Category Archives: Reviews

May 15, 2020

Review: Repo Virtual

By Josh Melican

Repo Virtual is the debut novel from Melbourne author Corey J White, published by Tor. It’s unrelated to the trilogy of novels he has released previously (Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, and Static Ruin, collectively known as The Voidwitch Saga). I’ve reviewed those over on Goodreads, but haven’t posted them here. I’ll get on that in coming days.
A shorter version of this review is also available on Goodreads.

Repo Virtual

Repo Virtual is unapologetically cyberpunk, and with that acceptance of genre will come a lot of familiar features and tropes: the heist, the evil corporation, the Asia in the 21st Century, the virtual reality, the AI… and they’re all here, and they do form the backbone of the novel, but White has built something original on that framework, and updated the genre for the actual 21st Century, not the one being imagined by the cyberpunk pioneers of the 80s. That’s not to say that those 80s influences aren’t here. There’s definitely a debt of gratitude owed to some of the genre’s landmark works, but that’s the nature of genre isn’t it? As I said, unapologetic.

Overall I enjoyed the novel. It hooked me early and I kept making time and making excuses to read it during a pretty busy phase of my life, which is always a good sign. I was invested in the characters, and their fates, and there was an interesting philosophical depth beneath the aesthetic and the action.

(more detail, but no real spoilers, below)

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The heist itself is really just the set-up. It serves to introduce the protagonist, JD, and some of the important people in his life–a friend/colleague from an online gaming world and his step-sibling–but it is over quickly and relatively easily by the end of the first act.

The story really picks up once JD has his hands on the prize and the various forces with an interest in either recovering or receiving it are in motion. In this, Zero Corporation functions in much the way we would expect a Corp to function in a Cyberpunk future, with a profit-driven lack of morality and a single-minded obsession with self. The other player here is Kali, a pseudo-mystical leader of a cult of the disenfranchised in the city’s slums. She’s a little more nuanced, and her connections to JD’s life and relationships a little more complex.

Once the heist is completed JD goes to ground, and White takes a bit of a risk benching his protagonist (and our lens on the world) and introducing a new POV character in Enda. Structurally, this changes the nature of the story and our relationship with it, but it’s well done and the novel is better for it: having multiple perspectives on the world really fleshes it out well, and Enda has her own complex backstory on a more grand scale than JD’s local hustle.

There is a third POV character as well, who is introduced in snippets right from the start but as the plot develops this character increasingly enters and eventually takes over the narration in the 1st person. White’s skill in managing this perspective shift is genuinely impressive and shows both boldness and precision in his craft.

On the downside, the villains of the piece were a little monochrome, their motivations and their methods fairly simplistic. The climax, once in motion, moved a little too smoothly to the resolution. Complicated situations became perhaps too quickly uncomplicated. Moral quandaries are raised and then side-stepped without real angst being required.

That said, White set the stage well and followed through. He’s committed to his take on the genre and on the philosophical questions he’s raising, and he avoids some of the pitfalls of cliche along that path.

I was satisfied with the ending and especially impressed by the epilogue, another bold decision from White to shift the scope of our perspective and to put a genuine full-stop on the story.

I’m looking forward to his next novel now.

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May 14, 2020

Review: Terra Nullius

By Josh Melican

Recently, I read Terra Nullius, by Claire Coleman. I’d heard Coleman speak at a couple of conferences since the novel was released, and it’s quite critically acclaimed. Coleman was awarded the 2016 Black&Write! Fellowship, and the novel itself was short-listed or commended in a range of awards, including the Stella, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the Aurealis Awards.
It seemed to be making waves in both the Literary and the Spec-Fic circles, and Coleman is an engaging and passionate speaker, so I was keen to check it out for myself.
(This review also appears on my Goodreads)

Terra Nullius Novel

Coleman’s debut novel hinges on a reveal (which I won’t spoil here) which occurs approximately 10 chapters in, and somehow when it comes it feels too late in the piece. Perhaps because I had picked it earlier and had been reading for some chapters with the revelation already assumed, or perhaps because the novel improves a lot after the reveal, so that the opening chapters felt longer than those that followed.

Her language and rhythm took some getting used to, and I bounced of it pretty hard early, but once I developed an understanding of it a little better I quite enjoyed the prose. In its best moments it had a kind of lyricism and a unique voice, though this was a little inconsistent, perhaps to be expected from a writer still honing those skills.

