Tag Archives: Urban Fantasy

September 9, 2026

Review: The Etched City

By Josh Melican

This is the second in a series of reviews I am doing based on a reading-list which was inspired by Adrian Tchaikovsky’s proposal for a micro-sub-genre of Speculative Fiction which he has labelled Fantastical Realism. These are novels in which charatcers with low status or limited power inhabit a world (usually a city, usually in some state of early industrialisation) which is fantastical to us but mundane to its inhabitants, until the introduction of something new, or some changed condition, disrupts their world.
My first review in the series was of Tchaikovsky’s own City of Lost Chances.

KJ Bishop is an Australian author (and fellow Melburnian). Published in 2003, The Etched City is her debut novel after she had previously been focussed on short fiction, and it was recognised with a nomination for the World Fantasy Award as Best Novel, and with the Ditmar Award for Best Novel, as well as Bishop herself being recognised with the Ditmar for Best New Talent.

I struggled with this novel, and I’m struggling with articulating my thoughts into a review of it. Like the novel iteslf, my thoughts on it are shifting and hard to pin down into the concrete.

Initially, I was taken in by the world Bishop described and the characters inhabiting it. We join Raule as she moves across the blasted desert-scape of Copper Country and its clear from the start that both the world and Raule herself have a rich history. We are joining her at this point in her story, but it has more the feel of a denouement than an opening. Raule had been a revolutionary in a failed revolution, and now, brought low, on the run, the climax of that story is already in her past. Her path intersects with Gwynn, a fellow-revolutionary and a former-colleague. They make an interesting pair, alike in many ways and opposed in others. Both capable of violence, though Gwynn is ruthless where Raule is methodical, Gwynn embraces the opportunity for violence where Raule accepts the necessity of it. Together, in an alliance more of circumstance than of conviction, they flee their pursuers as long as they can, before they inevitably need to make their stand.
The Copper Country setting has been described in other reviews as a blend between that American ‘Wild West’ and a mythologised ‘Arabia’ of bazaars and camel-trains. As an Australian reader it has more of the feel of the Outback to me, that vast interior of the continent in which red dust plains stretch horizon-to-horizon, towns spattered onto the landscape like bird droppings, and the ruins of colonial structures crumbling back into the sands. Other than the lack of cars, bikes and trucks, Copper Country could call to mind the backdrop of Mad Max.
With compelling characters in a complex relationship and an interesting landscape, and with the tension of the pursuit driving the narrative forward, this section of the novel drew me in and had me turning pages, but after the desperate stand against their pursuers, the novel takes a dramatic shift.

The second section of the novel, and the much larger bulk of it, take place far from Copper Country, in the city of Ashmoil.
A crumbling, shifting, decaying, vibrant, crowded city built on the banks of a broad river amid dense jungle, Ashmoil operates as a port for trade, a haven for criminals, a territorial battleground for gangs and a marketplace for art, drugs, guns, slaves, sex, and possibly for magic. That ‘possibly’ is there because Ashmoil is an ambiguous place, as the novel itself is ambiguous, and the line between potions and drugs is just as blurred and uncertain as the lines between claivoyant and charlatan, between mystic and mythology, between moral and immoral.
Raule finds work in a hospital among the city’s slums, acting as both nurse and midwife to the poor, using her war-time experiences of medicine to stitch up the wounds of the young knife-fighters after their ceremonial duels.
Gwynn finds work as a ‘cavalier’, a paid retainer for one of the city’s more successful crimelords. Part-mafioso, part-assassin, part-bodyguard, part-errand-boy. Always too well-dressed and well-mannered to be merely a thug, he spends many of his days in hedonistic pursuits: gambling, drinking, smoking, womanizing… a life of leisure punctuated by acts of violence.
Both are amoral in their work, though differently: Raule’s morality worn down to a nub by hardship and circumstance; Gwynn’s morality silenced by necessity and apathy.
Both are better trying to understand the city they inhabit: Raule through the study of the several deformed infants who die in the womb or shortly after their birth; Gwynn in his search for the artist who etched a cityscape in which Gwynn himself appears in the background.

