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Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Monsters, spies and paperwork

Review by Jedediah Berry

Henry Lamb, formerly the child star of a BBC sitcom, is working a dead-end job in London’s Storage and Record Retrieval unit. He’s helplessly single, hopelessly in love with his landlady, and he can’t escape his oppressive mother. When his alcoholic grandfather falls suddenly into a coma, he learns that his family is tied to a secret government agency known as the Directorate, which for over a hundred years has been fighting a clandestine war to protect the people of the United Kingdom from an ancient and malevolent force.
Their enemy? Nothing less than the British royal family.

The Domino Men is a funny and often gripping entertainment, a wry mash-up of espionage thriller and Lovecraftian horror reminiscent of the Hellboy graphic novels. It is also a satire that cleverly draws parallels between the tropes of cosmic horror and the mundane tyrannies of the modern bureaucratic state.

Though The Domino Men takes place in the same world as Barnes’ first book, The Somnambulist, it is not properly speaking a sequel, and readers may enjoy this novel’s mysteries and intrigues without knowledge of what has come before. Queen Victoria, fearing the downfall of the Empire, made a deal with—well, not the devil exactly, but something quite bad. Now, conscripted into the Directorate by its gilled and aquarium-bound chief, Henry must thwart the House of Windsor by turning to something arguably worse: the Domino Men of the title, a pair of immortal goons who delight in human suffering but who possess the secret that could tip the war in the Directorate’s favor.

In what may be the novel’s most effective gambit, interpolations from the opposition are scattered throughout Henry’s account of his final stand, representing the voice of doubt and fear that threatens to undo the protagonist and maybe the world itself. Though the novel veers at times into overtly grotesque terrain, its horrors are usually of the subtle and psychological kind, a dark lens through which to observe a beguiling story of power and corruption.

Jedediah Berry is the author of The Manual of Detection, published by Penguin Press.

Henry Lamb, formerly the child star of a BBC sitcom, is working a dead-end job in London’s Storage and Record Retrieval unit. He’s helplessly single, hopelessly in love with his landlady, and he can’t escape his oppressive mother. When his alcoholic grandfather falls suddenly into…

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Light in the deepest dark

Review by bookpagedev

M. John Harrison’s latest novel, Light, arrives from the U.K. having already won the Tiptree Award and follows the critical and sales success of his short fiction collection, Things That Never Happen. Light is a genre-bending novel, part space opera, part murder mystery, maybe something entirely new.

Harrison is an immensely confident writer: confident in his writing, the power of his narrative and in his readers. He quickly introduces us to three narratives that eventually intertwine in an unexpected and marvelous manner. Michael Kearney is a physicist on the cusp of transforming his field. Seria Mau Genlicher is a 24th-century woman who has fused her body and mind to an ancient and little-understood alien spaceship. Ed Chianese is the most stable of the three, but perhaps only because he spends most of his time immersed in virtual realities he can’t really afford. Chianese has to flee the local mob when he reaches his credit limit and ends up working at a backwater circus.

None of these characters are particularly sympathetic, but neither are they the cardboard cutouts of old science fiction. These are believable people in a believable 24th century where there are areas of space in which the laws of physics don’t work, there is fascinatingly weird and shiny alien technology, and people are scraping by on the edges of mainstream society.

Harrison’s writing is top-notch and involving. He takes old ideas and mechanisms from early science fiction (abandoned alien technology, wars that occur in the blink of an eye) and invigorates them with a sense of possibility and even, strange within this dark and foreboding book, transcendence and hope. Gavin J. Grant writes from Northampton, Massachusetts.

