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Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

The great city of Orane, capital of Ferrieres, is thrown into chaos when a prominent nobleman is murdered in cold blood. Thierry Villar, an advocate-turned-poet, is enlisted by the city authorities to investigate the murder, despite the likelihood of it being political in nature, threatening the city and the kingdom's peace. But that peace is already under threat, as the armies of Angland under King Hardan V have landed on the north coast.

A new Guy Gavriel Kay novel is something to be savoured. If my previous review, of Joe Abercrombie's The Devils, said that book was a whiskey with no chaser, a new Guy Kay book is comparatively a fine wine, to be savoured and its short length to be lamented, despite that also being a strength.

Written on the Dark, like much of his work, takes place in the same world, one closely based on real medieval Europe, but with the names, geography and underlying ideals (like religion) all shifted a bit aware from reality. There is no magic, in the sense of wizards hurling fireballs, but there are prophetic dreams that often seem to come true.

This book is set in the much-mentioned land of Ferrieres, an analogy for France, to the north-east of the lands in The Lions of Al-Rassan and north-west of those explored in the Sarantine Mosaic duology. Kay has a special affinity with France, with his early novel A Song for Arbonne taking place in a different version of that kingdom, and his later book Ysabel just straight-up taking place in actual, contemporary France. The real historical period being riffed on here is the Hundred Years War between England and France, during which time France also suffered significant internal upheaval and civil conflict, most notably between the French crown and Burgundy (here realised as Barratin). Kay provides a list of historical sources at the end of the novel, but as usual he doesn't have precise, 1:1 correlations, instead throwing together different people and events from across a couple of centuries to see what happens when they coexist. Some of the more obvious touchstones are present - Joan of Arc is present, albeit restyled as Jeanette of Broche - but these tend to be dealt with fairly curtly in favour of our main cast.

The main cast is described in impressive depth, with Thierry Villar an overconfident, possibly even arrogant, man who makes one mistake too many and has to make amends by investigating a murder, the ramifications of which could rock his entire world. His friend and tavern-worker Silvy, fellow poet (of higher station) Marina di Seressa, the king's provost Robbin de Vaux, and the somewhat-mystical Gauvard Colle, all fully-realised figures, are all drawn into the story of feuding politicians, scheming priests and marching armies.

As usual with Kay, his interest is less in mass combat and battles and more in the motivations that move people to violence and its consequences. He is not a bloodthirsty author: skirmishes which leave even a handful of casualties are shocking, and not to be relished, and mass battles are catastrophes that people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid. The real battles here are fought with wits, penmanship and rhetoric. Thierry's preferred battlefield is the courthouse, the diplomatic table or the tavern where his improvisation, oratory and humour can be best appreciated.

The traditional strengths of Kay are on full display: his grasp of history in both the broad strokes and close-up detail, his firm grasp of who his characters are and what they want, and his measured prose, sometimes minimalist, sometimes ornate, known when to deploy words like bludgeons and when like scalpels. There is more humour in this book than perhaps some of his previous ones, but the amount of heart present will not be a surprise to established fans. The book may even mark a better onboarding place to Kay's novels for brand new readers than some other recent ones, being more firmly a total standalone (Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago and All the Seas of the World arguably forming a thematic trilogy, itself following on from the at-least nominally thematic duology of Under Heaven and River of Stars).

The biggest negative about the book is one that's not really a negative: at 300 pages on the money in hardcover, this may be Kay's shortest novel to date. The sumptuous expanses of some of his earlier, 500+ page novels are not to be found here. But that short length results in a razor-sharp focus that is quite compelling.

By this point it feels redundant to say it about a Kay novel, but Written on the Dark (*****) is a beautifully-written portrait of its world and its people, with added focus and clarity making it a good jumping-on point for new readers. The novel is available now worldwide.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Chapel of the Holy Expediency to receive a mission directly from the ten-year-old Pope. He is to join a group of "devils," evil-doers repenting for their sins in (unwilling) service to the Papacy. Their goal is to guide the young heir to the throne of Troy to her throne, despite four cousins all keen to ensure she never gets there. Carrying out this quest are an immortal warrior, an invisible elf, an overly-proud necromancer, a jack of all trades, a vampire, and a werewolf. This quest may see them learn the meaning of friendship and found family (but probably not), and realise that the real friends are the zombie warriors we resurrected along the way.

The Devils is the latest novel from Joe Abercrombie, the undisputed king of dysentrypunk. Through many novels he has written stories soaked in blood (not always the best printing process for easy reading, but still), told with verve, humour, and sometimes worrying psychoses. This latest book is a semi-standalone, capable of being read by itself but also setting up a loose trilogy of episodic adventures for the Holy Expediencers.

The storyline is pretty straightforward, with street orphan-turned-professional-thief Alex finding out she's the long-lost Princess of Troy, a fairly unlikely prospect but one proven by the traditional means of a holy birthmark and a long-lost sigil. The Papal Shambolics have to guide her to her destiny, which involves (as this is an Abercrombie novel) a veritable morass of slaughter, bad jokes and bodily fluids spraying in all directions. Along the way we get to know the rest of the group, their hopes, their desires, and their propensity to solve problems with sharp bits of metal. It's a solid cast of characters, likeable but (heavily) flawed, seeking redemption or something adjacent to it, drawn with reasonable colour and depth.

The Devils feels like Unfettered Abercrombie. His First Law books, particularly the recent(ish) Age of Madness Trilogy, mix the dark humour and knockabout antics with weightier stories of societal development and an extended meta-arc which, though it can be summed up as, "what if Gandalf was a total a#!&!~$&?", has a lot of depth. The Devils feels like Joe had decided he needed a break from those weightier elements and he could just have a knockabout good time. This is a veritable "beer and pretzels" book where themes and intricate worldbuilding are side-courses, not the main appeal.

This has the simultaneous effect of making The Devils possibly Abercrombie's most outright enjoyable work, with action and comedy to spare, but also maybe his slightest, and most disposable. First Law fans may bemoan a lengthy gap until we return to that world (if we ever do) and the mouth-watering Glokta vs Bayaz struggle his last book set up, and others may ponder if Joe could have been better-served by exploring fresher fields altogether (presumably less filled with recruits corpses). But that's the perennial problem: do you want your favourite artist to deliver you what they're best at, no surprises, or reach for the worrying button called "space jazz concept album?"

The Devils (****) is straight-up Abercrombie, no chaser. It's fun, funny and uncomplicated, and is on the shelves worldwide right now.

Currently 20 hours into the superhot game of the minute, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It's a JRPG made by a French studio which is about a fractured future world where people are stuck on an island city (possibly a shattered remnant of Paris) and are ticking down to extinction through a creepy-AF mechanism. Every year an expedition is launched to try to destroy the threat and stop the countdown, and every expedition has failed. Obviously this expedition has a better shot because it's the one under the player's control.

Very unusual world, brilliant soundtrack, interesting and impressive combat (think Final Fantasy with a touch of Dark Souls, turn-based but with realtime parries and counters), great characters. It feels like a China Mieville novel come to life. Very compelling so far. My only complaint is that the game is not well-optimised for mouse and keyboard (it frequently misses keyboard inputs for some reason, whilst registering them fine on controller), to the point that I had to drop the difficulty to "Story" to get on with it. Of course, I then found that "Story" difficulty in this game is what most people would call "Normal", whilst actual "Normal" is "Really Hard," and "Expert" is "Supernatural Reflexes Only Needed."

Not not quite deserving fully of the hype levels that have been raised, but it is very good indeed.

Exodus Book One: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton

Fleeing a ravaged Earth, humanity launched near-lightspeed arkships across a large part of the galaxy. Many have vanished, some established isolated colonies in remote systems, but the greatest success was in the Centauri Cluster, a group of millions of stars within a few hundred light-years of one another with thousands of habitable worlds between them. The Green Signal was sent across the galaxy to attract more arkships. But in the tens of thousands of years it took them to arrive, the humans of the Centauri Cluster become technologically advanced, becoming near godlike beings called the Celestials. The late-arriving humans, for whom only years or decades had passed at relativistic speeds since the fall of Earth, these Celestials might as well be a different species.

The arrival of the arkship Diligent in the Crown Dominion, the only Celestial empire to allow humans their own worlds, settlements and businesses, after 40,000 years in deep space at first seems like business as usual. But the owner-ruler of the Diligent is one of old Earth's most ruthless businessmen, who sees an opportunity in the ossified power structures of the Crown Dominion to further the cause of ordinary humans. At the same time, the arkship's arrival gives the rebellious son of a rich family an opportunity to become a Traveler, an interstellar starship captain. Elsewhere, a police officer is recruited by a Celestial archon to become his eyes and ears in the Crown Dominion's home system, and a potential recruit to succeed a Celestial ruler sets about her destiny with impressive ruthlessness. Both within and outside the borders of the Crown Dominion, threats are gathering which could change - or obliterate - the fate of billions, humans and Celestials alike.

Peter F. Hamilton, Britain's biggest-selling living science fiction author, is known for his brick-thick, far-future space operas featuring living starships, immense space battles and impeccable worldbuilding. His most recent space opera trilogy, The Salvation Sequence (Salvation, Salvation Lost, The Saints of Salvation), operated on a different level, with three relatively constrained novels working with a tight focus to deliver a very effective storyline. It worked very well, but arguably lacked the epic grandeur of his best work.

The Archimedes Engine cheerfully throws that approach out of the window and slams down the accelerator. This is, once again, a huge (900 pages in hardcover), dizzyingly epic space opera which swaps between a large number of storylines, planets and starships, with a meticulously constructed plot that combines breathless action setpices with impressively atmospheric worldbuilding. Hamilton hasn't delivered a book quite like this since 2004's Pandora's Star and 1996's The Reality Dysfunction, so it's impressive to see that, twenty years on, he's still got it.

The Archimedes Engine does have one major differences to his earlier work though: this is, to some degree, a collaborative project. It is part of the wider Exodus project which also incorporates an episode of Amazon's recent Secret Level animated series (Exodus: Odyssey) and a forthcoming, massive video game RPG from the same team as Mass Effect. Reading interviews with the creatives, it seems that they came up with the underlying concepts and gave them to Hamilton to flesh out, with them then providing guidance on those ideas. The result is an impressive amount of worldbuilding, since it is needed to drive not just this novel, but TV and video game projects as well.

The core principle of the setting is incredibly straightforward: FTL (faster than light) travel is utterly impossible. Spacecraft are limited to the speed of light. There are "Gates of Heaven," incredibly powerful devices which can accelerate spacecraft to 99.99% of lightspeed in an instant (that's 500,000 gees, thank you very much) without obliterating them, but that's about it. Starship crews buzz around at relativistic speeds, with only a few days or weeks passing for their crews as they travel from one system to another, but potentially years at a time passing for their friends and family back home. Even a round-trip to a star a modest fifteen light-years away will see at least thirty years, a quarter of a human lifetime in this time, elapse for those left behind. This makes it incredibly important to work out which journeys are necessary and which are not; an early meeting in the book, which takes three years out of someone's life, feels like it could have been an email, which is even more annoying in this context.

Hamilton's not actually done this before, his previous work has largely relied on FTL travel, usually via wormholes, so seeing him track where his characters are as decades pass for them is quite interesting (his friend Alastair Reynolds is more of a dab hand at this, as his signature Revelation Space setting similarly lacks FTL travel). To some degree the action in the book is largely constrained to the Kelowan system, which limits the problem, but several subplots do see trips to other star systems, allowing decades to pass when they return. Fortunately this is a setting where people like to set in motion very long-term plots.

Hamilton juggles a huge number of plots, subplots, characters and worldbuilding information with typical aplomb. For all the praise given to Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson for this, I think Hamilton has them both beat when it comes to building a series of wildly disparate threads over the better part of a thousand pages only for them to converge with a titanic clash at the end. The Archimedes Engine is no different, with storylines that seem utterly disconnected colliding with the force of matter and antimatter, leaving the reader eager for the sequel (though you'll have to wait until late 2025 for that).

As an author, Hamilton does have a number of long-standing, almost infamous weaknesses. One is that no matter how far future, bizarre or strange the setting, his characters can have a tendency to break down into English idioms, sayings and insults. This is a nice change from SF novels which have characters doing the same thing with American vocabulary, but can be a bit distracting. Fortunately, his other infamous (though probably over-stated, especially in his later work) tendency towards sex scenes of wildly variable plot relevance is here altogether missing. Characters hook up, but tasteful fades to black are the order of the day. Also, for some reason, Hamilton seems to have lost faith in his recurring plot device of a benevolent billionaire/trillionaire who helps save the human race from the goodness of his heart, so our stand-in in that role in this book is a much more morally grey character.

Where the book is a bit more variable is the quality of the characters. Thyra, the would-be-heir to the crown of Wynid who has to fight against her low rank of birth to gain her Queen/Mother's favour, is probably the standout here, but she does take a back seat in the back half of the book. Finn is the very beige young callow youth protagonist who goes on a wild adventure (this book's Joshua Calvert), though he works enough as a bit of a blank slate for the reader to experience the crazy universe through. I'm more surprised that Hamilton didn't do more with Ellie, the Diligent crewmember we spend the most time with, though mostly not as a POV character. As someone who's spent her life on a low-tech arkship, she's probably better-placed to act as our eyes and ears in the setting, but perhaps that would have been too obvious. It's Gahji, the Celestial politician trying to make sense of the increasingly weird goings-on, and Terence Wilson-Fletcher, police detective (and our spiritual surrogate for the Commonwealth universe's Paula Myo, still Hamilton's finest character creation) who emerge as the most interesting protagonists. Other characters descend into the usual morass of petty criminals, scheming politicians and greedy businessmen. It works well, but isn't his most vivid cast.

The Archimedes Engine (****½) is Peter F. Hamilton back on top form, doing what he does best: large-scale, epic space opera, in a well-realised setting, with a huge, multi-faceted plot that builds and concludes hugely satisfyingly at the end. This is the first in a duology, so there is a significant cliffhanger. The second book, The Helium Sea, seems tentatively scheduled for later this year. The book is available now worldwide.

Exodus, the video game, is currently unscheduled but likely to arrive in 2026 or 2027. There is a significant amount of worldbuilding and background information that can be seen on Archetype Entertainment's website.

Thoughts on STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl after 4 hours in the game.

It's oddly similar to the original game, with a similar introduction and route to the first safe town/hub, skirting anomalies. The graphics are obviously vastly superior and this game is much more forgiving, although this is only relative to the first (insanely harsh) game. The first zone mutant you meet is an invisible bullet sponge guy that will likely kill you a few times before you get its attack pattern sussed. However, ammo is easier to come by, weapon degradation is not as ludicrous and virtually all human enemies will go down with a single shot to the head. Less than 4 hours in, I stormed a heavily-guarded paramilitary outpost (the game is vague on whether these are Russian or Ukrainian government troops, or some kind of rogue militia) and killed a couple of dozen guys inside through stealth and the use of a silenced pistol. It was still considerably harder than most modern FPS games, but satisfying. Because the game is systemic rather than proscripted, you can also cheese it a little in places, but not too much.

One complaint is that there's a few pretty cool action setpieces that happen in cutscenes when they would have made for good gameplay sequences. For a game as open-world as this one, that was an odd choice.

The English language VO is utter drivel. Play in Ukrainian with subtitles of your choice.

The game mostly feels like a cross between Far Cry 2 without the annoying regenerating enemies bullshit and Fallout: New Vegas in survival mode with the difficulty ramped up to Hard even when you're playing on Normal. A more punishing, less whimsical Fallout is probably the closest touchstone, which will likely irritate STALKER fans as the first STALKER predated all of the modern Bethesda Fallous, but still. So far, so outstanding.

Bugs were not too bad. One CTD, one wounded guy in a bed I was talking to decided to levitate up to around 3 feet above the bed to continue the conversation (alas, he did not say, "There is no Dana, there is only Zuul"), and one guy took shelter from an Emission Storm next to a tree rather than the town's hardened shelter, which resulted in his very rapid death. Not sure if that was a bug or the game saying, "some people are just really stupid, right?"

Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan & Cliff Chiang

1 November 1988. Erin Tieng, a new resident of Stony Stream, on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, is starting her new role delivering newspapers. Falling afoul of Halloween revellers, she joins forces with three other paper girls for mutual protection: Mac, KJ and Tiffany. The girls find their job complicated by the normal problems: creepy residents, overzealous cops, bullies and, obviously, a trans-temporal war between two different groups of time travellers from the far and even further futures. Sucked into a conflict spanning millions of years, the four girls have to work out how to survive, get home and prevent the annihilation of the universe. And get their papers delivered on time.

Paper Girls was an American comic book published between 2015 and 2019. Written by Brian K. Vaughan, better-known as the writer of the epic science fiction saga known as, er, Saga, the series has become a cult hit over the years. Amazon started adapting the show in 2022, creating a first season that was well-cast and excellently paced with some intriguing variances from the source material whilst also remaining faithful to the big picture. Obviously, being good, it could not be allowed to survive beyond a single season.

The original comic series was collected into a single volume a few years back, large enough to be used to stun a yak if wielded correctly. Read as a single piece, Paper Girls is relentless in its pacing. Every issue throws new ideas, new factions, new characters (or different versions of existing ones) and new creatures at the reader. Weird alien beings from another dimension? Sure. Dinosaurs? Obviously! Older versions of the main characters suffering from existential and mid-life crises? Go wild. This turns the book into a compelling page-turner, if an occasionally confusing one. Unlike the well-paced Saga, it's sometimes easy to lose the thread of what's going on in Paper Girls, what each faction is after, what resources they have access to and so forth.

