The Rise of Io by Wesley Chu | review by Stephen Theaker

This cyberpunk action thriller takes place four years after the end of the Alien World War. Twenty-odd years before that, humans discovered that they had been sharing the planet all along with a secret race of body-hopping aliens, the Quasing, who arrived in a spaceship crash eons ago. Unable to survive unprotected in Earth’s environment, they had lived inside the dinosaurs, then inside the cavemen, and for the last few thousand years – an eyeblink to them – they have lived among us. Despite the Quasing pulling the strings, history played out pretty much how it did in our world.

When the invention of Penetra scanners revealed their foggy existence, things changed forever. At first they were hunted. This particular book (Angry Robot pb, 424pp, £8.99), which follows a previous trilogy (The Lives, Deaths and Rebirths of Tao) doesn’t say how that went, but given the Quasing’s immense political influence one imagines it went quite badly for the hunters. The war then saw the countries of the world taking sides between two Quasing factions: the Genjix, a nasty bunch who think progress comes from conflict, and hence encourage it at all times, and the Prophus, who began to feel guilty about the misery they had caused.

Our brave young hero is Ella Patel, who doesn’t know much about any of that. She knows the war lasted a decade, that it left India shattered, that it took her from Singapore and left her an illiterate orphan in Surat. Unsurprisingly, this has left her rather cantankerous, though not so much that it’d put anyone off reading about her: the way she irritates and needles everyone she meets is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book. Whether it’s the other inhabitants of Crate Town, a desperate slum built out of shipping containers, or deadly Genjix super-assassins, she’ll do their heads in something rotten; it’s always amusing.

She annoys no one so much as the title character, Io, one of the least impressive of the Prophus Quasings. Long after the others left the Yucatán crash site and swam into the ocean in search of life to glom on to, Io was still trying to get communications working. She’s been catching up ever since, and it doesn’t help that her host humans have a habit of getting themselves killed, from the first sailor she possessed, to General Custer, through to secret agent Emily Curran, leaving Io in need of yet another new host: Ella, who doesn’t even pretend to respect her uninvited new passenger. She thinks Io is boring, full of dumb talk, but if they don’t learn to work together, neither will survive.

It’s a good set-up for a novel. Right next to the shipping containers of Crate Town a secret facility is in development, and, as Ella and Io work to investigate it, the narrative benefits of the protagonist having an onboard frenemy become clear. They can have lots of little arguments, debate the best course of action, and get at each other all they want without any need to explain why no one else acts during the conversation. Ella’s impoverished background means there’s a lot she needs to know, and we can learn it along with her. It also means she’s extremely scrappy and determined, a con artist and thief who leaps at the chance to join the good guys because it pays better.

The other side of it is that she’s not ready to fight. She’s underweight, unhealthy, and still carrying the physical and emotional scars of living a very hard and lonely life. So although there are action scenes, the book has to keep Ella away from the main mission at first. It takes five months of training and over half the book before she goes on her first solo job as an operative: this is very much the first book of a series. It works fine as a jumping-on point for those who haven’t read the previous trilogy, but less so as a standalone novel. Star Wars wouldn’t be the same film if the Death Star was still in one piece at the end of it, and while that isn’t exactly what happens here, the book may leave readers with a similar sense of anticlimax.

However, there is plenty to enjoy before that. The action is well done, Ella is a fine character, and there are signs that after this book’s tight focus on Crate Town and its surroundings the next one may open out a bit more. It sets up plenty of future conflict, and fans planning already to read the entire series will probably be very happy with it. ***

This review originally appeared in Interzone #266.

If Then by Matthew de Abaitua | review by Stephen Theaker

James is the bailiff of Lewes. When the Process decides that people – a village, a family, a child – must be removed, he cannot resist for long the urge to put on the armour and abandon himself to it, stomping around the countryside, scooping up those who refuse exile. He tries the peaceful approach first, popping round for a chat to see if they will leave freely, but of course even then he wears personal body armour in case of ambush.

Taking this job was the price of being allowed into Lewes after the economy collapsed and everyone became unemployed, destitute, desperate and homeless. Ruth, James’s wife, worked in a library in Hackney in the run-up to the great Seizure, and as other public institutions closed she saw it become the final destination of hundreds of people with nowhere else to go for help – and then there was nowhere at all.

Now that Ruth and James, and about ten thousand others, are a part of the Process, she works as a seamstress in the evenings and a schoolteacher in the day. The other people in town, all of them bearing the telltale data stripe from their crowns to their necks, fear her, because of her husband, believing that the Process will want to keep him happy, and thus will keep his wife happy. They also pity her: he’s not quite the man he used to be.