M. John Harrison's latest novel, Light, arrives from the U.K. having already won the Tiptree Award and follows the critical and sales success of his short fiction collection, Things That Never Happen. Light is a genre-bending novel, part space opera, part murder mystery, maybe something…
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

In a magical battle, Merlin is the key

Review by bookpagedev

Elizabeth Bear’s first fantasy novel, Blood and Iron: A Novel of the Promethean Age, follows her well-received debut science fiction trilogy, Hammered, Scardown and Worldwired, released last year. Her latest work a distinct change of pace from her action-packed near-future trilogy is a complicated, immersive fantasy in which readers must hold back their questions and wait patiently for answers to appear later in the lengthy narrative. For the last 500 years, humanity, mostly through the workings of the mysterious Promethean Club, has been gaining the upper hand in a war against the faerie. A Merlin, a human who can not only practice magic but also embodies it, has been born a rare event that occurs once every few generations. The two faerie courts, the Seelie and the Unseelie, both equally slippery in their dealings, vie with one another (and the Promethean Club) to bring the Merlin to their side of an eternal low-level conflict. Mixed in with this struggle are the politics of succession within a werewolf clan; speaking trees; Morgan le Fey and King Arthur; and linking them all, a few half-human, half-faerie folk who must balance the two worlds they straddle. The story moves from midtown Manhattan to the Western Isles of Scotland, from palaces to penthouses, as the complex tale plays out.

Bear’s knowledge and use of ballads, legends and fairy tales is impressive. Her rich style filled with double and triple metaphors and references that range from Yeats to Uncle Remus make the novel dense and a slower read than it might otherwise be. However, this complexity will be no bad thing for readers who enjoy the opulent fantasies of writers such as China MiŽville and Hal Duncan.

Bear’s confidence in both her writing and her readers shines through her ornate prose. From the looks of this knotty first fantasy, there will be more novels of the Promethean Age ahead to enjoy and learn from. Gavin J. Grant co-edits The Year’s Best Fantasy &andamp; Horror for St. Martin’s Press.

Elizabeth Bear's first fantasy novel, Blood and Iron: A Novel of the Promethean Age, follows her well-received debut science fiction trilogy, Hammered, Scardown and Worldwired, released last year. Her latest work a distinct change of pace from her action-packed near-future trilogy is a complicated, immersive…
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Marsbound

Review by Jedediah Berry

When Carmen Dula leaves Earth with her younger brother and their scientist parents, she is not entirely at ease with the notion of a six-year sojourn on Mars. The change of address requires a 50,000-mile ride on a Space Elevator, and then six months aboard a cramped shuttle. And like many 18-year-olds, Carmen is concerned about beginning her college studies, making friends and maybe even conducting a love life. All this in a new hometown, partway across the solar system.

The first section of Marsbound is science fiction with an emphasis on the science. Joe Haldeman lays out a fascinating course for one potential future of space travel, complete with an orbiting Hilton hotel. The reader is treated to an in-depth tour of the Space Elevator, with insights into the technical as well as the human challenges. Carmen’s narration of the trip, charming and often wry, keeps the story fun and the science accessible.

Once on Mars, Carmen quickly earns the enmity of the colony’s chief administrator. Their mounting antagonism results in an act of transgression with unexpected and far-reaching results. When Carmen strikes out across the surface of the planet in a stolen Mars suit, she falls and injures herself; rescue does not come from the human colony, but from members of another species already inhabiting the planet.

Marsbound then becomes an intriguing story of first contact. The tale’s inventiveness lies in the fact that the aliens are a mystery not only to the earthlings who encounter them, but also to themselves. They have only a limited sense of their own history, origins and purpose—and only a vague, half-remembered notion of the forebears who left them on Mars millennia before. As the consequences of the encounter take on global, and then intergalactic significance, Carmen must gather what allies she has in order to avert a catastrophe of horrific proportions. The stakes are high, but at its heart Marsbound is a thought-provoking meditation on time, history and the potential for human evolution.

Jedediah Berry is the author of a novel, The Manual of Detection, forthcoming from Penguin Press in February 2009. He is an assistant editor of Small Beer Press.

The stakes are high, but at its heart Marsbound is a thought-provoking meditation on time, history and the potential for human evolution.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The land between the mountains

Review by bookpagedev

Canadian writer Sean Russell spent years purposefully and successfully avoiding the Tolkien-type of grand fantasy that has ongoing characters and plot elements. He had two persistent ideas, however, that eventually led him to attempt a fantasy on a large scale. The first idea derived from Huckleberry Finn was of a group of characters traveling down a river by raft. The second was of two families fighting for power, somewhat akin to the Montagues and the Capulets. When Russell realized these two ideas could be linked, he found himself with the basis for a traditional fantasy, one that would have a motley group of characters traveling through strange and distant lands on a quest to save their homeland. The Swans’ War series was launched last year with The One Kingdom. The second entry, newly released, is The Isle of Battle, and it includes a dense four-page section, “What Went Before,” to help new readers to catch up.

