Auctions and Contests News (By Mihir Wanchoo)

This coming Friday, the 15th of June the David Gemmell Awards for Fantasy will be held at the Magic Circle Headquarters in London. These fantastic awards play an important role in spreading public awareness of the fantasy genre and rewarding excellence within the field while also remembering David Gemmell and honoring his contributions to the fantasy field.

In order to raise funds and keep these great awards running, an auction is held every year at the ceremony. This year, Anna Gregson, Commissioning Editor of Orbit Books has been helping to organise the auction lots, and They include: 


-  Have your name featured in an upcoming Terry Brooks novel! 


- A Star Wars Moleskine notebook containing the signatures of over 40 SFF authors including Brent Weeks, Robin Hobb, Peter Brett, Joe Abercrombie, China Miéville, Patrick Rothfuss, Peter Hamilton & many more 


- Have 10,000 words of your manuscript, plus submission letter and synopsis edited by the exceptional editor Gillian Redfearn at Gollancz 


- The original pencil sketch by the artist Didier Graffet of the cover for The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie 


- And Many more items…

Please see details of these lots and more here. They can also be found on the Gemmell Award homepage. All of these lots will be auctioned off at the award ceremony on Friday 15th June. However, for those who would like to bid on an item but can’t attend the event, highest bids can now be submitted by email to "christineharrison_007@hotmail.com" in advance of the ceremony on the 15th June.

In other contest news, James Rollins's newest book Bloodline is due to be released in the month of June and to coincide with that he's holding a contest in lieu with The Human Society of the United States. The contest details are given in this blog post and therein lies the explanation to become immortalized in the Sigma novel next year.  To quote Jim "Visit the Sigma Store (where ALL profits go to help endangered or abused animals) and order a piece of Sigma logo wear. I'm looking for the most creative use for any of that gear: t-shirt, hoodie, tote bag. Stain them with blood-red paint, burn in some bullet holes, write messages on them, use them in ways unimaginable. In other words, go wild!

As per the rules in the author's own words "Send a photo or appear at one of this summer's book signings wearing any of the altered gear. The photos will be collected and featured on my Pinterest page." At the end of July, James will pick his favorite one--and that person's name will appear in the next Sigma novel coming out in 2013.

NOTE: Banner and author picture courtesy of the DGLA Website and David Sylvian. DGLA Announcement courtesy of Anna Gregson.

Blood Divided by Kevin James Breaux (Reviewed by Mihir Wanchoo)

Official Kevin James Breaux Website 
Official Soul Born Website 
Order “Blood Divided” HERE 
Read Sample Chapters HERE (PDF) 
Read FBC’s Review of Soul Born 
Read the e-Story “Soul Born Meantime: Tala” HERE (PDF)

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Kevin James Breaux was born and brought up in Pennsylvania. He’s graduated from Temple University with a degree in fine art and is currently working as an IT Professional and a Graphic Artist. He’s also a black belt in karate with some background in Aikido as well. He also writes short stories and is currently working on the third book in the Soulborn series.

OFFICIAL BLURB: There exists an ancient elven proverb, dating before the time of man. Life and death, like day and night, meet at a point where they blend into one. It is that brief moment when anything is possible.

There was a time when four sparks of life burned brighter than the sun itself. Megan was born with power, Lucien born with station. Autumn was born full of life, while Nathan was entwined with death. 

Peace has come and gone... The conflicts of old have returned-rejuvenated and driven. This is the beginning of the end. The children of Karn have come of age, and now they will take part in shaping the fate of Illyia.

Will they join forces, or with blood will they be divided?

CLASSIFICATION: The Soulborn sage is a dark epic fantasy series reminiscent of the works of James Clemens, Paul S. Kemp and R.A. Salvatore.

FORMAT/INFO: Blood Divided is 300 pages long divided over thirty-four titled chapters with a Prologue and an epilogue. Narration is in the third person via Opal, Autumn, Khaos, Megan, Vasche, Queen Tala and King Ethan. Blood Divided is the second volume in The Soulborn Saga with the book ending on a proper note.

December 30, 2011 marked the trade paperback publication of Blood Divided via Dark Quest Books. Cover art provided by Dan Dos Santos.

ANALYSIS: Blood Divided is the sequel to Soul Born and as a book; I was a bit apprehensive as to how it would turn out to be. The preceding book was proclaimed to be a dark epic fantasy tale and promised much however didn’t quite live up to its promise for the reasons described in my review. This book however has another great cover and in this particular regard is a great follow-up to the first cover.

