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New Releases: The Skybound Sea by Sam Sykes

It is fair to say that this, Sam Sykes' The Skybound Sea (2012) is a review I've been trying to write for almost five months. It isn't a straightforward one, so, with that in mind, I'd like to ask two favours, gentle reader:

• Bear with me, as this will be even more wibbly and discursive than usual
• Read the whole review (or at least skim it), as any single thought or line won't work out of context
• (Bonus favour: don't stomp on me when I use phrases like "gentle reader", as much as I deserve it)

The Skybound Sea is the conclusion of Sam Sykes' debut trilogy, The Aeons' Gate. Lenk, Kataria, Gariath, Asper, Dreadaleon and Denaos are adventurers - a profession quickly (and repeatedly) established as lower than pondscum. At the beginning of Tome of the Undergates, Lenk & Company were tasked with retrieving the titular tome. By the end of that book, they had managed to embroil themselves in an island-hopping apocalypse, with beasties of all sizes and planar origins competing for the prize. This is still the situation as The Skybound Sea opens - the adventurers are now in an extreme state of (for lack of a better word) decay, and evil is everywhere. 

Physically, the group is utterly delapidated. They're injured, hungry, bruised, battered and miserable. Emotionally they're no better off - at some point in the trilogy, everyone has been captured, knocked unconscious, horrendously violated, betrayed or left for dead. They've got some mental wounds - deep ones. Lenk, for example, has been wrestling with nothing short of demonic (or is it angelic?) possession. He's got a lot of little voices in his head, and they'd really like him to kill stuff. His enemies. His friends. Anyone to hand. To top it off, his uncomfortable thing with Kataria has gone volcanic (not in a good way) - they've got smouldering red hot lust, boulders of shame and, uh, ash clouds of weird racial issues. 

New Releases: Blood Song by Anthony Ryan

Blood Song (2013) is the first volume in Anthony Ryan's Raven's Shadow series, a new epic fantasy saga published by Orbit. Blood Song has been lurking around as a self-published ebook for a while (gaining insane reviews) - now it is being released as a book-book. 

Blood Song is the story of Vaelin Al Sorna. As a child, he's abandoned at the gates of the Sixth Order by his father, Battle Lord (sort of "high marshal" to King Janus). The orders are monastic organisations - each has its specific focus (2: philosophy, 5: healing, 6: kicking ass), and joining one is pretty much a life long commitment. You forget your family, forget your past - do nothing but train, learn and study. The curious thing is that the Orders are devoutly irreligious - the "Unified Realm" (four kingdoms squished together) has long eschewed belief in gods and myths. When the Orders are rooting out "heresy" (the Fourth Order's task), they're persecuting faith of any sort. A nice little twist.

Of course, forgetting one's past is easier when you join the Order as a street urchin. When you're Vaelin, heir to a noble family and child of a Big Name, it is harder to shed the outside world. In the epic fantasy tradition, much of Blood Song focuses on Vaelin's training years. As well as all the anticipated difficulties that come with joining an organisation of lethal lunatics, Vaelin's also got his own issues to deal with. Why did his dad dump him here? Who was his mother, really? Are people trying to kill him (that is, people besides his classmates and instructors)? Why do some of his fellow students hate him so much?

I don't think it gives too much away to say that the answers to most of these questions are wrapped up in revelations of Vaelin's Chosen One-ness. Vaelin's destiny has been predetermined by a lot of different players - his mother, his father, the king, the princess, the Order, the other Orders and forces even more esoteric than that. It doesn't help that, as Vaelin stumbles through his training and his first combat experiences, he keeps bouncing against other prophecies. Prophecies that, in a resolutely secular world, ought not exist.

Review Round-up: Jesus, Bridesicles and New York City

Three recent releases with very little in common.

Will McIntosh's Love Minus Eighty (2013) is coming this June. I've not read him before, but from what I understand, Mr. McIntosh is sort of an ebook/indie sensation, not in the "sells like Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking" way, but in the "there's this guy quietly making great books in the corner" kind of way. Love Minus Eighty is his first UK print publication and it is a corker.

A hundred years in the future, death isn't... conquered, but it is beat-up a bit. Cryogenics and medicine have both advanced spectacularly, so if you've got the cash, you can hang on for quite some time. If you don't have the cash, but you do have insurance, you can freeze yourself - give yourself that tiny bit of hope that someone, someday will pay to bring you back. And if you don't have the cash or the insurance? Well, look both ways before crossing the street.

