Adrian Collins's Blog, page 195

REVIEW: Fable by Adrienne Young

Adrienne Young’s new novel Fable is, in essence, a story about a daughter’s longing for family. The bestselling author mentions in the afterword that the idea for the book came to her just a few days after her father’s death.

Written in first person, the novel tightly follows the resilient and tough 17-year-old Fable in a vivid seafaring setting. Fable kicks off just four years after the titular character was abandoned by her father on a dangerous island. This abandonment followed immediately after Fable survived the shipwreck that killed her mother and most of the rest of her father’s trading ship crew. Her father left her with a mysterious parting gift of an intricately gruesome knife wound to the forearm and a promise: “Get yourself off this island. And the next time I see you, I’ll give you what’s yours.”

Fable contains a richly textured look at the dangerous domain of sea trade. The fictional setting described in the novel is small: limited to a few island and port cities and the sea connecting them. Well-researched sailing lingo helps immerse the reader into an unfamiliar world.

The story follows Fable as she does what she can to survive and get “what’s hers” following her father’s five essential rules:

Keep your knife where you can reach it.

Never, ever owe anyone anything.

Nothing is free.

Always construct a lie from truth.

Never, under any circumstances, reveal what or who matters to you.

She eventually uses her special diving and gem-finding skills as a dredger to join the young, tightly knit crew of the trading ship Marigold. As the book unfolds, the reader learns that Fable has inherited remarkable and magical abilities related to dredging, abilities that might just get her and the rest of the crew killed. By the end of the book, all five rules are broken at least once, causing Fable and the crew of the Marigold no end of trouble.

Embedded within the overarching plot of an escalating blood feud between the Marigold and another trading ship, all the characters make bad choice after bad choice until things escalate to a cliffhanger finale. Frustratingly, all the main characters have strong plot armor and are often injured to within an inch of their lives. The author tends to put characters in unsurvivable situations and then contrive farfetched solutions out of thin air.

That is not to say the book is lacking darkness and violence. One particularly memorable scene of vengeance involves a man from an opposing crew being kidnapped, hammered into a crate, and tossed into the middle of the sea to die slowly. Though Fable knows the man had earlier painfully disfigured one of the crew of the Marigold and deserved to be made to pay for what he did, she has a challenging time accepting the cruel nature of the punishment.

Young’s prose is easily readable and smooth. She makes effective use of vivid descriptions of scents and sound, creating a solid sense of place. Fable is 368 pages long, so the narrative moves along at a fast and sometimes hurried clip. A more considered unfolding of some of the dramatic reveals may have improved the pacing. No passages stand out as truly remarkable in syntax, imagery, and turn of phrase. Some of the weakest moments are when the author occasionally slips into purple prose, which feels out of place in the greater context of the work.

This fun and readable story of dark fantasy misadventure with a sprinkle of romance will most appeal to the young adult demographic, but there are enough moments of descriptive brutality for the lovers of grimdark. People who enjoy the dark fantasy worlds and strong female protagonists of Leigh Bardugo, Laurie Forest and Holly Black will love Fable.

The Fable series is planned as a duology with the second book, Namesake, slated to come out in early 2021.

Three Stars

Read Fable by Adrienne Young

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REVIEW: Persephone Station by Stina Leicht

Persephone Station is the upcoming science fiction novel by multi-award-nominated sci-fi and fantasy author Stina Leicht (The Fay and the Fallen, The Malorum Gates). The novel tells the story of a band of mercenaries hired by a friend to a protect an indigenous village from the greedy interplanetary Serrao-Orlov Corporation. Serrao-Orlov has just purchased the planet Persephone on the outskirts of the United Republic of Worlds and seeks to profit from a secret scientific development that could change human life forever with dire consequences for everyone except the richest humans. But the secret is known only to the indigenes, the Emissaries in Ogenth, Persephone’s perilous frontier. Serrao-Orlov will destroy everything to exploit this secret. Angel and her band of misfit mercenaries must stop them.

Angel’s friend Rosie is the owner of Monk’s Bar, a seedy hangout for mercenaries and other lowlifes in the corporate-run town of West Brynner on Persephone. Rosie has a special tie to the planet’s indigenous people—they saved her when she was a small child of Catholic missionaries who were trying to convert the indigenous population to their religion. When Rosie finds out that Serrao-Orlov is determined to exploit the Emissaries at any cost, she hires Angel and her band to protect Ogenth. Angel has fallen on hard times since her career as a space marine ended. And because she has just been framed for the assassination of a powerful corporate leader and needs to get out of town quick, she gathers her team of assassins and oddballs and heads out to Ogenth in her spaceship, Kurosawa.

Like many excellent novels, and like Stephen King recommends in his book On Writing, the fight to save Ogenth from Serrao-Orlov is smashed together with another main plot—the emergence of artificial intelligence in human bodies. Artificial intelligence of at least two kinds is already widely employed in the United Republic of World, including in the spaceship Kurosawa and in Angel’s combat assistant, a function of her battle suit that enhances her ability to produce adrenaline and whatnot. But transferring artificial intelligence to humans could present extraordinary challenges to human life. After she is framed for the assassination, Angel runs into mysterious off-world stranger, Kennedy Liu, who just might hold the key to stopping the proliferation of this dangerous technology. Ultimately, the two plots converge on Persephone Station, a floating space station above the planet.