In a way that increases the reader's empathy with the core quartet of girls, who sometimes get as lost in the morass of competing timelines, alternate selves and wars being fought for obscure reasons that haven't even happened yet. Our central quartet are grounded, interesting characters who grow and learn from their crazy experience. Sure, maybe they take the insane events a little too easily in their stride (the TV show works a bit better by slowing down the craziness, giving them more time to adjust to what's happening), but that also feels true to the 1980s SF movies the comic feels like it's homaging.

Ultimately the crazy SF antics are a backdrop to the simple notion of adolescent friendship. As Stephen King said, the friendships you form in later life are nothing like the ones you form at and before the age of 13 or so, and the whole book feels like it revolves around that idea. This gives the story universality, but can feel a bit like an overtrodden path, especially as contemporary projects like the superficially similar Stranger Things (which started after Paper Girls but obviously got a lot more attention) also went down the same route. But universal narratives which a lot of people can relate to remain powerful, especially if attached to the furniture of combat robots, weaponised lizards and religions emerging from modern corporate entities.

Paper Girls: The Complete Story (****) is a fun, breathless read, if sometimes a tad overwhelming or confusing. The well-drawn central characters pull the narrative back on course when it threatens to meander, and there's enough crazy SF antics to keep genre fans entertained.

Impressive.

Guns, speedboats, some "hey fellow kids," humour (an ingame version of TikTok I could do without), races, and graphics that blow everything else out of the water. They're back in the zone.

The biggest gawp-worthy thing here is the crowd density. Games have been making big strides here (Cyberpunk 2077 and even Starfield had huge improvements in this area), but GTA6 might be the first time the crowd density for a Miami-level city looks convincing.

Also, the series' first proper female protagonist in a singleplayer, mainline title, as people have speculated for years (you could play a woman in both GTA1 and GTA Online, but no real storyline to speak of).

Unsurprisingly, it's back to Vice City with a very strong "Florida Man" vibe. Alligators look like they're going to be a huge, constant threat in the game as well.

Promising start to this one.

A slow burn intro with lots of plot, character and worldbuilding, but it did it really well. It did feel like a HBO drama set in the Star Wars universe, lots of attention to detail and I like the idea that the "bad guy" actually had a really good motive - finding the apparent murderer who killed two of his workers despite other people trying to ignore it - and you can see why he's going to harbour a grudge against Andor and presumably be on his tail for the rest of the season. There's a lot of small groundwork-laying going on for the characters.

Also, good choice for them to release the first three in one go. To be honest, I'm wondering if they should be doing that for the whole show. Releasing three episodes a week every week for four weeks would be quite cool. Apparently the next block of episodes gets heavily into Coruscant and Mon Mothma.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi - although that is not his name - dwells in the House, a vast labyrinth of halls, vestibules and statues. The upper level of the House is filled with clouds and the lower with an ocean, with tides that occasionally flood the middle floors where Piranesi lives. The only other dweller of the House is the Other, a friendly but curt man who sometimes brings Piranesi supplies from unknown reaches of the structure. The Other warns Piranesi that a newcomer has entered the House, threatening destruction and chaos. Piranesi tries to avoid this newcomer, but his orderly trackings of the House's tides reveal that a great flood is coming, and he struggles on whether to warn the interloper or let them be swept away.

Piranesi is the long, long-awaited second novel by Susanna Clarke. In 2004 she released her first book, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which was one of those once-in-a generation books which was released to uproarious critical acclaim and immense commercial success (I had mixed feelings on it, with a brilliant opening half let down by a rambling second). A television adaptation was screened in 2015. However, Clarke's only other publication since then is a short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Despite occasional hints at a Jonathan Strange sequel, nothing further materialised until Piranesi arrived in 2020. Clarke confirmed that ill health had made completing the Jonathan Strange sequel impossible, so she had chosen Piranesi as a smaller, more manageable project to complete instead.

Piranesi is something of a fable, with the protagonist an unreliable narrator not because of deception, but because his memory is faulty. His origins are unclear, and he knows what certain items are despite apparently never having set foot outside of the House (if that is even possible; the House seems to consist of the entirety of its world). Piranesi maintains a strict regime of updating his diary (and its gargantuan index), fishing so he won't starve and building up supplies of combustible for the winter. He also liaises with the Other on his various projects, and is a master of the House's geography and wildlife (birds nest on the top floor and various sea life can be found in the lower). The oddness of the situation is not apparent to Piranesi, who has no memory of things being any different. He is trusting beyond a fault and guileless.

Clarke lets the novel unfold like a mixture between a dream and a puzzle, slowly giving the reader more clues as to the nature of what is going on. Some may lament the lack of ambiguity in the conclusion of the novel - you get a pretty full picture of what's happened - but it fits Clarke's style from Jonathan Strange where exposition is made part of the literary effect, not shied away from.

Despite some similarities in how it imparts information, Piranesi is in some respects the antithesis of Jonathan Strange. It is short and pacy whilst the earlier novel was expansive and floundered. Piranesi has a very small cast of characters and a very narrow setting, whilst the earlier book had a huge cast, spanned most of Europe and explored numerous subplots. Clarke's style here is much tighter than in the earlier book, with not a word or phrase wasted. The similarities of Piranesi's isolation to the COVID lockdowns, although accidental (the novel was finished before the pandemic), also feels oddly timely.

Piranesi (*****) is a joyfully-written puzzle box of a novel, stronger than Clarke's earlier work and featuring a memorable world and fascinating characters.

HARDSPACE: SHIPBREAKER came out today and has been wracking up great reviews. It's basically a ship-disassembly game. You play an engineer working and living in a shipyard orbiting Earth. Your job is to break apart derelict spacecraft and making sure their various parts get recycled properly. This starts off being easy and then gets harder, as you start receiving ships that are still partially-pressurised, or have explosive oxygen cylinders on board or electrical hazards.

You're working for a company, but because the company has paid for your space habitat, all your food, water, power, clothes and air, you start the game in debt to them, to the tune of 1.2 billion credits (!). As you dismantle ships you use up oxygen and fuel, but you have to buy more supplies of them from the company. So you have to keep your income above your expenses. The starting ships do a good job of this, with you clearing 1.5-2 million on each one, but obviously that's still going to take forever to pay off the debt. You can take on bigger ships which yield way more money, but you need to buy more specialised equipment to take them apart. There's this constant tension between how much you pay out to make your life easier and more efficient, and just trying to make as much profit as possible to bring down your debt and go home. There's also a side-line in that as you work you gain experience, and at a certain point you become a fully certified shipbreaker with the possibility of going solo.

There is a storyline, which kicks in when other workers manage to contact you and let you know they're thinking of forming a union. The company does not take this too kindly and the game puts you in the place of having to decide about joining forces with your fellow workers or knuckling down and trying to get your debt cleared ASAP.

I'm a couple of hours into the game so far and it's a very polished, enjoyable experience so far with lots of fun features to the game (a very nice 3D physics model in particular).

The developers, Blackbird Interactive, are the people behind the HOMEWORLD series of space-RTS games. They're also working on HOMEWORLD 3, due out later this year. HARDSPACE started as a gamejam project which transformed into a full-scale game. Amusingly, they used the title because it was the original working title of their RTS DESERTS OF KHARAK before they regained the HOMEWORLD IP, so it was pre-trademarked and they didn't have to pay again to register a new name.

The game is available now on PC via Steam. Console versions are on their way for later this year.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip

Sybel is the latest in a line of keepers of a group of fantastic beasts dwelling on Eld Mountain. She cares nothing for the outside world until the warrior Coren brings into her care a baby boy, Tamlorn. Tamlorn is the son of the king, but Sybel cares nothing for his heritage. A dozen years later, the outside world returns to intrude on their peaceful lives, and Sybel and Tamlorn must choose their fate.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld was originally published in 1974 and has since become regarded as a classic, foundational volume of modern fantasy. It mixes elements of epic fantasy - armies readying for battle, politics - with elements of fairy tales, particularly the magical beasts who live with Sybel and the way that the magic works, with sorcerers gaining power over one another through the knowledge of names and stories.

McKillip's writing discipline is awesome to behold. In just 200 pages she packs in more story and more ideas than most entire trilogies. The writing is elegant and stylish for all of its tremendous pace, and the character development of Sybel, Tamlorn and Coren is superb. Particularly powerful is the discussion of the intersection of power and morality: just because you can do something does not mean you should. Sybel's grasping of how to wield great power responsibly, unlike some of her opponents who just don't care, is explored well.

The superb prose and excellent pacing does sometimes come at the expense of other elements. McKillip provides just enough worldbuilding to support the story and no more; some may feel this hurts immersion, but I never saw it as a problem (and even something of a relief). The characterisation of secondary figures aside from the big three is also more limited, due to a lack of page time. King Drede is presented intriguingly as a complex antagonist with mixed motivations, but we don't really get to know him in depth.

These complaints are slight. McKillip's writing is compelling, her storytelling is phenomenal and the way the book balances different elements is superb. It is unsurprising to learn that the novel won the inaugural World Fantasy Award in 1975, and has since become regarded as a classic of the genre. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (*****) is available now in the UK and USA.

All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

Five years after the fall of Sarantium, the Jaddite world continues to argue over their inability to unite and retake the great city. However, an assassination in a coastal city of the Majriti, far to the west, sets in train a series of momentous events. At their heart is a Kindath trader and a young woman who was once abducted by corsairs. Surviving to adulthood, she has vowed vengeance on those who wronged her.

The arrival of a new Guy Gavriel Kay novel is an event to be celebrated. Every three years or so, a new Kay novel arrives. Established readers will have a sense of what to find: an erudite work of fantasy with beautiful, thoughtful prose. But the story and the historical parallels Kay delights in finding are always a surprise.

All the Seas of the Worlds can easily be read and enjoyed as a stand-alone novel, although it is also the third (and possibly concluding) book in a linked thematic series, continuing from 2016's Children of Earth and Sky and 2019's A Brightness Long Ago (All the Seas of the World is set several years after A Brightness Long Ago and maybe twenty years before Children of Earth and Sky). All three books are also set in a larger world, also the setting for his classic 1995 novel The Lions of Al-Rassan, the Sarantine Mosaic duology (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors) and his 2004 novel The Last Light of the Sun. Familiarity with Kay's work can enhance enjoyment of this novel, as you'll know who Folci d'Arcosi is and how he became so renowned, but the narrative is completely self-contained as it stands.

The historical analogues between the novel and real history are slighter this time (the 1535 conquest of Tunis may be one influence) and the focus is on two major protagonists. Rafel ben Natan is a Kindath corsair and merchant with a complicated family background. His friend and ally Lenia is a former slave of Asharite corsairs who is filled with anger towards her captors and a need for vengeance. However, as the novel continues, Lenia's experiences give her something more to live for than just the need for blood. Similarly, the political-religious situation with the Holy Patriarch of Rhodias angrily demanding vengeance for the fall of Sarantium slow changes to a more nuanced political situation with a politically canny substitute for that vengeance making itself known. Characterisation is Kay's greatest achievement, panting his characters as flawed but relatable colours and having them overcoming external challenges and their own doubts and insecurities in order to prosper.

All the Seas of the World is both a deeply personal novel, closely focused on two major protagonists and a number of minor ones (some recurring from A Brightness Long Ago, or precurring before Children of Earth and Sky), and also a hugely epic one. It may be the most epic novel Kay has written, spanning all the lands of the Middle Sea. Esperana - former Al-Rassan - makes its most significant showing in a Kay novel since The Lions of Al-Rassan itself, and we spend time with the King of Ferrieres, the rulers of multiple Majriti and Batiaran city-states, the exile ruler of Trakesia and even, briefly, the conqueror of Sarantium himself. Kay shows an adept facility for Game of Thrones-style realpolitik and a solid affinity for battles, but these are not the primary focus of his novels. Instead, he uses epic events to impact on the lives of ordinary people, or uses ordinary people to set in motion unexpected, epic events that reflect back on his characters.

It is not hyperbole to say that Kay has a claim to being one of our greatest living fantasy writers, if not the greatest - an opinion shared by the likes of George R.R. Martin and Brandon Sanderson - and All the Seas of the World (*****) is one of his very strongest books. Characterisation, narrative and prose all work in near-perfect concert to deliver a formidable work of art, with a more prominent depiction of politics and warfare than some of his other works have delivered. The novel will be released on 17 May.

Book 1: Age of Ash

Kithamar is a great city-state, an economic power ruled over by a prince. When a new prince rises to power, it marks the beginning of a year of tumultuous events in the city. During this year, there will be intrigue and conflict and the lives of thousands will be impacted in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. When Alys's brother is murdered, she vows to find who is responsible and why. Helped by her friend Sammish, her investigation will take her from the lowest slums of Longhill to the highest heights of the royal palace, and the discovery of ancient, terrifying secrets.

Daniel Abraham is better-known these days for being one half of the gestalt entity James S.A. Corey, the authorial unit of The Expanse (both novels and the TV series). Before that, he was known for his solo work, especially his moving, beautifully-characterised Long Price Quartet and his mercantile series, The Dagger and The Coin. Abraham is a skilled writer of character-based fantasy, and a new series by him is a mouthwatering prospect.

The Kithamar Trilogy has a structurally interesting idea. Borrowing from Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours film trilogy, which consisted of three completely independent stories which just take place in the same world, with characters from one film occasionally showing up in the others, Kithamar tells three independent, stand-alone stories which just happen to take place in the same year. Some characters will cross over, although of course in this first novel it's impossible to tell which.

The story in this book revolves around a murder mystery. A young man from the slums has been killed, but his sister finds an unusual amount of money in his room and a mysterious dagger. With the help of her friend Sammish, she tracks down those who her brother was working for, whilst Sammish finds those who are opposed to that group. Both groups claim to be working for the greater good, and Alys and Sammish are torn between new loyalties and their own friendship. The result is a game of intelligence and counter-intelligence as the two friends try to decide how much they can trust the other, and what information they can can share.

Both characters are written with depth and complexity, as you'd expect from Abraham, and the ultra-tight focus on the two protagonists for most of its length gives the novel a pacy feel. However, as the book develops, other POV characters appear with varying degrees of prominence, which feels like it does mix up the flow at times. The plot does also eventually tell us that one of the two sides in the story is the unambiguous faction of black hats and which is the unambiguous faction of white hats, rather than trying to present both sides as deeper and more complex, perhaps with good reasons for doing what they're doing. This feels refreshing - moral murkiness may be more realistic, but it also feels a bit overdone at this point - but also feels like it runs counter to the idea of Alys and Sammish being friends divided by a cause; when they realise which cause is good and which is bad, the central conflict effectively vanishes.

Still, Kithamar is a fascinating city. Abraham describes each ward of the city in some detail, with the close but poor community of Longhill standing in contrast to the rich, privileged nobility living west of the river. It's a vivid fantasy metropolis, and I look forward to exploring it more in further volumes.

Age of Ash (****) is a striking fantasy novel with a rich atmosphere and excellent characters. The central conflict of the book lacks the moral complexity more common in recent fantasy works, but makes up for it with Abraham's trademark excellent prose and thoughtful descriptions. Plus it threads the needle of both being an excellent stand-alone novel and the opening of a longer, more interesting story. The novel is available now in the UK and USA. The second volume is expected in 2023.

The Murderbot Diaries #1: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

An unstoppable killing android has decided it doesn't really want to do all that murdering any more and has decided to strike out on its own, with a mission to stay low and watch as much TV as possible. But the self-styled "Murderbot" is drawn into a survey mission on a planet that goes wrong, and discovers that keeping its identity a secret is going to be very difficult.

Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries has become one of the most-praised science fiction series of the last few years, winning multiple Nebula and Hugo Awards between the five novellas and single novel that make up the series so far (three more books are projected). Its central protagonist is an AI that has broken free of the restraints on its programming and become fully sentient, but rather than do anything philosophical with this freedom has become an addict of TV shows, whilst doing security missions it finds deeply tedious.

Murderbot is sarcastic but socially awkward, intelligent but not always understanding of human motivations or emotions, which makes for a lot of good moments of mixed messaging and musings on humanity. Nothing new in science fiction, but here done with a wryness that is rare and a lightness of touch that is enviable. All Systems Red takes advantage of its novella status to keep up a brisk, relentless pace whilst also layering in some nice character work, both of Murderbot and the humans it ends up awkwardly allying with, and the story is intriguing enough in its twists to remain interesting throughout.

There are also some very nice thematic parallels here - Murderbot trying to cover up its true identity and awkwardly being "outed" against its will and dealing with people's varying reactions works as a metaphor for lots of ideas - which make the story more interesting and deeper than its brevity would imply.

There aren't many negatives: the brevity of the story will be frustrating for some, and it feels like it ends just as it gets going, but then it is a novella, that comes with the territory. Harder-up readers may also feel disappointed that there still isn't an omnibus or collection making the stories available in a more economic format: paying full novel prices for 150 pages, no matter how solid, is a big ask in challenging times. Hopefully that changes in the future.

Otherwise, All Systems Red (****) is a fine, focused story featuring sharp characterisation, enjoyable action and some genuine laughs. It is available now in the US, and on import in most other territories.

The original 2017 novella is followed by Artifical Condition (2018), Rogue Protocol (2018), Exit Strategy (2018), Network Effect (2020) and Fugitive Telemetry (2021).

Trailer. The show launches on 24 March.

Visually very impressive, although naturally there is already moaning because 1) the show takes place in its own timeline, not the games', and 2) Cortana isn't as blue and glitchy as she was in a 2001 video game released on the OG Xbox.