As befits the mid-book in a trilogy, The Isle of Battle is a dark book. The land between the mountains is on the brink of war as the two ruling families (the Rennes and the Wills) use politics, games and marriage to try to take the throne. At the start, Elise Wills has thrown herself in the River Wynnd rather than give herself up to a political marriage. But she has not died, as her broken-hearted father and friends suppose; she has made a deal with Sianon, a nagar or dark river spirit, to live on and share her body and mind.

The Isle of Battle is mostly questing and chasing, as various groups of warriors hunt the three nagar: Sianon; Hafydd, Sianon’s murderous brother; and Sainth, their half-brother, who inhabits the body of a wanderer named Alaan. The chase leads into lands that exist side by side with the land between the mountains, where the only hope of exit is Sainth and Sainth is very much in danger from Hafydd and his men.

Russell keeps the characters moving, the tension high and the quest arduous. The politics are complicated, the relationships even more so. When one young lord swears he will spy for his enemies in the hope of future peace (and familial gain), it is difficult to remember who he can safely talk to, and who he can’t.

The Isle of Battle will please Russell’s earlier readers and bring him many more. He has taken up the mantle of a traditional fantasy writer and is producing strong, highly readable tales. Gavin J. Grant reads, writes and publishes science fiction in Brooklyn.

Canadian writer Sean Russell spent years purposefully and successfully avoiding the Tolkien-type of grand fantasy that has ongoing characters and plot elements. He had two persistent ideas, however, that eventually led him to attempt a fantasy on a large scale. The first idea derived from…
Science Fiction & Fantasy

Riding herd on the human race

Review by bookpagedev

Reading The Mount is a challenging, but ultimately rewarding, experience. Author Carol Emshwiller expertly forces readers to identify with a narrator who is shrouded in ignorance and stubbornly resists being coaxed toward enlightenment. Like the best sci-fi, the novel uses a fantastical setting to illustrate a painfully realistic internal struggle.

Charley is a mount, a member of the human race on an Earth that has been invaded by small, weak-legged aliens the humans call Hoots. Hoots have used their superior senses and intellects to enslave humanity, training and riding them as we do horses, keeping them in stables, even breeding them to produce specific characteristics. Charley’s a Seattle, the breed engineered for superior strength and stamina. He’s also a Tame, i.e., born in captivity. Escape has never crossed his mind. As the mount of the Future-Leader-of-Us-All, a baby Hoot called Little Master, Charley enjoys every luxury: a comfortable stall, good shoes, plenty of playtime, plenty of food. The only thing he lacks is something that, as an adolescent, he hasn’t yet learned to value: his freedom. When Charley’s father a Tame who escaped and now runs with the Wilds scattered through the nearby mountains leads a raid on the village and frees Charley and his young rider, the teenage mount is resentful. Why should he give up his comfortable home just to run around in the mountains where there are no shoes, no racing trophies, not enough food and a bunch of Wilds who aren’t even purebred Seattles? On top of that, he doesn’t like his father partly because he’s a giant of a man who can barely speak, thanks to the scars left in his mouth by the spiked metal bit he wore as a Guard’s Mount, but mostly because the pure-blooded patriarch is in love with a lean, lanky Tennessee, not a Seattle. If his father and the Tennessee had a child, Charley frets, it would be a “nothing,” neither Seattle nor Tennessee, and no Hoot would want to ride it.

As Charley struggles with his conflicting emotions devotion to his Little Master, desire for prestige in the Hoot world, pride in his breeding, a growing admiration for his father, inexplicable fondness for a “nothing” girl the foolish bigotry, misplaced loyalty and other trappings of his upbringing slowly fall away.

