Every 10 years, the secretive Alexandrian Society, inheritors of the lost knowledge from its namesake library, recruits six of the most powerful young magic users, or medeians, to join their ranks. The half-dozen potential initiates are brought to the Society’s headquarters, where they study and learn from the greatest compendium of magical knowledge that has ever existed. This year, Caretaker Atlas Blakely has selected a sextet of particularly ambitious young medeians: three physical mediums, who specialize in manipulating external forces and energies for purposes as varied as deflecting bullets and obtaining midnight snacks; and three nascent masters of the mental, emotional and perceptual magics of reading minds and concealing acne. But these newest residents are confronted with even darker secrets than the arcane knowledge they all covet, for they are the linchpins in a conspiracy that could either save the world or utterly destroy it.
For a book with such a melodramatic premise (think “Big Brother,” but half the cast can read their companions’ minds and the other half can conjure actual black holes), Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six is curiously matter-of-fact, dispensing with on-page relationship drama and coasting through tense fight scenes with brevity. Likewise, instead of providing flowing backstory, Blake communicates personalities through lighthearted conversations and depicts the world outside the Library’s magically warded walls entirely through the scars it left on her protagonists. The Atlas Six is stingy with its exposition, with the lengthiest passages being debates between characters on topics such as the nature of time and the conservation of magical energy. But in Blake’s hands, these tracts are engaging and often very, very funny. This duality—an extremely pulpy plot married with smart and nimble writing—is the core of The Atlas Six’s appeal.
This macabre romp of a magical reality show nevertheless revolves around one weighty question: Is there knowledge that should not be shared? Blake draws heavily on the structures and practices of academia, which in our world is in the midst of a push for greater transparency and democratization of knowledge. Analyzing the costs and benefits of advanced technology or abilities has been central to speculative fiction since its inception. That Blake is using academia as a vehicle for it, adding her agile and cutting voice to the likes of Neal Stephenson and Cixin Liu, feels particularly relevant to the present moment. And if she happens to suggest some legitimately wholesome uses for small wormholes along the way, all the better.
Olivie Blake marries an extremely pulpy plot with smart and nimble writing in her debut fantasy, The Atlas Six.
Battle of the Linguist Mages, playwright Scotto Moore’s debut novel, more than lives up to the nerdy promise of its title. It follows die-hard gamer Isobel Bailie, who unlocks magical abilities due to her mastery of the virtual reality game Sparkle Dungeon, down a rabbit hole of conspiracies and capitalist enterprise. The reigning champion of the game, Isobel has mastered its vocal spellcasting mechanics. But then she’s let in on a paradigm-shifting secret: The same techniques can be used in the real world. By uttering phrases called power morphemes, Isobel can literally change reality. In this Q&A, Moore unpacks the myriad inspirations behind what he deems his “science fantasy,” from Burning Man and EDM to the very real reality-altering dangers of technology.
Battle of the Linguist Mages is reminiscent of some other speculative fiction I’ve read or seen, like Ready Player One, Snow Crash and Contact, if these were all reflected off a few dozen disco balls and seen through a haze of real-life events. What were your inspirations for this project? Back in 2010, I had a conversation with a linguist friend of mine who described her work in the field of speech recognition and speech-to-text and scaling that technology out to new languages. And I remember thinking it sounded completely like science fiction to me, a theater artist with no training in linguistics or any other science. Every word you say narrows down the potential words that might happen next, and I sort of cheekily thought, “Well, wouldn’t it be evil if you were capable of surreptitiously planting that first word in the sequence without a subject knowing it?” This ultimately led to me writing a play called Duel of the Linguist Mages, which we produced in Seattle in early 2011.
Then in 2014, I wrote a play called Balconies, which evolved out of a desire to write a giant farce with a romantic comedy wedged into it. I needed two sets of contrasting characters to play on two neighboring balconies, so on one you had a political fundraiser, and next door you had a video game-themed costume party. I’m sure my many Burning Man experiences must’ve inspired Sparkle Dungeon, the video game in that play. By the time I started writing the book, I’d acquired a hobbyist-level interest in DJ culture, so that got added to the mix. Balconies is one of my favorite plays, and the humor in the book is directly inspired by the comedic style of the play. I entertained some wishful thinking about writing a sequel, [but] instead I became motivated to use those characters in a book. That general atmosphere of menace from Duel provided a contrast to the lighthearted nature of the Balconies source material as I started to plot out the book, cherry-picking characters and concepts to use.
“Isobel and Maddy somehow find a way to fight the powers that be without sacrificing conscience or compassion . . .”
Battle of the Linguist Mages (and Sparkle Dungeon itself) sits right between science fiction and fantasy. Do you see your creations as bridging that genre gap or simply filling a niche that neither genre really describes effectively? I’ve called it science fantasy from the start, although my publisher called it contemporary fantasy at one point, and that seems fair too. There’s so much spellcasting in the book that fantasy probably outweighs the science fiction elements. When I was a playwright, I did often write actual science fiction, but since then, I’ve also come to a better appreciation of fantasy. It feels natural right now to explore the wilder and weirder aspects of my imagination within the context of fantasy or science fantasy.
If someone were to release a real version of Sparkle Dungeon, would you play it? Well, I don’t actually play video games. So if a Sparkle Dungeon game came out and I wasn’t connected to it in any way, it would miss me altogether. I wouldn’t even notice its release unless it became a monster hit that affected culture at the top level.
