The Devils - Joe Abercrombie

 

I've been sat on this one for a while, and honestly, I am so excited to finally talk about it. Because The Devils is both a new direction for Abercrombie - a fresh setting, characters we've never seen before, a chance to lay out a story unwebbed from his First Law series - and also absolute vintage in terms of quality of writing. Its sharp, funny, and terribly, wonderfully human. So if you want the one line version, if you're wondering if The Devils is worth your money, then basically, yes.

The world, then. Well, it feels equal parts familiar and strange. A medieval Papacy exists. Constantinople stands athwart a crossroads of land and sea. There are knights, marching around like they own the place. Worthy peasants and more than a few priests. But in between the cracks of the familiar, we find the strange. There are wizards raising the dead and throwing the occasional fireball in service to Imperial masters. There's werewolves skulking about. Constantinople is run by a nobility that purportedly fuelled its power with blood magic. And there's the omnipresent threat of the Elves, of course. Because while humanity is always its own enemy, here it's only the second-worst enemy it has. Every so often, the Elves surface from the lands held under their sway, and go on a rampage of murder, property damage, and bespoke cannibalism. Abercrombie takes these differences, and weaves them through the tapestry of the world so seamlessly that sometimes you won't even notice that they're there. Like that elf. That just tried to eat you. From the rich, ornate halls of Papal Italy, through dark forests and, at one point, several ships, and all the way to the end of the (human) world, we see a world rich in flavour and texture, a place that feels lived in and real, whilst also slipping in wonders and horrors from beyond imagination. It's a heady mixture, that helps lift up what is in many ways a journey novel.

Of course, it doesn't do that alone. There are...well, there's a lot of characters, and more than a few get their own points of view. The Papacy, you see, is putting together a team to return a lost princess to the edge of the world. Which may save the world, or at least buy it a bit of time. But when your princess may not be...exactly...princess material, and when the city she's meant to rule over is run by people who aren't super keen to have her back, its time to build a team with special skills to get her back there. Like the A-Team, if the A-Team consisted of a werewolf, a necromancer, an immortal warrior, an elf,  a Jill-of-all-trades seemingly of all trades, an actual elf (minus cannibalism) and a vampire. And if they all had terrible attitudes, leaned toward homicide as a solution to all of their problems, and performed their duties out of resentful self-preservation rather than any actual zeal. So...not so much like the A-Team, I guess. But they're a wonderful set, nonetheless. The werewolf, Vigga, is a personal favourite, a person who takes "live in the now" to its extreme, and has trouble remembering what she's up to and why, and so leans into relishing every second of it - in between moments of raw human guilt. She's alive, passionately so, and that pours off the page. I was also partial to the invisible elf, Sunny, who is sufficiently unmemorable that she an wander about in all sorts of places that she perhaps shouldn't be. Her gentle slow-burning romance with the ersatz princess is a delight, both of them trying to figure out why the other one might seem to like them, with a lot of will-they-won't-they and more than one moment of comical misunderstanding based on them trying to unravel each others emotional intelligence form first principles. But the whole cast are wonderful,. They're fun to read, fun to root for, and have that blade-tinged dialogue that Abercrombie is famous for. Importantly, watching them work together, or, well, at cross-purposes, is constantly fun. You can tear through he pages wanting to see what this band is going to do next, because it's almost always not what you expect, and only sometimes because they screwed something up! Or blew something up! Or both!

And the story itself. Well, it crackles with energy. It's a story of a journey, mostly. Going form point A to point B with, well, quite a few stops and diversions in between (I shan't spoil them). And along the way, the characters go on a journey of their own, figuring out who their friends and enemies are, and who they want to be. It's probably a bit more....positive than you'd expect if you're used to the First-Law-iverse, and it's also heart-warmingly, acidly, charmingly funny, and at times emotionally raw and honest. At other times, it's doing banter and swordfights, basically for the fun of it. It's a story that knows where it's going, and trots along such that you have to keep turning pages to keep up, and suddenly it's four in the morning, and you're wondering whether you should sleep or just keep going and finish the whole thing. And when you do, you're coming off it feeling the catharsis of a well-crafted conclusion, and the sadness that you have to wait who knows how long for another book (though I gather they'll all be standalones).

This is, in short, Abercrombie at his best, and you should give it a try.

Descent - Marko Kloos

I've been talking up Marko Kloos for a while now, and at this point he's my go to recommendation for "military SF done right". He has a talent for action, for being able to make fighting on the ground seem visceral and bloody and deadly, and battle in space seem stately and messy and lethal. It has an honesty to it, an unflinching acceptance of people trying to do the right thing in a space where that can mean getting hurt, or killed. There's a sense that anyone can be a hero, and a careful caution against hero worship in the same package. And he does this while also being able to put you through an emotional wringer, both in combat and out. Wondering who will survive is one thing, but seeing how they relate to their friends, their families, building them up past ciphers into something more, with a payoff to match, takes talent - and Kloos has it in spades.

Descent is, honestly, proof of that. It spins us across four point s of view, all familiar from previous books in the series, and gives us a blend of personal connection, functional competence and superior firepower that proves quite compelling.