The sequel begins twenty years later than the events of the first book, the lands of Illyia now are under the rule of the king Ethan Essex who was the former duke of Kel Tora. His queen is Tala Silverwolf, former lover of Karn and current wife to Ethan. She has been blessed with a son and daughter who share her elfish traits as well as their father’s human genes. Opal has lived a secret life of sorts as well and she also has two progeny of her own. Autumn, Lucien, Megan and Nathan/Khaos are the four children that are bound by blood and magic and its there story which introduces readers to the world of Illyria once again.

There’s a lot more which I have left vague in regards to the four children as well as their parents as the story demands that the reader discover their motivations, plans and actions in the book itself. The opening chapters have quite a twist to them thereby surprising the reader with the direction of the plot, plus the author reveals a lot more details about the background story. The backstory is very suitably introduced through out the starting chapters. Particularly surprising is the enticing concept of avatars which was a small part of the earlier book but is rather nicely expanded upon quite precisely and fuels a major plot point. The magic system is also explained more this time around and forms a pertinent part of the plot.

There's also the Tala short story which gives us an important look into the events between the first and the second book, readers would be wise to read that excerpt as it will deepen their understanding of the story.  The author has done a decent job with the prose and its a definite plus from the previous book. The author seems to have plotted this story out and the pace of this book is definitely a redeeming factor, it never lets the reader rest, the story zooms ahead with all its twists and revelations and that is indeed a good point. Lastly the characterization once again is a positive factor and the character cast is suitably expanded. However the focus is tightly controlled and therefore the readers get a very good insight into the POV character actions and thoughts.

There are still some nagging points about the book namely that plot seemed a bit too convoluted at times. The entire story has some plot twists that seemed a bit coincidental sometimes. Another feature which works against the book is that the plot is a bit stereotypical, beginning with the death-crazed villain to his enamored sidekick to the half-blooded prince, etc. The story is also a bit predictable and therefore most veteran readers will easily be able to guess most of the plot points. In this regard Kevin J. Breaux fails to divert the reader’s attention and therefore the story does get adjudged to be bit weak. As a fantasy fan, I want the book to make me forget about its fallacies by its shining points however this story wasn’t able to do that completely. The tight focus of the POV structure robs the reader of knowing the overall scale of the destruction wrought but this was just something of a personal observation.

CONCLUSION: Blood Divided is a sequel and a book which can be read on its own, Kevin J. Breaux has definitely shown improvement in his second outing and this does raise my hopes for the last book in the trilogy. This book will appeal to fans of Dragonlance and R. A Salvatore books, it's also a strong sequel that manages to take the story in a different direction than expected.

12 Highly Awaited SFF Novels from July until December 2012 (by Liviu Suciu)

Here I am not including Sharps by KJ Parker (July) and Great North Road by Peter F Hamilton (September/December) as I have read both with Sharps taking the #1 overall spot for the year for now, while Great North Road a highly recommended 2012 novel but not a top 25 as about 700 of its 1100 pages are outstanding Peter Hamilton, but 400 are boring and superfluous and unfortunately the first 250 pages of the book are mostly of that second kind. Sadly no Cold Steel by Kate Elliott in 2012 as that one would have been here otherwise. Also I am not sure what the status of the upcoming Christopher Priest Adjacent is as it would have been a top 5 here for sure.

**********************************************************************

1: “The Hydrogen Sonata” by Iain M. Banks. Release Date: October 9, 2012. Published by Orbit. (SF).

2: “Midst Toil and Tribulation” by David Weber. Release Date: September 18, 2012. Published by Tor. (SF).

3: “Jack Glass” by Adam Roberts. UK Release Date: July 26, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (SF).

4: “The Eternal Flame” by Greg Egan. Release Date: September 4, 2012. Published by Night Shade Books. (SF).

5: “The Blinding Knife” by Brent Weeks. Release Date: September 11, 2012. Published by Orbit. (FAN).

6: “The Air War” by Adrian Tchaikovsky. UK Release Date: August 2, 2012. Published by Tor UK. (FAN).

7: “The Rise of Ransom City” by Felix Gilman. Release Date: November 27, 2012. Published by Tor. (FAN).

8: “Luminous Chaos” by Jean-Christophe Valtat. Release Date: October 2, 2012. Published by Melville House. (Steampunk).

9: “A Red Country” by Joe Abercrombie. UK Release Date: October 18, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (FAN).