The several POV characters challenge the reader early, as we head-hop between very different (and initially quite disconnected) perspectives in our introduction to the setting and circumstances of the novel. Initially the descriptions are quite minimal, sometimes vague, other times stark, but there’s a reason for why this is the case in the early chapters because those descriptive gaps allow for the revelation which is to come.

Of those various perspectives provided, Jacky in particular (the first, and perhaps the most protagonist character of them all) gave the reader someone to connect with and to barrack for. It’s his plight which I think carried me through some of the other chapters, and the desire to know his fate which kept me in the story.

Not without its flaws (I did struggle with the pacing at various stages), but overall the novel is of interest for its craft, its narrative, and the underlying social commentary.

(a vague possible spoilery stuff below…)

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I think perhaps that reading this in the context of a work of genre fiction contributed to that. I was expecting SFF elements, and so attuned to what they may be. If I had approached this without that context, or read it from the start as a mainstream literary novel I imagine I might have been surprised by the reveal, and I hope that other readers got to experience that moment of discovery.

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July 18, 2017

Mid-year reading reviews

By Josh Melican

At the beginning of 2017 I set myself these reading goals:

  • Read 12 novels (one per month)
  • Read 50 Short stories (approx one per week)

Mid-way through the year, I’m tracking ahead for the first one with 8 titles completed and a 9th about 50% done (on the proviso that one accepts novellas in place of novels–more on that later). I’m a long way behind on the second.

What I have read though has been of an excellent standard. I’m really enjoying the novellas I’ve read. The novella, as a form, has been undervalued in recent years (decades), and there are fewer markets publishing novellas, but there’s something really pleasant (for me at least) about having a slimmer story which I can get to and complete with less ongoing time commitment. Novellas are more binge-able, and when there are breaks between reading opportunities or I have to step away from my reading for a length of time I find it’s easier to come back to the novella. The start is still recently enough in my mind that it’s not lost to the fog of time and distractions.

The books I’ve read (with brief reviews) are:

Gemina (Book 2 of the Illuminae Files) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

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This book follows the same structure and style of the previous in the series (Illuminae, which I also loved). This time we have two new protagonists but there are a lot of parallels: boy/girl, separated from one another, smouldering coals of a possible romance… all of which keeps the book familiar, but Hanna and Nik are their own characters with well-developed identities and personalities, so the material is still fresh.

The action has moved from the fleeing fleet of rescue ships of the first book to the space station which was due to provide our erstwhile heroes an escape route. The same nefarious corporate forces which set everything in motion are back again, looking to cover up and save face (and legal consequences).

Kaufmann and Kristoff play off each other’s strength and the banter between the characters sizzles along. There’s a lot of moving parts at play here, some established in the previous book but a lot brand new. The threads of the narrative are interwoven throughout and only start tying in as we approach the climax. There’s a little narrative cheat in there, near the end, but it was well foreshadowed and probably earnt.

Would recommend this series to anyone but especially mid to upper teens.

Half Resurrection Blues (Bone Street Rumba #1) by Daniel Jose Older

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I had been meaning to read Older’s longer work for a while now, ever since I read a good short story of his (‘Anyway Angie’, from Tor), found him on Twitter, and appreciated some of the writing advice and cultural representation thoughts he shared.

This novel was a good intro to his world and his style. The New Yorker setting came through with a strong sense of authenticity and Older’s affection for the place was obvious on the page. The people too. In many ways this is a tribute to the grimier parts of NY’s boroughs, the alleys and bodegas, the clusters of community, the street celebrations, the hidden bars and the sense of having tourists and others intrude on your place like it’s some sort of urban cultural safari.

The plot was solid, taking a few turns at speed without ever really giving you the feeling that you’d lose a sense of where it was all going. In that regard there was a sense of safety or familiarity at work. Carlos’ half-resurrection was a cool concept, as was the ghostly world overlaid on the living world. Older introduces some cool concepts and gets creative with some of the tropes and cliches that the genre offers. He controls the tension well, and the climactic battle(s) fought almost simultaneously in different worlds are well-handled.

If you’re looking for some urban fantasy with ghosts, sword-fights, otherworldly conspiracy and world-saving that starts local, this is for you.

