Shadows of the Apt

"GONNA REC IT!" as seen in Ralph II where the destructuve anti-hero takes up a quiet post in a library and guides people towards appropriate reading material.

Anyway, I am up to my eyeballs but want to get some book recs out there before I, hopefully, get the Clarkes shortlist written up (which, owing to a mountainous reading pile, may not happen, alas, but I'm reading as fast as I can so crossed fingers). I also have a little fanfare of my own for shortly-to-be-released business:

Coming out at the end of July from Rebellion is Redemption's Blade, a heroic fantasy novel that was, frankly, one of the most fun projects I ever threw myself into. It's a self-contained story intended to kick off a multi-author series, and the redoubtable Justina Robson is kicking off the second volume, Salvation's Fire. The war against the Kinslayer is over, the free lands of the world are scarred and still frankly on fire in many places. Former allies eye each other nervously; entire nations live as refugees on the doorsteps of others, and the armies of the Kinslayer are still there, even though their leader is gone. Into this mess comes Celestaine, hero, owner of an infinitely sharp sword and Kinslayer-slayer. Into a world of monsters trying to be people and people becoming monstrous she seeks redemption by trying to put right even a little of all that has gone wrong. I had so much fun with this book, seriously. Please do give it a look. That excellent cover, by the way. is the work of Tomasz Jedruszek.

Also out next month (and apparently 'frequently bought together' with the above) is The Expert System's Brother, my new SF novella from tor.com. This is something of a different tone: on an alien world, a community of humans live in harmony with nature… until you start to scratch the surface and find out their weird customs, the ghostly voices that possess them, the secret rituals that allow their children to live alongside the alien… or fail to. Handry falls by mischance into the latter category and is cast adrift into an infinitely hostile world. On his journey he'll learn the truth behind everything his people do and believe. So this is hard SF told through the eyes of someone who doesn't understand the science of it, which is one of my favourite SF modes as a reader (and which comes over a bit in Children of Time). Currently you can even read the first 2 chapters at Barnes and Noble if this sounds like your cup of Severance. The equally splendid cover here is by Raphael Lacoste.

Anyway, on to the recs, which I'm kind of going to spin through without giving them the attention they deserve, but here we go:

I've been showered with advance reader copies of things recently, more than I can honestly read, but few as welcome as Record of a Spaceborn Few, the third Becky Chambers book in the sequence that began with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. I have waved a big old flag for Chambers before, and I will absolutely continue to do so. Here, we learn about the human exodus that led to much of our species living on a fleet in space in a kind of powered commune, the society that evolved there out of need, and what is happening to that way of life now that alien contact means the old necessities just aren't so necessary any more. It is a beautiful, thoughtful story about human societies, and unashamedly relevant to many aspects of modern society — the anxiety of an older generation whose culture is being eroded, the awkwardness of the distant descendant coming back to "find himself" without understanding the checks and balances.., It is an elegant, moving mosaic of a story and Chambers continues to be one of my favourite SF writers of all time.

Also solid SF is Paul McAuley's Austral, a magnificent piece of near future speculation. This is climate-change fiction of a very different manner to, say, Bacigalupi. In a fairly bleak but entirely livable future, Antarctica is no longer an icy hell, but merely a very cold new land ripe for occupation. Austral, our heroine, is a 'husky', a strain of human engineered for harsh, cold climates, convenient once and now disavowed by increasingly conservative (read: bigoted) governments. Worse, she can trace her line through to some very wealthy people indeed amongst her unmodified ancestors, meaning two things: One, that she's am embarrassment they might want to get rid of; two, that she might just be planning some revenge of her own. McAuley has been a mainstay of the UK SF scene for a long time and Austral is a very powerful book.

Moving into fantasy, I've read RF Kuang's Poppy War and thoroughly enjoyed it. This is a kind of coming of age story set in a fantastical China. On the face of it, the story sounds quite archetypal: orphan child passes civil service exam, enters the elitist war college, discovers great gifts. It is not by any means Sun Tzu's Harry Potter, however. Poppy War is one of the best examples of the subgenre I've ever read. It clips along, its central character is likeable and interesting, and her story is neither one of manifest destiny nor of incessantly being ground underfoot. And then she leaves school and goes to war, because this book has places to be and isn't going to spend its entire length doing sums and cribbing off the student next to it. Kuang has an assured and enjoyable writing style, and the story balances a lightness in some parts with some extreme grimness in others.

I was also lucky enough to get a copy of RJ Barker's Blood of Assassins straight from the hand of the author. This is the sequel to last year's excellent Age of Assassins and marks the first sequel to that little cluster of books I looked at back then. What grabbed me most about Blood is the shift of time. The hero has been places and seen things, and only now come back to the magic-scarred mess he calls a homeland. He's screwed up, and the world is screwed up more, and there are enemies in every shadow trying to make sure that none of the would-be kings left over from the previous book's climax can possibly fix it. Blood is a much darker book than Age, primarily because of the hero's own personal journey and the places it's taken him. I'm very much looking forwards to the third (King of Assassins, I think?) to see where it will go next.

Also a book 2 from that crop, Ed McDonald's Ravencry. If there is a day of reckoning for fantasy authors, where their characters turn up to demand an explanation for the crap they get put through, then were probably all doomed, frankly. McDonald, however, will still be enduring a kicking from Ryhalt Galharrow when the rest of us have crawled off to count our remaining teeth. I really enjoyed Blackwing, and Ravencry is a worthy sequel in which all manner of horrible things befall the unfortunate protagonist, and we learn some more about the Deep Kings and their minions. The ending does somewhat crank the whole show up to 11, but it's a good read, full of soul-searching and punching people in the face in around equal measure.

Last, but by no possible rational definition least, is Peter Newman's The Deathless. This is that most frightening of things (for the author), the new series. I remember moving on from Shadows of the Apt myself, and it is a pants-wettingly terrifying period of anyone's career, because you've basically built yourself a nice fort and now you have to go out into the wilderness and hope people send you food parcels until you've re-established yourself. Thankfully, The Deathless is a superb new offering — in tone and world it reminded me of Jen Williams' excellent Ninth Rain, in that it manages to effortlessly combine extremely individual and relatable characters, humour and a very original (and, in both cases, rather nasty) fantasy world. Original world building is always my thing, as a reader, and The Deathless has all manner of fascinating new concepts worked seamlessly into the tapestry.