10: “Empty Space” by M. John Harrison. UK Release Date: July 19, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (SF).

11: “The Night of the Swarm” by Robert V.S. Redick. UK Release Date: August 16, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (FAN).

12: “The Fractal Prince” by Hannu Rajaniemi. Release Date: September 4, 2012. Published by Tor. (SF).

"Harmony (Alt.Human)" by Keith Brooke (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu)

Official Keith Brooke Website

Order Harmony HERE (US) or as Alt.Human HERE (UK)

Read FBC Review of The Accord

 

INTRODUCTION: A few days ago I was quite surprised to notice that a book that seemed to be called either Alt.Human (love this title) or Harmony by Keith Brooke was published at the end of May. As I quite enjoyed The Accord especially for its wonderful style, I immediately looked for more information and then got the book asap.

"The aliens are here, all around us. They always have been. And now, one by one, they’re destroying our cities.

Dodge Mercer deals in identities, which is fine until the day he deals the wrong identity and clan war breaks out. Hope Burren has no identity and no past, but she does have a multitude of voices filling her head.

In a world where nothing is as it seems, where humans are segregated and aliens can sing realities and tear worlds apart, Dodge and Hope lead a ragged band of survivors on a search for sanctuary in what may be the only hope for humankind."

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: On finishing it, I was a little mixed about Harmony (alt.human in the UK) by Keith Brooke though I generally liked it and I really enjoyed the frantic first person narration and the final twist. However, for large parts of it Harmony had an adolescent feel and as I've seen its themes treated in an adult way much better, it turned out to be a  pretty minor sf novel that read like an airport thriller (see William Barton's When Heaven Fell for one of the best ever treatments of the themes of Harmony).

Harmony is also a Fermi paradox novel, though in this case instead of "where are they", they (ie the aliens) are everywhere and the humans are sort of serfs/pets restricted to IPP (Indigenous People's Preserves) ghettos where they live at the will of the powerful aliens who may - and do - kill them at their whim.

Dodge, a pid runner - every human has personal identification device nanos in his/her blood stream, who define where the human can go, and the local gangs into which the humans are generally divided found how to fake them - is involved with the saving of four human refugees from a destroyed city and later together with the mysterious girl Hope whom he has also saved earlier, tries to find the rumored last refuge of humanity called Harmony...

Harmony had a lot of possibilities - the sadly short descriptions of alien landscapes and cities on Earth was as good as sf goes - but the way the author chose to go precluded them and turned the novel into "fugitive" on steroids. I will quote one long paragraph below which shows the sense of wonder I expect from sf and I wish the book would have tried to develop instead of turning into a generic action-adventure novel:

  "Here, in Central, the roads were alive. Place your foot and the surface would arrange itself to your imprint; lift that foot and the surface gave you an extra push – wheeled vehicles got such a push from the road surfaces that they barely needed to propel themselves at all, or so I had been told. 

 All around, the buildings loomed above me. Buildings with mirrored fronts, moving images blending with what they reflected, so that it looked as if my inverted self was passing through a distorted, surreal landscape. Buildings that were all sharp angles and flat surfaces; buildings that were organically globular, jellied so that beings passed through apparently solid walls, absorbed into the bodies of the buildings. I did not know what was inside them; perhaps you passed through into air, like a normal building, or perhaps you remained in jelly or fluid as you conducted your business. Other buildings were covered in webbed silk nests that were alive with dragonflies and all varieties of flying creatures – the nests could have been the homes of sentient beings or they could have been the nests of parasites and vermin.

 Looking up: the undersides of the mushroom towers were lit up with rhythmic traceries of light, all supported by implausibly slender central stalks. Flying vehicles darted and twisted; flying beings cut through the flow.

And all about, a seething, chaotic throng of bodies. Aliens of all varieties mixed with humans and trogs. The humans and nearly-men here were business-like, some of them half-mech, others cauled in alien webbing, controlled, not human at all.

The aliens walked on two legs, three, four or more; they floated on personal transports; they sat in self-contained personal environments, sealed off from the world. They strode, rolled, flitted, hopped, skittered, flew, ran... They travelled in all directions, yet appeared to know when to give way and when to plough on. They chattered, clicked, shrieked and yammered; they rumbled and groaned and whooped and roared. They smelled of urea and dung and decay, of perfumed flowers and sharp spices, of raw meat and chlorine.