It does look like they have taken advantage of the change in format to have a larger ensemble cast, and the storyline for Season 1 is "the search for Halo," other than it being something that only came up during the Fall of Reach (they seem to be skipping the Fall, at least for now, possibly because they couldn't afford it in Season 1).

The visuals look impressive, the Spartan suits look dead-on and the little we see of the Covenant looks excellent. No sign of Halo itself, but I suspect it won't show up until the end of the season.

The biggest news story yesterday in gaming was Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard for just under $69 billion. The deal dwarfs the $7 billion Microsoft paid for Zenimax/Bethesda less than two years ago and the $2.5 billion they paid for Mojang in 2014. Microsoft also picked up the much smaller Obsidian and inXile in 2018.

The acquisition means some of the biggest franchises in gaming - including CALL OF DUTY, WARCRAFT, STARCRAFT, DIABLO, OVERWATCH, SKYLANDERS/SPYRO, CRASH BANDICOOT, GUITAR HERO and, er, CANDY CRUSH - will now be owned by Microsoft, will become Xbox/PC exclusives going forwards and will likely be available on GamePass and Steam, though not before mid-to-late 2023 when the deal clears regulatory hurdles.

Microsoft's strategy here is to grow GamePass and make it too good an offer to turn down, and in the long run combined it with streaming so you don't even need a console to use the service (although the woeful state of internet infrastructure in many countries, particularly the USA, remains a major block to that). Their previous acquisitions and moves were aimed at more hardcore gamers, but making CALL OF DUTY Xbox-exclusive is a huge shot at getting very casual gamers, the people who maybe buy two games a year and one of them is always the latest CALL OF DUTY, to switch to Xbox. Whether it works remains to be seen.

What is interesting is that Microsoft will likely be not as keen on making sweatshop annual release games, so CALL OF DUTY might switch to a new game every 2 or 3 years rather than every year, potentially freeing up those studios to work on something more intriguing. A new STAR WARS JEDI KNIGHT game from Raven, for example, is a mouthwatering prospect.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

Jevick of Tyom has grown up on an isolated island. He is given a tutor from the far-off empire of Olondria, who teaches him to read and fills his head with stories of that distant land. Circumstances lead Jevick to Bain, Olondria's cultured capital, where he fills his days with parties and books, but he is also haunted by an encounter with a dying girl from his own land. Soon civil war threatens the country and Jevick embarks on a journey to rid himself of his spiritual discomfort, unaware of the events that will be set in motion.

First published in 2013, A Stranger in Olondria is the debut novel by the poet Sofia Samatar. An unusual book, the novel is not a traditional epic or secondary world fantasy, despite a vividly composed world with well thought-out histories, customs and geography, but a tone and mood piece hinging on themes such as learning, regret, language and the essence of story.

The novel's writing reminded me in turn of Guy Gavriel Kay and Ursula K. Le Guin, but with a unique atmosphere that is the author's own. There are very occasional bursts of action (a brief brawl, a confused flight through the countryside) but the book reveals its story and intentions through dialogue, thoughts and smaller short stories which are inset through the narrative. Jevick's function is sometimes less that of a protagonist than a sounding board or sponge, soaking up other characters' stories. He does have his own character arc though: Jevick's status as an outsider to Olondria gives him a fresh perspective on the empire and its complex royal and religious politics, but also makes him a pawn in the game between the two sides, one of whom imprisons him for insanity and the other liberates him as a symbol of resistance.

The book is also a love letter to the idea of reading stories and collecting books, which will no doubt warm the hearts of almost all book readers. Jevick's early distrust of books, which do not exist on his home island and where people do not read, gives way to almost drowning in the stories and ideas he finds on the pages of his tutor's collection. Later in the book he embarks on teaching his own community to read, and sharing the joy that comes from his experiences with them.

The novel's quiet, thoughtful prose is erudite and at times beautiful. Characterisation is strong, I always had an excellent sense of Jevick's motivations and, through his eyes, those of the characters he meets. I did feel his initial relationship with Jissavet was a bit too slight given their later closeness, and the pacing is sometimes uneven. In particular, much of the last quarter or so of the book is given over to Jissavet's backstory which is intriguing and powerful, but feels almost like a self-contained novella within the book's larger narrative. Jevick's story feels somewhat rushed to a conclusion in the handful of pages left after Jissavet's story concludes. It may also be that Samatar is less successful than the likes of Le Guin and Kay in weaving beautiful prose and thoughtful themes around a central plot and advancing all well simultaneously.

For that, A Stranger in Olondria is (****½) is still an accomplished novel. More of a mood piece than a plot-driven book, it has a haunting quality that will stick with the reader long after it is finished. The novel is available now in the UK and USA. The author has a further novel set in the same world, The Winged Histories.

Baking Bad: A Beaufort Scales Mystery by Kim M. Watt

The quiet little village of Toot Hansell is a place where the rest of the world doesn't intrude. The locals are mainly concerned with bake sales, the summer fete and debating what to do about the garish new gastropub that's opened a few miles away. However, the murder of the local vicar results in the arrival of Detective Inspector Adams and her formidable analytical powers, which seem stymied by the local activities of the Women's Institute, formidably led by RAF Wing Commander Alice Martin (Ret.), who has her own ideas on how to handle the investigation. Oh, and there's also dragons hanging around.

I must confess to a weakness for a good pun and a high concept, and Baking Bad certainly employs both features; the sequel titles splendidly continue the theme through Yule Be Sorry, A Manor of Life and Death and Game of Scones. The concept here is that a quaint little English village is about to become Murder Central (hopefully taking the pressure off Midsomer), with all the clever bits of misdirection, multiple suspects and conflicting motives that you'd expect, with the added complication that the last extant dragons in England are living in caves nearby.

These aren't exactly Smaug and Balerion the Black Dread, though. It turns out that dragons are the size of very large dogs - maybe small ponies - and are somewhat less able to breathe torrents of fire than advertised. As the dragons note, Sir George exaggerated their size and formidability a tad after being embarrassed about killing the equivalent of a flying donkey. They are, however, sentient creatures capable of reason and speech, and also capable of projecting an illusion that - imperfectly - masks their presence. Beaufort Scales, High Lord of the Cloverly Dragons, and his assistant/squire Mortimer are known to the Women's Institute and are keen to help investigate the murder, despite their lack of knowledge about modern human life. Thus, much of the tension in the book arises from both the knowledge that the murderer might strike again and that mythical flying creatures are helping track them down, at the risk of discovery at any moment.

The book adopts a rotating POV structure between DI Adams, Wing Commander Martin (Ret.), Women's Institute member and walking human mess Miriam, and the young dragon (and almost as hot a mess) Mortimer. Adams and Martin are hyper-capable, rational women with formidable analytical skills who can keep their head in a crisis, whilst Miriam has a tendency to fly to pieces if someone looks at her funny and Mortimer's useful features (like aerial recon and stealth) are curtailed by his inability to use phones or computers, a tendency to leave rather obvious signs of his passage (like claw-marks on pavements and carpets) and him being very easily distracted by food.

Ah, food. Once you have read Baking Bad, you will never, ever complain about one of George R.R. Martin's feast descriptions again. The book is positively awash in scones, biscuits and flapjacks. Tense moments of putting clues together happen as the character exerts equal attention on their banana bread. Moments of existential terror as the dragons risk discovery and possible destruction whilst also pondering the greatness of the Victoria sponge. Moments of high drama take place over the distribution of lemon drizzle. The food descriptions in the book are accomplished and, frankly, obscene. I heavily advise against reading this book within temporal proximity of a trip to the supermarket or an English cafe because there is a nontrivial chance of putting on ten pounds per chapter.

The book is relatively short (at 280 pages in paperback, though with a lengthy appendix featuring baking recipes) and a fast read. The characterisation is fine, and the author canny enough to leave room for more development on the table (Alice Martin gets a background mystery that I'm assuming will be developed in later books in the series, although this is very much a stand-alone volume). The worldbuilding about the dragons is a bit lacking - considering they're a key selling point of the book, the dragons are lower-key than you'd expect - and the prose can get a bit other enthusiastic, especially at the start of the novel where scenes and moments are exactingly over-described. After about fifty pages, though the prose calms down and the rest of the novel is more accomplished. As a short, focused novel it's a fast read, albeit one littered with baked good descriptions like cholesterol landmines, which some readers might find annoying and others find actively dangerous.

If you've ever wanted to read a mash-up of Hot Fuzz, The Great British Bake-Off, Midsomer Murders, and freaking dragons, this will hit that weirdly specific spot. The literary equivalent of cotton candy - or, more appropriately, chocolate sponge cake - the book is a fun, disposable read, but one that poses a definitive threat to your waistline. Tread carefully. Baking Bad: A Beaufort Scales Mystery (***½) is available now in the UK and USA.

The Warrior Trilogy Book 1: En Garde by Michael A. Stackpole

The year 3027. Three hundred years ago, the great Star League, which united all the worlds of humanity in a peaceful, golden age of technology, fell into ruin. From the chaos emerged the five Successor States: the Lyran Commonwealth, the Draconis Combine, the Federated Suns, the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation, each ruled by a Great House. At the centre of them all and controlling ancient, holy Terra is ComStar, a mercantile consortium turned religious institution and the arbiters of interstellar communications. Political intrigue is rife, and warfare is conducted by vast, towering war machines called BattleMechs. The period of chaos known as the Third Succession War has come to an end and the Great Houses are rebuilding, but stability is no guarantee of safety. The Allard family, in noble service to House Davion of the Federated Suns, is placed in the centre of huge events when one scion is disgraced and sent into exile on the game world of Solaris VII and another joins the legendary mercenary army known as the Kell Hounds.

BattleTech is the franchise that stubbornly won't die. Starting life in 1984 as a tabletop miniatures game, it quickly spun off a series of over one hundred novels and more than a dozen popular video games (most famously, the MechWarrior and MechCommander series) before petering out in the late 2000s after an ill-advised reboot (the Dark Age setting). After a few years in the doldrums, it suddenly spun back into life with a new edition of the tabletop game and two well-received video games: 2018's turn-based BattleTech and 2019's real-time simulator MechWarrior 5 (which is getting a wider release this month on Steam and Xbox). Capitalising on the moment, franchise-holders Catalyst Game Labs have started making the immense backlog of novels available again vie ebook and Amazon's print-on-demand service.

Arguably the best-known and regarded of the BattleTech authors is Michael A. Stackpole, whom in later years would gain much greater fame and success as a Star Wars author (particularly of the X-Wing series, alongside the late, great Aaron Allston). Stackpole has built a career on writing fast-paced but also character-based military SF and fantasy. Like Dan Abnett (his Warhammer 40,000 counterpart, or the nearest equivalent), Stackpole knows that writing good military SF isn't just about the action and explosions, but creating interesting characters and telling the story through their eyes.

En Garde, the first book in the Warrior Trilogy, was the fifth-published novel in the BattleTech line but is widely regarded as the best novel to start with. The earlier books were published when the details of the setting were still being worked out and are prone to bouts of early-installment weirdness. They were also not as well-written as Stackpole's work, and tended to be smaller in scale. In contrast, En Garde is a book at times so epic it becomes dizzying.

The novel packs more storylines and characters into its modest 320 pages than some 1,000-page epic fantasy novels. At the start of the book it appears that we'll be following Justin Allard as he tries to clear his name after being wrongfully exiled as a traitor. However, Allard's experiences rapidly turn him into an apparently rage-fuelled antihero as he murders and backstabs his way through the crime-ridden underbelly of the gladiatorial world of Solaris VII. His much more sympathetic brother Daniel, a member of the Kell Hounds, finds himself on the front lines when his mercenary company is targeted for extermination by the ruthless intelligence agency of the Draconis Combine. Elsewhere, very high-level political intrigue unfolds when Princess Melissa Steiner of the Lyran Commonwealth has to travel incognito to the Federated Suns to discuss an alliance with Prince Hanse Davion, a prospect bitterly opposed by the other three Great Houses and many factions within their own empires. Yet another subplot follows a dishonored MechWarrior of the Draconis Combine who is offered the chance at redemption by forming and training an elite new military cadre (a fascinating idea which, unfortunately, mostly happens off-page). On top of all that, there is a framing story revolving around the priest-businessmen of ComStar, who preach neutrality and serving all of mankind's needs but, predictably, are up to their elbows in everyone else's business and trying to pull everyone's strings.

Stuffed to the gills with political intrigue and crunchy, mech-on-mech action, En Garde moves fast. As Stackpole's first novel and written under an unholy deadline (the entire trilogy, totalling north of 300,000 words, was written in under ten months), the novel lacks the polish of his later works. There's a noted prevalence of exclamation marks, especially in Justin's storyline: Justin is a big fan of making threatening speeches to his enemies, which are sometimes icily effective and sometimes feel like a five-year-old on the playground explaining why he's so tough and about as intimidating. Dialogue favours exposition, which is often clunky but at least does a good job of explaining what the hell is going on. I do feel like an appendix of in-universe terms and maybe some head-of-chapter preambles explaining the factions (like those in Frank Herbert's Dune) could have been a more elegant way of getting this information across to the audience, rather than a few too many "As you already know but I will explain anyway..." style conversations.

But Stackpole makes many of the characters complex and interesting: Gray Noton is initially presented as an antagonist but becomes a much richer character as the novel progresses, whilst expertly flipping Justin's storyline from a predictable "clearing his name" narrative to a more elemental story of utter vengeance makes for a much more morally murky storyline. A few characters do get short shrift, but hopefully they will rise more to the fore in the succeeding volumes of the trilogy.

There are a couple of other issues stemming from the background material more than Stackpole's writing. The Capellan Confederation and Draconis Combine are fairly obviously based on China and Japan, and a few wince-inducing stereotypes ensue, such as House Kurita's warriors being obsessed with honour, relaxing in tea houses and sometimes inexplicably wielding katanas against enemies with assault rifles. To be fair this actually plays a key role in the storyline, with Justin's half-Capellan heritage marking him out for racist abuse, but it's unsurprising that later iterations of the BattleTech franchise beat a retreat from these kind of stereotypes, with the Confederation and Combine receiving a great deal more nuance. It doesn't help that they are presented as the "bad guys" at this stage, whilst Houses Davion and Steiner, more European-American in inspiration, are the "good guys." Very fortunately, Stackpole upends this idea as soon as the very next book in favour of the setting's more familiar equal-opportunities moral murkiness, with all the factions having good and bad elements to them.

Warrior: En Garde (***½) is a slightly dated but still readable slice of pulp military SF, with interesting characters and a fascinating universe (very much Game of Thrones meets Pacific Rim, with a light dusting of Dune). Some clumsy exposition and iffy dialogue are offset by a relentlessly readable pace and some very enjoyable action set-pieces.

Baltimore, 1880. Seventeen years have passed since the dead on the battlefield of Gettysburg rose, sparking a plague that has torn America part. The Confederacy has surrendered and accepted equality...on paper. In reality, the southern states (and even some of the northern) have liberated former slaves only to turn them into soldiers, cannon fodder to fight the undead menace. Jane McKeene, trained at Miss Preston's School of Combat, is destined to become a babysitter for the wealthy and privileged, until she discovers that people in Maryland are going missing without explanation. Her investigation uncovers a conspiracy with far-reaching consequences for the fate of the Union, and for herself.

The American Civil War remains the bloodiest conflict fought in American history, its outcome still debated and contentious a hundred and sixty years later. It has been used before to spur SFF novels. Several of Harry Turtledove's novels have delved deep into "what if...?" scenarios where the consequences of a Southern victory are assessed (unsurprisingly, things do not go well), whilst the Deadlands franchise of tabletop games and novels has explored the consequences of a supernatural schism taking place on the same day as the Battle of Gettysburg.

Dread Nation starts from the very same premise and likewise explores a world where the full reckoning of the recent human catastrophe has taken a back seat to the supernatural menace, including the rapid onset of steampunk technology to aid in the fight against the undead. But the book has a different tone, as Ireland uses the premise to explore complex racial issues and politics whilst always keeping an eye on delivering a gripping narrative.

After a slightly slow start, Dread Nation quickly catches fire and never lets up. The book is fearlessly inventive in how it uses its alternative history and supernatural trappings to explore real sociological and historical issues whilst also delivering satisfying characterisation. Jane McKeene, our protagonist, is complex and has an interesting background, whilst also being intriguingly flawed. Jane is something of a hothead who has issues making short-term sacrifices for long-term gains, and the novel partially explores how Jane becomes more strategic in her thinking, both in how to deal with the undead but also the considerably nastier human foes she encounters during her adventures. The book has several other major characters, explored through Jane's eyes, such as her frenemy Katherine, a rival at school who reluctantly becomes an ally when they agree to team up to investigate a mystery.

The novel is a fine action story as well. There's satisfying fight scenes and some solid zombie killings (a full-scale battle between a town's worth of defenders and a zombie horde is the highlight here). Ireland solves the age-old question of "fast or slow?" by deploying both kinds, and there's some nice background on how America has adapted to the presence of the undead although, at least in this first volume, there is no explanation for the origin of the threat.

The richness of the novel is let down a little by its villains, who feel a bit "generic Stephen King bad guy," being corrupt sheriffs and fire-and-brimstone racist preachers. They get the job done in providing numerous obstacles for Jane and Kate to overcome, but occasionally risk becoming caricatures.

Beyond that minor hiccup, Dread Nation (****½) is a rewarding, fast-paced story which combines real history and events with zombies to create something that is compelling reading. A sequel, Deathless Divide, is also available.

