Eve's Alexandria

Stepford Seal-wives

It's a slow week at Alexandria, perhaps related to the fact that Vicky, Esther and I spent much of the bank holiday weekend together, talking about books, drinking wine, and exploring Bowness and Windermere (including but not limited to the utterly, utterly wonderful Fireside Bookshop). In the absence of fresh reviews, here's a selection of things I've written recently (ish) for other venues.

At Strange Horizons: By Light Alone, by Adam Roberts

At SFX: Intrusion by Ken MacLeod

And finally, another SFX review, which only appeared in the print edition: of Margo Lanagan's Brides of Rollrock Island.

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Margo Lanagan has been publishing young adult and children’s fiction since the early 1990s, but she only garnered widespread attention outside her native Australia with the harrowing but superb World Fantasy Award-winning (and Hugo- and Nebula-nominated) short story ‘Singing My Sister Down’, which appeared in her collection Black Juice in 2004. Since then she has published two more collections of short stories and – a badge of honour for any self-respecting writer – managed to outrage the Daily Mail with her gruelling 2009 fairytale of child abuse, Tender Morsels.

A new Lanagan novel, therefore, is an event to be met with both delight and a faint dread: it’s likely to be excellent, but it’ll also put you through the emotional wringer. And Brides is indeed not a cheerful tale, but it is a richly nuanced one. Set on a remote island and told in Lanagan’s trademark pared-back, lilting style, the novel traces the shattering consequences of an abused and outcast woman’s decision to summon a selkie (a seal transformed into a woman) into her community. Soon every man is bewitched by the desire for a seal-wife – beautiful, obedient and sad, powerless as long as their real skins are kept hidden away – of his own, and their deserted wives and daughters are heading for the mainland in droves.

Framed as a series of first-person accounts, fragments of vivid lives, Brides is a bleakly beautiful, highly atmospheric be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale.

~~Nic

Many Skills

Again with the recycled content! Sorry. Here's my review of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor, which was originally published in SFX issue #214, last year. I hope to have a new review up on either Thursday or Friday this week...

Lots of people loved this, but it really was not my cup of tea.

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There are some trends in young adult fiction that it’s hard, as an adult reader, to take entirely seriously. The special snowflake loner heroine who has no idea how beautiful she is, for example, or the brooding older guys who have endless time on their hands to spend gazing at her from a distance. Relationships that consist largely of angst and pretty, pretty cheekbones. You know the type.

Taylor’s heroine is Karou, a blue-haired 17-year-old living alone in Prague, whose drawings inspire awe in her art school classmates, and who numbers martial arts expertise and multilingualism among her many improbable talents. (There is, at least, an in-story reason for those last two. Although not a very good one.)

Karou also grew up in a magical workshop in a parallel world, to which she periodically returns. The novel is at its most successful when it homes in on Karou’s dislocation and search for identity, while the angels vs. demons war-without-end of the backstory makes for some grim dystopian fun. But it is the inevitable star-crossed romance that gets the lion’s share of the pages, drowning out the more interesting stuff.

Taylor writes well, although she is more secure with high emotion and portraits of her protagonists than sense of place; for all that the characters periodically sneer at superficial tourists, this is a soft-focus, chocolate box Prague whose landmarks are name-checked rather than explored.

~~Nic

That Old Black Magic

Time for two more of my reviews that originally appeared in SFX magazine: The Emperor's Knife by Mazarkis Williams is available over at the magazine's website; here on Alexandria is Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder.

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Ah, that old tale: Boy meets girl, girl hates boy on sight, boy returns the favour, boy rescues girl from certain death, boy lies on top of girl in the forest for several hours (essential for hiding from pursuers, of course), girl and boy are forced to travel together and bicker like crazy at every step. What happens next, readers?

If you said, “Girl and boy go their separate ways and never think about each other again”, you’re either a) wildly optimistic, well done, or b) new to this whole reading thing, aren’t you?

If you fall into category b), you could do worse than start with Touch of Power, if only for the crash course it provides in romance tropes; the star-crossed pair’s first kiss, in particular, should win some sort of award for cliché, but might be sweet if you’re unfamiliar with the concept. There are gestures at world-building: magic, deadly plants, interchangeable towns with unpronounceable names, and some hilariously simplistic politics (all the various rival rulers were at boarding school together!). But the fantasy isn’t the point, except insofar as the magic system gives Snyder an excuse to have heroine and love interest hold hands regularly; in truth, everything – including a horrific, population-decimating plague – is just a backdrop to the love story.