Persephone Station has everything a grimdark fan could want in a science fiction novel. The characters are outcasts, heavily armed and highly flawed. They face a powerful force on a suicide mission against all odds. Though the main characters are undoubtedly on the side of good in this novel, they are assassins and mercenaries who take the job for the money and for their friend. They fight with spaceships and mech suits and rail guns and pulse rifles and bombs and all kinds of good stuff. People get injured and killed. The settings are grim and perilous. The action is tense and fast, extremely interesting, logical, and vivid.

The one thing Persephone Station doesn’t have, though, is men. Similar to Kameron Hurley’s fantastic Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy, all the main characters in Persephone Station are women, and the novel is billed as feminist science fiction. Hold on, dudes, don’t go anywhere. For me, an old man (and a feminist—women should be treated as equals), this did not lessen my enjoyment of the novel at all. These women kick ass. And unlike Hurley’s excellent novels in which there is a clear reason why there are no men around—they are conscripted to battle for life essentially—there is no such clear explanation here. These are just some tough assassins and mercs. Angel is an ex-marine who has purchased Kurosawa with money she made as a merc. Her would-be lover best friend, Sukyi, is from Earth, Nigeria specifically, which has fallen victim to a plague that Sukyi carries around with her, knowing she does not have long to live. She likes to blow things up. Lou is the adrenalin-addicted pilot of the Kurosawa. She cannot get enough of the fight, and surprisingly, she has a boyfriend. Enid is a dry, taciturn, top-notch assassin. All these characters have secrets that will out, and Leicht handles them and their relationships beautifully, creating an emotionally gripping backdrop to the furiously fast-paced adventure.

Persephone Station is a bit of mashup of grimdark fighting fiction, space opera, and cyberpunk. It has just enough science to bring it to life without distracting from the characters and their relationships and is loaded with many interesting subplots that come together to create a very entertaining story with depth and complexity even if it is not mind-blowingly original. Leicht’s prose is crystal clear and unpretentious. And although the pace of the novel is almost recklessly fast, the book is long enough at 512 pages to be truly immersive. Fans of gritty, grimdark space opera and science fiction should enjoy it. Fans of female-centred (feminist, if you insist) SFF should definitely give it a read. Though there are many, many more female protagonists and antagonists in SFF now (as you can see from Grimdark Magazine’s top fantasy novels of 2019 list) than there were when I started reading the genre, it is still male-dominated, especially on the sci-fi side. Give this one a go for a fun read.

Persephone Station is scheduled to be released by Saga Press on 5 January 2021.

Read Persephone Station by Stina Leicht

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REVIEW: The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids by Michael McClung

The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids is the first novel of the Amra Thetys series by Michael McClung and the first winner of the Self Published Fantasy Blog-Off. If you are unfamiliar with the Self Published Fantasy Blog off or SPFBO, it is a competition held by fantasy author Mark Lawrence that pits 300 self-published fantasy books against each other in a grand battle with only one book surviving. The winner gets the title of SPFBO winner for that year. Not a small feat.

“Sometimes theft can be as simple and direct as a fist in an unsuspecting face, and sometimes it can be as complex as a military operation.”

The story in a The Thief Who Pulled on Troubles Braids starts in the apartment of the thief, Amra Thetys. Her friend and sometime business partner Corbin Harbin comes a-knocking with a stolen artifact in hand. Of course, Amra is no fool. She doesn’t want anything to do with this nonsense; if he has a stolen artifact, he needs to hide it himself. He persuades her, and she agrees to watch the artifact overnight if he returns in the morning to collect it.

The next morning Corbin does not show, and she finds Corbin’s body lying in the street dead.

This death puts Amra in the middle of a battle on the cosmic scale. In the beginning, this was just a quest to find out who killed her friend Corbin, but it turns into a story of deceit, magic, power, pain, and gods. Amra will be tested both physically and mentally. She will have to come to grips with her past choices and possible future while trusting help from unexpected places. Man, I just loved Amra.

“I’d always assumed hair was an integral part of any hairstyle.”

The remarkable thing about this The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids is that it is so short. You wouldn’t think with the emotion conveyed or the in-depth characters that this was a short book at all—quite the contrary. But The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids does everything very well. When a writer has a clear picture in their minds and can convey that to the reader, the book does not need to be long.

To start with, Amra seems like a pretty common type of protagonist. When I was reading her, it reminded me of Sancia from Foundryside. Both are thieves who are wily, remarkable, quick-witted, prone to disaster, and caught up in something much bigger than themselves. That is where the similarities end. There is tenderness and vulnerability in Amra that is not as apparent in Sancia. But, coupled with that vulnerability is a core of steel. Amra is a capable person. Her command of herself, the dignity that she lives her life with, demands respect from every person she meets. She lays herself bare; there isn’t a lot of guile with her. Which is odd considering she is a thief. She is what she is, and that attracted me to her as a character.

“Fate is a slaver, bloodwitch, and I refuse its chains.” As I walked out her door, she spoke in a quiet voice. “That is why fate has singled you out, Amra Thetys.”

