It is in the third person, which seems odd, as a first person narrative in the form of a confession would probably have conveyed the horror more effectively.

'The Seventh Incantation' by Joseph Payne Brennan (1963) is the opposite of the preceding story, instead depicting an outcast seeking power through the old ones, but thwarted in his dark designs by the frailty of cattle. It's a more direct cautionary tale than is usual in Lovecraftiana, perhaps equally influenced by the likes of Dennis Wheatley's satanists with its propitiatable but fickle deities.

'From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy' by Hugh B Cave and Robert M Price (2014) replaces 'Black Noon' by Lovecraft contemporary C.M. Eddy Jr in this reissue of the collection. It's an oddity, beginning with an anthropologist being offered a glimpse at the rituals of a secret subsubculture within the slightly wider faith of Haitian Voudun, only to find himself initiated into a cult of the old ones. His local guide admits that he is to be initiated into the deeper mysteries, which apparently involves being chopped up with a machete, so I don't know if the priests are supposed to have gone through that or what. It then goes a little off the boil, leading to the cult being slain by an army of machete-wielding zombie-ghosts led by the deceased guide and the anthropologist becoming a full-blown white saviour as he leads the - apparently - innocent children of the cultists out of the swamp. Our 'hero' never really does anything however (apart from engaging in morally dubious intercourse with a woman in a trance state) which may be a comment on his intention to participate in a bloodthirsty ritual merely as an observer and expecting to be untouched. As a result, this story is uncharacteristically upbeat for the mythos, and the protagonist more than usually irritating.

Next up is another early offering. 'The Jewels of Charlotte' by Duane Rimel (1935) is a simple tale. The nameless narrator is caught up by chance in the pursuit of two criminals into his decrepit rural holiday spot. The fugitives seek the grave of the eponymous Charlotte, to deprive her of her eponymous jewels, but seemingly fall victim to the mysterious guardian of her grave site, as heralded by an unearthly chime. In the best traditions of the genre, it never seeks to explain what happened and the narrator wisely punks out.

Quite the opposite is true of 'The Letters of Cold Fire' by Manly Wade Wellman (1944), a tale of devil-puncher extraordinaire John Thunstone. Thunstone is a colossus of a man, a playboy and a scholar who battles evil with strength, will and occult know-how, then goes home and shags a countess; admired by men and desired by women, and about as far from any of Lovecraft's protagonists as it is possible to get without spending his entire life playing uneventful rounds of golf. In this story, Thunstone seeks out and defeats a sorcerer who has stolen the graduation book from the super-secret anti-Hogwarts* he previously washed out from. The book allows the man to bend the universe to his will, but Thunstone defeats him with a cigarette lighter.

Wellman was a pulp writer, contributing among other works to the ouevre of Captain Future, and more than anything 'The Letters of Cold Fire' reminds us that Lovecraftian fiction was born in the same crucible as Doc Savage and Conan the Barbarian. While more recent contributions to the muscular mythos are often viewed as missing the point, Wellman is really just doing his own thing here. The only solid Lovecraftian link is a passing reference to the Necronomicon, rather than Thunstone casually giving the finger to cosmic horrors.

'Horror at Vecra' by Henry Hasse (1943) is more in keeping with the traditions of HPL's own canon, and more obviously and directly influenced by him. The narrator and his chum Bruce Tarleton visit a remote hamlet, ostensibly by accident but actually so that Bruce can pry into things that man was not meant to wot of. He wots, and is got, and thot's thot, with the narrator fleeing after Bruce is lured into a catacomb and incorporated into a gestalt thing of appropriately nebulous and unexplored nature.

* Magical schools are so hard to take seriously these days.

American Gods

And there it is again. Do American publishers worry a lot
that readers will mistake a novel for, say, a boa
constrictor?

Shadow is looking forward to getting out of prison, seeing his wife, getting his life back. The news that Laura is dead hits him hard; the news that she died in flagrante along with the friend who was going to give him a job is devastating. There seems little to do except take up the offer of employment given him by the mysterious Mr Wednesday. This job leads him on a journey that falls somewhere between a spirit quest and a road movie, to rally the old gods brought to America by generations of immigrants for a final battle with the new gods of technology. America is a bad country for gods, and there isn't enough to go around.

"Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual."
Aptly enough, Neil Gaiman's biography of the American soul dances among the great American genres: Part beat novel, part noir, part war story, part sting, it defies even the many layered label of magic realism. It is what it is and that's probably all you can say without an essay. It's a big ass, slow moving read, but none the worse for it, and it is absolutely full of beautiful prose moments that thumb their noses at any snide presumptions as to the quality of fantasy writing. The story is rambling, its turns deducible, but not predictable. At its heart, it is a series of vignettes in which Shadow meets gods who tell tales of how it used to be, and of tales of the many migrations that made up modern America.

