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Fantasy Book Critic is pleased to welcome Rowena Cory
Daniells as she celebrates the release of her new series The Outcast Chronicles. Enjoy this lovely guest post from her as we
celebrate the release of book one, Besieged.
Don't forget to enter the giveaway at the end!
**************************************************************
The Power of Story
When my great grandmother gave birth to a
seven month baby back in 1901, the doctor told her to be ready to bury it. She
didn’t. She wrapped the baby girl in cotton wool and kept her in a shoe box and
fed her with an eye-dropper through her nose, because the baby couldn’t
swallow. This damaged her hearing and made her deaf, but she grew up to be the
eldest of four girls.
Everyone in the family learned sign
language and she joined to the Deaf and Dumb society (as it was called in those
days). There she met a young man. They fell in love and she brought him home to
meet the family. As a small, deaf boy of six, his parents had left him in an
orphanage to sail home to England and visit relatives.
They never came back for
him and he spent his childhood waiting for them. When my great grandmother
heard this she told him - the ship went
down.
She said it with total conviction and he
believed her. To her, this was the only thing that could have possibly stopped his
parents coming back for him and the moment she said this, his outlook on life
changed.
It didn’t matter whether it was true or
not. It mattered that he believed it.
My mother told me this story when I was a
child and I’ve never forgotten it. I think of that little boy, left alone,
waiting for his parents to come back for him, being disappointed year after
year as he grew into an angry young man who believed he’d been abandoned
because of his disability. And I think of my great grandmother who, with four
simple words, rewrote the story of his childhood.
To me this is a powerful story because it
changed someone’s life. It also reveals the power of story because I will never
forget it. Story taps into emotion because we identify with the people in the
story.
We grow up listening to stories. We teach
children important lessons through stories (remember what happened to the boy
who cried wolf) and we make sense of the world through story. It is much easier
to remember the details of a story, because we identify with the characters. As we experience what they experience, we
learn from their mistakes, which is why so many children’s stories are
cautionary tales.
A really good story makes us question our
assumptions and the characters linger in our minds. Even fantasy stories based
in created worlds can do this, if they didn’t Harry Potter and Lord of the
Rings would not be so popular.
As a writer, I prefer writing in a
secondary world because I can create just the right situation to test my
character. I love placing my poor people in terrible situations where they have
to confront their inner fears and make important choices.
This is what I have tried to do with The OutcastChronicles. I’ve built a world where people born with gifts are feared and
ostracised, where parents whose baby is born with the physical characteristics
of a mystic, are forced to give them up. Then I’ve told the story of Sorne, the
king’s son, disinherited because he was born with the six fingers and the
wine-dark eyes that marked him as a mystic.
I hope, readers will find the Sorne’s story
as compelling as I did while writing.
GIVEAWAY:
Rowena has invited the readers of Fantasy Book Critic to celebrate the release of Besieged.
Rules of the Giveaway:
1. Giveaway is open to everyone around the world!
2. Only one entry per person please.
3. Contest starts September 8, 2012 and ends September 17, 2012 at 12:01 p.m. EST.
4. All entries will be used for the sole purpose of this giveaway and not sold or used for other purposes.
5. Entries without an answer to the giveaway question will not be included.
6. Have fun!
How to Enter:
Send an email with the subject - BESIEGED to FBCgiveaway@gmail.com. Make sure to include your name, address and an answer to the giveaway question listed below.
Rules of the Giveaway:
1. Giveaway is open to everyone around the world!
2. Only one entry per person please.
3. Contest starts September 8, 2012 and ends September 17, 2012 at 12:01 p.m. EST.
4. All entries will be used for the sole purpose of this giveaway and not sold or used for other purposes.
5. Entries without an answer to the giveaway question will not be included.
6. Have fun!
How to Enter:
Send an email with the subject - BESIEGED to FBCgiveaway@gmail.com. Make sure to include your name, address and an answer to the giveaway question listed below.
Rowena has a copy of Besieged, book one of
The Outcast Chronicles, to give-away to one lucky commenter. (Open world wide).
Give-away question: What stories did you
hear as a child that still linger in your mind?
