Legends and Latte's - Travis Baldree

You know what, I'm late to the party on this one. People have been talking up Legends and Lattes for years, and I finally picked it up on sale the other day. And you know what, it's really very good. I'm hesitant to use the word "cozy", but I will say it has a delicious blend of gentle relationship building, action which if not epic in scale is extremely personally important, and  an overall, well, vibe of something comfortable. You're watching someone start fresh, build a new life, a new person, if you like, and deal with the consequences of that choice - and those don't always go the way you'd expect. 

Part of the reason for that is the person. Viv is a killer. Well, was a killer, an ex-mercenary adventurer who got up enough of a nest-egg to retire and do something else with her day. But instead of taverns or more hitting people with sticks, she's decided to do something different, and build a coffee shop. In a town which hasn't heard of coffee. Did I mention she's an orc, a species which make great adventurers due to being enormous and having muscles you could break rocks on, but who are perhaps underrepresented in the coffee sector?

Viv is, in fact, a charming protagonist. She defies our own expectations, as well as those from people around her. Always careful, thoughtful, industrious, Viv is less interested in combatting stereotypes than in reforming herself away from her past. If she has a penchant for wanting to hit someone over the head with a sword hilt when they're being annoying, she rarely ever does. And her interactions with the system around her are similar - when organised crime shows up for a bit of protection money, being seven feet tall with a huge sword is a good opener, but Viv recognises that cutting them all into teeny tiny chunks might not be the best fit for her journey of self-actualisation, so decides to do...something else. Anyway, she's smart and funny and seems thoroughly oblivious to a lot of personal emotional interactions - there's a romantic sub-plot in here that had me covering my head with a pillow at one point. Less "will they won't they" and more "Are they ever going to admit to each other...?" That particular plot point, by the by, is a work of art. Watching two adults figure out that they like each other and what to do about it like adults is (annoyingly) refreshing.

Speaking of which, something Baldree does well is build networks. Viv meets a lot of people, and at least some of them become customers, become friends, become people she'd put her life on the line for. And from that, we can see these friends as people, as something more than single-faceted voices. They're fully realised characters. My only complaint is perhaps that the antagonists are less well rounded, but you know what, sometimes you just have that one guy who's an arsehole and needs a comeuppance. 

This is, really, a fun book. It's telling a clever story that, if it doesn't twist at every turn, definitely has the capacity to surprise. It's telling a story with personal stakes and making them matter. It's a story about someone leaving their life behind and building themselves something better, building themselves into something more like the person they want to be. And it does that with warmth and love and humour that makes it deeply endearing as well as thoroughly entertaining.

Back next week!

 As we inch ever closer to the end of the year, it's been a longer one than usual, for various reasons. With that in mind, we'll be back next week.

Red Sonja: Consumed - Gail Simone

So, full disclosure. I know Red Sonja is a famous comic book character. And I know Gail Simone is a comics author with a strong reputation, and as someone with a highly entertaining Twitter feed. And I know she did some work on some recent Red Sonja comics. But that's all I knew going into this novel, and my expectations were, well, ambivalent. That out of the way...I was wrong. Red Sonja: Consumed is an adventure. It has blood and honour laced all the way through it, sure enough. And Sonja, as a protagonist, is largely focused on herself and her own needs, but she's also brutally honest about it. And its hard to judge her too harshly whilst she's carving up menaces in an arena, or getting into a fist-fight with a bear, or having the occasional unfortunate interaction with the forces of the nearest state. Sonja is who she is, a force of nature, a weapon, a killer. And sitting on her shoulder while she kicks arse and takes names is, in several senses, a bloody good time.

But also. Ah, but also, you see. Red Sonja isn't just a killer, a barbarian, a thief. I mean, yes, she is all of those things. And Simone manages to give her energy and fun with those things whilst not flinching away from what they mean. But Sonja is not just those things. She's a barbarian traumatised by a childhood that took a left turn into the horrifyingly unpleasant. A killer who still stands tall in matters of honour. A thief who has a near-spiritual relationship with her horse. There's more here than just a lone sword searching for profit and the next beer (and the next man). There's a depth and a history and a passion in here that make Sonja ring true, make her seem real. And at the same time, there's a flavour of the classic Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser about her - unapologetically fighting and screwing and drinking her way through today, and dealing with the problems that causes, tomorrow. Same as it ever was when Fafhrd and Conan did it, and more than equally entertaining. Sonja isn't a shy and retiring barbarian, contenting herself with daintily presenting her enemies with some mildly harsh language. This is a woman on the prowl, not afraid to get physical, and not afraid to make an end. She's a creature of passions, both sexual and violently visceral, and those do come up quite a lot in the text - but this is a story with the energy thrown all the way up to eleven, and the over-the-top nature of it all just makes it more fun.

So that's Sonja. And she really is great fun to read. I will say, that whilst I got a flavour of some of the world she travelled in, a little of its politics and history and old stories, enough to give it some context and flavour. I was left wanting more. Some of that we get from a diverse smattering of points of view through the text, dipping into, amongst others, some of her varied antagonists. We get a sense of where the spirit of things is, if not the exact geography. This is a story that is concerned with the story, with the highs and lows and emotions that the characters go through. Its a book of flash and glamour over pain and raw emotion, and if it doesn't delve lovingly into the mechanics of its magic systems, it knows that you can absolutely slow down a wizard by putting a knife between his shoulderblades. This is a story that isn't afraid to give you a protagonist who has no chill and no filter, but who has a vulnerability and a complexity that we can live with alongside the fiery sword, the monster slayer, the troubled lover, the lost daughter.

Ah hell, at the end of the day, this one is just a whole lot of fun. It draws from the sword and sorcery tradition, but puts a unique spin and flavour on it, with the protagonist being as unapologetically self-centred and as skilfully violent as those folks ever were, but also not being afraid to show us humanity and character, rather than caricature. This is a viscerally (and potentially viscera-lly, sorry) entertaining read, and I look forward to seeing more from Red Sonja in the future.

Martians Abroad - Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn is a new one for me, but not, I gather, for a lot of people/. She put out the Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a radio advice talk show, which I have to admit was a fun sentence to type out. Vaughn, in other words, has form. So I took a chance on her foray into science fiction, Martians Abroad, and it's...well, it's fun, I'll say that.

Polly Newton and her brother, Charles, are the titular Martians. They're being packed off to an elite boarding school on earth, so that they can glad-hand with politicians children and influential industrialists grandsons, and generally get themselves prepared for a life of visibility and influence themselves. Their mother is, after all, part of the social elite on Mars.  Unfortunately for Polly and Charles, the Martians are rather more egalitarian than those Earthside - they don't see themselves as special -and the folks down on Earth thing that the Martians and the rest of the riff-raff from off-planet are about half a step up the evolutionary ladder from Smallpox, and about as welcome an addition to the school campus.

We ride along in Polly's head, and she's...I want to say likeable, but relatable is probably something more like it. Her story plays out in a conversationalist style, from one viewpoint. But she's definitely a teenager being taken from everything she knows and everything she wants, and being dumped into a deep pool  without much warning. Cue culture shock, whinging, complaints ad nauseam (justified and otherwise). It can be a little exhausting, looked at from the outside. But Polly is also smart and funny and sometimes brave. If she isn't super-special per se, she's competent and willing to make decisions, commit to them and then ride out the consequences. If I occasionally wanted to roll my eyes at the theatricality of her antics, I also went along for the ride happily enough when she pushed back on prejudice, and on the need to be better expressed through owning things. Polly has an honesty to her that makers her work as a protagonist, a willingness to just be herself which probably sits well with the intended audience (it is a YA book after all). 

Having said that, Vaughn expertly draws a world that's living in a post-climate-crisis interplanetary era. We still have the same elites and the same prejudices, with different targets, different names, different faces. But there's a sense of the world having opened up just a little, onto the wider stage. The school and its routine and occasional casual brutality seem very well realised, as does Polly's sense of isolation from her classmates, her and the others from off-earth, as they try to work with different dietary and gravitational needs, with not much by way of accommodations. There's also some points trekking around on Earth that feel melancholic, feel genuine, and those were a pleasure; there was a particular piece in a museum that stuck with me thereafter.

