As you may have noticed, I have had Liam Sharp’s God Killers on my “currently reading” pile for some time. That’s because it is a collection, albeit one with one very long story and several very short ones. So I dip into it from time to time, but haven’t yet tacked the long story. Fortunately Fábio Fernandes is better organized than I am, and has managed to read and review the whole thing. Here’s what he said.

Peggy has noticed my enthusing about The Quiet War. I’m looking forward to hearing what she makes of it.

Via Jeff VanderMeer I hereby pimp the fabulous new special edition of Shirek: An Afterword, complete with fabulous John Coulthart design and accompanying CD of mushroomy music by The Church. Buy here.

Here’s something else I needed reminding of. Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn series of YA fantasies is being re-issued in the US. Andrew Wheeler kindly reminds me to plug it, and he got the story from Amazon whose feature showcases the eye-catching covers for the new editions. All I have to add to that is that the latest book in the series, The Stone Key, picked up a nomination for Best YA Novel in the 2009 Aurealis Awards.

I must admit that I was intrigued when I heard that the new Gene Wolfe novel, An Evil Guest, would be a heady mixture of science fiction, pulp detective mystery and Lovecraftian horror. Of course if anyone could pull off such a feat than Wolfe would be a pretty good bet. Has he managed it? Well, sort of.

The good news is that the book rattled along apace and kept me reading when I should have been doing other things (like sleeping and eating). The bad news is that the plot really doesn’t make a lot of sense (and I say this confidently, it is not just me missing half of what Wolfe is writing about). Also the setting doesn’t really lend itself to the odd, stilted way in which Wolfe characters so often speak. But I enjoyed reading it, and I suspect that Wolfe had a lot of fun writing it too. I’ll leave you with a small snippet of him getting carried away:

Her tiny dressing room seemed to be exactly as it had been the night before. Was the phone tapped? Was the room bugged? Cassie decided that the answers were no and yes. No because there was no phone. Yes because there were roaches..

Quite a lot of them, really; but everybody knew that it was the fly on the wall that spied on you. The roaches hid til you went to sleep, so they could raid your peanut butter.

Quite.

While we are on the subject of translations, Daína Chaviano could do with a better one too. Idiom is a hard thing to translate, especially if the language you are translating into is not your native language. All too often in reading The Island of Eternal Love I found myself thinking that the prose was stilted because while the words had all been faithfully translated the idiom was still Spanish. Maybe I’m spoiled by reading the superb translations of Zoran Zivkovic’s work, but I think Chaviano deserves better.

The book is actually fascinating. As well as being a ghost story, it is also an examination of the roles played by different races in the history of Cuba, and a heart-felt expression of the conflicted attitudes of Cuban emigres living in Miami. I don’t know enough Cuban history to get the most out of it, but there is clearly a very good book there.

My “Best of Year” article for the Aqueduct Press blog has gone online. I must say that I’m rather in awe of the company I’m keeping. I’m sharing space with Lisa Tuttle, and following on from Gwyneth Jones and Nicola Griffith. And then there’s Carolyn Ives Gilman who covers one book rather tangentially but is absolutely fascinating.

If Jim Steinman wrote science fiction novels then they would probably be a bit like Elizabeth Bear’s All the Windwracked Stars.

It starts with Ragnarök and goes forward from there. Ragnarök is, after all, merely the final battle, not the end of the world. In Bear’s book, three gods survive into the Age of Men: Fenris, a young and bookish Valkyrie (someone has to write the histories), and one of the winged horses. Two thousand years later, when men have brought about their own techno-apocalypse, it is time for the cycle to begin again.

Of course this is not exactly our world. To start with the horse has two heads (one stag, the other antelope) which looks great on the cover but is perhaps of dubious value (this particular feline finds ordinary horses quite dim enough without giving them two heads to argue with, both from prey animals even dimmer than themselves). And then there is technomancy, including bio-plagues and the moreaux (yes, you should be able to work out what they are). One of the latter is one of my mountain cousins, whom I’ve always thought were a bit dim too on account of living in snow, but they do look fabulous. (By the way, Bear, us big cats can’t purr, though I’m sure feline moreaux could have had the ability designed in.)

Parts of the book are overwrought, in a punning sense, and in a way that Thomas Covenant is overwrought, but then how else is one to tell of the end of worlds, and of two thousand years of survivor guilt? Perhaps it is best to leave this sort of thing to Milton, or at least to poetry.

And all the windwracked stars are lost and torn upon the night
Like candleflame they flicker, and fail to cast a light.
To begin with there was darkness, darkness, Light and Will
And in the end there’s darkness, darkness sure and still.

And yet…

…the angels had guitars even before they had wings.

And when you really, really need it the most, that’s when rock and roll dreams come through.

Ekaterina Sedia’s latest novel, The Alchemy of Stone, is one of those books that really deserves a full review but would be difficult to do that for without filling it with spoilers. The short version is that it is a steampunk novel about a clockwork automaton. As many other people have already said, the book asks all sorts of interesting questions about what it means to be human, and what it means to be a woman. Along the way it is also a very good story. The prose seems a little flat in places, but I’m not sure whether that’s a deliberate decision, a result of English being Sedia’s second language, or a result of my reading it immediately after Liberation. Aside from that, however, I have no complaints. It was a travesty that A Secret History of Moscow didn’t make the World Fantasy Awards short list this year. I expect to see The Alchemy of Stone shortlisted for both the Word Fantasy and Tiptree Awards.

I’m slowly coming to the opinion that Brian Francis Slattery’s prose is like very rich chocolate dessert: absolutely wonderful, but you can’t take too much of it at once. Perhaps he should just write short stories, except that Liberation is an even better novel than Spaceman Blues, and even if I was starting to glaze over on the sumptuous prose I still wanted to know what happened next. Despite Jeff VanderMeer bravely picking Liberation as Amazon’s best SF&F book of the year, I don’t suppose the book will have a huge market. However, it is most definitely my sort of book. I’m also giving Liz Gorinsky a Best Editor: Long Form nod on the basis of it.

Pat McKillip read the first chapter of her latest novel at SF in SF, and I was sufficiently intrigued by it to go out and buy the book. It certainly starts differently. The story is set in a small coastal village suffering economic decline. Judd Cauley’s inn has few visitors, and those that do come are soon chased away by the awful cooking of Mrs. Quinn. Judd can’t afford a better cook. But things look up with the arrival of Ridley Dow, a mysterious scholar from the big town of Landringham who has a passion for books and a nose for mystery.

The love of books and stories suffuses the narrative, which threatens in some places to eat itself, but eventually everything resolves into a neat tale of magic set against am 18th Century background. As with all of Pat’s books, it is small but perfectly formed. I love reading them, but can never find much to say about them.