A Cold Silence by Alison Littlewood | review by Stephen Theaker

A Cold Silence (Jo Fletcher Books) is the sequel to the author's first novel, A Cold Season, reviewed in Black Static #27. At the end of that book, Cass wondered how much she should tell her son Ben about it all. It seems her decision was to keep it a secret, but years later the mysterious death of a childhood friend takes him back to Darnshaw. Visiting the apartment where she died brings back the memory of himself as a boy, sitting on the floor of an abandoned apartment, covered in rats. Jessica had been playing a gamed called Acheron immediately before her death, which can supposedly grant wishes in return for the gamer’s soul. Ben worked for the company that made that game, and his sister has been playing it too. Ben is thus persuaded to lead an expedition into the company’s London headquarters in hopes of getting to the truth: are people really selling their souls, and if so to whom?

Of the author’s six novels so far [mid-2017], this is the one definite misfire. As a sequel it’s admirable in that it doesn’t try at all to retread the very successful first book, but it reads like the novelisation of a play or a television pilot. The bulk of it, well over two hundred pages, is pretty much one or two very, very long conversations, with a couple of changes of location to break things up. That makes it a quick read, though, and it is good on sibling relationships, and the way families mess each other up, and it’s interesting to see the long-lasting consequences for the survivors of the previous book. The method by which the game arranges for people’s wishes to come true is fascinating, an excellent idea rich with the potential for stories, but unfortunately that all happens in the backstory, in the dialogue and the revelations, rather than being part of the action of the book. ***

This review originally appeared in Black Static #60.

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.

Lone Wolf 24: Rune War | review by Rafe McGregor

Lone Wolf 24: Rune War (Collector’s Edition) by Joe Dever
Holmgard Press, hardback, £16.99, December 2019, ISBN 9781916268005

In addition to completing the late Joe Dever’s vision of a thirty-two book cycle comprising four different series, Holmgard Press is intent on completing the Collector’s Edition release initially begun by Mongoose Publishing in 2010 (for details, see my review of Lone Wolf 21: The Voyage of the Moonstone). I must confess that for a combination of reasons (and despite the user-friendly formatting of Project Aon), I had never actually played books 24 to 26, in consequence of which I was very pleased to see Lone Wolf 24: Rune War released at the end of 2019.  The game begins with True Friend (my Kai Grand Master of randomly-generated-name-fame) returning to the Kai Monastery from his successful mission in the Kingdom of Siyen (Lone Wolf 23: Mydnight’s Hero) to be invited to a private audience with Lone Wolf.  The evil Lord Vandyan has usurped the throne of the former Principality of Eldenora and invaded the neighbouring countries of Delden, Magador, and Salony in Northern Magnamund.  Vandyan’s imperial ambitions are currently stalled in Lyris, where he is besieging Varetta (the Stornlands setting of Lone Wolf 6: The Kingdoms of Terror) with his Vorka horde.  The Vorka are Agarashi (spawn of Agarash the Damned, an archdemon that serves at the right hand of the God of Darkness) and were believed extinct before their appearance in Vandyan’s army.  The Vorka horde is being continually replenished from Duadon, the capital of Eldenora, where it appears that the creatures are being created by means of the Runes of Agarash. While Lone Wolf leads a crusade of New Order Kai, allies, and mercenaries to raise the siege of Varetta, True Friend is tasked with infiltrating Skull-Tor, Duadon’s fortress, to destroy the runes and cut off the supply of Vorka at its source.  This mission brief suggests a game of at least three parts: a wilderness adventure beginning with a river journey and ending in a forest, an urban exploration of the streets of Duadon, and finally a dungeon crawl in the fortress.

The game begins well, with immediate action, although anyone who has played previous Lone Wolf games will not find the journey to Hulsta’s cooperage in Duadon too onerous (with the possible exception of the Grochod Forest section). The method of entry selected for Skull-Tor is the underground tunnels constructed in case of the need for escape by the original occupant. The plan is soon scuppered, however, and the infiltration (in my gameplay) was by means of the underground river, habitat to some very nasty local fauna. Once inside Skull-Tor, True Friend discovers the full extent of Vanyan’s megalomania, a three-step strategy for world domination, the first two steps of which have already been set in motion. This is followed by an exciting and multi-staged climax that includes a skirmish with the deadly Zorkaan the Soultaker. The game is in fact in four parts: a wilderness adventure to reach Duadon, an urban exploration on and below the streets of Duadon, a dungeon crawl in Skull-Tor, and then a two-stage escape from stronghold and city. As is so often the case, the escape is a little anticlimactic, becoming progressively easier from the stronghold to the city to the countryside. Rune War nonetheless has a gripping – shocking, even – ending, which I shall reveal seeing as Lone Wolf 25: Trail of the Wolf has been available in one form or another since 1997. After being extracted by Banedon, Guildmaster of the Brotherhood of the Crystal Star, in his skyship, True Friend returns to the Kai Monastery to receive the news that Lone Wolf, still at the head of the crusade, has been abducted by a black shadow that fell from the sky on the outskirts of Ruanon and is thought to be Zorkaan the Soultaker. Lone Wolf’s soul has, literally, been taken and True Friend’s next mission will be to bring it back.

I have little to say about the mechanics of play – as a game, Rune War is highly enjoyable, albeit not particularly demanding, and the Grand Master Discipline of Kai-screen is very useful (though not essential). As with all the other Collector’s Editions, there is a bonus adventure, “The Traitor’s Reward”, which is written by Gavyn F. Duthie. The player takes on the persona of Kalen of Salony, a Stornlander sellsword leading a band of mercenaries in service of the Salonese. My verdict is that the game is something of a mixed bag. On the upside, the adventure makes a nice counterpoint to the main feature and the idea of beginning with Kalen and his whole band is original. “The Traitor’s Reward” is also satisfyingly long for a bonus adventure (270 sections as opposed to the 350 of the feature). On the downside, there is a noticeable difference in authorial quality between the two adventures, particularly with respect to the descriptions (some of which are a little unclear) and turns of phrase (which are occasionally awkward) in the bonus adventure. More importantly, the attempt to turn the skills of a veteran mercenary into Kai-like special abilities falls flat and detracts from the internal logic of the cycle – the Kai are unique precisely in virtue of their exceptional skills and (as they progress) supra-human abilities, which are achieved by the combination of dedication, devotion, and divine intervention. Having said that, other players may well not be as distracted as I was by this question and will probably enjoy the bonus adventure much more than I did. Not only have I still not played books 25 and 26, but 25, 26, and 28 are the only three missing from my collection of various editions of the rest of the thirty books… so I really do hope Holmgard Press is here to stay.