Sadly for Polly, and Charles, and, well, everyone else, something odd is going on at their new school for the terminally rich and posh. Accidents are happening a little too often. Things are going a bit wrong. Issues are escalating. And nobody is really talking about why. This mystery threads its way through the book, and if the denouement wasn't entirely satisfying, it did deliver in terms of tension and catharsis. The story itself is paced well up to that point, slowly giving us more and more of an insight into what's going on and why, the who the what the why the where and the how. That said, the close feels a little abrupt, and like there's more to come, more to be said - perhaps in a sequel. 

Overall, this is a fun short read, and one I rather enjoyed; I hope you do the same!

Away this week!

 We're away this week, we'll be back next week!

Overcaptain - L.E. Modesitt Jr.

So, here's the thing. L.E. Modesitt has written, at this point, twenty-four books set in his world of Recluce. Twenty-five if you include the short story collection I reviewed a couple of years ago. It's a sprawling universe that covers a sweeping amount of geography, but also a vast amount of time. Different stories have happened earlier or later in the history of Recluce, and we can see yesterdays's heroes reflected as villains in the past of today's protagonist. Or, in the case of Overcaptain, the latest story, the reverse. Because the protagonist of this story, Aliyakal, is as early in Recluce's history as we've ever gone, all the way back to near the founding of Cyador, who have largely been antagonists in other books. Seeing the beginnings of an Empire that we've often seen as enemies, seeing the way the systems that maintain it are constructed and maintained out of necessity and by good people trying to do the right thing, we can get a different perspective on a system that we've also seen very determined to incinerate a few of our protagonists "later" in the timeline. 

Cyador, you see, is something a little different. At first glance, it's a fantasy empire. Everyone's riding around on horses, with swords. Everyone is very interested in politics, and Emperors. There's a whole caste system between soldiers, traders, and people who can do magic. But, but they also have hints and asides and historical notes that say they used to be something else. They're an Empire founded by "The First". They have "firelances", which spit raw chaos energy at the aforementioned barbarians. They have "firewagons" and "fireships" which sound suspiciously modern, not quite battleships and APC's, but certainly with enough heft in them to flatten ports, and make fighting with the Cyadorans an unpleasant prospect. They have a history that says, in fragments, that they come from elsewhere. They have "chaos towers" that contain the enormous forest that used to be where their Empire now sits. And they have, increasingly, no idea how any of it works. Cyador is an empire built on technology that is slowly failing, while those in charge try to keep everything together under tremendous pressure - both internal and external. Because all sorts if people want what they have (running water, regular meals), or are more than happy to rule an Empire from behind the throne for personal gain, regardless of what's best for everyone else - because, after all, when you're a mage, and you can turn someone into dust with a word, why would you take crap from any of those little people? I've always enjoyed Cyador, a place which seems to have become increasingly sclerotic and unpleasant as it ages, and its fantastic to delve into the near origins of the place here. Looking at it through Aliyakal's eyes, we're inside of a system which seems to promise a better world for, if not everyone, at least everyone inside the system, but he's not blind to its flaws, to the abuses that are hobbling progress, the way that the military, the magi and the merchanters are always at odds, and what happens when they're not. Anyway. It's a fun place, a civilisation coming off the back of some science-fiction beginnigs, trying to build something self-sustaining. Interestingly, Modesitt does this again later with Fallen Angels, when survivors of the other side of a war in which Cyadors forebears were involved find themselves stranded on Relcuce, watching their tech also slowly fail. Its a solid beginning, and here it gives a flavour and a texture to the world,makes it a little different to your standard fantasy setting. 

As an aside, I maintain that both sides in the conflict that drove Cyador's ancestors and their eventual antagonists to Recluce is the one from Modesitt's sci-fi standalone The Parafaith War, and one day I'd love to know if that's true. 

Aliyakal is, well, this is going to sound weird, he's a Modesitt Recluce protagonist. He's smart, and also thoughtful. Having a military background makes him stand out a bit, but he fits into the mould of a lot of the others - someone who is practiced and focused on his craft, even where that craft is helping defend an empire by occasionally fighting a lot of people. He also has (ooooh) some magical power, which as a military officer, he has decided not to mention to anyone, just in case they decide he's a threat, and incinerate him. Probably a wise move, under the circumstances, because he does have a penchant for annoying important people. In fairness, that's due mostly to his actually being competent at his job, fighting off border incursions and encroachments from other local powers with minimal casualties. He's a smart person, trying to build a career and a relationship in a space where having a relationship is tantamount to stalling out your career. There's a conflict there, between two parts of his world, which we have yet to see play out - perhaps in the upcoming sequel - but the tensions are woven through his interactions, and add a nice complexity, even while we enjoy his emotionally uncomplicated burgeoning love for a long-time correspondent, and his no-nonsense approach to holding together military outposts in various degrees of collapse. Aliyakal is a decent person, and it's fun to ride around in his head for a while - and where the book allows, he's able to see the complexities of his own world, both in the strangeness of some of the things he's ordered to do, and in the web of politics clearly happening offscreen that's making his life difficult. Like all Modesitt's protagonists in Recluce though, he's a decent guy, trying his best - and if the story beats and characterisation are in a way familiar, they're also as comforting as a warm bath, and there's enough strangeness in here to make you sit up occasionally and go "Wait, what now?"

I won't spoil the story, as usual. But Aliyakal gets to visit a whole new and exciting section of the Empire of Cyador, where even more people try to get him killed than they did in From the Forest. You'll get some sharply observed, incisive military action here, and a lot of discussion of patrols, logistics, and how and why things should be done the way they are. But there's also wonder, in magic, yes, but also in the relationships Aliyakal is building, and fear and politics out there in the background, and an exploration of love and duty and honour. It is, in short, a Modesitt book, and a fine addition to the Recluce corpus. I look forward to seeing where Aliyakal goes next!

Citadel - Marko Kloos

Marko Kloos has been turning out military sci-fi for years at this point, I've been reviewing them for about as long, and I have to admit, his stuff is always a pleasure to read. It's reliable in that it always gives me characters I can empathise with, interesting worlds to delve into, and some adrenaline-shot action, usually when I'm least expecting it. His Palladium Wars series continues this trend, and has been a lovely comfort read until now. I saw the third book on sale recently, and snapped it up. So, does Citadel deliver? Basically, yes.

The book largely takes place on Gretia, a world under occupation by the remaining planetary powers in its system. Unusually, it's under occupation because it started a war, and then had the poor grace to lose it. The occupiers are struggling to contain a civilian population that doesn't want them there, and to rebuild a shattered economy without enabling the every people they fought a war against, and the Gretians want to get out from under the occupiers, and ideally never talk about that war business ever again. They're definitely not happy to have their administrative centres under military occupation, or to see armoured troops marching around like they own the place. Even if they, you know, do. And into that volatile mix have come a group of rebels, of schemers, who refuse to let the last war die, who refuse to accept that Gretia has changed its place in the universe, who are so embedded in the past that they refuse to look past it. And those people are out on Gretia, blowing up buildings and orchestrating massacres - to destabilise both the surviving power structures, and try to drive occupying forces off their world. They are very much not good people, with a penchant for civilian casualties, but they're probably familiar. This is Gretia, ruled by corporate cliques and aristocracies, trying very hard not to live with guilt, or think about it too much. Well, some of them. And this is the other powers, so sure in their virtue that they live in arrogance and pride, not reaching out to help those they can to build a better world, because of their own trauma and memory. 

If that sounds complicated and like it's going to get bloody, well...yes. The last book ended with the antagonists deploying an orbital nuke on one of the other planets, with predictable crackdown results. And so, here we are. This is a world, a system in turmoil But it makes sense. It has the seething layers of politics and personal advancement that make it real, and it has the shining stars of duty and integrity that make it true. We're spread across familiar viewpoints, including one of the occupying troops, the heir to one of the corporate Gretian dynasties, a navy captain for one of the other powers, taking a new ship on a shakedown cruise. And then there's the lost boy, a man who spent too long in the uniform of Gretian intelligence, did some things he regrets, and is now living as quietly as he can on a space freighter, trying not to let his past (and his corporate family) overwhelm his future

They're a fantastically diverse range of people, and it's to Kloos' credit that they don't all sound the same. That the corporate knives in the dark in the Gretian glass towers are as different and as sharp as the high powered recoilless rounds pouring down on our trooper and her squad. They're all people, trying to make the best of things and do the right thing. While Kloos manages to avoid the traps I find a lot of the genre falls into (the government, it turns out, are not entirely incompetent buffoons, and we aren't all better off having some aristocrats running things, and so on), he does tend to reify duty, honour and service. That's fine actually, in context, and I appreciate it here, letting us know who our heroes are. They're unapologetically decent people, which is nice. 

