Shores of Night

The second of my ongoing exploration of post apocalypse fiction, Year of the Flood is by Margaret Atwood and depicts a much more modern apocalypse than Greybeard did.  This is fitting, the fears of the early 21st century  are very different to those of the 1960s, viruses, cults and dirty bombs have won in our imaginations whereas the idea of nuclear weapons and experiments seems almost prosaic (unless you live in Kashmir at a guess). Atwood embraces this fact to present a world where capitalism has spun out of control, its almost cyberpunk in its intensity and in the politics she presents, and where things are fracturing at an alarming rate.  To fall through the gaps in society is to fall into a world of crime, cults and vice where nothing is safe, not even food (a chain called Secretburger makes mystery meat fast food, and its suggested that humans may be making their way into the food chain).  She creates interesting cults to show how desperate things have got...

The first of my post apocalypse reading, Brian Aldiss' Greybeard is set in a devastated England where nuclear experiments in near space coated the world in radiation and rendered the vast majority of mammalian life sterile.  Whilst creatures that nest within the earth have been unaffected, and are prospering in the increasingly wild world the last generation of humanity lives in, anything that lives above ground is in danger of becoming extinct, surprise is expressed by the main characters that they find sheep of all things for instance. By the time we join the story as readers the damage has been done, society has fragmented into tiny settlements in a world where roads have gone and the next village along the river is viewed with suspicion; horizons shrinking as old age with its terrible burdens sets in.  Aldiss doesn't shrink from his vision of the world, the elderly are shown to be just as grasping and tyrannical as the young can be, as delusional and demented.  D...

First, apologies for the length of time between posts, things have been busy here and trying to get my first novel sorted has taken up a lot of my time up (it's getting there and I hope to meet my end of April deadline for the first draft). I picked up these books last year, at FantasyCon (I think) and having read them I thought I'd throw a review together. Let's get on with it shall we? Gav Thorpe's Crown of the Blood is a big, swords and sandals style epic with a sword and sorcery feel to it. It tracks the rebellion of a general from a big Roman style empire that has grown to dominate most of the continent its on. The protagonist, Ullsaard has risen through the ranks from a mere legionary to be one of the most gifted generals the empire has and feels that he's being slighted by an assignment to conquer a desert backwater. He colludes with another, similarly disgruntled character, the second in line to the throne who, despite the fact his elder brother...

Portrait See her reflection in the water Child of invention, divinity’s daughter The widest eyes, the palest skin She’s wilfully starved and painfully thing Dark moons ride beneath her eyes And the land between her thighs Is undiscovered, a mystery In her eyes lies a sorrow In the shadow of their hollows Lonely and wild she rides And in her, all her hopes hide Beneath old dust sheets in her mind All her dreams are lost inside And struggle to be free Spider fingers and scorpion tongue Express her hate of this iron lung Of a world that she lives in Prefers the worlds she keeps within Only emerging to feast at dusk Full of vampires, wolves and lusts The measure of her dreams The graveyard truly is her home Amongst the memories and bones At midnight that’s where she’ll be With a book and a sprig of rosemary Like Ophelia cold and dead She’ll weep, tears so sweetly shed For everything that’s real And hiding there at midnight Standing in the cold half light ...