I didn’t call this out in the book, but in my imagination, there’s a mode in Sparkle Dungeon that’s like Rock Band, except it’s the DJ equivalent. Whenever Isobel boasts about her DJ skills, she’s actually referring to her mastery of this mode in the game. I might find that mode entertaining, but not “acquire a VR headset” entertaining.
Battle of the Linguist Mages is the exact sort of story that I can see somebody wanting to adapt to the screen, but that might not translate particularly well, given how many things would be challenging to visualize (or auralize). Since you have experience writing for the stage as well, do you think this book is capable of being adapted to another medium? Oh, you could definitely adapt this book into a film or a streaming series. I mean, I learned working in fringe theater, where the production budgets are ridiculously low, that you can almost always find a way to express a strong creative vision. Resource constraints and limitations become creative opportunities by necessity. Maybe your finished product is rough around the edges, but you can still tell a powerful story. Our version of power morphemes in Duel of the Linguist Mages was a series of intricate sound cues, which the actors lip synced. It was super weird and effective.
In the midst of all that spectacle and action, a very character-driven story engine drives the book. Isobel, Maddy and the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands feel to me like a charismatic trio of leads you really want to follow through this adventure. They’re like a mini superhero team, but instead of secret identities, they really wear their hearts on their sleeves with each other.
A lot of the characters and organizations in Battle of the Linguist Mages are very, shall we say, recognizable from our real world. How much were those references intended to situate the reader in a familiar world, and how much were they intended to make a point? I always wanted to situate the reader in our world, in the present day, because I think part of the fun is how our world is a springboard for these elaborate flights of fancy, so to speak. You get mileage out of that contrast, and the real world looks different to them when they return home. And the cabal’s actions have a more visceral impact because the story takes place in California instead of an invented land. It could be you or your own family that gets swept up in their schemes.
Meanwhile, as I developed the characters, it was apparent that Isobel and Maddy (like many of us) were deeply skeptical of modern capitalism, and some of my own rage bled through as they interacted with rich and powerful people in the story or observed how the world was being shaped by such unscrupulous forces.
But Isobel and Maddy somehow find a way to fight the powers that be without sacrificing conscience or compassion, and that’s what makes them so compelling to me.
Battle of the Linguist Mages is also very meta with all its references to literary and video game tropes. Do you think the characters in your book use tropes to describe their lived experiences, or did those tropes causally shape those experiences? Isobel spends a huge amount of time in Sparkle Dungeon, immersed in the narrative tropes of the game, and she uses her instinctive understanding of those tropes to succeed at the game. That way of thinking does bleed into her daily life. So for instance, when she needs to study new spells with Maddy for several weeks, she flat-out thinks of it as a “training montage.” But this is the era of TV tropes and the culture having a really deep knowledge now of the typical tactics that narratives deploy, so she’s probably not the only character who’s immersed on some level in those tropes. Still, I think Isobel revels a lot more in fulfilling a literal role in a narrative than anyone else in the book.
“Facebook has altered people’s perception of reality so definitively . . .”
I’m a composer and psychomusicologist (it’s a real thing, I promise) by training, so I’m fascinated by your choice of EDM and house music as the vehicle for magic, both in Sparkle Dungeon and outside the game. What attracted you to using that genre in particular? I think it’s just familiarity more than anything. I’ve been listening to electronic music since the mid-1990s, which is actually late to the game. A friend handed me an Orb CD and an Orbital CD and insisted that I would enjoy them, and she was totally right. And to the extent that my Burning Man experiences influenced Sparkle Dungeon, I mean, electronic music is seemingly everywhere you turn at Burning Man, or it was back when I was regularly attending the festival. Electronic music has been the soundtrack for a big chunk of my life.
The singing scenes are also particularly interesting to me, because they point to power morphemes’ implicit therapeutic potential. Where do you think they lie on the spectrum from therapy to enhancement? Well, it’s tricky. The way Bradford pacifies the participants in a large brawl by singing sequences of power morphemes is almost akin to a guided MDMA session, so therapeutic potential is certainly there. At the same time, Isobel notes more than once that some of the euphoric healing sequences she uses have addictive potential. Spellcasting in that fashion seems slippery, although if you scaled it up, maybe you’d cure diseases.
But I think it’s telling that instead of curing anything, everyone is a lot more focused on “combat linguistics” and other subversive techniques. It’s like these power morpheme sequences provide steroidal power boosts to the spellcaster, which are a lot more immediately compelling to these people than anything altruistic.
Although power morphemes are speculation, the core premise—the invention or discovery of something that alters people’s perception of reality regardless of their agency—hits a little close to home. Things like power morphemes can cause immense harm but also achieve incredible good. How worried are you about the possibility that real life may come to imitate your art? It’s happened already. Facebook has altered people’s perception of reality so definitively that otherwise rational people now believe wholesale in bizarre and outright harmful conspiracies. When these users first created their Facebook accounts, hoping to connect with friends and share photo albums or whatever, they never suspected they’d be hammered with insidious lie after lie after lie, propagated by an algorithm that operates with no mercy. I mean, maybe when you agreed to the terms of service, you willingly gave up your agency, but I doubt most people think of it that way.
At one point in the book, Olivia describes her work in advertising as “planting meaning in the culture and guaranteeing its effects.” Facebook mastered this approach, and they used their technological wizardry to torpedo the stability of American democracy and prop up despots around the globe. I’m not seeing the incredible good anywhere in sight. Maybe that’s part of why I like writing fantasy.
Author photo by Ian Johnston.