I struggled with the early Ashmoil section of the novel because it is not plot-driven and I kept trying to find the plot. I kept trying to force the story to conform to my expectations, rather than allowing myself to discover the story as I went.
Oh, I this is a story of Gwynn’s search for an artist and the secrets he discovers when he reveals her? But it’s not that.
Oh, I this is a story about the mysterious cause of the birth defects, and how Raule finds a way to respond to that cause? But it’s not that.
I kept trying to find a clear protagonist and a clear antagonist, but found neither. Or perhaps found multiple. Or perhaps it is too reductive to approach the story in those terms. There is no overarching goal which the characters share, no central conflict to be resolved, or central question to be answered. Events occur and the characters respond or react. In some instances their lives are changed by these events, in other instances they continue on.
The middle of the novel is more a selection of sub-plots than a unified narrative. The main characters have little to do with each other, their stories running most often in parrellel with only a few moments of intersection, such as the corrupt priest who is both an administrator at Raule’s hospital and a theological/philosophical debating partner for Gwynn. One of Gwynn’s colleagues becomes obsessed with his employer’s songstress, Raule tries to help the mother of a young man she treats, a civil war is brewing and arms must be provided (to both sides and at great profit from each), the precarious balance of power between the crime families and the authorities shifts in ways that sometimes favour and sometimes threaten Gwynn’s employers…

I enjoyed the novel much more once I stopped trying to make it something it wasn’t. Once I accepted it as an examination rather than a narrative. A meditation on some big questions about morality and reality. Here is a city, and here are the lives of some people who inhabit it, and this is how they see their world and how they live those lives.

When Gwynn finds the artist, Bethine, who etched his image into her representation of the city, he falls (perhaps) in love and his deepening connection to her coincides with (or perhaps causes?) his own life and the city of Ashmoil itself to become increasingly fantastical. Both the novel and the city take on an ethereal, dream-like quality. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the actual events of the narrative from dream sequences, drug trips and introspection. The character and nature of Bethine, and of the art she creates, are uncertain. It’s unclear if Gwynn is her muse or her subject, just as it is unclear whether she creates art from the city, or the city is created from her art, or the city itself is an artwork, or a dream, or an hallucination.

And in the final section of the novel, some of these various disjointed threads are stitched together into a final act. Or perhaps it is more apt to say that some of the story seeds germinate and propogate and blossom into a final act. Decisions are made. Overdue consequences belatedly arrive. Violence begets violence begets violence. Betrayal requires revenge. Some lives end in tragedy, others in sacrifice, others merely end, though death may not be the end it was believed to be. In mortal wounds, flowers bloom.
Few mysterious are solved, and the city–stranger now than it was when first introduced–is irrevocably changed.

This is one of those novels which embedded itself in my mind and which kept returning to my thoughts, unbidden, for many months afterwards. Fragments of images. The memory of scenes. Moments in the lives of the characters or in the city.
It is inventive and imaginative, excellently written and meticulously crafted. It fits very well into the subgenre Tchaicovsky proposes of Fantastical Realism.

Midway through I was expecting it would be closer to 3 Stars. Straight after I finished it I would have had it at a solid 4. Check back with me in the months or years to come and it may well be a 5.

Right now, as I complete this review: 4.5 Stars.
Would recommend to anyone who enjoyed Perdido Street Station and City of Last Chances, though with the caveat that it’s closer to the former than the latter, and more meandering and less structured than either.

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August 26, 2026

Review: City of Last Chances

By Josh Melican

City of Last Chances is the first book in Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s Tyrant Philosophers series, and was my first exposure to Tchaikovsky as an author. It is also the novel which prompted me to explore the rest of the series, and more of his works, and more of his ideas and thoughts on writing, and thus ultimately to the suggestion he made on Bluesky and elsewhere, that there was a small niche of similarly concerned works within Speculative Fiction for which City of Last Chances is an exemplar, and which he came to label Fantastical Realism.

