Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (20 page)

One of the ways in which I think he does this is by focusing on ordinary people: “The rude mechanicals,” Joe calls them, picking up on Shakespeare. He feels that a lot of fantasy concentrates on the big and the grand, whereas he wanted his own work “to feel real and earthy,” to concentrate on the common man's experience, reflecting the “randomness and mess of real life.” The problem with fantasy, he said, is that it tends to go from A to B, and not that much goes wrong, whereas history “is full of failures and disasters."

We also talked more broadly about characterisation. In common with many people, I enjoyed reading about Glotka (
The Blade Itself
), embittered, cynical but oddly humane as well, and Joe agrees that he's trying to avoid stereotypical characters. Neither Shivers nor Monza are straightforward characters. Neither is what they initially seem to be. They complement one another and gradually begin to trade places as they develop. Again, Joe notes that fantasy is so often about heroes and villains, everything clear-cut, the evil unexamined, whereas he is constantly trying for something different.

Finally, we touched on the matter of world-building. One of the things that particularly fascinates me about Joe's novels is the constant background presence of the bankers, Valint and Balk. Whichever kingdom you happen to be in, there they are, discreetly bankrolling everyone's wars. Drawing on his reading of history, Joe admits to being very interested in the emergence of the middle/merchant classes in the 15th and 16th centuries. He notes that a lot of fantasy seems to exist in a very static, medieval-style world, with no sense of scientific or economic development, and the focus is on characters. By contrast he wants a world where new things are constantly emerging, where everything is always moving on. Conflicts bring with them an end, but also a beginning. Rather than seeking a great victory and restitution, Joe Abercrombie is always investigating what happens next.

Copyright © 2009 Maureen Kincaid Speller

Reviewed by Lawrence Osbourn

Consorts of Heaven
is Jaine Fenn's second science fiction novel. However, readers might be forgiven for thinking they had picked up a fantasy by mistake, since much of the novel's action takes place in the most backward, rural parts of a pre-modern society which is governed by an oppressive theocracy.

The novel opens with Kerin finding an amnesiac stranger (subsequently known as Sais) near the mere above the village of Dangwern. Kerin's position in village society is already ambiguous—her mother was accursed, but her son Damaru is ‘sky-touched’ (a kind of holy fool with possibly magical telekinetic powers) and she is tolerated for his sake. The coming of the stranger into her life is to change it forever.

The bulk of the story is taken up with the quest to restore Sais's memory. This is eventually achieved with the aid of a priest. But the recovery of his memory reveals the horrifying truth about Kerin's world and forces him into a confrontation with the real powers behind the religion that dominates the world.

The story is full of well-worn tropes: an amnesiac stranger whose memory contains secrets that will rock society to its foundations, an oppressive theocracy governed by apparently benign but covertly malicious powers, a quest, a space elevator. Fenn even manages to slip in the need for people with special (in this case, telekinetic) powers to make interstellar travel possible. However, she has woven together these familiar themes to create an original and very enjoyable story.

But it wasn't just her handling of familiar themes that I enjoyed. Her characterisation is very good, and she is sympathetic to all her (human) characters so that readers will find themselves warming to characters that lesser authors might have left as stock villains. Description, too, is generally very good. Here, Sais's perspective as an outsider is very helpful in allowing Fenn to describe things that the natives take for granted (for example, the disgusting latrines in Dangwern). Oddly (for what is meant to be a science fiction novel), I felt the descriptions became less clear once the action moved into space (perhaps because now Sais was familiar with his surroundings but Kerin didn't have the necessary background to make sense of them). Finally, the story is well paced, with the action (and revelations about Sais and the world he finds himself in) coming at just the right rate to keep me turning the pages.

Unfortunately my enjoyment of the story was slightly tarnished by weaknesses in the world-building. As I understood more about Kerin's world I became increasingly sceptical about Sais's ability to communicate as soon as he regained consciousness. This is a society that has been cut off from the rest of the human race for at least 1,000 years and yet there has been virtually no linguistic drift! Nor was I entirely clear about the relationship between the villains (the Sidhe) and the human race. The fact that the people of Kerin's world carry Sidhe genes suggests a very close relationship indeed, but at times Fenn seems to present them as an alien race. Finally, the
raison d'être
of this world struck me as wildly extravagant and unconvincing. (Why use an entire world when a sufficiently advanced genetics laboratory would do?)