And they're decent people having a rough time. The action isn't unrelenting, but when it happens, it's always a shock. And that shock is often dark and bloody and kinetically charged. You can feel the tension build and seep into things, a moment of quiet turned into a bloody streetfight in a word or two. It's snappy, its gritty, and the moments between the action serve to give it room to breathe and make the meaning that keeps it embedded in the real. 

In other words, this is good stuff, and if you're looking for a quick, compelling read, this is one for you.

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying - Django Wexler

Alright, this was a fun one, the fabulously named How to become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. It's a progression fantasy, of sorts. The protagonist, Davi, is stuck in a time loop. Every time she dies, she finds herself right back at the start of an epic quest to save the Kingdom (capital K) from the invading armies of the Dark Lord (also capitalised). A lot of you are nodding along at this point - the protagonist grows stronger with every loop, works out their situation, and saves the world, yes? That's what we're used to, what we expect.

Well, Wexler is here to subvert your expectations - at least some of them. Davi is sick and tired of being the saviour of the Kingdom. She's spent more than a while trying to make it work, dying over and over and over. She's jaded, tired, and absolutely done with the entire exercise. So now, Davi is going off-script. If she's stuck in a loop, she may as well have some fun. And, well, so begins the adventure of Dark Lord Davi, who decides that she'll take over the world rather than save it, because at least it's a chance to do something new. It's a fun conceit, and it helps that Davi as a narrator is quite personable. A little prone to banter, but always an entertaining read. She's not a skull-clutching cackler of evil schemes, and if she was, she'd at least provide us with a few amusing footnotes as to why. 

Instead, Davi is...well, smart, experienced, and very much trying her best to remain a decent human being in a world that just won't cut her a break. Starting each loop with, in her own words, noodle arms, makes getting into fights rather tricky. Instead, she's determined to build a coalition, an army, that will let her seizer the power of the Dark Lord for herself. But she's presented as charming, exhausted, and with a habit of snarky asides which generally landed and made me at least chuckle. I will say, as a snarky aside of my own, that while I enjoyed that partiocular lightweight tone, it might not be For You, if you wanted something with a bit more of a serious face. Which isn't to say the story itself isn't serious enough. There's betrayal and battle and heartbreak aplenty, and some sensitively drawn  male and female romance. There's some magic and monsters too. And perhaps the smartest thing about the book is the way it whallops Davi with a need to see things through, see what happens next, even as it draws in the reader. She's been a good guy a thousand times before, but this time, she's doing something new. And if she feels at the start like she can just reset her mistakes over, and over, and over...as things progress, she doesn't want to, doesn't want to go back to the start. Wants to keep everyone going the way they are. And so everything gains flavour and texture for her, becomes more real, and she and wee learn to care about the characters together.

The world is some fun stuff, carefully avoiding just being boilerplate fantasy with the serial numbers filed off (though maybe that's The Kingdom, heh). There's different cultures and traditions and a history at work here, and part of the story is in the way those are uncovered, as Davi steps into each new place feeling more than a little overwhelmed. We learn the history of this side of things one piece at a time, in asides and chance remarks, and occasionally on a battlefield. In any case, the world has a richness, a flavour that suggests there's a lot more going on behind the scenes, and gives us enough to let it feel real, let the stakes feel real, without overwhelming in appendices and elven dictionaries.

In the end, this is a smart, accessible and entertaining read, with some snappy fight scenes, some even snappier dialogue, some poignant character moments, and a story which promises a lot, but manages to deliver. I'm looking forward to the second book in the series, and I think you will, too.

Warlords of Wyrdwood - R.J. Barker

R.J. Barker has a reputation for writing complex, well-characterised fantasy that does the rarest thing: something new. His previous series have been great favourites of mine, as long-time readers will know, and the latest, the Forsaken series, is no different. The first book had the same depth and the same unsettling, richly detailed world as its predecessors, and so I was excited to see if Warlords of Wyrdwood would follow suit.

And you know what, it really does.

The world of Crua remains a careful blend of scintillating wonder and outright horror in equal measure. The world continues to tilt, one end of the axis becoming increasingly untenable. The rai, the magical upper classes, continue to oppress everyone around them, both systemically, and rather more immediately with the occasional fireball or on-land-drowning. Using their magic seems to drive them increasingly into sadistic cruelty, and picking at that power balance is one of the many interesting parts of the story. Are the rai cruel because their magic slowly makes them that way? Or do they have a choice, a means to become something else? Given the horror that goes into their creation (which was explored in the first book in visceral terms), the reader can even see how they were once victims, now acting out their trauma on a wider stage, seizing the sense of power and control, and slowly losing themselves. On the other hand, they incinerate people for looking at them funny, and laugh about it, so maybe I'm overthinking it. But this is a wonderful bit of exploration of class warfare. The rai are on top, and while they're more than happy to murder each other in pursuit of power, without much interest in how many "little people" are caught in the crossfire, they're also willing to turn as one on any threat to their power. And that's before we get into the Forest that sprawls across much of the story, looming larger than its trees, full of wonders to delight the soul, and horrors which will more than happily eat it - not to be malevolent, but because they do not care. The world is filled with detail and asides and little revelations that give it a flavour and texture that are different to anything else out there, and yet also very believable.

A threat like Cahan. A threat like foresters. A threat like regular people carrying bows and arrows, and willing to use them to solve problems like "Maybe if we put an arrow into that fire guy from a hundred yards away, we don't have to listen to him any more. Cahan is the catalyst for a war that's bubbling under the surface of a broader conflict, but he's not the only one. He is, to be fair, a lynchpin. A person who feels like he needs to hold everyone together, without much of an idea of how to do it. Dragged unwillingly to the head of a march for freedom, he's a man who just wanted to be left alone, who now gets to make choices about how (and if) people get to live at all. He is, to put it mildly, not excited about that. And Barker charts his character...I want to say growth, but perhaps expansion is better, as Cahan makes some rather poor choices while thinking he doesn't have any other option. On the other hand, we get to spend a lot of time with some totally new characters (no spoilers there), and watch some old friends and/or enemies figuring themselves out. It's something Barker does well, letting each viewpoint unfold enough to give us empathy, if not sympathy, and see these people thinking through their emotions and their actions, trying to understand themselves and , if not be better, at least sometimes try to be different. There's an element of sympathy for self reflection, and then there's moments where you can be wading hip deep in the icy needle consciousness of an unrepentant killer. And you know what, it all feels like it makes sense, and I spent a lot of time being surprised, and watching characters I thought I understood take opportunities to be...different. Not always better, but different! And this sort of character stretch is done with a human rawness that makes it plausible, that makes it real. 

In a world filled with trees so huge they almost dwarf the sky, where uncaring entitites of unknowable puissance lurk in the dark glades out of view, where the alien and the horribly twisted familiar are the edge of a forest away, the humanity and the cruelty and the courage and the hope pour off the page in a deeply human experience which was both incredibly tense and deeply cathartic to read. 

Overall, this is Barker at his best; thoughtful, challenging fantasy that rewards a close reading, providing characters and a world that grips the heart and characters and a story which makes it sing. Go on out and pick this one up./

On Vacation!

 Hey everyone!

We'll be back in a couple of weeks, we're going on vacation and  off the internet for a short while.

Normal service should resume shortly.

The Mercy of Gods - James S.A. Corey

The Mercy of Gods is the start of a new sci-fi series from James S.A. Corey, the pen name of the writing duo responsible for The Expanse. As a big fan of their previous work, I was very excited to pick up this new work and see what they were up to. There was a danger that they wouldn't live up to the hype, and I can say that fear was unfounded. This is thoughtful, compelling, high-concept science-fiction, with characters that make us feel and understand a bit more about what it means to be human - and non-human characters whose perspectives will challenge, appall and excite the reader in equal measure. 

