(By the way, I am completely offline today, which will probably do me good.)
Second paragraph of third chapter of Dangerous Waters:
His casual gesture indicated the smirking man at his side.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Darkening Skies:
Jilseth had always been awe-struck by the Archmage’s talents. A stone mage by birth, hs instinctive affinity was with the soil and rock. Yet he had such effortless control over all the magics of fire, water and even of the air, the element most opposed to his own. There couldn’t be more than a handful of other wizards in this whole city so dedicated to the study and perfecting of magic who could work a scrying spell combined with a clairaudience.
These are the first two of the Hadrumal Crisis series, which I got from the author back in 2018. As usual, intensely detailed secondary world, where a rogue magician troubles the mages and corsairs trouble respectable coastal folks, with it gradually becoming clear how the two plot lines intertwine. Both are very long (well over 500 pages) but I found myself carried along by the narrative. The central characters, Jilseth the young woman mage and battle-hardened warrior Corrain, are especially well drawn. You can get Dangerous Waters here and Darkening Skies here.
These were the sf books that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (sorry Jools). Next on that pile is Redeemer, by C.E. Murphy (sorry Catie).
Advance warning: I only had time to read the Best Novel, Best Short Story and Best Non-Fiction categories this year, so there will be no write-up here of the BSFA Award shortlist in the Best Book for Younger readers category. I simply did not have time, and I wonder about the wisdom of adding another full category of books to a fairly short window for reading the shortlist between announcement and deadline. I’m also conscious that I’m writing this and tomorrow’s post on Best Non-Fiction in a bit of a rush, which is not ideal and means I am not doing any of the nominees justice. Anyway, we shall see. (I have previously written up Best Art and Best Short Fiction.)
6) Shards of Earth, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:
The Vulture God erupted out of unspace, close enough to set Roshu’s traffic control systems complaining, and Idris began bootstrapping the ship’s systems and waking the others. Roshu wasn’t his favourite place in the galaxy, frankly.
Dismayed to admit that I found this very tough going, and I have generally really liked Tchaikovsky’s work before. I think I was reading it during a particularly busy week at work, and my concentration wasn’t up to it. You’ll probably enjoy it more than I did. You can get it here.
5)Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Despite all this, Fosse had known he would return to the farm. There was Geography on the timetable before break, and that sense in the air that he was ready for something, some change, that he wanted to find for himself. He had been told not to return, and yet he needed to understand how the man, the stranger, could have taken that farm away from him so easily.
Again I think my concentration was challenged when reading this, apparently drawing on Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, which I have not read. You can get it here.
4) Purgatory Mount, by Adam Roberts. Second paragraph of third chapter:
The drive took a real long time, and he thought: Double-uh-oh.
I don’t always get on with Roberts’ fiction (I’ve always found him very pleasant in person) but I largely enjoyed this one – except that I could not work out the link between the main story and the framing narrative until it was explained in the epilogue. You can get it here.
3) The Green Man’s Challenge, by Juliet E. McKenna. Second paragraph of third chapter:
I walked over to Fin’s Toyota as she was getting out. Her white-blonde hair was quite a lot longer than I was expecting. Other than that, she looked the same as always: average height, average build, and as far as I’m concerned, absolutely gorgeous in jeans and a cream sweater. We stood looking at each other for an awkward moment. I wanted to kiss her, but that probably wasn’t sensible these days. She was making no move to get closer to me.
Here on the other hand I felt a lot more comfortable with the story, a solid intrusive fantasy with a bit of romance on the side. You can get it here.
2) A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine. Second paragraph of third chapter:
(Three months ago, even if she’d somehow reached this exalted position in the Ministry, complete with her own tiny office with a tiny window only one floor down from the Minister herself, Three Seagrass would have been asleep in her house, and missed the message entirely. There: she’d justified clinical-grade insomnia as a meritorious action, one which would enable her to deal with a problem before anyone else awoke; that was half her work done for the day, surely.)
As previously reported, I hugely enjoyed it; horribly lethal alien incursions, grand sweeping palace politics, and a smart kid and a fish-out-of-water diplomat who separately try to save the day. You can get it here.
1) Blackthorn Winter, by Liz Williams. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Serena, fellow list-maker, had once asked her why she didn’t just put them on a tablet or her phone, but Bee preferred paper and pen. It made it easier for her to keep track. She tried not to list things that she had already done, to make the list look more accomplished, but often failed. Now, she took the pen and drew a firm line through church meeting. Because that was about to happen and soon Bee would be on her way out into the wet cold of the night and down the lane and into the meeting room which joined onto Hornmoon church. It was a meeting about the Christmas flowers because Bee, in an unguarded moment, had offered to become a church warden.
