Lotus War #2: Kinslayer

Jay Kristoff had a charming debut with Stormdancer, but one I had some reservations with both morally (falling on some outdated fantasy tropes) and with its actual execution. The world he created resembled Hunger Games, The Last Unicorn, Miyazaki, and Kurosawa, but the novel had some logic and pacing issues that kept me from fully loving it, but was intrigued and entertained enough to continue. In a trilogy the second volume really only needs to be a decent bridging volume to succeed, but there is another way to tackle one. Kristoff thankfully went the latter route. This book betters the previous volume in every measure, creating a book more complex, gripping, brutal, tense, violent, realistic the handling of its themes, and morally probing. The action scenes are terrifically paced, the atmosphere is grim but captivating, and the new characters and plots lines all succeed. This book is so brutal in fact any lingering suspicions that this is a YA series disappear. But, the grim is undercut by strong characters and the thoughtfulness and maturity of the author’s performance, no grittiness for grittiness sake. The amount Kristoff learned between these two volumes is pretty impressive. The only problem (besides the demon subplot which still feels tacked on and unnecessary), is how he is going to better this for the finale. It is going to be tough but I will be there to see him try.

Bleeding Edge

Pynchon presents a book somewhere between his lighter cartoony romps (Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice) and his more epic works. A strangely accessible work that parodies some recent crime fiction and cyberpunk, but is still recognizably Pynchon and shows off his obsessions with paranoia, secret worlds, and the fading of promise. He fixes on the dot com crash, the internet and 9-11 as the moments where an irreversible change occurred in our world and I find him profound as ever if a little goofy in the virtual reality parts. The cultural references were strange in this one I could have been convinced a Gen x writer wrote this or maybe William Gibson. The conspiracies surrounding 9/11 made me fear for a second that Pynchon was handing us a “truther” manifesto, but as usual resolution and clear political agenda are not Pynchon’s game, and every clue and hint is another sign in his labyrinth of elusive meaning and shadows. A book easier to digest than most of his work and one as filled with little shards of dissonance to ponder over.

Empty Space: A Haunting

The finale to Harrison’s trilogy is as confounding, obtuse, and beautiful as the rest of the series. His prose is crafted so impeccably and relentlessly it is hard to resist chewing over each line and word choice (it is also very discouraging for the amateur writer) and occasionally losing the plot. But with Harrison you know you are going to read it again, soon I might restart the trilogy and see how they work together. His imagery, imagination, and prose are on such a level that they put much science fiction (is there anyone else who writes in the genre recently that is comparable as a stylist, Wolfe, Mieville, Shepard, or Gibson?) and other fiction in its shadow. Jodorowsky and Lynch should have skipped Dune and waited for these books to adapt. Quantum physics, Gnosticism, and dream imagery mixed with cyberpunk, noir, depressing near future science fiction, and space opera for a dense, cinematic, and surreal nightmare.

Predator Cities #1: Mortal Engines (Predator Cities)

Harry Potter and Dark Materials started the recent movement of YA titles that could be enjoyed by adult audiences as thoroughly as their target audience, but no title deserves this distinction more than Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. A thoroughly unsentimental, cliché rebuffing, and occasional brutally dark novel that still revels in wild adventures, crazy machines, Dickensian names and characters, and the full screen sense of wonder that belongs in a YA title. This book came out in 2001 not sure if before or after the events of September but it seems infused with the crazed atmosphere of that year, the mad march for war, the feeling of besiegement and blind trust in misguided leaders. Philip Reeve wrote the book that Mieville probably wanted too with Railsea, in fact the future wasteland of Reeve’s work is undoubtedly an influence on that book. Reeve creates a book that evokes Gilliam, Dickens, and Vance, and is overflowing with puns, references, and jokes about our time (my favorite being a character named Nancarrow and an airship called the 13th floor elevator), and filled to the brim with undead killers, giant machine cities, pirates, mad, old tech from an insane era of war, desperate atmosphere, villains that are ruthless but still human, an airship piloting spy named Fang, and two believable, unlikely young heroes. Reeve knows the trick to keep audiences on edge, make every character a full and believable character and be willing at any moment to kill one of them. The myth of protagonist’s invulnerability, revenge seeking, happy endings, the idea that a character has a destiny, and other atrocious tropes and clichés of fantasy/adventure stories are thoroughly skewered by Reeve along the way. He has created a unfriendly world ruled by force, accidents, and chaos that the character have to fight for survival in, but he has filled it with the warmth of a realistic view of humans, they can be cruel, selfish and self-involved and live in desperate times but they are recognizable human. If this series retains half the success rate of this initial volume it will be the YA series I point to above any other.