Emshwiller is a much-admired writer in the genre who won the World Fantasy Award for her short story collection, The Start of the End of It All. Her new novel is a beautifully written, allegorical tale full of hope that even the most unenlightened soul can shrug off the bonds of internalized oppression and finally see the light. Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

Reading The Mount is a challenging, but ultimately rewarding, experience. Author Carol Emshwiller expertly forces readers to identify with a narrator who is shrouded in ignorance and stubbornly resists being coaxed toward enlightenment. Like the best sci-fi, the novel uses a fantastical setting to illustrate…
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Ordinary love in extraordinary worlds

Review by bookpagedev

Like every world-class (“universe-class”?) story set on a distant planet ages hence, the true marvel of Jim Grimsley’s novel The Ordinary lies not in its technological wonders or its fully imagined alien landscapes and cultures, though there are these aplenty. The magic radiates, rather, from the way we identify with the characters, who see and feel things that flatly had no existence before the author conjured them into being.

“Magic” is just the right word for this story of conflicts and hidden connections between technology and wizardry. When Jedda Martele travels through the strange new Twil Gate from Senal to Irion from her technologically advanced, war-ridden home world to a world where there seem to be no sophisticated machines of any kind she believes she is going to a simple place as a simple trader and linguist. But the goods she acquires in magical Irion and the language she eventually learns there so far exceed her original conception that she must, in the end, trade far more than her textiles: She must exchange one idea of reality for another, surrender her former understanding of language for a new knowledge of the power of words.

In Irion (the site of Grimsley’s fantasy novel, Kirith Kirin, winner of the 2000 Lambda Literary Award), language wed to music has developed into a kind of magic that can change consciousness and alter the course of events. The ambassadors from Senal (for whom Jedda serves as translator) arrogantly presume that they can overwhelm Irion with their military might, but they have not reckoned the overwhelming force of Ironian magic wielded so effortlessly by the beautiful Queen Malin.

Jedda and Malin are women of different worlds, beings of different orders yet they are destined for each other. For many readers, the Sapphic grace of this love affair will be one more way in which Grimsley has opened a new, alternative reality of unanticipated beauty. Their “ordinary” love that is, ordained for every possible twist of fate literally transcends time, for Irion is not only the name of a world, but the name of its most powerful wizard, a wondrous demigod who sweeps Jedda through time to help him “change the sky” and discover the source of his own magic. Grimsley’s own wizardry could be put in almost the same terms: He sweeps us through time and space and changes our sky. By bringing two alien worlds together, he brings them both to us. It is a gift of unearthly power. Michael Alec Rose writes from Nashville.

Like every world-class ("universe-class"?) story set on a distant planet ages hence, the true marvel of Jim Grimsley's novel The Ordinary lies not in its technological wonders or its fully imagined alien landscapes and cultures, though there are these aplenty. The magic radiates, rather, from…
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Saving the world, one person at a time

Review by bookpagedev

Alexander C. Irvine’s debut novel, A Scattering of Jades, is a rich and entertaining tale. With no sign of first-timer nerves, Irvine brings together such disparate elements as Tammany Hall, Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, P.T. Barnum, Aztec gods, riverboats and New York in the mid-1800s to create a glorious adventure. While all these well-known people and places might overwhelm other writers, Irvine moves serenely among them, using characters and settings when necessary and dropping them immediately whenever his story demands it.

Irvine is like a real estate agent working areas no one else has discovered. He knows that one of the secrets of a good novel is location, location, location, and he fearlessly takes the reader down the rivers, into the caves and through the cities of the still-coalescing 19th century United States. One of the most interesting threads of the novel is the tale of Stephen Johnson, a historical figure whose real-life story Irvine entwines with his fiction. Johnson, a guide at Mammoth Cave, had a knack for discovering new caves and was responsible for finding and naming many of the caverns that are now famous visitor spots. In a particularly dark and almost claustrophobic section of the novel, Johnson explores a new cave. The scene is frightening, and the action gets even stranger when he goes off the beaten path and discovers an Aztec mummy hidden far from where anyone else had ventured at least for the last several hundred years. The mummy is an Aztec god who, now awakened, wants to bring about the end of the world, and needs a few small things including a child sacrifice to make it happen.