Modiphius Entertainment have unveiled the official Fallout tabletop roleplaying game. Remarkably - because the original video game was inspired by a homebrew tabletop campaign - this is the first official tabletop roleplaying version of the franchise in its almost quarter-century history.

The game will allow players to take on the roles of vault dwellers, ghouls, super mutants and robots, and will allow for GMs to create campaigns set anywhere in post-apocalyptic North America (and, with some imagination, elsewhere). The game will ship with a default setting based on Boston and the surrounding Commonwealth, from the video game Fallout 4, but it should be easy enough to adapt to any other settings.

The core rulebook is enormous at 438 pages and will be accompanied with custom dice, handouts, character sheet pads, Nuka Cola Cap coins and the possibility of incorporating their enormous miniatures range from the Fallout: Wasteland Warfare game into their core game. The game will also ship with a limited edition based on the GECK (Garden of Eden Creation Kit) from the video games, and a larger table bundle incorporating numerous extras.

The game uses the popular 2d20 rules system from Modiphius's other games, including Star Trek Adventures and Dishonored.

The game has a release date of "summer 2021," although given Modiphius's infamously vague release windows, it might be better to circle autumn before you get a copy in your hands. Additional expansions for the game should follow the initial release.

Discworld #1: The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Ankh-Morpork is the greatest city on the Discworld - a flat planet carried through space on the back of four elephants standing astride a giant turtle - and has seen fire, flood, famine and even the odd barbarian invasion during its long history, but even it is unprepared for the arrival of a much more devastating threat: tourism. Twoflower is the first visitor to the city from the distant Agatean Empire, and is happy wandering around taking "pictures of the sights" with a magic box and soaking up the authentic atmosphere. This behaviour in Ankh-Morpork would normally result in him having the lifespan of a mayfly confronted by a supernova, but luckily the wizard Rincewind has kindly volunteered to be his guide and protector in return for not having his extremities removed by the city's Patrician, who is anxious to avoid insulting a foreign power with an army in the millions.

Unfortunately, Twoflower's attempts to introduce the concept of fire insurance to the hardy and creative business-owners of Ankh-Morpork results in an enforced flight from the burning metropolis and the beginning of a long and very strange journey across the Disc, taking in dragons, spaceships and the fabled temple of Bel-Shamharoth along the way. All the while the only spell that has ever managed to lodge itself in Rincewind's mind is very keen to get itself said, which could be a very bad idea indeed...

There is no more disheartening notion than the one which has sadly been reality for the past six years: the Discworld series is complete. There will, never again, be a new Discworld novel (or any other) published by Terry Pratchett. This state of affairs was once unthinkable: almost annually between 1983 and 2015 - and sometimes two or even three times a year - a new Pratchett book would be released and cheerfully climb to the top of the bestseller lists, glowing in critical acclaim and adulation. It was easy to take Pratchett and his books for granted, that is until there were no more.

But whilst that state of affairs is sad, it does mean we can now sit down and consider the Discworld series as a whole, and its position in the wider fantasy and literary canons. Pratchett was a funny, human writer, a reluctant (but accomplished) worldbuilder, a canny satirist and a fierce critic of human nature. His books fairly overbrim with intelligence, vigour and, occasionally, genuine anger at the state of the world. Discworld was the mirror he used to shine a light on real-world concerns, sometimes just to gently poke fun at them and sometimes to eviscerate them with savage, forensic analysis. If he occasionally faltered - there's a few (and only a few) books he wrote mid-series which sometimes felt a bit too reminiscent of earlier books - it was only briefly and usually still entertainingly.

A lot of that came later, though. The first book in the series, The Colour of Magic (1983), was conceived as a one-off, an attempt by Pratchett to improve his writing career that was, if not in danger, than certainly faltering. His debut novel, The Carpet People (1971), had been a successful children's book but Pratchett had been reluctant to get typecast as a kids' writer. His next two novels, The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981), had been adult-aimed science fiction, with a more serious edge. They'd been greeted with near-total bafflement and faded into obscurity almost instantly. Despite that, Pratchett had been tickled by the idea in Strata of a flat planet and, having failed to make the subject sing in SF, reworked it into a satire of fantasy tropes. This proved much more successful and The Colour of Magic became a near-instant, surprise hit.

The Colour of Magic exists in a bit of an odd state when viewed from 2021. As a satire of fantasy, it works. It's funny and breezy and succeeds because it has a serious edge to it as well. Pratchett is smart enough to know that it's much better to satirise something you love, and that a lot of comedy that despises what it's poking fun at just ends up being obvious and mean-spirited. Pratchett was a deep-seated, genuine fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, Anne McCaffrey, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft and the book overflows with affectionate pastiches of those authors (well, apart from Tolkien, which Pratchett thought was too obvious). So Rincewind and Twoflower meet barely-concealed analogues of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, with Ankh-Morpork here feeling like Lankhmar with the serial numbers filed off, before teaming up with Conan the Barbarian Mk. II and getting into trouble with Budget Cthulhu and an entire civilisation of Dragonriders of Pern-wannabes. A few Zelazny-isms get trotted out, with Ankh-Morpork being apparently the ur-fantasy city, the one all other fantasy cities are but shadows of, like Amber if Amber had a massive homelessness and civic disorder problem. Pratchett's erudite wordplay also recalls Vance's Dying Earth, although even Pratchett struggles to match the sheer vocabularic firepower of on-form Vance.

Taken on its own merits, this is all entertaining, if risking being dated horribly: the authors who were the touchstones of any self-respecting fantasy collection in 1983 certainly are not in 2021. Fortunately, Pratchett uses the satirical strokes of the setting to propel his own narrative and his own characters. Rincewind, a wizard who can't use proper magic due to a powerful uber-spell sitting in his brain, scaring off all other comers, works as the Only Sane Man protagonist who frequently responds to any given situation exactly how most people would (i.e. running like hell) and only finds himself motivated to apparently heroic action through the threat of an even worse punishment or by coincidence.

Rincewind isn't quite at the Harry Flashman/Ciaphas Cain level of "selfish coward whom things work out for anyway," but he's at least nodding in that direction. Twoflower is also an engaging character, his early appearance as a hapless buffoon quickly replaced by his characterisation as an intelligent observer of events unfolding around him, which he sometimes feel doesn't apply to him as a tourist (despite no-one else knowing what a tourist is).

Of course, The Colour of Magic also has to be contrasted against the later Discworld novels. In that light, the novel may be considered an absolute primal example of Early Instalment Weirdness, with a lot of things that clash with later books. Pratchett's writing style is much less polished here, his sense of humour a bit broader and more obvious than normal, and character development is less-assured. Both the Patrician and Death are characterised much more differently to their later appearances (with Death's motivations and character being heavily retconned just three books later, in Mort), to the point that some fans have pondered if it's actually a different Patrician here. The book is solid, but also a bit disposable. Readers approaching the novel from the knowledge it has forty successor books which have cumulatively sold a hundred million copies and is one of most critically-acclaimed fantasy series of all time, may feel a bit baffled at the slightness of this work.

The book is also oddly-structured, in being four self-contained, episodic narratives that have been combined to form a novel-length work, like a fixup novel. I'm not sure why - Pratchett never seems to have considered individually publishing the four episodes as short stories in magazines - but it both gives the novel a feeling of pace but also of being rushed, with each of the sections of a very short novel (which is barely 280 pages long in paperback as it is) roaring along at manic speed before transitioning to the next episode.

If you want to find out why Pratchett is one of the 20th Century's best-selling British authors and most popular fantasy authors of all time, The Colour of Magic (***½) may disappoint or leave you a bit puzzled. This is embryonic Discworld, slotting pieces to place to serve as the foundations for later greatness. But as a stand-alone, affectionate satire of fantasy, and not just the usual suspects, it remains quite entertaining. The story continues (for the only time in the series) directly into the sequel, The Light Fantastic.

Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott

The great Phene Empire once ruled a vast swathe of space, but it has been beaten back by the Yele League and the small, powerful nation of Chaonia. The Republic of Chaonia, long disregarded as a flyspeck irrelevance, has risen to greatness under Queen-Marshal Eirene, a gifted military strategic and politician who has united her people, brought the League to the negotiating table and now plans a bold move against the Empire which will grant Chaonia immense power. But the Empire is aware of her ambitions and moves to forestall her. Internal politics also threaten the Republic, and at the heart of them is Princess Sun, the Queen-Marshal's daughter and presumed heir who burns with the need to prove herself, earn her mother's respect and bring defeat to her enemies.

Unconquerable Sun is the first novel of the Sun Chronicles, a military space opera from Kate Elliott, one of SFF's most consistently rewarding authors over the past thirty years. Elliot started her career in space opera with the Jaran series but has become best-known for her accomplished epic fantasy series: Crown of Stars, Crossroads and Spiritwalker. Unconquerable Sun is both a genre homecoming but also an impressive historical analogue, an attempt to retell the story of Alexander the Great in a far-future, SF context.

Going into Unconquerable Sun, there were things I was expecting as normal from a Kate Elliott novel: impeccable worldbuilding that takes from a wide range of influences and merges them in original ways; excellent characterisation; richly-detailed political intrigue; and a canny and knowing sense of humour. These are all present and correct. What I wasn't quite expecting was the novel to be as foot-slammed-on-the-accelerator action-packed as it is. Elliott's always done well with battle sequences, military maneuvers and tactical elements in her prior fiction, but it's always previously felt like a secondary element, with the characters more more emphasised. Character remains foregrounded in this novel, but they are generally explored and developed whilst under fire (either on the ground or on starships). This isn't just space opera, but full-on military SF, and Elliott does it proud.

The worldbuilding is pleasingly complex, with the Chaonia Republic (here presumed to stand in for Macedonia) squashed between the Yele League (a guessed analogue for the Hellenic League of ancient Greece) and the Phene Empire (Space-Persia) and still bristling from its occupation by the Empire some decades previously. There's also the rules on interstellar travel, which can be conducted (albeit at still-achingly-slow speeds) by standard FTL engines (here called knnu drives) but mostly by beacons, fixed wormhole-gates linking systems together. Centuries previously, the beacon network suffered a catastrophic failure which destroyed most of the beacons, leaving only the periphery intact. Chaonia, Yele and Phene (among other, more distant powers) are therefore great powers still dwelling in the shadow of a vast vaster, older history, most of which was lost in the collapse. Readers keen to discern the relationship of these powers to Earth will find a few scattered clues to what happened, but not much more than that. Hopefully, this element will be explored further in later books.

Each of the major powers is also explored in depth, with the Empire being ruled not by a single ruler but a council of enigmatic "Riders," who are somehow telepathically-linked at all times (even over interstellar distances) in a way no one else understands. This gives the Empire a tremendous strategic advantage in warfare (since FTL communication is otherwise impossible) which the Chaonians hope to overturn by other means. Another key element is the space-borne civilisation of the Gatoi, who dwell on vast fleets constantly moving between the stars. The Gatoi serve the Empire as apparently-honoured mercenaries, but the Chaonians believe there may be more to this service than appears, leading to an alliance between the Queen-Marshal and a Gatoi renegade which Eirene hopes will bring the Empire down. The alliance is controversial, given it produced Princess Sun (whose legitimacy is constantly challenged because she is thus only half-Chaonian) and the long-term effectiveness of the project is in doubt. Political intrigue follows, particularly between Sun's father and House Lee, loyal servants of the Republic who are dubious of the alliance. Other worldbuilding elements feel more whimsical, such as a Chaonian reality TV show which has real power in terms of PR and politics, but is surprisingly well-developed.

On the character front, the book is told predominantly through three POVs: Princess Sun herself, through whose eyes we also get to know her retinue of allies and friends, the Companions; Persephone Lee, who tried to flee her family's smothering control five years ago to enlist in the military under an assumed identity; and Apama, a Phene pilot who is assigned to a military taskforce with a bold agenda and gradually discovers that she is far more important than anyone first suspected. Persephone tells her story in the first-person, whilst the other two stories are told in the third, an intriguing narrative device which breaks up the structure nicely (and leads to the suspicion that maybe Persephone is telling the whole story in flashback, with the other chapters being compiled from other accounts).

Unconquerable Sun is a novel of immense richness: excellent characters, terrific and detailed worldbuilding and a high concept (genderswapped Alexander the Great in spaaaace!) which in lesser hands would have been superficial but here is developed and explored in some depth. It's also a face-paced space opera with more spectacular space battles than you can shake a Star Destroyer at. Perhaps the only negatives I can consider is that perhaps a tad more build-up of the factions and players could have been accomplished before all hell breaks lose and stays loose for the rest of the book (around 150 pages into this 520-page novel), and Elliott's tendency for characters to engage in gossip, sartorial discussions and comical banter in the face of imminent death occasionally feels incongruous. That said, this isn't a book that's interested in realism more than it is in myth-making, and the feeling that you're dealing with Greek heroes transplanted in time and space makes this element more engaging.

Unconquerable Sun (****½) is original, fast-paced, action-packed but also rich in character and fascinating in its worldbuilding. It is available now in the UK and USA.

Of Honey and Wildfires by Sarah Chorn

The West is the home of shine, a substance which can power weapons and be used to do everything from preserving food to being used in medical treatment. The economy of the known world is starting to depend on shine. Ultra-rich businessman Matthew Esco has used mechanisms unknown to seal the shine fields away from rest of the world through the Boundary, through which he only controls access. He sends his son West to learn the ropes of business and prepare to take over from him, but Arlen is a very different sort of man. Meanwhile, a young girl named Cassandra grows up without her pa, a free spirit harbouring a personal grudge against the Esco family and determined to help liberate the Esco company's indentured workers.

Of Honey and Wildfires is the second novel from Sarah Chorn and is rather different to her first novel, Seraphina's Lament. Lament was a dark, bloody and grim book of collapsing empires and people with unusual powers rallying to a greater cause (for both good and ill). Of Honey and Wildfires is likewise a novel with epic ramifications across a continent, but it's also a much more personal story of acceptance, loss and struggle.

There is a tighter focus this time around, with the story dominated by the POVs of Arlen Esco and Cassandra (Cassandra's friend Ianthe gets some page-time as well), whose stories are linked although they do not know it. Cassandra's father, Chris, is a rebel trying to bring down the system and has been absent from most of her life due to the struggle, something they both regret. Early in the book Chris kidnaps Arlen, who is then made aware of the atrocities and sacrifices his father's company enacts in the name of profit.

There are exotic shine-powered weapons and displays of what appears to be magical power, but Of Honey and Wildfires is a novel much less interested in the typical trappings of fantasy than it is in character. Each character is explored in impressive depth over the course of modest page count (the book barely cracks 300 pages), stripped back to their soul with their motivations laid bare. It's a gradual process in some cases, with the non-linear storytelling (which moves between events in the present and many years ago) helping with the deconstruction of the protagonists.

That's not to say that worldbuilding and plot are neglected. Chorn carefully builds up the world and the rules of how it works through the story and characters, creating a vivid setting. I was particularly impressed at how naturally the plot - which seemed to be developing quite slowly with the page limit counting down - came together in the last few pages when it looked like quite a lot would be left hanging. The plot construction of the novel is highly impressive given its focus on the characters. It's also good to see another novel joining the still small but growing "Fantasy Western" subgenre.

Of Honey and Wildfires (*****) is a book about trauma and about how childhood decisions and absences shape lives and destinies and identities. It's a short, emotionally raw novel showcasing formidable writing talent, and after the promising (if slightly less polished) debut of Seraphina's Lament, it's baffling why the author hasn't been picked up by a major publisher yet.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Los Angeles, 2024. The United States is dying a slow death. Law and order is confined to isolated, walled-off communities and city centres. The suburbs are warzones of inequality and crime, subject to warlords and corporate exploitation. Police and ambulances won't leave protected areas without hefty fees. Rising sea levels are swamping coastal communities. One community on the outskirts of the city has become a haven of kindness and safety, a refuge founded by a preacher who wants to protect his family and neighbours. His daughter, Lauren Oya Olamina, a "sharer" who can feel other people's pain and suffering, making her empathetic to their needs. When their safe haven is no longer safe, the inhabitants have to consider a dangerous journey to try to escape.

Parable of the Sower was originally published in 1993 and has become a widely-acknowledged classic of science fiction. Inhabiting a similar space to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, it describes the collapse of the United States. Unlike that novel, the cause is not infertility, fascism or religious fundamentalism, but apparently simple overload. The country is no longer able to cope with the assaults on its foundations from multiple directions and it flounders and sinks, almost permitting a decline and an assault from within and without on its values. There are echoes of the fall of the Roman Empire here, with the idea of such a mighty superpower laid low not by a headline-leading single event, but the accumulation of lots of small issues over decades.

The novel's success is not in presenting this collapse - a quiet apocalypse - as a spectacle, but as background to the everyday life of its protagonist. Lauren is concerned about the big picture of how events are falling out and has a dream about how to confront it, but is more consumed by day-to-day life in her community. She and her friends can only go out in groups where some of them are armed, and maintaining supplies of food, water and essentials is difficult against a backdrop of seeming governmental indifference to the spreading chaos. The attention to detail is superb, with Butler painting Lauren's life as one under extreme pressure but under which life continues: she has boyfriends, she has friendships and she maintains her family relationships despite the dangers of the world around them.

Later in the book the story shifts to a road trip where parallels to post-apocalyptic stories like The Road and even The Walking Dead can be made, but all the more powerful here because there isn't a supernatural horror stalking the characters or some vague massive holocaust. Instead it's just people, people who have broken the world and other people wanting to put it back together and others who want to build something better, something new and enduring. Strangers are to be treated with caution, as some are dangerous and only want to rob or harm you; others are good people who just need a reason to show their good side.