One pervy side-effect of this brave new world is the idea of the "bridesicle". Beautiful women in fatal accidents - and without insurance - are carefully preserved. Rich men drop by, interview them, and, if they like what they see, the 'suitor' pays to thaw/fix the young lady in turn for marriage (and all that entails). It is... horrible. Mr. McIntosh lets us know exactly how horrible it is - prostitution, grinding misery, the soul-crushing loss of all agency. It is one of the most grim and least titillating visions of the future ever committed to print. 

Love Minus Eighty is the story of how this premise impacts a half dozen people: a frozen young woman (thawed and killed and thawed and killed over and over again with each interview), a struggling musician who inadvertently kills someone, the woman he kills, a slightly neurotic writer who runs a dating service and a host of minor characters. Love Minus Eighty is a love story, I suppose, but less about people than an ode to love itself: natural, messy, serendipitous, ungainly love. Everyone in the book is busily trying to programme or direct something that refuses to be tamed. Love can't be purchased, wrangled, controlled or predicted - a lesson that everyone in the book learns, occasionally to their own detriment. It should be romantic, but Mr. McIntosh is wisely even-handed. For every couple that wins, there's also one that gets away.

Last Week's New Releases: Farnsworth, Ness & Smythe

The week of filler continues with three books that all deserve better treatment. But Farnsworth, Ness and Smythe sounds a bit like a Dickensian lawfirm, which is some small comfort.

Normally I'm not so bothered about shirking my frontlist duties, but last week was one hell of a week for new genre books, and I'm a little upset that I'm slack in reviewing. Whatever sort of science fiction you're in to, last week was packed with red letter days.

I did review Christopher Farnsworth's Red, White and Blood earlier, so this is more a "Hey! Out now!" sort of reminder. Red, White and Blood is the third in the Nathaniel Cade series (which began with Blood Oath and The President's Vampire), but there's certainly no barrier to starting with this installment. Backstory: the President has a vampire. Now you're caught up.

Mr. Farnsworth's series is a cross between Wes Craven and 24 or, uh, True Blood and Tom-Clancy-before-he-jumped-his-own-shark. Funny, witty, silly, smart, the series just keeps getting more and more entertaining - modern pulp at its finest. Read the earlier review for more complete thoughts. 

Meanwhile, James Smythe.

Mr. Smythe came from seemingly nowhere to publish two of last year's most thoughtful, most challenging science fiction thrillers. This year he knocks it up a notch, Elzar-style, and, with The Machine, has written one of the darkest novels - of any genre - that I've ever had the nightmarish 'privilege' of reading. And don't get me wrong, this is a corker, well worth reading and suspiciously, disturbingly easy to read. But the entire book is keyed at a slightly unsettling note that keeps the reader perpetually aware that THINGS ARE NOT RIGHT. And, nor should they be... in a fairly ruined world (the casual apocalypticism is handled with an unbelievably light touch, and, I hope will join Jessie Lamb in benchmarking the post-Wyndhamism contemporary cozy catastrophe) a young wife is experimenting with the Machine. The Machine is a thing - a big scary mechanical thing -  it looks suspiciously like your office's scary server closet crossed with the screen that you have to plug the presentation into but you can never get to work on the first try - that does stuff to your memories. Initially used as a cure for PTSD, it does... stuff. 

The Machine pokes all the tender places. There are beleaguered teachers and menacing students, long walks across abandoned estates at night, crucifying loneliness, creepy 'friends', oppressive bureaucracies, social isolation, tinkering with minds... all building up to the big question: what is it that makes us human? What's the line? When do we become so lost in ourselves that we aren't people any more? Mr. Smythe clearly refuses to be confined to an easy description, and like its inspiration, Frankenstein, The Machine makes a nonsense of genre definitions. The Machine takes the best of horror - claustrophic, personal terror - and combines it with the frenzied imagination of science fiction and the thoughtful, unanswerable questions of literature. 

Speaking of which...

Review Round-Up: Three More Novels of Note

Another round-up: Chris Marnewick's The Soldier Who Said No, Gail Carriger's Etiquette and Espionage and Robert Jackson Bennett's American Elsewhere. Three more unequivocal "yes" reviews.

It is hard to believe that Chris Marnewick's The Soldier Who Said No (2010) is only 310 pages. So very, very much happens, but it never seems rushed. Pierre De Villiers is a South African expatriate, living in New Zealand. As the book opens, he's suspended from his job as a policeman for a fit of temper. At exactly the same time, someone makes an attempt is made on the life of the Prime Minister. The assassin uses a Bushman weapon, and, as the coincidences stack up, De Villiers becomes the prime suspect. 

