On Books

by Peter Heck

Here’s a big fantasy novel combining the popular “school for magic” theme with a focus on the Tarot, and a prominent romance plot.

As the novel begins, Clara, the first-person narrator, is in prison. Her crime: creating Tarot cards without the sanction of the crown, which restricts possession and use of the cards to members of one of the noble clans. When Clara was arrested, she had neither graduated from the Academy nor been placed in one of the clans—both of which are required for anyone legally to create cards. To her astonishment, Prince Kaelis—the man Clara blames for putting her in prison, as well as killing her mother—appears to question her. After getting her to incriminate the warden, who has used her card-making skill to enrich himself, the prince sentences her to death, leaving her locked in the room for an hour.

But Clara has a way out. Finding inking supplies in a cupboard, she creates three cards that let her escape, climbs down a wall, and swims across the stretch of sea separating the prison from the mainland. Just as she’s about to crawl ashore, she’s knocked unconscious by a magical force. Kaelis has caught up to her. She wakes up to find herself at Arcana Academy—the elite school where all aspects of the Tarot are taught. Kaelis tells her he believes she has the skill to help him create the legendary twenty-first card of the Major Arcana—the World. If she does so, she will be rewarded.

Before Kaelis reveals any more details, his older brother—Prince Ravin, the heir apparent to the throne of Oricalis—shows up. He says he’s heard of an escapee from the prison, and Clara is instantly afraid she’ll be recaptured. But Kaelis tells his brother that Clara is a new applicant to the Academy, scheduled to be inducted at ceremonies that very night. What’s more, she is of noble birth, the only surviving heiress of Clan Hermit—all others of whom were killed off five years ago, reportedly at Kaelis’ orders.

Clara is stunned—none of this makes any sense to her. She has never heard that she belongs to Clan Hermit or any other noble clan. And when Kaelis announces that Clara is his intended bride, she’s completely thrown. As the man responsible for putting her in prison, he is the single most hated person in her life. Moreover, as the head of the Academy, Kaelis may be responsible for the disappearance of her sister Arina, who was a student when she somehow went missing. But with the alternative being a return to prison, she decides to go along with the deception and to see what she can find out.

This begins her career at the Academy, where she takes classes in the reading, inking, and wielding of the Tarot in magical combat. She makes new friends—carefully, because she has a lot of secrets—and enemies, especially among the aristocratic students who see her as an upstart. She carries on the search for her missing sister, and for answers about her mother’s death. And she wrestles with the consequences of Kaelis’s announcement that they are to be wed.

With all these elements in play, the resulting plot is packed with action—fights (magical and otherwise), chases, escapes, steamy sex scenes, and high-level political intrigue, all playing out in the setting of the school for Tarot users. If you enjoy stories of magical schools or fantasy romances, don’t miss this one. Better yet, if you like this one, there’s a sequel in the offing.

 

This is the third volume of Addison’s “Cemeteries of Amalo” series, set in a fantasy world where elves and goblins have achieved a sort of steampunk level of technology, with tramways, airships, and gaslight in the cities. The protagonist is Thara Celehar, a Witness for the Dead—one who can communicate with the recently deceased and convey their impressions and wishes to those who need to know. However, in a previous volume, Celehar lost his powers in an encounter with a revethavar—a sort of ghoul. Now, he works to fulfill tasks assigned to him by the head cleric of the city and, most importantly, to train his successor, Tomasaran, who recently came into her powers.

Celehar is in the middle of all this work—and spending time with his friend Iäna, director and main composer for the Vermillion Opera—when he is kidnapped by a group of miners. They take him to a mine in the far north, where they ask him to dispel a dragon ghoul that has been preying on them. When he tells them he has lost his powers, they throw him down a mineshaft to meet his doom, at the hands of the dragon if not from the fall.

Celehar survives the fall—and to his surprise, when he meets the dragon, he realizes that his powers have returned. Even more surprising, the dragon asks Celehar to speak up in support of the many dragons who have been killed by the miners in the building of this and other mines. Accepting this solemn obligation, Celehar returns to the surface and tries to figure out how to carry out that duty. The mines are a significant part of the empire’s economy, and it will be difficult to get anyone in power to take the dragons’ case seriously. And Celehar knows that once his plea becomes public, the mine owners will do everything possible to stop him.