12:30 PM | 
Posted by
Cindy |
Three Mini Reviews: The Coldest War, Shadows Before The Sun and The Corpse Rat King (Reviewed by Mihir Wanchoo)
Order "The Coldest War" HERE
Read an excerpt HERE
ANALYSIS:
The Coldest War is the sequel to Ian Tregillis’s brilliant debut Bitter Seeds, this book opens up nearly twenty years after the events of the second world war that took place in this alternate historical world. I was very much intrigued by this book and dove in based on Liviu’s excellent review of the first book.
The story begins in 1963 and we are introduced to a Europe wherein a cold war is on but the payers aren’t the same and the rules differ wildly. In this one Europe is over run by the Soviets and the lone country challenging them is Britain. The USA is not mentioned much and its not clear where they are in the pecking order. The British are trying their hardest to cope up with the tactics used by the Soviets who have been bolstered by the German experiments that they have managed to inculcate within their own.
The tale opens up and shows what has been happening with those that survived the events of the first book. Almost all of them have lost something of themselves in the past and nowhere near what they expected themselves to be. Raybould Marsh is barely able to hold onto his jobs and his marital and personal lives have become a mentally excoriating hell from which even alcohol holds no escape. Klaus and Gretel, the German siblings have become lab rats for the Soviet regime and are forced to endure many experiments. Will Beauclark has ascended highly on the social scale however his past actions with the Eidolons have left a bitter aftertaste in his mind.
The actual plot begin with Britain’s security net, its wizard force slowly and surely being depleted. Somebody is killing them and soon the British authorities are told of an escape from the mainland of two siblings that are thought to be very dangerous and should be returned if captured. Thus by Gretel’s machinations and with Klaus’s help Raybould is invariably sucked back into the Milkweed operations. This time he’s doubly determined to make sure nothing threatens Britain’s survival as defeat means that all his losses so far have been rendered null and void.
This novel was a terrific thriller and it definitely is going to end up in my yearend lists. Beginning with its characterization and then on to its zany plot, which mixes prescient beings, cold war era spies, mysterious extra-dimensional beings and much more. The author admirably mixes all these elements to concoct a story that is in parts a thriller and in parts a fascinating story of what happens to soldiers when their war is over. The characterization is one which nails the story whether be it Raybould with his stodginess, Gretel with her ultra-creepy prescience, Klaus with his helplessness and other characters with their own quirks. The author’s skills invariably draws the reader in and make them invested in this story.
The plot twists and pace are kept at a level that makes this book very very hard to put down at all. Beginning with Britain’s newest magic protection net to the ultimate aims of Gretel’s plans, nothing is too superfluous or too obtuse. The author has done some intense planning in regards to the overall story and it will be apparent to the readers once they get to the end of this book and a particular event in the first book makes so much sense. There’s an aspect to the plot wherein certain things are foreshadowed or atleast hinted at, this I found to be a fascinating thing wherein I went and reread certain parts of the book.
This book for me has everything needed to be called a terrific read and it is criminal how under appreciated Ian Tregillis is as an author. Do yourself a favor and grab Bitter Seeds and The Coldest War and read them back-to-back to understand the awesomeness of this story so far. I can’t wait to see how the author ends the story with Necessary Evil, the third book in the Milkweed Triptych series.
Official Author Website
Read an Excerpt HERE
Order the Book HERE
Read my review of The Better Part of Darkness
Read my review of The Darkest Edge of Dawn
Read FBC's review of The Hour Of Dust and Ashes
Read FBC's Interview with Kelly Gay
ANALYSIS: For a while I was thinking that Shadows Before The Sun would be the last Charlie Madigan book and after the events of the last book, anticipation was high in regards to how it would all end. The author has been kind enough to point out the egregious nature of our assumptions and this helped a bit.
The premise of this book needs a brief recap of the events of The Hour Of Dust and Ashes, wherein Charlie, Rex and Hank had to go to Charybdon and figure out a way to save Charlie’s sister life. This trip while being utterly dangerous was doubly difficult due to actions of the jinns. While the book had an explosive climax, a particular event left Charlie and the readers severely troubled. This book deals with Charlie’s efforts to go to Elysia and figure out a way to get someone back. Thus after their hellish ordeal Charlie will have to find her strength and gather her friends and make an attempt to enter Elysia and find out what is going on there. Her first attempt goes wrong thanks to the bureaucratic nature of relations between her world and Elysia however she soon discovers new allies in the form of an oracle and makes the trip to save her friend from his ultimate fate.
