Author: Civilian Reader

Guest Post: “Looking for God in Melnibone Places : Fantasy and Religion” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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TchaikovskyA-AuthorPicI ran a workshop at a convention last year on world building. It would be accurate to say that it was a section of a world building workshop I’ve been running for several years, because whenever I set out a bunch of topics, I generally manage about a third of them before we get hung up on something, and the rest never gets touched.

This time round, I dived into social conventions: governments, class systems, and then we hit the brick wall of religion and that is where the discussion firmly stayed.

This recurred to me while editing The Tiger and the Wolf because one of the main ways this series differs from Shadows of the Apt is the spiritual dimension. The insect-kinden of Shadows are aware of the concept of gods but have no truck with the idea. Their attitude to the numinous (those who can even conceive of it) is as something to master and control, not appease or worship. For Tiger I wanted to explore a culture that lived in constant dialogue with the spiritual. The various tribes’ ability to shapeshift is the cornerstone of a religion that, though it finds different expressions in different tribes, links them all together with a common cosmology. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “How to Build a Dragon” by Marc Turner

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TurnerM-AuthorPicIf I asked you to picture a dragon in your mind, what would it look like? It would probably have wings and breathe fire. It might also have scales and a long barbed tail. As for the rest of its body, though, it would just look… well, dragon-y, right?

If a winged and armoured reptile is the basic template for a dragon, its other physical characteristics can vary hugely. When I was younger I did some roleplaying, and my game-world of choice was that of the Dragonlance novels. In those books, you find a real menagerie of dragons. Different breeds come in different colours, and breathe out different things. So, you get the quintessential red fire-breathing dragon, but you also get white frost-breathing dragons and blue lightning-breathing dragons. Those different breeds vary in size and power, and live in different habitats. Continue reading →

Interview with JACEY BEDFORD

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BedfordJ-AuthorPicLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Jacey Bedford?

I’m a British writer who qualified as a librarian and then spent twenty years as a full-time folk singer touring the world with vocal trio Artisan. Since the band retired from the road I’ve become a booking agent, fixing music tours for other performers. I work from home and split my time between my music business and my writing. I’ve sold short stories to anthologies and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. My first two novels for DAW, Empire of Dust and Crossways, both science fiction, came out in 2014 and 2015 respectively and Winterwood, my first historical fantasy, comes out in February 2016. Continue reading →

Interview with CLIFFORD BEAL

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BealC-AuthorPicLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Clifford Beal?

I’m a former defence journalist turned PR professional who started writing books on weekends in what was left of my spare time. My first published book, back in 2007, was actually non-fiction 18th century maritime history.

Your next novel, The Guns of Ivrea, will be published by Solaris in February. It looks pretty awesome: How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

It’s an old-school epic fantasy set in a Mediterranean-like world very similar to our own 15th century, but inhabited by not just men and women but also merfolk and a bestiary of mythological creatures. The plot revolves around some interesting characters: A pirate turned admiral, a jaded mercenary, a monk on the run, and an inquisitive mermaid who all find an unlikely common cause as their kingdom slowly drifts towards war. It is the first in a series I’m calling “Tales of Valdur”. Continue reading →

Review: Recent HORUS HERESY Short Fiction

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HorusHeresy-2016eBooks

It’s been a while since I read anything set in Black Library’s ongoing Horus Heresy series — even longer when you just consider novels (I’m now two behind). I’m also having a rather long, frustrating bout of reader’s block. Over the past week or so, BL released a handful of new eBooks, and I thought the familiarity of the series and the slim length of the stories might help knock me back into a reading rhythm. Some of these stories were published before in other formats (as audio-dramas, for example).

Featuring: John French, Graham McNeill, James Swallow, Gav Thorpe, Chris Wraight Continue reading →

Music Recommendation: A Couple of Recent BREAKING BENJAMIN Singles

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I’ve been a fan of Breaking Benjamin ever since I found their debut album (Saturate, 2002) in Tower Records in Kumamoto, Japan. I think it came out on the same day as Seether’s Disclaimer, which I also picked up (as a result, I’ve always connected the two bands). Anyway, after a long hiatus due to illness, the band returned last year with Dark Before Dawn, an incredibly strong album. They’ve released two singles to day: “Failure” and “Angels Fall”. Here are the music videos…

“Failure”

“Angels Fall”

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Quick Review: FOREST OF MEMORY by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor.com)

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Kowal-MR-ForestOfMemoryAn intriguing, thought-provoking near-future story

Katya deals in Authenticities and Captures, trading on nostalgia for a past long gone. Her clients are rich and they demand items and experiences with only the finest verifiable provenance. Other people’s lives have value, after all.

