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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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REVIEW: Bloodlines by Chris Wraight

Bloodlines, by Chris Wraight, is the first full-length novel of Warhammer Crime line put out by Black Library. It therefore has a certain set of expectations attached to it: can it make the mean streets of Varangantua stick as a setting? Will the protagonist, Agusto Zidarov have a return outing?

Well, one of Wraight’s great successes for Black Library has been his settings: witness the stifling sense of place in his Vaults of Terra books. Varangantua is well-formed as a dark and rain-soaked hive city – vast enough to contain distinct districts, with significant differences in wealth, function and architecture. It benefits from being the only scene of the action. Rather than the brief sketches of terrain, industry and government provided in other books, there is a slower but more thorough approach to world-building. We see family life and street-life; take-away food, future slang and home entertainment. The hive city has something of a standardised cyberpunk feel to it; there is not the riot of ramshackle storefront hackers and hap-hazard body modifications, but rather mass industrial combine and numerous officials issued with identical implants. Other worlds and features of Warhammer 40,000 appear purely epileptically.

That said, the life of Agusto Zidarov fits into the wider setting neatly. His wife and his adult daughter may be atypical of a Warhammer protagonist, but said daughter’s desire to enter an Imperial Guard regiment will likely elicit a knowing reaction from established fans. Zidarov himself does not stand out significantly – an older detective (‘Probator’), showing his age, contending not only with the criminals of Varangantua, but also the de facto arrangements between gangs and Enforcers. Vitally, he’s not a gunslinger. Armed and armoured he might be, but fire-fights are not his speciality.

Zidorov’s search for a missing son of a wealthy family, aided and abetted by trigger-happy colleagues, interfering superiors, mob bosses and the missing man’s own family will not seem unfamiliar – especially for those who know their Raymond Chandler. However, the hidden motivations of the various players are memorably drawn and explored in sufficient depth to ward off cliché. Further, the precise industry that Zidarov uncovers is simultaneously an interesting conceit for a future-crime novel and a good reflection on established Warhammer lore. It would be spoiling to say which areas exactly Wraight chooses to expand on, but a memorable quote on the matter would be that ‘whenever there’s an expensive safe thing, there’s also a cheap, dangerous thing’.

Some of the lives and follies of Varangantua will perhaps fail to adhere – for instance, the depictions of the city’s wealthier quarters seem oddly disjointed. Nevertheless, the investigations of Zidarov and his struggle for one clear victory in the chaos of an imperial hive are compelling.

For Bloodlines, I would suggest Three Stars are in order, but with very strong hopes for the future of this series.

Read Bloodlines by Chris Wraight

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Five Tor.com novellas to help you fall in love with shorter books

When the incredibly popular review, article, and free short story site Tor.com announced they would be publishing novellas, I honestly had a bit of a publishing-business-gasm. What an absolute masterstroke of strategy to use the sheer weight of web traffic and established short story relationships they had to start a publishing business. And, what another excellent thought to look at the industry, realise that there is a market for shorter works that are still longer than short stories, in an increasingly time-starved market, and just go for it.

Needless to say, the team and I are big fans of Tor.com, and you’ll find a stack of reviews of their novellas on this site. Five of our favourites, which we highly recommend you check out, are listed below.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

Just bloody excellent. Five stars. The very fucking cool alternate history world; the magnificent and engaging characters; and the thoroughly enjoyable plot—this novella has it all and more. I can’t recommend it highly enough and I can’t wait to read more Sarah Gailey.

Read the rest of Adrian’s review here.

A Song for No Man’s Land by Andy Remic

Andy Remic has hit that feeling of horror–much like we see in All Quiet on the Western Front–with a dark fantasy angle that felt smooth and enjoyable in his novella. Robert Jones joins the war to avoid a drinking debt and clean up. His past–not his financial past, but his childhood run in with some fantastical beasts in the Devil Wood–has chased him into the biggest slaughter the world has ever lay witness to.

Read the rest of Adrian’s review here.

The Builders by Daniel Polansky

One of the best pieces of fiction I’ve read in 2017, the Builders is a masterclass in character and story and world. Betrayal, tough as all hell characters, a little flavouring of grit and a glut of unsavoury characters working towards an unsavoury goal–this has everything I and any GdM fan could want.

Read the rest of Adrian’s review here.

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht

The Monster of Elendhaven is a story rich enough for a full-length novel yet beautiful enough for a poem – a strange, grim, and mesmerizing tale that will leave you wanting to read it again immediately to find out what you missed, which is exactly what I did, and it was even better the second time.

Read the rest of malrubius’ review here.

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is a brilliant novella. It provides all the entertainment, action, surprises, and hilarity one could want from 33,000 words, but in the end, it makes you think about people, their lives, their relationships, their motivations, and their futures. I most highly recommend this book to discerning readers of grim fantasy as well as to ‘literary’-type folks who enjoy books like Alix E. Harrow’s also-brilliant The Ten Thousand Days of January. And even though there are so many more new books to review, I think I’m going to have to dive into Zen Cho’s back catalogue for a bit first.

Read the rest of malrubius’ review here.

Check out more reviews of novellas

You can check out more reviews of novellas, here.

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REVIEW: Black City by Boris Akunin

Boris Akunin’s Black City is a 2012 Russian thriller, translated by Andrew Bromfield in 2018 for Wiedenfeld & Nicholson. It sits towards the end of the Erast Fandorin series; these are, variously, detective stories, thrillers and mysteries, generally set in and around the Russian Empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Fandorin himself is a former government agent, getting on in years by the time of Black City. He is a successful and respected private investigator, a polymath and something of a dandy. Previous books featured a spy hunt during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, a murder mystery set aboard a cruise ship and an investigation among the decadent artistry of 1900 Moscow.

A murder in Yalta takes him to Baku, the titular Black City. Baku (as football fans discovered last year) is the capital of the present-day Azerbaijan, but in 1914 is part of the Russian Empire enjoying the fruits of an oil boom. The causes and consequences of the First World War and the Russian Revolution are certainly in the mind of the author, and likely the reader, though this is not quite a novel ‘about’ those historical events.

This was a return after several years to the Erast Fandorin series and I was not disappointed. The background of Baku makes for a spectacular setting at the intersection of Tsarist authorities, Bolshevik conspirators, nouveau riche oil moguls, struggling industrial workers, Islamic culture, modern technology and the ethnic tensions of the Caucuses. Elements of Black City and its fellows are rather pulpy – as the numerous gunfights, romantic interests, speedboat chases and Fandorin’s Japanese manservant and companion bear out. This said, the Japanese elements are conveyed with a respect and depth due to Akunin’s academic background in Far Eastern studies; pulpy they might be, but they don’t seem phony.

I also suspect some of the phraseology and humour does not translate perfectly from the Russian, but this does not reflect poorly on Andrew Bromfield at all. Indeed, at least a passing familiarity with Russian history, literature and customs will be useful to the reader so you don’t choke on the references to Chekov, or the ‘Erast Petroviches’, ‘Mesrop Karatepoviches’ and other patronymics. That said, it will be easier to start your journey into Russian literature with this than to go into Crime and Punishment unprepared.

I enjoyed the brisk pace and sense of place in Black City, though it may not sit perfectly with all. A new reader may appreciate reading one of Fandorin’s earlier adventurers first. This in mind, I shall award it Three Stars for a broader audience.

Read Black City by Boris Akunin

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