I think I am going to repeat myself.

Firstly, Justina Robson is one of the smartest writers around. Just because she happens to be writing about a sexy cyborg and her elf rock star boyfriend it doesn’t mean that the Quantum Gravity books are vacuous. Really, they are anything but.

Secondly the world desperately needs a Lila Black comic, or even a Lila Black anime series. Justina’s visuals are magnificent, and I’m sure that any comic artist would be inspired by them.

So yeah, Chasing the Dragon, great stuff as usual. Get the whole series.

And Ursula Le Guin aims some major league snark at Margaret Atwood. The paragraph about character is priceless.

I got given an ARC of this book at Worldcon. It does pretty much exactly what I expected. Bragelonne makes no bones about publishing straight commercial adventure stories. That one of their star French writers should prove to be a purveyor of such is no surprise. Besides, swashbucking adventure with Musketeers, Cardinal Richlieu and dragons — what more could you ask for? Review here.

Every time someone tells me that science fiction is dead I think of Al Reynolds, because he very clearly isn’t. His sales are huge, and Gollancz recently signed him to a 10-year, million-pound deal. Whatever it is he does clearly works for large numbers of people.

And what he does is space opera on a grand scale. House of Suns is very much in that vein. It has clone families that meet up every 1,000 years for a reunion, and really do live that long. It has an independent robot civilization. It has a very strange library with even stranger librarians. And one of the major plot points is that the Andromeda galaxy just vanishes one day. No warning, no boom, just one day it isn’t there. Yes, there is a market for that sort of thing.

Some excellent news from Jeff VanderMeer about the Best American Fantasy anthology series which he co-manages with his wife, Ann.

The guest editors for volumes 4 through 6 will be: Minister Faust, Junot Diaz, and Catherynne M. Valente.

Yep, Junot Diaz. Cat is pretty stoked about it. I’m sure the Minister is too.

What’s more:

Starting with BAF4, the series will consider stories published in English in Latin American publications, as well as translations of Latin American writers into English in North American publications.

And that means that my friends Fábio Fernandes and Larry Nolen are on board as consultant editors for the Latin American scene. Excellent news all round.

Update: Post corrected to include credit for Ann because I’m an idiot and she has a very honest husband.

I suppose that it is inevitable that a novel that re-tells the events of Ragnarok should have an air of inevitability about the plot. Even so, when reading Greg van Eekout’s Norse Code I kept getting the feeling that everything that happened in it was pre-determined. Characters would turn up in the right place at the right time; characters would fall in love with each other; and so on, just because it was required of them. It is a book that I thought could have been a lot better. But then I kept putting myself in the position of an editor faced with the choice as to whether or not to buy the book. And every time I did so I said to myself, “Modern day chick gets to be Valkyrie and hang around with surfer-dude godling seeking to save Earth from Ragnarok, complete with comedy ravens; how cool is that!” So yeah, I would have bought the book too, because it is a lot of fun for all its faults. Especially the comedy ravens.

Slowly but surely I am catching up on the writing I have arising from the past month or so’s activities. You can find my review of Adam Roberts’ Yellow Blue Tibia here. I have this awful feeling that I will get caught up just in time to head off for Worldcon and fall hopelessly behind again.

In today’s post I found my copy of Farah and Edward’s latest book, A Short History of Fantasy. Short the book may be, but the history itself is not short. The list of significant works in the appendices begins with Gilgamesh, as it should. I’m looking forward to reading this one.

And on the subject of academic books, congratulations to my friend Charlie Butler who won this year’s Mythopoeic Award for Myth & Fantasy Studies with his book, Four British Fantasists. I’m glad I bought that one while I was at the DWJ conference.

In order to enjoy The Caryatids you need to remember three things.

Firstly, Bruce Sterling is simply brimming over with ideas. He has put lots of them in this book. Some of them may not make a lot of sense, at least in context with the other ideas, but boy are there a lot of them.

Second, the book is satire. If some of the characters appear a bit like caricatures, that’s because they are. Sterling is exaggerating for effect.

And finally, Sterling is an incorrigible cynic, so he’s going to be poking fun at everyone and everything.

If you are OK with all of that, you should enjoy this book.

As for me, mainly it reminds me of how much I miss California. Yes, we may be stupidly optimistic at times, but at least we do have a positive attitude towards life.

Matt Cheney has posted a review of China Miéville’s The City and The City. I think he pretty much nails it. I see the book is the subject of a discussion panel at Readercon and participants are being urged to read the book before attending because spoilers are impossible to avoid. I feel a bit the same way about pointing you at Matt’s piece, even though he has tried hard to avoid spoilerage. Those of you who have read the book, go here now. The rest of you, here’s the short version:

“The more you think about The City & The City, the more interesting it gets.”

Now go buy the book.

Eric Bear is a successful advertising executive. His beautiful wife, Emma, is a popular painter, and his mother is a government minister. It seems that his youthful indiscretions working for a crime syndicate are long behind him. But one day his old boss comes calling. There is a job that needs to be done, and if Eric can’t get it done then, well, it will be the worse for Emma.

So far, so noir. Except that Eric Bear is, well, a bear. A stuffed bear, to be precise. Emma is a rabbit, Eric’s mother is a rhinoceros. Genetics are a little complicated in a world populated entirely by stuffed animals. So are noir thriller plots for that matter. You see, stuffed animals don’t die. They can, of course, be ripped apart by one of gorillas employed by crime boss Nicholas Dove, and they can certainly grow old and threadbare. But die? Not exactly. Instead there are the Chauffeurs – mysterious cowled individuals who drive a red truck around at night. Whoever they visit is taken away and never seen again. How do they choose? Well, there is a list. And Nicholas Dove has learned that his name is on that list. All Eric has to do is get it taken off. That might involve confronting Magnus, the god-like being that the Church claims controls the world.

Amberville, then, is a noir thriller set in a world populated entirely by stuffed animals. The way that world works is central to the plot, so the book is very much an exercise in world creation. And there was another surprise waiting for me as I read the book. I had noted that “Tim Davys” was a pen name, and hadn’t thought any more of it until I saw mention of cricket in the book. That got me wondering where Mr. Davys actually came from, and a quick check of the copyright page revealed that the book was originally published in Sweden. Congratulations are due to Paul Norlen for producing a translation so smooth that I didn’t notice it. Anyone in Sweden know who the original author is?

The Swedish origin explains a couple of things. The rather bureaucratic nature of life in Amberville now makes more sense, and indeed the book may be rather more obvious political satire in Sweden. Also the Swedes are noted for their particularly dark take on noir, and Amberville is a very brutal book in places.

It is, however, a very readable and entertaining book. It has some interesting things to say about the nature of evil and how one should try to live one’s life. I’d be happy to recommend it, except for one thing. Amberville is one of those books in which the main gay character is not only a mincing stereotype, but also a sadist and drug addict as well. All of the other gay characters are clients of the main character, so are presumably masochists and people who have to pay for sex. Everyone knows that depravity breeds depravity, right? I’d rather hoped we’d gotten away from that sort of thing, but apparently not. I was prepared to put up with the usual noir thriller misogyny because that’s an expected trope, but the gay = depraved thing tipped the balance for me. Shame.