The prose – especially the dialogue – is clumsy, but it moves quickly and is mildly entertaining. Unless you really like your romance, though, steer clear.

~~Nic

Catching Up

It occurs to me that I've been rather lax about reposting my reviews for SFX magazine here, lately.

My review of Elspeth Cooper's somewhat disappointing debut Songs of the Earth appeared on their website in June, and shortly afterwards in the magazine; below is another review of a debut fantasy, from late summer: Daniel Polansky's hardboiled, and rather better, The Straight Razor Cure.

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The Straight Razor Cure is not just 26-year-old Polansky's debut novel, it's also the launch title for publisher Hodder & Stoughton's revived fantasy and sf line. No pressure, then.

 A hardboiled noir set in an invented city not unlike early 19th-century London, told in a voiceover - sorry, first-person narration - saturated with world-weary snark, this is a thoroughly entertaining page-turner. It centres on a disgraced former detective turned drug dealer, nicknamed the Warden, who - much against his better judgement and carefully cultivated indifference to others - is drawn back into the game when he stumbles across the brutalised body of a child in his neighbourhood.

Somewhere between Lynch and Abercrombie on the grim fantasy scale, Cure wears its world-building lightly; while the nature of the tale means that we see little of society beyond cops, criminals, and victims, the host of small details thrown up during the Warden's investigations means the city feels like a place that functions outside the frame of the story. In particular, through his narrator's interactions with the city's immigrant underclass (Chinatown, thinly veiled), Polansky sensitively and economically sketches out the contours of a community ducking its host country's distaste while also fulfilling its needs.

The whodunnit is strung out long past the point where its solution is obvious, but there is at least a reasonably convincing character reason for the narrator's selective plot blindness, and the consequences are both bleak and far-reaching.

~~Nic

Deathless Prose

A bit of snark to lighten up your Friday afternoon: my review of Matt Forbeck's Amortals (2010), reprinted from SFX magazine. In retrospect there may have been a bit of a mismatch between reviewer and reviewee, although I thought the concept sounded quite entertaining when I said yes to the assignment.

This was the same month I got Tricia Sullivan's Lightborn. You win some, you lose some.

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On picking up a thriller, this reviewer has two main expectations: macho posturing and page-turning entertainment. Amortals signals a commitment to the former from its very first line ("Getting killed always gave me the worst hangover"); the latter, alas, is absent.

In 2168, secret service agent Ronan wakes from death into a freshly cloned body, for the eighth time in 150 years. This time, though, he hasn't fallen in the line of duty; he's been kidnapped and murdered. His new mission is to find out who targeted him, and why.

A story like this has to be fast-paced; give the reader time to think, and they'll be tripping over plotholes and clunky dialogue left, right and centre. Unfortunately, the narrator of Amortals regularly feels the need to spend whole paragraphs on such vital issues as clip-on ties and the fact that paramedics tend to take patients they've picked up to hospitals that are close by. Even when not giving detailed directions to the family cabin in Wisconsin, the prose stays tuned to monotone: I did this, then this, then this.

It would be bearable if either the murder mystery or the story's SFnal aspects were remotely compelling. They aren't. Forbeck's ideas are so familiar from other, better SF that you'll be able to guess whodunit 200 pages before the murderer has to explain all to our dim hero. In the meantime, you'll be gnashing your teeth in frustration at characters so slow on the uptake about the parameters of their own world that they're shocked, shocked at cloning technology being used to create multiple clones at once. Last-minute plot twists from nowhere only underline how inept it all is; avoid.

~~Nic

Two Reviews

A little bit of reading to help your Friday afternoon go more quickly:

1) My review of Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan has gone up on the SFX website ahead of its appearance in issue 203 of the print version:

Fiction – much like real life – is full of people whose relationships with their parents are fractious at best, and severely messed up at worst. Between a drowned sibling, a mother in a mental hospital and a father experimenting on his offspring, the main characters of Clarke Award-winner Tricia Sullivan’s latest could give anyone short of Oedipus a run for their money in the problematic parenting stakes. And all of that happened before the story even starts.