Home (Binti #2) by Nnedi Okorafor

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The sequel to ‘Binti’ (which I read and enjoyed last year) picks up almost immediately after the end of its predecessor. Binti is settled into the University now, but things haven’t been easy and she hasn’t integrated as well as she would have liked. Okorafor treats the trauma Binti carries with respect and she fleshes-out and realises that sense of dislocation, of homesickness. As someone who left a rural home to come to a large metropolitan university, that resonated with me. Binti, of course, first of her kind and survivor of the horrors in Book 1, has more to deal with and decides to head home and reconnect with her roots.

This novella gives much more depth to Binti’s world (galaxy?) and to her character. She is changing, and those changes add to her but also strip away parts of her foundation. She is desperate to reconnect with her family and the life she once had, but struggles to return to things as they once were, because they are no longer like that, and she is no longer as she was.

An unexpected quest leads her deeper into self-discovery and reveals secrets of her parentage and ancestry, challenges assumptions she had made about her world and her place in it. Throughout the story, Okorafor keeps the focus tightly on Binti and her inner struggles, even as the world around her unfolds. She also elevates to role of culture and spirituality, and allows these elements of Binti to co-exit with her scientific and mathematical strengths, indeed for these different world views to be complementary and mutually-beneficial.

I’d recommend this to anyone interested in seeing where modern Sci-Fi is heading.

(Recent side note: another of Okorafor’s novels, ‘Who Fears Death’, recently picked up for TV with an Executive Producer who is famous for some show about thrones and games).

Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) by Jeff VanderMeer

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This novel has been getting a little buzz (and will get more in coming months) as a Hollywood film version is being made. In part I wanted to read this before the film came out, but I didn’t really need that excuse. I read ‘Finch’ some time ago and since then have been meaning to dive deeper into VanderMeer’s worlds.

This is sufficiently ‘Weird’ and VanderMeer handles the weirdness with relish. The characters are kept anonymous, including the protagonist whom we know only as The Biologist. She guides us through her entry to the Southern Reach as best that she can, given the shifting sense of the place and the uncertainty and unreliability of her own senses, the influence of hypnosis and other less explicable factors.

VanderMeer doesn’t explicate too much, which is a welcome decision. The reader is left to piece things together, decide who to trust and how much. It’s a book in which you, as reader, must be an active participant. Making meaning from the fragments and clues and hints. As anyone familiar with VanderMeer’s work might expect, the novel delivers fungi, dysmorphic bodies, impossible mysteries and the central (unresolved) question of what it means to be human and how the line between the Human and the Other might be blurred.

I’d recommend this to anyone willing to walk a few steps through the darkness and investigate the strange things they find as their eyes adjust.

All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1) by Martha Wells

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This Tor novella was a great advertisement for the strengths of the form. Wells gives us our narrator in first person very quickly, building an amazing amount of world- and character-building into an economical opening without expository dump. She hints at a much larger world and a rich history for the character, but is very disciplined in keeping her focus on the story she is here to tell.

That story is great. A self-described ‘Murderbot’ (possibly a reprogrammed human, possibly a cyborg more machine than flesh), overcomes its control protocols and discovers a love of soap operas and personal freedom. The Murderbot is a sympathetic, snarky, and very enjoyable character.

Wells handles the action elements well, with sparse but evocative description which doesn’t bog down in the minutiae. She is also able to reveal her human characters slowly through the Murderbot’s narrative lens. The agency of the Murderbot is the crucial question here, and Wells maintains that agency right through to a very satisfying end.

River of Teeth (River of Teeth #1) by Sarah Gailey

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This Alt-History Adventure/Heist has one of the best set-ups I’ve come across in a long time. It’s the early-20th Century in the southern states of the young US of A and some enterprising types have taken to importing African Hippopotamuses and farming them along the Mississippi River and the swamps and bayous of Louisiana. Of course, the life of a Hippo (‘Hop’) Rancher is a hard-scrabble one and former-rancher turned general ne’er-do-well Winslow Remington Houndstooth has a scheme (“It’s not a scheme!”) to make some money moving on some feral Hops. A side-order of revenge is quite the motivator too.

This is another Tor novella, and Gailey has great fun with its premise, playing up the familiar tropes of the American frontier all while a semi-submerged hippo waits to rise out of the water and change everything. At times that happens, but overall I found the hippos became too peripheral. They were more than background colour, more than a quirk to the setting, but sometimes not much more.