World of Water by James Lovegrove | review by Stephen Theaker

Dev Harmer died at Leather Hill, the worst battle of a terrible decade-long war between humanity and Polis+, AI zealots who see an atheistic humanity as their natural enemy. The war ended in a truce, Harmer's consciousness was saved, and now he is downloaded by Interstellar Security Solutions into one genetically modified host form after another. His job: to foil the plots of spies and saboteurs working for Polis+. This is the second book of his adventures, but like the Dumarest books of E.C. Tubb you could begin with any of them. He was having adventures well before the first book began, and he'll have many more after this one ends, unless he earns enough credit at last to buy himself a new copy of his original body.

Not so fresh from his gruelling adventures on Alighieri in World of Fire, Harmer now continues his fight against the "digimentalists" on Robinson D in the Ophiuchus constellation, also known as Triton. His previous body was that of a miner suited to work on an extreme thermoplanet: short, heavyset, muscular and stumpy, with nocturnal vision and the face of a boxer who had gone a few too many rounds. This time he has high cheekbones, protective eye membranes, webbed fingers, gills on either side of his neck, and a face that can flash bioluminescent messages to those that can understand them. This is his first time as an amphibian – but the body has been compromised. It'll be dead in three days.

He needs an amphibious body because Triton is an ocean planet. It was an ice giant until a small shift in axial rotation warmed things up. That event persists in the legends the indigenous Tritonians tell of the Ice King, who sleeps in the ice at the heart of the world and will awaken when the time is right. None of the indigenous people are happy to have forty thousand humans building habitats on the ocean surface, and those angry enough to fight in the name of the Ice King are able to find plenty of support, and, predictably enough, Dev soon finds that the colonists are less than innocent.

It's his job to bring peace to this world, and in the process uncover any Polis+ activity. In three days. Before he can get started, he'll need to get his gills working, and that means a merciless swimming lesson, where his ISS liaison pushes him fifteen metres down into the ocean. Just when he's about to black out, he breathes in the cold seawater, and feels it rush down his throat, and out through his neck, giving him oxygen as it passes through – even after just two books, it's clear that a big pleasure of this series will be the way Harmer adjusts to the quirks of each body, and works with the skill set of each. This is not a body built for brawls in bars, for example, and Dev almost comes a cropper when he gets drawn into one. But at least it gives him a lead… And in the water it's a different matter, as we see when he encounters a seven-metre long thalassoraptor and all its teeth.

Harmer is absolutely the star of the show here (at least until the story's ultimate – and extremely epic – enemy is revealed), but he has a strong supporting cast. He forms an alliance with a Tritonian who has no love for humans but wants a peaceful resolution to it all. Her true name is a complex configuration of geometric patterns, an emotional autograph designed to convey an attitude of determination, resolve and desire for justice, and she more than lives up to that in the course of the book. On the human side, he is teamed up with First Lieutenant Sigursdottir and her band of brave and heroic female Marines. Dev takes an instant liking to her, but it'll take some work to earn her trust.

This is a book (Solaris ebook, 384pp, £5.99) for anyone who thinks they don't make 'em like that any more. Well, they do, and to all the action and thrills you could possibly want James Lovegrove adds a good deal of intelligence, tackling post-colonial issues head-on while showing us a fascinating alien culture, all in chapters that end in cliffhangers and are short enough to entice the most reluctant adult reader. The series has a great premise, but it's not a formula: this book offers a completely different experience to the first. The ebook is clever too: switch to publisher fonts to see how they are used to distinguish between different types of non-verbal speech. A brainy blockbuster. ****

This review originally appeared in Interzone #265.

Hunters & Collectors by M. Suddain | review by Stephen Theaker

The mother of Jonathan Tamberlain threatened to kill him if he ever squandered his gifts on criticism, and she wasn't just speaking metaphorically, he tells us, she told him exactly how she would do it. She was an art collector, his father a poet; the two of them met at a boxing match. Sparring with his father left Tamberlain in a coma, and he woke up with an amazing nose, one that can catch the scent of a wine from half a mile away.

So he did exactly what his mother didn't want: he became a food critic, though that's not what he calls himself. He follows the example of his hero, Eliö Lebaubátain, in claiming the title of "forensic gastronomer". It's not entirely clear why, since there's no legal aspect to his work – or at least there wouldn't be, if he didn't always get himself into so much trouble.

The book (Jonathan Cape pb, 506pp, £14.99) begins with snatches of writing from and about his early career, showing his rise to fame, but by the time the narrative settles down to its main adventure, he's had the time to develop a long and intense relationship with his bodyguard, the marvellously formidable Gladys. To her he's "like a grandpa you spend time with out of guilt", and for him she's like the annoying cousin your family takes on day trips, but they share an utter dedication to their respective jobs that is one of the novel's most interesting features.

Unfortunately, Gladys wasn't there the day he went to the Fair.

While Tamberlain grew up in the Western Hemisphere with a pair of liberal parents, the Eastern Hemisphere lived under the absolute control of Vlada Yinknokov, the Great Butcher. She had a billion people murdered during her revolution, including thousands of architects and doctors. She outlawed hospitals, declaring that from then on diseases would be cured by the will of the people. And she came to the Fair too.

Tamberlain only attended to make amends to an old friend. In that he failed miserably, and after a contretemps involving a bomb threat he didn't mean to make he was taken away to the Great Butcher's yacht, waking up to find a gas mask on his face and everyone including the dictator dead, following a nerve gas attack. Arrested and taken to the Eastern Hemisphere for interrogation, he fell into another coma, and it's when he wakes up that the story proper begins.

Dr Rubin Difflaydermaus is a batty psychiatrist with a habit of showing up in Tamberlain's head. He also has his book (Infinity Remastered: Engineering the Post-Human Species (and Why Our Great-Grandchildren Might Not Even Need Bodies)) delivered wherever Tamberlain is sleeping. The copy waiting after the critic's latest coma contains a clue: a laundry ticket from the legendary Hotel Grand Skies.

Tamberlain has long dreamt of eating at its famous restaurant, the Undersea. Nothing will stop him getting to the hotel, and once he gets there, nothing will stop him eating that meal. He'll literally wade through blood to get it, and he'll need to, because the staff have completely lost their minds and every interaction brings with it the threat of ultraviolence. Ace literary agent Daniel Woodbine and bodyguard Gladys will do their best to keep him alive as the severed heads pile up, but he won't make it easy for them.

Hunters & Collectors is quite reminiscent of Transmetropolitan, by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, and may appeal to the same people. Instead of political writer Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants we have here a food critic, but he adopts a similarly misanthropic worldview ("To me the greatest possible horror is not that humanity might end, but that our Empire of Stupidity might last forever") to protect a heart similarly sensitive to the horrors of his world. Like that comic, this is not an entirely serious book, but it does have moments that are truly shocking, and others that feel surprisingly sincere.