Tenth of December: Stories

Saunders was a remarkable fresh voice when I first encountered him. His combination of surreal settings and technology mixed with the dirt and grit of human experience and an absurdist vision of American life and workplace mores placed him in the pantheon of American satire alongside Matt Groening, Nathaniel West, Twain, and Vonnegut. His double punch of Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia signaled an impressive career. He has never made the move into novels and has concentrated on his short pieces and essays. His stories have occasionally moved towards realism which may be necessary but could render him indistinguishable from many other contemporaries. I would like to see him stretch his core vision into a novel; I know we should treasure the rare writer that concentrates on the neglected form of the short story but the results are getting increasingly spare. “Home” is the best story here where his dialogue resembles the zing of such masters as Charles Portis and Joy Williams. The story itself a despairing state of the union, could be criticized for hitting so many obvious points of contemporary American life (war, home foreclosures, health problems, domestic violence), but the story itself doesn’t feel like a polemic and is fresh, lively, comic, and humane. I will probably keep enjoying these occasional short story collections from Saunders but will keep hoping for more from him.

The Rise of Ransom City

Following up his Half Made World, Gilman does so in unpredictable style. Or maybe predictably unpredictable as Gears of the City his follow-up to Thunderer went totally postmodern. Here following Jeff Vandermeer’s Shriek: an Afterword and he presents a memoir that is edited by another, a mix of Nabokov’s unreliable narrator and Borge’s faux non-fiction with a healthy dose of Mark Twain’s picaresque wit. This is also one the most aggrieved skewering of Horatio Alger since Nathaniel West’s Cool Million. With references to Twain, Alger, and the continuing quasi-western milieu obviously this is fantasy novel with its eyes set on American myths. Some would argue that the style would keep much of action distanced from the reader, but I found this an interesting literary gambit that paid off more so than Vandermeer’s similar book. Gilman remains one of the most fascinating of contemporary fantasy writers to me. Where will he go next? I’m interested. On a side note how did he get Gordon Lish to blurb this? Weird. On another side note, is there a revival of the Western going on right now?

Crackpot Palace: Stories by Jeffrey Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ford has the keys to the landscape of our dreams. Taking the ephemera of our pop culture such as comic books and strips, pulp science fiction, the drudgery of day to day living, our dreams, our myths, and turning them into a startling dreamscape filled unsettling evocative images, characters, wonder, and terror, a rich and occasionally quite horrific world. Each of his short fiction collections is a wunderkammer, a cabinet filled with curiosities, grotesques, and eerie beauty but presented with an earthy sense of humor. His novellas like Relic and the Wish Head are the most consuming and realized but shorter pieces like Dr. Lash Remembers and Daddy Longlegs of the Evening manage to create whole universes, and really the only story that felt a little half-baked was Ganesha.

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The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was a little saddened after finishing Wind Up Girl and discovering that the Bacigalupi’s next book was going to be a young adult. I find this an annoying trend of authors of complex, adult, and sophisticated speculative literature to chase the YA dollar. Teens have everything these days grumpy old me says, leave me my speculative fiction. So instead of rushing out and getting his next title I decided to wait and see. I got my hands on both Ship Breaker and its sequel/sidepiece Drowned Cities and read them in a couple of days. I can’t endorse authors going YA (insert essay about our youth obsessed culture here), but if the results are this good, I won’t complain (excited about Railsea by the way). He has created a full world in these pages, a grim vision of a possible future that is painfully believable. Taking dire speculation on oil and global warming but mixed with prophetic horrors of the developing world (visions of children living in garbage dumps in South America and India and the terrors of Sierra Leon’s brutal civil war give these books resonance). The characters that fill this shattered, desiccated world are just as believable. The youth of the protagonists, the happy but uncertain endings, and the straight forward prose is the only concessions the authors makes towards fitting them into the YA mold. A lack of humor, subtlety, and over seriousness are some accusations with merit against these books, but I feel its tone is well earned. I smell a trilogy coming on (especially because of the character Tool) but I feel these books deserve a capstone. Everyone with well-thumbed copies of the Hunger Games needs to snatch these books up immediately, and Wind Up Girl. While the books are separate from the author’s debut, the worlds and concerns are so similar it wouldn’t be a stretched to place them as a singular unit.