The protagonist is Dafyd Alkhor, whom we first meet at a faculty party. He's a research assistant for a group of scholars that's busy making history. Dafyd is a smart, thoughtful viewpoint, with an instinct for people and interpersonal politics. He's not powerful, but incisive and a little manipulative. Those he's surrounded by are all brilliant in their own ways, and flawed in others - from Tonner, the research lead with a towering intellect and an equally towering sense of self-importance, to Else, who gave up her own position as a research lead to be inside Tonner's group, and is also incidentally his girlfriend, to Jessyn, who matches a searing intelligence with struggles to keep an even keel. While the story takes a while to get going, it uses its time wisely, building out these people, their lives, their hopes and dreams and darker desires, their pride, their flaws, their hubris, their leaps of intellect and occasional misadventures. We come to them with nothing, and Corey uses the start of the story to turn them into living, breathing people. Recognisably from a different cultural context, but still people we could recognise if we saw them in the street - from the venal to the brilliant and back again in the space of a breath. 

And the world they inhabit is there as well, one where humanity has entered an interstellar age - and then forgotten. Where people live on another world with a dual biosphere - and don't know why. With politics and institutions that are rich and filled with veins of lore and the crackle of hidden history told in a newsreel. A world that has texture, and a past. Dafyd and his friends live somewhere we can recognise, even if its about forty-five degrees off what we'd normally see looking out the window.

And then, right about the time you're trying to work out what the point is, it's all washed away. An outside-context-even shatters Dafyd's personal universe, and his world. An alien fleet descends and seizes  everything and everyone it deems useful, and whisks them away to, well, elsewhere. And that's where the groundwork becomes essential, as the book becomes less a space opera, and more of a survival story. A story of trauma and how we respond to it. A story of what it takes to make it through another day, and the compromises and decisions someone will make to ensure not just their own survival but the survival of their friends, or their species. And it doesn't shy away from exploring these questions either, of calling out when those compromises might be self-delusional grasps for a shred of comfort, or when the necessary thing is also a terrible thing. Where horrors force someone to behave like a captor they despise to survive, and what that does to someone, or to a group. It's by tunrs brutal and transcendent. I described it to a friend as "deeply harrowing". It's a story that drinks deeply from the well of human misery, from abrupt, seemingly arbitrary executions, to uncaring captors leaving their prisoners to become useful - or die. From people cowering in their nightgowns, to exploring the moral compromises and definitions of resistance. It's a book that delves into what it means to be human, what it means to survive, what it means to live.

It's a complicated story, which survives, first on the in-depth characterisation, as we see people we've come to know slowly change in the crucible of being alien POW's, and second on a world which is only revealed to us one strand at a time, but promises to be a flavourful gumbo of deeply weird alien cultures, all with their own histories, their own perspectives, their own agenda. Our protagonist and his friends and colleagues are blindsided, confused, and desperate to learn what's going on to ensure their own survival - and so are we, right along with them. And Corey does something wonderful here, giving us the Carryx, an antagonist so strange we're not even entirely sure what it is they want, why they're doing what they're doing, what their goals are and how their society functions. Some of this comes out over the course of the text, and uncovering it alongside Dafyd's group (and occasionally, shortly before) makes for a powerful and at times revelatory narrative experience.

In any case. Before I go on too much. Not to overstate it, this isn't The Expanse. This is something new. But it has a lot of the same hallmarks. Complex moral questions. A humanity on the brink of paradigm-shattering change. Characters whom you can live with love with, cry with, hate and love and empathise with, often over the course of a few pages. Sprawling, detailed societies filled with those little details that make them real. A commitment to asking big, hard questions and letting the reader push themselves toward answers, where there are any. And a fierce, for want of another word, faith in humanity, or at least in people. This isn't The Expanse. It's something new. But it's also really bloody good, if you want to explore trauma, survival, deeply alien environments, prison complexes that are also alien civilisations, and, again, those big questions around who wand what we are, what it means to be people, what it means to be a person. It's slow start is more than paid off by the catharsis of its conclusion, and if it took me a while to really let it get going, once it did, I couldn't take my eyes off the page. Top notch stuff, that lives up to the hype.

Back next week!

 We're on vacation this week!

We'll be back next week.

Deep Black - Miles Cameron

I've been waiting on Deep Black for a while. Ever since I finished Artifact Space, honestly, at which point I shook my fist and demanded a sequel, ideally immediately. Well, immediately it wasn't, but the sequel is here, wrapping up the story that the first book began: Marca Nbaro is having her first eventful cruise aboard the Greatship Athens, trading with mysterious aliens for technology and materials we barely pretend to understand. Nbaro grew by leaps and bounds in the first story, rising from her beginnings in an orphanage to something like a talisman, getting to live to her full potential in service to the Service. Of course to do that she had to deal with an espionage ring and the aforesaid mysterious aliens.

This second book opens where the first left off. With the Athens meeting some weird and wonderful starfish-aliens, and trading them all sorts of knickknacks for their own goods. And I'll say this for Deep Black. It's not afraid to start looking at the aliens that underpin the economy of interstellar human civilisation. We've heard a little bit about the Starfish, but this is seeing them up close, as Nbaro and the rest of the crew try to work out how to extract as much alien tech as possible for as little outlay as possible. This is, after all, a merchant voyage. But it's also a voyage that shows us a crew trying to understand the alien. Trying to see where they come from, and what it is that they want all our stuff for, and find a way to communicate. Those efforts are slow, and stumbling, but you can feel the small victories, and the potential for shattering consequences that they evoke. And the Starfish remain impressively opaque, with drives and responses that seem to sit at an odd angle to our own. They're fun to read. This is a universe populated by the strange. Speaking of which, there are rumblings of other aliens making an appearance as well (as seen in the interstitial short story collection Beyond the Fringe), and their agenda and world view is likely to change everything again. 

The book manages to make all of this work by taking the high concept stuff - the galaxy-spanning humanity, the distinctly odd alien cultures, and grounding it in what feels suspiciously like 16th century Venice, but with faster-than-light travel. The Athens is a massive, brutally elegant tool, staffed by tens of thousands of people, all of whom are, after months or years in the middle of nowhere, busy politicking or screwing or feuding just trying to find a decent cup of coffee. They're our grounding influence, in their messy humanity, in their enmities and in their friendships and in their love perhaps most of all. They're good people. And, you know, also, they learn to fight hand-to hand, they fly space-fighters, and they do, sometimes, blow shit up real good. Because this is a world that fights slow, real wars in space, where getting everyone in the same place at the same time is hard, but throwing a bunch of kilometers-long railgun slugs at them once you do is reasonably easy. Deep Black has more of a focus on the xeno-culture than its predecessor, but worry not. It's still full of tense space-navy warfare, and harsh, kinetic and bloodily immediate combat, on the "ground" and in the air - all described with compulsive prose that leaves a taste of iron and gunpowder in your mouth.

Nbaro is as much of a joy to read as ever, incidentally. If you're here for competence-as-a-service, she can hook you up. There's a sense that she's grown more as a person than at the start of the first book. Here she's thrown into the deep end of trying to be a grown-up officer in what's definitely not a space navy (it absolutely is).Buried beneath watch reports and Science! and trying to fly a space-fighter and maybe also learn to be an engineer and and and. But underneath that is a vulnerability and a humanity that show us she's not just a hyper-competent plot-magnet. She's someone trying to understand what's going on, what she wants, and where her friends and her career fit in a world slowly tilting out of the known, and into something different, whether or not it's better. I've always liked her for being intelligent and brave, but seeing her run into the edges of her own personality, and need to think things through, was a delight - working on her own need to be at the front, to be seen and a hero, and yet also somehow not end up dead. And she's surrounded by some delightful supporting characters. Including the mostly-not-that-bad shipmind AI, and also her long term crush who may reciprocate her feelings, and her roommate, who has her own problems. The book wants to spend more time with some than others, but I liked the way it dealt with the issues it did have time to explore - love, loss, and dealing with the sometimes permanent consequences of a life spent at hazard. I would've liked to give them all a little more room to breathe - sometimes there's a cavalcade of names and faces and they don't get as much flavour as I'd prefer, in between the world-building and the world-exploding. But that said, the book's already big enough, and honestly I was always going to want more anyway.