This relationship, which has already survived so much, faces a new crisis when the name Agnes appears on the eviction list. No one is surprised to see drunks, criminals and other undesirables on the list, though their families may fight tooth and nail to prevent their eviction, but Agnes is a child, one of Ruth’s pupils. “If you evict Agnes,” she says, “it will be difficult for me to love you.” James wonders, “Are we evil? Is this what evil looks like?”

The Process does have a benevolent side. On allocation day everyone, from Lewes and the nearby estates and villages, comes to the old supermarket, where “peeling posters showed bleached photographs of bygone normality, goods and prices, smiling faces, times of plenty, the strangeness of the lost everyday”. Now the shelves are filled by transparent boxes, containing the goods allocated to each person by the Process, sometimes even scraps of advice.

The strangeness of this life, this peculiar society, and the pressure it puts on this couple and everybody else, would be interesting enough in itself – this part is called If – but where a science fiction novel of the sixties or seventies might have stopped, this book takes a new direction: Then. The Process isn’t simply concerned with its participants’ wellbeing, it’s not something that happens to them: they are a part of it, and of each other, and it’s drawing them further in.

At the book’s beginning James finds Hector, a new-made soldier, hanging from barbed wire, “not quite a man”, a creation of the Process. His wounds reveal “spokes of tightly-packed crimson seeds like a pomegranate”. He wears a khaki tunic, puttees, hob-nailed boots, woollen trousers and an overcoat; a lifesize World War I toy soldier. James takes him to the Institute, an addled group of scientists on the fringe of the Process, mutated by their own experiments.

But Hector is only the beginning. Later come rifles, shells, cannons, “miles of barbed wire, legions of horse”, and, as the need for production overtakes capacity, men “with greatcoats fused to their skin and no feet in their boots”, until at last the humans of the Process themselves are co-opted into a phoney war, their memories muddled, their behaviour reshaped like the landscape, so that they fight and die in a replica of the coastline of Gallipoli.

This is a powerful novel (Angry Robot pb, 416pp, £8.99), both in its portrayal of the horrors of World War I, the wasteful loss of life, the dreadful conditions, the failures of those who let the war happen, and also in showing how easily the systems that support our modern-day lives could fall apart. And of course the book is all about the correlations between the two, about what happens when people get to experiment or play war games with the mass of human life, when we are treated as an expendable resource.

When Ruth enters the war in search of James, she meets a replica of Noel Huxley. “Every day is strange, threatening and uncertain,” she says of the future. “We are not in control of our lives.” To which Huxley replies, “That is a description of the soldier’s life.” The book suggests how much of ourselves we’d give up for a quiet life, and it’s hard to argue with its conclusions. ****

This review originally appeared in Interzone #261.

Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher / review by Stephen Theaker

The supervillains of the world are gone – defeated, retired, arrested – leaving two to fight the bad fight: The Cowl, billionaire industrialist by day, conscience-free killer by night (and sometimes by day too), and Blackbird, his untrustworthy sidekick with a heart of ice. Gangs throughout San Ventura, California wear his omega tag with pride. The city cowers. With no other supervillains to battle, the world’s superheroes have retired too, leaving just the Seven Wonders – Aurora’s Light, Bluebell, Sand Cat, Linear, Hephaestus, SMART and The Dragon Star – to deal with The Cowl, a job they handle with staggering and apparently wilful ineptitude.

Into this comes Tony, who wakes in the night with energy powers, then gains strength, bulletproof skin and flight, that last while interfering with The Cowl’s bank robbery. New friend Jeannie trains him and creates a costume with her atomic sewing machine, but the question for Tony is: what to do with these powers? Take out The Cowl? But if that’s obvious to him after just a few days of having powers, why haven’t the Seven Wonders done it? That question also troubles Sam Millar, detective on the SVPD SuperCrime unit, her husband one of thousands killed by The Cowl.

From that point on, Seven Wonders (Angry Robot, pb, 480pp) by Adam Christopher could be admired for not going where expected – this isn’t The Boys – but where it goes instead could have been more interesting. Though the novel has a detective at its heart, it gives her very little to detect; she doesn’t get to unmask anyone, for example. Bluebell’s ability to manipulate minds casts doubt over much of the novel’s action, but if we take events as read this is a simple story of power that corrupts. The incorruptible heroes are those without character flaws. Those corrupted can be set straight by siphoning off their powers.

Recent comics dealing with similar themes have given us the superbly evil Batman of Nemesis, the genocidal Superman of Irredeemable, and Invincible battling his own father to defend the human race from enslavement. In Seven Wonders there are no grand revelations, no ethical conflicts, no great insights into the way power corrupts over time or the immense pressure that would come with such immense responsibility. Everyone is pretty much what they appear to be, and that’s generally either bland or angry. Had the novel’s finale revealed the Seven Wonders as Billy Batsons pretending to be grown-ups it wouldn’t have surprised.