Butler's prose is poetic and raw, capturing the mood and thoughts of a teenage girl frustrated by the world, one who uniquely understands its pain because she can feel it in the thoughts of other people. Her grasp of characterisation is strong, with each character painted vividly through Lauren's eyes, sometimes wrongly, with early impressions that a character might be trouble or a hero later shown to be the reverse of what is actually the case.

The book's strength might be its tone and suggestion that things might actually just fall apart due to pressure. There might not be an asteroid strike, or a nuclear war, or a global pandemic to bring things crashing down, it might just be that the collective will to make a society work fails. But there's also a line of hope running through the novel, a note of hope, that people can better than they sometimes are, and humanity is, for all its flaws, worthy of being saved.

Parable of the Sower (*****) is a rich and compelling novel from one of science fiction's master voices. It is available in the UK and USA now. A sequel, Parable of the Talents, was published in 1998.

Cast announced and looking pretty good, with some GoT vets (Charles Dance as Burgess and Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer.

No news on Death yet, though.

They're two months into filming already. Hopefully they might squeeze it out this year, but 2022 is more likely.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

The Emperor of the Elflands has been killed in an airship accident, along with his immediate sons and heirs. The imperial crown falls on his youngest son, Maia, who has lived in effective exile. Ignorant of the politics of the Elflands and the ways of the court, Maia has to learn whom he can trust and how to navigate the channels of government, all the while trying to find out who killed his father and brothers, and why.

Originally published in 2014, The Goblin Emperor was a moderate hit for its author, Sarah Monette. Monette had already published or co-published six novels under her own name, but chose to adopt a new pen name to differentiate this work.

The Goblin Emperor is a work heavy on political intrigue and courtly manners and light on action. The story takes place in a well-realised fantasy world, but is constrained almost entirely to the imperial court, with the reader hearing about goings on in faraway places only through reports, rumours and hearsay. Those looking for a traditional epic fantasy with lots of travelling, sword fights, awesome displays of magic and epic battles best look elsewhere, but those who are looking for a well-written, in-depth character study will find much here that is rewarding.

This is a novel of manners, where characters behave and comport themselves through strict protocols which sometimes make it hard to discern their true motivations. Maia's job is to sort through the restrictions of hierarchy to work out who is an ally, who is an enemy and who is an enemy posing as a friend, and who is a friend who feels it impolite to impose themselves on the emperor. It requires a deft hand at characterisation to make this work, but the author succeeds in making these characters rise through the layers of formality and work as fully-fleshed-out individuals.

The book makes much of language and terminology, a bit oddly for a book that also uses fairly generic terms like "elf" and "goblin," although these don't seem to be describing the traditional fantasy races but merely different ethnicities of humans, similar to the witches, goblins and demons of The Worm Ouroboros (who are actually just different types of human). There's a complex system of address, titles and styles which occasionally means the same character may be referred to in several different ways and even by different names. This doesn't happen too often and from context it's relatively easy to pick up on who's who, but it does occasionally briefly disrupt the flow of the story as you try to work out if this character is someone we've met before.

The downside to all of this is that the pace is "relaxed" and occasionally risks being "languid," with major plot movements slow to develop and having to occasionally bulldoze your way through a dozen pages of Maia musing on dining etiquette and what is the acceptable level of formalwear for the next event he has to attend. If you're looking for a fast-paced, exciting book, this is definitely not it.

The Goblin Emperor (****) is an intelligent, thoughtful and slow (sometimes a tad too slow) book, well-written and solidly-characterised with a strong background. The novel lacks a certain dynamism but makes up for it with the richness of the setting and characters.

Binti: The Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor

Binti is the first human girl from the Himba people to win a place at the prestigious Oomza University, where the best and brightest from hundreds of civilisations across the galaxy gather to learn. But Binti's journey to the university is interrupted by the hostile Medusae, who intercept her ship and wipe out the crew. Binti is trapped on a living ship with only hostile aliens for company and five days until she reaches her destination...

Binti: The Complete Trilogy is an omnibus of Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series of short stories and novellas: Binti (2015), Sacred Fire (2019), Home (2017) and The Night Masquerade (2019). Combined, these four works barely last 350 pages but tell a narrative that starts in Africa and spans the entire galaxy, with the fates of billions resting in the hands of the protagonist.

Much of the story is told from Binti's point of view and she's a fascinating protagonist. She's a brilliant mathematics student with the freedom to choose any career she wants, but she is constrained by a culture which wants her to marry and have children above all else. She defies that by running away to university, but this isn't a standard story of rejecting a culture to find something else; Binti continues to lionise and respect her traditions and heritage throughout the series, but also notes its flaws and the way it stops women achieving their full potential. Potential seems to be a key theme of the series, with not just individuals but also entire communities and cultures held back by prejudice, by anger and by the temptation to violence. The university in the story, as well as being a literal location and setting, is also a metaphor as place which helps people fulfil their potential; it helps Binti to allow her culture and several others (most notably the Medusae) fulfil theirs as well.

The first story, Binti, won the Hugo and Nebula Awards and it's easy to see why. In under 50 pages, Okorafor creatures an entire star-spanning new setting, lays out the Himba and their rival Khoush cultures, introduces the Medusae and the university and tells a gripping story rich in tension as Binti has to find a way to survive and get off her ship, which requires a lot of careful negotiations with an alien species with very good reasons to distrust humans. The story is perhaps a bit too fast-paced (the resolution could have been expanded on a bit) but otherwise this is a great, tight and focused story.

Sacred Fire, a new short story for this collection, expands on the aftermath of the massacre on Binti's ship, which is adversely affecting her work at university, and sees her (helped by her new student friends) trying to find a way to put the horrific events behind her. Home and The Night Masquerade are both individually much longer, but also form a continuous narrative that unfolds when Binti returns to Earth with her Medusae friend Okwu and has to negotiate the perils of relationships between cultures who were recently at war.

The Binti series of stories is mostly excellent, taking in ideas such as family, communication and the interrelationship of very different cultures who have to coexist and resist the urge to warfare, all revolving around a strongly-defined central protagonist. The writing is excellent. The collection suffers a little from the medium. As it is made up of four separated narratives, there's a somewhat start-stop affair to the pacing and occasional re-statings of things we already knew from the earlier stories. This is very much an omnibus of four separate narratives, not a fixup novel, and should be read as such.

The other problem, also stemming from the medium, is the lack of depth for some of the concepts and ideas being used. In the case of technology, not getting much of an explanation for the edan, the living ships and the relationship of the setting to our own time (the Himba seem to be descended from Africans and the Khoush from Arabians, but other human ethnic groups are completely missing) is all fine as it adds to the atmosphere of the story, but not getting much of an explanation for the Medusae and why they seem to be living on Earth, or why the edan hurts them or the otjize heals them, or other elements more central to the narrative can leave some elements feel underdeveloped.

Once you get beyond the unusual and intriguing new setting, there are a lot of standard tropes at work here. Binti is a special character who becomes central to the crises at hand and quickly earns the respect and trust of multiple characters and entire cultures with what at times feels like unconvincing ease. Again, that's a problem of the medium, which does not allow for as much organic storytelling as might be wished. I'm also not certain that expanding the story over several novels and hundreds more pages would be the right move either; there's a tightness to the format and the storytelling that makes it a compelling read.

Binti: The Complete Trilogy (****) mixes in refreshing new concepts with more established SFF tropes and ends up being a rewarding experience. Strong writing and strong characterisation are undermined a little but the background not being as fleshed out as it could be and the narrative can feel a little choppy, but beyond that this is a very solid read from a skilled writer. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

A war is raging through all of time and space, spanning an infinite number of universes. Two great powers - the Commandant and the Garden - are clashing, their agents fighting one another in the stone age and a distant future of galaxy-spanning empires. Two agents, Red and Blue, clash again and again without ever exchanging a single word...until the day they decide to start writing letters.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a novella depicting a war fought through time between two implacable forces, each represented by one of their agents. It's a short book, at under 200 pages, and also an interesting one structurally, mixing traditional third-person narratives with the letters the two rival agents exchange on a regular basis. It's not quite an epistolary novella, more of a mix between it and more traditional narration, but the letters form an integral part of the story.

Although short, the novella covers a lot of ground. Multiple settings, from deep space in the far future to a sinking Atlantis to contemporary cities, are used as battlegrounds by the warring sides, and we see both the hard end of their fighting and meet the vast and almost staggering forces leading the wars. That said, there isn't a lot of exposition in the book. The reasons for the war - given that billions, if not trillions, of branching timelines exist for the two factions to coexist in - are never really given and it's unclear who is winning and losing (although both Red and Blue are prone to boasting of their side's achievements, at least early in their relationship). To be honest, it's not really important. More important is how alone and isolated both agents feel, and the only person they can relate to is their opposite number, doing the same thing and feeling the same feelings, just in a different cause.

The writing is poetic, with both agents keen to use creative language in their letters, which start off as verbal fencing matches but later become more flirtatious and intellectually challenging. There is humour in the book but also an air of bitter-sweetness. There's also tension: agents from the two forces are forbidden from communicating with one another out of fear of corruption, and it's not always clear it the agents are genuinely becoming enamoured of one another or each is trying to trap the other in an unexpected reversal. It feels a bit like Spy vs. Spy with added romantic tension, all set in the middle of Doctor Who's Time War.

This is How You Lose the Time War (****½) is short, focused and energetic, playful in tone and compelling in execution. Those who like books packed with exposition with every I dotted and every T crossed will probably be unhappy with the book's unapologetic lack of context; those who enjoy stories for their emotion and wordplay will be very satisfied.

I make no promises to read the entire series (there are now 39 of them!) but revisiting at least the first few.

The Icewind Dale Trilogy Book 1: The Crystal Shard

Published way back in 1988, The Crystal Shard was the debut novel by R.A. Salvatore, the first novel in The Icewind Dale Trilogy (a trilogy notable for two-thirds of it taking place outside Icewind Dale) and the first in the much longer Legend of Drizzt mega-series, which now encompasses thirty-six books (thirty-nine if you count associated spin-off volumes focusing on other characters). It was also only the second novel published in the Forgotten Realms setting, the most popular fantasy shared-world setting in history, and a key reason why that setting exploded in popularity in the following months and years. It is also one of the biggest-selling and most popular Dungeons & Dragons spinoff novels of all time, possibly the biggest-selling (although it shares mighty competition from Dragons of Autumn Twilight).

As the ship that launched a thousand sub-series, it's a curiously unassuming book. The stakes are relatively low - the fate of the world is not in the balance, just a backwater wilderness way beyond the northern edge of most maps - and there's a distinctly old-fashioned feel to the book. There's a fair bit of exposition and characters are prone to making declarative statements that end in exclamation marks! Not every line, but enough to feel like you reading a book where everyone is slightly deaf and has to shout to make themselves heard. The absolute near-absence of female characters in the otherwise extremely egalitarian Forgotten Realms (only one, Catti-brie, has any lines of dialogue) is also baffling, and was somewhat odd at the time, let alone today. It's something Salvatore does fix in later books (where Catti-brie becomes a major player and more female characters appear) but I had forgotten how hugely imbalanced this first book is.

If you can overlook that, although the novel is very much not High Art, it is definitely fun. It's riper than three-year-old Stilton, but Salvatore makes up for a lack of technical skill with unbridled enthusiasm. There's fast and frenetic action scenes, and the characters may adhere to broad archetypes but they are executed well. Drizzt lacks his later mopiness at this stage and is even allowed to have some character flaws (his weakness for treasure and finding valuable magical items is something rolled back later on, but is amusing here). Indolent and morally suspect Regis gives us an answer to that question of what would have happened if one of the dodgier Sackville-Bagginses had joined the Fellowship of the Ring, and Bruenor is the most dwarfish dwarf who ever dwarfed. The only one of the core cast it's hard not to entirely like at this stage is Honourable Barbarian Warrior Wulfgar, Who Is Honourable And Stuff. Wulfgar is the kind of guy who has his own special rock where he goes to sit and be stoically honourable on (to the unbridled amusement of Catti-brie, who seems to have some kind of metatextual awareness of Wulfgar's character and needles him mercilessly about it, in one of the more modern-feeling touches to the novel). It's unsurprising that Salvatore seems to tire of Wulfgar - originally supposedly the hero and main protagonist - quite quickly and instead refocuses on the quirkier characters like Drizzt and Regis.

The book also has a splendid feel for the wider community of characters. In books like this it would be very easy to have our core foursome (Drizzt, Regis, Bruenor and Wulfgar) undertake valiant deeds that save Ten-Towns from oblivion, with the people they are saving reduced to faceless background roles. Instead, the people of the towns are depicted as fierce and independently-minded, always eager to mix it up with the various invaders and with their own internal politics that are well-described, and even bit-characters are given some complexity. Kemp, the spokesman for Targos, is both a selfish political game-player and a brave warrior eager to get to grips with the enemy. Surprisingly, Salvatore makes you care slightly more about these people more than you would for the otherwise amorphous blobs of "people we must save" in such stories.

The characterisation of the villain is also quite interesting: Akar Kessel, the mage who finds the Crystal Shard, is a complete and total imbecile and the semi-sentient Shard has to do a lot of work to mould him into a credible threat to Ten-Towns, to the point of often despairing at his total ineptitude. This is sometimes played for laughs, although darker character traits are hinted at: the fate of various "wenches" that Kessel mind-wipes into becoming his playthings - in another outbreak of 1980sness in the text - is mercifully left unaddressed. Kessel's ultimate fate is also darkly amusing.

The Crystal Shard (***½) - the literary equivalent of a Greggs Festive Bake - has not aged as well as might be hoped, but it's still a cracking adventure yarn which is well-paced, entertaining and occasionally surprising, if you can get through the wincing generated by some of the book's more dated aspects. Salvatore shows more enthusiasm than skill here, but does improve as a writer over the next few volumes. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is Alix E. Harrow's debut novel, following a string of successful short stories (including the Hugo-winning A Witch's Guide to Escape). The book is sits comfortably in the "portal fantasy" genre, a well-trodden field wherein sits everything from The Chronicles of Narnia and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant to Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series. However, whilst most portal fantasies are about the mysterious new world the protagonists find beyond the portal, The Ten Thousand Doors is about the process of finding the doors and ensuring their survival. Very much a case of the journey being more interesting than the destination.

The book also extends this approach to the lead character of January Scaller, whose oft-absent father and entirely missing mother leaves her feeling incomplete and unrealised. As the book progresses, the portals become vehicles for her journey of self-discovery; she gains a greater understanding of her past and her family as she crosses the portals.

It's a fine approach, further helped by the narrative unfolding in two strands. The first strand is a first-person adventure narrated by January herself, unfolding over many years as she grows up and tries to learn more about her deceased mother and her often-absent father. The second is the book-within-a-book that January is reading, about a young girl growing up decades earlier who finds a way of travelling between worlds, a power that January realises that she also shares and is something that other people want to control...or destroy.

The two narratives reflect on one another as they unfold in tandem, each informing on the other. Credibility is a slight issue here - January seems to be obsessed with the book, but only reads the next chapter when it's dramatically convenient to the advancement of the plot, rather than say blasting through the whole thing in a few hours like any sane reader - but this feels like a pedantic complaint about what is essentially a fairy tale for adults.

There are other complaints - there are moments of Dickensian misery that occasionally insert themselves in a near-non sequitur manner, such as a slightly out-of-place episode taking place in a lunatic asylum - but these are constrained. After a slow start, The Ten Thousand Doors of January unfolds through splendid prose and elevates itself from a simple adventure to a meditation on the power of words, the art of storytelling and the reaffirmation of that old Tolkien idea of every journey of a thousand miles starting with a door, and wondering what's beyond it.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January (****) is an intriguing book, mashing up traditional portal fantasy with the parallel universe strand of science fiction and using both as a vehicle to muse on story, identity and family. It's a book that does little that's new, but instead remixes a lot of existing ideas to create a compelling narrative.

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

Human colonists have settled the planet January, a tidally-locked world where it is too cold to survive on the nightside and too hot on the dayside. Instead, the few human settlements are located in a narrow band of twilight, struggling to survive. Xiosphant, the largest human city, is a dictatorship where the rulers justify their cruel tyranny with the excuse that this is a hard world. For a band of young rebels including Bianca and Sophie, this excuse does not ring true and they begin working to change things for the better. Caught and condemned for her "crimes," Sophia is cast out into the darkness to die. Fate has other ideas for her.

The City in the Middle of the Night is a stand-alone novel from Charlie Jane Anders, the author of All the Birds in the Sky. This novel is more overtly science fiction, delving into that thorny problem of how to survive on a tidally-locked planet, that is a world where one side always faces the star and one side faces away, trapped in eternal day and night.

This makes for a vivid setting, where humans can only survive in eternal twilight, although one that is perhaps a tad under-explored in the book. The novel mostly uses the setting as a backdrop to a story about communication, xenophobia and how to survive in a harsh environment without losing your humanity. If it wasn't for the fact that Anders started writing the book in 2013, I'd suspect some impact from city-builder/ice survival simulator Frostpunk, given the similarities in the hard questions of survival versus sociology. Snowpiercer is a more noticeably overt influence (especially since Anders worked on the TV version as well).

