A Sword of Bronze and Ashes by Anna Smith Spark
(Flame Tree Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Steven French
This is one of those rare novels in which style and content are skilfully brought together in a way that leaves the reader (or at least, this reader) enthralled by both the story itself and the manner of its execution. It begins with Kanda, a mother and farmer’s wife who, one summer’s morning, while walking down to the water meadow to call the cows in for milking, spots a body floating down the river. Realising immediately what that means, she desperately tries to save her family from the terror that she knows is coming, revealing, as she does so, that in another life she was none other than Ikandera Thygethyn, the greatest of the Six Swords of the Hall of Roven. Together these golden and glorious knights would ride out, repeatedly, from that place of peace and beauty and light, to challenge the darkness, to fight the good fight, and to slaughter their enemies, again and again and again. This is not just a tale about a mighty warrior, however, taking up her sword one last time to protect those she loves. It’s also about facing up to the past, it’s about the hope for redemption and whether that hope can ever be truly fulfilled. It’s about the lies that parents have to tell their children to protect them and about how, inevitably, those lies will twist and strain and maybe even break the bonds between family members. And above all it’s about the contrast between the mythic and the mundane and about which of the two, in truth, offers the greater challenges and the richer prizes to be gained.
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Review from BSFA Review 22 - Download your copy here.
Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid
(Del Rey, 2022)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
Ava Reid’s Juniper and Thorn is a dark and complex story about identity, silencing and betrayal, and forgiveness. Its fairy-tale setting is as delightful as it is misleading—there is nothing magical about abuse and trauma, and the wondrous and baroque details hide all too common violence and power struggles within a dysfunctional family.
Marlinchen is the youngest daughter of Zmij Vasilchenko, the last wizard of Oblya, an ancient land swallowed by the cosmopolitan and capitalist empire of Rodinya. The eldest daughter, Undine, is beautiful and can see the future, the middle daughter, Rosenrot, is wise and skilled in herbs. As it often is the case with the third child, Marlinchen is plain-faced and simple-hearted, and her gift to read people’s feelings by touching their skin is closer to a curse. Her father seems to love her most, but his love is a curse, too, as there’s neither warmth nor kindness in it.
The Cleaving by Juliet E McKenna
(Angry Robot, 2023)
Reviewed by Estelle Roberts
The Cleaving is a feminist take on the traditional Arthurian legends, being told from the perspective of four of the main female characters, Nimue, Ygraine, Morgana and Guinevere. It begins with a celebration in Winchester of Uther Pendragon’s latest victories, where he announces his intention to become High King, much to the chagrin of many of the other monarchs. This appears to be mostly at the instigation of his advisor Merlin, who, from the start, very much works to his own agenda. It transpires that both he and Nimue are not actually human, but supernatural beings with magical powers, Merlin’s being exceptionally strong. When Nimue dares to question his decisions, she is angrily dismissed, with Merlin asserting his assumed superiority. It is noted at this point that the women, while not completely without power, are reliant largely on their ability to influence the men around them, particularly their husbands and lovers.
Together We Burn by Isabel Ibañez
(Titan Books, 2022)
Reviewed by John Dodd
I have neither time not patience for matadors, I thought I understood the nature and pageantry of it, but now I see that there were so many things about it that I didn’t understand.
Now imagine if it were not bulls that they fought, but dragons…
Zarela lost her mother at a young age to a dragon that got loose, and she lives on with her father in Hispalia, where he continues to work as a Dragonodor for the delectation of a heartless crowd. Then comes the betrayal, when her house is struck down by a series of seemingly random events, her father is left crippled, and she must stand as her own woman against the tyranny of a patriarchal society.
Sing Me to Sleep by Gabi Burton
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2023)
Saoirse Sorkova is the best of the best, the top of her graduating class who wins the brutal hand-to-hand combat that is the ‘Ranking’, to be offered a coveted place as a member of Prince Hayes’ personal guard. She is also a Siren, the last of her race who were exterminated by Keirdre’s fae rulers, who allowed only witches and humans to remain—the former for their magical abilities and the latter for their role as servants. As such she also works a side-gig as an assassin, luring ‘marks’ to their doom on the orders of her employer. However, one of her targets turns out to be a personal friend of the prince and when he takes over the investigation into the murders, Saoirse, with her true identity magically hidden, finds herself aiding the very fae who are hunting her.