Where do I begin with this book, only does it outdo the events and excitement caused by its predecessor, it also sets up some terrific things for the future books. While The Hour Of Dust and Ashes was my favorite book so far, it easily gets displaced by Shadows Before The Sun. Firstly lets talk about the unique nature of this book, for the first time ever we get a POV other than Charlie and it’s a third person narrative from Hank. This move makes this book even more unpredictable and adds in a unique look into the actions occurring in the story. Secondly the action and violence in this book makes all that has come before truly child’s play, this book seriously has some dark corners and the twisted imagination of the author inflicts heavy loads on all characters especially on the major duo.
We get a resolution in Hank & Charlie’s relationship status and that heralds a different direction from the next book and also the reader gets a resolution to the plot arc about what was found beneath the lake a couple of books ago. With so many character and plot arcs being resolved, this book can be said to an end of the first series arc in the Charlie Madigan world. The author plans to write another book with Charlie and Hank and perhaps a one from the Druid King’s perspective. That is something that makes me giddy with anticipation.
Shadows Before The Sun is a cracker of a book and easily the best of the series toppling The Hour Of Dust and Ashes. For all readers shying away from urban fantasy thinking it to be too much like paranormal romance, give Kelly Gay’s dark series a try, you surely will be surprised by the violence and lack of sparkly vampires ensconced within these pages. How can I be so sure, simply because I was a skeptic like you a few years ago before I read the first book!
Order “The Corpse Rat King” HERE
Read an excerpt HERE
ANALYSIS:
The Corpse Rat King is Lee Battersby’s debut and one, which intrigued me strongly with its blurb. The story seems to be a curious mix of dark humor and even darker shade of fantasy. In the end its an odd book to describe but not hard to review thankfully.
The story begins with Marius don Hellespont who is a person of considerably shaky morals. Currently looting a field of corpses along with his apprentice Gerd, Marius is almost done with his picking when Gerd mistakenly alerts the soldiers to their misbegotten activities. All things aside things turn horribly wrong and Marius end up in a place unknown to mankind. He is then offered a choice of sorts; to find a king for the dead as was promised in the holy books or die instantaneously and join the dead. Marius chooses to hold on to his soul and is set free with a chaperone. His onerous task being to find post haste a dead king or otherwise he might have to join the dead congregation rather unpleasantly as well as unwillingly.
This book is a very quirky one; the narrator of the tale is a vagrant, an outright liar, a petty pickpocket and an unscrupulous grave robber. His actions beginning from the start reveal not a single bone of integrity to him. Plus after being saddled with such a task, Marius’s sole intent is to fool his chaperone and alleviate his troubles by disappearing off somewhere where even the dead can’t find him. Thus Marius then leads the reader through a series of incidents as well travels to most of his previous haunts in trying to figure out a way to end his predicament. The humor showcased within the book is what can be considered its best shiny side as it is quite dark and funny thereby showcasing the quirky nature of the characters and the situations they get in.
Also the story is quite unpredictable, beginning in the middle of a battlefield and from then onwards to all the places its goes, it is like a fairytale but darker than any imagined by the Grimm brothers. Capricious and at times horrific, the story simply is very hard to pin down and can be simply described as weird. The plot while seeming very straightforward is anything but that. The author has some sharp twists lined up and from the beginning of the story the reader will be uncertain where the story is going next, what Marius will do eventually and how will it all end. This originality of the premise is what helps the story, as readers will be compelled to flip pages to see what happens next.
The only downside to this entire story (atleast for myself) was the narrator. I hardly felt any sympathy for him or any emotional connection and that perhaps robbed the fun of the story to a certain extent. He’s an insincere excuse of a human being and one who hardly inspires any confidence in his acquaintances. Perhaps that was the author’s intent of exploring the story through such a narrative voice and if that turns out to be the case then kudos to the author for nailing the voice down so precisely. Marius is exactly the person you wouldn’t want to be saddled with if your life depended on it.