As for the side characters in the story, the most entertaining is Holgren. McClung could have played it straight with Holgren being presented as a typical wizard/magician archetype. But he didn’t at all. Holgren is vastly powerful, but you don’t get that sense from him. He isn’t throwing his weight around, and he doesn’t need to. He holds his power in check until he is pushed to far, and when he lets it out, it is a thing to behold. I went back and read the chapters that talked about Holgren battling. He is a certified badass. Aside from the power, he also makes an excellent bantering foil to Amra. They both are exceedingly quick-witted, and that leads to some entertaining conversations between the two of them.

As this is a bit of a caper story, a whodunnit, you won’t know who the big baddies are until you get near to the denouement near the end of the story. I wasn’t prepared for the twists. The pacing is so good that it smacks you in the face. There is no slow burn here.

The city of Lucernis makes me think of cobblestone streets and Italian villas but beneath the beautiful exteriors lay a lot of rot. Along with the villas are apartments that are falling apart full of people barely making it. There was a societal division between the haves and have not in this story. The city’s poverty level is mentioned briefly here and there, but it was never one of the major players. But it created a background full of information that gave some context to people’s actions. There is also a great religious backstory that McClung created that paired with the city. The religious system consisted of various deities, gods and goddesses and their acolytes running various temples around town.

When I first heard about SPFBO last year and ended up on one of the teams, I wasn’t as familiar with the past year’s winners as I should have been. Since then, I have read 3 of the 5 winning novels, and they have been highlights of my year. This book, as the first winner, is no different. Damn, is this a well-done story. Although I feel like I am late to the game and the church of Amra, there are many books in the series to look forward to.

“I feel obligated to tell you that adventures are, on a whole, stunningly bad ideas, best avoided at all costs.”

The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids by Michael McClung is a beautiful piece of dark fantasy. It has a rich story, a morally gray protagonist, and scenes that will make you jump up and down and cheer. If you like exciting books, this is for you.

Read The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids by Michael McClung

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An Interview with Richard K. Morgan

Richard K. Morgan is a Multi-talented bestselling author of the Takeshi Kovacs novels: Altered Carbon (2002), Broken Angels(2003), and finally, Woken Furies(2005). In Altered Carbon, the main protagonist Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-envoy now convict, downloaded into the body of a “nicotine-addicted ex-thug and presented with a catch-22 offer,” to discover who murdered the body of a billionaire in a locked room mystery. Kovacs is pulled into a never-dying society of the ultra-rich, where intrigue and conspiracy abound, and death means little if you have enough money. All set within a gritty and futuristic world. Broken Angels takes place thirty years later. Takeshi has again changed bodies, and now instead of a private investigator, he is a mercenary soldier, “and helping a far-flung planet’s government put down a bloody revolution.” Finally, in Woken Furies, Kovacs is back on his home of Harlan’s World, investigating Kovacs past relationships. Much to fans delight, 

Altered Carbon was adapted to a Netflix series in 2018, starring Joel Kinnaman as Kovacs in season 1 and Anthony Mackie for season two. 

In 2008, Morgan took a break from gritty science fiction with his series in A Land Fit For Heroes, starting with the first book, The Steel Remains, Morgan takes on a typical sword and sorcery novel but adds a gritty noir feel with more modern characters. “Ringil Eskiath—Gil, for short—a washed-up mercenary and onetime war hero whose cynicism is surpassed only by the speed of his sword.” 

Additionally, Morgan has written more award-winning science fiction in the Black Man novels, first with Thirteen (2007) and Thin Air (2018.)

In the back and forth conversation below, Richard answers questions regarding the hero myth, influences, cancel culture, and more. 

Your first novel Altered Carbon is the story of an envoy, now-convict Takeshi Kovacs. It created its own genre with a combination of the hard-boiled noir of Raymond Chandler and William Gibson’s Neuromancer’s feel. Did either of these writers influence you?

Very much so, yes. Gibson’s short stories in Omni Magazine in the early eighties were a crystallising moment for me – the moment I realised This! This is the sort of thing I want to write!  The Chandler influence came later, and was consequent; everyone was referring to Gibson as The Chandler of SF, so I wandered over into the crime genre looking for this guy Chandler, to see what he was about. After that, I never looked back!

  Cyberpunk as a genre came to mainstream attention in the early 1980s with Blade Runner and Neuromancer by William Gibson, though arguably, it is seen in the earlier works of Phillip K. Dick. Either way, cyberpunk is the evolution of technology, leading to a dystopic future. Where do you think cyberpunk is going as a genre in the future?

