Tag: fantasy

The Raven and the Reindeer (2016): T. Kingfisher

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★★★★

As 2017 simply hunkers down in the bitter cold of winter, I find myself drawn to fairy tales and fantasies: the kind of stories you could tell beside a fire with the storm raging outside. This novella was my first encounter with T. Kingfisher (the pseudonym of Ursula Vernon), an author whose books have often been recommended to me by Goodreads. It’s a retelling of The Snow Queen, which I’ve read many times in my much-loved childhood copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. Smart and knowing, The Raven and the Reindeer delivers up all the magic without any of the piety, a marked glint in its eye.

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The Wolf in the Attic (2016): Paul Kearney

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★★★★

This was an extraordinary read: a real shapeshifter of a book. It began like a children’s story, full of the innocent fancies of an isolated little girl, but then morphed into an eerie fantasy full of symbolism and old magic. The most frustrating thing about the whole novel is that its final pages introduce a whole new potential canvas and then, with so many questions unanswered, and so much backstory unexplained, it simply finishes. I assumed that it must surely be the first part of a series but, so far, I haven’t found any mention of a planned sequel. And so I’ve been left feeling strangely short-changed because, for the most part, this is a genuinely gripping world and so much more could have been said.

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Short Stories from Tor.com

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tor

One of the things I most enjoy about Tor.com, a website focusing on science-fiction and fantasy publishing, is their original fiction. Recently I’ve been pleased to see that some of their short stories have been published as ebooks, complete with gorgeous covers that are designed for each one. At around 30 pages per story, these make wonderful amuse-bouches between more lengthy reads and are usually less than £1 a piece on Amazon. And, if you’d rather read them for free, you can always seek them out on Tor.com itself. As the stories aren’t long enough to warrant individual posts, I thought I’d collect my thoughts together five at a time.

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Mort (1987): Terry Pratchett

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★★★★

The Discworld Reread: Book IV

Mortimer, usually called Mort, is nice, well-meaning, but ultimately a bit hopeless. In an effort to make him into someone else’s problem, his father takes him down one Hogswatchnight to the hiring fair in the local town, but no one’s interested. It seems that the gangly boy can’t even be given away. Optimistic to the last, Mort insists on waiting until the last stroke of midnight, just in case a potential employer comes late to the fair. And, sure enough, as the bells strike out over the town, a strange figure appears, cowled and riding a white horse (whose name is Binky), to make Mort an offer that he can’t refuse. He always hoped he’d become an apprentice. He just didn’t think he’d be working for Death.

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Equal Rites (1987): Terry Pratchett

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★★★ ½

The Discworld Reread: Book III

Some more light reading was necessary after that brilliant, but thought-provoking last book and I returned with contentment to the Discworld. While the first two books dealt with one overarching storyline, this third novel breaks the mould and adopts the pattern that Pratchett would use in the rest of the series. Each book, while it features one or more of his recurring characters, is based around a particular theme or concept and can stand virtually alone. And so here, in Equal Rites, we turn our attentions away from Rincewind and the Luggage towards the distant Ramtop mountains, and one very special baby.

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The Light Fantastic (1986): Terry Pratchett

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★★★

The Discworld Reread: Book II

We left the hopeless wizard Rincewind in a situation where, quite frankly, things could only get better. To be precise, he was plunging off the edge of the world. As this new novel gets underway, he receives both good news and bad. The good news is that, quite improbably, he’s somehow managed to end up in a tree somewhere on the Disc and that he isn’t dead. Yet. The bad news is that the Discworld is in the path of a huge red star, which is approaching at alarming speed and is due to wipe out the entire world in two months’ time… and only Rincewind can save it. Under these circumstances, as you may imagine, it’s a toss-up whether Rincewind or the world at large is more worried about the prospect.

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The Colour of Magic (1983): Terry Pratchett

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★★★

The Discworld Reread: Book I

About twenty years ago, I found a secondhand book in a charity shop or at a jumble sale (it was 35p, according to the scrawled pencil inscription in the front). This was The Colour of Magic, the first in a long line of Discworld novels that would appear for birthdays and Christmases, and which would soon become a defining feature of my teenage years. Then there was the series of Discworld maps; the quizbook; the art book; the companion guide; and the three computer games (Discworld Noir was brilliant: I’m still sad that it won’t work on current editions of Windows). Yes: I was a bit of a Discworld geek. I still dip into the books now and then, when I need something light and cuddly. And, in the aftermath of the existential gloom of The Evenings, that’s exactly what I needed. So I decided to embark on a structured reread, book by book, of this much-loved series.

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The Devil You Know (2016): K.J. Parker

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★★★★

This is the first story I’ve read by K.J. Parker; or rather, the first I’ve read under that name. For K.J. Parker, as everyone now knows, is a pseudonym of Tom Holt, the author of gleeful comic novels set in Ancient Greece, and (as Thomas Holt) the slightly less successful Viking epic Meadowland. I’ve enjoyed Holt’s work under his own name and so was tempted to dip my toe into his fantasy efforts, courtesy of this short novel published by Tor. I absolutely couldn’t resist the blurb. This is a novella of wit, good, evil, ambition and sheer outright nerve; despite its brevity it reads like a mashup of Faust and Good Omens. And you should know me well enough to know that I think that’s a very good thing.

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Victory of Eagles (2008): Naomi Novik

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★★★★

Temeraire: Book V

Last weekend, at the Dorothy Dunnett Day meeting in London, I was chatting to Janet about Temeraire. She mentioned the central ‘moral dilemma’ of the series, which would have an effect on all the books that followed and, at the time, I couldn’t quite remember whether or not I’d reached this point. After all, I read the fourth Temeraire book in April 2014 and quite a lot has happened since then. However, I’d only read the first few pages of Victory of Eagles before I realised, with a jolt, what Janet had been talking about. Of course. The cure…

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Tremontaine: Season 1 (2016): Ellen Kushner et al.

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★★★

with chapters by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese, Patty Bryant and Paul Witcover

Apologies to all the authors I wasn’t able to show in the photo above, but it seemed a good idea to stick with Ellen Kushner. This ambitious project takes place in her world after all, unfurling the intrigues and romances that act as a prequel to Swordspoint. Here we see the city in all its familiar shades, from the dangerous alleyways of Riverside thick with thieves, rogues and swordsmen, to the elegant decadence of the Hill, where fashions, plots and chocolate are the order of the day.

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