Go here to read the rest.

2) Secondly, my review of Ian McDonald's The Dervish House is over at the webzine Strange Horizons:

When the latest Ian McDonald novel came to me for review, more or less the last thing I expected to be pondering as I read was a certain stylistic parallel to Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic duology. Both works are, it's true, set in imagined versions of the same city: Kay's is a fantasy take on Justinianic Constantinople where ghostly fire plays in the streets, McDonald's is a bustling near-future Istanbul on the verge of a nanotech revolution. But of all the writers working in the SF/fantasy field today, they are hardly an obvious pairing; the precisely measured phrasings, heavy foreshadowing and high emotionalism of the former finds few echoes in the hectic, jump-cut information saturation of the latter.

Read the rest (somewhat longer than the average SFX review...). While I'm on the topic of Strange Horizons, I'd like to recommend a couple of the short stories that have been published there recently: 'The Red Bride' by Samantha Henderson, and - by way of complete contrast - Meghan McCarron's sweet coming-of-age tale 'WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!!'

Strange Horizons - which just had its tenth anniversary - is funded entirely by donations, so if you enjoyed those, do consider putting some change in the pot for this year's fund drive.

3) Finally, two weeks ago I went along to a couple of events at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Niall, always more productive than I am, wrote a report about them so I didn't have to.

~~Nic

Colourless

This review - of The Black Prism by Brent Weeks - first appeared in SFX #201 (November 2010 - yes, I know it's odd that the November issue has already made way for the December one in mid-October). Let's just say I enjoyed writing the review a whole lot more than I enjoyed reading the book.

For my previous experience of reading Brent Weeks' special, special prose, see the first part of my review of the 2009 David Gemmell Legend Award shortlist.

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Some books you simply reach breaking point with. In the case of Brent Weeks' latest, it came on page 22, when the main character, Kip, is filled with alarm at the thought of his fellow teenager Isabel being caught up in the impending violent slaughter of his hometown. Not because they're sort-of friends, but because she's hot. Sorry, "turning into a beautiful woman".

Now, it might just be an attack of poor phrasing - there's more than enough of that to go around in Weeks' latest - rather than a sign that this story and its characters have all the depth and maturity of a paddling pool. Indeed, in a better-written novel, Kip could have been an endearing lead: he's a smart, well-meaning boy who buries the twin insecurities of obesity and an abusive upbringing beneath a wisecracking motormouth persona. But here he's lost amid glacially-paced infodumping, the most laboured dialogue this side of a Babylon 5 episode, and plot twists so contrived that they require characters to act in ways diametrically opposed to their, for want of a better word, personalities.

The Black Prism reads like the fever dream of a teenage boy who sees more shoot-'em-ups than sunlight. There are bucketloads of explicit violence, but it's all more garish than gut-wrenching and our heroes' bruises have generally worn off by the next chapter; the tediously leery descriptions of female characters' physical attributes, meanwhile, are offset by an awkward coyness about consensual sex and a cloying sentimentality about childhood crushes. Bonus star for a nifty magic system based on how the human eye perceives different wavelengths of light; it's not exactly hard sf, but it does provide some much-needed colour in an otherwise dull tale.

~~Nic

Battling the Ultimate Evil (Again)

For various reasons, it's a bit quiet here this month. Have a reprint SFX review: Karen Miller's The Reluctant Mage, the somewhat disappointing follow-up to The Prodigal Mage.

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Dark Lords, like superheroes, never really die. Stab them, burn them, nick their favourite ring, give them a magical Alcatraz all to themselves: some day, you just know they’ll be back, crosser than ever. If you’re really unlucky, they’ll be back in your lifetime, just when you were ready to hang up your adventuring boots and settle into a comfortable retirement spent yelling at those damn kids to get off your palace lawn.

Still, at least Asher and Dathne, world-saving stars of Miller’s earlier duology, had the foresight to produce some super-powered offspring to take up the good fight on their behalf. After a first volume consisting largely of build-up and characters arguing, The Reluctant Mage sees their daughter Deenie step up to take over the family business. This happens mostly by process of elimination, since she’s the only one left who isn’t in dire peril or otherwise indisposed. But Deenie blossoms in the spotlight – indeed, the transition from the timid girl of the previous book is arguably a little too abrupt, although her resilience is well drawn – as she and her trusty best friend head out on the inevitable quest.