As if that weren’t enough, Celehar finds himself trying to help solve a murder at the opera, the disappearance of a prince believed to be the leader of a planned rebellion against the emperor, and a long-overdue cleanup of a vital statistics office that turns out to conceal a far more serious issue. All this while he is trying to get the powers that be to respond to his witnessing for the dragons and continues helping the apprentice Tomasaran with her duties as witness for the city.

Addison has put together an unconventional fantasy world with interesting characters who have day-to-day problems most of her readers are likely to be able to identify with. And while there are frequent references to events of the earlier volumes—which I admit I haven’t read—I was able to follow the plot of this one without any real trouble. On the other hand, this one is good enough that readers who haven’t read the earlier books in the series might find it more rewarding to begin with the first in the series—The Witness for the Dead. Still, this third volume tells a grand tale.

 

Set in Singapore in the 1890s, this delightful fantasy follows the adventures of a Scottish governess dealing with supernatural creatures that haunt her employers’ families.

Red-haired Leda Cassidy—who is always referred to in proper Victorian style as “Miss Cassidy”—is hired by Captain Bendemeer, an English shipping official, to provide his daughter Sarah Jane with the essentials of a proper young lady’s education, which include embroidery, dancing, and speaking French or German. Sarah Jane is the captain’s only surviving family, the rest having died in an epidemic some years ago. And Sarah Janeis very shy and withdrawn, and hesitant to try anything outside her usual routine.

Shortly after Miss Cassidy’s arrival, the captain and his daughter go to a local Chinese businessman’s son’s wedding—which Sarah Jane at first seemed unwilling to attend. Miss Cassidy senses that her charge has feelings for Mr. Nair, a young Indian man who is another wedding guest. She also meets Mr. Kay, the father of the groom, with whom she has a brief conversation. Both these events carry significant weight as the plot moves forward—including an invitation by Mr. Kay for her to tutor his daughters in English, which she accepts.

As the story progresses, Miss Cassidy gets to know the other members of the household, from whom she learns a good deal about local history and culture—including the presence of various supernatural creatures in the vicinity. She also sees the relationship between Sarah Jane and Mr. Nair (who now works in the captain’s shipping office) begin to grow, although it is not clear whether the captain is likely to let it become anything serious.

Eventually, Miss Cassidy manages to counter the supernatural threats to her employers, while handling her duties as governess and tutor with a combination of tact and resourcefulness. When the captain eventually decides to retire back to England, taking Sarah Jane with him, Miss Cassidy stays in Singapore, taking on the full-time job of mentoring Mr. Kay’s children. There she becomes a close confidant to her employer, who seeks her out for evening chats. And as before, she uses her common sense to make sure that things in his complicated household go smoothly, on all levels.

In addition to the fantasy elements, I enjoyed this book’s portrayal of a society very different from those I’ve lived in. The author has clearly done her research into the history of her hometown of Singapore, and it makes the book that much more enjoyable. The book was originally published in Singapore and was a prize-winner there; this edition makes it available to a wider audience, which it richly deserves.

 

Set in the near future—2050—Weaver’s novel sets a mystery in the context of a catastrophically worsened world climate. At the center is Marcus Tully, a London-based online journalist driven by the quest for truth—and haunted by the death of his wife in the tabkhir, a heat wave that killed millions in the Middle East a decade earlier.

An anonymous tip arrives, about a scandal involving an American politician. The tipster says that if Tully publishes it, he’ll give him an even bigger story. Tully accepts the info and puts out the story. The tipster, satisfied with the result, tells him he has evidence that the tabkhir was caused by deliberate climate manipulation. With Tully’s obsession about his wife’s death, it’s an impossible story to pass up. He begins following up the tipster’s hints, which implicate the U.S. administration at the time of the disaster.

Then a huge news story breaks. An election to choose a Global Protector—someone to steer worldwide efforts to mitigate and if possible reverse the effects of climate change—has narrowed to two candidates. One is Lockwood, the former U.S. President implicated in manipulating the weather and causing the tabkhir. The other is Solomon—an AI personality created to govern several floating islands where the rich can escape the effects of the climate. Lockwood appears to be a shoo-in for the position, and Tully realizes that he may in a position to stop him—if he can verify the story about the tabkhir.

