I Am Providence, by Nick Mamatas (Night Shade Books) | review by Stephen Theaker

A horror book, or maybe literary horror fantasy. Lovecraftian fans, critics and writers gather in Providence, Rhode Island, at a hotel for a convention, the Summer Tentacular. To me it sounded very reminiscent of the first FantasyCons I attended (i.e. lots of blokes, lots of names familiar from the internet, and lots of people trying to sell their books; here, we almost immediately meet a chap hawking Madness of the Death Sun – which sounds great), while to newcomer Colleen Danzig it resembles a large Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, “except instead of alcoholism the attendees had all sorts of other, subtler problems”. Some of those people feel very familiar, but even if you aren’t well enough acquainted with that particular scene to identify the people being parodied, you get the gist of why someone would want to parody them. We have two point of view characters – Panossian, an older writer who gets himself murdered, and Colleen, who wants to investigate his murder – and chapters alternate between them. The dead (or “posthumously conscious” as he puts it) man tells his story in the first person, and his view of this environment soured long before he was killed there. Fandom is the social network of last resort, he says. Lovecraftians are a bunch of misfits and social defectives. Literary critics and fans are two of the more ridiculous sets of people in the world. Ambition is a hell. And he admits to having been a jerk to a lot of people – a lot of very mentally unstable people. Asked for his thoughts on writing, his answer is, “Generally, I’m against it.” He’s rather brilliant and very entertaining, much like the book itself. ****

Princess Jellyfish 01, by Akiko Higashimura (Kodansha) | review by Stephen Theaker

This 388pp manga collects episodes one to twelve in the story of an unhappily single Japanese woman, Tsukimi, and the geeky friends with whom she lives, and how her life changes completely when she meets a very glamorous young man. It’s rather like The Big Bang Theory in reverse. She calls herself a fujoshi, which means (rather nastily) rotten woman – a woman who follows her enthusiasms rather than trying to fulfil her expected role as a mother or wife. There’s no magical or fantastical element in this book, it turned out; it’s called Princess Jellyfish because she is a jellyfish geek (a phase the author talks about going through herself in the biographical comments). That’s what gets her talking to her gorgeous new friend: he brings his stylishness to bear in helping her save a dying jellyfish in a pet shop, just as later he will try to save Tsukimi and her friends from losing their home to property development. He’s the first boy she’s talked to since elementary school, and what gets her over that barrier at first is that she doesn’t realise he’s a boy: he likes to dress as a girl. It’s a sweet and romantic comic, with an adorable lead character and likeable love interests, and it’s an eye-opening portrayal of gender fluidity in Japanese culture. The backgrounds are sketchy, but the character artwork is highly expressive . Unfortunately, at the publisher’s choice, this Comixology edition can only be viewed a full page at a time (described as “Manga Fixed Format”). Not a problem on a tablet, but you’d struggle to read it on your phone. ***

The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred by Greg Egan (Subterranean Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

In this tense science fiction novella, there is strife on Vesta. Back when the colony was first being established, each of the founding families contributed different resources. Problem is, attitudes to private ownership of intellectual property have changed so much since then that the family that bought into the project with its patents and inventions is now regarded by some as having stolen its share, and a proposal to have them pay it back is, unthinkably, passed, with 52% voting in favour. Some put up with this discrimination, some decide to fight back, and some flee, either in passenger ships, or if the security forces are after them, via a space age underground railroad to Ceres, drugged, half-frozen, and hitching a ride on a rock slab. All of this will put Anna, only a week or so into her new job, in an impossible position, when a cruiser, the Arcas, is sent in pursuit of fugitives. It feels like a long short story rather than a short novel, but I enjoyed it very much, and it is of course remarkably topical, in that we too are experiencing what happens when a substantial minority of the populace is railroaded by a narrow popular vote rooted in prejudice and selfishness and hatred. The book does a terrific job of showing how that can happen, and how shocking it can be when it does. ***

The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove (Titan Books) | review by Rafe McGregor

I’ve recently made several comments on the evolution of Sherlock Holmes from the cold criminal investigator who calmly rejected supernatural explanations of even the most outré circumstances created by Conan Doyle to a character who is probably most accurately called an occult detective in the twenty-first century. In my review of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride in TQF55, I mentioned that Holmes and several others who cross the threshold of 221b Baker Street are more akin to superheroes and supervillains, giving the series very much of a fantasy feel, and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011) was served with a deliciously strong steampunk sauce. I recently responded to an article in The Conversation on the decline in the popularity of Doctor Who by noting that Doctor Who and Sherlock have become increasingly close in the last couple of decades and Steven Moffat is one of many writers who have written either official novels or screenplays for both the doctor and the detective. In my review of Simon Kurt Unsworth’s The Devil’s Detective in TQF56, I mentioned “the many failed and few successful attempts to combine Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos” of late, and the subject of this review is James Lovegrove’s contribution to precisely that subgenre – a contribution that is by and large successful. The subgenre was launched with Michael Reeves and John Pelan’s Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. Re-reading my somewhat scathing review in TQF24, I stand by most of what I wrote (though not my dismissal of Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”). One of my main criticisms of this volume was that there had been little or no effort to recreate the atmosphere of Victorian or Edwardian London in most of the stories. The shadows are, after all, over Baker Street, not Angell Street or Clinton Street. James Lovegrove’s shadows are, as his title suggests, in Shadwell (the district between Whitechapel and Limehouse), and he has paid close attention to both the historical setting and the original Holmes stories such that the few anachronistic turns of phrase he uses are insufficient to distract the reader. It’s the relationship between old and new where Lovegrove’s contribution to literary pastiche is revealed at its most ambitious and most promising.

