Whether published in electrons or on paper, she is aware how important it is these days for authors to market their book—a position not all authors are suited to. She is fortunate to have a flair for promotion and public speaking, and would love to visit Australia again as a guest speaker at a science fiction convention.
Book Reviews
Mole Hunt: The Maximus Black Files (Book 1)
by Paul Collins
Ford Street Publishing, 2011
ISBN: 9781742373423
Reviewed by Edwina Harvey
This is a Spy/Thriller novel with a science fiction backdrop aimed at young male readers (12+) but just as suitable for girls and adults.
Collins is an experienced writer, and Mole Hunt is a tightly written, action-packed fast moving story. The point of view shifts between master spy for RIM, Maximus Black, and Anneke Longshadow, also a RIM spy who is trying to find the mole working within the agency. When Anneke’s Uncle Viktus—a high ranking member of the RIM organization—is murdered before her eyes, she suspects the mole assassinated him. Or was she the mole’s intended target? Anneke’s and Maximus’s paths criss-cross, as they exchange roles of hunter and hunted, with many sub-plots woven into the story along the way. This book starts with a bang, and the pace just doesn’t let up. The story is surprisingly dark at times, as suits the thriller genre, I suppose, though I was left wondering if it was better suited to older teens and adults. I found this a gripping read with strongly drawn characters.
BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH
by Alastair Reynolds
Gollancz, 2012
ISBN 9780575088283
Reviewed by Simon Petrie
In Blue Remembered Earth, Alastair Reynolds’ latest widescreen SF offering, Geoffrey Akinya is the black sheep of an enormously wealthly African family, and a man for whom money holds importance only so far as it permits him to progress his independent studies on elephant socialisation and communication. As the story opens, Geoffrey is sent to the moon at the behest of his strongly business-minded cousins, Hector and Lucas, to retrieve a mysterious item from his newly-deceased grandmother’s bank vault. The item in question is disappointingly mundane, but it contains a riddle which soon ensnares Geoffrey and his artist sister Sunday, placing them at the centre of a nebulous but nonetheless deadly conflict of mid-22nd-century ideologies.
Reynolds is a master craftsman in modern SF. His combination of hard SF concepts, taut and tense plotlines, and plausibly detailed characterisation is seldom less than satisfying, and BRE again shows his skills to very good effect. The novel is expressed in a clean, relatively ornamentation-free prose—one of the Reynolds trademarks—which promotes accessibility without compromising quality.
If I have a quibble, it’s that, as the intended first volume in a trilogy, BRE is not completely self-contained, nor set up for a spectacular finish in and of its own right. There’s a sense, in places, that Reynolds is simply ‘showing off’ in arranging planetary or interplanetary backdrops for his plays of idea and character interaction which, in a couple of instances, might seem gratuitous. (It is, for me, most directly the aquatic sequences in BRE that spring to mind in this regard, though it’s entirely possible that other readers might well be captivated by the exuberance of Reynolds’ admittedly assured worldbuilding.)
Trilogies are a dime-a-dozen in fantasy. They’re not often attempted in SF (the principal example that occurs to me is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy), where the more widely-accepted approach is the continuing series which might, after one (Pohl’s Gateway) or several (Asimov’s Foundation) initial masterworks, devolve into self-satirising or otherwise disappointing sequels. I’ll be interested to see how Reynolds follows up BRE—can he avoid the holding-pattern sensibility embodied by, say, The Two Towers to produce a second volume as worthwhile and as mesmerising as Robinson’s Green Mars?
I hope he can. BRE is a largely fascinating and multi-faceted exploration of life in the fast lane, high, wide, and dangerous, a century and a half from now. I can recommend it as a solid and engrossing read.