The human focus is good, and the characters full of colour and movement. They’re a proudly diverse crowd in terms of gender and sexuality and melanin, and that’s a strength of the narrative. Houndstooth’s relationship with Hero is sometimes touching and beautiful; his relationship with Archie hints at a deeper history and mutual respect (along with mutual wariness). But ultimately there didn’t seem enough time to invest in these relationships to the extent that they deserved and sometimes the ‘team’ Houndstooth assembles feels paper-thin, the antagonist likewise a silhouette threat rather than an actual villain: the long shadow cast around the corner but the anticlimactic arsehole in the full light.

I’d recommend this for a quick, fun read for those who liked old westerns, heist films and hippos (but never expected to see them all in the same place).

This Census-Taker by China Mieville

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If you go poking around this blog for a while you’ll soon see that I hold Mieville in high regard. He’s one of my favourite authors. Having read other reviews of this novella, I’m left to wonder whether my fanboying may be lending a rose-tint to my reading glasses (metaphorically speaking), but…

I liked this a lot.

Even more after reading it than while reading it, I find my mind returning to its images, to the central conundrum of it all, to the problems and passages and moments of it. This novella wormed its way into my brain and was leeching its influence through my thoughts for weeks after I set it down. It’s beautiful and stark and confusing and contradictory and strange. Often weird, always uncanny, sometimes fantastical.

I want to stay spoiler free, so by way of setting things up this opens with a boy coming down from his isolated home high on a rocky mountaintop to the villagers who live a little further downslope. He come with a horrifying tale of having witnessed a murder: his mother has killed his father… or did his father kill his mother? He can’t recall exactly and there’s some doubt anyone died at all. The boy is unreliable as a witness and as a narrator, a point Mieville reinforces throughout with sudden shifts of narrative perspective, person and tense.

This is full of high ideas and beneath its surface you get the sense of a vast and urgent backstory, a history to this world beyond the relatively small tale of the boy on the mountainside. Mieville handles this expertly, but expect to do some work. There’s not a wasted word here (though if you’ve read much of Mieville you’ll know there will be a few which will have you reaching for the dictionary), and even the tangents and digressions come back around to aid what understanding the reader might be able to draw from the novel. It doesn’t move quickly. It’s more atmosphere than plot. It feels much more dense than its length suggests.

I’d recommend this to fans of Mieville, of weird mysteries and creepy, unsettling horror.

Thunderbird (the 4th Miriam Black book) by Chuck Wendig

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Miriam Black is back and she’s on a health-kick… of sorts. She’s jogging. She’s quit smoking. She’s on a path of self-improvement. The good news is she’s still cantankerous and nasty and if anything the ‘nic-fits’ she’s getting from quitting only make things worse.

She’s also dragging around the guilt and wreckage of her various past adventures. While this does give a sense of building consequence for the character (she can’t just fuck things up and then move on to the next episode. Things don’t reset for the people she’s collided with through her travels) it also means that a good memory of the previous three books is required. I don’t know how much you’d lose picking this up as your first Miriam read, but I suspect a lot.

Despite her best efforts, she’s drawn back in, perhaps by fate, or her Trespasser, or her own much-beaten but unwavering sense of decency. As much as she might deny that such a thing exits. She can still see the deaths of those she touches, and her connection to bird-life is only growing stronger and more powerful. But Wendig here populates Miriam’s world with others who also have ‘powers’, as he has started to do in previous volumes, and I felt that detracted a bit from what made the first book (especially) great. There, Miriam was a one-off–an anomaly in a very ‘real’ world for the reader. Here the balance of the scales has tipped, so that she’s not really operating in our world any more, but in a Fantasy setting which is like our world, but not.

Wendig’s taken a lot of heat from certain internet denizens for the politics in his novels, especially in his Star Wars novels. It’s never bothered me (perhaps because I think our politics probably coincide more than they contradict). In this novel, the rise of a Trumpian Far Right in America comes through in Wendig’s antagonists, but really that just made me barrack for Miriam all the more.

I’d recommend this to fans of tough, sweary, angry chicks who kick arse and talk back, who are stubbornly good despite many temptations to go bad.

