A Gamble of Gods - Mitriel Faywood

Full disclosure, the author asked me to read this one. But, if I'm honest, I probably would have anyway, because it combines a few things I really enjoy, and blends them up in a superlative package. There's the quick-witted, fast-mouthed swordsman, whose capacity to get into scrapes is matched only by his apparent skill at getting out of them. And the pensive, repressed scholar from a place where science has long since taken the role of magic, moving between worlds with hardly a thought, but torn from his place in the how and why of things, set adrift on the tides of circumstance. And the lady, mysterious, who walks beside them both, her internal struggles as fraught as those fought with sword and laser, carrying a power she doesn't entirely understand, and feelings she'll struggle to control.

This is A Gamble of Gods, and it's an absolute stormer of a debut, a charming, thrilling mix of science fiction and fantasy, where secret societies are running the universe behind the scenes, where a generations old conspiracy is unfolding, and where necromancy is as real, and as lethal, as a blaster bolt to the chest. But, to be up front about it, this isn't a po-faced text, filled with dour warnings and po-faced protagonists. It's a book filled with a rambunctious energy, a wry self-knowledge, and moments of on-the nose humour that made me laugh out loud more than once. It's a book which isn't afraid to dig into the emotional availability of its cast, to explore who they are, and why, and what they want; there's romance woven between the self-revelations and swordfights, the kind that balances teasing and the gentleness of emotional understanding with a soupcon of raw desire and fierce passion. 

This is a book which isn't afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, and I kind of love it for that.

It's also a book with a hell of a lot going on. It's spread across three main characters, and at least that many locations, including, well, London. The contemporary, British London that is, not some sort of future London in the clouds. And I'll say this, Faywood makes her London come alive. The streets are just the right kind of grey and misty, you can feel the edge of that damp cold coming into your bones as you trudge up Euston road to the office, hoping to stop at Pret for a coffee. The people have the same kind of fire and honesty and fragile bravery that you see every day at house parties and restaurant gatherings in the city. The world lives, and that's something of an accomplishment, because making somewhere that is real feel real on the page is something of a challenge. But London is joined by more exotic locales, never fear. The dark forests and palace politics, the witch-ridden geography, filled with old, deadly magics, is there too. And it feels just as plausible, just as real. And so does the purported utopia of SCIENCE(!), filled with dodgy characters of every description, whose motives are unclear and often downright Machiavellian, but who can put nanoprobes in the air, siphon data from anything, or build you an invisibility cloak. And some of them are the good guys. Maybe. Probably. 

Anyway. It's a story which is at once deadly serious, and doesn't take itself too seriously. A story which lets its characters have fun, and is fun, while also being an entertaining read, and one which kept me turning pages later into the night than I care to admit. And will probably do the same for you. Definitely worth a look!

Ocean's Echo - Everina Maxwell

Ocean's Echo is a science fiction romance novel from Everina Maxwell, whose Winter's Orbit I really enjoyed reading last year. For those of you familiar with that one: this story takes place in the same universe, but without any significant crossover in character or local setting. For those of you coming to this fresh: don't worry, it's a standalone, and you don't need to know anything going in to enjoy it. On which note: what even is it? Well, it's one part sci-fi mystery, delving for ancient relics and exploring the sociopolitical ramifications of exposing people to powers their society may not be prepared for. One part character study, exploring the emotional rocks, the trauma stricken, the self destructive - and the way those emotions, and the people they're wrapped around, can find meaning and feeling and purpose and love. It's a story laced through with action and (mis)adventure, crisis and moral choice, but it's also a story of two people reaching out expecting to be hurt, and finding each other. 

Speaking of the people, who are they? Well, one of them is Tennal. Tennal is, by his own admission, a disaster area. He's smart and funny and charming and socially adept. He can manipulate people (and does), he can read people (and does). He's also prone to making poor decisions. Or decisions which will cause the maximum amount of chaos, intentionally or otherwise. In a lot of ways, Tennal is a fuse, walking around bumping into a whole variety of lit matches. For all that, he's perhaps harder on himself than anyone. Tennal has a self image that is determined to accept and be honest about his worst qualities, but skates around his more positive ones, his live wire energy and enthusiasm, his passion and compassion, his love of family. Tennal is also running hard from being a poor little rich boy. His aunt is a high up member of planetary government, and Tennel is someone who will fight against the expectations of a path laid out for him. To some success, admittedly, but also...not. Anyway. As the story begins, Tennal finds himself rather abruply put into a new situation, and watching him rebuild himself and his image, and also try and reshape the institution's he's in, is a delight. 