I have discussed here on this blog (and over on Bluesky) how my reading in recent months was shaped by exploring this suggested sub-sub-genre and the various examples Tchaikovsky gave in defining/describing it, and in coming weeks I’ll add more reviews of those knowledge, but the best place to start is right here where the whole project was inspired, on the gritty streets of Ilmar, the eponymous city, and among the various bureaucrats, soldiers, monks, demons, patriots, professors, conjurers, thieves and priests who inhabit those streets.

The spoiler-free review here is probably apparent in that it inspired a whole reading journey. This is right up my alley, and will likely be up your alley too, if your alley twists through semi-industrialised factories, crowded with magicians and mystics and thieves and beggars, with gods and ghosts hiding in the gutters.

Ilmar is a complex blend of magic and myth, politics and power, theology and technology. The city has been recently defeated/colonised/invaded by the powerful Palleseen, an empire which is motivated by the pursuit of ‘perfection’, and whose manner of that pursuit is the rigorous application of rules which dictate every aspect of daily life for the Ilmar residents. Among those residents are a formerly-ruling aristocracy clinging onto ceremonial and symbolic power by collaborating with the Palleseen; the collectivist labour movements of ‘Siblingries’ of workers who toil in the factories of the city; the students and lecturers of the ‘Gownhall’ who are trying to maintain their political and academic independence; the Allorwen refugees whose way of life was marginalised and mistrusted even before the arrival of this new colonial power; the organised criminal syndicates that control the underworld parts of the city which other powers cannot reach; and the last dregs of the beleagured and outlawed religions which were once dominant but have now been largely crushed in the name of ‘Perfection’. Perhaps most-strange of all, a grove of trees still standing in an ancient wood, the ‘Anchorwood’, within which will intermittently open a portal to other worlds, and by this grove a tavern, staffed by those who can facilitate travel and trade through this portal… for the right price.

Tcahikovsky gives us perspective characters from each of these groups, and often multiple charatcers within a group so that the internal divisions and disputes are revealed. It’s a complicated cast, and sometimes a complicated task for the reader to make sense of each perspective, especially when the same event is viewed so differently by different parties, but this complexity is a strength of the novel. It allows Tcahikovsky to gives us a detailed and thorough overview of the society in which these characters operate, along with an intimate and personal view of their challenges and troubles.

While there is no real protagonist, per se, it was Yasnic who remained the most central figure in my understanding of events. The last priest of a very minor God of healing (so minor that he has no other name than God), Yasnic is trapped in a very personal relationship with his cantakerous and demanding deity. Yasnic is not a figure of great power or influence, often not even a figure of significance, but he is a sympathetic character, a well-meaning man burdened by his oaths and obligations, and yet unable to set them aside. He provides a moral centre to the novel (albeit a resolutely deontological one), and because he moves through the city in a way that a more prominent or more public figure cannot, he becomes a narrative unifier, interacting with other characters in oblique ways and tying various narrative strands together, allowing the reader to gather the intricately knotted stories, untangle them slowly and weave them into something larger.

It is a character-driven novel, and it is in those characters that its greatest strengths are clear, but it is well crafted in many other ways as well. The writing is highly engaging, with some memorable quotes and phrases. The plot moves along at a good pace, rarely sagging, rarely rushed, some twists-and-turns which are to various degrees unpredictable. The mysteries presented are strange and intriguing and reach satisfying revelations. The world-building is careful and considered and highly detailed, both fantastical and plausible, filled with both novel imaginative wonders and familiar themes. The stakes ratchet up, actions have consequences, petty motivations derail grand plans, people’s faults and foibles can harm themselves and those around them even when motives are pure. Motives are not always pure.