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So that’s it for the mid-year novels. I’ve read some great short fiction too, but not on track for the 50 for the year so will have to get my head down and get to work.

Might be a review post for the top five I’ve read so far coming soon.

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November 4, 2016

Review: “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies” (Short story)

By Josh Melican

I don’t normally review short stories because I read quite a few and I don’t often get time to reflect on them and write up those reflections here, but I’m making an exception, in part because this is a pretty exceptional story (and in part motivated by a tone-deaf review I read which seemed to miss the point of this story completely. I won’t link to it. If you’re desperate to know, trawl my Twitter feed for my reaction).

Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies appears in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 13.

You can read it (or listen to it) here: http://uncannymagazine.com/article/talons-can-crush-galaxies/

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(Cover art by Julie Dillon, www.juliedillonart.com)

I first read Brooke Bolander’s work with her rightfully acclaimed And You Shall Know Her By The Trail of Dead, which was published in Lightspeed Issue 57 (Feb 2015). That story went on to be a finalist for Nebula and Hugo and set a high bar.

And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead - illustration by Galen Dara
(Art by Galen Dara, 2015, which accompanied Bolander’s story in Lightspeed, 57)

Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies is a much different story, and much shorter, but it packs much of the same punch.

Bolander has a talent for an opening. In And You Shall Know Her… that was in a first paragraph with deep hooks in it. Here, she has boiled that down to one sentence:

“This is not the story of how he killed me, thank fuck.”

One of the most remarkable features of this story is how compact it is. It comes in at barely more than 1,000 words, but it’s full to the brim. It’s as lean and muscular as a prizefighter, not a word wasted.

Bolander’s opening paragraph makes the thematic purpose clear. For all the otherworldly elements, (copper feathers, wing stubs, immortality, multiple realities, black holes and parallel universes, to name but a few), this is a story about our world: a world in which the victims of violence become anonymised and the perpetrators become celebrities, where women’s brutalised bodies are ignored at best, displayed as warnings or entertainment at worst, and where excuses are found for nice boys from good families.

But while the reader can make connections between this story and the Stanford rapist, the Steubenville rapists, the likes of Ted Bundy, this is not a story about them. It’s a story which deliberately and explicitly ignores any temptation to sympathise with, or even to explain or understand, guys like that. It doesn’t want to tell their tale. This is someone else’s story; not theirs.

With theme established, Bolander delivers the main narrative in sparse but descriptive detail. Each piece of information is a bullet-point on a list, and we as readers must bring these discrete facts together. We co-create the narrative. I’m not always convinced by this as a story-telling form, but this proves that the technique–done well–carries power.

The final paragraphs bring it all back together, and broaden the scope from the gritty detail to the epic scale suggested by the title.

This is an excellent short story. A galaxy full of stars for it, from me, provided it is a small galaxy with 5 stars in it (or a crushed galaxy, perhaps, wherein 5 stars remain).

 

 

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May 6, 2016

Review: ‘Road Brothers’ by Mark Lawrence

By Josh Melican

Disclaimer — All the way back in 2013, elsewhere on this site, I sung the praises of Mark Lawrence‘s Grimdark Fantasy trilogy, the books of the Thorns: Prince, King, Emperor. They’re very good. If you haven’t read them and you like that sort of thing, you should check them out. Unexpectedly, my faint voice of high praise reached Lawrence himself and he has such a commendably fine memory (or perhaps more commendably, fine record keeping practices) that he offered me the opportunity to read ‘Road Brothers’ a little earlier than many and for free. He didn’t specifically ask for a review (I don’t think), but I intend to give one and in the interests of open transparency, I felt you should know about how I came to read it. I judge this a fair & frank review, but you’re welcome to make your own judgement too.

First, the spoiler-free:
This is a collection of short stories set in Lawrence’s ‘Broken Empire’ and featuring characters from the two series he has set in that world.
If you know these characters, you learn a lot more about them, get to spend more time with them, understand their histories, gain insights into the thoughts and motivations which inform their actions… all of which is great if you’ve read the earlier books. I have, and I enjoyed (most) of these stories largely for those reasons. More on that later.
I wouldn’t recommend this collection as an entry-point to Lawrence’s work, but in this I’m in accord with the author himself. It opens with the advice to people who haven’t read his earlier work, and who are picking this up without that existing familiarity with his world and characters, not to buy the book.
The author. Telling potential readers. Do not buy this book.