As for whatever follows? Well, that’s clearly another story …
FALSE CHILDHOOD MEMORY SYNDROME:
Tin toys that never were
by Lewis Morley
Edited by Marilyn Pride
Published through blurb .com, 2012
Reviewed by Edwina Harvey
This slim, glossy book is filled with detailed colour photos of Lewis Morley’s artistic creations—sculptures made to resemble tin toys popular through the 1960s. His passion extends to creating the cardboard boxes the toys would have come in. Each one is a unique work of art, carefully weathered and aged to look like a treasure that’s been sitting on a toyshop shelf for the past 40 years just waiting for you to discover it. These creations convey Lewis’ sense of whimsy and humour, such as the Robot Rider, mounted on a dinosaur, as well as his sharp observations of the world, displayed through his $uper heroes series.
Morley is comfortable sharing his past with his readers, recalling how his father, sculptor and photographer Lewis F. Morley, used to bring home fantastic toys he’d found in the sales, how his mother encouraged his creativity, and how a family friend had a toy robot collection that no doubt sparked his young imagination. Though he mentions his movie special effects work only in passing, his popular Peregrine Besset comics have inspired their own sculptures, as has his Dad’s famous photo of Christine Keeler, the centre of the Profumo scandal of the 1960s.
If, like Lewis Morley, you have ‘an enduring love of childish things’, I highly recommend you take a look at this wonderful book.
AVENGER’S ANGEL
by Heather Killough-Walden
Headline Publishing, 2011
ISBN 9780755380374
Reviewed by Edwina Harvey
Okay, I admit it, I’m attracted to men with wings. So I was immediately drawn to the cover of this paranormal romance.
Four favoured Archangels were sent to Earth over two thousand years ago by The Old Man (aka God) to live among us humans while they searched for four perfect women, their soulmates, or archesses. In modern times one is a famous movie star acting in vampire films, one is a rockstar and a genuine vampire. The other two are a little more modest, working as a cop and a firefighter in New York City. They have a minder, and live in a mansion which is not only bigger on the inside than the outside, but also has the ability to transport them just about anywhere they need to go. They also have a few enemies to be dealt with.
Think “Seven Wives for Seven Brothers”, take away three and add a whole lot of paranormal powers. The first Archess is found after 2000 years of searching. She works in a bookstore and leads a simple life if you discount the fact she has the ability to heal the sick and summon storms. It’s never explained why the Angels are immortal, while their Archesses have human parents.
Misunderstandings and melodrama take up a great slab of this book, with not much attention paid to romance-building, let alone anything saucy going on. The ‘good stuff’ doesn’t happen until page 275, and isn’t particularly convincing. It was around page 400 before there was finally the mention of wings. There’s a suggestion that the next Archess has been located in Brisbane, Australia, at the end of the book, which suggests the next in the series might have an Aussie setting, but I found this book promised much but failed to deliver.
THE COLD COMMANDS
by Richard Morgan
Gollancz, 2011
ISBN 9780575084872
Reviewed by Simon Petrie
It seems quite ungracious, in my mind, to conflate Peter Jackson’s vision of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth—across three, soon to be five, movies—with the fantasy world which Richard Morgan has constructed in The Steel Remains (2007) and last year’s The Cold Commands. Ungracious because, quite clearly, Morgan’s high-born, low-living anti-hero Ringil Eskiath is no Aragorn, nor is his steppe-nomad drinking buddy and partner-in-crime Egar the Dragonbane in any way analogous to Gimli. And yet I ca
nnot but picture Ringil as anyone other than Viggo Mortensen, nor Egar as otherwise than an appropriately-accented John Rhys-Davies. (It’s when I get to the third principal character in Morgan’s skewer-sharpened fantasy, the half-breed engineer Archeth Indamaninarmal, that I run into visualisation difficulties. Orlando Bloom? No. Cate Blanchett? Clearly not. Sir Ian McKellen? Not even close. But I digress ...)