The sf ideas at its heart, on the other hand, may not come as great surprises, at least not to people who have a holodeck episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the book is after all being sold as modern contemporary fiction rather than sf, and it uses its rusty tools to tell quite a sharp story. Equally, what seems at first to be quite an experimental novel, beginning with a hundred-page flutter of notes, letters, fragments and diagrams, settles down after that to provide quite a conventional first-person narrative that nevertheless does the job.

That's the book in a nutshell: a bit less ambitious than it looks, but still quite good, and rather well executed. Just like the guests at the Hotel Grand Skies. ***

This review originally appeared in Interzone #265.

The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon | review by Stephen Theaker

Glen Weldon is a respected writer on books and comic books for NPR, the American equivalent of Radio 4, and a panellist on their excellent weekly podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour, where his enthusiastically lugubrious voice, ad hoc taxonomies, and ever-readiness with an overarching theory make his contributions always entertaining. Though this sadly isn't a review of the audiobook edition, his distinctive voice can still be heard in every sentence, making this book (Simon & Schuster, hb 336pp, £16.99) a real pleasure from start to finish. Literally to the finish, since the bibliography is annotated with comments from him, and because he's a very interesting chap those comments are very interesting too.

The book is dedicated to Bill Finger, the original Batman writer, and it does a great deal to show how important his contributions to the character were. Even those who have read Batman books by the dozen may be surprised to learn that Bob Kane, “creator” of the Bat-Man, did so by tracing an Alex Raymond drawing of Flash Gordon on a rope swing, colouring his outfit red and blue, and giving him a domino mask. Milton “Bill” Finger was a quiet kid who wrote the scripts, and none of Bob Kane's editors even knew he existed, but Weldon tells us that Finger suggested the ears, the cape, the gloves and the colour scheme.

The dark knight's lack of regard for human life in his latest cinematic outing, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – the result, perhaps, of a death in the family – has provoked much controversy, but it's worth remembering that this is a guy who even at his jolliest still punches and kicks a number of people very hard in the face every night. Chances are, that would be enough to rack up quite the body count even without guns mounted on the Batmobile.

From Weldon we learn how little that violence conflicts with the character's early days: in his first year he killed twenty-four men, two vampires, a pack of werewolves and several giant mutants. Weldon argues that it's to this “grim, violent proto-Batman” that Denny O'Neil returned in 1970, establishing that as the “real” Batman once the swinging sixties were over: making the loner, badass Batman the default inspiration for later retellings by Frank Miller, Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan and Grant Morrison.

This isn't a book that trundles along with the critical orthodoxy; it has its own ideas at every turn. Apparently the Batman tv series was not well-liked among American fans, despised even, which may be a surprise to those of us brought up to think of it as a bona fide television classic. But this book sticks up for it, and identifies the neverending (and not so positive) effects of the ensuing backlash, which even now has barely petered out. When Weldon talks about Dr Fredric Wertham and his crusade against comics, readers may be shocked to see him say that, at least with regard to Batman, “The guy had a point.”

Being gay, the young Glen Weldon didn't just notice the “subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism” in the comic, he rather enjoyed it. Of course he notes how Wertham manipulated and misrepresented the evidence (for example deleting statements that the young men were much more strongly aroused by Tarzan in his loincloth and Marvel's Sub-Mariner in his skimpy swim trunks), but also praises how passionate and progressive he was in calling out racist and sexist stereotypes.

What Weldon really tries to get at is why Batman works. Why he appeals to nerds and why he is popular with normals (to use his words for those groups), why virtually all his films are huge financial successes, why so many of the comics, games and cartoons work so well, whatever the mood, whatever the style, from the sublime Batman: the Animated Series, which Weldon adores, to the technicolour team-up Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the finale of which he describes as a tour de force.

Partly, of course, this is because the character is owned by a huge multimedia company which can invest in paying the best talent to work on him. Put all that talent to work on Bouncing Boy and you'd still end up with some great comics, games and movies. For Weldon, though, what sets Batman apart, what creates the bond between Batman and Batfans, is a very specific thing: “the oath”, Bruce Wayne's candlelight vow to spend the rest of his life warring on all criminals to avenge the deaths of his parents. That is to say, he is just as obsessed as his fans. ****

This review originally appeared in Interzone #264.

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.

Armada by Ernest Cline | review by Stephen Theaker

Zack Lightman’s dad died in an explosion at a sewage treatment plant, and it made the papers so everyone knows. That was back in 1999. A bully called Douglas Knotcher once took the mickey about it, and got battered to a pulp after Zack went into a blind rage. He’s been trying to live it down, but it hurts to miss his dad so much while finding his death so humiliating. His mum kept all his dad’s stuff in boxes up in the attic. Zack watched his videos, played his games, and wore his jacket covered in high score patches.

A notebook he found there, back when he was ten, made him think his dad had lost it, and chapter two takes us through it. A four-page chronology begins with Space War in 1962 and Star Trek in 1966, then works its way through Star Wars, Close Encounters, Ender’s Game, Battlezone, Elite, The X-Files, Contact and Galaxy Quest, to pick out a few. His dad thought they were all connected, part of a conspiracy controlled by the U.S. military, preparing humanity for an alien invasion.

Now it’s 2018. After Zack sees a Sobrukai Glaive Fighter streaking around outside his high school in Beaverton, Oregon, he thinks he might be cracking up too. It looks pretty cool, like the blade of a two-headed battle axe with a black prism sitting between its serrated wings, but it’s from Armada, his favourite video game, created by Chaos Terrain, who, in a suspiciously Watchmenesque move, hired the best of the best to work on it, people like Gabe Newell, Shigeru Miyamoto, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, John Williams and Morgan Freeman.

The gamer plays a pilot, one of many defending Earth against an invading fleet of alien ships, controlled by anthropomorphic extraterrestrial squids from Tau Ceti. Players often complain about the unbalanced gameplay and the unbeatable missions (uh-oh!), like the one where the Disrupter, with its shields that drop for just three seconds, locks on to Earth and disables all the drones, but that hasn’t harmed its popularity, and Zack, especially, and fortunately, isn’t one to give up when the odds are against him.

There’s a terrestrial spin-off where you pilot a mech, Terra Firma, and Zack plays it sometimes, but just so his pals will join him for the big Armada missions. That’s his passion: it took three years of daily practice to crack the top one hundred, a few months more to make the top ten, and now he’s the sixth best player in the world. His handle is IronBeagle. (Later on, when an attractive young woman gets that it’s a reference to Snoopy vs the Red Baron and Iron Eagle, he’ll know she’s the one.)

The alien ship he saw? Not a hallucination. An alien armada is on the way for real, and Earth really does needs Zack to defend it. Just as he’s about to wallop Douglas Knotcher with a tyre iron after another altercation, an Earth Defence Alliance shuttle arrives to scoop him up. There are more secrets in Zack’s life than he could ever have guessed, and that life will be shorter than he could ever have ever imagined if his gaming skills aren’t sufficient to meet the alien challenge.