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Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was a little saddened after finishing Wind Up Girl and discovering that the Bacigalupi’s next book was going to be a young adult. I find this an annoying trend of authors of complex, adult, and sophisticated speculative literature to chase the YA dollar. Teens have everything these days grumpy old me says, leave me my speculative fiction. So instead of rushing out and getting his next title I decided to wait and see. I got my hands on both Ship Breaker and its sequel/sidepiece Drowned Cities and read them in a couple of days. I can’t endorse authors going YA (insert essay about our youth obsessed culture here), but if the results are this good, I won’t complain (excited about Railsea by the way). He has created a full world in these pages, a grim vision of a possible future that is painfully believable. Taking dire speculation on oil and global warming but mixed with prophetic horrors of the developing world (visions of children living in garbage dumps in South America and India and the terrors of Sierra Leon’s brutal civil war give these books resonance). The characters that fill this shattered, desiccated world are just as believable. The youth of the protagonists, the happy but uncertain endings, and the straight forward prose is the only concessions the authors makes towards fitting them into the YA mold. A lack of humor, subtlety, and over seriousness are some accusations with merit against these books, but I feel its tone is well earned. I smell a trilogy coming on (especially because of the character Tool) but I feel these books deserve a capstone. Everyone with well-thumbed copies of the Hunger Games needs to snatch these books up immediately, and Wind Up Girl. While the books are separate from the author’s debut, the worlds and concerns are so similar it wouldn’t be a stretched to place them as a singular unit.

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Immobility by Brian Evenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Noir character edge, apocalyptic tone, Marx Brothers meets Beckett (if they are at all different) dialogue, comic but sinister duos, stark prose, identity and reality in doubt, and probing moral questions are all present and mark Immobility as both a representative and a thoroughly accomplished example of what one our best writers, Brian Evenson, does. This is his take on the post-apocalyptic genre and it is lighter in language and tone then his previous venture (the beautiful and singular Dark Property: An Affliction being a prime example) into the territory. As a literary example of the genre, comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are inevitable, but the characters in this book are the ones the son and father in that book cower in woods and attics to avoid. Evocative of absurdist drama, seventies science fiction, lean, experimental tinged writing, and nasty noir, this book is recommended for any fan of such styles and of course fans of Evenson’s particular brilliance.

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Stephen Hunt

The Court of the Air
Court of Air is a nonstop carnival of imagination, Doctor Who, Superhero comics, English History being captured by a trio of Moorcock, Sterling, and Powers on amphetamines and pulp novel overload with the satirical vision of Jack Vance. The tone is swashbuckling and comic despite how dark and violent pretty much all of it is and the invention is dense and relentless. If this book fails it does so in excess.

Mark Charan Newton

Nights of Villjamur (Legends of the Red Sun)
Bleak and brooding, with minimal violence but intense, characters drag you along with them. This is not a reinvention like many are touting and Newton’s prose and dialogue are not as gripping as some quarters insist, but he is taking much of the invention of new weird and attaching it back to more traditional fantasy, thankfully the subgenre of Dying Earth is his milieu, and writing it with noir energy.

Newton’s Nights of Villjamur was a somber moody success, almost like a fantasy novel that read like a Scandinavian crime novel. The second entry is louder, more packed with grotesquerie and invention, and more emotional. Gang wars, bizarre technology, dystopian politics, inter-dimensional war, weird ancient technology, mutant animal/human hybrids, religious fanaticism, homophobia, and vampires are packed in with the somber mood retained from the first book, in this wonderful revitalization of the dying earth sub-genre. The plot tears you from grim set piece and danger to another and then all stops are pulled out are the apocalyptic siege of the city of Villiren. Brutal, relentless, and thunderous this is breathless reading. City of Ruin is a very impressive second entry in this series.
City of Ruin


Book of Transformations

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Burton & Swinburne)

A lot of recent outings in steampunk/gaslight adventure that I have encountered have been little anemic in their composition as opposed to some classic examples from Tim Powers and Kim Newman. In the tradition of these two authors is Mark Hodder’s debut, a brainy adventure that exists in a copiously realized world with an internal logic and characters and runs that gamut between ridiculous and sublime. The central conceit of the story is at its heart rather sinister and dark which adds some weight to this ripping yarn.

The Alchemy of Stone

Sedia provides us with fairy tale/fable with touches of steampunk and new weirdness that comes to a troubling end that is very open to interpretation. The dialogue and prose are guileless and provide a platform for her story, characters, and setting. Shades of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Quay Brothers, Angela Carter, and Guy Maddin are found in a story that manages to be charming, creepy and ultimately quite dark. I found the heroine Mattie quite appealing and found the book quite worthy of note; E. Sedia is a writing of great imagination that presents her stories with effortless writing.

Richard Calder

Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things


Calder’s Dead trilogy is a Frankenstein monster made up of masturbatory fantasies about anime, serious fevered study of De Sade and Bataille, love of the baroque prose of Nabokov and Angela Carter, and fin de siecle decadence held together with cyperpunk wiring and then torn to pieces with narrative scatterbombs from Burrough’s Nova trilogy and Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet. If you don’t like these references, you won’t like Calder.

