I feel like this post needs a disclaimer from the get-go. I like Chosen One stories, and tales where something sets the main character apart from everyone else, makes her special in some way (often, let’s be honest, at the cost of relationships or her entire way of life, not always for the better). I could wander over to my bookshelves right now and pull out the books where the main character has a rare or unheard of or forgotten ability, where someone is secretly the long-lost heir to the throne, or where they’re the most powerful X of their age. If I stacked ‘em all up, they’d at least reach the ceiling, maybe even the peak of the roof. My own urban fantasy series is filled with asskickers who are pretty amazing at what they do – so much so that I probably could have called it Five Badasses and a Bookseller, instead of Night Owls. Continue reading
Author: Civilian Reader
Guest Post: “The Undertaking” by Snorri Kristjansson
Have you ever done something you kind of didn‘t quite believe you would manage to do, even while you were doing it? Finished a marathon, wrestled a crocodile, asked someone out in sixth grade? These are the achievements that will come to define your life. We all have them – times when we’ve pushed ourselves to the limit of what we thought we could do, and pushed so hard that we popped out on the other side. Sometimes, of course, it ends in screaming and loss of limbs – but occasionally you actually succeed. Calibrating slightly for levels of adrenaline and fear of immediate death when attempting these feats, underneath is the same feeling of detached wonder and “Whoa. This is happening” – and it starts like this. Continue reading
Guest Post: “Whole Cloth Worlds, A Cheeky Cost-Benefit” by K.M. McKinley
World-building is a cool part of fantasy, but one of the hardest things to get right.
I like realistic worlds in my fiction. By its very nature, a goodly part of fantasy eschews them. A big chunk of the genre tends to fairly simple settings the better to tell its stories. There’s a real art to writing books like that, and as a narrative style it has its advantages, but it sacrifices verisimilitude. Fair enough, not everyone wants reality in their fantasy. The clue, you may say, is in the name. Who wants realistic fantasy?
Well, I do. I do want reality in my fantasy, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. I’m firmly of the school that the stranger the world is, the more real it has to feel. Construct a real enough imaginary environment and anything seems possible. I love Sword and Sorcery, with its vertiginous sense of deep time and holy-cow weirdness. I like the less grand guignol end of grimdark, as it suggests grubby existences of high infant mortality rates and oppressive lives lived in suffocating cultures. I love worlds with real ecologies, societies, economies and geographies. All of the “ies” Bring me more, so that I might feast upon them! Michael Swanwick, Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe, Ursula Le Guin, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Richard Morgan, George R.R. Martin, Robert Silverberg and of course JRR Tolkien – these are writers whose works I love. Continue reading
Interview with DAN WELLS
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Dan Wells?
Hi! I’m Dan Wells, and I write books. I mostly play around in horror and science fiction, but I’ve dabbled in fantasy, steampunk, thriller, humor, historical, and one time I wrote a novella about a Mormon Pioneer superhero who fights zombies. So I kind of cover everything. I lived in Germany for the past couple of years, and am now back in the states, in Utah. I have 5.5 children, and collect board games with obsessive zeal. My favorite movie is Jaws, I have Darth Vader’s autograph, and I will eat ramen at literally any opportunity. Continue reading
Excerpt: STEEPLE by Jon Wallace (Gollancz)
The second excerpt of the week (after Al Robertson’s Crashing Heaven). Published in the UK yesterday by Gollancz, Steeple is the sequel to Jon Wallace‘s well-received Barricade. Here’s the synopsis:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep meets The Raid in this high action SF thriller.
Another high action SF dystopia perfect for fans of Richard Morgan and Alfred Bester alike. The follow-up to the acclaimed Barricade this another short, sharp and kinetic SF thriller
Kenstibec is a Ficial – a genetically engineered artificial life form; tough, skilled, hard to kill. Or at least he was. He’s lost the nanotech that constantly repaired him. Life just got real. Just like it is for the few remaining humans in this blighted world – the Reals; locked in a fight over a ruined world with the Ficials they created to make Utopia.
And now Kenstibec must take a trip to the pinnicle of our failed civilisation. The Steeple is a one thousand storey tower that looms over the wreckage of London. It is worshipped, feared and haunted by attack droids and cannibals. And the location of a secret that just might save Kenstibec’s life.
The only way is up. Continue reading
Review: ROCKS by Joe Perry (Simon & Schuster)
“My Life In and Out of Aerosmith” – A superb rock memoir
Before the platinum records or the Super Bowl half-time show or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Joe Perry was a boy growing up in small-town Massachusetts. He idolized Jacques Cousteau and built his own diving rig that he used to explore a local lake. He dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. But Perry’s neighbors had teenage sons, and those sons had electric guitars, and the noise he heard when they started playing would change his life.
The guitar became his passion, an object of lust, an outlet for his restlessness and his rebellious soul. That passion quickly blossomed into an obsession, and he got a band together. One night after a performance he met a brash young musician named Steven Tyler; before long, Aerosmith was born. What happened over the next forty-five years has become the stuff of legend: the knockdown, drag-out, band-splintering fights; the drugs, the booze, the rehab; the packed arenas and timeless hits; the reconciliations and the comebacks.