The story? Well. If I can paraphrase Blackadder, it twists and turns like a...twisty turny thing. I will say that you naval warfare fans and you ground-pounders, there's plenty for you. But there's romance in here too, little sparks of joy in the dark. There's tense negotiation and catharsis and blood on the decks. There's epic space battles, and sometimes there's just training and coffee and trying to make it to the next thing before you fall over. There's being the one who shows up, the one who cares. This is high concept space opera, with a gritty feel to it, a feel of flight decks stained with oil and blood, but with some smart ideas hiding behind the explosions. This is, in short, a fine sequel, and a fine conclusion to the series.

P.S. I will say that there was some nice extra context made available in Beyond the Fringe reviewed last time, which I encourage everyone to give a read. It's not necessary but it certainnly adds some interesting facets to an already complex tale.

Beyond the Fringe - Miles Cameron

Beyond the Fringe is a collection of short stories by Miles Cameron, set in the Arcana Imperii universe. The mainline entry in the series, Artifact Space was a rollicking space adventure, with some deep world-building and strong characterisation, married to a plot that ramped up in a hurry and ended with me reading later at night than I should've been.  These stories take place in the same universe, butt with different characters, and in different places.  That said, most of them centre around the world of "New Texas", which seems to be getting rather expansionist, and also seems to feel like it can challenge the existing socio-political and interstellar commercial order. Why it thinks that is another matter entirely, one slowly revealed over the course of these vignettes.

I will say, up front, that I had a great time with each of these stories. There are five in the collection, and if I remember correctly, two were published already. Each has a different focus. From bloody massacre in the face of a New Texas revolution, through espionage, tradecraft and violence in dealing with a defector, and out the other side into the gracefully deadly ballet of space warfare. I won't say there's something for everyone - it's a little less cozy than you might expect - but if there's a military tinge to the SF here, that's fine if you like that sort of thing. And the stories themselves are lean, incisive work, without much in the way of narrative flab.

I think my favourite may be Tradecraft, which follows an agent of the human polity as she potters about her day, gathering information and selling luxury goods to the locals. Until someone puts down a red flag, and she has to drop everything to find and protect a (potential) defector with some very high stakes indeed. It's a story that emphasises the slow adrenaline of espionage - there's a soupcon of Le Carre in here somewhere - but backs up the long shots of preparation and discussion with some explosive moments of action which are kinetic and bloody in equal measure.

That said, there's another which explores the claustrophobic world of another human polity through its navy. Three ships diving through the darkness, on a mission of great importance. Probably. Unless what they're doing isn't what it seems. This one looks more at the enemies of the DHC, the central human power of the mainline story. If the DHC are a futuristic Venice, their opponent feels like something different - possibly there's a flavour of China there. In any case, this is a claustrophobic tale of betrayal, conspiracy and what happens when you let off a handgun in a confined space. 

I don't want to spoil any of the stories here; I think they're great at adding flavour and context to a universe that we're used to only seeing from one angle. That they're all also snappy sci-fi adventures is a bonus. That they sneak in some big ideas when nobody's looking, that's something else again. If you're a fan, this is a collection you'll want to pick up sooner rather than later.

The Daughters' War - Christopher Buehlman

Alright, up front, this is one of my favourite books of the year. Its a thoughtful paean on the horrors of war. It's a story of what family is and what it means. It's a means of exploring and understanding grief, and conflict, and trust, and faith. It's a story about kicking goblin arse, and a story of war with an unapologetic, harrowing darkness to it, a razor edge that makes sure you know you're bleeding. It's a tough read, no doubt, but also one that made me think and feel, and explore a little more what it means to be, well, human. It's a book that can be brilliantly funny, understatedly smart, and emotionally devastating in a handful of pages.

Anyway. That's probably telling you that I quite liked it. And I did! It's worth noting that it's a prequel to Buehlman's The Blacktongue Thief, but I'd say it could happily be read as a standalone. And it's very tonally distinct from that story, with an interlocutor whose perspective is very different to that of the previous novel, and in a different time and place entirely. Decades before, during the last Goblin war, which ripped apart a continent.

Our protagonist is Galva, a young woman who has defied her family to go to war. It helps that her family are one of the pre-eminent noble families of her kingdom, and it helps that two previous wars with Goblins have savagely lowered the number of men available to, well, fight wars - so now the military is heavily populated by women. Incidentally, the story does delve into the socio-political issues this causes, with a minority of rich men struggling to come to grips with the idea that their command structure is now populated mostly by women, many of whom both aren't taking any of their crap, and also are looking to step up and replace the existing hierarchy pretty soon now.

But anyway, Galva. Those of you who read The Blacktongue Thief may recognise her from there, but here she's twenty years younger, and it shows. This Galva is blunt, but thoughtful. She struggles to reach out and make human connections, but also seems very incentivised to make them - trying to be a little less self contained, looking for, if not romance, at least peace and comfort during a conflict that means life is likely to be cut short at any moment. Galva is also well trained and dangerous, though not yet a hardened killer - she has an innocent side to her, slowly calloused by the sheer brutality of what she's exposed to. But she's also sweet, compassionate, and probably not going to put a sword in you unless you deserve it. Her struggle to really understand people is something that gives her startling vulnerability, even when she's slogging through mud, falling headlong into the horrors of war, and marching with magical war-ravens (read and, well, find out). I mean...I don't want to go on about this exactly, but as a protagonist, she's pitch-perfect, drawing us in, letting us empathise and sympathise, and showing us not only the best and worst of her world but what it means and how it feels. She does also kick serious butt, but her emotions are there, her humanity is there to make us feel the raw nature of the events she's embroiled in. In summary, Galva is wonderfully realised here, and if you've seen her before, then this adds a rich texture to her previous appearance - and if not, well, she's still great.

This is a war story, and I will say that the Goblins, as primary antagonists, are brutal. This is not a happy-go-lucky book. It's laced with blood and tragedy, and you know what by the end I absolutely loathed these creatures as much as Galva does. Buehlman manages to make them repulsive while also giving the, a life and culture of their own, it's just one that sits at a solid ninety-degrees to our own (actually, since they can't abide straight lines, probably at eighty-five degrees). They're viciously intelligent, brutal, and horrifying in equal measure. And every battle (and there are a few) is viscerally felt, bloody, uncompromising in the grit and sweat and horror. But this is also a world that plays with triumph and with subtler emotions - the grief, for example, that an equestrian nation feels when its horses are cut down by an engineered plague, laced with a need for vengeance, and sorrow. 

Anyway. Maybe I haven't sold you with all that. So I'll say this. The Daughter's War is a war story, a story of family, born and made, a story of horrors and a story of love that could light the stars. It's a story that you'll want to tear through, a story that you won't want to end, an story that will make you feel. Go and get a copy as soon as you can, you won't regret it.

Back next week!

 Everyone here is ill right now so we'll try againnnext week!

Scorpio - Marko Kloos

Scorpio is a new novel by Marko Kloos, who has found fame for his Frontlines series of military sci-fi, which I've reviewed favourably in the past. It's set in the same universe as those stories, but in an entirely different place, and from an entirely different perspective. 

And you know what, not to give the game away, but it's a good time. There's some gnarly, thoroughly visceral action, that Kloos writes with an immediacy and intimate tension that will leave you sweating. The story cracks along pretty swiftly, and I found myself unwilling to put the book down while I was finding out what happened next - which then led to the next thing happening, and so on. And the main character (more on her momentarily) is believably young and  often out of her depth, whilst also being competent, brave, and driven to succeed at doing what she loves.