Scotto Moore unpacks the myriad inspirations behind his “science fantasy,” Battle of the Linguist Mages, which more than lives up to the nerdy promise of its title.
Summarizing Scotto Moore’s debut novel, Battle of the Linguist Mages, is an exercise in futility. Reducing it to the skeleton of its plot—Isobel Bailie discovers a talent that is considered magical, goes on a quest to save the world and maybe falls in love—would be ludicrously simplistic. Treating it as a philosophical treatise or a searing critique of contemporary politics would discount the fact that it’s also a riveting romp of an adventure.
Isobel, an avid gamer who lives in Los Angeles, contends with villains in the form of cynical advertising executives, disinterested game designers, conniving politicians, idealistic anarchists and arrogant gods. Along the way, she has to figure out how to get the “good” ending and she must also confront the mother of all trolley problems. To make matters worse, it’s all happening in real life, not in the friendly confines of her favorite virtual reality game, Sparkle Dungeon. Her talents in that game’s vocal spellcasting mechanic make her an ideal fit to learn power morphemes, vocalizations that alter people’s perceptions of reality so thoroughly that they change reality itself. While becoming the embodiment of a weaponized Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the idea that the structure of language shapes a person’s perception of reality), Isobel learns that all of existence is under threat and must be saved.
Battle of the Linguist Mages reads like Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler conceived a metaphorical child while high on LSD and blasting Skrillex in a basement. It is hilarious and irreverent, and it relishes the intrinsic ridiculousness of real-life mages and superheroes training in a video game that’s a cross between Kingdom Hearts and Beat Saber. In blindingly inadequate words, Battle of the Linguist Mages is, conceptually, very dense.
Flashes of social commentary shoot through this lurid unreality like lasers through a nightclub haze, but the most fascinating element is the deftness with which Moore crafts a fantasy epic about characters who role-play fantasy epics. Lying beneath endless music puns, pointed re-creations of Angeleno excess and cynicism about the modern-day celebrity cult is an impressive narrative self-awareness, an acknowledgment of every trope that Moore uses to render the reasonably straightforward core plot (discovery of magical talent, training montage, quest to save the world) as subversive.
The most powerful aspect of Battle of the Linguist Mages is not the sly humor, unrepentant geekiness, slow-burn romance or the trenchant sociopolitical commentary. Rather, it is the story’s tacit argument that books (and video games) are power morphemes. They contain the toolsets to construct entire universes but require readers (or players) for that vision to be fully realized. And, to pursue this analogy to its heavily foreshadowed conclusion, every writer is a linguist mage.
Except writers don’t have to be able to vocalize multiple vowels at once. Thank goodness.
Battle of the Linguist Mages reads like Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler conceived a metaphorical child while high on LSD and blasting Skrillex in a basement.
Greta Kelly’s The Frozen Crown introduced Askia, the exiled Queen of Seravesh, as a confident leader struggling to survive amid the schemes and machinations of the Vishir court. But during what should have been her triumph, a political marriage to the Emperor of Vishir, she was kidnapped, and the emperor and his senior wife, Ozura, were murdered—but not before Ozura pledged her soul to Askia’s service. For Askia is not just royalty: She is also a death witch, a rare magical talent who can both commune with and command the dead. Emperor Radovan of Roven, Askia’s kidnapper, intends her to be his seventh queen, to kill her and take her power for his own, as he has done six times before. But Askia has no intention of going quietly.
In Kelly’s follow-up, The Seventh Queen, Askia has morphed into a ruthless manipulator, willing to use any hint of leverage to save her own life and to prevent her world from falling under the dominion of the power-hungry Radovan. While this characterization is something of a leap, it suits Askia’s nature as a doggedly competent survivor. Kelly’s incisive prose, along with a plot that continues to defy fantasy tropes by focusing almost entirely on court intrigue rather than displays of magical or martial prowess, renders such narrative discontinuities forgivable.
One of the highlights of The Seventh Queen may be Radovan himself. In the prior book, he was a sinister yet distant threat, easily dismissed as the inevitable emperor motivated only by a bottomless quest for power. Here, Radovan is revealed as an odd sort of failure, a capricious dictator who began by genuinely trying to right the world’s wrongs. Kelly’s world is one dominated by magical elites, and Radovan is one of the only characters who questions this status quo.
Radovan is much more compelling than when he was a remote evil, but the treatment of his character is also indicative of the loss of the moral complexity that made The Frozen Crown such an interesting take on fantasy. The Seventh Queen categorizes Radovan’s actions as those of a simple madman whose policies are only twisted parodies of true reform, refusing to admit that there was any merit in his initial crusade and uncomplicatedly championing its aristocratic, magically gifted protagonist. While there is plenty of dramatic tension, the most surprising part of how Kelly concludes her duology is how closely it hews to the standards of high fantasy and abandons the thematic ambition of The Frozen Crown.
While not truly groundbreaking, The Seventh Queen has a compelling villain and an unusual focus on courtly maneuvering for a fantasy novel. It is a wholly satisfying conclusion whose only real shortcoming is its inability to fully realize the ambition of Kelly’s debut.
The satisfying conclusion to the story launched in The Frozen Crown features incisive prose, along with a plot that continues to defy fantasy tropes by focusing almost entirely on court intrigue rather than displays of magical or martial prowess.
Science fiction, more than perhaps any other genre, has an established tradition of social and political critique. Such iconic works as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune all used future human civilizations as stages to play out contemporary struggles such as Golden Age hedonism, class-based societies, modern imperialism and plutocracy. This pattern, dating back to the genre’s inception in the 19th century, has created an expectation that new science fiction must also contend with some contemporary crisis of the human condition, preferably in some novel fashion.