In this,  the aggressively civilian Tennal is helped out by the other half of our protagonist duo, Lieutenant Surit Yeni. Surit is closed off, compartmentalised, dealing with the aftermath of family tragedy and family history. He's a perfectionist, with a memory like diamond, morals to match and an expectation that everyone around him is trying their best. That expectation is often thwarted. Surit, career military, has to work with Tennal, who is the essence of everything that Surit isn't. Initially they're like oil and water, but as the story progresses...well, you'll see. 

In any case, the characterisation here is top notch. The emotions, the drives, the needs of our characters are raw and painful and genuine, and make turning the page an absolute pleasure, trying to see what they'll get up to next. 

Which brings us to the world. This is a society which has a history of violence, of the quiet rumbling of coups. It also has, more recently, a history of audacious body modification. After some rather classified experiments, parts of the population are now architects, or readers. The former can drop short term commands to cause people to do things; they seem to be prevalent in the military command structure. The latter on the other hand, can read minds, and are something of a controlled minority, following an attempted coup a few decades before the story begins. This is a world haunted by its past, by a history of struggles for advantage, trying to decide if this is going to be the time it settles down and has a bit of a quieter period, a world still trying to work out how to deal with the mind alterers and mind readers it's it's introduced into society. A world where the military divisions are large enough and competitive enough to almost be private fiefdoms. And it's also a world that has to keep one cautious eye on the skies, because out there, a larger intra-system community is watching, and waiting for any opportunity to step in to their affairs. There is, in other words, a lot of history going on, and that history is informing this story, which also has a lot going on. The setting is plausible, the background and context introduced to the reader with a skill that means it never feels like you're just getting an infodump, while giving you a rich tapestry as background to what the characters are up to. It is, in other words, a real world. 

I don't want ot talk about the story, because spoilers, and because if I'm honest, I couldn't put it down while wanting to know what happened next, and I don't want to ruin it for you. But! Yes, there's romance in here. If you're not really here for that, I'll note that it's relatively low key, and entirely relevant to the characters and their situation. It's also gloriously queer, but that's another topic. Anyway. There's a lot of politics here. And a lot of scheme and counter scheme. There's personal drama, and the kind of individual stakes that make you gasp and feel the tension in your gut while the protagonists try and solve the unsolvable. There's ground warfare and mind powers, and lots of delving in deep space into things which perhaps would have been better left undisturbed. In short, there's a damn good story, and I encourage you to give it a try. 

Children Of Memory - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Memory is the third in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, and much like its predecessors is, to be frank, an absolute banger of a story. It's also, that aside, a book that's difficult to describe succinctly. It's a book that grapples with big ideas about mortality and personhood, but also explores the more personal, intimate stories of people struggling to make lives in a hostile environment - and, to be fair, some of those people aren't necessarily human. That dovetailing of big ideas with emotional, honest, intimate moments is something Tchaikovsky has mastered, and it works well again here. If you're here for the raw, messy, wonderfully crafted characters, you're good. If you're here for a plot that will grab hold as tension ramps up and into catharsis and up again,..you're good. If you're here for an imaginatively crafted future and an exploration of larger concepts in a narrative framework, then again, this one's for you. Which is a long winded way of giving the short version, this is a damn good book, and you should read it. 

Speaking of the world. Well, we're in an interesting space here. Humanity is out of the bottle, in ships that can leap between solar systems, looking for any of its own. They're looking on planets that were scheduled for colonisation before the collapse of civilisation on Earth put a damper on things. Post-recovery, we're once again out here causing trouble. Though now we're doing it with friends, including sentient spiders, octopi, and bacteria which can absorb personalities and craft bodies and take them for a ride.  It's an absolutely wild space, and one that's about to get even stranger. There's two major pieces of setting at play. One is a colony, populated by humans, whose past history we're slowly exposed to over the course of the book. A hardscrabble world on the bare edge of possible survivability, and a crew struggling to make things sustainable while thawing out the frozen sleeper cargo they brought with them gives things a terrifying frontier feel.  The blend of the high tech and the low, the struggle at the edge of survivability, gives the setting an immediacy and a power it's hard to overemphasise. You can feel for these people, scrounging out a life from soil they have to make live for them, while overhead a sleeper ship circles in high orbit. And then, well, then there's the birds. Survivors of a research and terraforming team gone horribly wrong after collapse, evolving under pressure into duos that between them manage a convincing appearance of sentience, but individually definitely aren't. As characters they're fantastic, and I'll chat a bit more about that in a second, but wanted to say that the history of these duos, the desperation of a team trying to build something from the wrong side of societal collapse, that history is fantastic, Vividly imagined, authentically described, laced with the emotion and passion and horror that makes for authentic life.