It’s a gutsy move, but consistent with a similarly gutsy decision Lawrence made at the end of his first series and explained in the postscript of Emperor.
So if you’ve read Lawrence’s other books, this is definitely worth your time and money. If not, look elsewhere first and come back to ‘Road Brothers‘ when you’re ready.
Spoilers ahead:
image via Goodreads

image via Goodreads

You’ve been warned
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The positives:
Much of this is exactly what you are expecting, and that’s likely a good thing, because you’re expecting well crafted stories with a strong sense of character and a a bit of black humour and a hard edge and difficult moralities. This book delivers all that. Blood, betrayal, lies deception, the callous and banal cruelties of which humanity is so exceedingly capable. Weak men pretending at strength, strong men worn down, widowers and one-time fathers bearing the great burden of inconsolable grief.

Lawrence has a gift for metaphor and simile. He scatters quotable bon mots and wry observation throughout these stories. He often holds up a critical mirror to our own world in the world of his Broken Empire. He asks if ours is less Broken, after all.

To the complaints:

There are flawed and burdened and broken women here, but significantly fewer of them and cast in lesser roles. In some stories, none at all. In others stories perfunctory or peripheral appearances. This is ‘Road Brothers’ after all, but Lawrence’s female characters are so significant and complex and interesting in his novel-length trilogies that their absence (or at least their lack of centrality) is felt here. It’s not that he can’t write women well, it’s just that here he doesn’t seem as interested in their stories as in the stories of his men.
If binge-reading, these stories take on a sense which might be called ‘consistency’ but is perhaps more a sense of sameness. Again the village raided. Again the murdered family. Again the man’s need for revenge. Again the witty remark, the clever ploy, the fortunate hand of fate. Always, always, burning thatch. Lawrence here burns a hell of a lot of fictional thatch.
This complaint only occurred when I read several end-on-end. When I spaced things out, about a story a week, the problem wasn’t so apparent.
My top three stories (and an honourable mention):
Sleeping Beauty
Know Thyself
Rescue
Bad Seed
To the specifics:
Below, my thoughts story by story. I took these notes contemporaneously, sometimes immediately upon finishing the story, sometimes as I was reading. I’ve cleaned them up for spelling, grammar, etc, but they’re otherwise my thoughts as they occurred.
Rescue –  Makin’s story. Very short. Effectively three scenes and heavy on memories and Makin’s internal thoughts. It becomes, quickly, Jorg’s story, even while Jorg takes no action within it. Makin loses centrality in his own story. Does a good job explaining his back-story and his loyalty/connection to Jorg.
Sleeping Beauty– This was a strong story, and perhaps because of being back in Jorg’s head and in first-person it felt more familiar to the Broken Empire. I got Resident Evil vibes from the bunker. Lawrence intertwined sci-fi and fantasy elements well (as he does in his long form writing) with the additional thread of the fairytales. The Goldilocks diversion wasn’t necessary to the tale, but worked. The revelations about the hook briars was good, but does this retcon his scars from the novels?
Bad Seed – great first line drops always to a slow build, and the little play on the 6th Sense twist is obvious early but confirmed late (in the sense it was confirmed after being obvious to the reader for too long. Guessing the twist a moment before the reveal is exciting. Guessing it and waiting on the ever-more-obviously-inevitable reveal, less so). The gap between childhood and adulthood is well-written. The loss of the family in a manner repetitive to others (Makin’s notably) felt unnecessary. We had no real connection to wife/sons, so would a burnt house not be enough to set him off? If he’s a natural born killer, why does he need the family-loss motivation? Surely the soldiers’ arrivals are sufficient motivation. He wanted to go to war, but war came to him. The scene in the field was very good, but the latter fight (1 v 6) was best when it was general ‘he threw himself amongst them’, rather than the blow-by-blow which slowed things down and made it all a little overly described. This especially the case when those blows rang at odds with a farmer who had done no violence for years. Throwing the perfect sword stab, sliding and cutting…
The skill in the writing elevated the story. The passage on a farmer’s relationship to killing (as contrast to soldiers’), and on tendons and slaughter and such were all poignant and offered depth to the narrative.
The frisson of meeting Jorg through Red Kent was good fan-service, as was the explanation for the name as a growth from the Old Tongue. Unlike Makin’s this was Red Kent’s story throughout.