This isn’t a book (Century hb, 355pp, £12.99) that provoked strong feelings in me. It was entertaining enough in a three-star Hollywood sort of way: the author’s previous book, Ready Player One, will soon be a Spielberg film, and this one has half a dozen roles into which you could slot a movie star. It might make a good film; it’s not as if we’re overwhelmed with outer-space action, and its conclusion, though a bit cheesy on the page, might still seem novel in cinemas.

The constant referencing of pop culture (apparently a big part of Ready Player One’s popularity) feels a bit ingratiating, and even patronising: if your characters are going to talk about losing their goram shields and being out of frakkin’ power, let us feel clever for recognising them (or at least like we’ve spent our television time wisely). Don’t have another character name the two shows, just in case we didn’t get it.

Maybe this is aimed at younger readers, though they might wonder why this teenager has the cultural touchstones of a middle-aged man. Missing your dad is one thing, but he has apparently watched all the shows and played all the games it’s taken me forty years to get through. That stuff dies down once Zack is out in space and it becomes a decent action adventure, but, even then, I’m not sure tipping your hat to The Last Starfighter makes it okay to nick its plot – even if this is in truth more of a Phantom Menace.**

This review originally appeared in Interzone #260.

The Great Bazaar & Brayan’s Gold by Peter Brett | review by Stephen Theaker

Thousands of years ago humanity was almost wiped out by the nightly attacks of coreling demons, and saved at the last by the discovery of wards which turned the magical power of the demons back upon themselves. The monsters crept back to the centre of the planet, to regroup, recuperate and procreate while humans slowly forgot about them. Eventually many thought the demons nothing but pub tales, so their Return (it is always capitalised) three centuries ago came as an unwelcome surprise.

This book (Tachyon Publications pb, 192pp, $14.95) collects two novellas about Arlen, previously published by Subterranean Press as collectible hardcovers. He is in these stories a young man with a passionate interest in rediscovering the lost wards, not least because he is pursued by a four and a half metre tall rock monster he once managed to injure – accidentally knocking off its arm – which rises up each night and makes a beeline for his current location. A darned inconvenience, but of course he’s clever enough to use it to his advantage at times.

Arlen has studied the books in the Library, and gleaned what knowledge he could, but it’s fragmentary and he needs more. Working as a Messenger, he travels between the Free Cities, taking notes and making sketches of the demons, always on the lookout for new information, and for chances to test in practice what he already knows, or thinks he knows. Given time to prepare, Messengers can prepare a safe place to sleep in the open, surrounded by wards against which the coreling demons smash throughout the night, but that’s no way to live!

“Brayan’s Gold” takes place 324 years after the Return. Arlen, still an apprentice at this stage, and Curk, an older colleague, have taken on a challenging job, to transport a load of thundersticks – what we would call dynamite – to the most remote mining town in the duchy. It’s ten nights’ travel into the height of the mountains, but the reward is fifteen hundred gold suns, an absolute fortune.

As each night falls, mist seeps “from invisible pores in the ground, reeking and foul, slowly coalescing into harsh demonic form”, demons made of wind, rock and wood. The monsters aren’t Arlen’s only problem. There are bandits and betrayal on the route, he can’t rely on drunken Curk, and he is entreated to help two sundered lovers reunite. To top it all will be an encounter with a snow demon that catches him out on the mountain, unprepared and unprotected.

“The Great Bazaar” is set four years later, between chapters sixteen and seventeen of The Warded Man (The Painted Man for UK readers). Arlen can now travel freely on his own, and is on the outskirts of the Krasian Desert. The merchant Abban has him searching for Baha kad’Everam, a hamlet long abandoned to clay and wind demons, which “drop like silent stones from a mile in the sky, snapping their wings open at the last instant to sever a man’s head, snatch him in their hind talons, and take back off without ever touching ground”.

Arlen is after the precious pottery that might with luck still be there unbroken: one pot from a master’s wheel would make his trip. If he makes it back to Abban in Fort Krasia, there will be more trouble, but also the chance to learn the location of Anoch Sun, the lost city, ancient home of Kaji the Deliverer, who conquered the known world and united humanity in its first great war against the demons. A few scraps of defensive magic have kept humanity hanging on, but Anoch Sun might hold the secret of combat wards, for creating magical demon-killing weapons.

Brett’s books are endorsed by Paul W.S. Anderson (“Inspired, compelling and totally addictive!”), which is a recommendation to me if no one else, and like Anderson’s always enjoyable films these novellas reminded me a bit of video games. Pulling a trailer of explosives up a bumpy road, fighting demons in ruins among smashed urns, questing for ancient manuscripts; these are pleasantly familiar scenarios to gamers. The novellas also share with his films an uncomplicated and earnest desire to entertain. I think they succeed.

In an introduction Brett says that he hopes these short adventure stories will offer newcomers a convenient introduction to the Demon Cycle series and its characters, while giving existing fans a broader look at his world and a fix between full-length novels. I can’t speak to the latter, but for newcomers they are perfect; including a dictionary and ward grimoire helps with that. No book in my collection is fatter than The Daylight War, third in the Demon Cycle, and that had put me off reading it. Now it looks like a feast. ****

This review originally appeared in Interzone #259.

Proof of Concept, by Gwyneth Jones (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

Kir is a young woman with an AI embedded in her head, and this was done by her mother, Margrethe Patel, who adopted her precisely for this purpose. Kir was born in one of the heavily irrradiated and ever-growing Dead Zones that cover the Earth while most people cram into overcrowded dictatorial Hives. Mum trained her as a scientist, while touring the world so that people could pay for the use of her onboard computer, and now they have gone deep underground on the Needle Voyager mission, in a massive cavern deep under the Giewont mountain in Poland. There are habitats on Mars and the Moon, but the future is not looking great for humanity, and so the hope is that Margrethe and her team can find a way out. Unfortunately part of the deal is that the scientists are joined in the base by the irritating future equivalent of YouTubers, and as events unfold Kir’s trust in her mother is put under increasing stress. Short novels are one of my favourite things, and at 140pp this hits the sweet spot. Yet even I was wondering, with sixteen minutes of reading to go, how it could possibly wrap up all the (personal, political and criminal) plotlines without at least a few hundred pages more. Somehow it does. There’s room for sequels, and people may be surprised by the suddenness of the ending, but no one could complain that they didn’t get enough story. And it’s an inventive story with strong characterisation. It’s impossible not to sympathise with the difficult situation in which Kir finds herself, to worry for her as she sneaks out of the base to chill out in the black abyss, or to keep one’s fingers crossed as she takes her first tentative steps towards a romantic relationship. ****

The Wildlands Hunt by Martin Charbonneau and Gary Chalk | review by Rafe McGregor