Take Aden. Once a member of an infamous political unit on the losing side of a cross-system war, all he wants to do now is keep his head down, fly trade runs with a crew who are becoming his friends, and forget the past. That past, unfortunately, is seeded throughout the world of the Palladium Wars series, and escaping it isn't often an option; in fact, reckoning with it may be Aden's only chance for a regular life. He's a thoughtful person, and we get to see that here, as he's quietly inserted as a deep cover operative into a movement looking to revive the nationalism of his homeworld. If he manages to figure out what's going on, and who's behind the surprisingly well funded terror group he's infiltrating, then he can go home happy, and alive. But managing to do that is going to be a real trick. Aden's scenes are often wonderfully tense, as he tries to get into the inner circle of the group without giving himself away. But all the more so because, as time goes on, he feels more empathy and sympathy for the, What side he'll be on by the end of the series remains open to question, but Aden can take us on a voyage of moral complexity without making it feel like drudgery - and the portrayal of his, ha, descent, into radical politics, off the back of seeing how poorly his people are being treated, is picture-perfect. 

He's not the only one of course. I always enjoy Idina, the combat soldier for the forces occupying Aden's world after their failed war of aggression. A peacekeeper, she always manages to be in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. And that gives her an excuse to blow some stuff up, often with extreme prejudice. That said, now Idina is running an extra-judicial snatch-squad, looking for the heads of the group that Aden is infiltrating, and things seem like they're a little murkier for her. She's still making the right calls, but the ground is shifting, as her team kicks in doors and works through the ethics of pre-emptive imprisonment, torture and execution without trial. It helps that Idina herself has a personal courage and moral centre that keeps her deeply sympathetic, and that when the chips are down, and she's almost out of ammo, she'll do the right thing.

If Idina is the heart of the story, Solveig is the soul. Instead of approaching conflict through the lens of battle armour or ship cannon, she's coming at it with a sharp suit from the boardroom. Her company, her family, seem to be entangled with the nationalist resistance, a group Solveig has no sympathy for. And we can watch as she slowly stretches her wings, takes hold of some of the company that her father is legally no longer allowed to run, and starts digging into both the past and the future. Solveig is a bright, fierce flame on the page, and her gently budding romance with a police detective is a quiet joy between more adrenaline-fuelled moments (though Solveig has her share). It's interesting to look at things outside a purely military perspective, and Solveig gives us another angle with cool precision over a deeper river of emotion that sometimes makes for a rather intense read.

And then there's Dunstan, who, fresh off being promoted and in charge of the weirdest, deadliest ECW boat in the history of space warfare, is now out on a fishing expedition. He's a solid lad, a good commander, and it's interesting to note that he keeps finding himself wanting to go back into the black rather than stay at home behind a desk with his family. That dilemma is approached with a maturity and compassion I thought was interesting, and I hope we see some more of that later on - though for now, he's mostly breaking out the cool space warfare gadgets. Which, to be fair, are pretty cool - Kloos has a good eye for space action, and knows how to eke out the tension for maximal emotional payoff.

And that's Descent, really, a book defined by its characters. We're here at an inflection point on their journey, as they all stumble down one slightly darker path or another, deciding who they are, and if that's who they want to be. And doing it against a backdrop of rapid-fire action that'll leave you desperately looking at the last page and wondering when the next book is coming out (or maybe that's me). In any case, it's a perhaps more deliberately paced moment in the series, but if you're a fan, still a damn good time.

Metal From Heaven - August Clarke

I'm at a loss with Metal From Heaven. It's passionate. It's bloody. It's personal. It's a song for the regular person in the face of oppressive systemic forces, a carmine hymn of revolution and sacrifice. And it's also a story of a lost person looking for a family, looking for truth and definition and love, sometimes, some way or another. There's a splash of magic in there too, of the kind that surrounds us every day, as well as the flashier sort.

That person is Marney Honeycutt. Marney is the child of workers brought in to work on a miracle substance, driving an industrial revolution, changing the world. But that substance, that mysterious metal, is changing them, changing their children, changing Marney. Making them sick. Making them better. Making them other. And in a sign of the story to come (unabashed in its exploration of revolutionary ideals), Marney's family, and everyone she knows, are murdered by snipers and strikebreakers when they protest and ask their employer for help. That inciting event is a hammer on Marney's life, a boulder thrown athwart a stream. it breaks her, and us along with her, and what they become to survive is someone very different indeed. It's worth taking a second to talk further about this, because the immediacy, the bloody-handed ruthlessness, the sense of place are all pitch-perfect here. The gruesome details are not spared, and the innocence and desire for change are such that you can taste them in the air, alongside the blood and gunpowder. This is a story that stares unflinching into the costs of things, and it's also, there's no way around it, an angry book, a book whose characters are all notable for the searing intensity of their needs and desires.

It's also a book that isn't afraid to look at women - what it means to be one, where the fault lines are, what the internal dialogue on that is. Sisters, daughters, mothers. They're the characters here. I'm struggling to think of more than one or two folks of another gender in the story at all. This is a story of and about women, and, on a grittier, somewhat sweatier, kinder level, a story about queer women specifically. There's more than a splash of sex, that's true, and it's written with a feverish energy that infects as you turn the pages, a desire that sweeps under the table and ends up in a passionate clinch on the floor of a closet somewhere. t's a book that approaches queer politics, then wraps that up n a silk shift carrying a Molotov cocktail. I genuinely can't talk about what this book is about, because it's about too much. There's the growth of a revolution and collective emancipation. There's more than one quietly fierce romance, and at least one that starts at knifepoint. There's conversation about power and how to wield it and what those in authority will do or not, and whether power itself is an amoral entity. And there's Marney, walking one page at a time toward the revenge she's wished for every day, balancing that against the life she may want to live, and the costs she may have to bear.

It's a bloody excellent book, basically, but it's also a high-energy high impact exploration of revolution-by-disaster-lesbians, and in that, in its rich world and tapestry of strange and unusual lives filled with love and lost and blood and mud and a passionate intensity that roars off the page, I'd say it makes a damn good read.