Following a meeting with Lockwood—at which the former President denies everything—Tully realizes he needs to talk to the creator of Solomon, Martha Chandra, who was on Lockwood’s staff at the time of the tabkhir, and likely knows something about decisions made at the time. And Tully employs Martha’s sister, Livia, as a researcher, so he’s hoping that Martha may be inclined to talk to him in spite of the nondisclosure agreement she signed when she left the government.

Tully and Livia make their way to New Carthage, the floating island where Martha lives—and where Solomon nominally makes his home. There, they attend an event where Solomon outlines his plans for the planet should he become Protector. Afterward, they attend a party at Martha’s, where they meet several of her friends. At the end of the evening, after drinking a toast to Solomon’s campaign, Tully and Martha fall asleep on the sofa. And in the morning, Tully wakes to find her dead beside him—poisoned.

This sets off a murder investigation, led by Commander October of the New Carthage police department. Medical tests indicate that Tully has received a nonlethal dose of the same poison that killed Martha, which pretty much eliminates him from the inquiries. But everyone else at the party is obviously a suspect, and narrowing down the list won’t be easy. Tully believes that Lockwood is somehow involved, and he convinces the detective that he can help with her investigation.

The investigation heads off in a dozen directions, and every time it looks as if they’ve put together an iron-clad case against one suspect, new evidence appears to undercut it. Other people involved in the case start dying. And the scope of the investigation keeps growing; while Martha’s murder had international implications from the start, it eventually becomes clear that there’s way more at stake than it first appeared.

A satisfying whodunit set in a believable near future world—recommended especially to those who enjoy a well-crafted mystery plot with science fiction underpinnings.

 

Here’s the sequel to Stirling’s To Turn the Tide, in which a group of American scholars from our near future went on a one-way time journey to the Roman Empire of Marcus Aurelius (165 CE) in hopes of preventing the disasters of their own time.

Escaping our era just as a global nuclear war was beginning, the Americans arrived in the vicinity of modern Vienna. They brought along samples of modern technology, intended to help move Rome into an advanced society. And by avoiding the collapse of the Roman Empire, they could possibly prevent the national rivalries that led to the destruction of their own society.

The first volume showed them establishing themselves in the Roman world, making allies, and putting their knowledge to work. Eventually they introduced modern weapons—gunpowder and cannon—that won a major battle and prevented what would have been a long war, sapping the Empire’s resources. They also introduced vaccination and prevented a smallpox outbreak that would have killed millions. And by doing so, they gained the favor of Marcus Aurelius—already one of the most enlightened Roman emperors.

Now, a few years later, they’ve begun to consolidate their gains. New World crops such as maize, potatoes, and tomatoes are changing Roman agriculture, as are the introduction of improved farm equipment such as wheelbarrows and cradle scythes. The military innovations have added a significant swath of territory in what’s now Eastern Germany to the Roman Empire, and as the novel progresses, more gains take place, especially in the former Persian empire—modern-day Iran.

But there’s trouble brewing. Unknown to the America time travelers, another group has made the transition to the same era. This group is in China, and its goal is to shape human history so that their nation and culture are the dominant force in the era to come. Unlike the Americans, they are a state-sponsored group, and are prepared to use direct force to establish their control of the country. We learn that China initiated the nuclear war that destroyed twenty-first-century civilization, and that they had specifically targeted the laboratory where the time machine the Americans used was located. At this point, the Chinese don’t know that attack failed to prevent the time machine from reaching the past.

Meanwhile, the Romans’ efforts to annex Persia take the Americans eastward—a course that inevitably will bring them in contact with China. This gives Stirling the chance to write some battle scenes, at which he’s one of the better exponents in the genre. But the clash with China doesn’t happen yet—instead, Stirling sets it up for a subsequent volume. Meanwhile, we get a look at Chinese society in a time period that most Western histories gloss over. I suspect there’ll be a good bit more in the sequels.

Good alternate history set in a fascinating era. Recommended.

 

Novik’s latest is a novella set in a kingdom on the border of the Summer Lands, where elf-like beings share space with other magical creatures. The border between the two realms is closed except during summer, when—until recently—the Summerlings emerged each year to carry on a war against the humans.

The protagonist is thirteen-year-old Celia, whose father was the general responsible for defeating the Summerlings in the long-running war and bringing about a truce between the two realms. Her older brother, Argent, is shaping up to become a hero in his own right, winning honors at tournaments all over the land. As the novel begins, she is eagerly awaiting his return from his latest round of successes. When Argent returns, he immediately goes to confront their father.