Happily, an alien invasion ends the book on a high, its cosmic fire and fury playing to the strengths of the novel and its heroes better than earthbound plots. The heroes and villains that assemble in space are entertaining and imaginative (Lucifer Now! Lady Liberty and her team of android Presidents! Connectormatic! A Terrible Aspect!), as is, earlier, the explanation for Aurora’s Light’s awkward name: supervillain Red Tape’s “final act of bureaucratic terror”, a contract so binding it would wrench the West Coast apart if broken! It’s a shame such fun ideas don’t play a bigger role in the novel.

After a bit of editing, this review appeared in Interzone #242, back in 2012.

The Buried Life by Carrie Patel, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In The Buried Life (Angry Robot, ebook, 4443ll) Carrie Patel tells the story of two women. Jane Lin is a laundry woman trusted by the height of high society to deal with their dirtiest and daintiest unmentionables. Liesl Malone is a police officer, currently getting used to a new partner with a theatrical background. They are brought together by a series of murders: Malone is shut out of the investigation – at least officially – but won’t let that stop her getting at the truth, while Jane is knocked unconscious after literally stumbling across the body of a Mr Fitzhugh during a late night laundry run. A conspiracy is afoot!

Mystery builds. Death will strike again. People scurry in the dark after curfew. Secret pasts abound. Motivations emerge from the shadows. Orphans discover how their parents died &c. Jane stays involved in all this at the prompting of Malone, who has no other way in to this world, but also on account of her own attraction, despite herself, to surly, sexy Roman Arnault, reputedly a button man for the council. He takes a shine to her, and literally sweeps her off her feet at a dance before saying, “I could show you who I am, what I do, and why they run. But will you like what you find?”

Roman is the kind of melodramatic anti-hero that seems to be all over fantasy at the moment, thanks maybe to the commercial success of Cullen and Grey, though of course they’re part of a long tradition of literary gits, going back through Mr. Darcy and Pamela’s Mr. B. Whether you find that type appealing may affect your enjoyment of the book. Jane has it bad – “Something in her chest fluttered as she watched him unnoticed” – but he didn’t do much for me. By the end he seems rather less significant and interesting than at first, and rather too many mysteries are resolved by him deciding to explain, just because at last he feels like it.

So far you might think this a Victorian novel, and it rather felt like one. However, it is set in the future, hundreds of years after a disaster. Far enough ahead for time to rub away most of the letters on a copper plaque, but close enough that paper books have survived and can still be read. Events take place, for the most part, in the underground city of Recoletta, but these people aren’t mutated – physically or psychologically – by the centuries underground. This isn’t, say The Caves of Steel: when Malone visits the surface she’s awed by the big sky, but not so much that it stops her climbing on the roof of a moving train.

There is nothing like the sense we get in City of Ember that keeping an underground city going might be difficult – though we do hear briefly about “orphans and unfortunates … working twelve-hour shifts on factory machines and assembly lines” – nor is there any shocking reality-shifting revelation upon emergence like the one in The Hero of Downways. Recoletta felt to me like Victorian London with a roof, its most unusual feature a ruling class who grow their nails slightly long because they can. The discoveries on the surface will feel old hat even to people who haven’t seen Logan’s Run or read Kamandi. It’s hard not to groan at the cheesiness of Roman revealing the collected Shakespeare he keeps in a hidden compartment.

For me, a hurdle the book struggled to clear was its initial similarity to City of Stairs, which also begins with the murder of an academic but heads off in more appealingly fantastical directions. The Buried Life doesn’t have any new science fiction ideas to offer, and for the most part it stays stubbornly away from anyone playing an active role in events. Yet for all that it was an enjoyable enough novel. I had a good time reading it and found the characters appealing. I worried about the danger they were in, hoped they would make it out alive, and was sad when some didn’t. I probably wouldn’t read a sequel, and I don’t expect this one to stick with me, but I’d look out for other books from the same author to see if they had a more interesting premise.

Should have sold more copies: Giant Thief by David Tallerman #bookaday

In doing this series of blog posts it seems polite to avoid promoting our own work, so I won’t pick The Mercury Annual, Pilgrims at the White Horizon, Five Forgotten Stories or any of our other titles, all of which should have sold more than the handful they did, and almost certainly would have if they had been published by a more active publisher!