Shockingly, Pierre has even worse things to worry about. His health is rapidly declining and the doctors confirm the worst: cancer. It is hard to find a man with more going wrong in his life.

Yet even this isn't even the low point for Pierre. That came years before, when he was a soldier assigned to do some of the military's more secretive mission. Upon refusing to complete one particularly unpleasant assignment, Pierre became "the solider who said no" - a man hunted down by his own countrymen. 

The Soldier Who Said No cycles between Pierre's past and his present as he works to solve a mystery that spans two continents and time periods. Pierre's a man falsely accused. In the present day, he's hunted by the (hilariously bumbling) New Zealand authorities. In the past, he's pursued by more predatory figures. In both times, he's debilitated - by cancer, starvation or inury. Yet even with all this happening, Mr. Marnewick writes at a surprisingly languorous pace. There's never sense of rush, everything unfolds smoothly and at a natural pace. Despite the action, this isn't a Bourne-style thriller. Pierre's life is certainly packed with drama, but Mr. Marnewick expresses it subtly, and often through the little things: examining street signs, discussions at meals, casual discussions with his radiotherapist...

Mr. Marnewick leaves the reader with the sense that the entire assassination plot was simply a device to explore a fascinating character, and not the other way around.

New Releases: Web of the City by Harlan Ellison

This is the latest installment in our scheme to review each and every Hard Case Crime publication, one every week. You can follow along here. This week, we skip ahead to the publisher's newest release - coming April 2013. 

It is hard to believe that I've gone this long without one review of a book by Harlan Ellison. He's easily one of my favourite authors. According to our long-suffering database, he's our fourth-most collected author [MacDonald, McBain, Sayers, Ellison] - it feels like I spent years on autopilot, heading towards the E's of any used bookstore.

On the other hand, Ellison is so significant to me, the lack of reviews actually makes sense.

I grew up devouring science fiction - and by that, I mean all that I could find. I picked up the doorstop tomes of Ye Olde Hugo Winners at library sales and bought crates of magazines at flea markets. I practically swam through the stuff.

Science Fiction was a genre of problems solved through logic and hard work. Puzzles and games, plots, not people. Rational thought! Strong ideals! Clever solutions derived from first principles! The application of logic-driven labour, leading to conclusions that were both rationally and morally correct! Everything in Science Fiction made sense, something that appealed to me as a child - as well as the overall message that Be Smart + Be Right = Guaranteed Win. 

By the time I hit 14, I knew this to be wrong. And I knew this with the depth and conviction that only a teenager can have - the confused, but determined nihilism that comes part and parcel with the swarming chaos of adolescence. From what I could see, no matter how correct or smart I was (and I was convinced that I was both), I wasn't winning. Nothing made sense. I could work statistics and run numbers and draw things and research and derive solutions from first principles, but, somehow, it wasn't working out in my favour. People were starving and homeless, politicians lied, the authorities were hopelessly corrupt, I had a C- in French, and I didn't have a date. The gross unfairness of it all - it rankled. It burned.

Review Round-Up: Five Novels of Note

Five books I've read recently that I just flat-out liked: Henrietta Rose-Innes' Nineveh, Mary Gentle's Black Opera, Carlos Fuentes' Vlad, Andrew Motion's Silver and Harry Karlinsky's The Evolution of Inanimate Objects. 

These all deserve longer reviews.

Nineveh (2011) by Henrietta Rose-Innes

My big ol’ grab bag of South African fiction has yet to disappoint me, but Nineveh is my favourite so far. Katya Grubbs is an exterminator - more a relocator, actually, as she’s a fundamental believer in vermin’s right to life. A swarm of mysterious beetles infests an idyllic suburb and Katya is hired to do her thing. Her investigation brings her in contact with pests of all shapes and sizes - including the suburb’s sleazy developer and her own wayward father.

Part Gothic, part mystery, all amazing. Despite the lack of any SF/F elements, Nineveh is a contemporary urban fantasy classic, along the lines of Zoo City and King Rat; a tale about a hidden world and the people (and critters) beneath our notice. This is all topped off by a genuinely surprising ending that, although it shocked me, couldn't have been more perfect.

I don't know if Nineveh is available outside of South Africa, but, if you're in any way tempted (and I hope you are) it is worth sending an email to the Book Lounge.

