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Niall Alexander

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Applied Kant: The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts

Thu Dec 17, 2015 9:00am 3 comments

At an Antarctic research station in the 1980s, two men at their end of their respective tethers, alone in this lovely if unlovable land but for one another and a copy of Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, see something that cannot conceivably be:

There was a hint of—I’m going to say, claws, jaws, a clamping something. A maw. Not a tentacle, nothing so defined. Nor was it a darkness. It made a low, thrumming, chiming noise, like a muffled bell sounding underground, ding-ding, ding-ding. But this was not a sound-wave sort of sound. This was not a propagating expanding sphere of agitated air particles. It was a pulse in the mind. It was a shudder of the soul.

Sound familiar? Well, it is—for a fraction of a chapter.

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Legends Emerge: Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

Thu Dec 10, 2015 10:30am 3 comments

As we close in on the conclusion of 2015, there’s been a lot of looking back, and I shouldn’t wonder if there was much more to come before it’s all over and done… but today, I want you folks to face forward.

Just a glimmer of a glance at what we’ll see in the first few months of 2016 gives every indication it’s going to be another good year for genre fiction. With the last volume of Daniel Abraham’s The Dagger and the Coin novels in March, Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie out in April, The Fireman by Joe Hill in May, and all this bracketed by books by China Mieville—namely This Census-Taker in February and Last Days in Paris come the summer—I believe you’d be hard pressed to disagree. But amongst this embarrassment of potential fictional riches, the crown jewel, if you ask me, has to be Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay. It’s a novel we’ve known was coming for some time, but this week, Hodder gave us a good, long look at it.

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Series: British Fiction Focus

Forever Autumn: Gollancz Announces Another War of the Worlds

Wed Dec 2, 2015 11:40am 3 comments

The inestimable Simon Spanton might have moved on, but Gollancz still has a few tricks up its sleeve, it seems…

This morning, Orion’s genre fiction imprint was delighted to announce the acquisition of world rights to release The Massacre of Mankind—and it has every reason to be pleased: said text is “a sequel to one of the most famous and influential SF books ever,” namely The War of the Worlds by Herbert George Wells. You must be wondering, as I was when I received the press release, exactly who you tap to modernize such a prized property. The answer: Stephen Baxter.

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Series: British Fiction Focus

Need a Ride? BITE by K. S. Merbeth

Mon Nov 30, 2015 11:35am Post a comment

Back in the distant past, when Mad Max: Fury Road was still a big hit in cinemas, Orbit announced—not coincidentally, I think—that it had acquired “a dark debut” complete with “an amazing world” and a “strong female main character” sure to prove perfect for fans of George Miller’s movie.

The book in question was BITE by Kristyn S. Merbeth, “the stark and darkly comedic story of a young girl who joins a crew of bandits in a lawless, post-nuclear world,” and last week, its publisher showed it off properly.

[Cover art coming up!]

Series: British Fiction Focus

The End of an Era: Simon Spanton Departs Gollancz

Fri Nov 20, 2015 11:10am 2 comments

Sad news, genre fiction fans: November 20, which is to say today, is Associate Publisher Simon Spanton’s last at Gollancz. It isn’t gilding the lily in the least to say that his departure—“by mutual agreement,” according to a statement supplied by the imprint’s parent—marks the end of an era. A truly epic one, to be sure.

His achievements in the nineteen years he’s been a part of the Orion Publishing Group are too numerous to list in any great detail here, but suffice it to say we have Spanton to thank, in large part, for some of the finest speculative fiction released since the turn of the century. If you’ve ever spent a spell sucking up Scott Lynch, or jonesing for Joe Abercrombie, or relaxing with Richard Morgan, know that though he’s “definitely more Arthur Dent than Takeshi Kovacs,” Spanton has been behind the scenes, helping to make the magic happen.

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Here Be Monsters: Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson

Fri Nov 6, 2015 4:00pm Post a comment

A great many maps were made in Europe in the Middle Ages. Foremost among them were the Mappae Mundi: “maps of the world” meant not as navigational aids but to illustrate different principles—the earth’s spherical shape, say, or its flora and fauna. Such scrolls represented repositories of medieval knowledge, but even the most definitive had their limits; here be lions and the like was oft-enscribed where the unknown roamed. The Ebstorfer Mappa Mundi, for instance, depicts a dragon to the east of Africa—also asps and basilisks, presumably because it was better to show something than nothing; better, according to that thought process, to invent the positively extraordinary than to admit the littlest deficiency.

In this day and age, we expect rather more from our maps than that. We demand that they are exact, in fact—detailed to the nearest nanometre, at least! And perhaps they are. But you know what? I hope to God not. If we’re to understand that modern maps are absolutely accurate, then there remains nothing about the world we do not know, and me… I love a bit of a mystery. Which might be why I loved Europe at Midnight.

[That and a hundred other reasons, even.]

Forget Me Not: Claire North’s Next

Fri Nov 6, 2015 11:45am 1 comment

With the digital release this week of The Gameshouse novellas—that is to say The Serpent, The Thief and The Master, which “can be read separately but also fit together to make a complete, intricately woven tale”—the time has come to start talking about what’s next for Catherine Webb’s nom de plume Claire North.

Long story short: a lot, is what—beginning with the novel formerly known as Forget Me Not. Like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and Touch before it, The Sudden Appearance of Hope—as it shall be known henceforth—is another interrogation of identity.