So I’m going to pick instead Giant Thief by David Tallerman, the story of a thief who steals a giant and sets off on the world’s most exciting piggyback. I’ve no idea how well or otherwise it did, although two sequels were released. But it stands here for all the interesting books that Angry Robot have been publishing over the last few years.

Unfortunately, Angry Robot has run into a bit of trouble this month, forced into closing two of its offshoots: YA imprint Strange Chemistry and crime imprint Exhibit A. The approach of Angry Robot seems to have been to throw a lot of books at the wall to see which ones stuck. Not all of those books were brilliant, but I didn't read any that were boring.

Their enthusiastic approach means they have given lots of new authors a crack at mainstream publishing, and they’ve also been a home to more experienced writers with good books still to write. Long before NetGalley, they sent ebooks to reviewers. If they disappear, they'll be missed. But Angry Robot have come through rough times before, let’s hope they do again.

Costume Not Included by Matthew Hughes, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

When last we left him, Chesney Arnstruther had set himself up as a superhero – The Actionary – found himself a nice girlfriend, Melda McCann, and caused significant problems for the bad guys, up to and including Lucifer himself. It was trouble twixt heaven and hell that got him his super-powers in the first place, a by-product of a negotiation between the two post-mortem destinations. That all happened in The Damned Busters, book one in the To Hell and Back series, reviewed in #37. Costume Not Included (Angry Robot, ebook, 4432ll) is book two, and it continues from the first book pretty much directly.

Chesney’s “weasel-headed, sabertooth-fanged” demon Xaphan is now much friendlier, having grown accustomed to the benefits that come with working for the Actuary. Chesney’s over-protective mother Letitia has taken up with the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre, a top-rated television preacher who plans to announce The Actionary as the prophet of a new era. Crime rates are low, thanks to the city’s new superhero, and so Chesney ends up investigating a cold case, the disappearance of a journalism student nine years ago, which quickly blows hot.

As with the superheroics of the first book, the most entertaining element of Costume Not Included might be considered a spoiler, were it not shown in Tom Gauld’s excellent cover illustration. Yes, that’s Jesus typing on a laptop at the bottom (or at least one version of him), brought into the story by Chesney to write a new Bible. Hardacre thinks the universe is a book being written by God, and maybe he’s right – trouble is, this Jesus comes from an earlier draft. It’s amusing to see how the conversation between Jesus and a modern-day television evangelist might go.

If you’re a fan of the TV show Community, imagine how Abed might cope with almost infinite power in a world of angels and demons and you’ll have a good sense of this book. If the Actionary dangled me over the edge of a tall building, I’d say whatever he wanted me to say. If he created a safe environment for me to express my feelings honestly, I’d admit I prefer this writer’s far future science fantasy to these modern day superheroics, but I enjoyed this book more than the first, perhaps because all the pieces of the world were in place and the author could just start playing with them.

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar (Angry Robot, ebook, 4253ll plus extras), is the first in a series that has so far run to three volumes (the sequels being Camera Obscura and The Great Game). It’s set in a world much changed since Amerigo Vespucci landed on the island of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Caliban’s people, Les Lézards, have installed themselves as the rulers of our island nation, whales sing in the Thames, the police are supported by automatons, airships fly overhead, and Moriarty is Prime Minister. Orphan is a young poet given to literary mischief, rebel rather than revolutionary, but when tragedy strikes a mission to Mars his need to set things right throws him into an adventure that will take him from London to the Mysterious Island of Jules Verne, and leave the future of the planet in his hands.

The Bookman didn’t bowl me over to quite the extent that Cloud Permutations and Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God did (reviews of those two should appear in our next issue), and it wasn’t as challenging, but I had a good time with it. Part of the book’s appeal is that Orphan’s choices are not easy; there are few people he can obviously trust, and many factions battling to come out on top. Irene Adler—in this world, a police officer—seems honest and trustworthy, but isn’t her job to protect the status quo? Or the Mechanical Turk, the chess-playing robot: sincere and intelligent, but his ultimate interest is the survival of his own kind. Or the mysterious Bookman? The Turk says he “almost never deals directly”, but he takes a direct hand with Orphan, promising everything he wants if he succeeds in his quest. All this intrigue and mystery gives the novel an interest beyond the spotting of celebrities fictional and historical—though that is, admittedly, fun.

The ebook has a few small issues. Paragraphs are separated by a couple of millimetres, at least on actual Kindles (on Kindle apps it disappears)—hardly noticeable, but annoying once you’ve seen it. In a few places words are split by spaces, and other words are welded together; probably where they were hyphenated in print, and "may" appears for “might” in a few places. Unattractive straight quotes are used, and there are no chapter marks, only section marks. But I mention that stuff mainly because it interests me, not because it should stop you from purchasing this inventive, entertaining novel.

