Shores of Night

Another first publication to wash up on the shores, the Home Front is a well conceived and executed book which serves as a strong introduction to the series, the Automata Wars. I would hesitate to call it a novel, in truth its a series of short stories, held together by the overwhelming concept of the setting and background. This background is well established early on in the book and is simple enough to strike true: the idea of a long, mysterious war taking place somewhere in the world against a foe, the nature of the which is left a mystery, beyond the idea that they are highly advanced machines that occupy specialised roles within their society. Cooke creates 'Skimmers' and 'Burrowers' to menace the troops and android infiltrators who aim to topple the humans from within through sabotage, treachery and the creation of fifth columns. There's a sense of gleeful menace to her writing in places, as she describes the actions of the automata; never lettin...

I was spurred to pick this book up by seeing the author speak at Edge - Lit, in Derby. She sat on the horror panel, 'Do We Still Need Monsters' (or some such, it was to do with whether monsters are still necessary  in any case - the answer was yes by the way) and I was impressed with the way she came across.  As one of my great loves is a good apocalypse story I thought it was worth picking up her debut novel and seeing what I thought of it. In all honesty the answer to that, is that my feeling are quite mixed.  On the one hand the world Newman has created is vibrant, realistic and exciting. She ably sculpts a post apocalyptic London that seems plausible and dangerous, with inhabitants and gangs that feel as if they fit naturally into her setting.  The additional details of the gangs make them interesting to read, though they do raise a fair of number of questions; for instance if there are Bloomsbury Boys, why no Bloomsbury Girls?  Women are rare in the bo...

A late post about this lovely event, out of the gate after most of the other attendees have posted blogs about it (I've had surgery for a hernia this week so I've not been working as diligently as I should; that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. Like glue).  For the ooh five of you that don't know what the Asylum is (let's be optimistic and assume that I'm going to get more than five readers shall we?), it's a big steampunk event, that takes place in the absolutely gorgeous, and rather steep, city of Lincoln in the, erm, east of England... I'm not actually sure how to explain Lincoln's location, it's not really very north, or east, or midlandy but sits between the three.  Anyway the Asylum coats Lincoln with people in beautiful clothes, selling beautiful things, doing beautiful things (you get the picture). All in all it was a highly enjoyable weekend; Eve and I had a lot of fun catching up with friends (we didn't get to do enough ...

Commissioned by Games Workshop in the late 80s and early 90s the Dark Future quartet, of Demon Download, Krokodil Tears, Comeback Tour and Route 666 are set in the Nottingham based games company's post apocalyptic near future setting, all written by SF's worst kept secret Jack Yeovil (aka Kim Newman). The sequence as published goes: Demon Download, Krokodil Tears, Comeback Tour, Route 666, but I would the chronological order of the books is this: Route 666, Krokodil Tears then Demon Download and finally Comeback Tour, if you want to read the sequence of events in chronological order (it's not necessary to do so but at the same time, I know some readers like to). It isn't clear from the novels what sort of disaster has befallen the world to throw it into such horrific and ridiculous state of affairs but it obviously draws from horror, cyberpunk (both in culture and technology, and the immense influence of Japan) and a number of other genres, mashing them all ...

Evening fell over Kingsford and the high street slowly emptied of people. Businesses shut their doors and only the handful of pubs and restaurants stayed open to customers. Teenagers congregated near the Fat Fish, a chip shop that tolerated their presence as long as they bought chips and did not cause too much trouble. The town's men retired to the Kings Head or the Swan to drink away the stresses of the working day. A few of them chose to go down to the old High Street and drink at the Green Man, the town's oldest pub, with its heavily carved sign in the shape of a leaf moulded face. Aiden and Brendan's father invariably ended up at the Man if he went drinking in town. He usually wound up debating some facet of local history that was probably petty and irrelevant but which he felt was important enough to enter into arguments with the Kingsford Tower Society, the local history group that took its name from the ruined tower near the town's centre. It was the same beat ...

Spinning out of the imagination of Iain Lowson, and incubating within his mind for many years, Dark Harvest is a Gothic roleplaying setting which takes a very simple idea, that far from being repulsed by what he creates Victor Frankenstein becomes enthralled by it and hatches a plan with some confederates that leads to him hijacking the creation of Romania for his own purposes; namely to create country in his image and runs with it. The resulting country, Promethea, is a country where science is revered, technology is pushed to the cutting edge of its time (the game is set in 1910) and Frankenstein's dream has been corrupted to the point where the poor are used as a resource for fresh body parts for some of the rich and powerful. In some respects this makes the game feel as if it's capturing the Zeitgeist, mirroring the track that the 21 st Century seems to be taking (to date anyway) but with enough distance to take the sting out of the situation and allow gaming gro...

A thick book of stories, this volume is packed with some of the best sword and sorcery I've read in a long time and really confirms that Leiber was one of the stars in the genre's firmament.  Written as short stories, which suits both the sword and sorcery genre and the characters, the narratives within have a different texture to those I've read to other writers of the genre, whilst losing nothing of the strangeness or wildness that make it one of the more interesting sections of the fantasy genre. The book starts surprisingly slowly and the first story is perhaps the weakest part of the book; it drags a little as the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are introduced and are set upon their paths.  The writing here is self indulgent and woolly, and it's a relief when the characters arrive in Lankhmar itself and meet, if only because the pace picks up and Leiber's use of language becomes much sharper. Despite this I must say it's a shame that two interesting chara...