In the audiobook, Neil Gaiman reads the 'Coming to America' interludes - plus a foreword and an afterword - while George Guidall, an Audible favourite, reads the main narration, but the character voices are read by separate actors, which is something that I always like in an audiobook. The performances are all good, although there is always something a little odd in the juxtaposition of Audible's preferred dry, measured style and scenes of sex and violence, the narrator describing the crunch of bone or a post-coital ecstasy with the same impassive tones he used to describe the dented paintwork of a car or the window of a diner.

The Martian

Again with 'A Novel'.

When a Martian storm forces a Mars mission to evacuate their base, one man is seemingly killed in a freak accident. He survives, however, and over the next 550 sols (Martian days) must scrounge, adapt and improvise to stretch mission supplies and resources long past breaking point in order to stay alive. On Earth, NASA struggles to come up with a rescue plan, and in the space between the worlds, the rest of his crew wait to hear the news.

The Martian is part Robinson Crusoe epistolary and part modern narrative, and in all honesty it's the former - botanist Mark Watney's survival log - that is by far the better half. It's not that the rest is bad, more that the log sections, composed in Watney's dryly, humourous voice, are excellent. The sections at NASA are still very good, with a range of accessible, convincing characters and just the right mix of technical detail, drama and humour. The weakest parts are the few occasions when Weir steps back to an omniscient perspective to describe the things that no character can see, because by definition they lack the characters who bring the rest of the novel so vividly to life.

The audiobook reading by R.C. Bray is truly excellent, one of the best single-voice readings I've come across, capturing perfectly the tone of the narrative.

The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky

Tiffany Aching is a practical girl who lives on the rolling downlands known as the Chalk. It's a quiet country, a safe country, largely free of monsters and tyrants, until another world knocks on the door and things start creeping in. Granny Aching would have sent them packing, but Granny is dead, and that leaves nine year old Tiffany to take care of business; because if not her, then who?

Fortunately, she isn't without help, as the local clan of the Nac Mac Feagle have taken a shine to her, and what could be more useful when confronting a faerie queen than a band of tiny, blue men with anger management issues?

The second of Terry Pratchett's more child-oriented Discworld novels (the first was The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents) and the first in the Tiffany Aching series, The Wee Free Men serves as an introduction to Tiffany and her Pictsie allies, who are basically a pack of tiny, drunken, woad-painted brawlers with far more speed and strength than their size implies and a bizarre quasi-Scots dialect. Tiffany's enemy, the Queen, first seen in Lords and Ladies, is a terrifying being, powerful and utterly callous, and her parasite world with its collection of interesting and unpleasant passengers presents a horrifying, dreamlike environment for a latter-day Alice to challenge with wit, courage and a cast-iron skillet.

A Hat Full of Sky picks up the story two years on, with Tiffany heading off to begin her apprenticeship as a witch with Miss Level, a woman with two bodies. The Chalk is short on witches, but in the mountains there are many, and Tiffany meets a circle of other apprentices who are very keen on black cloaks, silver jewellery and doing proper magic rather than all this going around making poultices and cutting people's toenails for them. Unfortunately, magic can be risky business, and carelessness can cost you everything.

Once more aided by the eager and occasionally competent Nac Mac Feagle, Tiffany must face a Hiver, a being of pure memory seeking a mind to think with and a body to act with. It possesses her, and uses the coolness and ruthlessness that makes her a good witch to make her a bad person.

Even more than The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky is about the making of a Discworld witch, with wisdom from the great Granny Weatherwax almost secondary to Tiffany's own internal revelations. It's about being the person who does when others say something should be done and about the difference between being tough and being a bully. It's actually a pretty rugged how-to on being a good person (which is not the same thing as nice; not the same thing at all.)

Both audiobooks are narrated by Stephen Briggs, who seems to be one of Audible's go-to guys. He gets the job done, without being outstanding.

Pines

Hello tie-in cover!

Ethan Burke, Gulf War veteran and Secret Service agent wakes on the road into the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, with no wallet or ID. He dimly recalls an accident, a truck hitting his car and killing his partner. He remembers that he was looking for two other missing agents. And he can not get out of Wayward Pines, a town which seems too perfect to be true.

Pines is the first book in the Wayward Pines trilogy (now adapted as a 'major television event' as the tie in cover informs me excitedly) and lays out a surprising number of its cards by the end of its relatively short length: What the deal with the town is, who is behind it; all revealed by the final page, so the following books are presumably going to be very different, and it's kind of a shame. Pines is a deliberate tribute to Twin Peaks, and although more SF at heart, has a vein of almost Lovecraftian horror running through it, with its road that leads back on itself, the eerie perfection of the town and its brutal and macabre immune response.