A Scattering of Jades is not a run-of-the-mill quest novel, in which a plucky band of brothers takes on the Dark Lord of So-and-So. Here, saving the world is left to a half-dozen or so seemingly unconnected people.

Irvine can be favorably compared to Tim Powers, especially Powers’ historically flavored novels such as The Anubis Gates, yet A Scattering of Jades instantly sets Irvine apart from his influences and allows him to carve out a space for himself.

Alexander C. Irvine's debut novel, A Scattering of Jades, is a rich and entertaining tale. With no sign of first-timer nerves, Irvine brings together such disparate elements as Tammany Hall, Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, P.T. Barnum, Aztec gods, riverboats and New York in the mid-1800s to…
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The future is all wet

Review by bookpagedev

Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, Forty Signs of Rain, is a convincing story of weather disasters in the not-too-distant future. Already a Hugo and Nebula award winner for The Years of Rice and Salt and his Mars trilogy, Robinson pulls his latest tale straight from the headlines. As a result of global warming, the Arctic ice shelf is melting at an alarming rate and millions of coastal dwellers are in danger.

At the center of the action are Charlie and Anna Quibler, a typical Washington, D.C., power couple. Charlie is a stay-at-home dad who works part time as a science advisor to a popular senator, and Anna is a full-time researcher for the National Science Foundation. Charlie and Anna are struggling to get the government to take global warming seriously while the administration’s only concern is surviving the next election.

Anna’s co-worker, Frank, is a scientist who prides himself on his emotional detachment, but he loses his comfortably distanced view of the world when he meets a group of Buddhist diplomats from a low-lying island nation. The monks blow Frank’s mind by pointing out that a single-minded devotion to one aspect of life (such as science) makes the mind unbalanced. Frank is unexpectedly open to this life-changing idea.

Forty Signs of Rain is all about balance, whether it’s love or work, spirituality or politics. There are flood warnings throughout (beginning with the Biblical reference in the title) but the blinkered D.C. politicians won’t pay attention until the rising water is lapping at their doorways. Robinson skips between the domestic, scientific and political spheres without missing a beat and delivers a hot-topic page-turner that leaves the reader gasping and stranded at high tide, eager for the next book from this science fiction master. Gavin J. Grant writes from Northampton, Massachusetts.

Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, Forty Signs of Rain, is a convincing story of weather disasters in the not-too-distant future. Already a Hugo and Nebula award winner for The Years of Rice and Salt and his Mars trilogy, Robinson pulls his latest tale straight from…
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

A gunslinger’s quest

Review by bookpagedev

The year 2004 will undoubtedly go down as a singularly exciting—and bittersweet—year for the millions of Stephen King’s Dark Tower fans anxiously awaiting the series’ much-anticipated finale. More than a quarter of a century after the publication of the short story "The Gunslinger" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1978), the genre-transcending saga that has been called King’s magnum opus will come to its climactic conclusion with the release of the final two books: Song of Susannah this month and The Dark Tower in September.

The seven-volume Dark Tower saga—essentially an epic fantasy—is a bit of a departure for the prolific King, who is best known for his wildly popular horror offerings (The Shining, Carrie, Cujo, Pet Sematary, etc.). The story’s central character, an enigmatic, solitary gunslinger named Roland Deschain (a cross between Clint Eastwood’s legendary Man With No Name of Sergio Leone’s 1960s spaghetti westerns fame and the quasi-historical King Arthur), is on a quest to find the Dark Tower, the nexus of a trillion different realities, before it is destroyed. Those who stand in his way are summarily killed. But during his travels through time, he meets allies who will eventually make up his ka-tet (a group of people joined by fate): Eddie Dean, a former heroin addict and drug runner from 1987 Brooklyn; Susannah Dean, Eddie’s wife, a civil rights activist with joint personalities from the when of 1964; and Jake Chambers, a sixth-grader from 1977 New York. Together, they battle the evil forces trying to topple the Tower and bring about Apocalypse.

Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah picks up immediately after the events of Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla. Roland and Eddie, via the Unfound Door, travel to 1977 Maine in search of a rogue bookstore owner with an invaluable resource to be used in the quest. Meanwhile, Jake and Father Callahan, another key figure in Roland’s quest, are thrust into 1999 New York City to find Susannah, who is not only possessed by a demon but also pregnant with a baby of mysterious origin. The unborn baby is "perhaps the most important child to ever be born . . . including Christ, including Buddha, including the Prophet Muhammad." This child, aptly named Mordred by the demon inside Susannah, is prophesized to destroy Roland. Can Jake and Callahan find Susannah before she has her baby? And more importantly, can they keep the baby out of the hands of Roland’s nemesis, the Crimson King?

King drops a bombshell of a plot twist at the conclusion of Song of Susannah that will force readers to re-evaluate their take on the entire saga and leave them tottering on the edge of the mother of all cliffhangers. Fortunately, readers will only have to wait a few months to find out what King has in store for the final installment in his chronicle of the gunslinger and his quest.

Hauntingly surreal and almost supernaturally enthralling, King’s Dark Tower saga is a monumental work of fantastical fiction created by a master wordslinger. The series is historically significant for a number of reasons—the eye-popping retail sales figures, the equally eye-popping value of first editions, etc.—but perhaps its most important (and fascinating) attribute comes from its prominent place in the author’s extensive and storied canon. Not unlike legendary British fantasist Michael Moorcock’s Skrayling Oak, the enormous tree that holds his entire Multiverse in its branches, King’s Dark Tower is the thematic hub around which many of his other novels revolve. The Stand, It, ‘Salem’s Lot, Insomnia, The Talisman, Bag of Bones, The Eyes of the Dragon—all have strong connections to the Dark Tower. (For example, Father Callahan was also featured in ‘Salem’s Lot as the priest investigating the horrific deaths of his parishioners.) Longtime fans delight in piecing together the incredibly elaborate mystery that is King’s Dark Tower universe, and the series has lengthy printed concordances to help readers keep everything straight.

And to think it all started with this unassuming sentence: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer in Syracuse, New York.

The year 2004 will undoubtedly go down as a singularly exciting—and bittersweet—year for the millions of Stephen King's Dark Tower fans anxiously awaiting the series' much-anticipated finale. More than a quarter of a century after the publication of the short story "The Gunslinger" in The…

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

A journey into India’s future

Review by bookpagedev

<b>A journey into India’s future</b> Ian McDonald’s faithful readership will be well rewarded with the publication of his new novel, <b>River of Gods</b>, which represents imaginative, extrapolative science fiction at its best. Already nominated for a Hugo Award, McDonald uses his latest work to transform the energy of today’s Indian economy and explore such familiar themes as man’s inhumanity to man and the limits of our imaginations.

Subtitled August 15, 2047 Happy Hundredth Birthday, India, <b>River of Gods</b> tells the stories of nine people whose actions will change the lives of the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the subcontinent. The novel begins with Shiv, a small-time gangster, dropping a woman’s body into the River Ganges in Varanasi (the city of Shiva). She is the unnamed victim of an ovular egg-harvesting operation gone wrong (as well as a stand-in for the crowded streets and unending hunger of India’s vast cities), whose death is about to lose any meaning it might have had. By the time we return to Shiv’s story and discover why the woman’s death was meaningless, the reader has been given a quick tour of India 40 years from now, as well as a glimpse of the U.S. and even outer space.

In this near-future world, artificial intelligences (AIs) above a certain complexity have been declared illegal by United Nations decree. AIs are valued for their many uses, but above that level the U.S. government fears AIs will outstrip their makers and perhaps destroy humanity. Mr. Nandha is a Krishnacop whose job is to enforce this law using software of his own to incapacitate or destroy the rogue AIs.