Both Peter Watts and Claire North (the pen name of Catherine Webb) have established themselves as unique literary voices. Watts is known for his exhaustively researched fiction and tight narrative structure, while North is a linguistic gymnast in the tradition of T. S. Eliot and Thomas Pynchon. Their most recent offerings, The Freeze-Frame Revolution and 84K, do not disappoint, and although each of their plots is strongly reminiscent of other novels, the delivery sets them apart from their compatriots.
In Watts’ The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Sunday Ahzmundin is a biological engineer on the spaceship Eriophora, whose unusually close relationship with the AI autopilot, Chimp, is tested when she learns of a rebellion being conducted by certain members of the crew in their brief gaps between decades-long periods of stasis. Although this is, by Watts’ admission, more scientifically speculative than his other work, purists will be pleased by his handling of machine learning, evolutionary time scale and even names—Eriophora is a genus of orb-weaving spider that creates spiral webs, and the Eriophora is building a spiral web of faster-than-light travel routes. The Freeze-Frame Revolution is closer in length to a novella than a novel, which enables the cover-to-cover tautness of the plot and makes the character development, especially of the relationship between Sunday and Chimp, all the more remarkable.
84K, by contrast, is both large and dense. Theo Miller is a man of uncertain provenance, living in a near-future United Kingdom that is dominated by a single massive monopoly called the Company. Theo determines the price in pounds sterling that convicted criminals must pay for their offenses, but when a woman from his past reappears, he must face the blight at the heart of his society. North constructs a linear plot out of disjointed slices of time, resulting in a book that never shows its hand and only snaps into focus at the very end. This unusual plot structure makes 84K a challenge for the reader, but it feels necessary. After all, North is painting a portrait of a society that hides its true form behind a facade of advertising and euphemism. Her heroes miss crucial details, and it is unclear whether “heroes” is really the right thing to call them.
Although The Freeze-Frame Revolution is strongly reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 84K contends with a similar autocracy to George Orwell’s 1984, each book distinguishes itself both by its author’s technique and by its treatment of moral ambiguity. In each case, the protagonist possesses imperfect and likely biased information and is embroiled in a revolt that, for all its humane intentions, is anything but benevolent in practice. Watts leaves the essential conflict tantalizingly unresolved and writes from the perspective of Sunday retelling the events. This casts doubt on the veracity of Sunday as narrator, transforming what could otherwise have been a relatively cliché story of man versus machine into an engaging tale that leaves the reader with more questions than answers. And North consistently justifies her writerly contortions by using them to convey her protagonist’s state of mind. Her carefully chosen run-on sentences, unusual phrasing and jarring jumps (frequently mid-sentence) from thought to thought, character to narrator, or present to past convey Theo’s progress from being a deliberately boring, utterly confused bureaucrat to a man who has finally attained a sense of purpose.
Perhaps modern science fiction is somewhat hamstrung by its need to reflect our current society in its speculative funhouse mirror. There are only so many great debates to be had, after all. But these latest contributions, from such eminently skilled writers as Watts and North, are worthy voices in their respective conversations, and thoroughly engrossing stories in their own right.
Both Peter Watts and Claire North (the pen name of Catherine Webb) have established themselves as unique literary voices. Watts is known for his exhaustively researched fiction and tight narrative structure, while North is a linguistic gymnast in the tradition of T. S. Eliot and Thomas Pynchon. Their most recent offerings, The Freeze-Frame Revolution and 84K, do not disappoint, and although each of their plots is strongly reminiscent of other novels, the delivery sets them apart from their compatriots.
What does one do when one is kidnapped by vampires with atrocious fashion sense and an unhealthy fondness for body glitter? Or when one is sent across the Pacific Ocean to confront flying soup ladles, a distressing lack of appropriate headgear and an inconveniently amorous werelioness? How on earth is one supposed to manage with neither accurate aerial charts nor adequate hellphone service? And most importantly of all: how is a writer to confront such ghastly events while also contending with questions of consent, sexuality and femininity?
Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw and Competence by Gail Carriger are each later books in their respective series. But unlike books in other fantasy sequences such as the Kingkiller Chronicles or A Song of Ice and Fire, these books operate more like episodes in a long-running television series. There are certainly plots that began in earlier entries, and others that have yet to conclude, but each book is a well-constructed story on its own and is both violently British and Britishly violent. They share other similarities as well, especially in their rather more nuanced depiction of the supernatural than is typical. In both books, for instance, there are multiple species of vampire with distinct capabilities, weaknesses and diets, as well as a complicated set of social and ethical practices surrounding supernatural culture. And in each novel, the protagonists find themselves in the midst of a cultural crisis which is only solvable because they are confident, no-nonsense, utterly unique and extremely well-written women.
Fantasy has always been chock-full of brooding men with nominal pretensions of humble origins, wielding swords and hurling fireballs or lightning bolts at horned demons and vast, shadowy cabals of necromancers. And although vampirism has long been associated with sexuality and abuses thereof, modern vampires are often too busy sparkling or sulking about in thoroughly impractical capes or getting into intra-coven drama for the analogy to play out much. But in the world of Dreadful Company, the worst things a vampire can do to a mortal are turn one against their will or turn one too young; demons are friendly, slightly aloof folks in dapper pinstripe suits; and the undead have extremely capable doctors who obey their oaths even under duress. Shaw’s prose is quick and funny without resorting to kitsch or unironic cliché, and heroine Dr. Greta Helsing, esteemed physician to the undead, is far from an archetype of either her profession or her gender. That character complexity turns a story about daring escapes, incompetent overseers, literal femme fatales and a magical rift in reality into something of an allegory without sapping any of its entertainment value. Dreadful Company is an adventure yarn, a vampire novel and a story about a serial abuser getting what’s coming to him all in one. There is also a graveyard conversation between Oscar Wilde and Freddie Mercury.