With such a large cast and with so many plots and sub-plots running simultaneously you do sometimes find yourself in the view of one character when you’re keen to find out how another is progressing. The novel has a lot to say and each character provides us with a lens through which to examine some weighty themes: the brutality of colonial oppression, the resistance of the oppressed, the limits of unification in a hierarchical labour force, the effects of lost faith, the relentlessness of obligation, the costs of our commitments, the ways in which we are able to convince ourselves to do the things we feel we must do, the reasons we provide to ourselves when we are unable to do the things we cannot.

As more and more peices are added to the board, and as their connections complexify, and as each characters personal motivations come increasingly into conflict with others, it seems that it will be a difficult task to bring all of the ambitious threads together for the conclusion, it is finely done and Tchaikovsky sticks the landing.

So 5 Stars, from me.

I would highly recommend this novel, especially to any reader who enjoyed Mieville’s ‘Perdido Street Station’ or similar ‘New Weird’, or the kind of Fantasy which of more about an early-industrial era rather than the medieval, perhaps something like Abercrombie’s ‘Age of Madness’ series, or to those readers who are as interested in the political machinations of Fantasy worlds as they are in the magic and mythology of them.

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September 25, 2014

‘Bound’ Review

By Josh Melican

Disclosure: I met Alan Baxter once, briefly, at Genrecon. He seemed like a great guy, and since then I’ve been following him on Twitter and FB and reading some of his short fiction. He’s a writer I admire, a local writer too. He’s always been generous with advice and with sharing his experiences of being a writer, and I’ve learnt a lot from him. He’s given me a very valuable perspective of what being a writer entails. I was really happy to hear that he got the book deal, and I was looking forward to reading about Alex Caine.

Review:

‘Bound’ drops us straight into the action. We’re in Caine’s head and he’s in a fight, an illegal MMA match somewhere in Sydney’s underworld. We are quickly introduced to Caine’s ability – to see the ‘shades’ of his opponent’s intent. It makes him a formidable fighter, so much so that he attracts the unwanted attention of an organised crime boss. When a mysterious Englishman arrives who recognises Caine’s powers, and offers to teach him more about himself, the fighter reluctantly follows his new mentor’s call. Thus begins a globe-trotting adventure of rapidly escalating magic and quests to find ancient objects of great power.

This is Urban Fantasy with a magical bent and lashings of sex and violence. If you like ancient prophecies and street fights and magic and shadowy organisations in the wainscoting of normal life, try this book.

There are possible spoilers from here on, but if you want to know more, and are prepared to risk spoilers, read on.

Photo courtesy of author's website

Photo courtesy of author’s website

There are some very cool concepts here. I haven’t read Baxter’s original – self-published – novels, but their titles echo here. Some characters sit meaningfully at the edges of Caine’s story and I suspect they’d be even more meaningful to readers familiar with Baxter’s earlier work. The magesign to which Caine is so perceptive is a great idea. Other elements are from more familiar tropes: elemental control, warlocks, grimoires, gargoyles, faeries, ancient demi-gods, shape-shifters. Baxter has thrown them all into a blender of his own design though, and they each come out with some new twist. It’s in combining these elements that Baxter is at his best.

I also really enjoyed the globe-trotting. Australia, England, Iceland, Canada, Italy, Scotland… it was like Bond, if Bond was a magically empowered brawler. Baxter evokes each location in his writing and the shifting geography, the litany of airports, adds a layer of the familiar and mundane over which the supernatural elements can rise.

As we become more familiar with Caine’s growing confidence in his own powers, we are shown the even greater forces opposing him. It’s a steep incline and Baxter drives us forward relentlessly, ever-changing, ever-escalating. The consequence of this is that the stakes quickly become very high indeed, perhaps too quickly. Caine’s transition from neophyte to dominance is even quicker. I found that he lost me a little somewhere on the climb. The Caine of the early chapters was a guy I could relate to. By the latter half of the book this was no longer the case. The previously engaging fight scenes lost their fizz when the outcome was no longer in doubt. A fighter out of his depth fighting for his life against two gargoyles is tense. An invincible superpower tearing through powerful opponents with ease, less so. I also struggled to maintain my sympathy for the character after his decision to take a life, even if that was a decision influenced by a force at that point uncontrolled. Another review I read suggested that Caine was an author-surrogate, and though I wouldn’t entirely agree with that assessment, I can see where it comes from.