Nominations for the British Fantasy Awards 2017

The British Fantasy Awards nominees have been announced for 2017, and it's the first time since 2012 that our magazine and its contents have been eligible, thanks to me stepping down as awards administrator last September.

Sadly, though, fate did not hear our call, and we did not receive any nominations, although I do contribute on average a page per issue to one of the best magazine nominees, Interzone, edited by the apparently tireless Andy Cox, so I'll be celebrating that while the rest of the TQF team weep into their teacups. Andy's equally fine Black Static, to which I occasionally contribute a review (albeit not last year), also received a nomination.

The other magazine nominated was Uncanny Magazine, a first-time nominee which I haven't read, but which looks very interesting. There are also first-time nominations in this category for Tor.com and Ginger Nuts of Horror, both websites which don't style themselves as magazines or periodicals – they don't publish in issues, for example – so it's a bit of a surprise to see them on the list. But the BFAs often follow the voters' heads in this kind of thing: see for example how the best small press award morphed over the years from being an award for small press publications to being an award for the small presses themselves.

The full list of nominees is here. Congratulations to all of them!

Scroll down to the bottom and you'll see that I'm a juror on the best comic/graphic novel category, and the work for that kicked off when we were appointed on June 24. I was glad to find I'd already read 29 graphic novels and comics collections from the relevant year, and I read another dozen or so highly-recommended books in the course of us deciding whether to add egregious omissions to the list. In the end, we added two to the four put forward by the voters of the British Fantasy Society and FantasyCon. Now I'm reading and re-reading all the nominees, but I know already that it's going to be a very tough decision.

Not going to say much about the other categories, since there's a lot of overlap between juries, so I might be seen as having inside information about the juries I'm not on. (I don't – I didn't even know my fellow comics jurors were on a couple of other juries, or that my all-male jury wasn't the only one, until yesterday's announcement.) It does seem a bit of a shame that the best horror novel, best fantasy novel and best artist juries decided not to add any items to their shortlists, given all the work out there deserving of awards recognition, but maybe the jurors were deadlocked on what to add.

A Wizard's Henchman was my favourite book of last year, so I'd hoped it might get a nomination in best fantasy novel. I'd also had hopes for Glen Weldon's The Caped Crusade in best non-fiction and A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson in best novella, and it was a big surprise to see that Central Station by Lavie Tidhar didn't make the best collection list – perhaps its votes were split between people voting for it as a novel, and people voting for it as a collection?

If I'm not picking out my favourite works from female writers there, that's because they made the shortlists: overall nine of the thirty-nine items I voted for made it on, a pretty good batting average! It's definitely worth using all of your votes. The plan is for winners to be announced at FantasyCon 2017, in Peterborough. Memberships of the convention and tickets for the awards banquet are available here. Good luck to everyone!

A Taste of Honey, by Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

An interesting and romantic novella, in which Aqib, a young and good-looking member of the Olorumi minor nobility with a special way with animals, falls for a rough soldier from the Daluçan embassy. Forbidden and sweaty things happen, to their mutual delight, but it is important to his family that he makes the right marriage, and so when the opportunity for one arises he must choose between love and duty, happiness and family. As the story progresses we are also shown episodes from progressively deeper into his future life, placing ever more weight upon the decision he will have to make. This was a very well-written, exciting and romantic book; the relationships of Aqib with both his lover and his other significant other are tender and believable. Using an extremely famous literary title for another book always seems a bit odd (see also Signal to Noise and Journal of the Plague Year), but the story works hard to justify it. A word for the evocative cover art: fantasy and science fiction book covers often feature great design, but it’s brilliant to see that not every publisher has given up on illustrative artwork. ****

Sherlock, Series 4, by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (BBC One) | review by Rafe McGregor

Like Conan Doyle, who famously tired of his creation, the BBC seem curiously reluctant to represent Sherlock Holmes on the small screen. Compare Sherlock, which began in 2010, with CBS’s Elementary, which began in 2012: the former has a total of thirteen episodes across four seasons (I’ll use the American term to distinguish an individual season from the series as a whole); the latter is, at the time of writing, in its fifth season and will have aired a total of 109 episodes by the time this review is in print. In addition to the British tendency to disguise mini-series as series, writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat seem intent on frustrating our enjoyment of the Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) and Martin Freeman (Watson) partnership in a way that Robert Doherty does not with Jonny Lee Miller (Holmes) and Lucy Liu (Watson) in Elementary. Season 1 ended with Holmes and Watson about to blow up, season 2 with Holmes’ faked suicide leaving Watson bereft, and season 3 with Holmes exiled to certain death. Ominously, the final episode of season 4 is called “The Final Problem” and it is telling that Doyle’s story of the same name – his half-hearted attempt to kill off Holmes after 26 episodes – is the only original case to have inspired two of the TV adaptations.

