At the funeral of Michele Angelo Besso, an engineer remembered primarily for his friendship with a young Albert Einstein – from their time together in the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich and latterly the patent office in Bern where both of these bright sparks once worked – the famous physicist famously remarked that though Besso had “departed from this strange world a little ahead of me [...] that means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

But what if it was not?

Which is to say: what if the impossible were possible, after all? What if the temporal division Einstein oft alluded to was exactly as arbitrary as he believed? And what if we could cross it? What then?

What, moreover, when?

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War. War has changed.

But then, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Isn’t that what they say?

Kings of Morning is the third and final volume of the saga of the Macht, which began with The Ten Thousand in 2008 and continued, albeit on a smaller scale, in Corvus, two years later. The series has been hugely acclaimed to date for great writing, awesome action, and a wonderful weave of historical fact and phalanx fantasy, and if in commercial terms it has not found the foothold certain other military fantasy sagas have, then that is on our heads – assuredly not the author’s.

If anything, Northern Irish author Paul Kearney has gone from strength to strength in the years since Steven Erikson described his last completed work, the five volumes of The Monarchies of God – collected now into two mighty omnibus editions – as “simply the best fantasy series I’ve read in years and years.” Here’s hoping Erikson is still paying attention, because all told, the tall tale of the Macht is more impressive yet. It’s tighter, tougher, and on the whole more touching. Fit to reduce grown men to quivering fits of emotion by its bittersweet conclusion, and make no mistake: “We are at the end of things here. The finish of everything we have known.” The stakes couldn’t be higher, the prize – an empire – could hardly be grander, and this endeavour will take a toll every cent as expensive as all the jewels in Asuria. When all is said and done, there won’t be a dry eye in the house.

But we were talking about war, weren’t we?

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Insofar as it marked the emergence of an innovative and exhilarating new voice in dark fantasy fiction – or in fiction, full stop – Mr. Shivers’ publication in early 2010 was a watershed moment of sorts. Indeed, the very next year it earned its originator the prestigious Shirley Jackson Award... not for Best Newcomer, or Best Debut, or some similarly subordinate category, but for Best Novel proper, and such was Mr. Shivers’ primal power that I dare say the eminent honour was well and truly warranted.

Of course, certain expectations come hand in hand with that sort of success. The Company Man, an effective and unsettling love letter to airships and acid noir – by way of steampunk, sci-fi and murder mystery – crushed these to pulp and a waste of paste. In a good way, I mean to say. Because instead of trotting out another borderline apocalyptic Southern horror show – instead, in other words, of contenting himself and his hard-won readership with more of the same – Robert Jackson Bennett changed the rules of the game, ably demonstrating that his talents were not to be constrained by either the requirements or the restrictions of any one genre amongst the many.

In The Troupe, Bennett’s third novel in as many years, the ambitious author is at it again. Riding the crest of a weird wave of speculative and indeed superlative circus stories – with The Night Circus, Cyber-Circus and Genevieve Valentine’s marvellous Mechanique bringing up the esteemed rear – The Troupe is a tall and ineffably tender tale about nothing less than “the warp and weft of the web” of the world.

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The last time international treasure Neil Gaiman tangled with the classic canon coined by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he came away with a Hugo Award in 2004 for writing the year’s Best Short Story, and something of cherry on top, too: namely the 2005 Locus Award for Best Novelette.

If he hadn’t had it already, he could have had my heart as well.

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In terms of the order in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote them, ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ was one of the very last Sherlock Holmes stories, but though it was published in 1924, it occurs before the turn of the century, in approximately the middle period of the great detective’s career, canonically speaking.

More than a decade on from the events of ‘A Study in Scarlet,’ then, and some years yet from his retirement in ‘His Last Bow,’ ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ documents Holmes and his beloved biographer as they investigate what is ostensibly a very curious case: a conundrum like no other, which is to say, both testimony and evidence indicating the presence of a transplant from Transylvania in – of all places – middle England.

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Halfway through The House of Silk — a lost tale which purports to take place a decade before the great detective “was found dead at his home on the Downs, stretched out and still, that great mind silenced forever,” and has been hidden from the public since because of the scandalous social and political revelations depicted within — an unshaven Sherlock Holmes stands trial for the crime of murder in the first degree. That he has killed this poor person is allegedly

beyond question. In fact, even the imaginative powers of his biographer would be unable to raise a shred of doubt in the minds of his readers. At the scene of the crime I observed that the gun in his hand was still warm, that there were residues of powder blackening his sleeve and several small bloodstains on his coat which could only have arrived there if he had been standing in close proximity to the girl when she was shot. Mr Holmes was semi-conscious, still emerging from an opium trance and barely aware of the horror of what he had done. I say “barely aware” but by that I do not mean that he was completely ignorant. He knew his guilt, your honour. He offered no defence.

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I never really had a head for numbers... for dates and times in particular. Rather, language was my forte — you might say from word one — so in school, I found those salient facts I was to absorb from history classes fell away faster than the hours in a day.

In any event, as a Brit, and a Scot, what history I was taught, whether I recall it or not, was the history of Britain, and of Scotland. Which is to say, before now — before immersing myself in the latest tome to come from the undisputed King of pop genre fiction — I couldn’t have told you very much at all about the significance of the 22nd November in the year of our lord 1963; the date the 35th President of the United States of America, the democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was shot dead in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Now JFK was not the first American President to be assassinated by some disillusioned so-and-so — in fact he was the fourth... I know these things now — and there would be unsuccessful attempts on the lives of several subsequent holders of the one office to rule them all thereafter, yet it is commonly thought that Kennedy’s death had such far-reaching ramifications as to alter not just the patchwork fabric of the United States, but that of human society entirely. And perhaps it did: borne as it is of the philosophy of chaos, which holds that everything — bar nothing — is uncertain, the butterfly effect may be far from a verifiable fact in and of itself, but science certainly concurs that from each and every action springs an equal and opposite reaction, and the assassination of arguably the most powerful person in the world is no exception to the rule.

11/22/63 begins with a bona fide believer in that theory.

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