Giant Thief by David Tallerman – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Stories by the author of Giant Thief (Angry Robot, ebook, 4314ll), David Tallerman, have appeared twice in our magazine, and twice more in my issues of Dark Horizons, so of course you must bear my potential bias in mind when reading this review. That said, on to the book. Easie Damasco is the thief of the title, who finds himself dragooned into the army of ruthless warlord Moaradred, who’s on his way to capture the crown of Castoval. Key to Moaradred’s plans are his contingent of giants, kept under his evil thumb by his possession of an object just small enough to be accidentally stolen by a thief hustling his way into the tent. Riding Saltlick, the giant to which he has been assigned, straight off the battlefield and into the hills, Easie is somewhat surprised by the persistence with which he is pursued—and subsequently, the keenness with which he and his huge new friend are courted by the resistance, particularly Estrada, female mayor of Muena Palaiya.

Easie Damasco is not a particularly nice guy. He’s a thief, of course, and he’s selfish—for example in abandoning friends to delay his own capture—and something of a sexist, as revealed by his having assumed Estrada’s appointment as mayor to be a prank of some kind. He assumes Saltlick to be an idiot and exploits him with barely a wince of conscience. Where he has to choose between himself and others, or between virtue and wealth, he’ll make the selfish, greedy choice. The book doesn’t apologise for that. One of its most admirable, likeable characters, Alvantes, brave captain of the Altapasaedan City Guard, utterly detests him, and you can see his point of view. But Easie isn’t too bad: where the chances of survival and financial gain are equal either way, he’ll choose good over evil. As the book goes on, the question is whether the good influences in his life—Estrada, Saltlick, Alvantes—will rub off on him; can he be encouraged to consider his self-interest in more than just the short term. Can this rascal be socialised by contact with upright citizens?

This novel isn’t a startling reinvention of heroic fantasy (although its portrayal of principled civil servants is somewhat novel), and the plot—mostly a long chase seen from a single character’s point of view—isn’t terribly complex, but the book is as much fun as you’d expect the story of a thief who steals a giant to be. It’s a pleasure to read, the author always at pains to give the reader a clear idea of what’s going on and where people are in relation to the action. If I say the book reminded me of an RPG scenario in that sense, I mean it as a compliment. It reminded me of one of the other fun things about playing pen and paper games: if you can do anything, you might as well do the most entertaining thing, and that’s the route this book takes. David Tallerman will almost certainly go on to write more complex, substantial novels, but I hope he gives us a few more like this first.

The World House by Guy Adams, reviewed by John Greenwood

What is it about dreams that makes them so hard to remember later? For a start, they're not easily woven into the story of one's waking life. Every night the mind channel-hops to the murkier end of the EPG where you’ll find a mixture of repeats and experimental drama before normal service is resumed the next morning. What was that mad foreign film I was watching last night? Wolf Maggots was it? Can't quite recall. Never mind, back to the 24-hour rolling news and travel.

Partly it is the anarchy of dreams that induce rapid forgetting. They're notorious for ignoring well-established rules of physics. How come that dog could levitate? Well, I was wearing my brother's sweater in the dream, which seemed to explain a lot.

It's also clear that your unconscious mind has never read Writing Fiction for Dummies. I was back at my old school, only it wasn't anything like my old school, but somehow I knew it was, and then we reached the edge of the forest. Cavernous plot holes and smeary ellipses abound, while on the other hand inconsequential conversations are dwelt on at unseemly length.

The World House is an extra-temporal dwelling which relies on human nightmares for content-provision. Partly because of this, Guy Adams's novel suffers from these memorability problems. To be fair, the plot is pretty tightly sewn up: a handful of disparate characters from various (but mostly English-speaking) locations and historical points in the last century or so, come into contact with an exotic, impenetrable wooden box. When these circumstances coincide with their being placed in mortal danger, they are plucked from their native time and place and dumped, apparently at random, somewhere in the house. We then follow each group of abductees as they try to survive animated taxidermy, giant snakes and ladders and assorted bizarre threats. Adams splits them into small groups who battle and quarrel their way through the maze of rooms (although some of the rooms turn out to be mountains or oceans), and the side-effects from one chapter cleverly inform what is happening to characters in another part of the house (removing a giant bath plug saves one group while imperilling another who are climbing through the drains). In a very effective, cinematic climax, a railway station is generated from of the imagination of a little girl, the trains designed to take passengers back to their respective times. Adams has a neat trick of reintroducing characters into the action so that you don’t immediately recognise who you’re dealing with, and the realisation can be startling.