I don’t know that cyberpunk is “going” anywhere, any more than its non-SF antecedent “noir” has ever “gone” anywhere. I think in both cases what has ended up identified as a subgenre is in reality more of an aesthetic or, in musical terms, a backbeat. Cyberpunk showed up in the eighties as a conscious rejection of both the Big Shiny Futures of the Golden Age (an easy enough target!), but also the weird-ass speculations of the New Wave. CP was eminently pragmatic in both its approach to technology and to socio-political trends. Look, it said, Here’s some cool new tech, and look how little it’s actually changed the way humans behave.  Cyberpunk insisted, in much the same way as noir, that we are our own worst enemies, that there aren’t really any Good Guys or Bad Guys, and that the human condition has some uncomfortable eternal verities to which we’ll likely always be subject. And to be honest, those were assumptions that had been kicking around in mainstream literary fiction for a very long time indeed. There is, in fact, a case to be made that all Cyberpunk really represented was the final unavoidable seepage of that modernist literary aesthetic into the rarified ghettoes of genre (just as the New Wave had smuggled in experimental writing a decade or so earlier). So, while there’s been a lot of talk about The Death of Cyberpunk, or how The Cyberpunk of Today Just Ain’t The Same As The Cyberpunk of Yesteryear (a sort of genre-based “Today’s Music Ain’t Got The Same Soul” whinge), the truth is that the aesthetic of Cyberpunk has taken the world by storm, sunk into every aspect of it at every level, and endures as a major defining factor in the stories that we continue to tell, not only in genre but across the whole literary firmament.

There has been quite a lot of societal and political upheavals in the world this year. Do you think that this year will affect your writing in the future? And if so, how?

It probably will at some point, but it’s hard to say how right now. I find that any new input needs to marinate for a while before I find a use for it. The car lease agreement I signed that triggered the idea of the sleeve rentals in Altered Carbon was something I encountered in Vancouver back in early 1991. It didn’t crop up in my writing until some time in ’93 or ’94. The argument I had with a buddhist that underlies the main storyline in the same novel happened even earlier. So yeah, all the shit that 2020 brought in will likely make its way into my fiction somewhere down the line, but as to when and how – watch this space!

I remember reading about that argument with a Buddhist, and I found that your statement, ‘So I’m suffering and I can’t remember what I did to earn this suffering? That’s not right, is it, because I’m not that person?’ And he said: ‘It’s the same soul.’ I said: ‘It doesn’t fucking matter. What matters is whether you, as an experiential being, remember it. Otherwise, I’m being punished and I don’t know why. That’s the height of injustice.’” to be true. It is the height of injustice when distilled like that as an idea and I can see how that reflected in Takeshi Kovacs. What other broad concepts would you like to tackle someday? 

I think if we’re talking about broad moral concepts, I tend to mix the same basic palette into most of what I write – I’m concerned above all with injustice and human stupidity, and Buddhism, for all its superficially non-judgemental appeal, is still a religion, still an example of human stupidity. (Not sure on this? Go ask the Rohyinga). My protagonists tend to be exasperated with the world, because I am too – as Quellcrist Falconer puts it “The human eye is a wonderful device; with a little effort it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”  The brutality we cheerfully inflict on our fellow humans in the scramble for ascendancy, the self-serving lies we tell about it, the sheer infantile cognitive dissonance of the dynamic – that’s the enduring texture of the backdrop my stories tend to play out against.

You have written both a fantasy series in A Land Fit for Heroes and genre-bending series in Takeshi Kovacs and the novel Thin Air. Is the process of writing a fantasy novel different than a science fiction one? 

For me, it wasn’t. In fact, I’d made myself something of a tacit promise that I’d simply hump all the usual noir furniture from my SF work over the fence into the field of fantasy and see how it panned out. Turns out it works there pretty much as well as anywhere else

REVIEW: Ink by Jonathan Maberry

The concept of a dream thief, or a stealer of memories is fascinating. A creepy villain with the ability to sneak in and access the mind of victims, especially in such a way as to be unnoticed, is quite scary. What Jonathan Maberry does in Ink is that, but he takes it to a higher level. In Ink, the method of the villain’s access is as intriguing as the theft itself. He gets in by way of the victim’s tattoos.

Several characters from different walks of life come together in the small town of Pine Deep, Pennsylvania. This is a town that Maberry has had as the central location for some of his works before, but it’s not necessary to read those first (I haven’t). There is a good bit of background, but the essentials are provided in story to cover the reader’s lack of experience.

Monk Addison is a skip tracer, a private investigator specializing in tracking down those who have skipped bail. On the side, he’s a bit of a vigilante with a history as a special ops soldier and mercenary. He has faces of the murdered victims of those he hunts tattooed on his skin to remind of him of why he does this grim work.

Patty Cakes is a tattoo artist settling in Pine Deep, with a gift of tattoo artistry handed down through her Vietnamese ancestry. She has a tattoo of her deceased daughter on her forearm, where she can see it each day. Except, it’s starting to fade…

Owen Minor is the Lord of the Flies, named as such as he uses his own tattoos of blowflies to access and steal the ink from people. He isn’t sure how he has this ability, but he makes use of it. The flies move out and upon making contact, can absorb the tattoos and associated memories then transmit them back to Minor for his personal use. He can also use the blowflies to quite literally get under their skin, and he’s able to exert some degree of control in the short term.

Mike Sweeney is a cop in Pine Deep who comes across a couple from out of state who got into a car accident after having an argument about the man’s missing tattoos, which he does not remember having. The woman is upset, as the tattoos were a reminder of her recent battles with cancer – something that she’s quite disturbed that her husband has forgotten. Not only the tattoos, but the memories associated with them.