Speaking of Alex. Alex Archer is a colonist on Scorpio, reaching for the dizzy old-age of twenty-one, in a future where humanity has embraced the stars. Unfortunately for Alex, the stars fought back. Her home was obliterated eight years previously by hostile entities known as "Lankies". As the story opens, the few hundred survivors have been buttoned up in a hardened installation known as The Vault for over eight years. Children have been born not knowing any other way of life, while outside their deep dark hole in the ground, those who devastated their world have turned it into a toxic hellscape unfit for human life. Much of the initial setup is Alex familiarising us with this world she lives in, one where the only thing keeping the lights on at home are dangerous "salvage runs" from the safety of their hidden vault, diving into the broken remnants of the thriving colony that existed eight years before. There's a claustrophobia inherent to the text in those pages, as well as a more literal one - she spends quite a lot of time inside an armoured vehicle on the way to a salvage site, or outside in horrible weather surrounded by unbreathable air, with the unseen possibility of alien-monster-related-disaster lurking ominously just out of shot. We can see in her a woman trying hard to build as much of a life as she can, to take joy in small things - like having a particular flavoured ration bar - that we might skip over ourselves. But while those things are beautiful, they're also small, and you can feel Alex, and her team, fighting the ragged edge of a losing war against time. And that edge is crumbling away beneath them, taking a toll that's physical as well as mental.  Still, Alex is a smart, personable protagonist, one we can easily sympathise with, who is doing her best to hold things together while the world crumbles around her - with her team, and her dog.

The dog, incidentally, is lovely. He gets to go outside in an APC because he's bene trained ot sniff out the aliens that snuffed out Alex's world. So now a woman and her dog ride out with salvage teams, keepinmg watch for extra-terrestrial terrors alongside the more mundsane ones of simple survival. Her buddy is a very good boy indeed, and Kloos manages to write them a bond that will be familiar to anyone with a beloved pet of their own. He's a working dog though, and takes it seriously - but Alex and her boy are in the mix together, always. There's opportunity there to give little dashes of kinbdness, of humanity, to the cast at large in their canine interactions - and the dog is also a proper character (indeed, a Proper Character!) in his own right. As a re the supporting cast, mostly surviving military grunts, who banter with Ash and each other, and try to figure out what they'll do next as and when something goes wrong on their latest dive into hell itself. I would've liked more time with the crew, this being a fairly short book, but I will say that I felt like I knew them as much as Alex did, by the time it ended.

The story? Ah, well, no spoilers. Being a new series in a new place, it takes awhile to spin up, but I think that the high-wire tension, the rising dread, and the aforementioned claustrophobic feel probably help with that. And when things do kick off, Kloos' writing absolutely shines. He can write combat that feels like you can hear the com-chatter in your ear, like the blood running out of a wound is your own, makes you feel the lives and eaths and last-moment defeats and searing comeback victories in those moment-by-moment firefights. High-stakes, deeply personal, and absolutely riveting.

In any event, this is likely to be popular with anyone coming off Frontlines and looking for another work with a similar vibe. And for everyone else, I'll say that this is a story with a well-crafted protagonist, an accessible prose that snaps you through pages, moment-to-moment stakes that always keep things feeling like they matter. Also there's massive aliens, auto-cannons, armoured vehicles, and, of course, a Very Good Dog. It's a fun read, and as ever, I look forward ot seeing where Kloos goes next.

The Blacktongue Thief - Christopher Buehlman

Well, this was a fun one. I'd heard good things before I started The Blacktongue Thief, which may have set my expectations a little high. But I will say that the story delivered. It also managed to do so by being character driven, with a plot that ticked along between suspense, exploration of the world and the motives of the characters, and cathartically explosive action scenes, and did so with metronomic precision. I had a lot of feelings reading this story, but at absolutely no stage was I bored, which I have to say is high praise.

Anyway. Kinch. Kinch is a thief. Very explicitly a thief. Employed by a Guild, who amongst other things, illicitly train people to become better thieves. And also, conveniently, charge them a large sum of money in order to do so. A debt which can be brutally, magically enforced. Kinch is charming, thoughtful, romantic, and also opportunistic and ruthless. The Guild, on the other hand are, if I can be permitted the odd expletive, a grey-faced band of total arseholes, whose weapons-grade corporate malevolence only becomes slightly more obvious in the person of their magical assassin enforcers. Kinch, something of an independent spirit, is not one of the Guild's favourite people - and they aren't any friend of his. But as long as he keeps paying off his debt, he's got the chance for that one big score that will leave him free and clear.

Which, for Kinch, would be a novelty. He's part of an expansionist power that still sees his recently conquered people as an underclass. That power is in a state of near-perpetual war with, well, goblins. Not the squishy, chaffy goblins you see loitering around other books either; these goblins are monstrous. So on the one hand there's a state which has conquered you in order to use your manpower and resources to propagate its war. And on the other hand, that war is one of survival in the face of an enemy which regards people as something roughly akin to cattle, and has already launched several invasions in living memory in order to fill its larders. So, you know, Kinch isn't having a great time. 

But for all his lows, Kinch is fun. He's self aware, and incisively witty. He can also be surprisingly vulnerable, even while he's figuring out whether he's sincere in his own right. And  if he's not exactly a hero, he is innately sympathetic, someone struggling to get out from under the varied thumbs of The Man. Between that and his penchant for the odd knife-fight and desire to just, well, keep out of things, the protagonist is in a similar boat to the reader, the winds of fate blowing him just where he doesn't want to go. 

Which is a disservice really. Because I can't quite capture what it is that comes off the page when you read it in his voice. Possibly its that he has one, or that its shifts from cynical detachment to a kind of deep truth via bursts of existential horror in a way that feels very real. Kinch isn't the mighty-thewed barbarian hero, in fact he'd probably not know a thew at fifty yards, but then again, neither are we. And like us, he comes across as complicated, as a bubbling stew of past mistakes and remembered triumphs, a gumbo of regrets and passion. Buehlman has a real eye for character work, and his protagonist here just...comes off the page, and starts shaking you down for a beer somewhere around the third page, eerily reminiscent of that uncle who still owes you a twenty from ten Christmases ago, but he made you laugh so you're happy never to see it again as long as you see him again.

Suffice to say, this is Kinch's story, and it has some...moments. He's about to meet someone who will change his world. Expand it, destroy it, that's a little more unclear. But, to take a moment, what a world it is. There's the high level stuff, of course, a clash of empires that's also a clash of species who regard each other as food animals or inhuman monsters, respectively. But there's also a raw energy and worn texture to the whole thing, from the part-reconstructed buildings in cities recovering from war, to sublte (and less subtle) magic and its wielders running around and doing, well, horrible things to each other (and sometimes people around them). There's people just trying to live their lives, and there's monsters, human and otherwise, in the woods and in the mountains. There's a history to this world, told in the lost fingers, in the empty places at the hearth, told in the way that women significantly outnumber men, and in the number of those women who carry injuries - and what that looks like for societies which you can feel struggling to adapt away from a male-centric model of power. There are old tragedies writ small if we look around , because they've been placed artfully there for us to see. And it's done in a space that feels like it exists, just one ocean over, and a little in a dream - or a nightmare.

What I'm saying is, the worldbuilding is bloody good.

The story...well, I can't comment on it without spoilers, honestly! But I will say that it spends a while laying deep groundwork, which it rewards with some beautifully set up emotional results, with resolutions that left me feeling raw, and bloody, like someone coming away from an attempted murder. But also a little lighter, like someone hearing horses in the early morning light. That's the story. It's high stakes, it's tightly plotted and kinetically paced, and honestly I powered through it over a couple of nights and was desperate to reach the end but also very sad to have finished it. 

So yeah, this is a good one - go pick up a copy!

Disquiet Gods - Christopher Ruocchio

I've been talking about Ruocchio's series for years. He does good work, building out a complicated universe filled with a diverse range of factions, weird and wonderful tech, and people that live inside that space. Of course, the centrepiece of the story is Hadrian Marlowe, once an arse-kicking knight of the Solar Imperium, and before that all kinds of things, including a runaway son, a gladiator, and a general troubleshooter for his somewhat decrepit polity. Of course that kind of troubleshooting invovles warfare with aliens, blowing up clandestine research facilities, and tracking down technological abominations, so there's a breadth of coverage there. And now, he's back in this latest volume, Disquiet Gods.