All the same, we don't really find out enough about the reason for the house's existence, or why is has to take the form of embodied dreams at all. I'll try not to spoil it, but some non-human agencies have been making mischief: their powers and motives are dealt with in a few colourful but hand-wavey interludes. I'd rather have learned more about the relationship between house's human inhabitants and its god-like designers, and spent a little less time watching the characters bicker and chew the fat in the downtime between fighting for their lives. Even if real people do sometimes discuss their breakfasts at tiresome length (and I've worked in offices where the subject can take up most of the morning), if that meal is not going to play a vital role in future events then perhaps we should not waste time eavesdropping on such exchanges.

The plot of The World House has the linear feel of a particular type of puzzle-based role-playing computer game. Typically a group of characters find themselves trapped in a room without any apparent exit, but faced with imminent death at the hands of (say) a cannibalistic chef, or a swarm of killer moths. After a hard trial they discover a hidden exit, only to find themselves similarly threatened in the next room. Some of the threats are mind-bending (an indoor mountain, from the top of which one can still make out the cornices in the ceiling), but the arbitrariness and omnipotence of the house and its dangers pall after a while. "Anything's possible" is sometimes a recipe for imaginative slackness. As in poetry, it's the restrictions themselves that fuel innovation.

One central conceit, which I feel could have been given more space, is the library, a vast hub in the centre of the house where the biographies of every human being, living or dead, are all written, or still in the process of writing themselves (clear echoes of Borges's “The Library of Babel”). The characters find their own biographies (rather too easily, I thought), and this plays a key role in the story, but I found myself wondering how the biographies of Australopithecus would read. Would there be a cut-off point, beyond which the library would disdain to describe the pre-linguistic gruntings of bipedal apes?

The characters Adams introduces us to are from a much smaller range of historical time. Roger Carruthers is an Edwardian explorer (we're not given his exact date of abduction, but he does mention Roald Amundsen as a contemporary), and seems to be the earliest, although he is a pantomime gallant Colonial. Oddly, given the house's unlimited reach through time, there are no characters buzzed in from the far future, but further developments in the sequel Restoration, may well shed light on this. Tying the house to the mysterious box is a clever way to restrict entry to this club, but the one character who does not speak English as a first language suffers a lack of depth. A sincere, hard-working fisherman's son from Civil War era Valencia, Pablo's language skills peak and trough from one sentence to the next. The other characters (a jive-talking alcoholic pianist from the 1970's, the stripper he's in love with, a social butterfly from the 1920's Harlem, a bunch of stranded sailors, each with their own, singular character trait) are distinguished mainly by their verbal tics.

The interesting characters are a Spanish street kid who is cruelly dropped from the cast list at the last moment (she gives up the box before it can zap her), a neurotic academic called Alan Arthurs, and the young girl Sophie (possibly autistic although this is never stated) who he teams up with. These last two have the most appealing inner monologues. There is a witty set-piece in which the lecturer confronts a hallucination of his therapist on the seabed. Sophie is interested in things being in the right places, and there is a lovely moment of self-realisation while she is trying to impose her own sense of order on a ship's galley:

She moves on to the cutlery, making sure that there are forks then knives then spoons (this is the order in which you use them unless you have soup but soup has its own type of spoon, not like these, so it's still all right). She makes the forks and spoons sit inside each other so they are one stack of each. She cannot do this for the knives but she can make sure that all the blades are pointing the same way. This makes them look better. They are not all the same type of fork, knife and spoon so it will never be perfect but it will Just Have to Do. She is not always good at Just Have to Do (however much her mother tried to teach her how it worked) but she does her best. She realises that this means that her trying to make Just Have to Do work is a good example of Just Have to Do. Life is funny like that. She understands it a bit better for the realisation. Sometimes nearly is the best you can get. Yes. This is an important thing. Just Have to Do. A wise thing.

Passages like this stand out because they capture somebody's inner voice and inner conflicts. They're not trying only to be funny, but they are amusing all the same.

There is no central protagonist, but the book begins with Miles Caulfield, our contemporary and a gambling-addicted loser who escapes a beating from loan sharks by falling into the house. What spoiled my enjoyment of this book was largely the filter of strained jauntiness through which Miles sees the world. While hiding underneath a table from an unseen animal attacker:

He was damned if he was going to cower in fear of what sounded like an asthmatic terrier.

A few pages and one kick in the groin later:

…having had his reproductive organs shunted to just below his lungs.

As they enter a room filled with snow:

Welcome to bloody Narnia, Miles...Hope you remembered to pack the Turkish Delight.