Frenzetta
A baroque picaresque/romp of surrealistic porn and grand guignol a la Angela Carter’s Passion of New Eve or Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, with a mix of the decadent adventures of Moorcock, and more than a hint of Ballard pushed through a vision where anima, 30’s pulp, and French Symbolism are of equal import. Strangely fun if you give it a chance and wade through the purple prose with lots of cruelty and outrageous gore and an overload of style. Set in version of world where an event called the Abortion forced another reality on our own with lots animal people, a weird mix of technology (airships and muskets, teleporter and one stomping robot), and divided into Afric, Europa, Cathay, and Atlantis who wages war on all with their air navy and robots and in a wonderful inverse are the last remaining humans (the others ruled by the tribes of the perverse). Romping through this world on their way to the Moon and mythical freedom are a goblin princess (half rat and human) who will die when she orgasms, a brain eating revenant, and their dwarf maid. Balloon rides, a birth from a corpse, squid weaponry, necromancers, a queen who has her brain transplanted in a freshly killed young girl every year, a mix of myth and technology add to the perverse thrills of this book. Edgar Allen Poe and Marquis de Sade would have loved this one.

The Twist


A surreal western evoking Henry Darger, Angela Carter, and Lucius Shepard(especially the Nazi fantasia of “The Spanish Lesson” and “Bound for Glory”(a chapter bears this title.). A mix of western, 50’s sci fi b-movies, dark fantasy, and an exploration of death. This is a mix of ridiculous and the sublime like all Calder. A 14 year old girl narrates the proceedings like a jaded post grad, people quote Schopenhauer during gunfights, but the hallucinatory imagery and beautiful prose makes this so weird you can’t help but love it a little bit.

Malignos



Cynical, decadent adventure tale like Moorcock(including a living sword) or Vance(with a protagonist as arrogant and obnoxious as Cugel) that is remarkable straight forward for Calder with little of his baroque prose and density of weirdness. Set in the same future as his Frenzetta but set so far in advance of that book that its events have become a fable. This book has everything you would want from an adventure story: a world decaying with lost secrets, traps, narrow escapes, traveling carnivals, a hollow earth(or an underground hell or demon realm in its center), plenty of action, ancient technology, castles, ghosts, dimensional gateways, cruel experiments, and a quest. The place and character names are all taken from Milton, De Quincy, and the Old Testament which adds to the atmosphere. The protagonist is so arrogant and self centered I wonder if Calder is poking fun at his own notoriously solipsist protagonists. So this was a rip roaring adventure with plenty of pulpy and gothic wonders but a little to straightforward to be one of Calder’s better work. Maybe he wanted to see if he could restrain himself and actually write a book that kind of made sense? Fans of Moorcock, Vance, Wolfe, Rudy Rucker (Hollow Earth), Milton, Lucius Shepard’s Dragon Griaule stories, and E.R.Burroughs, will find this a fun addition to their bookshelf

China Miéville

Perdido Street Station. China Miville
Where I can understand people being off put by Perdido Street Station, it never did that for me it was pretty much reading crack for me and I lived only to read it when I first discovered it. It felt like reliving my childhood in a new light as it was so entwined with my first literary loves of Moorcock, Wells, Poe, and Lovecraft and also with my adult faves like Angela Carter, W.S. Burroughs, and Borges.


The Scar


The Scar is a wonderful evocation of the macabre adventure stories of Verne and Wells, philosophical treatise on dystopias/utopias, dark steampunk fantasia in the Moorcock vein, grisly spy story, mad quest worthy of Melville, and a language showcase. I think once the shock of the new wore off that caused people to fawn over Perdido Street Station(which for the most part deserved the praise) critics and readers dimissed the other two subsequent books of Mieville’s anti-trilogy. Well, they missed out because I think he got better. Not much in fiction is more intense than the last third of this book where it gets pretty messy.


Iron Council


Enough imagination for eighty books..my favorite of Mieville's anti-trilogy for some reason...seems like you walked into a Bosch painting for most of the book.The most dismissed of Mieville’s books maybe because the first hundred pages are a little confusing and the structure strains a little bit more than usual. While all his books have flaws his enormous imagination and stunning vocabulary (rivaling Wolfe and McCarthy) pave over any hesitations I have. This one focuses on a tragic and costly civil war and the idea of heroes and roles people decide to play. Of course it’s also a fun and yet disturbing adventure that is part gothic western a la McCarthy and features a surreal war that evokes Bosch and Lovecraft . A love for folklore, language, politics, and real history infuse this one with some heft.


