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.
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