Competence, however, is a remarkable work of character development, starting with its protagonist, Miss Primrose Tunstell, daughter of a vampire queen. Its plot, if abstracted from its setting, is deliberately bland, because that setting is what is worth experiencing. Carriger’s steampunk Victorian fantasia is instantly addicting and lushly detailed. The sheer range of characters within it is staggering, from the dyspeptic Professor Percival Tunstell and the brashly seductive Templar Rodrigo to the tassel-obsessed werecat Tasherit Sekhmet and the impudently imprudent Captain Prudence Akeldama. Hilarity abounds, entirely derived from the interactions among this beautifully drawn cast of miscreants (and a few extremely British swipes at the United States in general and California in particular). And underneath it all, Carriger discusses cultural norms surrounding transgender marriages and homosexuality, compares excessive liposuction to vampirism and analyzes the philosophical implications of not having a soul. It is a gender-bending, unexpectedly philosophical work of modern fantasy clad in a muslin blouse, chocolate duster and a matching skirt with precisely as many petticoats as necessary. Oh, and with an armored parasol and a tasselled fez.
Both books are well worth reading, relishing and then regretting that there aren’t more like them, and that there are as few heroines as well written and compelling as Greta Helsing and Prim Tunstell in contemporary fantasy.
What does one do when one is kidnapped by vampires with atrocious fashion sense and an unhealthy fondness for body glitter, but does not have one’s medical supplies handy? Or when one is sent across the Pacific Ocean to confront flying soup ladles, a distressing lack of appropriate headgear and an inconveniently amorous werelioness? How on earth is one supposed to manage with neither accurate aerial charts nor adequate hellphone service? And most importantly of all: how is a writer to confront such ghastly events while also contending with questions of consent, sexuality and femininity?
Debut novels can be tricky, and in the fantasy realm, debuts frequently define entire careers. Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara marked him as a leading proponent of high fantasy; Susanna Clarke’s towering Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell established her reputation as a master of Victorian fantasy; Neil Gaiman’s solo debut, Neverwhere, defined his trademark wry humor and knack for mythologizing everyday life; and China Miéville’s King Rat sparked his career as a progenitor of today’s ethically complicated urban fantasy. In each case, the expectations established by the success of these authors’ debuts irrevocably shaped their future work. Debuts carry power. In this vein, the inventiveness demonstrated by both Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand and Alexandra Rowland’s A Conspiracy of Truths carries fascinating implications for the future development of their individual styles.
These two novels are, in some ways, polar opposites: Suri’s tale revolves around two isolated, naive people whose personal relationship might save the world, while Rowland’s protagonist is a storytelling traveler who wields his enormous trove of global mythologies to save his own skin. Suri’s world is self-contained within Empire of Sand’s pages. Rowland casually references entire continents and magics that are never visited or explained, giving the impression of an unknowably massive universe that surrounds this story that takes place almost entirely within prison cells.
Suri’s Empire of Sand follows her headstrong protagonist, Mehr, the illegitimate daughter of an imperial governor and an Amrithi woman, as she navigates the deadly conspiracies and complicated politics of a Mughal India-esque empire. The Amrithi are desert nomads who claim divine descent and have a special connection to the natural world, and are thus viewed with scorn and fear by the ruling elite. When Mehr’s uneasy position within her father’s court grown untenable, she accepts a marriage proposal from one of the empire’s mysterious, feared mystics and is thrust into an even more dangerous world. As she tries to unravel the secrets of her new husband, Mehr begins to discover the true extent of her powers and the dark secrets at the heart of the empire. Suri’s tightly focused, propulsive story blends multiple simultaneous storylines without resorting to flashbacks or post-hoc descriptions. This style is evocative of George R.R. Martin but unfolds on a much more intimate scale, and sleeping gods take the place of Martin’s dragons.
By contrast, Rowland frames the entirety of A Conspiracy of Truths as a recounting of an elderly raconteur known as Chant, whose adventurous wanderings are put on hold when he is arrested on suspicion of espionage. Chant wades through the hilariously byzantine bureaucracy of Nuryevet, a country ruled by powerful queens and plagued by all manner of superstition, and peppers his life story with various forms of folk tales, complete with different narrative voices and linguistic characteristics. Rowland conjures tension out of the interminable prison sentence as Chant must both determine why he was arrested in the first place and who he can actually trust in order to avoid execution. The sheer variety of linguistic forms at play contributes to the overwhelming scale of Rowland’s world, and the overall conceit of the book as a story recounted to one of its characters is reminiscent of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicles. However, Chant is a much more approachable character than Kvothe, and the world he evokes through his stories hints at a world as grand and varied as any in contemporary fantasy.
The next step for both writers is to determine which aspects of their debuts they will sustain, and which characteristics they will jettison or warp as they continue. Will Suri fill her next novels with tense relations between misguided mortals and a sleeping divine? Is Rowland plotting a lineage of Chants as protagonists of their future stories? At this stage, it is impossible to say how either writer’s follow-up effort will unfold, but both authors have demonstrated more than enough to be worth that second look.