Actually, no, I don’t digress, not entirely. If Morgan’s world, for me, evokes Tolkien in some sense, it’s a measure (a) of the limited quantity of epic fantasy which I’ve absorbed in my half-century on this planet, but also, and more importantly, (b) of the detail and scope of Morgan’s fantasy worldbuilding. The world of TSR and TCC is a world with history, strife, rampant inequity and inequality, problems great and small in every crevice: wars, political intrigue, idealogical disputes, slavery, invasion. Whatever one might think of the foreground action, the backdrop is fascinating. What Morgan has concocted here is something like the fantasy analogue of hard SF, detailed, compellingly plausible, wonderfully grainy. (Is it appropriate to talk of ‘hard fantasy’?)
The Cold Commands seems at once a better and a less perfect book than its predecessor, The Steel Remains. Better in that Morgan feels more assured in his world this time around: the swordstrokes carry a weight that was not always evident in the earlier book, the characters have accreted into something yet more three-dimensional than they were previously, the sexual encounters less arch, less in-your-face, more real. Less perfect in that the second book is less compellingly propulsive, less dangerous than the first: if one arrives at the end of The Steel Remains with a sense of ‘bloody-hell-what-was-that?’, the reaction to The Cold Commands is more likely to be ‘so-is-there-more-to-come?’ Which is not to say that TCC disappoints, more that it sometimes loses its way. But the vista, at all times, remains fascinating, and for that I commend it. If you like your fantasy with grit, and if you can resist the temptation to populate your mind’s eye with LOTR outtakes while you read it, you’ll find a lot to like in Morgan’s latest.
WOLFBORN
by Sue Bursztynski
Woolshed Press, 2010
ISBN 9781864718256
Reviewed by Edwina Harvey
This Young Adult fantasy novel is the story of Geraint, a noble Lord of the Kingdom of Armorique, as told through the eyes of Ettienne, his new page.
While fair and just, Ettienne notices his lord has an unusual habit of disappearing into the night at least once a week. Ettienne soon discovers his lord is Bisclavret, or one who is born a werewolf. These shape-shifters are well-regarded as mercenaries, and are more or less tolerated among the normal folk just so long as they don’t start killing the livestock. But when the local lord is a werewolf, he wants to keep such knowledge secret from his people.
Geraint’s young wife is bored with her husband, and she follows the new religion, while the lord adheres to the old customs, donning the horns of the old god to perform the rituals for his people. Will she be successful in her plot to overthrow him?
Sue Bursztynski has studied history, and is particularly interested in medieval times. She drew her inspiration for Wolfborn from a 12th century collection of short stories gathered by Marie de France, and has obviously enjoyed weaving her story with folklore, historical fact, an element of whimsy, a smattering of romance and gentle humour. I especially liked a cameo regarding Armand, a senior page and Ettienne’s friend, and a unicorn when he is discovered in the Underworld.
About the contributors...
Anatoly Belilovsky was born in what is now Ukraine, emigrated to the US with his family in 1976, and learned English from Star Trek reruns. He worked his way through a US college by teaching Russian while majoring in chemistry, and has, for the past 25 years, been a paediatrician in New York, in a practice where English is the fourth most commonly spoken language. He has been published in Nature, Kasma, Ideomancer, the Immersion Book of Steampunk and other markets, and is a SFWA member since 2011.
Sue Bursztynski is a writer, teacher-librarian and reviewer who lives in Melbourne, without a cat. She has written ten books and many articles and short stories. Her short fiction has been published by ASIM, Ford Street, Fablecroft and Specusphere. Her YA novel Wolfborn, published in 2010, is a Notable Book in the Australian Children’s Book Council’s annual awards. ‘Midwinter Night’ is set in the universe of Wolfborn. Sue’s blog is at http://suebursztynski.blogspot.com
Zen Cho is a Malaysian writer living in London . Her fiction has been featured in various publications including Strange Horizons, GigaNotoSaurus, PodCastle, Fantastique Unfettered and Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. She is a Selangor Young Talent Awards finalist and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Nothing stirs budding writer, Belinda Crawford, more than a fast horse, a new computer or a good book. A Melbourne based IT Graduate, Crawford has expanded her passion for reading to creative writing as well. Currently she’s studying Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT. Somewhere between uni, karate training, learning the Argentine tango and work, Crawford finds time to write a full-length novel. ‘Lex Talionis’ is the first of what she hopes will be many published works.