Anyway. Marlowe. He's been through the wringer the last few books, and that doesn't really change here. He's still rocking that penchant for sticking his neck out, for taking risks, for saying not-quite the right thing to not-quite the right person. There's a sense to him of someone determined to walk away, to not be seen as a hero any longer, to fade into the west, as it were, and live outside the shadow of his own legend. This is, however, quite a long book, so I think you can all expect ithis plan not to work out exactly as he hopes. That said, this is Marlowe with a stake in events. He's trying to build something personal now, trying to look at his relationships, his family and friends, those that have survived, and keep them safe, keep them alive. Whether that's the best thing for them or not is rather open to question, but still. This version of Hadrian has matured enough to recognise his own weaknesses, and recovered sufficiently from the trauma laid out behind him in order to at least function. He's someone whose life has derailed maginificently from its expectations, and Hadrian is, if not resigned to that, at least comfortable in it; perhaps, as the story begins, too much so. Still, after the lavishly wrought inner worlds of earlier stories, its enjoyable to see him on something of an upswing.

In this he's helped by his relationships, with those surviving acquaintainces he has. As time passes for Hadrian Marlowe, we the reader risk growing a little disconnected from events, as the Patrician Marlowe, rendered long-lived by science and caste, outlives those other characters we loved so well - even when they don't get disembowelled, assassinated or otherwise fall to misadventure. Still, there's a few familiar faces in here to enliven the spirit, in terms of friends and enemies both and a swathe of new people whom we're learning about alongside our protagonist, and whom, as ever, the author draws with a rich and vivid passion to his prose that makes it both believable and great fun. Because while this is a story about galactic empries, about war between the stars, about atrocities and super-science and the inner heart of humanity and their story, it's also a apean to the person, to people, to the value that one clear vision can have if it finds itself lifted up by those around, about how no-one is an island. ABout human need and folly and loss and fear, yes, but about our strengths, our compassion and friendhsip and love for one another and how tht can make and break both people and empires. 

And if you're not into that, hmm. Well. Okay. The story lives on. The universe lives on, filled with horrendously alien aliens, who would like nothing better thn to eat you for their own aracane reasons (or, you know, for fun). Filled with people who've handed over more or less of themselves to machinery. To those who claim to live forever, flitting from one re-animated body to the next. Filled with horrors to blight the soul, absolutely, or even to slowly wrap it in turgid chains of protocol and a fog of formality. Of Empire, not without ambition, but with an impending mortality, Byzantium on the wane. But also a universe with laughter, with vital, fierce people who can and will change the world. And that's what makes the stoy, I think, because the world feels complicated, liek we see a small piece of a wider mosaic, and even what we see is filled with life and colour and movement and other stories just out of frame. It's a world that has textruee and heft, in a story which demands your attention. 

Speaking of....well. I won't delve into the tale here because it gives too much away really. But this is the beginning fo the end, I think, you can feel different voices building to a crescendo, you can feel institutions tottering, can feel choices being laid down which will drive a path to ruin, or something more. It's a story of fast-paced escapes, duels, unlikely alliances, extremely likely betrayals, and more than a little love. And for that, with that, it builds a story worth reading. It's not all fast-paced space battles; and though some of the more introspective pieces feel a little laboured, or occasionally  felt suspect or made me uncomfortable
, there's still a thoughtful, compelling story here, which will keep you turning pages until it's done. 

Return of the Jedi: From a Certain Point of View - Saladin Ahmed et al.

This is another in the sequence started way back in 2017, bringing you perspectives on the classic film trilogy from the perspective of various bit players. Those include a variety of Imperials stationed on the moon of Endor and beyond, bounty hunters, monsters, unfortunate civilians, and beyond. The idea is to provide some context and flavour to the world, to look at the adventures of Leia, Luke, Han et al through another lens. To emphasise that those other perspectives are just as important, in a wider universe.

And I'll say this, this is a collection with a diversity of perspectives, gods and monsters and heroes and unrepentant villains. There's something for everyone to enjoy, whether you like your hard-edged heroines, your scoundrels and killers, or the more familiar cast of the working stiff just trying to make it by while people keep waving laser swords and doomsday lasers in your face. I admit I have something of a penchant for the latter, but they all have their charms. And its a credit to the authors that they can show us different sides of characters we only saw in person, or ask us to interpret their actions a little differently, now we're inside their head. And enjoyably for Star Wars, this layer of personality, this extra flavour, makes for a more complex universe. Sure, the baddies are still bad. And the goodies are still good. But there's circumstance and story and history and all the rich tapestry of choice that brings not just the main characters, but all the people we see to the point of Return of the Jedi. And we get to see it here. 

Now, there's a fair point to be made that, well, do we really need to see another performer from the Max Rebo band? Does anyone care what blob-head-alien-in-the-crowd is doing there? And you know what...some of the time you're going to read one of these stories, and it'll be a miss for you. But there's enough here that maybe the next one will be exactly the flavour you need to pass the time, or the one in the collection that will light up your soul. 

And having said that, I think there's some good stuff here. Family stories. Redemption stories. Flat out adventure romps. More starfighter combat, fast and visceral and deadly, than you can shake a stick at. The ominous shadow of a super-moon that is something else. And of course, the knowledge that we know what's coming, but we don't know how we're going to get there this time, or why it may matter, differently, to others than our movie heroes. This is a paean to the idea that other people matter. That the greats are who they are because they're surrounded by other people living and working and supporting them, lifting them up with every choice, and being, in their own way, heroes in their own lives.  

This isn't a quiet book. It's full of blood and thunder and rousing speeches. But it's also an introspective one, which throws out some fun ideas to explore in the Star Wars expanded universe. Are we any worse off in the films for not hearing about Mon Mothma's corps of historians of the rebellion? Patently not. But they have an interesting story, and a protagonist who is ready to ask questions about whether what her leaders consider important actually...is. And if some of these stories are cracking yarns, others are looking around and using the Star Wars lens to ask some searching questions about us, and what we're willing to do, willing to accept. 

It's a solid collection, this. If you're a Star Wars fan, and want to get a little something more for your next viewing of Return of the Jedi, or you just want to delve deeper into the rich, diverse universe that Star Wars has on tap - then this is the one for you.

Wicked Problems - Max Gladstone

Wicked Problems is the second in Max Gladstone's Craft Wars sequence, which builds off another series of his, the Craft Sequence. I'll offer full disclosure by saying that there's never been a Craft book of his that I didn't like. Something about the blending of magic, gods and warfare with the more prosaic linguistics of consulting and attorneys, the mix of the high fantasy with the low familiar, really hits the spot. Gladstone also isn't shy about pointing out social issues, framed inside his fantasy; you're as like to see a necromantic lich lord called out for his unsound environmental provisions, as groundwater drains from a nearby lake broken by spellfire, as to find a high finance firm using precognitive worship to try and spot trends in the market. It's a smart conceit, and one I've always found deeply enjoyable. 

That has not, honestly, changed here. This is a second book in a second series, so I would say that if you're coming into the story fresh, there are probably better starting points. The original sequence pretty much works as standalones, but Wicked Problems needs you to have read its predecessor, at a minimum, to get to grips with it. And the additional context from the other series isn't a bad idea either. But if you're coming in as a fan, as someone who already knows the characters and the world, then let me tell you, this is a story which will reward close reading. It isn't afraid to ask hard questions of its characters - morally, ethically, and occasionally through all too literal sacrifice. It wants to know whether or not you're willing to take action in the face of mounting catastrophe, and it's also willing to entertain the idea that the specific action you might take may also be, you know, wrong. Wonderfully, this is a story which looks at two groups of people trying to save the world from onrushing cataclysm - they're just finding that their means of doing so, and their own sense of what is allowed in order to make that happen, are at odds. No cackling villains here (well, maybe one or two), mostly people doing the best that they can with the information available, and fucking up from time to time. Now granted, those times may or may not involve extradimensional entities and the occasional fireball, but hey.

And the characters themselves...well, if you're here you already know most of them. What they've already lived through, the decisions and consequences they've had to deal with Everyone on the page is smart, thoughtful, and willing to do a lot of things. Some of them are cynics, some are idealists, but they're there, looking back out at us, filled with raw pain and utter joy. There's families trying to live together on opposite sides, and students and teachers at the edge of a knife. There's golems and pirates and the occasional god, and say it however many times you like, they all feel like people to me, Like they could step off the page, grab a beer and start arguing about arcane theory and how it, say, allows you to use lava monsters to run geothermal plants. They're people, even the ones who aren't. Maybe especially the ones who aren't. They're dangerous and clever and hurt, and they're always willing to surprise both their antagonists and the reader at the last second. 