Nature of the Beast: Sabitha (as with Lynch’s Locke Lamora stories?) It’s interesting that Rike’s story is not in his head (as others have been). The author’s note at the end of the story addresses this. Afemale first person protagonist, but even with a view from within her head, she’s secondary. This is not her story; it’s Rike’s. More burning thatch. Stakes are suddenly life and death and why we should care about either is never well established. We’re not sure if we should care about her curse or her death, and we’re given no real reason why we should. The curse is the link back to the main books, but while thematically ambitious (that compassion is a curse and a cause of suffering) I would have loved more exploration of that theme. Without it, the curse loses some of its gravitas.
Select Mode:
I had read this before as stand-alone.
Now, as then, this seems an earlier effort. I’m not sure where it comes in ML’s writing chronology, but the prose seems an earlier iteration, less practised and assured than he becomes with experience. I like the concepts here, of slow time, of the post-apocalyptic ruins, of meaning created in misunderstanding. But overall, for reasons I’m not sure I can entirely explain, I didn’t enjoy the story as much as I was intrigued by those elements of it.
Mercy
Another Makin story?
Oh. It’s a Gorlan story. Did we head-hop, or was that my misreading from the start?
And that ending left me wondering what was the point of having read it. Some minor tweak late to misdirect the real threat from a known character to an unknown? It then became a climax played out between two characters I didn’t care much about because they hadn’t been made important to me. Both were significant only in how they related to Makin. Put him in and his gravity pulls the narrative toward him. Take him out and the vacuum he leaves is too great.
A Good Name.
Intriguing first line. Concern creeps in that this is going to be mired in noble savage tropes, but I think Lawrence avoids falling for that. The exoticism is filtered throughout the story, rather than dwelt upon or fethisized. Usually, this is done deftly, but sometimes with a heavy hand. Snaga’s introduction is at best a convenient contrivance. I don’t get Harrac’s motivation here. He didn’t want to wait a few hours but then he gives years in service with Snaga. Why? Then a head-hop? It’s Snaga’s story now? Only briefly.
I loved the character in the Broken Empire books and he fascianted me for his (seemingly misplaced) loyalty to Jorg and in Jorg’s dependence on him. Here, with his younger version, I didn’t feel the same way. He didn’t feel like the same character, whereas the farmer who would become Red Kent felt like Red Kent even before he was (that makes sense, trust me). Younger Rike was obviously Rike. Makin too.
Choices:
Lawrence does an opening line really well, but some feel as though they were crafted independently of the story they open and then bolted on to draw the reader in. Gorgoth and… Jane. What were those parents thinking? That’s a strange pair of names to give. The ‘darkness is patient…’ line is a killer line. Lawrence sure knows how to write those lines. The descriptions here are well done, and I like the quest/journey through the ruins. It has a little the feel of a video game. The fight scene with the bot is a bit silly/contrived. Sudden introduction of Jorg feels rushed/forced.
The Secret:
The different structure here offers promise. The narrative within a narrative, interwoven timeframes, flashing back and forward. It’s good to see Lawrence experimenting with form. His novels and several of these stories are first person perspective, so this is a fresh approach.
The ‘lie’ which Sim reveals was revealed far before the narrative means to reveal it, or perhaps was obvious enough that the reader should have been expected to ‘get it’ before being given it. The explanation of Sim’s diversion is unnecessary. Again Jorg twists the piece to himself.
Know Thyself:
Where Jorg’s presence, or even nearness, seemed to drag other stories off their tracks a little, here he is at once absent and central from the start. It is Jorg’s actions which provoke the narrative here and thus he belongs in the gravity well of the story. Where elsewhere (to varying degrees) he felt like an intruder, here he truly belongs.
But it did make me think of the dog (Justice) again and I never wanted to think of the dog again.
Gomst is an interesting character and the hints at an interesting past are deft and full of intrigue.
I like that the focus shifts from Jorg to William, and that it is through Jorg that we get the first earnings of William
Hope you enjoyed the review. If you’ve read this far you’ve probably read the stories already, but if you just skipped to the end for my verdict it is thus:
This is a good collection of Grimdark Fantasy stories which I’d happily recommend to fans of the genre and of Lawrence’s other work.

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