Several incidents of missing tattoos are soon being connected, as Sweeney and the police chief, Malcolm Crow dig deeper to discover what sinister forces are at work in Pine Deep, which is no stranger to the weird.

As fascinating as the story is, what really brings Ink to life is Maberry’s focus on character. He creates intriguing characters with rich backstory, then as they interact with each other we as readers can really make connections.

“They held each other, clung to one another. Patty screamed and Monk wept and their heartbreak filled the whole world.”

The reader feels not only connected to the characters, but almost as if submerged in the story right alongside them. We feel their pain and confusion as they cope with lost memories and question their sanity. We feel the violation that the Lord of the Flies has made over each as he steals essential parts of their souls, and gets off on it.

I’ve read several Maberry novels and stories before, but this was my first time to visit the town of Pine Deep. It does seem to be set in the same universe as the Joe Ledger stories, of which I’ve read a few. I think it’s safe to say that I’ll be putting some of that work on my reading list, starting with the first in the Pine Deep Trilogy, Ghost Road Blues. In a perfect world, I would have read those first, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment of Ink in the slightest.

Thanks to Sarah Bonamino at St. Martin’s Publishing Group for providing this eARC.

Read Ink by Jonathan Maberry

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REVIEW: Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York

Shadows of New York is the sequel to Coteries of New York that came out last year. It is a visual novel set in the World of Darkness by White Wolf Publishing. A visual novel is effectively a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book that is played on a computer and a bit different from a video game since there’s often no voice acting or much gameplay. Neither game is anything like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines but I enjoyed the former, so I picked up the sequel when it came out last week.

The World of Darkness is an urban fantasy horror setting where the human race lives alongside monsters. Vampires live in the shadows, hiding under fake identities and preying on the marginalized of society. They have conflicts among themselves, with government assassins, and a handful of other threats. Created in the Nineties, it has a strongly conspiratorial theme to it that focuses on the injustices of society and how much of it exists to serve the interests of the super-rich (as well as undead in this setting). Think They Live if they mixed it with Dracula and the Lost Boys.

The premise is Julia, a young reporter working for a once-trendy magazine, finds her life destroyed by forces beyond her comprehension before she is Embraced to become a Lasomra. Lasombra are vampires with superhuman strength, the ability to bend minds, and control over shadows as well as the ability to see ghosts. Julia’s clan is considered the scum of the Camarilla and she is frequently subject to jibes as well as carrying out the worst work of Kindred society. Her only lights in the tunnel are her girlfriend Dakota, a human who loves her, and the Sheriff of New York, Qadir, that considers her a kid sister.

Julia finds a chance to improve her situation for the first time since her Embrace by being assigned to investigate the murder of Anarch Baron Callihan. No one expects Julia to actually succeed in her task and it’s all designed to placate the few followers of Callihan. Julia is smart enough to find out the truth but should she? Is it better to play the game and see if she can parlay the secrets she uncovers to personal power? Is it better to stick to what little morality she has left? The choices are ultimately yours with each decision affecting Julia’s morality meter. At the end, whether she’s a hero or monster will determine your ending.

Shadows of New York benefits from playing Coteries of New York but works as a stand-alone story. It reuses a great deal of assets from that game (mostly art) but also incorporates plenty of new artwork. The soundtrack is excellent, being a sort of pulsing 90s beat that evokes the Goth nightclub atmosphere of the original game. Julia is a fantastic protagonist and oozes personality that makes it enjoyable to follow her adventures. I really liked her relationship with Dakota, her snarky personality, and complicated relationship with both religion as well as her sexuality.

The game deals with the larger concept of truth vs. propaganda. Some individual gamers may find its take on the subject to be politicized or preachy so let the buyer beware. Julia frequently finds that the truth of a subject is less important than the ability to convince people of your version of events. The coronavirus is also addressed in the story, though I don’t mind that since vampires are going to be affected by everyone social distancing as well as shutting down the usual hot spots where they might feed. It’s only a minor element to the story, though.

I have a few complaints about the game, such as the fact that the Hunger mechanic of the previous game is now absent. Blood was always a pressing issue for the Fledgling in the previous game while Julia doesn’t have to ever bother feeding at all in the game. Still, I overall feel like this is a massive improvement over the previous game (and I didn’t dislike it). I wouldn’t mind another adventure with Julia as the star either. This isn’t a video game, though, more of a visual novel and your choices are limited. That isn’t something that bothers me, though, because the story is just that good.

Play Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York

 

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REVIEW: Battle Ground by Jim Butcher

There is fighting, and then there is what happened in Jim Butcher’s Battle Ground, the latest addition to the Harry Dresden universe. Unlike the other books in the Dresden file universe, Battle Ground does not have a beginning, middle, and end. Battle Ground is instead the high note in an exciting crescendo that started during Peace Talks and is finishing with a bang. In actuality, Peace Talks/Battle Ground is one long story arc that is too long to be in just one book. The Peace Talks / Battle Ground combo feels like a gift after a few years away from the Dresden universe.