Tamlyn Dreaver has been writing since her primary school report card said she couldn’t. Growing up in rural WA and now living in Melbourne, she’s never had a secret basement or a dragon nesting in the backyard or anything nearly as interesting, so she makes up stories about them instead.
Jacob Edwards was born in Brisbane in 1976. He was comfortably ensconcing himself in academia until marriage and parenthood inspired him to seek a real job stacking deckchairs for Andromeda Spaceways. Jacob still writes articles, fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction, but is now on creative probation, having broken into Andromeda’s printing press and illicitly run off #45 of the Inflight Magazine. Though denying any wrongdoing vis-a-vis this print run, Jacob does admit to harbouring latent lexiphanic tendencies. He lives in Brisbane with his wife and son, and may be found online at www.jacobedwards.id.au
Dirk Flinthart lives in Tasmania and writes … stuff . He’s made the Aurealis finals more often than he can remember, and shared a Ditmar with Margo Lanagan, which he thought was pretty cool . He’s at work on an MA, two novels, a novella, a bunch of short stories, his second dan grading in ju-jitsu, raising three children, and preparing for the coming Zombie Apocalypse . This isn’t exactly his first appearance in ASIM—and he’d like to assure everyone who has hassled him that yes, the Red Priest will be back.
Sarah Frost lives in Kansas and puts scientific journals on the internet for a living. She dreams about space ships in her free time.
Edwina Harvey says of her story ‘H G’: Three months after my mother died, my father had a stroke from which he made a good recovery. I was fascinated with how his mind worked—especially in the early days—finding detours within itself so that he could say what he wanted to say, or at least get the idea across when he couldn’t. It was an often frustrating task for him, and I had no idea I was funnelling away observations I would later use in a story. Funny how this shrapnel of the soul has worked its way out of my creative skin.
C A L lives in an old boatshed on the Central Coast of NSW with two children, three house rabbits, three mice, and a (necessarily single) fighting fish. She spends her days as a research administrator at Macquarie University, writes in (very) rare moments of spare time and photographs astronomical and meteorological phenomena in others. She has short stories published in Interzone and Borderlands, and has some pieces of published poetry scattered in a few various, conveniently forgotten places.
David Luntz lives in the U.S. His short stories and poems have appeared in many online and print publications.
Lewis Morley has been associated with Australian Science Fiction Fandom since attending his first convention in 1979 (where he met fellow artist Marilyn Pride).
Originally remembered for his complex masquerade costumes, Lewis nowadays limits his creative output to sculptu
re and illustration (he has enjoyed providing internal illustrations and covers for several previous ASIMs, but this is his first complete issue).
Beyond fandom’s immediate sphere, he continues to (slowly) write and illustrate his Fantasy/SF comic series ‘Peregrine Besset’ about a time-travelling Ancient Egyptian dwarf.
His ‘day job’ working as a designer and prop maker in the Australian Film Industry is currently at the mercy of the vicissitudes of Hollywood bean counters. He has been surviving by lecturing at the Australian Film TV & Radio School and University of Technology Sydney, teaching the next hapless generation about ‘how we used to do things in the old days …’
He has recently published a catalogue of his fake tin-toy sculptures from his first exibition of SF themed art work: http://www.blurb.com/books/2996692
Lewis lives with artist Marilyn Pride in a fairy-tale cottage deep in the forests of the Blue Mountains.
Robert Porteous lives in Canberra, Australia with his wife and two teenage children. He thinks himself fortunate to have careered through a curriculum of interesting jobs, including stints as a speechwriter and a research physicist. He has only started writing in the last year or so and is still teaching himself the trade by writing each story in a different genre. This is his first fantasy quest story.
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