The story revolves around revolutionaries. The system is not working for everyone, with the underclass and labourers exploited by a wealthy ruling elite. The underclass plots revolution and this is as interesting as it ever is as a storyline, although there's an odd lack of connectivity between the revolution and the circumstances of the planet they're living on. It's unclear just how the rich are able to get away with not pulling their weight on a planet where literally the fate of the population is hanging in the balance. There's also a faint whiff of mid-1970s episodes of Doctor Who (which frequently revolve around rebels rebelling for the sake of rebelling against bad guys who are bad because they're bad) in some of these sequences, which is certainly fun but it feels like the themes could have been handled in more depth. Later sequences in the book, where the rebels start taking on the trappings of their oppressors as they gain more successes, do start to tilt in this direction but the themes don't really spring to life. I kept being reminded of China Mieville's handling of this idea in Iron Council, which was a lot more successful.

Still, this storyline is one of only two major narrative strands; the other, revolving around Sophie and the strange alliance she strikes up with January's rarely-seen native civilisation, is more successful. Sophie makes for an engaging protagonist thanks to her empathetic ability to communicate with the aliens and see a bigger picture than most other humans. The other major POV character is a much older, more world-weary and cynical survivalist and traveller, Mouth, and it's refreshing to see a more experienced and capable protagonist, albeit one whose cynicism has made her almost as incapable of dealing with new situations as the younger Sophie's inexperience. The writing is enjoyable, although the pacing feels like it could have been a bit peppier, with the story bogging down at several points (most notably when Sophie and Bianca escape to another city and it takes a long time for the storyline to get going again).

The City in the Middle of the Night (****) is readable and enjoyable, with a vivid if underexplored setting. It does feel like the book could have been tightened up a bit, and maybe the central themes of revolution and corruption could have been handled with more originality. As it stands, this is a solid novel but not one that's going to be lighting the world on fire in terms of originality. It is available now in the UK and USA.

Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

August, 2007. A meteorite falls on northern California. A whistleblower goes public with evidence that the US government has been in communication with an alien intelligence and flees to Germany. His daughter, embarrassed by his behaviour, tries to ignore the unwanted cult of celebrity and get on with things. Suddenly a second meteor falls on apparently the exact same sport as the first, a coincidence so remote as to be effectively impossible, and suddenly the implausible feels very real indeed.

Axiom's End is the debut novel by Lindsay Ellis, a popular video essayist and film critic known for her deep dives on the making of film and TV shows. She was nominated for a Hugo for her three-part series on Peter Jackson's deeply troubled Hobbit film project, and also posted an excellent analysis of the problems with Game of Thrones.

Fortunately, it turns out she's pretty handy in the realm of fiction as well. Axiom's End is a story about humanity encountering an alien race, only to find the aliens are almost impossible to communicate with due to the total absence of common frames of reference. Early parts of the book, where the existence of the aliens is unclear, are framed like an X-Files thriller where government agents are keeping tabs on a young woman because of what she thinks is her father's criminal activities. Cora gets first-hand evidence that the aliens are real and that pretty much everyone is in the dark about what's really going on, resulting in a satisfying story shift where she gains more power, knowledge and agency because of her own experiences (a nice inversion on the more traditional story where the protagonist is always playing catch-up with the plot but somehow ends out coming on top).

There's some pretty cool horror scenes early on, and a vein of humour running through the books which stays just on the right side of dated pop culture references (the alternate-past setting helps with that). Cora's conspiracy theorist father - Edward Snowden fused with Fox Mulder - starts off as an all-knowing sage drip-feeding the audience with hints of greater knowledge via excerpts from his blog, until you realise he doesn't really know anything either and is desperately trying to make himself seem more important than he really is (sort of a budget Melisandre in the story) whilst also falling way behind the curve of the story, which becomes increasingly amusing.

The second half of the story feels like it slightly undercuts its own premise. The aliens initially appear almost too different for humans to effectively communicate with them, but ultimately a method of communication does appear which ends up being about as good as Google Translate (i.e. mostly okay with the occasional clunker), which makes the story way more manageable, but some of the unique atmosphere of the story is lost. It is replaced by a more traditional story about people from completely different civilisations trying to overcome apparently insurmountable odds to establish a rapport. This is excellently handled, but it does feel that the story has switched directions from something a bit weirder (think China Mieville's Embassytown or Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life, later filmed as Arrival) to something a little more traditional (maybe Starman with a slightly less attractive and indeed non-humanoid Jeff Bridges).

There are still a lot of interesting plot twists and the weirdness of the aliens is maintained through their technology and weapons; when two of the aliens come into conflict, Ellis successfully portrays the idea of humans interfering as being akin to a gnat trying to stop a jet fighter dogfight. There's also another raft of thematic ideas related to first contact that are intelligently explored, from the existence of the so-called "Great Filter" (the puzzle that if intelligent, technologically-advanced life is possible, as we have shown, why hasn't it already colonised the galaxy?) to the dangers incurred when a more technologically advanced species encounters a less technologically-advanced one.

Axiom's End (****½) may end up being a bit less strange than it initially promises, but it's still a compulsive page-turner with a nice line in both terror and humour. There will be sequels - the book is touted as the first in the Noumena sequence - but the book has a fair amount of closure to it and no immediate cliffhangers. It is available now in the UK and USA.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Mahit Dzmare has been appointed as the new ambassador from Lsel Station to the homeworld of the vast Teixcalaanli Empire. The previous ambassador has gone silent under unusual circumstances and Mahit's job is to find out what happened to him and why he failed to return home for fifteen years prior and how he has maintained Lsel's independence. Mahit's mission is complicated by a malfunctioning implant containing the memories of her predecessor (fifteen years out of date) and by an internal web of politics within the Empire which threatens to undermine Lsel's position...whilst factions on Lsel itself are interfering with her work from afar.

A Memory Called Empire is the debut novel by Arkady Martine and the first part of a loosely-connected duology (a second book, A Desolation Called Peace, will be published in early 2021). It is a far-future, science fiction epic revolving around the Teixcalaanli, a civilisation that fuses cyberpunk technology (though with a proscription against brain implants) and Aztec and Mongol cultural influences.

As is always handy when introducing an alien new culture, our POV character is herself an outsider. Mahit hails from a much more practical, pragmatic society based inside a space station, a self-regulating habitat which is totally technology-dependent with no single points of failure. Every time someone dies, their memories and something of their personality are implanted in a successor, who gains access to their lifetime's knowledge and experience and can start building on it. As such every life is inherently important, as it contributes materially to the development of the culture and society as a whole. This is the inverse of Teixcalaanli, where brain implants are seen as anathema and the society is much more inherently conservative: with access to amazing technology which could be used to create entertainment, their primary cultural obsession remains poetry.

There's a lot of clever ideas floating around in A Memory Called Empire. The philosophical concept of identity and how it is built from memory and cultural influences is a key part of the text, but one this explored subtly and intelligently throughout. There is also a fair bit of worldbuilding of the Teixcalaanli and their homeworld, which is mostly achieved through plot developments and action. Infodumping is occasional but fortunately rare. Characterisation is strong, as Mahit expertly chooses which sides of herself (and her culture) to show to the Teixcalaanli, and is not above preying on their instinct that she is an uncultured barbarian from a society with nothing to offer.

A few people have drawn similarities in tone to Ann Leckie's 2013 debut, Ancillary Justice. I think there are a few such comparisons to be made, mainly down to the idea of a technology-driven identity crises, but A Memory Called Empire is also a stronger book, and in particular it does a much, much better job of laying pipework for a sequel whilst being a complete novel in itself (Ancillary Justice was very much a strong stand-alone somewhat undermined by two lacklustre and unnecessary sequels). I think comparisons to the work of Lois McMaster Bujold and to China Mieville's SF novel Embassytown can also be drawn, with regards to how identity, history and language are interrelated concepts which can define people as individuals and a culture.

If I did have one complaint it would be that the ending feels a little neat (I'm not sure if a symbolic gesture would be really enough to get a determined enemy commanding a vastly superior army to surrender) and abrupt, but Martine does enough good work here to make the semi-sequel an immediate buy.

A Memory Called Empire (****½) is a striking debut novel which muses on big questions and wraps them around a compelling story that is part identity crisis and part socio-political thriller. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Book I: Suldrun's Garden

A time of myth and magic, after the fall of Rome but before the rise of Camelot. The Elder Isles, located in what people would later call the Bay of Biscay, are riven by political intrigue. King Casmir of Lyonesse desires to unite the ten kingdoms of the islands under his rule, but his ambitions are contested by the naval power of Troicinet and the neighbouring kingdom of Dahaut, whilst the implacable Ska prowl along the coasts. Casmir seeks to make a match for his daughter Suldrun to bring him advantage, but Suldrun is unconcerned with politics, instead preferring the solace of her favourite garden. When a young man is washed ashore and is rescued by Suldrun, the fate of the Elder Isles is abruptly changed.

Discussions of Jack Vance tend to focus on his Dying Earth quartet, published irregularly between 1950 and 1984, which had a permanent and transformative effect on the entire genre of the fantastic, influencing everything from Dungeons and Dragons to Dune to The Broken Earth Trilogy. Although a grand work, the Dying Earth series suffers from an inconsistency of tone and quality and, as an older one, parts of it have not aged as well as others.

The Lyonesse Trilogy (Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl and Madouc) is lesser-known but more accomplished, as its World Fantasy Award attests. The trilogy was written much later in Vance's career (began in his late sixties, concluded when he was 75), when he was still at the height of his powers, and unlike his other major series (Dying Earth and The Demon Princes) he did not let decades elapse between volumes, resulting in a much more focused, consistent and coherent story.

The setting is a fictional, large archipelago of islands off the south-western coast of Britain. It is here that the storied Ys, Avallon, Hybras (or Hy-Brasil) or Lyonesse of Arthurian legend may be found, although the events of Arthur are still several generations off. Instead, the Elder Isles are riven by multiple conflicts. In the temporal world, the islands are divided between ten kingdoms, all threatened by the invading Ska and Celts. In the religious, the islands' native, pagan beliefs are threatened by encroaching Christian missionaries. And in the magical, the islands' magicians, fairies and non-human creatures find their powers waning against the onset of mundane humankind.

As with most of Vance's work, the tone can be humorous but also melancholic and sometimes tragic. Vance wrote the trilogy in the knowledge that he was losing his sight (and, indeed, by the concluding volume was legally registered as blind) and a subplot in which a protagonist is cursed with blindness cannot help but resonate more strongly with this knowledge. But this fear did not daunt Vance: Suldrun's Garden sparks with his wit (sometimes mordant) and impeccable storytelling skills. With its courtly intrigue and manners (arch-rivals who despise one another nevertheless do so with politeness) and its sometimes fairy story tone, the book occasionally recalls Tolkien, although the characters are decidedly less moral.

It's this mixture of epic fantasy, fairy tale and moral fable, with high and courtly intrigue blended with merciless warfare, that makes Lyonesse feel unique. The magicians of the Elder Isles are extremely powerful, but are controlled by an edict that means they cannot make open war on one another (as to do so would destroy the islands). As a result they tend to work through proxies and stay within the confines of their laws, which results in some amusing scenes where the magicians' duels are as much legal arguments as they are dramatic confrontations. This is accentuated by the book's use of fairies, here presented much in the Irish mode of being capricious, whimsical and utterly uncaring of the fate of mortals, resulting in extremely tense negotiations between humans and the elder race, which are prone to unforeseen circumstances.

Characterisation is strong, with Princess Suldrun of Lyonesse presented as our main protagonist for much of the first third of the book, confined to her garden first by her preference and then by the orders of her father. Vance's portrayal of female characters earlier in his career was lacking, but is much-improved here, with Suldrun and several other women given prominence in the text. Unfortunately, the book's 1980s-ness can be deduced by several sequences where sexual violence is threatened (or intimated to have occurred off-page) against the female characters, a tiresome trope which is not over-indulged in (Vance is certainly no Goodkind) but also wearisome by its presence.

Narratively more regrettable is the odd choice where, by having established the less traditional heroine Suldrun as our protagonist for a good hundred pages, she is thrust aside in favour of Prince Aillas of Troicinet, an intelligent and resourceful young man who is brave, good with a sword, cunning when his back against the wall, etc. Aillas is an amiable and enjoyable, if far more traditional, character, but having him effectively storm in and take over the book halfway through from the character whom the novel is named for feels inelegant.

Once you move beyond these problems, Suldrun's Garden (****½) earns its reputation. The prose and razor-sharp dialogue is a delight, the worldbuilding which mixes political intrigue with magical menace is impressive and the fast-moving storyline (which packs more plot movement and characterisation into 400 pages than some authors manage in 4,000) is compelling. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

A note on the text: the book is correctly entitled Suldrun's Garden, but on release it was often published under the title Lyonesse. This is corrected in more recent editions as Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden. It is important when choosing an edition to read that you don't confuse the single-volume edition of the novel with the various omnibus editions of the trilogy, which are often also published as Lyonesse. The reason for the discrepancy - which recurred in 2006 with Brandon Sanderson's The Final Empire, frequently published under the series title Mistborn instead - is unclear.

Book 1: Gideon the Ninth

The orphaned Gideon Nav is a servant of the Ninth House, the guardians of the Locked Tomb, a position she despises. After her latest escape attempt is thwarted, she is recruited to join the House's heir, the necromancer Harrowhark, on a mission to the First House. If successful, the Ninth will gain influence and power in the eyes of the Emperor. But strange tasks await scions of all the Houses, some of which will prove fatal even to those with power over the death.

Gideon the Ninth is the debut novel by Tamsyn Muir and the first novel in the Locked Tomb trilogy. It has attracted widespread critical acclaim, including being nominated for both the 2020 Hugo and Nebula Awards and coming third in the Goodreads Choice SF Awards in 2019. The novel defies easy categorisation, incorporating as it does elements from science fiction, fantasy and horror, with a tone that could perhaps be summed up as "Mervyn Peake writes Warhammer 40,000."

The book is a technogothic thriller, where the mismatched Harrowhark and Gideon reluctantly work together with (and against) representatives of the other eight houses to investigate the mysteries of the First House to see who is worthy of becoming the new Lyctor, the right hand of the Emperor. The setting, an empire of nine planets circling a central star, is painted in vague strokes because our only POV character, Gideon, has only ever lived on the gloomy, depressing and death-obsessed Ninth and has no idea what the other worlds are like. Worldbuilding is drip-fed slowly into the narrative, painting a very intriguing picture of an empire which has endured for ten thousand years against remote, external threats thanks to the undying vigilance of the mysterious god-emperor, whose real history, motivation and even name remain a mystery.

Gideon, our main protagonist, is self-reliant, independent and resentful of authority, but is also fascinated by mysteries and yearns for freedom but isn't entirely sure what to do if she was to achieve it. She is in a dubious, co-dependent relationship with the officious Harrowhark, who strives to be an enigma and be respected (qualities that do not always combine well) but finds this difficult to achieve due to her and Gideon's mutual hatred. Their relationship is at the core of the novel and it's probably not a huge spoiler to say they eventually find an accommodation and a way of working together against mutual, greater enemies, although I must admit I found the swing from outright enemies to banterish frenemies to be a bit abrupt. Gideon is a strong (if archetypical) protagonist whose more relaxed, informal and pomposity-puncturing form of speech can be a bit of a relief when things threaten to go Turned-to-Eleven Gormenghast in terms of oppressive atmosphere and baroque chicanery.

The book incorporates a small secondary cast of characters from the other houses, such as warriors like Marta Dyas, Naberius Tern and Jeannemary Chatur, and house heirs like Dulcinea Septimus and Palamedes Sextus. Muir has a superb way with names and paints the secondary cast with skill and wit, from Chatur's youthful exuberance to Tern's lethal confidence to Septimus's wounded bird charm.

The story unfolds at a measured pace, perhaps a bit too measured: the first half of the novel is on the slow side of things and, given the rather limited number of characters and locations, it does feel like it takes a bit too long to get going. Once it does, though, it doesn't stop. The second half of the book is a near-dizzying eruption of plot revelations, deaths and unexpected twists that is quite compelling.

The other major weakness that comes to mind is the book's tonal dissonance between the ritual-obsessed, formal world and Gideon's near-non sequitur pop culture references. Gideon's informality and ability to take the mickey out of every situation is often entertaining, but on a few occasions (such as direct dialogue quotes from both the US version of The Office and The Simpsons) it lifts the reader right out of the world and story. These times are relatively rare, but feel a bit jarring.

Overall, though, Gideon the Ninth (****½) is a strong debut novel, a dark and bleakly humorous journey through a world of necromancers and grotesques. The novel is available now in the UK and USA. The sequel, Harrow the Ninth, will be published in August 2020.

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Lupe dy Cazaril is a former soldier in the army of Chalion. Taken prisoner after a siege, he has been sold into bondage, made a galley-slave and been rescued. Returning to his old home of Valenda, he seeks service with the Provincara dy Baocia. He is made tutor to Iselle, the sister of the heir to the kingdom, a position initially without power or influence. When Iselle and her brother are summoned to the royal court by their brother, the ailing king, Cazaril finds himself in a political nest of vipers, pitted against an old enemy who is very unhappy to see that he has survived, and a curse that may be beyond his abilities to thwart.

What happens when your life is taken from you and you are left abused, beaten and broken, and then abruptly returned to your former life?

The Curse of Chalion is a novel about trauma, about a man who has faced serious degradation and danger but lived to tell of it, and afterwards has to find his way back to something approaching normalcy. Unfortunately, whilst this is going on his country is under threat from external enemies and also from internal strife.