It's on the level of weird fiction that Pines works best, and the high concept but ultimately mundane reveal at the end was actually a slight disappointment, for me at least. That said, I think there's enough potential to look into the other books in the series, but I'm going to miss the weirdness.

Letters to Zell

What is it with everything being 'a novel' again? It's
oddly 19th century.

All is not well in Grimmland. The princesses Rory, CeCi and Zell (Briar Rose/Aurora/Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Rapunzel) have all finished their pages and get to live the rest of their lives as their happy ever after, but Bianca (Snow White) is troubled by her own pages and chafing at the restrictions on her freedom. When Zell and her family suddenly up sticks to Oz to run a Unicorn Sanctuary, it is the start of a major upheaval in the group which wil have potentially catastrophic consequences for all the beings in the lands of imagination.

Camille Griep's debut novel treads the well-worn yellow brick road of fairytale reimagining, but the quirky, backstage antics approach - the tale itself is represented by a princess's pages, the book is about what happens around and after them - is fresh. These fairytale characters exist in a world created by human imagination, and they know it, having the ability to cross into the real world to visit Disneyland for giggles and culture shock. The truth of their 'happy ever after' is that Rory is traumatised by the loss of her actual true love and his replacement with a boorish lug, CeCi deplores the loss of cooking from her life, and Bianca is a bi-curious free spirit whose pages require her to plan an execution into her wedding.

Griep expands on this through an epistolary format, presenting the unfolding events in an overlapping series of letters, each one providing an alternate point of view on something in the last before adding something new. It's a not unsuccessful mechanism - it was the primary means of writing for a century or so, after all - but it has flaws, and while the relationship between the princesses is portrayed as sufficiently close that the sometimes confessional tone is appropriate, for my money the immersion falters from not including any of Zell's return correspondence, especially when references to it are made and have to be in the counter-naturalistic format of 'as you say in your letter...'

Or is it just that email has changed epistolary expectations? In retrospect, it could be that. After all, it's less unreasonable to reiterate something said in a letter that someone might have written a month ago and may well not have a copy of.

Anyway, it's not going to turn the genre on its head, but Letters to Zell presents a relatively fresh approach to fairy tales, with princesses learning to define themselves outside their relationship and happy endings and princes who are varied and realised characters in their own right, but serve primarily as props to the princesses' stories.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Fresh off the back of the recent TV adaptation, I went back to Susanna Clarke's first - and to date only - novel, this time in audiobook format, read by Simon Prebble.

Clarke's work tells of the restoration of English magic, some three or four centuries after the disappearance of its founding father. It is set in an alternate history, in which the familiar Kings and Queens of  our own history are only the rulers of Southern England, and latterly the stewards of the north following the disappearance of the King in the North (a magician taken by fairies as a child, who as the Raven King laid the foundations of English magic.) Gilbert Norrell, the first practical magician in three centuries, is determined to be rational and respectable, but his first and only pupil Jonathan Strange is of a more romantic bent.

Norrell craves the favour of great men and an order of law to bind magic to his own pattern; Strange longs for grand magic and the notice of the Raven King. The two magicians break with one another even as a sinister and otherworldly foe moves against them, and those around them are caught up in the conflict to their own detriment. At last, the two come together for what many believe will be a duel to the death, but which has far greater stakes than that.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a grand and sweeping work (weighing in on Audible at 32 hours), full of footnotes and digressions laying out the history of English magic in tantalising snippets, from the rule of the Raven King in the North and the golden age of the Aureate magicians, through the decline of the Argentine or silver age, to a time of mere theory, when gentleman magicians scorn the idea of casting spells in order to excuse the fact that they can not do so. It is a world in which northern magic threatens southern rule, and even the potential existence of female magicians is seen as a threat to a typically Regency social order in which women have no place in politics and power.

As the story of the beginning of the return of English magic in this era, and the story of two gentleman magicians, the book is quite light on strong female characterisations (I complained of this in the first episode of the TV adaptation, but on revisiting the book it is striking how much was done to beef up the female characters there.) Arabella Strange is strong-willed, but ultimately becomes a victim to be rescued, and even the more dynamic Lady Pole is driven largely by emotion rather than the presumed masculine preserve of rationality. In part, this is due to the nature of the text as a facsimile of a period manuscript, but especially given that one of the key differences between the two magicians is that Mr Norrell considers women entirely unsuited to magical study while Mr Strange is noted to be more comfortable in female company than male, it is a shame not to see more of women.

It has been argued that the narrator - the pseudobiographical nature and scholarly layout of the text is suggestive of a specific narrator, rather than an authorial voice - is one of the new breed of female magicians who emerge alongside their male counterparts from the novel's climax, and there are hints of this even through Prebble's reading in the narrative's hints to the folly of men, and especially of men who do not pay mind to the value of women (see also and especially the short story 'The Ladies of Grace Adieu' in the collection of the same name, Clarke's only other published work of fiction, and the audio short story 'The Dweller in High Places' for a strong, period female lead from the same author.)