Nevertheless, in spite of a few weaknesses, this is a very enjoyable piece of writing from a promising new sf writer. Jaine Fenn is definitely a name to look out for in future.

Copyright © 2009 Lawrence Osbourn

Reviewed by Paul Kincaid

Surely I don't have to introduce John Clute to the readers of
Interzone
. All the tricks and tropes that have made him the leading if often the most controversial critic of science fiction are on display in this latest collection of reviews: the sudden shifts of tone from hieratic to demotic, the extended metaphors that can take over a review (and that are often explained or elaborated by recourse to yet another extended metaphor), and the encapsulation of books under a term that may only have meaning to Clute himself. This last, the encyclopedist seeking out themes within which any book must fit if it is to receive its due consideration, is made specific when Clute writes about a collection of essays on Christopher Priest and mourns the fact that he ‘never felt that I had gotten a critical language to fit him'; without such an overarching vocabulary of terms, Priest escapes serious critical attention.

Thus the word that Clute finds to apply to both Iain M. Banks's
Matter
and Nick Harkaway's
The Gone-Away World
is ‘loud', and so the reviews are filled with references to noise and quiet. Robert Charles Wilson writes a ‘belljar’ novel; John C. Wright produces a trilogy that is ‘splotchy with kabooms'; Gordon Dahlquist's
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
is ‘a vast paratactic Perils of Pauline’ (parataxis, such a Clutean word, refers to clauses being jammed together without benefit of a conjunction, rather as in this sentence). Words are so important that it seems the review cannot be written until the key word is in place, but that key, while always precise, may be so obscure that its meaning is not immediately apparent. Nevertheless, we go along with it because the language has such a dandified style about it that we delight at each new outrageous outfit.

But the one word that crops up again and again is ‘Story', usually capitalised and referring not to a work of fiction but to what that fiction is doing. Any story worthy of our attention is ‘telling the world'; the world is made of story, or at least we can only hope to understand it by the stories we tell. The best stories for explaining the world are ‘fantastika', Clute's catch-all term for, essentially, any non-mimetic fiction (I prefer ‘the fantastic', though this is perhaps more clumsy); but this means that the ‘fantastika’ he reviews has a very high standard to live up to. Anything that fails to tell the world, anything that lives only within itself, that does not connect, is doomed. This may be why he can be better at telling us which books to avoid rather than explaining why we should read certain books; but in truth we rarely disagree with his judgements.

As well as gathering practically all the reviews he wrote between 2003 and 2008, along with a handful that had somehow escaped his earlier volumes, the book features several pieces on John Crowley (you can tell how highly he rates Crowley just from the number of times his work is referenced throughout the rest of the book); three pieces which, over time, covered Michael Moorcock's Colonel Pyat sequence; and, right at the end, a handful of pieces memorialising his old friend Tom Disch. To me, these three more personal sections make for a more satisfying book than the usual collection of reviews, though you can't really complain when the reviews are by John Clute. However, since it is something he would pick up himself, it behoves me to mention how many proofreading errors there are throughout this book, far more than usual from Beccon: authors are misplaced by a century, key words are missing, tenses change, it is one of the few really disappointing things about this book.

Copyright © 2009 Paul Kincaid

Reviewed by Duncan Lunan

I came to
Prospero Lost
with quite high hopes, and indeed it boils over with ideas, inventions, and references to
Piers Plowman, Dr. Faustus,
Philip Pullman and others. After
The Tempest
Prospero remarried, regained Milan, and eventually lost it in 1499 to supernatural forces led by Charlemagne. But he never abandoned magic or drowned his books as promised, and he gifted each of his new family with staffs embodying some of the powers of his own. By our time Ariel is the family's invisible butler in Oregon and Caliban has disappeared from Prospero's Island, which no doubt betokens trouble to come.

The siblings have scattered, some of them with severe physical or mental problems, and Prospero is missing, leaving Miranda to run the family business of controlling or placating the elementals who would otherwise wreck civilisation in the course of their own conflicts. She controls the winds personally and her personal servant is Caekias Boreal, spirit of the northeast wind, most powerful of all. That fairly speeds things up as she goes looking for her brothers and sisters by Learjet and sailboat.