Throne of the Fallen by Kerri Maniscalco
(Hodderscape, 2023)
Reviewed by Steven French
This is the first adult offering from YA author Kerri Maniscalco and by ‘adult’, I mean ‘ADULT XXX’ with episodes that are definitely NSFW! The story is constructed around two core protagonists: Miss Camilla Antonius, a talented painter who is petite and buxom, with ‘deep silver’ eyes; and Lord Synton, whose eyes are a ‘unique, lovely shade of emerald’ and who is lean but hard, in all the right places (if you know what I mean…and trust me, you will after just a few pages!), and is actually Prince Envy, one of the seven demon Princes of Hell. He is caught up in The Game, set by the chaos-loving King of the Unseelie fae. As well as some anagrams and a pretty obvious riddle, this involves successfully completing certain magical tasks, the first of which is to persuade Camilla to paint the Hexed Throne.
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Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.
What The River Knows by Isabel Ibañez
Reviewed by John Dodd
Together We Burn surprised me when I read it, I wasn’t expecting to like it anywhere near as much as I did, particularly with the nature of the story. With that in mind, I took a chance on reading What the River Knows, which turned out to be something else entirely.
Inez Olivera is an adventuress in the making, her mother and father are famous explorers and are missing much of the time because of their ongoing adventures. Until they die, and Inez is left with the mystery of what happened, but more importantly, the same adventurous spirit to journey out to unknown lands and find out what happened to them. Thus begins a twisting tale of death, revenge, and mysterious artifacts. After reading Together We Burn, I was expecting betrayals and complex familial situations, and nothing to be what it had been set up to be by the end of the book, and I was not disappointed.
The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2023)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
“Twice upon a time,” as The Land of Lost Things starts, I fell in love with a book. It has all the elements I enjoy: old libraries in abandoned houses opening entries to parallel worlds, ancient woods populated by stranger, darker creatures, primeval gods from the dawn of history, fairy lords rivalling humans, and a deeply moving and emotional story—but there is something more to the book, a quality both rare and precious: its over-arching humanity that stretches through universal (and thus relatable) mythological tropes.
The Double-Edged Sword by Ian Whates
(NewCon Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Susan Speak
Ian Whates is active in British science-fiction in almost every way possible. He is a writer—novels, novellas, short stories—an anthologist, a publisher (NewCon Press), and a BSFA director. Possibly the only thing he doesn’t do is SF art. He has a distinctive writing style which, at its best, has a Gaimanesque quality (e.g. ‘Knowing How to Look’ in his short story collection The Gift of Joy). So I found that reviewing his novella, The Double-Edged Sword, seemed like picking a pebble off a beach—but a rewarding and interesting pebble.
The Judas Blossom by Stephen Aryan
(Angry Robot Books, 2023)
Even without any embellishments thirteenth century Mongol conquest of Persia is as close to fantasy as history can be. Not only this period (and this region) is conspicuously absent from Europocentric historiography and thus allows for certain fantasies and liberties (think Marco Polo), the deeply embedded fear of nomadic invasion seems to run deep in our blood centuries after Genghis Khan’s empire came to end, and Baghdad and Damask are the source of fairy tale ever since A Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights found its way into European imagination. So, Stephen Aryan has very interesting sources for his historical fantasy, and he uses them well.
Dragonfall by L.R. Lam
Everen was the last male dragon, and the chosen one, the one who would right all the wrongs and give back the dragons their place in the world. Except this did not come to pass and he found himself trapped in the form of man, there to wander the world without purpose, hoping for what he had lost.
Across the gulf of universes, the dragons left behind, including his sister and his mother, try to find a way to get through to him, there to give him the purpose and direction that he needs, which will come from befriending a human, and then using that human as a sacrifice to allow the dragons their rightful place in the world.
The Glasshouse by Emma Coleman
(Newcon Press, 2024)
This is a collection of creepy stories spanning a range of time periods but with a strong sense of place, namely rural Northamptonshire. Some, it has to be said, are more effective than others. One of the most disturbing is ‘Unearthed’, in which a pair of detectorists start digging into an old barrow (never a good move) and awaken the undead of a long since vanished local village. The narrative then shifts abruptly into the past and the immediate cause of the burial is revealed but frustratingly it ends there, so we don’t learn what happens to our amateur archaeologists as the villagers claw their way out of the mud. Nevertheless, the elements of body horror combined with a dispassionate delivery generates some disquieting images.
The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard
(Gollancz, 2022)
Reviewed by Dev Agarwal
Aliette de Bodard is one of the biggest and most highly regarded names in the genre. She is almost hyperactive in producing work of any length, from short fiction to novellas and novels. Additionally, de Bodard consistently features on the short lists for major awards in the US and UK, often claiming the top spot.
Not only busy, she is also a lyricist of noticeable power and range.
Readers of The Red Scholar’s Wake will find that it combines space opera and future history. Like Heinlein and Haldeman before her, de Bodard has built a body of work around an imagined future. In her case this is based on a parallel universe where Chinese and Vietnamese cultures dominated world history from the fifteenth century onwards (the Xuya universe).
Strange Attractors by Jaine Fenn
(Newcon Press, 2023)
This is a delightful collection of fifteen short stories, of which all but one has been published previously elsewhere. The last, ‘Sin of Omission’ is one of the best in the collection, depicting on one hand, a shriver who takes on the sins of the dying, thereby denying herself eternal communion with the Empress and, on the other, a golem on a mission. It is how the paths of these two characters come together in a revelation of the true culture in which they operate, that illustrates the care in which these tales have been crafted.
Not that this should come as much of a surprise to the readers of this magazine. Fenn won the BSFA short fiction award a few years ago with her gay awakening story, ‘Liberty Bird’, set in a world of privileged clan scions racing space-yachts through the ion-streams of a gas giant.
Black Sci-Fi Short Stories: Anthology of New & Classic Tales (Gothic Fantasy) Forward by Temi Oh Co-editor Tia Ross Introduction by Dr. Sandra M. Grayson
(Flame Tree Collections, 2021)
This is a collection of twenty “black sci-fi short stories”, where the term ‘short’ is loosely interpreted. Four of the entries are described as novels, totalling almost 70% of the entire volume. The first, ‘Blake: or the Huts of America’ (Part 1) by Martin R. Delany, from 1859, features the travels and travails of Henry Blake, an escaped slave searching for his wife through the America’s deep south and then up to Canada, before heading to Cuba and organising an insurrection in Part 2 (not included here). Described by Samuel R. Delany (no relation!) as a work of ‘proto-science fiction’, this early slice of alt-history reproduces the colloquial speech of the time and offers a brutal window on the conditions of both freed and enslaved black people.
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