Not without its flaws then, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is however still an impressive work, and most of those flaws are answered by its place in the wider canon of Clarke's short stories.

The Folklore of Discworld

I've never been all that interested by books about 'The Science of Star Trek', for example. It seems to me that wherever and to what extent I don't already understand the science involved in Star Trek on the basis of my A-level in Physics and general scientific curiosity, I'm probably never going to get it. I maxed out on science at A-levels. I'm also afraid that the really interesting bits will turn out to have been made up. The Science of Discworld was a different proposition. Since it was based around a fantasy series, and not science fiction, it didn't offer to immediately get mired in the hinterland between my own understanding and things far beyond my ken. I very much enjoyed the first two, and look forward to reading the others some day. It was thus with some anticipation that I picked up an audiobook of The Folklore of Discworld, read by Michael Fenton Stephens.

Sadly - and I've been putting this review off for weeks because I didn't want to say this - I found it lacking. I think this is my own fault in part. The book is an exploration of the Discworld's folklore and an expansion on its sources, where I was hoping for something which more looked at our folklore through the eyes of the Disc, as the Science series did. I also found the repeated suggestion that Earth folklore mirrored the Disc to be disingenuous after the third or fourth repeat.

The Folklore of Discworld is not a bad book, it's just much more a book about the Discworld than it is a book about folklore.

The Long Mars

It has been fifteen years since Yellowstone erupted on the Datum, gouging the heart out of America and plunging the world into a volcanic winter. Emigration to the worlds of the Long Earth has increased, and the population has become attenuated, stretching out across the near-infinite space of the stepward worlds.

The ur-pioneers Joshua Valiente and Sally Lindsay find themselves once more roped into adventures not of their own making. Joshua is recruited by the AI Lobsang to investigate the apparent rise of an intellectually superior subspecies of human, while Sally's father - Willis Lindsay, father of stepping - calls on her to accompany him on a mission not just to Mars, but to The Long Mars (roll credits.) Meanwhile, US Navy captain and veteran explorer Maggie Kaufman is sent out to delve deep into the Long Earth. With two 'Twain' airships and a crew of navy personnel and scientists, her goal is to travel a quarter billion steps from Earth, into worlds as alien as any Mars.

As with previous books in the Long Earth cycle, The Long Mars is a multi-stranded narrative with a somewhat take-it-or-leave-it approach to the conventions of dramatic closure. The main narratives are Sally and Maggie's, with Joshua's primarily serving to set up the final conflict which bring the two other threads together, and the dominant theme of the book is that of the alien. This theme is expressed in the many Marses which exist in their own long chain, distinct from the chain of the Long Earth and only crossing at the Earthless Gap (which may mean that a) every Earth's Mars connects to a different Long Mars, b) every Mars's Earth connects to a different Long Earth, or c) that the Long Mars and Long Earth intersect entirely, but not in a fashion which line up with one another,) but also in the remote Earths which developed in a radically different fashion to the Datum, and the thought processes of the Next.

As in The Long War, the science in The Long Mars is better than the fiction. Although written as a conventional narrative, it has more of a documentary quality to it, leading to an open ending and a lack of really likable characters. Again in common with the previous book, the most sympathetic character is a semi-outsider, aging rocket jockey Frank Wood. In the nature of high-concept hard SF, the resulting novel is more interesting than involving (I think I said the same thing about much of Neal Stephenson's oeuvre,) but it is definitely interesting.

Maggie for Hire

Crude as it is, this is a much better cover than my
Kindle edition had. This is how Maggie is actually
described in the book, all sass and biker leathers.
On the one I have she has massively 90s pop video
hair and a vest that looks like it was crudely beaten
from aluminium. Still, it's better than the one where
she's wearing stripper leathers and you can't even
see a full face.

Maggie McKay is a Tracker; basically a skip-tracer for the Otherworld. A child of both worlds, she is able to move with relative ease across the boundary between the mundane and the magical, find rogue vampires and ghouls, and bring them back to the Otherworld, dead or more dead. But then something goes awry and the vampires seem to be hunting a bounty on Maggie. Before long, she's got a contract to save the world, a long-lost uncle who might want her dead, and an unwanted new partner in the form an an irritating elf named Killian.

So, I admit, I read this book for two reasons: 1) I loved The Woodcutter, Danley's first novel, and 2) the Kindle edition was free. Maggie for Hire is, even more than The Woodcutter, part of a vast herd. It doesn't really distinguish itself in either direction, neither managing to be a standout success, nor yet more than ordinarily appalling. It's workmanlike, which may be pretty damning in and of itself, although the several favourite phrases textmarked in the Kindle edition suggest that it has at least a cult following.