I don't have a lot to say about the story, except that it'll grab you at the back of the neck and not let go. It's going to keep you there, turning pages until far too late at night, as you try and figure out who is going to survive, what they plan to do, and whether or not they're right. It's a story that asks questions and throws out answers for you to look over yourself, to decide where you sit, where your sympathies are. It's a story that compels and fascinates, blood and metal and love and thunder. It's another marvellous book from Gladstone, another excellent Craft story, and if you're a fan, you should go pick it up, very soon.

 Back (again) next week!

We're all sick this week sadly, review to follow next week!

The Book That Broke The World - Mark Lawrence

As long time readers know, I've always been a fan of Mark Lawrence. He's got a knack for writing a richly imagined, immersive universe. For making the stage feel like a real, lived in place. And for putting characters on it who you can feel. Who are working on their own wants and needs, not just marching through the narrative motions. A knack for stories that ask big questions, and challenge the reader to go on the journey to, if not find the answer, at least find an answer. Which brings us to The Book That Broke The World. 

In part, this is a book about The Library. Not a library, but the library. It squats on its world, pulling in knowledge and focus like a gravity well. It's a monstrous thing, a collection of more knowledge than anyone can bear. Constructed over aeons, pulling in different peoples, different species, from all across its geography. The library squats within a mountain, and plumbs its depths. And while its physically imposing, its cultural weight is larger. Wars are fought for the knowledge of the library. People broken and forced out of the city. Which changes hands again, and again, and again. On a long enough timeline, the library draws everything to it, and then sets it aflame. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is open to debate. But the library itself has a warm, cosy, only slightly horrifying feel to it. As people step between different rooms, which can be feet or miles across. As they uncover secret knowledge, and terrifying defence mechanisms, those people step deeper into the space which is at once confined and limitless, chambers going ever deeper into the bedrock, each turn and each open door promising more understanding, greater knowledge. Greater power. And that's a promise which in this world carries costs.  The story isn't afraid to explore those, looking at the systemic oppression enacted by those in control, at one time or another. At the efforts to make changes, gradual or otherwise, violent or otherwise. It's a text that gives us a world about which it often seems fiercely angry, a world where knowledge is available if you're willing to kill for it, where keeping people down is a survival strategy and also inevitably ends in blood and fire. From the dark tunnels of mines worked by slaves, pulling out layers of shattered civilisations, to iron shelves in the library, torn apart by murderous automatons, there's layer after layer of history, of politics of compromise of blood. This is a world in thrall to its past, unwilling or unable to walk away from it. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is one of the questions this book is asking, as it shows you the consequences of both knowledge and ignorance (and perhaps, quietly, understanding).

We get to see some of our friends from the previous book once again. Livira and Evar are back, each one looking for the other, in their own way. Something Lawrence does well is show us characters changing, not just telling us about it. So we can see Livira, marked by her actions in the previous story, trying to find a way home, find a way back to Evar, to hold tight to a connection that might slip away forever. Whether she's willing to bear the costs of doing that is uncertain. But like Evar, she finds her family in those around her, and you can feel her becoming something more by osmosis. Evar, of course, has his own family, from hardened killers to schemers and back around again, victims of ancient trauma that they struggle with every day. He's a person willing to guide and be guided, growing from a lost boy into a leader, but still holding to curiosity, to vulnerability, to a quiet hurt that draws sympathy. They're both delightful in their empathy for others and fierce love for each other, and sympathetic in their struggle against their environment, their circumstances, and their struggle against antagonists that include malevolent ghosts, automatons, and, of course, other people. But this book also gives us a breath of fresh air in Celcha, someone brought up as a slave, mining knowledge, crushed into despair that hides a lively intelligence, and a strength of feeling likely to shatter worlds. Her journey, along with her brother, is a searingly painful one with flashes of joy, of understanding and belonging - and it's also a story of suffering, of the conflict between becoming what you hate and fighting back against it. Celcha is fiery, unyielding, thoughtful, and every page she's on is better for it.

The story. Well. No spoilers. But this is Lawrence at his best. Weaving strands of narrative across different moments of time and space, across multiple books, setting up convergences, letting people make choices that move them toward fraught, occasionally bloody conclusions. There's more action here than you can shake a stick at, and a slyly leering horror, and on the other side, there's the best of people, coming together to try to make something better. And, of course, the big questions - like how much knowledge is enough, how much is too much, is there such a thing, and should we let other people decide that for us, even if they look like they know what they're doing? It's a story that wants to give the reader room to think, while pacing the story so that you have to run to keep up at the same time. This is smart, wonderfully written fantasy that asks big questions about the kind of world we want, and about ourselves. It's also bloody good fun. So as ever, I thoroughly recommend it - though you could stand to read the first book in the series beforehand. Anyway, absolutely brilliant book, go, read.

Back next week!

 We're away this week, we'll be back next week!

Mother of Learning is a little outside of my fantasy comfort zone. It’s a progression fantasy. That is to say, it’s one where the protagonist explicitly gains power over time, going from squishy novice to, typically, all powerful wizard of doom. And, in fairness, the protagonist here certainly has the opportunity to do tha> Zorian starts the story as a student at a pre-eminent mage academy, but definitely just a student - and one with, it must be said, something of a high opinion of himself, whether thats deserved or not. But he’s about to have the opportunity to learn more - both in terms of skills, and in terms of himself.

The Zorian we meet on page one is…well, I described him to a friend as “incredibly annoying”. He has a self satisfied self importance, dovetailed with a sense of having bucked his own family to become a mage-student. He’s the youngest child of a family with several other famous mages in it, most of whom he can’t stand, with a seemingly absent father, a deeply manipulative mother, and a younger sister who starts her day by stealing his books and jumping on his chest. If his home life feels toxic, still Zorian seems embedded in his own past and prejudices. He’s determined to be an island, determined to succeed by force of will, determined to do so by striding forward in the future and beat his head against it, alone.

The first part of the book is about that Zorian. About his day as he sets out for the academy. About his irritation with his sister and his mother’s schemes. About arriving, about going to class, about a gently simmering resentment of his own friends. And about how that Zorian runs into an outside context problem. About how he starts to think differently, feel differently. 

Because Zorian is stuck in time. 

He wakes up again, and again, and again. And steps through the same period of time, again, and again, and again. But he can make other choices, can decide who to be, who to help, what to do. And of course, what to learn. Over, and over again.And so we see Zorian, changing. Becoming kinder, more compassionate, more aware of himself, yes, but slowly, resentfully almost, of others, He grows as a person, not just in throwing fireballs and shattering steel, but in how he relates to people, and to at least some of his family. 

Of course, it’s not all a journey of self discovery. Because there ar either people living their lives in the loop. And some of them know it’s a loop. And some of them very much don’t want times to change. Zrian has unreliable friends he hasn’t met yet, and unknowable enemies who won’t be averse to killing him over and over again, if they learn he’s in the loop repeating and aware. Because this is a story about how a city dies, or is saved. About how a conspiracy is formed and triumphs, or is defeated. A story of psychic rats and talking spiders, of mana fountains in the sky, and of magical schools built over the homes of monsters and martyrs. The world is context for Zorian’s struggle - though we mostly see it in asides, in deflections.We see old noble houses, crime families, great monsters. It’s a world whose perspective is very limited, as Zorian haunts his academy, and learns and learns and repeats and repeats and learns. But what flesh hangs from the bones has promise, and II hope we see more. 

In the end, this is a story of progress. Of Zorian, stepping through life after life after life, learning how to act better, live better, be better. And maybe throw a fireball or two. And trying to stay alive. This is a story that slowly, slowly builds an unsympathetic protagonist into a hero, and slowly, slowly builds the stakes around him to make us care. But it works. It’s compelling, page turning fantasy by the end, and a story I’d like to hear more about. I look forward to reading the sequel - and if you’re a progression fantasy reader, this one’s a good read.