We start in Battle Ground on a boat coming away from Demonsreach. The city of Chicago is under attack from a mashup of Fomor King Corb, Listen, and the Last Titan Ethniu. Under any circumstances, any of these foes would fill a Dresden novel. As it stands, we have all three battling against the acordees. All enemies and friends are digging deep within themselves to pull out all the magical stops. It is the witching hour, the best time for gathering energies, and Chicago is swirling with a combination of fear and battle lust. “Apocalypses always kick-off at the witching hour. All the cities inhabitants are on the edge of their seats, waiting for the final moment, the one last thing that will send everyone to battle. Whether that is battle lust or resignation at their fate, the city holds its breath.

Harry, after depositing his brother on Demonsreach, and the island accepting it’s newest charge. Harry and a cadre of allies are frantically sailing Thomas’s little boat, The Water Beetle, back to Chicago. Chicago is blacked out. The buildings of downtown look like dark and menacing jagged cliffs. The only light is the light of fires raging out of control and candlelight in the windows floating like stars in the black skyscrapers.

“Abruptly there was a crunching sound, squeals of protest from the Water Beetle’s hull and superstructure, and the boat went from moving slowly to not moving at all in the space of several seconds… It was thick, rubbery, pulsing, living limb, deep red-purple in color, covered in leathery, wart shaped nodules and lines with toothed suckers… a great, faintly luminous eye glimmered up at me through the waters of Lake Michigan. A colossal squid. A Kraken.”

This squabble with the Kraken happens in the first five pages of the book. And this is relatively slow and stately compared to what happens in the rest of the novel. After Harry meets with the Kraken, the Fomor forces rise out of Lake Michigan’s cold waters to start the battle. In many ways, I think Battle Ground is the denouement of the series’s first 18 books. Butcher has played the long game here. Foes, friends, and allies are brought forth in a tremendous mythological battleground. Characters you would not have paid much attention to in previous books come out of the woodwork and show their real metal. I’ll give you a small preview with the character Major General Toot Toot Minimus. We have met and dealt with Toot Toot on many occasions. “Major General Toot-Toot Minimus resembles a glowing violet comet more than anything else as he approached in a low-pitched buzz of dragonfly wings.” He is a wee folk, small, almost childlike in stature with the silvery wings of a dragonfly. Nearly too cute in representation to be anything menacing. Especially when standing shoulder to shoulder to the Black Court and Fomor. You will think that until the wee folk come out to do battle, and the sky lights up as if it is full of deranged Christmas lights.

Do not under any circumstances discount the little guy.

There is a reason why the wee folk have survived as long as they have. The wee folk respect the hell out of Harry and love pizza and these are perfect reasons to go to war, and there are a lot of them. And they are in everything, as fast and hummingbirds and as gentle as porcupines. They could poke your eye out before you had a chance to blink.

Theme wise, there are two ideas worth talking about that permeate the novel and color each of the exquisitely orchestrated battle scenes. Firstly, for Harry, this book is about compartmentalizing and conquering. Battle Ground plays on his unique strengths of mental toughness, ones that Harry has wrought from a lifetime of mental exercises and the practice of harnessing his will. Throughout this novel, he will watch and experience great horrors. He can either break and crack, folding under the massive strain, or be who he is and do what he must. Dresden has to take that pain, anguish, and horror that he feels and shove it into a little compartment in his mind and move forward. He does this not to run from the pain because his experiences are worthy of that pain. It would be a coward’s way out otherwise. It is heroic in the reading and what I think to be the most challenging thing Harry has ever had to do. But if he is going to move forward, he must.

The second theme is that, as I mentioned earlier, do not underestimate the little guy. Harry is a little dude in the cosmic scheme of things. He is a mid-grade fighter, less knowledgeable and skilled as some, but in most situations where he is fitting people or things in his weight class, he can handle himself. But outside his weight class, things become a bit more complicated. Sometimes you do not need a lot of power to overcome; you need a persistent personality and the will to keep going. You see that in Harry, in Butters, in Sanya, Murphy, the wee folk, and the wolves. You see that in all the cosmically lower characters throughout the novel. I wish I could tell you what will happen instead of eluding to it, but Battle Ground is not that kind of story. The sheer magnitude of what these characters face, and how everything plays out in this massive war of mythological creatures would be spoiled from one slip of the tongue.

Pacing wise, this is unlike any Harry Dresden book I have ever read. It is relentless. It beats you, swipes you to the side, and then beats you again. And, in a moment when you thought you were safe, some incredible creature comes forward to show you how minuscule and insignificant you are. They break your will, they break your heart, and then eventually they break your body. Harry falls and rises from one moment to the next, relying heavily on the mantle to keep him going.

If he were an ordinary human, he would have died in the first five pages of the story. Probably from the mental trauma alone.

Also, Butcher is not one for subtleties. By the end of this story, there is some resolution, but Butcher is a magician. While you were looking at one thing, he wallops you with what starts as a future plot in the next book. Even though Battleground is, in a lot of ways, the ending of much of the previous story arcs, it is the beginning of Harry’s second chapter. It is going strong, and if that ending told me anything, it is that Harry’s foes, those close to him and those keeping their distance, are going to come back and bite his ass. And I am here for it.

Battle Ground is an urban fantasy done at its best. Indeed it is the bar in which other authors should strive to. Harry is everything I would want in my wizard from Chicago. And I cannot wait till the next book is out so that I can dive in and read it in one day like I did this one.