I can understand how it might: Sassy hunter, gorgeous if lippy sidekick and a side-order of family angst; it's got everything a book of its ilk should have. As of book 1, however, Maggie McKay Magical Tracker doesn't really have much more than that (actually, that's not 100% fair; Pipistrelle the Brownie was kinda awesome.) It's a shame, because The Woodcutter felt like Danley had a lot more to say. On the other hand, I can not fault her industry. Maggie for Hire has four sequels, and Danley now has an even dozen books out in the past four years. I guess that's the kind of thing you have to do to make the bacon as an indie novelist, so maybe a little unevenness is inevitable.

The Rithmatist

Rithmatics is a magic forged in chalk. A Rithmatist can create, defend and breach barriers just by drawing in chalk, but it is not a skill that can be learned: Rithmatists are chosen.

Joel was not chosen, but he has a fascination for Rithmatics that is matched by an agile, mathematical mind and a superb geometric eye. The son of a chalkmaker, he attends a prestigious school on a scholarship, fitting in with neither the Rithmatic students, all bound for ten years military service defending the United Isles from wild chalklings, or the sons and daughters of the wealthy who attend the general school with him. Melody has position and wealth to spare, and was chosen as a Rithmatist, but can't even draw a circle. Pushed together in a summer elective class with eccentric Rithmatic theorist Professor Fitch, this odd couple are drawn into the investigation of a series of gruesome crimes involving Rithmatic students; crimes which could threaten the entire nation.

The Rithmatist is my first encounter with terrifyingly prolific fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. It's a slow-burner, paced more like a detective novel than a conventional fantasy or even school story, with the investigation and the magical theory surrounding it more important than dramatic duels or detentions. Joel and Melody are well balanced as protagonist and deuteragonist, one mathematical, the other artistic, and both qualities given weight within the setting and the magical system. Both are at times irritating - Joel in his absolute focus on Rithmatics and insistence that everything else is boring, Melody in her melodramatic self-pity - but the author is not blind to these faults and they are explored in the text rather than overlooked or excused (as in a scene where Joel is confronted with and confounded by politics and admits to failing his government class last year. "When am I going to need to know historical government theories?" he asks. "I don't know... Maybe right now," is the reply.)

Rithmatics is basically really badass
geometry.

The audiobook, read by Michael Kramer, is good, but suffers from the semi-illustrated nature of the book, and in particular the chapter-heading rithmatic diagrams which provide a great deal of visual context. Having the Kindle book as well proved a boon in this instance. The diagrams are part of a simple yet detailed magic system, although a couple of its facets felt brushed over, specifically that Rithmatists are only chosen to replace those who have died, and that one of the new rithmatic techniques which form a central plot point is so dramatically out of character for the rest of the system. I am sure that both of these facts have relevance, and even if not answered it would have been good to hear the characters ask some questions.

Rithmatics does not exist in a vacuum, however, and is clearly linked to the nature of a world in which the North American continent was shattered into a vast archipelago before any European explorer every reach its shores, and abandoned by its indigenous people in the face of wild chalkling attack. The pseudo-Anglican church with its monopoly on Rithmatists, the clockpunk aesthetic and the political landscape are broadly sketched, but clearly intrinsically linked to the history and nature of the world.

Who doesn't like a map?

If The Rithmatist has a flaw, it is that it is all setup and very little conclusion. It's not without closure, and manages a good turn of action in the closing fifth or so, but is unmistakably, and self-consciously, part of a series. It's a series I intend to follow - when the next part is published and probably recorded - but it's there.

If there is a single sentence to sum up the book's achievement, it is that it makes dual-wielding chalk seem hardcore.

The Oversight

A drunken reprobate brings a girl, bound and gagged, to the door of a London house, where he has been told a Jew will pay a pretty penny for screaming girls. Thus is a scheme put into motion with the intent of destroying the Free Company of the London Oversight, the thin red line between the natural and supranatural worlds. Once hundreds strong, the Oversight has been reduced to a mere handful of members, the very smallest number able to perform their function. The girl, Lucy Harker, might be the first in a line of new recruits, or she could be the destruction of all they have worked for.

In The Oversight, author Charlie Fletcher sets about the creation of a world in which a company of individuals with magical gifts protects an unsuspecting human world from the depredations of the uncanny. Not that it is an entirely new creation, as the presence of Glints - exclusively female psychometrists, who experience the past recorded in stone as tooth-jarring visions, and focus their power through a sea glass heartstone - and John Dee - characterised as a serial killing arsehole* who travels through mirrors and murders Glints to use their heartstones as torches - connects it to the world of the excellent Stone Heart trilogy (which I reviewed in my past life as a teacher.)

