Sometimes fantasy and Science fiction verge into literary excellence. While that has probably always been true, the separation of fiction into genres has emphasized the weaker generic tales at the expense of the stronger visions that transcend the genre limitations.
Sarah Micklem has been attempting to look at the real aspects of mediaeval life through the eyes of Firethorn (paper), a camp follower raised to the level of sheath(mistress). At the end of the first tale, Sir Galen gave her land and property to keep safe while he crossed an ocean to help his king in a foreign war between mother and son rulers. She follows him anyways and is hit by Wildfire (hard from Scribner) or lightning on the ship. That costs her her ability to read and also gives her aphasia, but also prophetic dreams. Because of those dreams the losing King of Incus kidnaps her and takes her, with his army, across the impassible winter mountains where she is effectively abandoned in a strange stratified society, while the King waits for an army from his ex-father-in-law.  With some help and a lot of gumption, she moves through the various levels of that society from weaver to untouchable to courtesan.   Deeply intense, I’m waiting eagerly for the next and final tale. I expect this to show up on award nominations.
War always provides a font for stories, but the politics of being a Warbreaker ( hard from Tor and available in an early form on the web) is something few writers tackle. Brandon Sanderson shows us a world with two countries that used to be one. The previous ruling family rules the smaller of the two and its king has avoided war by promising his daughter when the eldest daughter becomes twenty-two. Instead he sends Siri, the youngest daughter and the older, Vivenna, follows on her own, thinking she can rescue her sister. The magic of the world is based on breath (one breath per person unless given away). Rarely, after a person dies, they return larger-than-life with an expanded breath. However they need one breath a week to survive. In Idriss, where Siri and Vivenna come from, this is thought of as evil, but the Hallendrens worship them. Their god-king is a still-born child returned (children grow to adulthood when returned, but then stabilize) with a massive number of breaths passed on from previous kings. Even though Idriss and Hallendren have been at peace for centuries, there are many people who want war. Opposing them is Vasher, a man with full command of the breath magic and with a talking sword. There’s also Lightsong, one of the gods who doesn’t believe in the gods and who is trying to understand the dreams that haunt him. The tale is a lot of fun with an ending that can’t be put down. This will be the last original novel for a while from Mr. Sanderson because of the trilogy he is writing to complete Robert Jordan’s massive series.
Revenge is, of course, Best Served Cold (hard from Eos), but it wouldn’t be fun if Joe Abercrombie didn’t provide the eccentric characters he is known for. Monza Murcatto had drifted into Mercenary work and become a highly successful general until her boss, Duke Orso decided she had been too popular and had her tossed off a cliff after stabbing and garotting her didn’t work. Dumb mistake, of course. He didn’t know about the crazy surgeon who saved her life, or the massive gold she had hidden. So with a few paid assistants like a mad Northman who keeps trying to improve his morals; a mad poisoner, convinced he is the best, but whose mistakes are hysterically funny; and an ex-convict only secure when there are things to count. Along the way there’s the mercenary general gone to drink who she used to work for, and another Duke whose troops always seem to arrive too late to help his allies (whom he doesn’t trust anyways) Nothing goes the way it should. Poisoning a bank manager takes half the staff with him. A trap set in a fancy whore house goes wrong and at the end burns down. Lots of fun, very exciting, with lots of plot twists.
Very writers tackle the far, far future because it is so differentiated from our present.. Alastair Reynolds has slowed down change with human immortality combined with star travel at slower than light speeds. At the beginning of the interstellar age, a few very rich individuals had themselves cloned and sent out their clones in individual starships to eventually meet up and share memories. These lines act as a stabilizing force on galactic culture, at least until, six million years later the Gentian line is attacked at it’s regular reunion which occurs every two hundred thousand years. Two of the clones are late, Campion and Purslane, are a decade late because they travel together after falling into a forbidden love. After rescuing some of their kin and bringing their prisoners, they go to the alternate meeting planet, a planet inhabited by a cloud intelligence whose origins are human. Why were they attacked? Why do two mechanical beings want Purslane’s starship? There’s a secret cabal called the House of Suns (hard from Ace) at the heart of the mystery and they have surviving members from the Gentian line trying to block any probes because of a five-million, year-old secret they have vowed to keep. This is the sort of science fiction that makes you think about future possibilities.