Sequel to Comet Weather, which I also really enjoyed last year. Lovely liminal contemporary fantasy, with lots of Doctor Who references as well. Get it here.
More detailed plotting and scene-setting in the third of the Aldabreshin Compass series. It was so long since I had read the first two that it took me a while to get back into, but that is not the author’s fault!
The first of the second series of fantasy novels by , set in the same world as the first series but in a different part of it, among the lascivious island race visited briefly in a previous book. I said in a previous review that I would have liked to have heard more about these people; well, you should be careful what you wish for, because you may get it – I found the first third of the book awfully slow going as we learnt loads and loads about the Aldabreshin culture, a worthy attempt to create a fictional society which practices polygamy but where women are nonetheless pretty emancipated. Fortunately (and I have to thank for encouraging me to keep going) it really picks up after a bit and I found it impossible to put down once I had reached roughly page 200, when our lead character puts his heritage aside and sets off on a quest for knowledge which may save the archipelago at the cost of his life (or his lands and family at the least). Also Juliet pulls off the impressive feat of describing the climactic showdown between good wizard and evil wizard twice – once in anticipation and the second time for real – and making it work both times.
So, I will keep the faith and get the next in the series. Nice astrolabe on the front cover.
The fifth in Juliet McKenna’s Einarinn series, of which I am a moderate fan (see third and fourth books previously). Once again, competently done, and most of the threads from the first four books pulled together (though I did want to hear more of the lascivious island race from book #2). Among McKenna’s strengths (others are mentioned in my previous reviews) are decent battle scenes – just enough detail to make you feel that it’s a confusing, violent situation to be in, without at the same time confusing the reader (or at least this reader). There’s also a wonderfully described bath scene. And the final confrontations with the bad guys are most satisfying. I was slightly surprised, though it’s not really a criticism, by the low-key tone of the final wrap-up chapters after the plot is basically over; I’d somehow expected something more dramatic after five books and 2500 pages. But perhaps McKenna is just trying to tell us that life goes on.
Darn it, browser crashed the first time I tried to post this. I should switch to the email interface.
Another trans-Atlantic flight means another chance to make inroads on my to-read list. Last night’s flight started a lot later than the one from Paris on Monday and I was also much more tired, so only got through two books this time. The first was The Gambler’s Fortune, by Juliet E. McKenna.
I confess that I hadn’t heard of Juliet McKenna before meeting her at P-Con in Dublin last September. But we got on very well on a personal level then, and so I’ve been working my way through her books ever since. And they are good books. I’m not really into Big Commercial Fantasy on the whole (and at 500+ pages per volume, her works are certainly in that sub-genre) but on the basis of my brief encounters with the sub-genre, her work scores well above the average in at least three respects.
First, oddly enough, is the fact that the books are clearly rooted in role-playing. (McKenna makes no bones about this in any of her interviews.) It seems to me that this has a fundamental impact on the way the books are structured – you have a campaign, you have to begin it and end it, you have to provide a certain rate of incidence of exciting events, the characters are classified into particular categories (magic-user, warrior, thief) – but this is no bad thing. If the fundamentals of your universe are sound, then that provides a much firmer basis for the story. Elsewhere I’ve compared McKenna favourably to Raymond E. Feist, and more favourable comparisons follow below.
Second is the fact that there are no non-human nasties. All of McKenna’s villains (and heroes) are people like us. The breadth and variety of human cultures depicted in her world is something I have only seen surpassed by George R.R. Martin (Tolkien loses on this score by having too many Elves, Dwarves and Ents). To this she injects a conflict between two different kinds of magic which are mutually incomprehensible. And population pressures are driving technological and economic change in a fantasy environment. On top of that, as you would hope for from an Oxford graduate in Classics, there is a whole store of knowledge from the ancients waiting to be decoded. Good stuff.
Third is the sex. McKenna is no Silverberg or Delany (let alone a Jacqueline Carey, whose Kushiel’s Avatar is next-but-one on my “to read” list). But it is really refreshing to encounter protagonists who are not young folks going through a rite-of-passage narrative, but people much nearer to my own age, juggling the conflicting needs of a demanding career with the need for a decent home life. OK, so McKenna’s characters are battling to save their continent from the evil invader rather than analysing the Balkan Question (like me) or writing best-selling novels (like Juliet). But I still feel a much greater sympathy for them than I do with the protagonists of Eddings’ Belgariad (let alone Jordan’s woeful Wheel of Time).
Anyway, The Gambler’s Fortune is a worthy third book in the series, and I’ll be looking out for the others.