But when her A.I. suddenly stops whispering in her ear she finds herself cut off from the grid and loses communication with the rest of the world.

The man who stepped out of the trees while hunting deer cut her off from the cloud, took her A.I. and made her his unwilling guest.

There are no Authenticities or Captures to prove Katya’s story of what happened in the forest. You’ll just have to believe her.

This is the first thing by Mary Robinette Kowal that I’ve ever read. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I really liked what I found. This won’t be the last thing of Kowal’s that I read.

The synopsis above really tells you everything you need to know about the story — it’s not only short enough that any more detail would spoil everything, but Kowal’s world-building within the text is sparse and sometimes vague. At times, I really wanted to learn more; but for the purposes of the story, it’s actually unnecessary. For example, we never learn any specifics about Katya’s employers, or the motivations of a person she stumbles across in the forest. If we had, then the story might have felt a little bit more substantial, true, but it’s still a satisfying read.

The novella is presented as a typed account by Katya (typos and all), and she has an interesting voice. If you take the purposeful typos out of the equation, this is very well-written, and Kowal’s prose is excellent. Unwittingly, Katya’s writing highlights the complete dependence her society has developed on mobile and networked technology. It’s a nicely-composed critique, perhaps, of today’s ever-increasing addiction to cell phones, tablets, the internet and, especially, social media. There are references to “captures” and feeds, painting a picture of willful, conscious abdication of privacy. The subject is well-presented, and lacks the heavy-handedness of, for example, David Eggers’s The Circle — a novel that practically bludgeons the reader with a critique that borders on technophobia. I’d be interested in reading more fiction in this setting.

If you like your near-future sci-fi thoughtful and thought-provoking, then Forest of Memory is for you. Recommended.

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Forest of Memory is published by Tor.com next month. For more, check out the author’s website, and follow her on Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads. The author’s next novel is Ghost Talkers, due to be published by Tor Books in July 2016.

Upcoming: THE MIRROR THIEF by Martin Seay (Melville House)

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SeayM-MirrorThiefUSAnother novel that has frequently popped up in my Goodreads and Amazon recommendations, as well as a number of “Most Anticipated Books of 2016” lists, The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay sounds pretty fascinating:

A globetrotting, time-bending, wildly entertaining literary masterpiece in the tradition of Cloud Atlas.

One of the most audacious and confident debuts in years, The Mirror Thief is a masterful puzzle: a genre-hopping novel that combines an intricate, fast-paced mystery with serious literary ambition. Set in three cities in three eras, The Mirror Thief calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its serendipitous mix of entertainment and literary merit.

The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world’s most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination — was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing? — the Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death. One man, however — a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose — has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city’s terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten …

Meanwhile, in two other iterations of Venice — Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today — two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret…

All three stories will weave together into a spell-binding tour-de-force that is impossible to put down — an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice… and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of literary art.

The Mirror Thief is due to be published by Melville House, in May 2016.

Upcoming: THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS by John Wray (Canongate/FSG)

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John Wray‘s next novel, The Lost Time Accidents sounds fascinating:

Every moment that passes is a

Lost Time Accident.

Close your eyes, Children,

when you want

to stop Time…

Haunted by a failed love affair and the darkest of family secrets, Waldemar ‘Waldy’ Tolliver wakes one morning to discover that he has been exiled from the flow of time. The world continues to turn, and Waldy is desperate to find his way back.

In his ambitious and fiercely inventive new novel, John Wray takes us from turn-of-the-century Viennese salons buzzing with rumours about Einstein’s radical new theory to the death camps of the Second World War, from the golden age of post-war pulp science fiction to a startling discovery in a modern-day Manhattan apartment packed to the ceiling with artefacts of contemporary life.

The Lost Time Accidents is a bold and epic saga set against the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.

Both the UK and US cover have been popping up on my Goodreads and Amazon recommendations. I’m certainly intrigued. The Lost Time Accidents is published in the UK on June 16th, by Canongate (above, left); and on February 9th in the US, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Wray is also the author of Lowboy (published by Canongate), The Right Hand of Sleep and Canaan’s Tongue (published by Vintage).