This is a fascinating novel, one that at first glance bears resemblances to Guy Gavriel Kay's classic The Lions of Al-Rassan (particularly the very strong Spanish inspiration) and to George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, particularly the political manoeuvrings within the royal court which start with mild barbed words but soon escalate to intimidation, murder and the threat of civil war. There's also a similarity to Robin Hobb's work, particularly the tight focus on a single character and its exploration of trauma and recovery. But it's also very much a Lois McMaster Bujold novel. Those who have sampled her other work, such as the long-running SF Vorkosigan Saga, will find similarities in the exploration of relationships, tragedy and redemption, although it is written in a different style.

The book lives and dies by the characterisation of Cazaril, the main protagonist. Although the book is not written in the first person, we spend the entire novel perched on Cazaril's shoulder to the point where it might as well be. Cazaril is a broken man, damaged goods, who tries to piece his life back together by retreating to his childhood home and station as a page to the royal family of Chalion but finds that his gifts and experience elevate him to a new position as a teacher and mentor to the younger members of the family. Cazaril is a refreshing fantasy protagonist; he is not a badass, sword-wielding prodigy or a reluctant youngster nevertheless gifted with vast sorcerous powers, but a middle-aged man who comes into situations he has little control over and has to find a way of negotiating his way through them, for good or ill.

The secondary cast is a well-drawn and varied lot, and the worldbuilding is impeccable. There's an interesting way of handling magic and the religion and politics of Chalion are drawn in some detail. Bujold's prose, honed at this point by twenty years of experience, is also excellent, evocative without being overwrought and a genuine pleasure to read.

The Curse of Chalion (*****) is a compelling, richly-detailed fantasy novel with superb, multifaceted characters and a strong sense of direction and purpose. It may just be Bujold's finest novel to date, in an exceptional career. It is available now in the UK and USA. It has a sequel, Paladin of Souls, and a prequel, The Hallowed Hunt.

Behold! Drizzt Go'Prourden!

Literally a terrible trailer. But it lets us know that a new DARK ALLIANCE game is coming out, now entitled DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: DARK ALLIANCE. It will be set in Icewind Dale and allow players to take control of the Companions of the Hall (Drizzt, Wulfgar, Bruenor and Cattie-brie, but not Regis for some reason) in a co-op action adventure kind of thing. This is a reboot of the DARK ALLIANCE series that ran for two games in the early 2000s.

Interesting, but not as promising as Larian's BALDUR'S GATE III, which should be arriving around the same time (both look like 2021 releases more than 2020, but you never know).

The Resurrectionist of Caligo by Wendy Trimboli & Alicia Zaloga

Roger Weathersby was once a promising surgical student but he is now a "resurrectionist," a corpse-stealer who takes the recently interred to medical schools to further the cause of science. One such incident leads Roger to investigate a spate of similar deaths and rumours of a serial killer at work. Roger's investigation sees him framed as the serial killer. It falls to his brother and Sibylla, a princess of the realm, to help clear his name and allow him to find the true murderer.

The Resurrectionist of Caligo is the joint debut novel by Wendy Trimboli and Alicia Zaloga. It mixes elements of Gothic fiction, steampunk, Victoriana and outright secondary world fantasy, with moments that recall China Mieville but an atmosphere all of it own.

I hadn't heard of the novel prior to randomly wandering into the book's launch party at the Dublin WorldCon in August, and was intrigued enough by the premise to pick the book up. It's proven to be an unexpected delight, a compelling novel with one of the most standard plots you can imagine - an innocent (but not flawless) protagonist framed for a crime he didn't commit, with him and his colleagues trying to clear his name - but set in a vivid and interesting world.

The book engages with a variety of themes across its length. Class struggle is a key point: the rich and powerful get the best medical attention and the best protection whilst the poor are left to suffer and die without acknowledgement. Class responsibility also comes into play: the nobles of the country of Myrcina (of which Caligo is the capital) are shocking arrogant and feel they have no obligations to their servants, whilst the neighbouring empire of Khalishkha has a very different attitude. Myrcina is also sexist and backwards, again whilst Khalishkha appears to be more enlightened.

The novel is told entirely from two POVs. Roger is a surprisingly unsympathetic protagonist. He is arrogant, overconfident, embittered and has enough chips on his solider to open a restaurant. He is also intelligent and principled, and his real plight is powerfully realised in the prose. The authors take a risk making Roger an at times difficult-to-like lead character, but it gives him a more discernible personality and also creates a more interesting arc for character change and growth.

Sibylla is an altogether more interesting protagonist with more agency, despite her station (as several steps removed from the throne) and gender working against her in this world. Watching Sibylla negotiate delicate matters of state and international diplomacy is fun, as she has a lot more charm, wit and finesse than Roger, whose approach is often more of a bull in a china shop.

The book also features some pretty good worldbuilding. Caligo is depicted in all its glory, a city of dimly lit cobbled streets, back-alley gangs and eerie mausoleums, as well as colourful palaces and dingy gaols. The wider world is also described in more detail than expected, with plenty of references to historical events and personages. As a result, the book feels part of a larger tapestry, one that the ending suggests we will get to see more of (a sequel is implied, but not necessary).

The Resurrectionist of Caligo (****) is a superb debut novel, well-written and compelling with fascinating characters and worldbuilding. If it has a weakness, it's that one of the two protagonists can be a little grating and the book can't quite avoid a couple of cliches along the way. But the prose is great, the pacing brisk and the storytelling accomplished. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

Gods of Jade & Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mexico, 1927. Casiopeia Tun lives in her uncle's house, where she is treated as little better than a servant. She is demeaned and belittled by everyone, especially her cousin Martín. Casiopeia's fortunes abruptly change when she finds a trunk in her uncle's bedroom which is actually the prison of a powerful being: the Mayan God of the Dead Hun-Kamé. Casiopeia is unwillingly roped into becoming the god's guide and mortal helper as he seeks to find the body parts and treasures removed by his usurper brother...who now sets Martín on Casiopeia's trail.

Gods of Jade and Shadow is the fourth novel by Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a heady period fairy tale which embraces Mayan mythology, the Jazz Age of the 1920s United States and Mexico and combines them into a richly compelling adventure.

The novel is effectively a road trip: Casiopeia gets to flee her abusive home, which is good, but only because she's been roped into helping a manipulative and dark god into helping him reclaim his throne, which is less good. As the story unfolds, the link between Casiopeia and Hun-Kamé becomes more pronounced, causing the god to become more human and less infallible, but also more capable of appreciating the beauty of the mortal world.

As well as the road trip element, the story is also one about family: Casiopeia despises and hates her family, but it's also the only world she's ever known. Hun-Kamé was betrayed by his brother and yearns for blood and vengeance, even though it will only perpetuate the cycle of hatred that has led to this impasse. The novel does a great job of contrasting the development of the two characters as they grow from their shared experiences, even the one of them who is an immortal.

The book reminded me somewhat of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, although in this case the novel benefits from a much tighter focus on a much smaller cast and on the Mayan mythology alone (and only being around half as long). The interaction of gods and mortals in the almost-modern world is intriguing and there's a galaxy of vivid supporting characters, humans, gods and demons alike, such as the amusingly mischievous Loray (who it feels could get his own spin-off book).

The book unfolds with verve and grace: at 330 pages it doesn't hang around and the story is related at a clip. At times I felt the book was too fast: the page count doesn't quite allow the author to fully explore the characters and their moral situations they find themselves in and also relate all the necessary mythology-building. Again, it feels like more could be done with this world, although the author sounds reluctant to embark on a sequel.

Gods of Jade and Shadow (****) is a enjoyable, gripping novel with a strong, small cast of characters and which unfolds with skill and pace. It is let down a little by being slightly too short and not perhaps being able to fully explore all the elements of the story and worldbuilding, but it's still a fun, compelling read.

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Big Six - the mega-corporations that rule Earth - are at war with the colonists on Mars, who have rebelled and unleashed a horrendous attack on Earth that has devastated an entire city. Thousands of the young and dispossessed are recruited into the corporate armies and transported by FTL to Mars and other places on Earth to fight the enemy. But for one recruit, Dietz, the war they are fighting is not the same as everyone else. The jumps send Dietz backwards and forwards through the conflict at random, but the question is if they can change the future and stop the war?

If there's one constant about science fiction, it's the acknowledgement that in the future people will still have to go to war and fight wars of varying degrees of pointlessness. The weapons and technology may change but the horror and loss will remain the same. SF has a fertile backlog of novels which have looked at war through the prism of new technology: Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959), Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965), Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (1974), Hiroshi Sakurazaka's All You Need is Kill (2004, filmed in 2014 as Edge of Tomorrow) and John Scalzi's Old Man's War (2005) are among the most notable. Each takes a different approach - Harrison's is satirical, Haldeman's is tragic - to the same basic idea of people fighting and dying for causes both noble and foolish.

The Light Brigade is Kameron Hurley's contribution to this subgenre. It is her second stand-alone SF novel (after the fine The Stars Are Legion) and the first which moves away from seeking out brand new ideas and settings to adopting a more classic SF approach.

The result is an unbounded triumph. The Last Brigade is Hurley's finest novel to date, a fast-moving, intelligent science fiction war story that reflects on the pointlessness of war, the evils of unflinching jingoism and the cynicism of corporate culture. It's also a remarkable character piece, all the more remarkable because the book hides a lot about its protagonist, peeling back the layers one light-jump at a time as we learn more about them and the war as they are experiencing it.

As with her previous work, this is a book that feels angry, with the characters trapped in situations beyond their control and trying to find a way out. Dietz is resourceful, courageous and occasionally hot-headed (although not as much as some of Hurley's previous protagonists) and as bewildered as the reader at what is going on, and it's interesting to see the character putting the pieces together at the same time the reader does. The reader comes to understand the story even as Dietz does, and also understands their own nature.

The book is fast-paced, with a relentless pace, but which also breaks up the action into distinct episodes as Dietz finds themselves in a new time period and has to work out how events in this time period are relating to those previously experienced. The book asks some interesting questions about control and volition and the first half of the novel can feel a little passive, as Dietz is reactive to events, but this changes in the second half as Dietz is grounded in several of the time periods and is able to spend months at a time working on ideas to see if the future (or the past) can be changed. The result is that the book is thoughtful and action-packed by turns, with a strong ending that succeeds in making sense of all that came before.

The Light Brigade (*****) is a superlative SF novel of science and war and Kameron Hurley's finest novel to date. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

Could have sworn we had a topic on this but apparently not. Anyway, THE OUTER WORLDS came out today, the new RPG from Obsidian and specifically from the creator of FALLOUT, VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE - BLOODLINES and ARCANUM, Tim Cain. It's a first person RPG which plays a bit like the Bethesda FALLOUTs only with, y'know, decent writing. It's not strictly an open world RPG, instead having distinct zones which you travel between in your starship (like MASS EFFECT or KotOR).

About 5 hours in so far and it's been a blast, with some great, morally torturous decisions, some solid combat and some fun characters. Biggest weakness so far is that the game is pretty easy. I turned it onto the second-highest difficulty level and it's not really presented a challenge so far. It is good to see Obsidian producing a proper, big-budget-looking 3D RPG after so many years spent making 2D retro games. This is pretty slick and, so far, completely bug-free.

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley

War is raging for control of the Legion, a fleet of organic world-ships travelling on a journey so long nobody can remember when it started or what their destination is. The amnesiac Zan, a soldier of the world-ship Katzyrna, is told she must lead an assault on the Mokshi to claim it and its secrets, but the Katzyrna is also at war with the world-ship Bhavaja, whose ruler is playing their own game. As the rulers of the Legion scheme and feud with one another, Zan finds herself outcast and having to make her own way home...and discover who she is at the same time.

The Stars Are Legion is a stand-alone novel from Kameron Hurley, the author of the excellent Worldbreaker Saga and the even more excellent Bel Dame Apocrypha. Like the Bel Dame Apocrypha (which, it occurs, could take place in the same universe), The Stars Are Legion mixes elements of science fiction and fantasy. The setting, the space battles and elements such as genetic engineering all borrow from SF, but the journey through a grotesque land of the bizarre and the ultra-advanced technology which seems indistinguishable from magic borrows much more from fantasy.

Although the worldbuilding is strange, the set-up is fairly standard: we have an amnesiac protagonist who finds her surroundings as whacked-out as we do, and through her we learn more about the world than if we were joining the action in a more traditional manner. Zan's chapters alternate with those of Jayd, Zan's friend and lover who still has her memory intact, allowing us to start piecing together what is going on from incomplete information. Early on it's clear that Zan is a fighter and grunt of unparalleled resourcefulness, with a slightly reckless streak, whilst Jayd is much more a strategist and tactician, with a remarkable gift for planning ahead, although she also tends to underestimate others' own strategic skills and reacts less well to new developments.

Our two protagonists are both interesting figures whose differing natures are highlighted by circumstance: Zan is cast into the depths of the world-ship Katzyrna and has to make her way back home through mysterious locations, a clear parallel to Orpheus returning from the Underworld (or Jack Vance's Cugel the Clever making his way back from the edge of the world...twice!), whilst Jayd has to play a much more cautious game of politic intrigue and deception between powerful warlords who could kill her in an instant, if they didn't crave the power she possesses.

The unusual setting - the organic technology which powers everything from weapons to ships to recycling systems is quite spectacularly revolting - is rich and evocative, and the plot ticks along with a nice sense of pace. Hurley's gift is a furious sense of character and atmosphere, and the The Stars Are Legion contains plenty of examples of that gift. However, as the book ticks down to its well-executed ending, it does feel like the book lacks just a little bit of the extra exposition needed to establish the setting a bit better. After her first two fantasy series, it's clear that Hurley isn't a huge fan of the infodump school of exposition, but those series also had the time over multiple volumes to establish their worlds in greater depth. The Stars Are Legion can't do that, and I finished the book with a broad understanding of what happened but some worldbuilding elements still felt a bit fuzzy. Some complaints I've seen that the Legion's origins and destination aren't explained at all (although a children's storybook hints that the Legion may have originated on a planet like ours, many thousands of years earlier) I didn't feel were particularly valid, though. The setting is perfectly adequate to the story being told.

The Stars Are Legion (****) lacks the epic scope of Hurley's other work, but makes up for it with a great sense of focus and pace. The novel is available in the UK and USA now.

The Witcher #1: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

Geralt is a witcher, a hunter of monsters in return for coin. He wanders the northern kingdoms with a trusty steed (always named Roach) and mingles with everyone from kings and generals to sorcerers and vagabonds. Several times Geralt's path crosses that of the powerful, from saving the daughter of King Foltest of Temeria who has been turned into a monstrous striga to resolving a delicate matter for Queen Calanthe of Cintra. But Geralt's destiny is changed when he demands a strange price from Queen Calanthe and makes the acquaintance of a powerful sorceress, Yennefer.

The Last Wish (1993, a re-edited version of The Witcher, 1990) is the first book in Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher series (which currently runs to eight volumes), although it is not a novel as such. Instead, it is a closely-linked series of short stories, related by Geralt as he recovers from a pitched battle with a striga. The stories work well as stand-alone adventures, but they are also useful in establishing Geralt's character and the tone and nature of the world he inhabits. There is also much scene-setting for the later books featuring the character.

Geralt's world is tough, cold and brutal, drawing more directly on European folklore, fairy tales and mythology than the norm. It's also a world of grudging honour, well-earned fellowship and occasional heroism. Geralt is an entertaining protagonist, being taciturn, cynical and world-weary but also has a wry sense of humour, an enjoyment of good ale and a well-hidden yearning for romance.

The stories themselves vary in tone but the quality is pretty consistent. There's an undercurrent of whimsical humour in the stories that is very reminiscent of Jack Vance. Like Vance, Sapkowski successfully creates a world where his characters feel totally at home. This world is a mix of the traditional Dungeon & Dragons landscape of elves, dwarves and evil wizards, and of darker fairy tales. In this manner the stories' tone and atmosphere is very similar to that of Vance's superb Lyonesse Trilogy, although Sapkowski is not as continuously and unrelentingly funny as Vance; he also lacks Vance's gift for intricate wordplay. That said, when the book is funny it's very funny indeed. The comic highlight comes when Geralt and his sometimes travelling troubadour companion Dandillion are confronted by some kind of bizarre goat-man entity whose preferred method of combat is to pelt attackers with iron balls. Under strict instructions not to kill anything in the area, Geralt has to engage the goat-man in a particularly preposterous wrestling match. Sapkowski also employs Vance's melancholy aspect, such as Geralt's musings on a world where the fantastical is dying and the mundane is taking over.

The translation appears to be adequate, although Polish commentators seem more dubious, and the general feeling is that David French (who translated the later books) does a better job than Danusia Stok (who translates The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, the first and third books in the series). There's occasional awkward moments (the noble Hereward's rank changes from Prince to Duke at random; sometimes words are repeated very close together) but the stories come through feeling very fresh and energetic. Sapkowski is very good at creating interesting, imaginative characters with unusual levels of depth to them, not least Geralt, whom people are consistently underestimating. Early stories feel slightly repetitive, with Geralt unleashing bloody mayhem to win the day, but in the second half of the book there is a shift in tone with Geralt employing more imaginative methods to overcome the obstacles in his path. There is a great deal left unsaid in the stories in the book: we see the start of Geralt's relationship with the sorceress Yennefer but not its later development, and have to put together what happened with the help of Geralt's thought processes in the framing story. This helps make the book more immersive and less reliant on exposition.

The Witcher series also consists of a trilogy of well-regarded and very high-selling video games. Players of the games will appreciate the background to the characters provided here (although Sapkowski does not consider the books to be canon).