I’m a little tired of vampires and werewolves in urban fantasy so I was glad to seen Lori Devoti breaking the mold. Melanippe (Mel) left the Amazon tribes, who hide like gypsies in the back roads of America. Unlike gypsies they are super-strong, live for centuries, and some of them have magical powers. Like the legend they do kill their male children, and she thought her stillborn son was murdered. So she is working as a tattoo artist, raising her daughter without knowledge of her background, and living with her mother and her five-hundred- year-old grandmother who still uses Russian despite having lived in America for a hundred and fifty years. Then someone kills some Amazon teens and drops them off on her porch. It’s a case of Amazon Ink (paper from Pocket) in which her school house converted home-office is invaded by a police detective and Amazons from the tribe she left. But it’s really Mel, finally learning how to use her magical powers, who has to solve the case. I want a sequel.
If you loved True Blood (HBO series whose first season is out on DVD) and found the Charlaine Harris series it was based on, then you will love the latest Sookie Stackhouse tale, Dead and Gone (hard from Ace which I bought electronically), in which the were’s come out of the closet and Sookie’s sister-in-law, a were-panther, is found crucified. However that’s not the main problem. Sookie’s Fae grandfather from whom she inherited her talent for telepathy, is the center of a war of the Fae and Sookie is a target for powerful beings who can teleport. Fun.
Mike Carey has the latest of his noir squared tales in which ghosts have been walking our world since the turn of the millennian. Felix Castor is one a small number of exorcists. When a colleague dies via suicide, and a lawyer insists that the latest will demands cremation, he gets involved because he was friends with the widow. Then he is asked to step into another case of horrible murder, because it resembles the work of a long dead serial killer. It’s impossible, he thought for the living to wear Dead Men’s Boots (Hard from Grand Central Publishing). Things are not necessarily impossible, in this age of ghosts and the real story is locked in a private cemetery where gangsters go to die. I really enjoy this hard-boiled series with a fantasy twist and rush to read each new addition.
Jon and Lobo are back for another adventure. As Mark L, Van Name tells it, Jon was the only successful survivor that linked nano-technology to human cells and he has been in hiding ever since. Lobo is an intelligent attack vehicle that we learn in this episode was also modified by an experiment gone wrong and is far more intelligent than other machines. This time they’ve been hired to snatch a scientist working on the illegal technology that created Jon from a planet known for its park filled with human-created creatures of fantasy. The government of Heaven is protecting Dr. Wei, and Jon’s snatch of the Doctor will result in Overthrowing Heaven (hard from Baen). Of course nothing goes right, and, because Lobo’s intelligence was the result of a previous experiment by Dr. Wei, the bad guys are looking to trap our wily heroes. Always lots of fun.
E. E. Knight has been writing a series about a revolutionary war against the Kurian alien invaders and their blood sucking, soul draining servants the Reapers. In the last tale the Southern Command had a failed invasion of  Kentucky and found some allies they hadn’t expected. Most of the Army has pulled out, leaving Major Valentine with a lot of human deserters from the Kurians trying to survive Winter Duty (Hard from Roc). This hard future, half a century from now, is well thought out. And Mr. Knight manages to put David Valentine at the moments of political change like the political convention to determine Kentucky’s future and the new Raving Virus that hits in the middle of the worst winter of the century. The series is always fun.
Nineteenth century science fiction assumed the world worked a bit differently from our own and George Mann envisions a vision of the late Victorian age with dirigibles and clock-work automatons. What a crashed dirigible with a missing automatic pilot, and a glowing policeman killing the poor in the dark areas of London’s poor has in common is The Affinity Bridge (hard from Tor), the first case for the Queen’s agents Sir Maurice Newbury and Miss Veronica Hobbes. Mr. Mann brings this alternate version of Victorian England to life.  I devoured the book in a day.
Laura Anne Gilman concludes her retrievers series, in a world where magic works with electricity,  with a problem for P.B. (Polar bear because that is what he looks like). His species of fae were artificially created. When the papers of the Frankenstein like doctor are discovered in a local museum, Wren and her partner have to retrieve the papers, and protect P.B. from the descendants of P.B.’s creator and finally work out their own personal problems. The only way to survive, the fortune tells Wren, is to get Blood from Stone (trade from Luna which I bought electronically)  A nice ending. The next series will follow different characters in the same world.