All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays by Niall Harrison
(Briardene Books, 2023)
As a former editor of both Vector and Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison knows whereof he speaks when it comes to mapping the landscape of recent science fiction. This collection of 55 reviews, covering novels and short stories as well as entire magazine issues, and spanning the years 2005 to 2014, is bookended by a clutch of typically informative essays. It opens with Harrison’s reflections on the changing state of play over the last twenty-odd years, charting the rise—and fall—of New Weird, Mundane SF, Slipstream… all dismissed as movements that ‘turned out to largely be moments’ (p. 10). Nevertheless, he notes, their cumulative effect was to batter down various walls and the debate over ‘racefail’, the subsequent Sad and Rabid Puppy backlash, and the latter’s fade into pathetic irrelevance are all touched upon. Of course, as Harrison emphasises, there is still more to be done, along a number of axes, including the further internationalisation of the genre.
Sparks Flying by Kim Lakin
(Newcon Press, 2022)
Kim Lakin’s Sparks Flying is a truly miscellaneous collection of short stories: Victoriana and voodoo, cyber punk and morality play, grim industrial dystopia and deluge apocalypse, all the oddballs of deft imaginative writing crafted in evocative and distinct voices. Such an expanse of moods, ideas and genres left me with mixed feelings: this is not a book you can read in one go, instead, you keep returning to it, savouring one story at a time.
My favourite is a steampunk variation of Peter Pan, “The Island of Peter Pandora.” With the unthinking cruelty of a precocious child, Peter Pandora is playing God (or Dr Moreau) on a small island in the middle of nowhere. His lost boys are automatons, his pirates—the Rogues—are hybrid monsters he created by experimenting on dead animals, his main antagonist, Hookie—a family pet turned into antagonist through vivisection and animatronics. The palimpsest of Peter Pan, The Island of Dr Moreau and Frankenstein is poignant and powerful, and Lakin’s ingenuity is a treasure trove of conscious echoes and unconscious ripples. Peter’s sister, Bella, lives with the natives of the island, while Peter is tinker-ing with his boys, is it a linguistic vivisection of Tinkerbell? My inner reader claps in belief. Yet with all this intellectual guess making in the background, it is a story about loneliness and loss and despair, when a child scares himself with monsters not to feel scared of the real world.
Multiverses edited by Preston Grassmann
(Titan, 2023)
Anthologies are often a mixed bag, ranging from superb to average, and it’s difficult to review the book as a whole, particularly when there are 18 submissions to cover, and most of these need more than forty words to do them justice.
Multiverses has three categories of story, Parallel Worlds, Alternate Histories and Fractured Realities, each one dealing with a different aspect of Multiversial theory. There are several stories and at least one poem in each of the categories, and while I’m not a fan of poetry, this made a nice diversion.
My particular favourites though…
Mores Voices from the Radium Age edited and introduced by Joshua Glenn
(MIT Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
Joshua Glenn’s concept of the “Radium Age”—that period (roughly the first three decades of the twentieth century) before sf’s post-1935 “Golden Age”, points away from what Hugo Gernsback was pointing to when he identified, in 1926, the “new” wave of writing he dubbed “scientifiction”—towards a wider field. Glenn’s alternative, “proto-sf” is, for me, less happy, because it implies even more of a sweeping-up of material which we can now identify as sf rather than the kind of iconic wonder-story such as Gulliver’s Travels, or post-Copernican moon-voyages, which later writers drew upon. Perhaps it is safer to simply take the nine stories here, published between 1901, and 1926 and ask what they bring to us.
Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister
Reviewed by Niall Harrison
It’s a little unfortunate for Kay Chronister that in between last year’s US edition of Desert Creatures and this year’s UK edition a lot of people will have watched the TV adaptation of The Last of Us, and will as a result have in their minds vivid imagery of a father-daughter team, traversing wilderness and confronted with human bodies that have been transformed by other biology, to compare with this:
They came suddenly to a forest of cactus arms wrapped around each other: thin and sinewy and curling from the trunk of a limbless human form in a dust-crusted denim shirt. Rising from the arms were red flowers with wide yellow stamens […] Even from a distance the smell of the vegetation was bright, rusty, palpable […] “Never seen one still rooted,” he murmured.
They came suddenly to a forest of cactus arms wrapped around each other: thin and sinewy and curling from the trunk of a limbless human form in a dust-crusted denim shirt. Rising from the arms were red flowers with wide yellow stamens […] Even from a distance the smell of the vegetation was bright, rusty, palpable […]
“Never seen one still rooted,” he murmured.
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