Argent is gay, and his father does not approve. Argent announces that he plans to leave the family forever and make his own way in the world. Celia, listening in secret, is appalled—she loves Argent the most of anyone in her family, How can he leave her behind? She corners him, demanding that he take her with him—at least, it’ll rescue her from the arranged marriage to an old duke her father has been promoting. Argent says he’s going to the Summer Lands, where it’s far too dangerous to take along a young girl.

Celia is furious. She accuses him of not caring about her, and says, “I hope no one is ever stupid enough to love you again.” What she doesn’t realize is that she has just begun her first period, and is therefore a woman, with the full magical powers she has unexpectedly inherited from her mother’s line. When she sees the menstrual blood, she knows that she has cursed Argent—and unless she can find a way to remove the curse, she has doomed her brother to a loveless life.

But there is another consequence to this achievement of powers. Now, as others learn that she is the only full-powered sorceress in the kingdom, she is a valuable catch, and her father can aim much higher than the old duke for a marriage partner. In fact, she soon receives a proposal from the royal prince, although she doesn’t really want to tie herself down in a marriage until she’s removed the curse from Argent. Nevertheless, the royal family is eager to conclude the match, and they set up an engagement party at the annual Summerfest. The marriage itself can wait a couple of years as long as the arrangements are settled.

At this point, the story takes an unexpected turn—I won’t spoil Novik’s plot by spelling it out. But a very satisfactory outcome is brought about by Celia’s magic, Argent’s martial prowess, and a couple of other factors that fit in neatly with the world Novik has created. A very enjoyable short novel by a writer who has consistently ventured into new fictional territory when she easily could have kept her fans happy by continuing to work in the series that first made her reputation.

 

A sequel to Maberry’s NecroTek, this novel—which lists Weird Tales as copublisher—is probably best described as “H.P. Lovecraft does military space opera.”

The action opens in the deep Antarctic, where a scientific expedition led by Dr. Evie Cronin finds an enormous metal artifact melting out of the ice. This is obviously from an era well before human civilization—which, as Cronin immediately recognizes, calls into question the basic assumptions all religions have about when the world was created. But these concerns take a back seat when one of the expedition members disappears in the vicinity of the artifact.

Cronin calls in a team from the Defense Advanced Research Priorities Administration (DARPA), headed by Dr. Torquil Brollachan and including both scientific experts and a top-notch military team. But when the military team goes to investigate the artifact, they find an open hatch in what is now identifiable as an alien spaceship emerging from the ice—and nary a sign of the missing expedition member.

Alternate chapters jump to a far-distant star system, where a human team inhabits Asphodel Station and the nearby planet Shadderai. Among the team leaders is Dr. Lars Soren, one of Cronin’s mentors and a leading theorist on the implications of first contact with aliens. The humans had been transported there accidentally, when an experiment in matter transmission sent the entire station to the other side of the galaxy. And they have come into contact with a hostile alien race, who appear to be monsters out of the Lovecraft mythos—Shoggoths. These sections continue the scenario of NecroTek, in which human pilots killed in battle are resurrected as machine bodies to fight the Shoggoth fleets.

While Cold War is a sequel, I found it quite readable without having seen the previous volume—although there are undoubtedly a few plot points I missed that readers of NecroTek will catch. And while it’s probably by the strictest definition a horror novel, Maberry takes the reader on a romp through space battles and alien contact, with allusions to The Thing, the Lovecraft canon, and Edgar Allen Poe, among others.

With lots of action, several relatable characters, and an awareness of deeper issues, this is a compulsively readable book by one of the more prolific authors on the current scene.

 

Here’s a new collection of stories from Swanwick. While most of them are probably best categorized as “fantasy,” anyone familiar with Swanwick’s work will know that the usual labels are inadequate to describe his imaginative tales, several of which have appeared in this magazine over the years.

In a brief introduction, Swanwick tells that the title story began with a project his wife, Marianne Porter, began several years ago—13 cigar boxes filled with astronomical illustrations and a quirky selection of small objects, sold through her Dragonstairs Press imprint. The story the boxes inspired—a copy of which was included in each of them—features a cosmic thief who ropes the protagonist into his most daring heist.