Read Battle Ground by Jim Butcher

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REVIEW: Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliot

The first book in a new trilogy billed as ‘gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space’, Kate Elliott’s Unconquerable Sun is both a complex political thriller and an action-packed coming of age story, wrapped up in a grand, sweeping space opera. Although long caught between the haughty Yele League and the vast, domineering Phene Empire, the Republic of Chaonia is a growing power. Fresh from her first military victory, Princess Sun – heir to Chaonia’s ruthless Queen-Marshal Eirene – is desperate to prove herself to her demanding mother and enigmatic father. As conflict with the Phene becomes increasingly likely, however, and Sun chafes at being kept away from the front lines, she and her Companions soon find themselves caught up in deadly court politics and a murky web of conspiracies and lies.

As befits a tale of intrigue, espionage and political maneuvering this is fairly complex in places, with lots of information to process about empires, ideologies, technology and character identities, and it throws the reader in at the deep end with little in the way of up-front explanation. It’s the sort of story that asks you to trust it, however, and rewards your patience with a richly detailed world that slowly unveils as the book progresses. The murky politics takes careful untangling but proves brilliantly devious and twisty, and as it gradually makes sense, so too do the histories and various cultural identities of this setting come into focus. Elliott takes an elegant, light-touch approach to portraying a deeply believable world with sexuality and gender equality baked in but never dominating, allowing the character dynamics and the politics to take centre stage as themes of genetic engineering, social inequality and familial obligation are all explored along the way.

Elliott uses multiple viewpoint characters and different perspectives, each with a clear, distinct voice and offering something different to the ongoing story. As the key protagonist, Sun provides the driving force for the narrative – intense, often impulsive, engaging despite the inherent coldness of her determination. In contrast, Perspehone – a reluctant member of Sun’s inner circle of Companions – provides warmth and humanity, as does Apame, a skilled but slightly hapless Phene pilot who helps to humanise the ‘enemy’ faction. These characters and more are all driven to achieve their goals by a willingness to break social convention, and utter determination to forge their own paths. They’re flawed and relatable, able to do their own thing, make mistakes, suffer the consequences and come back stronger, and almost all of them have their own moments of coming of age, understanding that the truths they thought they knew were in fact nothing of the sort.

This is a story that manages to be both brilliantly character-driven and breathlessly exciting. It’s packed full of pacy action sequences which draw the various characters together, split them apart, and give the reader all manner of opportunities to get to know them, never offering action just for the sake of it. There’s a darkness to the core narrative that helps build up an overarching sense of considerable danger, and while they’re only used sparingly the sinister Riders – members of the Phene ruling caste – are properly creepy. The brisk pace, dizzying twists and turns, well-developed relationships and thrilling moments of action all combine to ensure it’s never too bleak, however, and it’s full of clever touches like the modern cultural references scattered throughout (see how many real-world song lyrics you can spot), and interesting uses of media for performance and propaganda.

If you’re familiar with Greek history then you’ll no doubt spot the references here, but it’s far from a requirement to enjoy this. While the political and historical touchstones are suitably linked to Alexander (there’s even a ship called the Boukephalas), the world they’re set in is influenced at least as much by East Asia in its architecture and naming conventions, and narratively speaking this has all the elements needed to make for a fantastic story in its own right. If ambitious, expansive, detailed space opera is your thing, and you like a novel with masses of brilliant female characters that keeps you on the edge of your seat from start to finish, Unconquerable Sun comes highly recommended. As the first part of a trilogy, it sets a high bar but promises big things to come.

Many thanks to Kate Elliott and Head of Zeus/Ad Astra for providing a review copy of Unconquerable Sun in exchange for an honest review.

Read Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliot

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Dune is a Sci-fi classic, but is it Grimdark?

Historically, mainstream science fiction blockbusters don’t qualify as Grimdark. They’re marketed at kids, they’re brightly coloured, have jokes that don’t qualify as ‘dark humour’ and the power of hope is a recurring theme. Dune might just be different and here’s why. Spoilers will follow if you’ve not read the books, so be warned.

On the surface, Dune has all the hallmarks of a traditional fantasy setting. Our prophesied hero leads a persecuted people against the ancient enemies of his house to avenge his father and brings low a corrupt empire.

However, the Dune universe is not one with neat lines of good and bad. Indeed, it’s a significant influence on the archetypal grimdark setting – Warhammer 40k.  It’s got mutants who facilitate space travel and can see the future, a tendency towards feudal & commercial institutions and a prohibition against AI because of a past war against robots.

Sound familiar?

Dune goes to great lengths to emphasise the way in which the Emperor, Great Houses and CHOAM corporation are corrupt, the insidious way in which the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood influence the galaxy and the awesome influence of the abhuman Navigators.

This is not a universe with a sense of justice.

The depiction of a detached and manipulative political class is solid grimdark fare. The Harkonnens are almost comically villainous. Baron Harkonnen is a gross paedophile, Feyd-Rautha is a manipulative psychopath and Glossu Rabban is a brute.

It does have to be said that having your main villain be fat, physically disabled, diseased and an abusive pervert is probably overkill and doesn’t carry through all that well in the modern age.