The Wildlands Hunt is the second instalment of the new Lone Wolf gamebook series, which began with The Pit of Darkness in 2017, and follows the adventures of New Order Kai Konor Autumn Snow. Like its predecessor, The Wildlands Hunt is crowdfunded, with progression from funding to delivery proceeding much quicker and smoother the second time around. The project was launched on 28 January 2017, received the required initial funding of €4000 the following day, received €15,000 within a fortnight, and the volume was published in October 2018. Megara Entertainment was founded in 2007 and director Mikaël Louys appears to have been transparent about the company’s financial situation throughout. In March this year, for example, Megara published a hardback collector’s edition of Grey Star the Wizard. This was the first in a short spin-off series – The World of Lone Wolf – that followed the adventures of Grey Star, a Shianti wizard. The four books were written by Ian Page, illustrated by Paul Bonner, and edited by Joe Dever, creator of Lone Wolf and Lone Wolf’s world, Magnamund. Grey Star the Wizard (1985) was succeeded by The Forbidden City (1985), Beyond the Nightmare Gate (1985) and War of the Wizards (1986), making 1985 the most prolific year for the franchise, with The World of Lone Wolf 1–3 published alongside Lone Wolf 4–6 (The Chasm of Doom, Shadow on the Sand and The Kingdoms of Terror). On the Kickstarter updates, Louys reveals that Megara published Grey Star the Wizard at a loss, selling a disappointing two hundred copies. He seems undeterred, however, and after revision of the production model, launched The Forbidden City project as Grey Star the Wizard was released. The campaign has reached €11,845, exceeding its €8000 goal, although the stated delivery date of December 2018 is likely overambitious. For those who have followed the vicissitudes of Lone Wolf publication (which I related in my reviews of Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone and Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai), it will come as no surprise to hear that Megara are currently in the midst of financial problems. The Wildlands Hunt is printed in the same format as The Pit of Darkness (medium octavo hardback), retails at €40 (delivery included), and is only available from the Megara website (www.megara-entertainment.com).  I ordered my copy on 12 October (the transaction cost me a total of just under £37, but no doubt this will rise in direct proportion to Brexit chaos). On 12 November, I received an email from Louys stating that there had been a delay caused by issues with investors. The book arrived on 24 November, along with a free copy of the collector’s edition of Fabled Lands 1: The War-Torn Kingdom by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson (first published in 1996; published by Megara in 2014). My assessment is that Megara are scrupulously honest, but that until the publishing uncertainty is resolved, buyers should be wary. On a related note, I must admit to not contributing to either Autumn Snow Kickstarter project – as much as I long for more Lone Wolf gamebooks, past experience has made me wary of paying any small presses upfront.

Like The Pit of Darkness, The Wildlands Hunt has been released in French and English and combines the literary expertise of Martin Charbonneau with the artistic expertise of Gary Chalk. The volume is a perfect companion to The Pit of Darkness, with another wonderful colour cover by Chalk, twenty new full-page black and white illustrations, and several smaller ones that I didn’t recognise from previous publications.  Chalk’s artwork is widely-praised for an instantly-recognisable style that foregrounds clear lines, the use of negative space, and deliberately disproportionate figures. His drawings are also incredibly expressive, as a quick comparison of the illustrations for sections 65, 140 and 318 reveals. The first depicts the Ragadorn city guard, three men oozing so much menace and hostility that the picture alone motivated my decision to avoid the encounter. The Red Mask slaver in 140 looks just as deadly and dangerous, but Chalk’s representation provides a subtle invitation to the player to take up combat. Finally, the stagecoach ticket-seller is depicted with consummate pathos, imprisoned behind the bars of his counter, lending a melancholy mood to what purports to be an occasion for celebration. In keeping with The Pit of Darkness, there is no colour map in The Wildlands Hunt (these have been a mainstay of the Lone Wolf series to date), but my parcel arrived with a separate map (in colour) of the city of Ragadorn (where the second part of the adventure takes place). While I appreciate the gesture from Megara, I thought it detracted from the high production values of the gamebook, a laminated A4 sheet (too big to be slipped inside the book) that is functional rather than artistic and also superfluous to play (I didn’t use it at all). My review of The Pit of Darkness was critical of the number of typos and formatting errors, but there are much fewer of the former and none of the latter in the second instalment of the series (in my gameplay, anyway). There are, however, occasionally unusual turns of phrase and I wonder if this is a consequence of translation from the original French. At times these can simply read a little awkwardly, but one instance seems to make a racial slur against a particular character – which, permissible though it might be in a fantasy world is unnecessarily provocative in the context of publication and incongruous with the humanism that pervades the franchise. (I have not read the French version, though, so it may well be the result of a loss in translation.)

I gave The Pit of Darkness high praise for its balance in terms of gaming: difficult but not impossible; solving the perennial problem of healing and endurance point recovery; and presenting progressively more challenging encounters. The second and third of these hold for The Wildlands Hunt, which adds two more welcome elements. First, the use of the Kai disciplines is perfectly pitched – they all prove useful somewhere and no one in particular is essential for completing the gamebook. Second, there is a clear game (although not narrative) structure: the adventure begins with Autumn Snow held prisoner on a pirate ship; she must then navigate the trials and tribulations of Ragadorn; finally, she ventures out into the Wildlands that separate Ragadorn from her homeland of Sommerlund. My only complaint with respect to the game is that I found it too easy. Granted, my version of Autumn Snow is now an Aspirant, able to use six rather than five Kai disciplines, but as she failed to accrue anything of great value in The Pit of Darkness, she isn’t particularly powerful. I have always equipped my various Kai characters – Lone Wolf, True Friend (in the New Order series), and now Autumn Snow – with a bow and this was especially useful in The Wildlands Hunt. On reflection, I wonder if it was too useful and that without it the Wildlands would have proved much more dangerous than they were in my gameplay. My main criticism of the gamebook is its narrative. Despite the exemplary game structure, the story itself fails to fit the overarching narrative initiated by The Pit of Darkness and to match the internal rigour of the various Lone Wolf series so far. The Pit of Darkness concluded with Autumn Snow losing her Kai mentor and discovering a Nadziranim (evil sorcerer) plot set to unfold in the Maakenmire swamp. The final section saw Autumn Snow on the island of Kirlu, headed for Misty Bay and thence to Sommerlund, where she would report to her Kai superiors in the hope of being dispatched on the mission to the Maakenmire. The title of the second adventure was revealed as Slaves of the Mire, which appeared to reference this mission. When the title was changed to The Wildlands Hunt, I assumed this would chart the journey of the mission from Sommerlund to the Maakenmire through the Wildlands. When I began playing The Wildlands Hunt, it seemed as if the slings and arrows of fortune had taken Autumn Snow off course and the hunt of the Wildlands would feature her as the hunted, attempting to reach Sommerlund by land rather than by sea, fleeing from enemies in Ragadorn. Instead, Autumn Snow is the hunter in the Wildlands, having teamed up with an new ally – Athania, captain of the Valkharim (personal guard to the Overlord of Ragadorn) – and pursuing an exciting but irresponsible digression from her duty to report to her Kai superiors. While in the Wildlands there is a further twist setting the whole campaign in a different direction, although the title of book three is (once again) Slaves of the Mire… so perhaps the overarching plot has not been lost after all. This sense of meandering over mission is replicated internally and while the whole game is fast-paced, much of the action seems incidental or supplementary. This is the first gamebook set in Dever’s Magnamund that has, in consequence of his untimely death in November 2016, been published without his guiding hand. Dever’s influence as a master gamer and accomplished storyteller defied detection, but is revealed in its absence – the lack of the economy, artifice and vision that have underpinned all of the previous gamebooks, including The Pit of Darkness. I concluded my review of the latter by stating that the series could be the best addition to Magnamund since the Magnakai campaign ended in 1988, but I fear that it has, like Autumn Snow herself, lost direction.