The Oversight is divided into three main parts: The deeds of the struggling members of the Oversight itself; the misadventures of Lucy Harker; and glimpses of the doings of the villains of the piece. The first of these is a sort of desperate mystical detective novel, the second a paranormal fugitive Huckleberry Finn and the last a chance to wallow in the smirking evil of the repellent Templebain brothers, a vicious Viscount, and probably-Napoleon and his retained vampire.

The story of the Oversight's history emerges quite organically, without too much delving into the pronoun game or willful retention of vital information - two of the perils of emergent backstory - and while one development in Lucy's story seems a little counter-intuitive at first, it makes sense on consideration that a group of people trying to protect a paranoid natural ninja might consider it necessary to bung her in a sack temporarily for her own good. While the focus is on Britain, and especially London, there is a definite sense of a wider world in which the Oversight operate, and a good balance between their powers and competence and forces which nonetheless threaten them.

Simon Prebble is a good reader, which is a good thing, since my next audiobook is 30 hours of Prebble reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which could otherwise get pretty tedious. Actually, I might set that one back while I get through the TV version, but it's on the phone anyway, and I am not remotely averse to picking up The Paradox if it has the same reader.

* I don't know why John Dee is so much the whipping villain of mystical alternate histories; possibly because he was English.

Anansi Boys

Fat Charlie Nancy hasn't seen his dad in years, and that's just how he likes it. It was his dad who named him 'Fat' Charlie, a nickname that has never gone away. When his fiancee insists on a family reunion for the wedding, however, he learns that his father is dead, that he has a brother, and that his father was Anansi, the Spider God. Soon, his brother Spider is in his life and living it better than he ever has, and Fat Charlie discovers what lengths he will - and will not - go to to get shot of embarrassing family.

A sort-of-not-a sequel to the vast epic of American Gods, and possibly taking place in the same fictional universe (or not) Anansi Boys is a lighter and more intimate affair, focusing on the West African trickster Anansi; or more accurately, on his two sons, Charles and Spider. It begins as an Anglo-American comedy of manners, before evolving into a white collar crime thriller, then a manhunt, and finally a cosmic struggle for the lives of the brothers and, in all probability, the soul and essential narrative of all humanity. The fact that this progression isn't utterly ludicrous should be praise enough.

Where Gods focused on the interface between Americana, technology and religion, the mythology of Anansi Boys is more straightforward. Anansi is a god, as are his sons, and all in all they just are what they are, even at the start of the book when Fat Charlie solely embodies the aspect of Anansi who suffers the karmic backlash of his many tricks. Whereas American Gods is about what humanity does for its gods, Anansi Boys is very much about what gods do for humanity, and what humans can do for each other, as the non-divine characters are far from unimportant.

The audiobook is read by Lenny Henry, which is both a good thing - because he is very good - and perhaps a bad, since he already defines Afro-Caribbean culture for so many Britons. Regardless of the socio-cultural ramifications, the reading is excellent, with clear voices for all of the characters, from the nasal and obsequious Graham Coats to the George Sanders purr of his murderous counterpart Tiger.

The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle

It is the height and heart of the Industrial Revolution, Victorian London, a city of iron and steam. Horatio Lyle, inventor, detective, special constable and unwilling dog lover, is the embodiment of the brave new world, and as such is called in by Lord Lincoln, aide to Her Majesty herself, when a cultural treasure is stolen. Aided by Thomas, a young gentleman with a connection to the case, and Tess, a girl whom he caught breaking into his house, and Tate, the canine who long ago insinuated himself into his home, Lyle will find his scientific rationality tested by confrontations with things that man was, perhaps, not strictly supposed to wot of.

A Victorian urban fantasy with elements of steampunk in Lyle's advanced use of roughly contemporary science, The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle certainly features and unusual cast of characters. Lyle is a skilled observer and inventor, but is physically weak and afraid of heights, while his more robust young cohorts lack social polish and education in the one case and experience of the real world in the other. The plot is a pretty breakneck affair, and there were points where I could have stood a bit of a breather, but I certainly never found it dragging.

Stardust

"There was once a young man who wished to gain his heart's desire."

When a novel opens with the kind of line that you just know is going to appear at the top of just about every review or description written of it, you know that you have something special. So begins this review, and so begins the tale of Tristran Thorn in Neil Gaiman's Stardust. It seems almost disingenuous to go into the details of a book that is, if not universally acclaimed, then certainly pretty well loved and certainly known by most of the people likely to be reading this blog. The book has been out for years and I own three copies (original UK paperback, Charles Vess illustrated paperback and now Kindle,) so it's not exactly new to me, but there's a virtue all its own to a book you can reread time and again.