The characters match that feeling actually. There's the captain of the slow seed ship, desperately trying to pull tech and crew from the shattered remnants of his craft, and build a civilisation back up from nothing. Surrounded by his command crew and survivors, you can feel the pressure on them all, you can feel the passion and energy that animates a people who know that their survival is not guaranteed. Who know that the survival of everyone after them is not guaranteed. Who know they have to build something. They're people, top to toe. But the same is true of the ravens, talking to each other and construction their discussions with other people in terms of cultural references and constructed meaning. They're people, even if they're different. And the people of our future, the octopi and the living gestalts and the spiders and the humans learning to be better. They're all people, even in they're not all humans. And the differences of their lived experience are often, though not always subtle. And it's amazing how they all feel like people, but they also feel strange. But they feel genuine, and that's what matters - the experiences are comprehensible but different, and that's sometimes hard to get used to, but it's also an absolute delight. These are living breathing real people, they're just different to us, and how we expect to be. But they're amazingly well realised, and great fun to read. 

Which is true of the story too. I won't spoil it , because there's some twists in there that took me a little while to absorb. But I will say that it works across multiple layers. This is a story which explores what it means ot be sentient. Explores the collapse and rebuilding of societies. Explores how people cope and manage in crisis. Explores identity and reality. But also explores family relationships and friendships and meaning. It doesn't shy away from either of these, and builds a story that is emotionally wracking but also an extremely compelling page-turner of action and adventure and mystery as a result. 

Which brings me back to the beginning: this book is an absolute banger, Tchaikovsky has hit it out of the park again, and you should, if you're a sci-fi fan, read it

Blackbirds - Chuck Wendig

So, Blackbirds. I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but better late than never. It’s the first in Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black series, walking alongside a woman who, on skin contact, will see how someone is going to die. Black is smart, but as sharp and cutting as strong acid. She’s hurt, and willing to let her life tailspin until, well, it doesn’t. In the meantime, she moves between jobs, between towns, between dead people, just keeping the wolf from the door, and trying not to think too hard. The universe, of course, has other plans. 

This story feels, in a lot of ways, like a contemporary thriller. Miriam Black is on the run in an America we can all recognise from television. Maybe not one we’d especially like to visit though. Cookie-cutter suiburbanism is elsewhere. These are the cockroach riddled motel rooms, the truck stop bathrooms, the silent depths of the US experience, writ large on its public consciousness. There’s something weirdly private about it too - Miriam navigates her mental geograpy as much as the physical, but both are more and less than they seem on the surface, and both have absolutely no shortage of nasty surprises. This is a space of movement, of transience, where nobody stays for long, and nobody wants to, skipping from town to town in beat up junkers or hitching a ride in a long haul truck cab while trying not to do a line of coke off the dashboard. It’s a sparse, grim place, and I’ll give Wendig credit, he evokes it with a lean, tight prose that makes you feel like you’re there, filling in the gaps between the words with, usually, something worse. It’s also a world filled with abrupt and occasionally lurid violence. Shootings, torture, bladed weapons, and some truly brutal, intimate hand to hand fighting. It’s all here, and approached in an unflinching way which, if I’m honest, didn’t sit well with me. It felt a little too much for its own sake. That said, I also know it works for a lot of people, and as a style and mood choice it fits perfectly with the story presented, so I can’t get too upset. But, you know, go in with a gore warning in front of you, and maybe take some goggles and a plastic apron,  just in case.