The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock | review by Stephen Theaker

This book (Tor Books ebook, 7569ll) tells the story of Michael Moorcock, a hard-working writer of fantasy, science fiction and literary fiction plagued by the noise of a mysterious swarm. As a teenager, already at work in publishing, Moorcock meets Friar Isidore, who takes him to Alsacia, a magical Sanctuary with connections to all time and space by way of the moonbeam roads. There he meets people like Dick Turpin, Jim Bowie and Buffalo Bill.

At first he thinks them all actors on a film set, and later he comes to think the whole experience must have been a dream, but then comes the whispering, beginning shortly after the birth of his children, at which point it is but the “faintest of distant murmurings”, growing into “a torrent of unfamiliar, whispering voices”, and later becoming so unbearable that he can “barely ignore it for seconds at a time”.

That noise abates only in Alsacia, so he decides to stay there. He eventually becomes friends with the four musketeers and Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and thence involved in the war between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. Drawn into a desperate plot to save King Charles from Oliver Cromwell and the scaffold, Moorcock must balance principle, friendship and his own responsibilities, choosing to help his new comrades though they must surely fail.

His story is told in the first person, and the reader may find themselves wondering how much credit these adventures are owed. The whispering begins when he has been “worrying what was best for the baby, where we should move and so on”, and much of his time in Alsacia is spent romantically with Moll Midnight, the inspiration for his most popular historical fantasies, while his wife and children believe him to be recuperating at a retreat.

Moorcock married young, to Helena, and they had children when young, and though his love for those children isn’t in question it doesn’t feel like he was ready to have them, and the character’s justifications for his absences fall flat throughout. At times it feels like the whole thing is a tall tale told to his children to explain away the times when he abandoned them, a fanciful excuse for a mundane affair.

He takes them to the cinema and the roof garden of Derry and Toms, but isn’t always there for everyday life. He comes across pretty badly. He takes lots of drugs (“where the coke and the speed met the mary jane and the wine my poor, puny little ego decided that promises were negotiable”), decries “unhappy women who eroticised inequality”, and at times becomes “briefly, a roaring monster with my friends or Helena”.

It is easier to cheer on his successes in publishing, from Tarzan Adventures and Sexton Blake Library to New Worlds, Elric, Jerry Cornelius and American success, “going instantly from work-for-hire hack to literary novelist”. He explains the two strands of his writing career thus: the fantasies are paperbacks and take three days to write, while the literary books appear in hardcover, are reviewed by the mainstream press, and take ten days to write.

His encounters with writers, editors and publishers make the book unmissable for publishing geeks and fans of the new wave, whatever its merits as a novel. He has a “desultory correspondence” with William Burroughs, trusts Barrington J. Bayley with the secret of Alsacia, and goes to the pub with Harry Harrison, Ted Carnell and John Wyndham. He helps “barmy, brilliant, treacherous old Phil” K. Dick get a publishing deal with Jonathan Cape.

E.C. Tubb tries to get off with Moorcock’s mum at a party. John Brunner gets it in the neck – “I tried to tell him he irritated people” – but gets credit for writing “with tremendous brio”. Other names are somewhat familiar, like Jack Allard, Jack Slade and Rex Fisch, though it’s worth remembering that the book tells us: “All of the characters ... are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.”

The narrative is straightforward and linear, so it’s not a difficult book, but it is peculiar. Like The Coming of the Terraphiles it may divide its readership. The autobiographical elements will fascinate fans, but if the book weren’t stretched out to fit those facts it might have felt a bit tighter and less repetitive. Bored readers should skip to chapter forty-one before giving up.

That’s when the book springs to life, with the mission to save King Charles. Moorcock, Rupert and the musketeers sneak into Whitehall with an unwitting impersonator, then try to escape down the frozen Thames at night while hunted by Cromwell’s men. Like his fictional equivalent, our Moorcock has few equals when writing adventure tales, and the last forty thousand words here comprise one of his best. ****

This review originally appeared in Interzone #258.

River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

In March 1857 Albert Broussard proposed the Hippo Act, which would bring hippopotamuses into the United States to be raised for meat. Hippo ranches began to open in August of that year, and by November the Mississippi river was being dammed to create extra marshes for all the hippos to live in. This area was known as the Harriet. Unfortunately, by January the following year hippos were on the loose, ranching in the Harriet became much more difficult, and in time the area came to be dominated by criminals and cutthroats. Nevertheless, pansexual Blackpudlian Winslow Remington Houndstooth tried real hard to get a ranch going, and he was well on the way when malice struck. Some time later, he’s accepting a mission from the federal government. They want the feral hippos cleared out of the Harriet. He gathers a team: heavily pregnant contract killer Adelia Reyes, explosives expert Hero, meteor-hammer wielding Regina “Archie” Archimbault (and her boy assistant Neville), and fastest gun in the West Calhoun Hotchkiss. The government expects them to catch the feral hippos one by one and escort them off the territory. Houndstooth has a rather quicker method in mind, and he’s also hoping to squeeze in some revenge along the way. One problem they’ll face is that the local crime boss rather likes having the wild hippos around, since they keep civilisation out of the area, making it perfect for his needs, and give him a convenient way of disposing of his enemies.