The first two of David Gunn’s  tales of Sven, who is nearly unkillable, and his talking gun sent him on impossible missions. This one which has him living through Death’s Head: Day of the Damned (Hard from Del Rey) starts with him on leave on the Capital planet of the immortal emperor OctoV and finding monsters dropped from orbit on a hunting trip. But the commander of the Death’s Hear, General Jaxx, is on his way out and the Ufree (high tech society that usually stays out of the lower tech wars)  are manipulating the players who could replace him leading to a full revolt with Sven in the middle. This feels like the first half of the final book of a trilogy and I suspect that the final book will straighten up all the loose ends.
Judith Tarr writes both fantasy and historical fiction, often mixing them together.  Bring Down the Sun (trade from Tor) is a magical version of the early years of Alexander the Great’s mother and of the various forces trying to block the prophecies of his future. Intensely sensual, especially the scenes with Olympias and Philip of Macedon, it is an interesting look at the ancient world and its beliefs., but the tale would probably have been better without the magic.
Rudy Rucker, a retired mathmetician, loves to load his books with multiple infinities and dimensional  branes (which I really don’t pretend to understand) His last tale told of the Earth going Postsingular (paper). Now in a Hylozoic (hard from Tor) world where everything can talk, including individual atoms, other postsingular species have discovered Earth and one, the Pekka, have decided to colonize Earth. They can only be stopped if our heroes travel to the highest infinity with a stop at a higher brane version of Hieronymus Bosch’s village in Fifteenth Century Netherlands. Dr. Rucker is an acquired taste. The two books in this series are more obscure than his other writings, but still fun.
Time Travel can make plots obscure too. Sandra McDonald’s third tale of Australia in space, The Stars Blue Yonder (hard fromTor), has Terry Myell dropping in a various points in Jodenny’s life at the same time the Roon are preparing to attack and destroy all the human worlds. He can’t alter time because when he moves on, all the changes are erased. However he can take other’s with him, like Jodenny when she was seven months  pregnant. There’s also Homer who claims to be from their far future and who can actually move people permenantly in time to the early Australian settlement days in the 1850's. there’s some fun her, which is why I kept reading, but the ending has too much of a deus-ex-machina to be satisfying.
Thomas A Day’s tale of escaping an Earth gone to pot a few decades from now is based on some quick assumptions that I had problems with. First, before the wars over energy started the US built a gate to other planets, but couldn’t finish it because of lack of energy to power it. Secondly on an Pacific island due to be destroyed as part of the war, a tech warrant officer finds a mad scientist testing a device that will provide almost free energy. Eduardo instantly decides to steal the plans. He and his friends fake their death, find a way to manufacture the device and use it to leave Earth and find another planet to settle. Nothing, of course, goes as planned. Earth governments try to steal the plans. The robots, exploring for new planets prove too intelligent. It’s A Grey Moon over China (hard from Tor), bleak and disparate where people keep trying their best merely to survive. I kept reading despite my doubts, but I’m not keeping the book.
One of my favorite writers is L. E. Modessitt, Jr , but even the best writers fail. Mr. Modessitt, Jr was an ecologist and looks at two future societies that use controlled capitalism to maintain stability. Roget is sent as a spy from the Federation to investigate a planet covered by Haze (hard from Tor), a utopian society when compared with the hardships of Earth ruled by Chinese capitalism. The good guys have the better technology, technology which would have made Earth equal. I really couldn’t see the real differences in the two societies even though the deck was heavily stacked in favor of the people on Haze.
    Collections this month include a collection of Charles Stross’s shorter works , Wireless(hard from Ace); a sampling of Fred Saverhagen’s tales Of Berserkers, Swords, and Vampires (hard from Baen) selected tales from Poul Anderson that tell of the Rise of the Terran Empire (trade from Baen); two novels by Andre Norton about Star Flight (paper from Baen); and assorted tales collected and edited by Esther Friesner about witches in modern times asking Witch Way to the Mall (paper from Baen).
     Baen has reprinted Wen Spencer’s tale of the Endless Blue (paper) ocean where spaceships crash when they get lost in subspace.
    The Science Fiction Society will have its next meeting on July 17th at 8:00p.m. at International House on  the University of Pennsylvania. Campus. John J. Adams, an editor, blogger, and book reviewer will speak. Guests are welcome.