Speaking of the unpleasant, well, Miriam Black is not a good time protagonist. She’s smart, obviously, but miserable, seemingly getting by on not much more than coffee and attitude. Her expectations are relentlessly low, and her miserableness, her sharp edges, and her low opinion of everyone else are saturated through every line of the story. Miriam is not a nice person, and she makes a lot of bad choices because she doesn’t believe she deserves better ones. As the narrative expands, some of the forces behind her current situation become less occluded, and who she is and why she is that way make more sense. But it’s a hard read, a dive into sorrow and depression and violence. As a character, Miriam Black is wonderfully drawn, and entirely believable, but sharing her perspective is an experience that it took me several coffees to come to terms with.  The same is true of most of the cast, to be honest, though we see most of them from a little further away than Miriam’s head. They’re almost all awful in some way or another, almost all people you’d gladly push down a mineshaft, but for all that, they’re perfectly plausible as people, terrible as they may be . A few rays of light here and there mean things aren’t quite as dark as all that, but still. Again, be ready for that sort of mood-lowerer going in. 

Having said that, the story itself is a good time. It rattles along with enthusiasm, giving us interludes in Miriam’s past, slowly building her up and out from our first impression, putting in details and shifts that change our perspective even as we walk alongside her. There’s a lot going on in this one, to be fair. Murders. Drugs. Chases across country. Interrogations. Surreal antagonists. Romance, and well, not-romance. Gunfights and aftermaths. It’s a story filled with emotional moments, stitched together by violence and loss. Did I always want to keep reading? No. But did I always turn the page anyway to see what happened next? Yes. 

I’m not sure how I feel about this, in the end. If you’re in the mood for a violent supernatural thriller that’s also a slice of Americana gone bad, you’ll love it, that’s for sure - this one’s for you.

Out due to illness

 Sorry friends - everyone in the house has been sick for a week, so going to delay todays post until next week!

The Mystical Murders of Yin Mara - Marshall Ryan Maresca

 

The Mystical Murders of Yin-Mara is a novella length piece from Marshall Ryan Maresca, whose Maradaine books I've enthused about here, from time to time. While it's set in the same universe, this book has a different geography and a different cast, though it still has the same crackling energy and heart as its antecedents. It's smart, occasionally funny, and blends highwire tension with an honesty and emotional depth that's always a winning combination. 

Yin-Mara is a city at the edge of the world. At least as far as our protagonists are concerned, anyway. Heading out of the cosmopolitan city of Maradaine, to start  a promising academic partnership, the two find themselves walking into a space that is very different to what they're familiar with. From the cusinine to the law enforcement, they do things differently there. Regular Maradaine readers will see a few nods to familiar institutions - particularly law enforcement - but the customs, the language, the presumptions that underpin culture, those are all different here. But what isn't different is the sense of place. A place where you can get sausage and cabbage rolls and a half decent beer. Where most people are just trying to get by, day to day. That some of them are trying to get by with a bit of backstreet magic, or by investigating the gruseome demise of other residents, well, that's by the by.

Except, of course, that it isn't. Because as we come in, our protagonists find themselves torn between the demands of an academic career in magery (including research, arguments with their supervisor, and kowtowing to the nobility who fund everything) and the less lucrative investigation of the aforesaid brutal murders - victims drained dry of life, husks suggesting that it was rather painful too. Something is stalking the streets of Yin-Mara, striking seemingly at random. Whether or not our protagonists will be able to figure out what it is and what it wants before they attract its attention is another matter.. Maresca builds out a cracking thriller from this fairly simple premise. Anyone or anything could be the killer, and as the list of victims starts to ramp up, the question of whether our heroes are stalking it, or it's stalking them becomes rather pressing. The tension ratchets up masterfully, and it certainly left me turning pages rather later at night than I should have been awake, because I wanted to know what happened next.

The emotional heart of the story are Phadre and Jiarna, our protagonists. Young, smart, determined to get somewhere in the world, they've set out into their great adventure with enthusiasm, and with each other. The genuine affection and emotional closeness on the page is visible throughout the story. A pair in love, determined to do not just the necessary thing, but the right thing. Of course this doesrather tend to land them in trouble. But between the magic of one and the razor-sharp mind and iron determionation of the other, there's no obstacle they can't at least attempt to overcome. In their struggles, their failures and successes, their disagreements, make-ups and quiet moments, they steal every page they're on, and I look forward to seeingmore.

That applies to the whole book, really. Yin-Mara is a place crying out for further exploration, and our protagonists are an entertaining, likable duo you can empathise and sympathise with. The story zips along and never outstays its welcome -- but I would happily read more of it, please. If you're looking for a thoughtful, thrilling murder mystery with a dash of magic, this one's for you.

Brief outage - back next week!

Apologies for the delay folks - our internet is out.

Back once that's resolved!