This jocularity starts to infect the other characters too: the drunk, staggering towards his seat fancies that "he was an inebriated Frodo Baggins heading to the leatherette and formica landscape of Boothor..." Nor is the narrative itself immune from this misplaced archness:

Within ten minutes they were walking again, trudging up the snow-covered steps, the peak of the mountain drawing closer at a speed normally reserved for indolent bricks.

It's not that I'm opposed to humour in adventure novels, it's just this compulsion to try and drag a joke out of everything. If you find the above quotes funny, then you'll probably love this book to bits, but try this: read them in your head in the voice of Jeremy Clarkson, then tell me they're still good.

The World House by Guy Adams (Angry Robot, ISBN 978 0 85766 037 4, 416pp, £7.99)

Reality 36, by Guy Haley - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In 2067 the Greenlandic ice sheet tipped, leading to calamitous environmental and social change; 2104 saw the creation of class five artificial intelligences, most of whom promptly went insane; by 2129, the year of this novel’s events, the population of Earth has fallen to five billion. In this novel Otto Klein, a retired cyborg soldier with a dodgy shoulder, and Richards, his friend and colleague, a class five AI with an odd sense of humour, investigate the many deaths of Zhang Qifang, a leading sentient rights campaigner. The investigation leads to Reality 36, one of a series of virtual worlds from which humans were expelled back in 2114, when their AI inhabitants were granted full rights. Harvesting orcs for XP is a lot less fun when it sees you tried in The Hague for genocide! A parallel thread sees Qifang’s assistant Veronique Valdaire following her own leads on Qifang’s deaths, illegally entering Reality 36 while plugged into an amateur life-support system. There she meets its defenders, Sir Jagadith Veyadeep and his talking steed Tarquinius. Someone is using Reality 36 to set themselves up as a god, and the knight is on a quest to bring them down.

The future of this novel feels a bit old-fashioned in some ways (especially when Richards is swimming around in cyberspace), but it's not as if ecological disaster and artificial intelligence seem less likely to affect our world than they did at the height of cyberpunk. Why not exploit that setting when, as this book shows, there are still good stories to be told in it? Guy Haley - for whom I must admit a certain affection, having subscribed to SFX for many years after it began - has created a world rich with potential stories, and characters with powerful reasons to get involved in anything that’s happening, and enough skills to survive, just about, the worst the world can throw at them. The action sequences are exciting, the mysteries intriguing, the characters people whose conversations I enjoy, people I’d like to read more about. Which is fortunate, since I won’t know how the story ends unless I do. Approaching the last 10% of the book, one realises with a sinking feeling (as with The Damned Busters, from the same publisher) that quite a bit of the plot is unlikely to be resolved by the end, and so it proves. Would Star Wars have been a better film had it finished halfway through the assault on the Death Star? Probably not, but it would have been pretty good wherever it ended, and I’d say the same about Reality 36.

Reality 36, by Guy Haley. Angry Robot, ebook, 5127ll.

Vampire Warlords, by Andy Remic – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The events of a previous book freed the three Vampire Warlords from captivity. While Kell (basically Druss the Legend with a Stormbringer axe) goes on the run to find allies, the ferocious warlords make themselves at home in Jalder, Vor and Gollothrim, eating babies, siring vampire minions, and building ships to spread their curse across the world. Kell's quest will take him to a mountain prison and then the stronghold of his bitterest enemies, accompanied by womanising popinjay and new-made clockwork vampire (and yes, that does seem as silly in the book as you might think – cogs fall out of them when they get injured!) Saark, Kell's granddaughter Nienna, and Myriam, another clockwork vampire.

This is a book that takes a long time to get going, the first half reminding me of nothing so much as the Twilight films, with their interminable chats punctuated by fleeting, very welcome bursts of violence. The journey from Skaringa Dak to the Black Pike Mine prison is essentially a long camping trip, and how much readers enjoy it will depend on how they like the company. Saark and Kell are grudging friends in the buddy cop mould, the one who gets annoyed and the one who is annoying – Gibbs and DiNozzo. But their banter is not as funny as it thinks, and goes on for far too long. "But enough talk, " says Kell at one point, only for the conversation to go on for pages more. By the midpoint of the book I was regularly yelling "Shut up!" at it. But beyond that point it gets better. From the arrival at the prison until the final battles Kell and Saark are often separated, or have more important things to do than bicker.

Kell's plan to recruit warriors from the prisoners is pretty daft – I think the book underestimates the Sariah Gallego factor – and the scene in which he wins them over – like too much of the book – has a distinct whiff of "Will this do?" But in a funny way the sillier the novel got the fonder I became of it. Words are italicised for emphasis in the goofiest way, and there's a definite touch of the Fanthorpes to Andy Remic's writing style: "Kell filled the space. He was vast, a giant, a titan, a god. His face was bathed in shadows, gloom was his mistress, darkness his master, and Kell stood with Ilanna lifted against his chest and Saark felt fear, knew fear, for this was it, the end, his death come so soon and for what?"