This violent novella feels like a men (and women and Hero) on a mission story, but almost as soon as the team is put together, it begins to fall apart. There’s nothing wrong with subverting expectations, but it does feel unsatisfying. The villain’s plan is hard to understand – he seems to be caught unawares by the completely predictable consequences of his actions – and for the most part the feral hippos function quite similarly to piranha fish, swarming upon anyone they catch in the water. It becomes more interesting on the occasions when individual hippos step into the limelight. It’s got a good cover and a high concept, and that’ll be enough to carry a lot of readers through the book quite happily, but for others it’ll probably feel a bit thin. I found the characters likeable and interesting, especially Houndstooth, Archie, and the enigmatic Hero, whose preferred pronoun is they. The book doesn’t always handle this well: in a sentence like “Hero had grinned and gone back to work, and Archie had caught Houndstooth beaming at them” the reader has no way of knowing whether Houndstooth is beaming only at Hero, which would have romantic implications, or at both Archie and Hero, which would just be jolly. ***

Richochet Joe, by Dean Koontz (Amazon Original Stories) | review by Stephen Theaker

Joe lives in a small town called Little City, where he attends Little Junior College, in hopes of one day becoming “an English teacher or an advertising copywriter, or maybe a destitute novelist”. While volunteering for litter-picking in the park and considering whether to ask Portia on a date, he is seized with the urge to say “Corvette!” and to then run off towards one. When he touches the car he shouts “But stop!” and then carries on to that, and thus from one clue to the next till he gets to the source of the trouble. Hence the nickname, Ricochet Joe. It’s a funny idea, and one with obvious potential for television or film, but as a book this would seem a little old-fashioned were it not a Kindle in Motion title. The plot, the writing style, the way Joe talks about Portia (and “her delightfully distracting presence”) make it feel like something from the fifties or sixties, like one of Robert Heinlein’s more fantastical stories. But the Kindle in Motion elements make it feel very modern, Oliver Barrett’s art brought to striking life by Belief Agency. The only downside is that having those media elements enabled also fixes the background colour of regular pages to a grubby white. Worth a download, if only for the novelty of the moving pictures. ***

Priestess, by Justine Geoffrey (Martian Migraine Press) | review

My first taste of Cthulhu erotica, and I wasn’t left with a shadow over Innsmouth, if you know what I mean. My Dunwich was not fully horrored. The thing remained on the doorstep. Doom did not come to Sarnath. This 2013 ebook brings together four previously published titles: Anicka and Kamil, Red Monolith Frenzy, Yvette’s Interview and Green Fever Dream. It starts with a dedication to “Ramsey Campbell, the first man to render my veils” (sic). Anicka, “teen witch of Stregoicavar and High Priestess of the Black Stone”, is trying to summon Daoloth, from Campbell’s story The Render of the Veils, and she goes about that by having sex with her brother and anyone else she can lay her hands (and inhumanly long tongue) on. Favourite phrase here: “Daoloth activates your hyper-chakras”! The Render puts her on the trail of Justine herself, who might become the next priestess, and does become the protagonist for the rest of the book. The sex is usually gross but consensual, except when Justine breaks out “the Triple Word of Power”; the descriptions of unfortunate people like “the pinheaded mongrel freak” are much more offputting. The dialogue all appears in italics rather than within speech marks, which is a bit distancing, and a lot of apostrophes are missing, which is not at all sexy. The synonyms used for relevant body parts (“dripping vacancy”, “orgone-sheathed cockmeat”) can be quite amusing. Not my kind of thing, but I’m glad I gave it a try, and people in the market for Lovecraftian erotica may well find that it calls their Cthulhu. Stephen Theaker **

Retief! by Keith Laumer (Baen Books) | review by Stephen Theaker

Retief, a junior member on various ambassadorial teams, clears up the messes of his incompetent superiors with a combination of brains and fists. The stories in this 2002 collection tend to be action-driven comedies, cynical reflections on the madness of the world and what a good man with two good fists could do to sort things out. There’s a very American impatience here with the limitations of diplomacy. Stories of competent men fighting their way out of difficult situations can be brilliant – many Jack Vance books, like the Demon Princes series, fall into this category. But Retief’s world is flimsy, his enemies paper cut-outs, and he tears through them as if the paper in question was single-ply tissue. He is stronger, more intelligent and more sensible than everyone he meets. His opponents are fat, effete and in some cases literally lightweight. A typical story sees Retief visit a world where the workers have overthrown the technological elite, with theoretically hilarious consequences. These stories may well have been based on actual events Keith Laumer himself had witnessed during his foreign postings, but, as written here, it comes across as extremely condescending to the working class. Women tend to be either strict secretaries, or very literal rewards for a good day’s work (with “very fat watchamacallits”). They are very rarely involved in the action, and often entirely absent from stories. The exception to the rule goes by the Bond-esque name of Miss Braswell. None of which is to say that this was entirely unenjoyable. In an undemanding way it’s okay, and it’s the kind of goofball sf I like to try writing myself. But the stories left no impression on me – and not for the first time, since according to my list of books read I’d already read some of them in a previous Retief collection, Envoy to New Worlds. None raised a flash of recollection. The most enjoyable section of the book was the complete novel included, Retief’s War, where an offworlder is encouraging the formation of a police state on a world where robots have evolved to live in anarchy. ***

Lost Souls, by Kelley Armstrong (Subterranean Press) | review

Gabriel Walsh is a thirty-year-old defence attorney who would be feeling bored if he wasn’t so down in the dumps. He finds his day-to-day work rather too easy, and about a month ago he had a row with a key employee, his firm’s investigator, Olivia. What’s more, she is also his chief crush, they both have fae blood, and they had recently discovered a big secret about their joint destiny. Gabriel hasn’t yet discovered that the handsome hobgoblin hanging around his office is actually his father, but the old, old man is looking out for him all the same, and brings a potential case to Gabriel’s attention in hopes that it’ll be enough to tempt Olivia back onto the team. A horny middle-aged guy picked up a dripping wet braless hitchhiker in the middle of the night, and she led him deep into the countryside before disappearing. It sounds like an over-familiar scenario to the two investigators, an urban legend doing the rounds for the umpteenth time, but it becomes a bit more serious when they realise that people have been dying. This was a fairly enjoyable novella, a part of the author’s Cainsville series. A Goodreads user asked whether people who hadn’t read the other books in the series would be able to follow it, and my answer was that I think they can, because it sets out the background very clearly. However, new readers may not care very much about it, because it does for the most part read like an extended epilogue to (and recovery from) the previous story, with the investigation only really beginning in earnest about two-thirds through the short book. Gabriel and Olivia are a good romantic pair, well-suited and both with enough jagged edges to make their reluctance to get together believable. Stephen Theaker ***

The Jack Vance Treasury, by Jack Vance (Subterranean Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