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Series: British Fiction Focus

At the End of the Tunnel: The Light That Gets Lost by Natasha Carthew

Thu Nov 5, 2015 9:30am 1 comment

When you think about it, the business of living boils down to a string of decisions; seemingly insignificant decisions about little things, largely, like whether to take the left road or the right. Maybe one direction gets you to your destination without delay on this postulated day, and perhaps that matters, but taking the long way could lead, equally, to a chance meeting that leads to laughter that leads, at the last, to love.

What I mean to say is that, in a very real way, we’re changed by our choices—made or broken or both. Take Tremain Pearce, the deeply damaged protagonist of Natasha Carthew’s languid but ultimately uplifting latest. When a man murders his mother and father, and hurts his big brother Billy so seriously that he’ll require round-the-clock care for the remainder of his days, Trey chooses to make the guy who got away with it pay: a decision that determines the lot of his lamentable life from that sickening instant on.

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Death Becomes Him: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

Wed Nov 4, 2015 5:00pm 3 comments

“I never feel the limitations of my talent so keenly as I do when writing short fiction,” confesses Stephen King in the introduction to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams—an unusually introspective yet no less effective collection of eighteen variously terrifying tales, plus a few pieces of poetry, from the affable author of last year’s similarly reflective Revival.

This is far from the first time King has discussed his “struggle to bridge the gap between a great idea and the realisation of that idea’s potential,” and although, as readers, we only have the end product to parse, the ideas the Edgar Award winner explores here—and the characters, and the narratives—are not at all inadequate. If anything, in dispensing with the hallmarks of Halloweeny horror to which his bibliography is so bound in order to investigate a goody bag of markedly more grounded goings-on, the stories brought together in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams number among King’s most thoughtful and evocative.

[Which isn’t to say they ain’t scary…]

A New NME: The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp

Wed Nov 4, 2015 11:50am Post a comment

From the writer of Beast in the Basement, a decent number of Doctor Who audiobooks “and further tomfoolery” such as A Sincere Warning About the Entity in Your Home comes The Last Days of Jack Sparks: a “chilling and utterly immersive” account of the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of the eponymous provocateur and pop culture critic.

To his fans, Jack was a fearless rebel; to his detractors he was a talentless hack. Either way, his death came as a shock to everyone. It was no secret that Jack had been researching the occult for his new book. He’d already triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed in rural Italy.  Then there was that video: thirty-six seconds of chilling footage that Jack repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet was posted from his own YouTube account.

Nobody knew what happened to Jack in the days that followed…

[…until now.]

Series: British Fiction Focus

Watching the World Burn: The Fireman by Joe Hill

Tue Nov 3, 2015 9:30am Post a comment

In case you weren’t aware, there’s a new novel by Joe Hill on the horizon. It’s called The Fireman, and apparently it “marks a remarkable new direction for the bestselling author”—one Gollancz’s Gillian Redfearn is confident will take Hill’s already-astronomical career to new heights.

Said to be a synthesis of “the epic scope of The Passage and the emotional impact of The Road,” this apocalyptic thriller is “set in a world overtaken by an incurable runaway pathogen that causes death by spontaneous combustion.”

[No one is safe.]

Series: British Fiction Focus

Time Was: Slade House by David Mitchell

Tue Oct 27, 2015 4:00pm Post a comment

Though there have ever been elements of the speculative in David Mitchell’s fiction, his Man Booker Prize longlisted-last, released last year, was the first to fully embrace the form. Section by section, The Bone Clocks revealed itself to be “a soaring supernatural sextet” somewhat taken with time travel and very interested indeed in immortality. Unfortunately, the protracted finale of Mitchell’s sixth made a middling meal of the same fantastical flourishes that had been so appealing when presented with more measure—an oversight I’m pleased to say he sets right in his latest.

Not so much a novel as a collection of interlinked short stories, Slade House shares a world with The Bone Clocks—such that the Shaded Way has a pivotal role to play and Spot the Horologist is the game of the day—but where said setting was once an expansive canvas spattered with the stuff of science fiction, in this book it becomes the close-cropped backdrop of a hypnotic history of haunting.

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The End of the Eternals: Covering Those Below

Mon Oct 26, 2015 1:15pm 2 comments

Late last week, Hodder & Stoughton unveiled the remarkable cover art Rhett Podersoo has crafted for Those Below, the concluding volume of Daniel Polansky’s Empty Throne duology, and I figured it might be a fine time to have few words with one of the most promising genre authors to have appeared on the scene in recent years—not least because the blurb provided by the publisher of the forthcoming book was so unbelievably brief:

For centuries humanity has served Those Above, god-like Eternals who rule from their cloud-capped mountain-city. They built a civilisation of unimagined beauty and unchecked viciousness. They thought themselves invincible. They were wrong. 

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Series: British Fiction Focus

Announcing the 2015 British Fantasy Award Winners

Mon Oct 26, 2015 10:45am 1 comment
An array of award-winners featuring, from left to right: Lee Harris, Emma Newman, Adele Wearing, Scott Andrews, Frances Hardinge, Ramsey Campbell, Juliet E. McKenna, Stephen Volk, Adrian Cole, Adam Nevill, Laurel Sills & Lucy Smee

At a ceremony held on Sunday afternoon in the East Midlands Conference Centre and Orchard Hotel in Nottingham, following a mighty meal of courses including home cured ham salad, ricotta and spinach gnocci and a lime jelly served with dark chocolate and salted sauce, the winners of the 2015 British Fantasy Awards were announced to a room full of full people, I’m sure, in addition to any number of other FantasyCon 2015 attendees.

The first award of the afternoon, alphabetically at least, was to act an indicator of what was to come: a diverse and I dare say deserving array of acclamations for the best authors, artists, editors and other entities involved in the British genre fiction industry.

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Series: British Fiction Focus

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