The most important, and perhaps most controversial thing I have to say about the book is that I like it better than the film. I like the low key, bittersweet ending and the fact that the girl Tristran runs off to fetch a star for isn't a worthless, preening snob. I adore the way the book wraps magic around old tales and rhymes far more than the film's Babylon Candle, and the inextricable blending of love and loss speaks to me in a way that the films genuine ever-after never has done.

But then I'm the kind of guy who likes the original ending of The Little Mermaid better, although truth to tell my own preferred version is the one where she shivs the prince for being a dick ('Oh, hey there girl who winces with every step; dance for me.')

Stardust. If you're only ever going to like one affectionate reconstruction of the fairy tale milieu, this will be the one. If you're going to like more of them, you've probably already read this.

Fire & Chasm

There are two great, primal forces in the world. The Fire is the warmth of creation, the Chasm the abyss of unmaking. All humans are given a gift by the fire, a singular magical ability that they can employ at will, unless they sacrifice that gift for the power of the many spells that can be drawn from the chasm. The Church worships the Fire, the Wizards' Guild studies the Chasm. The two clash politically all the time, but Az is the Church's weapon in a more secret war. Able to control the intoxicating power of obsidian - where fire and chasm meet - he is an assassin, a wizard killer, and an enigma even to himself.

Fire & Chasm is a fairly short YA fantasy novel with a decent bit of world building. Unfortunately, it has two major problems:

First, Az spends a lot of time bemoaning his lot, although overall he comes through lightly given how many people he has killed during the course of the narrative, including about a dozen wizards who were just trying to stop him breaking into their house in a fugue state. I guess we're supposed to forgive him because of the fugue and the horrors done to him, but in all seriousness these deaths are basically never mentioned except for their impact on the political landscape. After the immediate aftermath, they seem to prey on precisely nobody's conscience, ever. The other main characters are the wizard who made him this way, the wizard's daughter Leora, whose romance with Az has little conflict even when his fugues are revealed to her, and a cartoonishly diabolical High Priest.

The second problem is that the plot wants to be political, but the characters essentially exist within a bubble. The wider ramifications of their actions are reported, but never shown, and more importantly involve characters that we are not allowed to know and thus have little reason to care about. We never see anything of the political sphere besides the High Priest, who is a hands-on kind of guy and is never seen at court or engaged in subtle diplomacy and manoeuvring, just setting things on fire and torturing Az for shiggles.

Fire & Chasm isn't terrible, but an unengaging protagonist and an emphasis away from what feels like the more involving part of the plot mean that it fails to distinguish itself from the crowd.

The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

In a post-national world of primarily economic tribes, a young tribeless girl named Nell receives a stolen book as a gift. This book, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is in fact a dazzling work of nanotechnology which guides Nell's education as she lives through a period of upheaval in China and its artificial neighbour, the manufactured islands of New Chusan. The book was created by an engineer named John Hackworth, and as Nell's star rises so his falters, setting him on a ponderous quest to find a man called the Alchemist.

Like many of Neal Stephenson's books, The Diamond Age - which I got as an audio book, read by Jennifer Wiltsie, is less a single narrative and more a collection of stories building towards a conceptual conclusion. It is as much about the nanotechnology of their world and the potential revolution embodied in the development of a 'seed' which would permit unmonitored nanotechnological use as it is about Nell and John, and much more about the potential political ramifications of such technologies than their technical specifics. It has many more discussions of cultural and philosophical mores than of emotions, and in many places reads more like a history than a novel. Consequently, it is always more interesting than involving.

As with Snow Crash, I was struck by the 90sness of Stephenson's cultural portrayals, in particular a China more regressing into the 19th century than emerging from Communism, and a slightly piecemeal depiction of Confucianism. I don't think it can be called racism, especially given that the same regressive tendency is depicted in the Anglo-American Neo-Victorians; it is more that Stephenson appears to see a return to pre-information age social structures as a natural consequence of the collapse of the technologies which made them obsolete.

Wiltsie's reading is good. Many audiobook readings suffer from a coolness necessitated by maintaining a clear reading voice, but the nature of this book means that wild emotionality would be out of place anyway. For me, the decision to pronounce primer as 'primmer' was distracting, but that's personal.

The Last Changeling

There has always been a secret history, existing alongside that which everyone knows. There have always been the fairies, wreathed in mystery and hidden from sight, dark and malevolent. Now, something has changed, and the 'metahominids' of Britain are coming in from the country, flowing like foxes into the city. What has brought this on, and where will this change of habit lead? For the man known as D and his Department, a group so secret that even their own government doesn't really know what they do, this is not merely a mystery; it is a prelude to war.

The Last Changeling is a tale of fairies, the dark and terrible sort that people used to warn their children about in the days before the otherworld became cute. It is also a kind of social satire, with D9 - the government taskforce which monitors and contains fairy activity - hampered by swingeing budget cuts, and the fae themselves cast as immigrants from the dying countryside.