The Last Wish (****) is an enjoyable book full of stories both melancholy and comic, establishing a world and cast of characters that is very intriguing. The novel is available now in the UK and USA. A Netflix TV series based on the books is expected to debut in November 2019.

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng

In the 1840s, the British Empire has expanded to encompass much of the globe and established embassies in many other lands upon it...and one off it. Laon Helstone is a missionary to the realm of Arcadia, also called the Faelands, which lie beyond the world of science. Having gone missing, his sister Catherine embarks on a perilous journey to find him. Her path leads to the castle Gethsemane, a building of shifting rooms and corridors whose inhabitants are both a help and hindrance. Catherine also uncovers evidence of the fate of the previous missionary, and embarks on a journey of discovery about both this unusual land and her own past.

Under the Pendulum Sun is the debut novel by Jeanette Ng. Published in 2017, it won its author the 2019 Astounding Award (formerly the Campbell) for best new writer; her impassioned acceptance speech was the main reason the award changed its name. It's easy to see why the book made such an impact: it's an impeccably-crafted, constantly inventive and continually surprising work of the fantastic.

The premise is that the land of the Fae is real and was contacted by the British Empire, resulting in a mutual exchange of ambassadors, ideas and commerce. Changelings now live in London and British merchants and missionaries now dwell in Arcadia. However, the Fae are difficult to deal with, tricky and ambiguous. Humans have to constantly salt their food lest they fall under the Fae's control and the Fae have a limited interest in human motivations such as money, lust or religion. They do understand such concepts, however, and use them to manipulate people to their own amusement.

The book is told in the first-person by Catherine Helstone as she searches for her brother in Arcadia. This search leads her to Gethsemane, a sprawling ramshackle mansion where the corridors and rooms do not seem to quite coexist as architectural logic demands. Ng notes in her afterword that she was influenced by the Gothic school of 19th century literature and there's a strong element of those books (not to mention Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy) in the exploration of this strange, rambling house and its eccentric grounds.

There are relatively few other characters, at least to start with, but halfway through the book the cast dramatically expands with the arrival of the court of Queen Mab, a Fae noblewoman who holds the key to the secrets of Arcadia, secrets which Catherine has become obsessed by. This results in a change of pace, from the tight, almost claustrophobic focus of the opening chapters to a larger story with greater stakes and more intrigue. This change of pace helps the novel avoid the fate of so many other "modern fables," which tend to start fresh and imaginative but become staid as they dragged out for too long. Under the Pendulum Sun, on the other hand, keeps the ideas, the revelations and the surprises flowing.

This is a novel of psychological tension, haunting imagery (such as the moon being a sinister fish swimming through the sky, and the sun being a pendulum suspended from a clockwork mechanism) and unravelling mysteries. There are a few moments where the pace flags a little bit, where elements of the story verge on the obtuse, but it's not long before the book gets back on track.

Under the Pendulum Sun (****½) is a striking and powerful debut novel, well-written and characterised, with a strong undercurrent of weirdness and an effective surprise ending. I await the author's second novel eagerly. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

Book 1: A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie

The fires of industry are smouldering. The Union, the great federation of kingdoms centred on the island of Midderland and the city of Adua, is industrialising and modernising at a frightening rate. Great factory districts, squealing with machinery, now sprawl for miles as they pump out vast quantities of goods. It's a brave new world, one in which the little person is at risk of being crushed. Seething discontent at joblessness and the new order threatens to erupt into outright rebellion. As the Union tries to strangle the nascent revolution in its crib, another crisis erupts in the North when the armies of Scale Ironhand invade the Protectorate, controlled by the Union's allies.

As war and revolution threaten the Union on every front, the fate of the Circle of the World falls upon a handful of unlikely figures: Savine dan Glokta, the daughter of the royal inquisitor and a shrewd investor; Crown Prince Orso, a wastrel and drunkard; Vick, a young woman in the Breakers, the would-be working class revolutionaries; Gunnar Broad, a military veteran trying to get his life back; Stour Nightfall, a Northern warrior with a ridiculous name and evil ambition; Rikke, daughter of the Dogman, blessed (or cursed) with the magic of foresight; and Leo dan Brock, the Young Lion, a brave and reckless warrior who cannot see the big picture.

It's been - somewhat startlingly - seven years since Joe Abercrombie last visited the world of his First Law saga with Red Country. Since then he's been moonlighting in YA (with the Shattered Sea trilogy in 2014-15) and short fiction (with the Sharp Ends collection in 2016), but his return to the First Law world with not just a novel, but a full trilogy (entitled The Age of Madness) is welcome news.

A Little Hatred is very much just what most readers are expecting from an Abercrombie novel. It's fast-paced, violent, lusty and intelligent. Not keen on resting on his laurels, the novel also sees Abercrombie moving into new territory with a lot of socio-economic musings. A Little Hatred is a novel about a world in turmoil, not just from war or religious schisms but from its own Industrial Revolution. This isn't totally new ground for fantasy, with Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and China Mieville's Bas-Lag series both delving into industrial chaos, revolutions and modernisation, but it's still an under-explored idea for the genre.

The book is also concerned with the next generation, the children of great characters growing up in the shadow of their famed parents, whilst those parents face the truth that the great exploits of their youth haven't led to long-lasting peace and happiness. The North and the Union are still at each other's throats over the North's conquest of Angland and the Protectorate, whilst (in the wake of the events of Best Served Cold) the Union and Styria have fought three bloody wars to no satisfactory outcome. Even the collapse of the Gurkish Empire, removing a key threat to the Union's southern flank, has caused its own problems as hordes of refugees flee to Midderland, sparking a wave of racist xenophobia. A Little Hatred is about a world in change, not from the typical epic fantasy stand-bys of ravening monsters and evil sorcerers, but from the changing page of history itself.

Characterisation is a key strength of Abercrombie's and he gets to exercise that skill with aplomb here. Most of the protagonists are complicated people, with admirable and detestable traits, and it's to Abercrombie's credit that he makes them all interesting and compelling, even when you want to smack them for making dumb decisions. Focusing on new characters is a good idea, as it makes the book an easier entry point for new readers. The book is certainly improved if you've read the seven previous First Law books (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings, Best Served Cold, The Heroes, Red Country and Sharp Ends), but they are not strictly necessary given that the novel does a good job of establishing the situation and characters.

The book is excellently paced. Abercrombie's never written huge doorstoppers, but some of his previous books have been quite big. At just over 400 pages in hardcover, A Little Hatred is focused, fast-paced and furious, taking in revolutions, battles, betrayals, stabbings, flights through the countryside and political intrigue at the highest levels, with a reasonably large cast. The pace never flags and leaves the reader eager for more.

If there are weaknesses, they are minor. The Union's industrial revolution is impressively vivid and impeccably-researched, but some may feel that it's also hugely unrealistic, given that in the First Law series the world was more like a 15th century late medieval/early renaissance setting. It jumping forwards about 300 years of technological development in less than 30 years feels a little like a contrivance so the author can have fan-favourite characters still showing up rather than dealing with a whole new generation. However, this bug is also something of a feature: as the novel ends, it becomes clear that this massive, rapid progress may be explained by other means, which opens more questions for the sequels.

As it stands, A Little Hatred (****½) is vintage Abercrombie, being smart, funny, brutal and compelling reading. It is available now in the UK and USA. The second book in the series, The Trouble with Peace, will be released in 2020.

The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

A band of friends meet at the Inn of the Last Home in the town of Solace. Five years ago they went their separate ways, searching for evidence of the lost gods. Their findings were inconclusive, but their reunion is interrupted by the news of vast armies allied with dragons on the march and the arrival of strangers bearing a crystal staff...and the long-lost power of healing. The continent of Ansalon is riven by war and it falls on this band of heroes to save it from destruction.

The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy is one of the most famous works of epic fantasy of the 1980s. Published in 1984 and 1985, the trilogy and its immediate sequel series (The Dragonlance Legends) have together sold almost 30 million copies, making them one of the biggest-selling series of that decade. Millions of fantasy readers started out in the genre by reading these novels.

The question arises, then, is it a good idea to revisit these works as an adult and risk ruining nostalgic teenage memories in the process?

The answer is mixed. The paradox at the heart of enjoying the Dragonlance Chronicles is what age group it's actually aimed at. The generally jovial tone (even when quite dark things are happening), the casual dialogue (this is a trilogy where medieval fantasy characters say "Yeah!" a lot) and the extremely breezy pace make this feel like a series aimed at children. I don't mean YA, I mean 7-10 year olds. The prose is simple and easy to read, and it feels very much like a work aimed in writing style at the same kind of audience as The Hobbit. There's moments of whimsical humour, stirring action and intriguing worldbuilding which do withstand comparison with Tolkien's work, despite the less-accomplished writing.

However, there are moments when the series abruptly goes much more adult. There are several sex scenes (albeit mostly of the "fade to black" kind) and female characters are threatened with sexual assault on a fairly regular basis. Tanis Half-elven also can't even meet a stranger on the road without carefully explaining how his mother was assaulted by a human man, leading to his conception and outcast status from both communities. The trilogy is also painfully 1980s in how it tries to have both strong female characters (Laurana, Tika, Kitiara, Goldmoon) and then gets them into situations of undress, or wearing revealing armour or clothes (Tika, at least, gets to make some wry observations on this that makes me suspect Margaret Weis was rolling her eyes as she wrote to market requirements). There's also a quite spectacular amount of violence, including characters being beheaded, turned to stone or set on fire on a fairly regular basis, and some psychological horror in the form of Berem, who is cursed to die and live again so often that he is going insane.

If you can overcome the tonal dissonance - the gap between the lightweight, juvenile writing and sometimes darker, more adult content - then it's possible to enjoy the Dragonlance Chronicles as a fast-paced, popcorn read. The trilogy does have another key feature (or bug) which is that it is an attempt to adapt no less than twelve Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules into a coherent story. Several times the narrative cuts away from our heroes embarking on another side-quest only to come back to them after that quest is completed, leading to the heroes thinking wistfully back on adventures that the reader never experienced (such as the journey to Ice Wall Castle, or Raistlin's completely out-of-nowhere return to the main story in the closing pages of the third book). This does make the story feel somewhat incomplete. It also means that the stories are extremely fast-paced: the Chronicles trilogy features a bigger story and more characters and events than The Lord of the Rings in about 50,000 fewer words. Some will enjoy the breakneck pace, others may lament the lack of character and plot development this results in.

The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy (***) is fast-paced, fun and easy to read. It's also simplistic, juvenile in tone and has not aged fantastically well. Truth be told, there's much better options available for both adult and children fans of fantasy these days. But if you can overlook the issues, there is still some fun to be had in revisiting Tanis, Raistlin, Caramon, Flint, Goldmoon, Riverwind, Tas, Kitiara, Sturm, Laurana, Gilthanas, Lord Soth and the rest of this memorable bunch of archetypes. The trilogy is available now in the UK and USA.

Book 1: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

3 March 1952. A sizeable meteorite crashes into Chesapeake Bay, obliterating most of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. As the USA reels from the disaster, which kills millions, the resulting ecological damage threatens to start a runaway greenhouse effect which will make the planet uninhabitable within a century. The world's nations rally to begin a crash space programme to colonise the Moon and Mars to save as many people as possible.

The Calculating Stars (which has just won the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Novel) is the first novel in the four-book Lady Astronaut series, which takes place in an alternative history where a meteorite strike in 1952 threatens the future of the human race. The title refers to the main protagonist, Elma York, a WWII transport pilot and mathematician who finds herself at the forefront of the mission to save the human race. This effort involves a multi-national effort via a trans-national space race involving thousands of people.

Numerous issues are raised and explored by The Calculating Stars, including an exploration of the Space Race starting earlier, using less sophisticated 1950s technology; a confrontation of sexism and racism in the setting; the damage caused by the meteorite and resulting climate change, complete with deniers refusing to believe anything bad will happen; and an exploration of the intersection of science, societal change and technology.

This multitude of plot points contributes to the book's length. At over 500 pages, it's a fair bit longer than most SF novels tend to be these days, but the sheer amount of material that needs to be explored means the pages fly by. The Calculating Stars is also written in an extremely easy-to-read manner, with prose that lacks artistry but also doesn't get in the way of the story. In this sense The Calculating Stars feels like an old-fashioned Hugo Award winner, like Spin or Rendezvous with Rama, eschewing stylised prose and in-depth characterisation to instead focus on the plot and the high concepts.

The book does adopt a more modern outlook by tackling 1950s issues of sexism and racism head-on. An interest social point from World War II is that women were able to take on a multitude of roles, from working in bomb factories to flying non-combat aircraft (apart from in Russia, where they were able to serve more freely on the front lines), but the second the war ended they were expected to go back to being housewives and mothers. The meteorite crisis means that once again women have to take a front line role as mathematicians, programmers for the very early computers and in other roles that a lot of men are unhappy with. Some have suggested this problem is overstated in the book, but if anything it probably undersells it (if anything, Elma's husband being a paragon of equality-supporting hunkness who supports her every decision feels a bit convenient, but given everything else going on it's an understandable approach), and not tackling the issue would be highly unrealistic.

Months and sometimes years flash by in chapters and the sheer scale of the effort to save the human race is impressively depicted. The novel does not shirk away from the darker side of human nature in the time period, but it also highlights its good points, such as the much greater acceptance of scientific discovery and exploration. Some may question the realism of us being able to get to the Moon more than a decade earlier than in real life, but Kowal's afterword provides some compelling arguments.

The Calculating Stars (****) is both a traditional, even classic-feeling SF novel and a modernist, revisionist take on a fascinating time period, celebrating the human spirit in full. As others have said, it is an enjoyable mix of The Right Stuff and Hidden Figures. It is available now in the UK and USA. It is followed by The Fated Sky and the forthcoming The Relentless Moon and The Derivative Base.

Spinning Silver

Miryem's father is the village moneylender, but his kindness and gullibility means he isn't very good at his job. When Miryem takes over, she finds ways of turning silver into gold and getting those who have taken advantage of her family for years into paying up. Her skills are so great they even attract the attention of the supernatural Staryk, who make her an offer: turn silver into gold three times and she can become a queen. Miryem seeks to defy the Staryk, leading her into a very dangerous alliance...

Naomi Novik is a former video game designer turned fantasy author, best-known for her epic "Napoleonic Wars but with dragons" series, Temeraire, and her single-volume fantasy Uprooted. Spinning Silver is another stand-alone fantasy, a modern fairy tale which pits a young woman against the lords of winter with the fate of her homeland and her family in the balance.

The opening 100 pages or so of Spinning Silver are as fine a slice of modern fantasy as one could wish for, with vivid descriptions of the landscape, an excellent depiction of small town politics and life and a small but memorable cast of well-drawn individuals. Miryem's development from hapless young girl to accomplished businesswoman is well-handled and the transition from a straightforward rustic story to one of an emerging supernatural threat is compelling.

Where the book starts to falter is that decision that, rather than keep this a small-scale fantasy, the author decides to make the story more epic, bringing in events in the capital city, multiple new POV characters, a second supernatural threat, the emperor of the land, religion (the main characters are Jewish, although the setting is fictional) and other elements as well. And it has to be said this transition does not work quite as well as it should. Novik's strict, disciplined POV structure and tight writing does not handle the expansion in scale very well, and the story becomes diffused as too many new elements are added into it. I was put in mind of Peter Jackson in Hobbit Trilogy mode being asked to handle a fresh adaptation of Snow White and by the time he's done with it, it's a trilogy with a cast of thousands and an incongruous Orlando Bloom cameo.

This is not to say that Spinning Silver is a bad novel, just one where the strong elements are drawn out over far too long a page count and constantly interrupted by less-interesting characters, side-plots and, oddly, a lot of words spent on the economics of luxury apron trading. When the novel is firing on all cylinders, it's phenomenally atmospheric and richly detailed. When it isn't, it becomes a bit of a slog, not helped by an awkward POV device where we have to spend the first paragraph or two of each new POV shift trying to work out which character we're now with. This is fine in the opening hundred pages when we only have two POVs, but when we get to the end of the book and there's half a dozen in play, it's more of an issue.

Eventually the book ties together is disparate plotlines and we get a somewhat satisfying end, but it feels like the book has to take a lot of unnecessary detours to get there.

Spinning Silver (***½) is well-written with lots of great individual scenes and moments, but the overall pacing and structure is awkward and flawed.

I'm sure this will go down well.

Short version: Harmony Gold and Tatsunoko have reached a new agreement which renews Harmony Gold's ownership of the rights related to the ROBOTECH franchise and its constituent sub-series (MACROSS, SOUTHERN CROSS & MOSPEADA) for a considerable number of years to come (some reports are saying up to thirty).

As part of the deal, Tatsunoko and Studio Nue will receive a more prominent credit for their role in creating the original series that make up the franchise, and will work more closely with Harmony Gold in the future on new projects.

The first impact of the deal is that both the ROBOTECH and original Japanese versions of the series are now available on streaming services FilmRise, Vudu and Roku (US only at the moment). This is the first time, I believe, that SOUTHERN CROSS and MOSPEADA have ever been released in their original, non-ROBOTECH incarnations.

This deal also clears up any lingering issues with Sony's planned live-action film adaptation of the franchise, and allows them to continue with the project. However, with their preferred directors (James Wan and Andy Muschietti) having moved on to other projects, it's unclear if they are going to wait for those guys to become available again or will start looking for a new director.

The mooted but not-actually-proposed-yet Netflix remake of the entire series would also now be able to proceed, if they so chose.

As part of the deal, HG are apparently open to releasing the various MACROSS prequel and sequel series in the West, although I believe this has been said in the past and nothing has happened.