There must be a billion cities like this on a million worlds. More. I couldn’t grasp the scale of the universe, couldn’t hold it in my head. Perhaps this was why we humans hid in our Ipps: we really were the hangers-on, unable to take the pace of being full members of such a diverse, galaxy-spanning community."
 
I read this "humans as serfs and pets of superior alien races" theme for the first time when I was about 10 in a Romanian sf magazine short story (a little bit surprisingly as the communist regime usually asked its writers for uplifting stories and downers were generally not allowed) and it impressed me a lot and stamped my love of sf, but that was 33 years ago and today I expect more sophistication which Keith Brooke amply demonstrated in his wonderful The Accord or in the paragraph above.

So overall, Harmony turned out to be a pretty engaging but ultimately minor sf.

"Worldsoul" by Liz Williams (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu)

  

Liz Williams at Live Journal 

Order Worldsoul HERE

Read FBC Interview with Ms. Williams HERE

Read FBC Review of Darkland 

Read FBC Review of Bloodmind

Read FBC Review of Winterstrike

Read FBC Review of The Shadow Pavilion

Read FBC Review of the Inspector Chen short stories 

"What if being a librarian was the most dangerous job in the world?

Worldsoul, a great city that forms a nexus point between Earth and the many dimensions known as the Liminality, is a place where old stories gather, where forgotten legends come to fade and die—or to flourish and rise again. Until recently, Worldsoul has been governed by the Skein, but they have gone missing and no one knows why. The city is also being attacked with lethal flower-bombs from unknown enemy. Mercy Fane and her fellow Librarians are doing their best to maintain the Library, but... things... keep breaking out of ancient texts and legends and escaping into the city. Mercy must pursue one such dangerous creature. She turns to Shadow, an alchemist, for aid, but Shadow—inadvertently possessed by an ifrit—has a perilous quest of her own to undertake."

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: After quite high expectations, I have to say that Worldsoul turned to be a little mixed for me as the novel aligned closer to the UF subgenre than to the SF that remains by far the most interesting of the author's oeuvre to date. It is true that the novel is not quite the usual UF junk as it takes place in a "higher dimension" from Earth, but Earth's cultures, myths, supernatural beings of lore, books and tales are crucial for all that happens.

 
Worldsoul has great inventiveness and the writing style is the compelling one I have been expecting from Liz Williams with interesting main characters, and action happening in the higher dimensional city Worldsoul of the title, metropolis which is in a bit of disarray as its former rulers vanished a while ago and the various powers to be have started the struggle for domination.

  

Mercy is a somewhat naive but dogged librarian - though of course not of a mundane library - from a Northern tundra clan lineage whose two mothers have left on a quest to find the disappeared rulers - Worldsoul is a Liz Williams book so expect men to have minimal roles if they are  not dispensed with as in her superb Solar System novels like Banner of Souls or Winterstrike -  while Shadow is a devout alchemist from a Middle Eastern inspired culture who is compelled by the local power broker, a male Shah, to do some work for him that her ethics code finds distasteful.

A few demons including a duke of Hell - still female - who is the best and funniest secondary character, Disir i.e. Loki's supernatural minions, and assorted supernatural beings play the humans and one another and are occasionally played in turn while the novel moves at a brisk pace and ends at quite a satisfying point solving its main local stories though of course the big picture is just coming into focus as the ending emphatically punctuates that.

Where my reservations lie is in that the whole UF setup is a bit hard to take seriously and the external world lacks focus with the Worldsoul itself more of an abstraction or a stage for our characters than a "real place" with texture and depth.

On many occasions scenes that are supposed to have tension simply lacked it for me as I had no idea what the parameters were (and no idea if the book follows standard UF ones as I heartily detest the subgenre) so the various fights, chases etc read: "well this happened because it happened" with no way for me to realize if it was normal, an act of valor or something unusual.

I would compare my experience in those parts of the novel as with reading about a Wild West gunfight without having any ideas what guns can or cannot do - pretty much everything described can happen as the fact that the sheriff is faster on the draw may simply be so because his gun is a "lawful" one so it comes out faster, the fact that he shoots straight and the villain shoots badly maybe because his gun is an AI that targets itself etc and if the author inserts that the sheriff's gun shot 500 times in succession without recharge, it may seem a little odd but hey, it may be possible after all...

Overall, I think that if you are a UF buff you may love Worldsoul a lot, while personally I found it entertaining and I would definitely recommend it. Not as grand as the author's excellent sf, but I am still looking forward to see what comes next in the series!