The novel has an interesting set-up, but feels like too much world-building and not enough narrative. The flashbacks into the secret history tie too obscurely to the main thrust and theme of the story, and the characters are barely given room to breathe. For a narrative built around a crux of betrayal, this is a serious weakness, as it is hard to feel the necessary outrage, particularly as so many of the key characters do not even find out who the traitor is until the epilogue.

This is essentially an establishing narrative given the status of self-contained novel, and suffers from a lack of development. For my money, it could have stood to be half as long again with a lot more character building; a flashback to each main character's first encounter with the fae would have gone a long way towards illuminating their personality with more show and less tell.

Also, as a personal niggle, it felt odd that the fairies were vulnerable to silver, rather than cold iron.

The Invisible Library

Irene is an agent of the Library, a literary superspy trained to work undercover in a multitude of worlds to retrieve unique books for the Library's collection. Assigned a new apprentice, Kai, and a new assignment, she is startled to find that the world she is to retrieve an 1812 Grimm manuscript from is riddled with chaos, the force which opposes the Library's philosophy; hardly the right place to break in a new Librarian. Before long, Irene has made a local ally in amateur sleuth Vale, but is faced by a rival Librarian and the Library's near-legendary renegade operative, Alberich.

The Invisible Library is the first book in a series, and the sense of worldbuilding is palpable. Lapsing occasionally into tell-not-show, overall the nature of the Library is explored organically and - deliberately - incompletely. This first volume establishes that it exists between dimensions, has apparently sole access to the fundamental Language of creation, and secures its links to the many worlds of the multiverse by means of the books in its collection. Irene states that its purpose is 'to protect books', but there are hints that there is more to it than that.

Aside from anything else, the Language - and thus the Library - is the intrinsic enemy of Chaos, a force which manifests in the form of supernatural entities and a creep from physical laws to those of narrative. This is one of the most intriguing aspects of the story, that the Library is all about books and not about stories (although clearly the Librarians themselves, all of whom take literary or folkloric pseudonyms, are as romantic as anyone.)

Overall, I enjoyed The Invisible Library, although it did seem odd that a book so hung up on text and grammar should harbour quite such a grudge against run-on sentences. Cogman rattles out the prose in a machine gun stutter of simple sentences, reminiscent of the staccato stylings of Dashiel Hammett and suggestive of some early trauma involving semicolons. Other than this, my only real criticism is that neither Kai nor Vale ever seemed significantly dangerous or untrustworthy, even when the narrative was concerned with whom, if anyone, Irene could trust.

A Darker Shade of Magic

This is a much better cover than the Kindle image,
although there's something disingenuous about
adding 'a novel' to your cover these days.

There are four Londons. Red London lies at the heart of a world filled with magic and wonder. White London is the centre of a starving world, where power-hungry sorcerers wrestle the vestiges of magic wherever they may be found. Grey London has no magic, just a mad king named George and an empire of iron and steam. And Black London went rotten with wild magic and had to be locked away for all time. Only a few people possess the power to move between the worlds. Kell is one, a servant of the Red Throne; Holland, servant of the White is another. As far as they know, they are the last. Delilah Bard is just a thief in Grey London, but when Kell is tricked into throwing the balance of the worlds out of equilibrium, she may have a key role to play in setting things right.

A Darker Shade of Magic is a crossworlds fantasy about magic, deception and crossdressing wannabe pirates. It has a neat bit of worldbuilding and some interesting ideas, but ultimately feels like an incomplete part of a larger whole (as perhaps indeed it is*,) and seems to fail to break out of some of its more conventional moulds.

Red London is depicted as the prime world, the best of Londons. It is hinted that there are flaws in its apparent perfection, that not all are happy in this seeming-Utopia, but the unmitigated vileness of the Dane twins, gleefully sadistic rulers of White London and its empire of bones, serves to mask the flaws. Likewise, when Holland is controlled by a bolt of magic through his soul, it papers over the fact that Kell appears to have been taken from his family as a child and 'claimed' by the royal family of Red London, an issue that is raised, but never resolved. The threat of rogue magic rears up in various places, but particularly in Grey London never really materialises into anything but a red herring.

Delilah Bard skirts a number of very irritating tropes without ever falling into them, but her story feels unfinished. It is strongly hinted that she is a third Traveler (which would place one as native to each of the realms, and suggest that maybe there is one in Black London as well,) her identity concealed by the fortuitous loss of her distinctive black eye, but that too is never resolved. It would in part explain her wanderlust, and the innate sense of responsibility that she appears to share with Kell (and to an extent, Holland.)

It's not a perfect book, but is a good start to a series, and I would certainly be interested in future installments.

* Edited for new information, although the book makes no such indication, the slightly arch 'a novel' on the cover actually suggesting away from a series.