Spectral, by George Nolfi (Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

James Badge Dale (24, The Pacific) here plays Clyne, a character quite similar to the chap he played in the underwatched spy show Rubicon. There he was an extremely intelligent analyst who grew concerned about the patterns he was beginning to see, and he stayed for the most part in his office. Here, on the other hand, he is an extremely intelligent engineer who gets pulled away from his usual work at a DARPA lab to address a problem in the field. There is a civil war in Moldova, at some point in what appears to be the near future, and American peacekeepers on the ground have been seeing things through the special goggles he created: spectral things. And now the things have started to kill, leaving victims flash frozen. Once there, he meets CIA analyst Emily Mortimer and chap in charge Bruce Greenwood, and applies himself to the job. He confirms that whatever they are, they aren’t glitches in his goggles, just in time for a massive surge in their numbers. As the city falls to their attack, Clyne must work with the surviving troops to track the spectrals to their source. This is a really good little film, with an excellent cast, sort of what you might expect the Syfy channel to produce if they weren’t pumping out deliberate rubbish (enjoyable as that can sometimes be). It’s directed very nicely by Nic Mathieu, and could easily have justified itself as a cinema release, although you know that if it had been, bigger stars would probably have been cast, their pay packets requiring the movie to be more of a traditional blockbuster, and it wouldn’t have been the same. It never feels cheap (it feels not unlike a big budget Asian film), the spectrals have a interesting origin, and James Badge Dale makes a very likeable lead. It’s great that the economics of Netflix made a film like this possible, and I hope there’s more of the kind to come. ***

The Drowning Eyes, by Emily Foster (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Windspeakers, weird weather wizards who have their eyes replaced with stones in order to gain control of their powers, have been attacked by the marauding Dragon Ships, and the seas are no longer safe. This means less work for sailors, since no one wants to travel. Chaqal, Tazir and Kodin, who sail on the good ship Giggling Goat, have found a job: Shina, a rich young woman who seems to be on the run from her family. They might be overcharging for their services, but she has secrets of her own, and they are all going to get in much more trouble than expected. Being a fan of short books in general, I like the Tor.com series of ebook novellas, not least for their diversity and for having original artwork on the covers (Cynthia Sheppard provides the art for this one), and this is another fine example. It does feel like more of a novella than a short novel, covering for the main part just one journey, though it is an important one with serious consequences for their passenger. The ebook has a slightly annoying quirk – at least on Kindle, each incidence of italics is followed by a line break – but that wasn’t anywhere near enough to spoil my enjoyment of a very entertaining book about a dashing group of characters. ***

The Mummy | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Just leave your brain at the door and enjoy it. 

When Tom Cruise takes on a role, no matter what it is, he’s going to put his all into it—his characters are believable. In less capable hands, The Mummy, directed by Alex Kurtzman, could have been lifeless. Instead, we get a likable protagonist who smiles and sprints his way through (as Cruise so often does) a solid action film wrapped in all the creepy-crawlies, monsters, grand displays of destruction, and narrow escapes for which the most entertaining entries in the Mummy canon are known.

The Man in the High Castle, Season 2, by Frank Spotnitz and friends (Amazon Video) | review by Rafe McGregor

Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) is one of the most disappointing books I’ve ever read and it’s no spoiler to say that the novel simply doesn’t end. It’s not even as if Dick deliberately withheld closure to fascinate or frustrate his readers, but more a case of found himself in a narrative corner from which he saw no escape, stopped writing, and moved on to the next project. He could have used a disappointing device like that employed by Sarban (the nom de plume of John William Wall) in his similarly dystopian The Sound of His Horn (1952) or declined to publish, but left what I suppose is a rare artefact in itself, an unfinished novel published during an author’s lifetime. What is even more baffling is that it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1962. The work is of course rich in Dick’s trademark complexity, weaving several subplots together and combining literary themes with genre conventions, transporting the reader to a strange and very unpleasant world where the Axis powers were victorious in the Second World War. It was perhaps the careful crafting of this alternative twentieth century that won Dick the award, although that world is not represented with quite as much verisimilitude as the subsequent efforts of Len Deighton in SS-GB (1978) and Robert Harris in Fatherland (1992). I mention the novel in such detail for two reasons: first, as a spoiler alert (alert: Dick spoiled the novel by not finishing it), and second, because the suggestion that there are two different realities in season 1 (that of the story world and the real world revealed in the films of the real world that appear in the story world) was cause for concern that season 2 would follow Dick in failing to explain the very question it had raised.