Debut novels can be tricky. They can be an author’s best friend, setting a high standard for quality and inventiveness, or they can pigeonhole a writer into a niche. In the fantasy realm, debuts frequently define entire careers.
Starting a fantasy series is a tricky business. Not only must the author tackle the usual tasks of character development and world building, but they must also introduce a central story that is sufficiently compelling and developed to lure the reader into returning for the next instalment. Dan Stout’s Titanshade and Angus Macallan’s Gates of Stone take two different approaches to this challenge, and succeed in vastly different ways.
Gates of Stone stars a menagerie of displaced misfits: a self-exiled, rebellious princess; a lovesick spy with a gambling addiction; a prince who watched as invaders razed his home; and a pair of former priests. As Macallan veers from character to character, drawing their disparate storylines inexorably closer, he builds a world tantalizingly close to historical fantasy, with near-analogues of the Indian, Russian, Chinese and Majapahit empires. However, Macallan’s story is pure high fantasy, complete with evil sorcerers, magic swords, heroic journeys with wise old advisers and magic from all the least likely places. Gates of Stone is a Wheel of Time set in Southeast Asia, but the skill of his writing and his exquisitely detailed world more than make up for the occasionally predictable plot, and the novel ends in a near-perfect fashion—an inspiring victory in danger of disintegrating mere moments after the reader closes the book. It is at once a conclusion and a hook, and firmly situates Gates of Stone as an excellent introduction to Macallan’s grand universe.
The self-contained Titanshade, on the other hand, is equal parts fantasy, Western and film noir. Stout is a blunt, no-nonsense writer of blunt, no-nonsense characters who seem written for a young Harrison Ford. Detective Carter is a human detective in an oil boomtown populated by a variety of species, all of which coexist by a mutual agreement that the oil is worth the trouble. But his latest case involving a murdered diplomat turns into a saga of greed, corruption, zealotry and manipulation, not to mention sorcerous constructs, vigilante prostitutes, mad scientists and weaponized body odor. Stout’s magic is intensely visceral, reading as if the most twisted aspects of medieval mythology were real. His story is almost apocalyptic, as the titular city teeters on the edge of environmental destruction. The only flat characters are those at the story’s periphery, and Carter’s core relationships are complex and well realized. And even though the case is solved at the end, the world of Titanshade remains unstable enough to merit further tales.
While Gates of Stone opens a traditional high fantasy sequence in style, kicking off what is clearly a long story arc, Titanshade feels more like an episode of a procedural, with a fully encapsulated narrative woven through with potential season long plots. They are radically different books, but both are well-crafted and compelling beginnings to their respective series.
Starting a fantasy series is a tricky business. Not only must the author tackle the usual tasks of character development and world building, but they must also introduce a central story that is sufficiently compelling and developed to lure the reader into returning for the next instalment. Dan Stout’s Titanshade and Angus Macallan’s Gates of Stone take two different approaches to this challenge, and succeed in vastly different ways.
Fantasy has always been inspired by history, but in recent years what was once an accepted undercurrent has become a full-blown trend—from Susanna Clarke’s magical retelling of the Napoleonic Wars in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to George R.R. Martin’s War of the Roses-inspired A Song of Ice and Fire series. In their new fantasy novels, W.M. Akers and Guy Gavriel Kay offer two compelling and well-crafted takes on the historical record.
A Brightness Long Ago is classic Kay. A beautifully rendered depiction of Renaissance Italy, the fantasy icon’s latest work is filled with compelling characters and a multifaceted tragedy that is as emotionally resonant as it is inevitable. The longstanding feud between Teobaldo Monticola and Folco Cino, mercenary lords of Remigio and Acorsi, dominates their lives and the lives of all close to them, from the brilliant, driven Adria Ripoli to the observant Danio Cerra, a scholar and diplomat who travelled with both Monticola and Cino for a time. Kay once again immerses his readers in a kaleidoscopic world of ambition, politics and romance. By the end, there are no clear antagonists, and the plot is recast as just one episode in the long, slow decline of the Rhodian Empire and the decadent and fragmented Church that sustained it. For devoted fans of Kay’s work, there are myriad connections to other novels, especially Children of Earth and Sky and The Sarantine Mosaic. But A Brightness Long Ago easily stands on its own as a masterful addition to Kay’s historical fantasy oevre.
In contrast to Kay’s elegiac style, Akers’s Westside revels in stripping its characters of their carefully constructed mythologies and revealing their seedy, petty true selves. Few of Akers’ characters are fully redeemable, and those who do possess better natures are relatively feckless. In Akers’ Prohibition-era New York City, street gangs and moonshine smugglers rule over a city slowly being devoured by a mysterious darkness. Gilda Carr is a private detective specializing in “little mysteries” whose search for a missing glove sends her down a rabbit hole of secret documents, all-consuming greed and personal rivalries that threatens the lives and souls of her friends and her home. While Kay’s characters play their parts in a world that turns beneath them, Akers’ protagonists have all the agency in their stories and must decide whether to use that power to repair their city or repair their pasts.
There is a minimalist elegance to the magic in both worlds. And neither book uses its fantastical elements to alter the historical timeline, as Clarke’s titular magicians do with abandon. But fantasy is essential to both stories nevertheless, and both A Brightness Long Ago and Westside are welcome additions to the burgeoning genre of historical fantasy.