The opening story, “Starlight Express,” features a common laborer living in a future Rome who dreams of visiting distant worlds, except the interplanetary transportation system has long since been abandoned. Then he meets a woman who appears to be from one of those other worlds. . . .

“The Last Days of Old Night” is essentially a mythological “origin story” for a rock formation Swanwick saw along the coast of Iceland. Swanwick says he heard a folktale explaining the rocks, but thought it needed filling out.

“Grandmother Dimetrodon,” first published in this collection, is the tale of a time-travel fugitive who escapes to the Permian period, some 250 million years ago, and makes his living ranching the big prehistoric carnivores of the story’s title. Trouble starts when he meets a woman who wants to tour the ranch.

Other stories look at a world without men, at an animatronic rabbit who escapes from a theme park, at an expatriate Russian poet who meets a talking bear, and a troll living under an urban underpass in a city with strong resemblances to Swanwick’s Philadelphia. The tone covers a range from quirky humor to very dark, with a range of quite distinctive characters. A fine collection—and a good introduction to Swanwick if you haven’t encountered his stories before. For those who’ve been reading Swanwick all along, this is obviously a must-have.

 

Wilson offers up a first-contact novel with a twist based on his own Cherokee heritage.

The story is told by four characters. The Man Downstairs (we never learn his actual name) is an analyst at the defense department, chosen for his ability to pull astonishing but true conclusions from exotic data. Gavin Clark is director of the same department’s Emergency Weapons Technology Group, charged with studying the capabilities of potential wartime adversaries. Jim Hardgray is an electrical repairman for the Oklahoma Cherokee nation and the father of Tawny, an angry thirteen-year-old girl. And Mikayla Johnson is a NASA analyst/mathematician attached to the Voyager program.

Signals detected by the Voyager indicate that a large object is approaching Earth at high speed. Both Mikayla and the Man Downstairs interpret this as an alien spacecraft, and there are numerous indications that it is about to touch down on Earth. Clark is ordered to travel to the projected landing site with a military escort in preparation for whatever is coming.

As it happens, the landing site is in a rural area of Oklahoma, where Hardgray is preparing to take his daughter home. He believes Tawny will benefit from learning traditional ways of the Cherokee nation; she is skeptical. Meanwhile, Mikayla—who wears a pair of computer-augmented glasses to help her recognize her coworkers’ faces—is getting messages from the glasses. She decides they’re from the aliens, and that they’re calling her to the landing site.

While these three—and the armed task force accompanying Clark—are on their way to Oklahoma, the government has declared a state of emergency and is urging residents to evacuate. It becomes clear that the aliens are going to land on what Hardgray recognizes as a significant site in Cherokee lore. So he and Tawny head in that direction, in spite of the waves of others fleeing the area.

The conclusion—following the landing—affects each of the characters in unexpected ways. Wilson combines SF tropes and Cherokee tradition to produce an unusually rich story. Recommended.

 

These reminiscences by some fifty writers, editors, artists, and fans are taken from interviews conducted from 1977 to 1995 at a San Francisco radio station. Together, they constitute a strikingly detailed oral history of the “Golden Age” of SF.

Wolinsky, along with cohosts Richard A. Lupoff and Lawrence Davidson, interviewed many giants of the genre, including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, L. Sprague de Camp, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Williamson—and that’s just a sample of the better-known names. Some of the more interesting comments actually come from lesser-known figures who were active in the field before about 1940.

The book is organized chronologically, each chapter focused on the magazines, editors, and writers prominent during the era under discussion. So instead of printing each interview subject’s comments in a block, the book excerpts sections relevant to the specific topic. This produces a sort of dialogue between different voices on the subject of, say, Weird Tales magazine or legendary editor John W. Campbell. Those voices include writers who published in the magazines, editors, and other staff who worked on them, and the fans who read them. Of course, a fair number of the interview subjects—Frederik Pohl comes to mind—filled more than one of those roles over the course of time.

Wolinsky has done enough research on his own to correct some of the inevitable lapses of memory on the part of his subjects, giving the book a degree of authority that will make it even more useful to readers interested in the history of the genre. But this isn’t a dull reference book, by any stretch of the imagination. There are plenty of colorful personalities here—check the list of names a few lines back—and they have plenty of good stories about the formative days of our genre. This one belongs in any serious SF collection.