The survival of these high-level AIs who can be seen as symbols for any discriminated group is at the heart of the book. But on a broader level, this is an action-packed meditation on the future from an exciting and fresh angle. Science fiction readers should be happy to follow McDonald down the river of his imagination. <i>Gavin J. Grant runs Small Beer Press in Northampton, Massachusetts.</i>

<b>A journey into India's future</b> Ian McDonald's faithful readership will be well rewarded with the publication of his new novel, <b>River of Gods</b>, which represents imaginative, extrapolative science fiction at its best. Already nominated for a Hugo Award, McDonald uses his latest work to transform…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Making Money

Review by Thane Tierney

Conman and condemned prisoner Moist von Lipwig cheated the noose once, but it’s not the sort of thing you really want to get good at; while practice makes perfect, mistakes make cadavers. You can imagine why von Lipwig is particularly attentive when his benefactor, Lord Vetinari, tyrannical Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, favors him with a Godfather-style offer that he dare not refuse . . . and why would he want to? Like the fox being given the henhouse key, the former swindler is appointed to the post of Master of the Royal Mint.

English satirist Terry Pratchett apparently found our universe too mundane, so he invented seemingly, in fact, lives in one of his own. Making Money is the 36th novel in the venerable Discworld series, and the second to feature Moist von Lipwig, who had previously displayed a talent for wrangling bureaucracy in 2004’s Going Postal. When Royal Bank chairman Mrs. Topsy Lavish (née Turvy), whose death may or may not have been untimely, leaves a 50 percent share in the bank to her dog, Mr. Fusspot and leaves Mr. Fusspot in von Lipwig’s care, hijinks ensue.

Much like certain Helmsleys you may have read about recently, the members of the Lavish clan who have been, as they see it, unfairly cut out of the will in favor of a canine, are not pleased. And when 10 tons of gold bullion disappears from the bank’s vault under Mr. Fusspot’s and von Lipwig’s four suspect eyes, it’s a race to see which will collapse first: Ankh-Morpork’s economy, Lord Vetinari’s dictatorship or Moist’s windpipe, as the noose tightens around it for a second, and presumably final, time.

Pratchett can always be counted upon for a high-spirited romp, and his observational skills seem only to sharpen with each succeeding novel. With equal doses of Molière and Michael Moorcock, Pratchett holds up a funhouse mirror to our own culture and leaves us with a simple question: Which universe would you rather live in? No wonder so many of us, three dozen times now, have joined him in his.

Thane Tierney makes his money in Los Angeles. He just has trouble passing it.

Pratchett can always be counted upon for a high-spirited romp, and his observational skills seem only to sharpen with each succeeding novel.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The life of a 23rd-century cop

Review by bookpagedev

British author Karen Traviss’ debut novel City of Pearl is the first entry in a fast-moving science fiction trilogy. In the intriguing near-future world that Traviss creates, Shan Frankland is a 23rd-century English beat cop who has moved up the police force to lead an Environmental Hazard group. Just before she retires she is asked to go on a mission to the second planet of Cavanagh’s Star (CS2), which is 75 light-years from home. Frankland takes the mission, but she doesn’t know why. She is given a “Suppressed Briefing” so that her orders will only come to mind when she is in an appropriate situation. Traviss builds her societies and characters slowly. Frankland is very tough and very proud of it. She has scars from the police front line and she prefers open arguments or fights to unspoken concerns. She meets her match in Aras, a wess’har, warrior and environmental defender, blessed (or cursed) by a parasite with the ability to live forever. The wess’har are extreme environmentalists and will do anything to maintain biodiversity and balance. They don’t understand that humans eat other “people” (animals) and they are determined to protect the sea-going inhabitants of CS2, the Bezer’ej.

A third alien race, the isenj, is in some ways the most human of the three. Having overpopulated their own planet, they want to make CS2 accessible to their people. This led to war 500 years before, and if the humans are not careful, they might find themselves caught up in a new struggle. City of Pearl is a strong first installment and marks the debut of a writer to watch. Traviss takes what could have been a rote collection of characters (marines, cops, religious extremists) and slowly adds depth, complexity and color, so that by the end, even Frankland has a new appreciation for the shades between black and white. Gavin J. Grant is the co-editor of The Year’s Best Science Fantasy ∧ Horror, to be published this summer by St. Martin’s.

British author Karen Traviss' debut novel City of Pearl is the first entry in a fast-moving science fiction trilogy. In the intriguing near-future world that Traviss creates, Shan Frankland is a 23rd-century English beat cop who has moved up the police force to lead an…

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