The antagonists are varied. The sub-contractor was probably the most interesting, and I would have liked to have seen more of him. The Weird Sisters were also strong. Their introduction was one of the best scenes in the book, clearly the darkest and most horrific. I’m not easily put-off by horror, but that scene in a Scottish hotel required a pause for recovery. Again they were perhaps under-utilised. Other antagonists came and went.

Mr Hood and Miss Sparks are the most enduring, and ultimately the truest antagonists of the novel (other than the force behind the grimoire). I felt Miss Sparks was one of the more interesting POV characters. There seemed to be more to her than was revealed. Perhaps this waits for me in the second and third volumes of the series. Mr Hood was menacing and confident and a good counter-point to Caine. The Sparks/Hood relationship was repulsive and fascinating, even though the sexual elements of it sometimes dropped in with a thud. I have no qualms about the sexual content, and even as it is Baxter is never overly explicit with it, but there were some instances that felt gratuitous.

Which brings me to Silhouette. I didn’t like Silhouette. I understand how she was necessary to the narrative and how Caine couldn’t have achieved what he did without her. I understood why he went from Welby to Silhouette, why he came to depend on her, and then she on him. I didn’t feel that the emotional connection really evolved naturally, but that wasn’t really a problem – emotional connections can be unexpected and inexplicable. I just didn’t like her, as a character. She promised to become quite interesting, briefly, or to reveal a side of herself to which Caine was unaware, but it never really happened. As Caine’s power grew her independence and agency seemed to contract accordingly. A shame, because she entered with a certain sense of self that seemed by the end to have been diminished. Her (many) sex scenes with Caine were unsexy, probably deliberately so, and some of them deeply discomforting – for much the same reasons as with Hood/Sparks.

‘Bound’ kept me hooked throughout. I finished the whole thing in a week, and there’s plenty in it to keep you wanting to turn the next page (or swipe the screen in my case). It’s the novel of a writer who knows his craft and can deliver on a promise. I’ll read the others in the series too, at least because I’m interested in where Baxter goes from here. With such a powerful protagonist, and such powerful enemies already defeated, I’m sure there’ll be something even bigger to come.

***Alan Baxter will be in Melbourne this Friday (26th Sept) and will be signing books. Check out his website – http://www.alanbaxteronline.com – or follow him on twitter – @AlanBaxter – for details.***

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July 24, 2013

The City & The City Review

By Josh Melican

I’ve decided to shift some reviews I wrote on another blog and have them up here as well. The first of those is of Miéville’s “The City & The City”, which I read last April. More to come.
(Minor warning on the potential for spoilers, but I think I’ve avoided any obvious ones).

China Miéville has always been an author with an ambiguous relationship to genre. He is often to be found in the Fantasy sections of the bookstore (where they still have bookstores), but this isn’t an exact fit. (His most famous ‘Fantasy’ novel – “Perdido St Station” – has a scientist as its protagonist.) He is also an author far more comfortable with urban environments than the bucolic pastoralism of more traditional Epic Fantasy (in the Tolkein tradition). The first question one may ask of “The City & The City” is then which genre it belongs to. It’s an answer I’m not sure I can give.