Less welcome were the Guy N. Smith style sex scenes: "she shivered in anticipation and thrust herself painfully against him, in need, in lust, and his hands came to rest on her buttocks, firm and hard from so much travelling in the wilds." And some writing that was just plain bad: "You’re carping on like a fishwife on a fish stall selling buckets of fish to rank stinking fishermen" or "The vampires watched in silence, like kicked dogs licking their wounds. Licking their balls." Eh? When faces were ripped off and heads twisted off, when eyes popped out on stalks, the book almost had me – it almost had a purpose – but I couldn't quite forgive it those tedious fireside chats and the perfunctory plotting.

I think the stupider this author's books get, the more outrageous, ludicrous and laughable they become, the more I'll enjoy them, but I couldn't recommend this one unless you've already read every single book Joe Abercrombie has written, or for that matter William King's Gotrek and Felix novels, which have a similar tough guy/dandy relationship at their heart but are much better. About the best I can say of this one is that if you excised the first half of this book you'd be left with a novel Thongor or Kyrik wouldn't be too embarrassed to appear in.

Vampire Warlords, by Andy Remic. Angry Robot, epub, 7654ll. Reviewed from epub ARC. Amazon US. Amazon UK.

The Damned Busters, by Matthew Hughes – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The universe of The Damned Busters (I haven’t quite figured out that title, to be honest) is one familiar from the quirkier sf of the fifties, one where there is an order to the cosmos, but it’s an order that reflects the muddled way things are done here on Earth. There’s a heaven and a hell, but both sides talk and act rather like lawyers, and the crafty hero can always find a loophole. It's a crazy universe, but one with rules that can be learnt, mastered and circumvented. And so, a fifth of the way in, having been caught in the crux of an infernal union dispute, introverted Chesney Arnstruther wangles himself a career as buffed-up superhero The Actionary (the name a clever play on the mild-mannered alter-ego’s work as an actuary), and gains Xaphan, a weasel-headed sidekick with a Jimmy Cagney patter and powers that are near-infinite – so long as Chesney’s requests stay within the terms of the deal that he’s made.

This remarkable transformation came as quite a surprise (reviewing from an epub ARC, I hadn’t spent much time looking at the (excellent) cover – and if the superhero angle wasn’t shown on the front cover I would have avoided mentioning it here as a spoiler), but it came at just the right time, that is to say, just when I was about ready, in my impatient way, to give up on the book. Though I’d quite enjoyed the early chapters – they had some interesting thoughts on the potential consequences of hell’s minions going on strike, for example – a few hundred pages more of the same would have been too much for me. When Chesney becomes a superhero the novel doesn’t move past the contractual wrangling that dragged a little in those early pages, but it all becomes much more fun. The idea of a superhero whose powers have contractual limits is, I think, a fairly novel one, and the book explores it well, with a good deal of charm; imagine a Robert Sheckley take on decompressed superheroics.

Further volumes are planned; it doesn’t feel like a novel that requires a sequel, but the battle is after all never-ending. Though a thread marks the trail to the next book, the reader with no plans to read on will not be unsatisfied by the conclusion. Or at least not for that reason; the drama of the climactic game of poker was pretty much lost on me, since I had no idea whether the players should be glad of the cards they received or not. (And why didn’t either party, once they were ahead, just fold all remaining hands?)

I didn’t adore The Damned Busters the way I did this author’s Quartet & Triptych – the books couldn’t have been more different – but by the end it had won me over, and I’ll remember it fondly.

The Damned Busters, Matthew Hughes. Angry Robot, pb/ebook, 416pp. Reviewed from epub ARC. Amazon UK. Amazon US.

We hate it when our friends become successful...

...especially when they are at least a dozen years younger and so very much better looking!

Bitter, crippling jealousy aside, we're really, really chuffed for Theaker's Quarterly Fiction (and Dark Horizons) contributor David Tallerman, who has just been snapped up by up-and-comers Angry Robot – and an agent too. Here's the info about the first book:

"The notorious Easie Damasco is a rogue and a thief and a scoundrel, who somehow always lives to see another day. In the first of his outlandish adventures, Giant Thief, Damasco manages to steal the wrong treasure and ends up with an entire army on his tail. Riotous swashbuckling adventure in the popular tradition of recent fantasy successes Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie, the Easie Damasco adventures will run to at least three books."

More details here and here. Congratulations to David – and to Angry Robot!