It’s a long way from being the fastest, most plot-driven fantasy writing out there, but there is much to appreciate here. Miller once again displays a knack for thoughtful character interaction, which is easier to enjoy this time with Deenie’s annoying brother offstage for most of the narrative. It’s just a shame that one of the most interesting, the Dark Lord’s unwilling minion Arlin, gets increasingly sidelined in favour of the over-long and over-familiar quest storyline. Given the way her skills tend, Miller could have produced a fascinating novel with Arlin as the protagonist.

~~Nic

Magical Mafia

Here's a short post for a Sunday afternoon: a review I wrote for SFX #198, of Holly Black's very enjoyable White Cat. And while I'm here, another of my reviews went up on their site last month, ahead of its appearance in the print version (now on sale).

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Spiderwick Chronicles co-creator Holly Black's new book doesn't lack for ambition. It's a mob saga, a boarding school caper, a mystery and an allegory for the immigrant experience in the US. All this in 300 pages and the pace never once flags. 
 
The story begins with our narrator, Cassel, on his school's roof in the middle of the night, with no idea of how he got there or how to get down. All he remembers is dreaming about a white cat. Off the roof, out of the school and back in the never-loving arms of his dysfunctional family, Cassel discovers there's a lot he has no idea about – including the things he does remember. 
 
The inventive world-building shines as each twist of the plot drags Cassel deeper into an underground of black market magic, and the powerful families who have controlled it since 'working' was outlawed in 1929. It's not a unique idea, but it's sketched with nuanced economy and lashings of vivid secondary characters from many walks of life. 
 
Cassel himself is a prickly but engaging outsider, both at home - as the only non-'worker' in his family - and as a poor kid in a school for the rich. A self-confessed liar from a dynasty of con artists, he has a fun approach to problem-solving and a habit of hiding his true self. Black combines the high concept with the everyday to great effect, using the magic-infested waters of Cassel's life to explore what is, for some, the darker side of growing up: a nascent awareness of being hemmed in by adults who don't always tell the truth, and may not have your best interests at heart. But she counters that with the possibility of learning to trust - and to form true, lasting friendships. Despite such weighty themes, the pages fly by. 

~~Nic

The Wasps Go Marching Two by Two

Yes, June was a quiet month here at Alexandria. To kick off what I'm sure will be a more productive July, here is a review I wrote for SFX magazine earlier this year: Salute the Dark, volume four in Adrian Tchaikovsky's fun on-going series. My reviews of the previous instalments are here, here, and here.

In related news, at a housewarming party a few months back I ran into Tchaikovsky's agent, Simon. "Oh, it's you!" he exclaimed. "Queen of the three-star reviews!"

I am amused. This one got three stars, too.

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War may be good for absolutely nothing, but there’s no denying its effects on technology. By the end of this fourth installment of the ‘Shadows of the Apt' series, the peoples of Tchaikovsky's steampunk fantasy world have not only developed the local equivalents of mustard gas and a Gatling gun, they're also thinking about fixed-wing aircraft. If this volume is carnage - and, with the Wasp army invading new territory while its older conquests rebel in its wake, it is - goodness knows what's in store. We predict nuclear holocaust by book ten.

Salute the Dark wraps up the first phase of the story. Loose ends remain, and at least one major character death looks to be temporary, but there is plenty of resolution for dedicated readers. It will mean little to newcomers, though, and in general is less successful than the last two volumes. Certain characters - notably conflicted artificer Totho - stay largely offstage until their big moment, while others - like upbeat Cheerwell - mark time in brand new subplots that add little. With so many plates spinning, some struggle to earn their emotional payoff in the few chapters allotted them. New locales like the Dragonfly Commonweal get short shrift, and are accordingly much less vivid than the places we've visited previously.

Where Tchaikovsky excels is in portraying the courage of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances: uncertain, terrified, but trying anyway. There are still examples here: the new Bee queen of Szar, resistance fighters in Solarno. But the shift from the close focus of the previous books to a larger city-hopping canvas sacrifices some of the human story, giving the sense of pieces being moved around a board.

~~Nic Clarke