Justina Robson is a British writer of Science Fiction like the magnificent Natural History, and of the less easily categorisable but hugely entertaining Quantum Gravity series (multi-dimensional urban magic police procedural - ?). Fantastic Fiction lists 10 novels and a collection of short stories under her name – this includes the book at hand, The Glorious Angels, where she attempts to walk the narrow line between SF and Fantasy.
The story plays in the city of Glimshard – a former Sircene Mage City, but now part of the Golden Empire; ruled by an Empress (each of the 8 cities has one, they are mentally linked). Glimshard is at war, due to an expedition into the Southern Fragment, for what is called an 'Excavation'. The army is over-stretched, and the losses are huge and unsustainable. And the dig is in the Karoo forest – the Karoo being one of the decidedly non-human species on this world (although there is a huge amount of snobbery on what is considered human and what not - they definitely are not), and apparently a formidable enemy. I was not sure, for most of the book, what the reason for this was – why this was so important, worth that war, worth risking everything including the Empire. Are they really that desperate? Or that jaded? Or is this only the Empress' doing?
But now a Karoo from the North has arrived, and joined the ranks of the mercenaries propping up the army and the war effort, and things are spinning quickly out of control. There is conflict between the Empresses, someone is plotting against Torada (Glimshard's Empress), the Infomancers are spying on everyone, and Aline, the Minister of Defense, is blackmailing Tralane, a crystallomancer and Matriarch of one of the old Sircene mage families for materials for his (forbidden?) magic weapon projects...
It talks about a society coming out of a (civil) war, about what people do during such a time, even if not directly involved, and what his means you have to live with afterwards, when times and the situation have changed, when you're older, and when your aims and desires have evolved.
Haunting, fascinating, and nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award (which is for stories published in 2014, and will be awarded in 2015).
The picture on the right is from the Beneath Ceaseless Skies, where the story was first published.
Warren Ellis is UK based writer of comics (Transmetropolitan, Freakangels, amongst others), books, and is dabbling in film work, too (RED was based on one of his stories, and had his involvement). Note to those not familiar with him (yet, you should be!) – this is not the Warren Ellis playing the violin in Nick Cave's The Bad Seeds, although he sports a similarly impressive beard...
The album at hand, called Trees, Volume One: In Shadow is a collection of the first 8 issues of the on-going series Trees; written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Jason Howard. Number 1 was published in spring 2014, number 8 in January 2015, with this collection hard on its heels.
The setting is simple – this is a world which has been invaded by aliens, and has ever so slightly come apart at the seams as a result of that. Not completely, you see, as this is not your vanilla alien invasion, but out of whack with a slightly post-apocalyptic feel, nevertheless.
As the opening sequence, overlaid over a brutal police raid in Rio against a group flying smart phones on a kite (the rationale is not explained, but I'm sure you can come up with a number of scenarios for what this could be useful for!) states:
Harry Connolly is a Canadian author with a growing body of work to his name - Circle of Enemies, the topic of this review, is the 3rd book in the 20 Palaces series, published by Del Rey. When Del Rey did not renew the contract for further books in this series (a shame, really) he self-published a prequel to it; and has since written a game tie-in novel in the Spirit of the Century series and has published a collection of short stories (Bad Girls Die Horrible Deaths) which he describes as Dark Fantasy. His latest venture, an Epic Fantasy trilogy called The Great Way, has been crowd-funded (and is rather over-subscribed), with the first book expected in Summer 2014.
But back to the book at hand. Circle of Enemies is the final book in the series before Del Rey put in on ice, mainly due to falling sales figures, I understand. This is a shame, as the trajectory in terms of writing quality, readability, and enjoyability definitely was pointing upwards - whilst I found the first book in the series (Child of Fire) a bit of a slog at times, and the 2nd one (A Game of Cages) better but still lumbered with some of the same weaknesses in the storytelling, I devoured and rather enjoyed this one, and would really rather have looked forward to further installments. Maybe at some point, after the Epic Fantasy trilogy - ?
Circle of Enemies plays in a roughly contemporary America, with the main difference to ours being that Magic is real (well, I have not heard that it is, but maybe things have been kept quiet…). There are sorcerers with extra powers, there are spell books, and there are creatures (the 20 Palaces Society calls them Predators) from a parallel dimension which can give you huge powers and abilities if controlled and handled correctly. If not then they have the distinct ability (at least the more powerful ones) to destroy this Earth…
And where there is power there are people abusing it, bickering over it, and killing each other for it.
The story consists of a number of short vignettes, focussing on family occasions and celebrations in a near-future Chinese society.
It was, in it's translated form, published over at Clarkesworld - go check it out, it's well worth your time if you have any interest in non-US/UK based SF with an interesting societal slant.
The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself is the second Novella in Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet, and was originally published in 2012. The third book in the series – Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (he has a flair for wordy titles, doesn’t he just!) - is also languishing on my reading pile (hopefully not much longer), whilst the final book, titled All That Outer Space Allows, is scheduled to come out in 2015, and has been announced to be of full Novel length.
Ian Sales is a British writer, editor, blogger, and now publisher. Adrift on the Sea of Rains (the first, BSFA award-winning book in the series) was the first book published on his own Whippleshield Books imprint (he is expanding beyond his own writing now, so this is definitely not a vanity setup).
The book kicks off with a Shelley quote, which gives/gave it its title, which I found very apposite, all the more so as it is from “Hymn of Apollo”! And then we dive into another story built around a diverging timeline of events, based on the American Apollo programme. This time the premise changes earlier than in the first book; so these are clearly not part of the same universe - I would actually expect each of these books to stand on their own, and only be linked by being extrapolations of the original Apollo programme. And by their structure, of course. Anyway, in The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself the back story diverges from what we know as our history between Apollo 10 & 11 - the Russians landed a man on the Moon (which means that the divergence on the Russian side must have been earlier to allow this), whilst Neil Armstrong in Apollo 11 aborted the descent and landing due to the persistent 1202 error he kept receiving (instead of ignoring it, as has happened in our time line). After the cancellation of the Apollo programme the Americans then re-focused their efforts to getting an Astronaut to Mars, which they achieved with Ares 9 (using re-tooled Apollo hardware - this is realistic!). The landing area was in the Cydonia region, famous in conspiracy circles for its Face, its Ruins, and its Pyramid. But what Commander Elliot finds there changes history, eventually changes the technology humanity has available for space flight, and of course proves that the conspiracy theorists were right all along (except that all this is top secret, and everything is being denied officially).