The title refers to Beszal and Ul Qoma, cities which, for reasons never fully explored or explained, share the same physical space. These two separate political, judicial and social entities overlap and intersect each other, the citizenry of each share physical spaces, streets, parks, weather, even traffic, but they are distinct. They have different laws, authorities, governments, bureaucracies, airports… To call a house physically next door but existentially in the other city would require international calling codes. To pass from one to the other requires a passport and visa. Through an ingrained psychological process of ‘unseeing’ they have learnt to disregard each other and the city they should not be in. This ‘unseeing’ is enforced by the mysterious power of ‘Breach’, but presents obvious difficulties for tourists and the foreign academics coming to study the unique archaeology of the area.  In this element you might suggest that “The City & The City” is a Fantasy, but the label doesn’t really fit. Both Beszal and Ul Qoma are very definitely in our world, even if it is an alternative version. They are located somewhere in Eastern Europe, or perhaps the Balkans, and interact with neighbours as well as with Canada and the US. While the setting feels fantastical there’re no definite indications that the separation between Beszal and Ul Qoma is anything other than a human social construct. Some technologies exist which seem difficult to understand, but whether this is Science-Fiction or Futurism is again ambiguous.

Being a China Miéville novel there is inevitably a political aspect to the sociology of these cities. Both Beszal and Ul Qoma have Nationalists who are prepared to fight to keep their city separate from its spatial twin. Likewise there are Unificationists fermenting a rebellion that will see Besz and Ul Qoma made one. Economically, and in terms of foreign policy, the two cities are diverging and the influence of extra-national forces is felt by both populations. Readers of Political Thrillers will be familiar with the subplots of multi-national corporations and foreign ambassadors. Miéville is explicit in denying that this is a simple allegory of any existing or historical city (Borlú specifically states that this is not like Jerusalem or Berlin), nor is this an easy dichotomy of Capitalism/Communism or East/West. More than political allegory the division between the distinct citizens is a metaphor for almost any major city in the modern world, where our physical space is distinct from our social space, and where we may live next to the same person for decades without having a conversation, but have a close relationship with someone who lives suburbs away. In this way Miéville’s metaphor seems to be for the manner of modern urban socialisation, though he actively discourages any limited reading of meaning in the text.

At its heart though “The City & The City” is a detective story in a highly unusual setting. The narrative follows the investigation of Inspector Borlú of the Beszian Extreme Crime Squad. A body has been found dumped: a Jane Doe. Quickly Borlú’s investigation begins to hint at a larger conspiracy. Mysterious and anonymous tip-offs are phoned in, slim leads are followed, forensic tests are done on the body. In many ways the narrative has all the features of Crime Fiction, perhaps with a Noir element. Borlú runs in to the jurisdictional problems which are a familiar trope of this genre, but with significantly different challenges. His investigation uncovers more possible victims, and perhaps evidence that would call in the absolute powers of Breach. Borlú’s own understanding of his world, his city, Ul Qoma and the unique relationship they share is challenged, and the novel invites you to keep turning pages as the narrative twists and reverses and opens up to an extraordinary denouement.

Miéville channels the earlier Detective SciFi of Philip K Dick, the political fear of George Orwell, the hard-boiled detective of Raymond Chandler, and the Noir imagery of “The Third Man”. Although the publishers (and The Times) make a comparison to Kafka this is not absurdism. The concept of Beszal and Ul Qoma seem surreal, but it is really an exaggeration: a hyperbole of our border jurisdictions and the real examples we can find in places such as Stanstead, Coolangatta, or  Baarle-Hertog.

Miéville is an obviously intelligent writer, and though his vocabulary here is far more accessible than in some of his other work, his ideas and imagination are evidence of this great intelligence. In lesser hands the conceit of this setting would be fragile, or slippery, of overwhelming. In “The City & The City” it is none of these things. Miéville handles the subject matter with confident assurance and never loses control of the beast he has created. The narrative itself is weaker and at times takes a second place to the setting, and the characters, while well drawn, are simplistic.

His greatest ability though is to present us with the utterly implausible and make us believe it. He brings us along with him as we tour the streets of the preposterous cities, and we go along without objection, accepting and enjoying the world as he gives it to us.

Highly Recommended

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