Below the jump... vampires, pirates, opera and forks.

New Release: Solace by Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown's Solace (2012, Zebra Press) begins with the murder of Muslim boy - the body found in one of Cape Town's synagogues. The city's religious tensions are already running at an all-time high, with the Muslim, Jewish and evangelical Christian communities at one another's throats. In the background, the Social Values Act is being debated at the highest levels of government. The Act, which would bring an unprecedented level of government interference into the religious practices of South Africans, is incredibly divisive, with both proponents and opponents that will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.

Into this mess walks Inspector Eberard Februarie, an excellent policeman, but, to put it politely, a distracted one. His marriage is ruined, his career is at a dead-end, he's loathed by his superior officers and regarded with polite scorn by his peers. He's floating through each day on alcohol and making it through the nights with the aid of a teenage prostitute. Compared to Februarie, Harry Bosch is Postman Pat.

Februarie's investigation into the murder - and the synagogue's congregation - brings him face to face with matters of faith. He's a policeman and a rationalist, but, on this case, Februarie's asked to take the proverbial leap, and believe in something bigger than himself. Mr. Brown takes Februarie on a tour of many of South Africa's denominations - although the investigation begins within the Jewish community, the Inspector encounters members of a half-dozen religious beliefs, and has ample time to think about them all. Februarie realises that faith doesn't need to be about God - or even religion. But he does have to put himself out there: ask for help, seek answers outside of himself and trust in someone (or someones) to be there for him.

Review Round-up: Time After Time

Paul Witcover's The Emperor of All Things and Julie Cross' The Tempest - two books about time and what makes us tick.

Paul Witcover's The Emperor of All Things (2013) is the start of a sprawling epic. Set in 1758, it features Daniel Quare, a talented journeyman in the Worshipful Company of Clockworkers. The Company is one of the cornerstones of the British Empire, for, as many a general knows, precise time measurement is the key to many a maneuver.

But the remit of the Company extends even further than just making good clocks: it investigates (and quashes) any sort of innovation into time-keeping devices. Daniel's role is a complicated one. He's a double agent within the guild, playing one faction against the other in order to satisfy his own need to learn more about the nature of time.

He's also curious about his own heritage (he's an orphan, naturally). And super-duper curious about the crazy new timepiece that he picked up from the unconscious body of a (sexy) cat burglar named Grimalkin. Something something fairies. Something something French spies. Something something war across dimensions. Did I mention "sprawling epic"? This is a really ambitious book.

For the most part, Mr. Witcover pulls it off: the fairies and the orphans and the cat burglars and the French and the dragons and the time and the espionage. Largely, this is achieved by sacrificing Daniel's agency; he comes across as one of the world's last true innocents, bounding from place to place, attentively listening to vast amounts of exposition.

Granted, being an epic amongst epics, it is revealed that Daniel is Extremely Special, and all the stories that the reader picks up are, inevitably, related to Him. (Of course, any reader that didn't pick up on "Extremely Special" at the word "orphan" is really the last true innocent.)

New Releases: Ice Forged by Gail Z. Martin

Blaine McFadden (I know, right?) kills his father, a long-overdue and universally appreciated act of retribution. Lord McFadden was a brutish thug that had been tormenting Blaine his entire life. Just to be 100% Evil, his hobbies included a) raping his teenage daughter and b) gloating about it afterwards. Still, the law's the law, and, in the greatest act of legal injustice since the opening minutes of Con Air, Blaine is punished to transportation to Edgeland.¹

In Edgeland (cold, mountainy, distinctly unfun), convicts mine rubies whilst being crushed under the heel of a corrupt military governor. By serving three years of back-breaking labour, convicts earn their 'freedom', and, as 'colonists', they allowed to perform the same back-breaking labour but for a tiny wage.

Now, after serving six years in this awful place, Blaine has actually managed to thrive - well, relatively speaking). Not only is he the party leader (his group includes a fighter, a bard, an engineer and an assassin), but Blaine's also a respected member of the colonial community. When the supply ships stop coming and the frosty plains of Edgeland become an even more miserable place, Blaine becomes a pivotal figure in the battle for survival that ensues.

Meanwhile, back on the continent, four kingdoms have all gone to war and things are looking grim. Mad King Edgar has unleashed his war sorcerers and Good King Merrill is reluctantly forced to follow suit. As powerful tides of magic wash over the land, all the kingdoms suffer, and the world is changed forever.²