The Corpse Rat King is an odd book but it is not a bad one. It promises a different sort of read and delivers exceptionally on its word. The Corpse Rat King seems to be a dark imaginative collaboration between Joe Abercrombie and Jesse Bullington but its not! Its Lee Battersby’s debut and one that will leave a mark on the reader’s mind, though it depends on the reader’s prerogative whether it will be a remarkable one or not.
Curated Fantasy Books was
founded by a knowledgeable enthusiast with a lifelong love of good books. The
website is dedicated to providing readers with the best Fantasy reading,
selected by an expert Curator and organized by specific category. To offer a
bit more on what Curated Fantasy Books has to
offer, here is Fantasy Curator Cat
Rambo with a few words she would like to share:
When
I was first approached about working on the Curated Fantasy Books site, it
was both exciting and daunting. While I’ve been reading fantasy works for a
number of decades and published a number of fantasy short stories and
collections, I knew I’d need to do a lot of research.
The
first step was coming up with the categories. After some amount of back and
forth, we arrived at these: epic, urban, Arthurian, steampunk, dark fantasy,
superhero, literary, historical, and anthologies. I had to argue a bit for the
superhero category, but it’s one that’s near and dear to my heart, and I was
able to find plenty of titles in that vein to back the notion up, including
several of my all-time favorite books, such as Minister Faust’s amazing From the
Notebooks of Dr. Brain.
Some
surprised me. I knew there were plenty of Arthurian fantasies, but I had no
idea how many until I started looking. Nor did I realize how far they ranged in
time – from early history up to several centuries in the future. I’d thought
about international fantasy as well, but in the end, I ended up sorting those
into the different categories – which meant I was satisfied that we had a good
representation of writing from outside America and Great Britain.
One
of my guideposts in making selections were the award lists from the past. I
looked at the lists of winners from the World
Fantasy Awards, the Hugos and
the Nebulas. With the latter two I
had the additional task of winnowing out the fantasy from the SF. Over the
course of going through those, my own “to-read” list swelled enormously – it’s
going to take me a decade to wade through all the titles that looked appealing.
My
spreadsheet grew, and grew, and grew as I worked. I kept finding old favorites
and new delights. I asked every fantasy reader I knew what they’d recommend,
and that led to lively Facebook conversations that only added to the list. One
of the genres where suggestions from others were particularly useful was
steampunk, and I was able to include not just current examples of the genres
but some of the works that most influenced it, such as Jules Verne’s Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Michael Moorcock’s The
Warlord of the Air. I even found some gems I hadn’t known about, such as Edward S. Ellis’ The
Steam Man of the Prairies.
I’m pleased with how Curated Fantasy Books turned out. For a reader
new to fantasy, the website should prove an excellent guide to reading in the
genre, while for longtime fans, there should be new and interesting finds among
the longtime favorites.
Cat Rambo, Fantasy Curator
ABOUT CAT RAMBO:
Cat Rambo is
an avid, long-time fantasy reader and the former fiction editor of Fantasy Magazine. She currently
writes reviews and conducts interviews for the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and Publishers Weekly.
She also works as a volunteer for the Clarion
West Writing Program.
Cat loves to
write short stories, with over a hundred short stories published including
appearances in Asimov's
Sci-Fi Magazine, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com. Her stories have been published in two
collections: Eyes Like Sky and Coal and
Midnight and The Surgeon’s Tale and
Other Stories, with a third, Near and
Far, on the way this fall via Hydra
House. She has a BA in English from the University of Notre Dame, and separate MA’s from both Johns Hopkins and Indiana University.
INTRODUCTION: Last year Greg Egan started the Orthogonal Universe trilogy with the groundbreaking novel The Clockwork Rocket which combined highly advanced natural philosophy speculation - a very detailed Riemannian universe in which there is no special time dimension, though locality and thermodynamics actually impose a quasi-arrow of time on any collection of organized matter - with an intriguing alien race, shape-shifters and with a weird biology - both of these following from the nature of the universe - but quite similar in some ways with us too, this last speculation - beings that have science and try to understand and manipulate their universe being similar with us to a large extent - very well argued for example by famous physicist David Deutsch in his awesome The Beginning of Infinity.
While Mr. Egan has written extraordinary sf before - the novelization of General Relativity in Incandescence just the latest example before last year - The Clockwork Rocket had the added dimensions of great characters, most notably in the lead female physicist Yalda, and of an emotional ending that stayed with me for a long time.