In their new fantasy novels, W.M. Akers and Guy Gavriel Kay offer two compelling and well-crafted takes on the historical record.
Folktales may be the bedrock of contemporary horror, but they have seeped into the mainstream. From sparkling vegetarian vampires and werewolves playing basketball to witches and wizards parking their broomsticks in the house on the cul-de-sac, yesterday’s bogeymen are today’s brooding protagonists, even in television shows about vampire slayers. Given this reality, any novelist dealing with the paranormal must confront the new comprehensibility of the monsters under the bed. Are they forces of nature beyond mortal ken? Or are they humankind’s kindred spirits, in the most literal sense possible? T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon’s nom de plume) and Vivian Shaw take radically different approaches to answering this question, but both are blessed with an irrepressible sense of humor that makes their books equal parts scary and funny.
In The Twisted Ones, Kingfisher depicts a kind of magical elsewhere filled with strange compulsions and warped conjurations that enchant and ensnare humans led astray. It is a skeptic’s telling of a scary story, in which an editor called Mouse, while cleaning out her late, estranged grandmother’s house in rural North Carolina, is unwittingly drawn into the world of the tall, pale folk who once stalked her step-grandfather. Mouse discovers his journal in the assorted rubbish, and the fact that the terrors he describes within start to happen to her does not prevent her from approaching the text with the eagle eyes and determined skepticism of an editor. Mouse’s narrative is gripping in its uncertainty and her refusal to believe what she sees, but also genuine in her morbid fascination with her unexpectedly paranormal milieu and her unwavering love for her dog. Kingfisher imbues a classic “things-that-go-bump-in-the-night” monster story with hints of modern context without dwelling on the issues that context raises, simply because it is irrelevant to the story she wants to tell. The result is tense, well-crafted Southern horror with a meta twist.
Shaw’s Grave Importance, on the other hand, is the conclusion of an epic trilogy about a doctor to the undead who, with the aid of several vampires, a witch with prehensile (and somewhat fidgety) hair and an old family friend who happens to be a high-ranking bureaucrat in Hell with a gift for mathematics, manages to save her world from an untimely apocalypse. Greta Helsing, scion of the Helsing family of former vampire hunters and current vampire doctors, is called to fill in when the lead physician at a mummy health spa leaves to spend several months on an urgent case in Cairo. Apparently the mummies are having fainting spells and nobody quite knows why. Meanwhile, the fabric of space-time is ripping, and the demons tasked with keeping an eye on it are very concerned. Shaw’s writing is more Pratchett than Lovecraft: There are different species of vampire with different dietary restrictions, mummies make a living as programmers and Dr. Faust runs the finest medical institution in Hell, with cutting-edge imaging technology that can diagnose even the most complex of curses. It is, in short, less horrifying than hilarious, and delightfully so.
What these books share, however, is an interest with how the supernatural is portrayed. Kingfisher has great fun with the tropes of found-manuscript horror stories, while Shaw recasts Dracula’s kin as misunderstood outcasts. Both writers humanize their monsters and rationalize the actions of their human protagonists. Mouse walks into danger out of filial responsibility, then curiosity and finally for the unbreakable bond between a woman and her dog, while Greta is simply following the Hippocratic Oath as applied to the undead. The Twisted Ones and Grave Importance are radically different in tone and scale, but they are equally enjoyable modern folk takes.
Folktales may be the bedrock of contemporary horror, but they have seeped into the mainstream. From sparkling vegetarian vampires and werewolves playing basketball to witches and wizards parking their broomsticks in the house on the cul-de-sac, yesterday’s bogeymen are today’s brooding protagonists, even in television…
Magic, in some form or another, has been an integral part of human culture as long as people have told stories. It is an informal codification of the ineffable forces that lie just outside human understanding, whether it manifests as the will of the gods, the encroachment of a chthonic netherworld or parallel realm or an arcane incantation by candlelight. As a genre, fantasy has contended with this uncertain nature in every way imaginable, and a great many contemporary writers have concocted beautifully detailed magic systems to govern their fantastic realms. But few writers make the attempt to uncover the system behind magic quite as central to their stories as W.M. Akers and Molly Tanzer.
Gilda Carr, the heroine of Akers’ Westside Saints, is a detective specializing in “small mysteries,” such as finding a lost glove or a specific shade of blue. But her natural skepticism often drives her, against her best intentions, to turn her small mysteries into quests to explain the bizarre happenings occurring around her in an alternate Manhattan during the 1920s. For Gilda, human rules that forbid lock-picking and govern social status are irrelevant and easily broken, but natural rules—shadows should not eat people, the dead should stay dead—matter a great deal. So when those immutable laws begin to mutate, Gilda sets off to uncover why, resulting in a magical mystery that ends by revealing not only the agent responsible for the chaos, but also the mechanism they manipulated, warped or outright broke to accomplish it.
In a very real sense, Akers’ stories are about his magical system, probing the limitations of reality and what happens when it is unexpectedly torn. This process is enabled by the strength of his leads, especially Gilda herself, whose practicality and sentiment are constantly at loggerheads. Akers can be a touch matter-of-fact regarding significant events, but his characterization and magic-building are as believable as it gets.
Tanzer’s Creatures of Charm and Hunger, on the other hand, is set in a world where the discipline of summoning demons, called “diabolism,” is not only real, but constrained to a kind of incremental scientific inquiry. This constraint is itself a source of frustration for Jane Blackwood, a budding diabolist whose thirst for glamour is barely slaked by the staid, bookish approach her mother Nancy, the Librarian for the leading diabolist society, favors. Jane’s fellow apprentice, Miriam Cantor, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, is perfectly at home among the stacks and catalogues. When Miriam’s parents disappear into the shadows of the Third Reich amid whispers of treachery, she begins delving ever deeper into the most dangerous branches of diabolism.