This was my favourite book I read in 2017, and maybe my favourite book ever. Edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan, this collection of short stories and novellas was originally published as an expensive six hundred page hardback in 2006, and unfortunately the ebook isn’t generally available in the United Kingdom, but I was able to acquire it in a Subterranean Press Humble Bundle (every one of which has been an essential purchase). It contains several of my favourite stories of all time, for example “The Moon Moth”, about the hunt for a murderer on a world where everyone wears masks and speech must be accompanied by the appropriate musical instrument; “The Dragon Masters”, where Joaz Banbeck of Aerlith must lead the fight when aliens return to Banbeck Vale; or “The Overworld”, where Cugel the Clever encounters a village of people surrounded by filth but delighted to live in such luxury. Though I had read many of the stories before, either in short story collections or fix-up novels, it was a sheer treat to read them again, and there were many interesting stories with which I was not familiar, such as “The New Prime”, “Sail” and “The Men Return”, a very strange tale of a world where causality had gone away. The language is always a delight: stories begin with lines like “The archveult Xexamedes, digging gentian roots in Were Wood, became warm with exhertion” (“Morreion”) and are full of new vocabulary. Its weakness is that there are not a lot of female protagonists, and the supporting female characters can be caricaturishly simpering. “The Mitr” is an exception, the terribly sad story of a shipwrecked young woman, which reads like it could have been written yesterday. There are eighteen stories in all, each with an afterword extracted by the editors from Vance’s writings about his work. These don’t always comment directly on the story itself, but always add to our understanding of his work. The afterword to “The Dragon Masters”, for example, quotes him considering in 1977 the science behind the worlds of Rigel in the Demon Princes, which might surprise those who think of him primarily as a fantasist. You may not be able to buy this book. If you can, I recommend doing so! If not, seek out these stories in whatever editions are available in your country. *****

The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord | review by Stephen Theaker

Rafi Abowen Delarua, Moo to his friends, also known as Rafidelarua, lives on the planet Cygnus Beta. For the last year he has attended the Tlaxce National Lyceum, and he’s getting bored, even though it’s a school for training “rogue and random psi gifted” to use their powers wisely. He is only fourteen when the book begins, but everyone is worried about him: his notorious father was immensely powerful, and did not use his powers for good.

Staff at the Lyceum leverage Rafi’s interest in the sport of wallrunning to persuade him to wear a cap, which will let them monitor the development of his powers more closely. The results are worrying: his psi powers manifest when he dreams about sex, and the dreams come with “a truly astonishing amount of fear”. He sneaks away from school over the weekend, and heads offworld, to the planet Punartam, where he’ll wallrun for shady Baranngaithe.

The galactic background to all of this is that the planet Sadira was devastated by a surprise biological attack, leaving “its biosphere locked in toxic regeneration for centuries to come” and its people scattered. Old Sadira had been the “leader of the galaxy… or at least policeman and judge and occasional executioner”, in part thanks to the psychic abilities of its people. Their absence from galactic affairs leaves a power vacuum and opportunities for the ruthless.

The government of New Sadira is desperate to bring female survivors to their new world. As a result “Sadiri women are now the galaxy’s rarest and most valuable commodity”, whether they like it or not, including those in a community of Sadiri recently established on Cygnus Beta. Meanwhile, Terra is out there, until now cut off from all these shenanigans, to allow us time to reach full maturity. The myths claim that endangered branches of humanity were brought long ago from Earth to Cygnus Beta to thrive in safety.

This was a disappointing book, for reasons that are a bit difficult to explain: it has what should be a satisfying array of mysteries, interplanetary politics, future sports, and interesting societal structures. Being lost for the first tenth of it didn’t help. The prologue is five thousand words long, a flood of information that simply serves to obscure the book’s main plot: a boy who leaves his home planet to play sports just as the galaxy gets crazy; it’s like the beginning of the Alan Smithee Dune, if each planet had names in three different languages.

That’s not the only aspect of the book that felt unnecessarily obfuscatory and foggy. For example, certain passages about a minor supporting character, Ntenman, and only him, are in the first person. The novel explains itself as a compilation of information recovered from datachips, audioplugs, data vaults and filigree, so perhaps the in-story explanation is there, but why him and no one else? It leads to the confusing assumption that he will be much more important to the plot than he really is.

Stories of future sports can be thrilling – they feature for example in Ben Bova’s The Duelling Machine and Jack Vance’s Trullion: Alastor 2262 – but wallrunning doesn’t sound particularly compelling. Two teams of players must run from the bottom of a wall to the top, guided by a strategist’s signals, conveyed through grav-bands on their wrists. Rafi plays as a booby, a deliberately useless player who lets everyone else practise how to handle team-mates’ mistakes. His skills don’t improve, but the teams around him do, almost preternaturally so.

Though the walls can sometimes be tilted by the players’ concerted movements, and some courses feature gravity twists, it sounds pretty much like bulldog’s charge with everyone running in the same direction, which is hard to imagine being much fun to play or watch. That the sport is also known as Forerunner is perhaps too big a clue to where the book will take it, and this heavy-handed hint is offered long before the reader has had a chance to start caring about the sport or its secret purpose.

Maybe that is what makes it a hard book to like: it assumes from the beginning that the reader is fully invested, in all its information, in all its characters and planets, in their multitude of names, in everything it wants to say. The plot takes a while to get going, and starts winding down with a quarter of the book still to go. However, the plot pieces do fall into place neatly towards the end, and a later scene where Rafi watches Dllenahkh, a Sadiri, return briefly to his home planet was extremely moving. I wouldn’t mind reading more from the author, but I’d want to start with the first in the series. ***

This review originally appeared in Interzone #258.

Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

To be the first from your family to go to university is a curious experience, and, although Binti’s family is exceptionally talented, she is the first of the whole Himba tribe to attend a very special university: it’s on another planet. She’s made friends there with Okwu, a Meduse who was present at an event in the first book that left Binti badly traumatised – and, more positively, left her with alien head tentacles that wave around when she gets mad instead of braids. A year later, she is still getting used to those, to everything, and, even though she’s a dab hand at using maths to calm herself down, she decides to return home during the holidays, to Earth, to go on a traditional pilgrimage and sort herself out. When she gets there, there’ll be some comfort, some pain, and a new, unexpected and revelatory adventure. Binti is a fascinating character with a fascinating background who is living a fascinating life, and what more do you need for a great book? Though this is the middle story in a trilogy, and at the end things are set up for the third book rather than concluded, there is plenty going on. It is easy to sympathise with her feelings about it all. It’s a book with lots of fun ideas, like spaceships that are giant pregnant fish, and when Binti dances she can “manifest mathematical current within me, harmonising it with my muscles, skin, sinew, and bones”. However, she’s forbidden from dancing, from going in the water, from being seen in public without otjize, the happiness of returning home tempered, as it is for so many people, by the need to fit back into the metaphorical cocoon. An old friend, Dele, tells her sadly why he doesn’t want to hang with her while she’s back: “You’re too complex.” But as she comes to realise, “Change was my destiny.”

Note that the Kindle edition can only be downloaded on a limited number of devices, which seems odd for a DRM-free title. We ran out quickly, because everyone in the family wanted it on their Kindles. ****