All of this would be ruined if our hero – Paul Atreides – was exactly as noblebright as he seems at first glance. However, Paul isn’t as benficent as he appears, the machinations and prophecy that led to his ascension are far from divine and what seems like a straight ‘you killed my father’ desire for justice is more complex.

For a start, Paul’s genesis is the result of a horrifically manipulative genetic conspiracy going back thousands of years, and worse – he was NOT the intended result. The prophecy that aids his ascension on Arrakis is not divine, but implanted by the Bene Gesserit to benefit any of their number who found themselves abandoned amongst the Fremen.

It’s arguable that Paul’s father, Duke Leto is the most overtly noblebright character in the story – a loving father and a caring feudal lord (insofar as such a thing is possible). However, he still makes political decisions over loving ones and his decision to create an elite fighting force is what brings about his fall. There are hints of Leto’s troubling relationship with his overly martial father and I’d like to have seen more of that.

The Atreides retainers can be seen as uncomplicated good guys, but Duncan Idaho gets drunk when he believes Lady Jessica is a traitor, Thufir Hawat turns willingly when he believes the same, Gurney Halleck is motivated by revenge and Dr Yueh is a traitor. Not so shiny after all.

In avenging his father, Paul lays low the house of his genetic grandfather – who is killed by his infant sister, who was brought to sentience in the womb as a result of a psychedelic trance. This is not the fluffy sort of narrative you’d see from Disney or directed by Steven Spielberg.

Ultimately, Paul makes many compromised decisions – he keeps his beloved as a concubine for political reasons, he fails to stop the crusade that his influence unleashes among the Fremen and ultimately he cannot face the inhuman necessity of the Golden Path eventually taken by his son Leto II.

What is entailed in that Golden Path is truly horrific in itself but that topic takes us far past the initial book.

The one thing Dune lacks to qualify as the truest grimdark is the dark humour that populates the archetypes of the genre. Paul is not one for sarcastic quips or making light of his body count and that straight-laced quality does drop the story a few points on the grimdark meter.

Finally, it bears mentioning that Dune is a problematic story, with its depiction of a ‘savage’, refugee semitic people, ripe with the potential to unleash a jihad on the galaxy who are brought literally out of the desert by a prophesied white savior who cannot restrain them.

That was a problematic narrative in 1965 and in 2020 it’s actively dangerous. You can argue that the best grimdark directly confronts such issues and Dune definitely has things to say about colonialism but only as an aside and I can wholly understand why the story doesn’t have a lot of fans of Middle Eastern heritage.

The new Dune movie is likely to be the science fiction event of the year and while it’s certainly going to be beautiful, it deserves credit as a work of grimdark fiction as well, set in an unjust universe, with compromised heroes and little in the way of happy endings.

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REVIEW: We Men of Ash and Shadow by HL Tinsley

We’ve all heard the phrase, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” and I’d have to say this is good advice. The best artwork in the world won’t make a story engage the reader. What a great cover can do is catch the eye and stand out in an unending sea of books. We Men of Ash and Shadow did this for me, as one evening I was scrolling through social media and my attention was caught by the wonderful book cover. This got my attention enough to read the blurb, and I was immediately hooked.

“It was the most highly recommended venue the city had to offer. It was called the Ring O’ Bastards and it had the lowest patron to murder victim ratio in a five mile radius.”

That’s the opening paragraph to this fine novel. Within moments, I knew I had stumbled on something special. HL Tinsley didn’t disappoint me as I read further. Right away we are introduced to the protagonist of this novel and the Vanguard Chronicles series. We see Vanguard in his element and given a quick snapshot of his typical night on the job.

John Vanguard is a former soldier, now a mercenary employed to do unsavory but necessary work for the city’s warlord, Sanquain. He’s disgruntled by his life and shamed by the disastrous ending to his military career. As Vanguard doesn’t have much self-respect, he feels he deserves the rotten path his life has taken. But he has unique skills, and Sanquain recognizes that and puts him to grim work.

“It was as though the rats of the city could smell the blood before it hit the cobblestones.”

Soon Vanguard is tasked to learn who has killed two city guards whose bodies have washed up. As he conducts his investigation, he travels the city’s underworld and soon learns much more than he expected. While the criminal elements are as much a part of the city’s darker side as they are in any sizable community, Vanguard discovers that this city is on the edge of collapse, and revolution is looming, just waiting on something to push it over the brink.

Meanwhile, a young aristocrat named Tarryn Leersac has fallen on hard times as his family fortune has been chipped away. He stumbles upon Vanguard and recognizes that the man has skills that mirror his own. Tarryn decides that he must have Vanguard mentor him, to teach him how to control and properly use these talents, hopefully to regain his noble position in the city.

“’We are men of ash and shadow. We endure the darkness so that others might see the dawn.”

We Men of Ash and Shadow takes us through this remarkably fascinating underworld of crime and survival, showing the darker side to the human experience, but also carving out a path to possible redemption. It’s a brilliant debut from a new author to the grimdark scene, and I look forward to seeing more of her work, rather in continuation of this series or other things.

Read We Men of Ash and Shadow by HL Tinsley

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