Tanzer’s masterful depiction of the relationships among Jane, Miriam and Nancy meshes perfectly with the precision of her magical system. Jane’s ambition and insecurity, along with Miriam’s drive and idealism, run up against immutable limits of diabolism, and their inability to transcend Tanzer’s rules is itself the cause of inevitable tragedy.
Both books are excellent examples of how novel magical systems can drive entire narratives. Westside Saints and Creatures of Charm and Hunger are more than deserving of the spotlight, and are wonderful examples of this remarkable trend in fantasy writing today.
Magic, in some form or another, has been an integral part of human culture as long as people have told stories. But few writers make the attempt to uncover the system behind magic quite as central to their stories as W.M. Akers and Molly Tanzer.
Two debut fantasy novels, Lisbeth Campbell’s The Vanished Queen and Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard Daughter, bring their rebellion plots down to earth with exemplary grace and skill as their complex female protagonists square up against wicked, corrupt kings.
Stewart’s chief protagonist, Lin, is a princess living under the dual weights of her father’s disapproval and the moral depravity of the necromantic magics he wields to maintain his kingdom. She is joined by Jovis, a smuggler dragged unwillingly into a struggle far grander than running an imperial blockade. Their journeys, both together and apart, are set in a Polynesian-inspired world reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea.
Campbell focuses on Anza, a young student with a fondness for mischief who is drawn into a resistance movement after she accidentally discovers the diary of her country’s missing queen in a forbidden section of her school’s library, and Esvar, a prince waiting for his manipulative father to die so his older brother can inherit the throne of Karegg. Campbell's story is devoid of magic, but studded with gunpowder and machinery, rendering it more a piece of vaguely steampunk, central European-inspired historical fiction than archipelagic high fantasy.
The absence of the supernatural feels as natural and necessary in Campbell’s world as its omnipresence does in Stewart’s. However, these differences seem more aesthetic than fundamental; they are more relevant to how the story is told than the underlying nature of each story itself. In some ways, although both books are clearly and resolutely fantasy stories, they incorporate aspects of world building more common to science fiction. Both worlds are familiar, with clear allusions to recognizable cultures and history. Even Stewart’s bone magic is designed to follow rules, much like a natural force that can be manipulated, rather than offering a route around them as in much contemporary fantasy. These constraints lend both The Vanished Queen and The Bone Shard Daughter the cohesiveness and believability so treasured in dark fantasy, but without requiring the gritty aesthetic characteristic of writers like Erikson and Abercrombie. Instead, they demonstrate the rare combination of conceptual clarity and narrative drive that characterizes peers such as Catherine Rowland and W.M. Akers.
If their debuts are any indication, both Lisbeth Campbell and Andrea Stewart should be mainstays of modern fantasy writing for years to come. Perhaps Stewart will answer some of the tantalizing unanswered questions from The Bone Shard Daughter. Perhaps Campbell will explore the world of The Vanished Queen beyond the evocatively claustrophobic borders of Karegg. Or perhaps not. Either way, they are both welcome and timely additions to the pantheon of modern fantasy.
Two debut fantasy novels, Lisbeth Campbell’s The Vanished Queen and Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard Daughter, bring their rebellion plots down to earth with exemplary grace and skill as their complex female protagonists square up against wicked, corrupt kings.
Through an accident of timing and celestial alignment, Orquídea Montoya was born unlucky. But unlike most unlucky children, she knows how to bargain, even with creatures of myth and magic, and how to phrase a wish. Her search for luck leads her from her home in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to the small Midwestern town of Four Rivers, where she finally puts down roots and starts a family.
Decades later, Orquídea’s descendants are summoned home to Four Rivers, to the house and verdant valley she conjured. Once there, they discover they have inherited a deadly legacy of ill-used power and festering secrets.
Acclaimed young adult and romance author Zoraida Córdova’s first adult fantasy novel, The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, is strongly influenced by the Latin American literary tradition of magical realism. Córdova weaves the story of Orquídea’s childhood with that of her family’s struggle in the present, masterfully synchronizing revelations in both timelines. In the process, she successfully casts those who mistrust or are suspicious of magic as irrational and unwilling to believe their own eyes. After all, magic is everywhere in Córdova’s enchanted reality, both the endemic sort of magic found coursing through rivers and creeping up trees and more alien varieties. Magic is an absolute cornerstone of this world, and Córdova evokes it beautifully.
Most striking, however, is her careful and deliberate use of language. Córdova’s gorgeously compelling prose brings a natural sense of humor and poignancy to even the darkest moments of the story, and the way she uses Spanish to enhance and add depth to her narration is remarkable. Additionally, she has paid extraordinarily close attention to the names of characters and settings. Every single one has meaning to it, and while some are explained in the story, others are left for the reader to discover. This lends a unique sense of purpose to the writing and exemplifies the uncommonly poetic precision of Córdova’s prose. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina demands to be savored and read with care.
A commandingly propulsive story with a complex writing style that is best enjoyed slowly makes The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina a challenge, but one well worth the time.
Through an accident of timing and celestial alignment, Orquídea Montoya was born unlucky. But unlike most unlucky children, she knows how to bargain, even with creatures of myth and magic, and how to phrase a wish.
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