Mieville in his Bas Lag books took the gothic secondary world fantasy of Peake and M. John Harrison added complexity worthy of Thomas Pynchon, a vocabulary matching Gene Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy, and grotesque imagery of Bosch and Ernst; and created a series that may have the cultural impact of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. This book features not even a hint of that. He must have lost his favorite thesaurus with all the sticky notes in the right place. If this was handed to me without a cover Mieville wouldn’t even be a consideration for me when guessing the author. That said I enjoyed this for the most part. He obviously intended to follow the police procedural formula to tell his story but most of the characters were pretty hard to distinguish so a lot of the plot revelations fell flat for me. This book also is intended as a tribute to Bruno Shultz and other Eastern European authors(impeccable taste as always) but a few references aside it didn’t do much for me there as nothing resembled Shultz’s night music laced world. The setting provided many memorable and thoughtful metaphors that will linger once the characters and plot fade. Glad he is trying different stuff but I won’t rush back and reread this one while I struggle to keep from rereading his other books.

The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse

While not reaching the heights of language or assured experimentation of W.S. Burroughs, “Atrocity Exhibition” era Ballard, or Borges, it should be know that the Jerry Cornelius stories are way more fun, as Jerry and his cast of players turn 20th century atrocity and culture into wild theater. The world ends over and over, wars are always being fought, music blaring, awesome outfits are worn, science fiction gadgets buzz and scream, they kill each other over and over, time blurs, and we rotate through this world over and over again from a variety of permutations. All possibilities are explored.

A grim John Brunner future rewritten as a Firbank farce. Off course Brunner’s futures are basically today but with domed cities and the war on drugs finally ceasing its screaming obsolescence and this book is accordingly about now and what is to come. Jerry Cornelius seems at home in the day and age of 24 news channels, encroaching ecological disaster, out of control corporatism, government gangsterism, and terrorism. The war on terror as a video game, the U.S invading the U.S., a disturbing vibration cannon, cartoonish violence, London and Washington D.C. both get destroyed, battle blimps, and a note of despair with the silliness. Who else of Moorcock's generation is writing stuff this weird and savage? Alan Moore’s intro nails it and is a worthwhile essay on the Cornelius books.

Sleepless

Sleepless is a mix of zombie movie,a future is now(actually an alternate present), a hard boiled thriller, and strangely a meditation on a family. This is written in a more convoluted style than Mr. Huston usually stripped down style for a couple reasons I suspect, mainly his use of invented author as the teller of this story and I suspect a mild overload on research. He is using punctuation marks on his dialogue so any of those lunatics who find this stylistic trait so annoying as to write off author’s entire oeuvres can rest assured that their delicate sensibilities will be left unruffled. There is some intriguing stuff in this book and it will be seen whether this will be the first step in an evolution of an author or a one off, but if it is the former it needs some tweaking as this was an interesting but a little cold as a book. Some of the fight scenes made think I was trapped in the video games that everyone in the book are playing. The central disease is beautiful and terrifying and the world is an unsettling portrait of our own, a brilliant slice of the future is now in the style of Gibson, Brunner, and Warren Ellis

Dancing with Bears: The Postutopian Adventures of Darger & Surplus

When I first read Swanwick’s Surplus and Darger stories in a collection of his I wished that he would craft more of them, and just maybe a full length. My wish came true. While much of the novelty and compressed energy of the stories is lost in the transition but their world is more filled out. The strange combination of biopunk grotesquery, 19th century ambiance, myths, and post-apocalyptic future combined with tales of unredeemed roguery on wider canvas, true the characters aren’t given much more depth, but Swanwick crafts this like a comic novel with endless disasters, double crosses, action, and a cast exhibiting the depth of human folly. The stories also traffic in the particular myths of the area they are set in and this story does so for Russia with revolution, Lenin, Baba Yaga, Koschei the deathless, a brutal secret policeman, economies run on cigarettes, Rasputin, wolves, and bears being elements of the story. This book is mostly Swanwick having a lot of fun, granted his sense of fun maybe darker and more grisly than your willing to take, but I had a blast.

The Dancers at the End of Time

This one of the most interesting and fun books in modern fantasy, a comedy, a satire, a love story, a retelling of Adam and Eve, and tribute to the fin de siecle of Wilde and Huysmans (and also Wells and Dunsany) An uptight Victorian women in a post-human(and post-morality) future(resembling a description of a Bosch painting much of the time) and her tumultuous courting by Jherek Carnelian through time and past the end of the world. Genocidal aliens, ridiculous London cops, living cities, robot nannies, HG. Wells himself, and other weirdness and fun.