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: The Eternal Flame is the second book of the trilogy and takes place several generations after Yalda's time, on the mountain top that became the starship Peerless, currently in Orthogonal space and far away from home.
Being in Orthogonal space means of course that no time passes on the home-world, however long Peerless stays there, hence the strange to us idea that their long ago ancestors from the home-world are still alive at "present", while people on Peerless are born and die, generation after generation, while they try to solve a few monumental problems, most notably being the reason d'etre of Peerless, namely how to save the home world from the imminent - in cosmic time of course - collision with large amounts of Orthogonal matter, stuff that in very small quantities produced devastation and mayhem for no clearly understood reasons for now.
For the biology of the characters and the choices and limitations imposed on their society by it, I refer to my review of The Clockwork Rocket above or to the author's website, with the main point being that reproduction happens by division of the mother into two pairs of opposite gender "twins" called "co's", while the father (generally but not always her co) and usually the grandfather (the life span of males tends to cover two generations) take care of the children, so the phrase "knowing your mother" is a metaphor for an utter impossibility.
While there are exceptions and finer points (eg Yalda was a single with no co of her own, though she had two co-siblings) and females can extend their life span by taking an inhibitory drug, holin, usually its effect attenuates with age and the chances of spontaneous (with no father for the children) fission increase considerably...
Being in Orthogonal space means of course that no time passes on the home-world, however long Peerless stays there, hence the strange to us idea that their long ago ancestors from the home-world are still alive at "present", while people on Peerless are born and die, generation after generation, while they try to solve a few monumental problems, most notably being the reason d'etre of Peerless, namely how to save the home world from the imminent - in cosmic time of course - collision with large amounts of Orthogonal matter, stuff that in very small quantities produced devastation and mayhem for no clearly understood reasons for now.
For the biology of the characters and the choices and limitations imposed on their society by it, I refer to my review of The Clockwork Rocket above or to the author's website, with the main point being that reproduction happens by division of the mother into two pairs of opposite gender "twins" called "co's", while the father (generally but not always her co) and usually the grandfather (the life span of males tends to cover two generations) take care of the children, so the phrase "knowing your mother" is a metaphor for an utter impossibility.
While there are exceptions and finer points (eg Yalda was a single with no co of her own, though she had two co-siblings) and females can extend their life span by taking an inhibitory drug, holin, usually its effect attenuates with age and the chances of spontaneous (with no father for the children) fission increase considerably...
The cast of The Eternal Flame is comparable to the one in The Clockwork Rocket, but here there are three main characters whose research, action and personal struggles are the focus of the novel:
Carla, the spiritual descendant of Yalda and the leading theoretical physicist of her time, Carlo, her co and a biologist who abandoned reproduction research for trying to increase the food production only to ask his former coworkers to take him back as he deems himself a failure in agronomy and Tamara, an astronomer and pilot whose impossible dreams of being the one to guide back Peerless to the home world may find an expression in the exploration of a mysterious flying object that comes closer to the starship, but whose very traditionalist farmer co and father, Tamaro and Erminio may have other ideas...
In other important roles, we have Patrizia, Carla's best student, Amanda, Carlo's main research colleague and friend, Silvano, a politician and family friend of Carla and Carlo and Onesto, a physics student of Carla who finds himself better suited for the philosophy of science than for pure research.
At the start of The Eternal Flame, the
inhabitants try to solve some major internal problems like
overpopulation and manufacturing fuel or a new engine to return home, when the mysterious object assumed to consist of Orthogonal matter is spotted and an expedition to investigate is planned. And so it starts, while when it ends things will be quite different from before.
Quantum
mechanics, antimatter and new biology; lots of diagrams, some good
interpersonal conflict and a great ending again, though this time a bit
less emotional than in The Clockwork Rocket. As much of the fun of the novel consists in following the investigations of the characters about the nature of their universe and of their species, I will just conclude with this quote that perfectly summarizes both the philosophy of the series and why sf is still the most interesting genre of today:
"Onesto said, “Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.”
Overall The Eternal Flame
is another outstanding novel from the author and a top 10 of mine for 2012!
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