Rocks is an unusually searching memoir of a life that spans from the top of the world to the bottom of the barrel — several times. It is a study of endurance and brotherhood, with Perry providing remarkable candor about Tyler, as well as new insights into their powerful but troubled relationship. It is an insider’s portrait of the rock and roll family, featuring everyone from Jimmy Page to Alice Cooper, Bette Midler to Chuck Berry, John Belushi to Al Hirschfeld. It takes us behind the scenes at unbelievable moments such as Joe and Steven’s appearance in the movie of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (they act out the murders of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees).
This is an excellent memoir. After a somewhat shaky start in Johnny Depp’s introduction, Perry (with the help of David Ritz) gets on with telling his story. It’s quite the story, too: Perry takes us through his childhood in (upper-)middle class Massachusetts, his difficulties at school, his love for the outdoors, and eventual discovery of music and guitars. It’s a fascinating look into the life of a rock megaband, and one of the creative minds behind it. I really enjoyed this. Continue reading
Interview with ROB BOFFARD
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Rob Boffard?
A funny-looking South African with freakishly long arms, lots of tattoos, a really weird accent, and bad hair. I spent a decade as a journalist being paid specifically to not make stuff up, and now I’m getting paid to do the exact opposite.
Your debut novel, Tracer, will be published by Orbit Books in July 2015. How would you introduce the novel to a potential reader? Is it part of a planned series?
Tracer is about a courier on a city-sized space station. Her name is Riley, she loves going as fast as humanly possible, and she makes a point of never asking what she carries. Of course, when she accidentally finds out what’s in one particular shipment, things go very wrong, very fast.
It’s the first book in a trilogy, and if you like space stations, parkour, killer gadgets, edible insects, explosions, psychotic villains or any combination of the above, you’re going to love it. Continue reading
Excerpt: CRASHING HEAVEN by Al Robertson (Gollancz)
Al Robertson‘s Crashing Heaven is one of my most-anticipated novels of 2015. I’ve heard great things, too. In advance of a review, Gollancz have sent me this excerpt to share with you all. First up, though, the novel’s synopsis:
Meet Hugo Fist. The most terrifying and enticing AI to grace SF since the works of Al Reynolds and Hannu Rajaniemi
A diamond-hard, visionary new SF thriller. Nailed-down cyberpunk ala William Gibson for the 21st century meets the vivid dark futures of Al Reynolds in this extraordinary debut novel.
With Earth abandoned, humanity resides on Station, an industrialised asteroid run by the sentient corporations of the Pantheon. Under their leadership a war has been raging against the Totality – ex-Pantheon AIs gone rogue.
With the war over, Jack Forster and his sidekick Hugo Fist, a virtual ventriloquist’s dummy tied to Jack’s mind and created to destroy the Totality, have returned home.
Labelled a traitor for surrendering to the Totality, all Jack wants is to clear his name but when he discovers two old friends have died under suspicious circumstances he also wants answers. Soon he and Fist are embroiled in a conspiracy that threatens not only their future but all of humanity’s. But with Fist’s software licence about to expire, taking Jack’s life with it, can they bring down the real traitors before their time runs out?
The novel is published in the UK on June 18th (tomorrow!). Now, on with the extract… Continue reading
Upcoming: THE IMMORTALS by Jordanna Max Brodsky (Orbit)
I spotted the synopsis for Jordanna Max Brodsky‘s upcoming novel, The Immortals, a little while back in an Orbit catalogue. Today, though, Orbit has unveiled the rather splendid cover for the novel (right), by Kirk Benshoff. I think that’s a pretty great cover.
Here’s the synopsis:
The Restless Ones, the Bearer of the Bow, the Untamed…
… those are only a few of the names Selene DiSilva’s answered to over the years. But these days she’s content to work in secret, defending the women of Manhattan from the evils of men. She’s reclusive, stubborn, and deeply unfriendly to everyone but her dog. But when a woman’s mutilated body washes up in Riverside Park wearing a laurel wreath, Selene finds that she can no longer hide in the shadows.
As more women are threatened, Selene is forced to embrace the one name she’s tried hardest to forget — Artemis. For who better to follow the killer’s tangled trail than the Goddess of the Hunt herself?
The Immortals is due to be published by Orbit in February 2016 (which seems very far away…). I can’t wait to read it. For more, be sure to follow the author on Twitter.
Upcoming: CAREER OF EVIL by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland)
I really enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, and have been rather looking forward to the third novel starring Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott: Career of Evil. Today, the cover and plot were unveiled, for both the UK and US editions! Here’s the synopsis (from the author’s website)…
When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg. Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible – and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality.
With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike is increasingly sure is not the perpetrator, he and Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them…
The novel will be published on October 20th (US) and 22nd (UK), 2015, by Mulholland/Little, Brown. Robert Galbraith is, of course, better known as a pseudonym of J.K. Rowling’s…
Also on CR: Review of The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm
Civilian Reader 