 A Pile of PyrbyGillian PolackI have an enthusiastic work experience student sorting my library. This means that my fiction can be orderly. It also means that it’s time to put away all the books I’ve read and not quite written about these last couple of months. It would be a shame to put them away, story unexplained and unassessed, so it’s time for me to give another quick overview of a range of books. This is not (let me hasten to add) everything I’ve read. It’s an intelligent selection. It is, in fact, a selection made from the books Pyr has sent me recently. I love seeing what publishers do with their range and one day I’ll talk about Pyr and Angry Robot and their similarities and differences (for these are two of the imprints I read most thoroughly). Today, however, it’s time to focus on a group of books published in 2011. While these books all technically share a genre (fantasy or speculative fiction, depending on which definition I use), in fact they’re quite different one from the other and it’s been a lovely, fantasy journey reading through them. Jasper Kent’s The Third Section. Russia, 1855 is, like Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, entrenched in the history of continental Europe and in making that history weep with the blood of vampires. Unlike Kostova’s book it’s more about the broad society than the family struggle. Kent uses the Crimean War and the last decades of the Romanov dynasty as his backdrop, with a focus is on Tamara Valentinovna Lavrova and her family, her connections, and her work for the Third Section. It owes a debt to Tolstoy with its wide sweep and small lives that somehow pick up the heart of the times. Think of it as Tolstoy with added sex, fewer armies, and more vampires. These vampires are not neutral players in the game of history. It’s one of a series and that series will probably be about as long as War and Peace, when it’s done, which is another hint of Tolstoy. When people get tired of reworking Jane Austen, maybe they will turn to the Russian writers and see what they look like with supernatural components. Uncle Vanya with werewolves, Crime and Punishment with zombies, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich with harpies. It could become interesting. Speaking of vampires, last night I read a second book in a trilogy that was just as good as the first. From time to time it took shortcuts with the plot, and its hero and heroine are obviously going to overcome all odds and change the world, but apart from that, it was a most excellent way of spending an evening. Clay and Susan Griffith’s Rift Walker is easy to read and doesn’t lack heart, the way some middle novels do in trilogies. I would say it has fine writing, but compared to the next book on this list, its writing reads as competent. Good, and clean, but not fine. It doesn’t have to be. It’s a good story, well told: steampunk vampire adventure, full of decaying empires, true love and the growth of heroes. Now I want to read a steampunk vampire version of What Katy Did. M.D. Lachlan’s writing is beautiful. Even when his plot loses heart (largely because he forgets —as he did in Wolfsangel, the first novel in his series—to give his characters a semblance of normalcy from which they can engage in strange lives and extraordinary events) the beauty of his prose carries me through. Fenrir has the same strengths as Wolfsangel, and the same weaknesses. It also has similar twists and turns. The biggest strength is his prose style, which sweeps all else along in its wake. (And, in the spirit of my earlier suggestions, I rather wonder what a Famous Five book would look like, rewritten by Lachlan.) The next book in my ever-decreasing stack is Michaele Jordan’s Mirror Maze. It’s fantasy set in Victorian England. It has footnotes. Both of these things ought to rejoice my heart, but somehow my heart wasn’t in this book. It felt carefully set up, and was like one of those long afternoon teas with elderly aunts, where you have heard the family story and are aching to get outside in the sunshine and yet there are still twenty years of family history to go. It wasn’t actually a bad book, just not to my taste. I suspect I like my women actually strong, not just explained as strong and that my sense of etiquette for those people and that time doesn’t quite match the writer’s. In short, it was a personality mismatch. Not the fault of writer or reader, nor any reflection on the publisher. K.V. Johansen’s Blackdog is an adventure fantasy about threats to godhood. It’s not as fast paced as some, which suits me down to the ground. Johansen spends just a bit more time developing characters than other writers and this means that I cared about the world. It’s not a perfect book (I keep saying this!). Not all the characters had all their dimensions—but it was a big-picture-told-through-small-lives epic, and so it made sense emotionally. I must say (again, since repetition is a good thing) that it was wonderful to find a book that didn’t rush and didn’t make action its focus. I don’t mind action books, but I really enjoy an adventure told at a more leisurely pace. Lightbringer is something unusual for Pyr. It’s a book targeted at young adults. It’s for the older end of YA, and so overlaps with several of their other books, which could easily have YA audience. What’s fascinating about Lightbringer is that the world has some really interesting concepts. What’s less good is that these aren’t introduced in a way that makes them easy to follow. By about fifty pages in, it all makes sense intellectually, but my emotions would have been engaged at a higher level, earlier, if the introduction sequences and given us just a bit more of what we needed. It’s an explain-through-doing approach, which is not quite a perfect fit with the high level differences between our world and the world of McEntire’s novel. It reminds me somewhat of the work of Foz Meadows, although I found Meadows’ characters more sympathetic and her world more engaging. Pyr has a second young adult book in its new offerings: Planesrunner. This one is far more closely targeted at its audience. The author surprised me, however. Ian McDonald is a marvelous writer, having written some exquisite words and fascinating stories (The Dervish House, for instance, which I wrote about relatively recently). For the most part it lacks the complexity of idea and the distinctive and wonderful prose that marks McDonald’s writing. It’s clearly structured and it’s entertaining and it’s very nicely told. What comes through clearly is that McDonald fully commits to writing. When I read something at the literary end of SF, I assume that this level of commitment is there—if it isn’t the work is significantly less. It’s rarer to find in young adult books. Also, it’s rather nice to find an old fashioned SF narrative, where a teenager faces danger and science at the same time. McDonald uses a host of current concepts (quantum physics, alternate realities, airships —some of the same sets of premises used for the TV series Fringe) and builds a boy-must-find-his-father-and-save-the-multiverse-and-cook-a-good-dinner-adventure. It’s a very fine romp, and I’ll look forward to the sequels. I now have a healthy stack of books on the left, ready to go away. My list of books that I want to see written grows and includes I Can Jump Puddles with séances and spirit dwellings and Far from the Madding Crowd with gods walking this earth. I think my favourite of this batch was one that took me back to a time when I read SF for children for the dreams it brought and the science it carried: McDonald’s book is the pick of the bunch, simply for the mood of reminiscing I’m still enjoying. Current science woven into teen adventure was an important part of my childhood and it’s wonderful to see it make a return, for a new generation of childhoods. The obvious side effect (apart from thinking of potential spin-offs and dreaming of Heinlein juveniles) of this reading binge is to help me realise that the reason I enjoy reading speculative fiction so very much is because it contains such variety. Pyr has a house style and so the works in theory should blur a bit together. I can feel the editing pulling at the books, but it doesn’t make them uniform. Each is different. Some appeal, some shock, some persuade. Some call out to the past. Some are set in our world and our present. Some focus on the writing. Some celebrate the people who inhabit the world of the book. All in all, a very interesting week’s reading. Books mentioned in this column:
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