Book Review | Ember and Ash by Pamela Freeman

Orbit

Review by Stuart Mayne

I am a fan of Pamela Freeman. The Castings trilogy is a fine series that strays away from the formulaic fantasy trilogy, with a deftness and lightness of touch that had me scrabbling for each as they came out. Now we can once again enjoy the mysteries of the Eleven Domains.

Ember watches helplessly as her future and happiness vanish in a scorching burst of flames with the murder of her husband. Determined to bring revenge upon the perpetrators she enlists the help of Ash, the son of a seer, and together they pit themselves against the terrible elements in a last desperate bid to end the conflict once and for all.

Ember and Ash continues Freeman’s journey as a writer of something different in the fantasy genre. Through the pain and suffering of her characters we touch on the human; the singular pain of the individual. She makes fantasy understandable to me. She writes with a light touch. Her novels feel like a watercolour compared to the usual impasto style. While more baroque than the Castings trilogy, Ember and Ash is a deftly portrayed study of evil and vengence.

 

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

DVD Review | The Lost Thing

Madman

Review by Carissa Thorp

The Lost Thing is a short film based on Shaun Tan's picture book of the same name. Shaun joined a small team, doing the production design, art direction and storyboarding, as well as co-directing, to make this lovely animated incarnation of his work, bringing to life a vividly drear and retro world, reminiscent of Melbourne in which an unnamed young man (narrated by Tim Minchin) adopts a potbellied crab-like, bell-tongued creature he discovers on the beach. With the creature "obviously" lost and out of place in the young man's world, the two temporary companions must find a solution to their problem.

Blessed with glowing animation, storybook transitions, gentle humor and a dreamlike logic, The Lost Thing is a real gem; whimsical, universal, and yet somehow very Australian (could just be the accent, but I think it’s the light). It may only be 15 minutes long, but it's a very special 15 minutes, recommended for young and old. I hope some day we get to see a feature-length film from the marvelous mind of Shaun Tan.

 

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Hachette
Review by Christine Tursky Gordon

Turkey in 2027 is a member of the EU, the meeting point of West and East, and of Christianity and Islam, a place of nanotech sweatshops, power struggles, hidden and open religious history, and the driving pulse of business amongst the heat and the smell of spices. Cosmopolitan, crowded, dynamic Istanbul seeps through on every page; McDonald captures the culture, the voice, and the atmosphere of the city just as evocatively as he did for readers in Brasyl.
In The Dervish House McDonald pulls together disparate characters whose stories dovetail in a seven-day-long ticking clock buildup of tension. A boy with a damaged heart sees a terrorist explosion on a tram through the remote camera on his BitBot and realises that someone else also has a hidden robot watching those who flee the aftermath. Necdet runs from the tram, amazed to be alive, but soon starts seeing djinns and spirits interwoven with the scenes of his daily life. Leyla misses the explosion, misses her job interview but finds work in a relative’s nanoware startup and must negotiate with both family and local criminal groups to secure funding. Adnan snorts nanoware brain enhancers just like his commodity trader colleagues, but he plans a massive fraud involving radioactive Iranian gas while his antique trader wife Ayse is offered an outrageous sum to quietly find a mythical artefact. Greek-out-of-water Georgios is a retired economics professor with a poisoned past of radical activism who is suddenly, incongruously invited to join a government think tank.
The implications of the terrorist attack trickle slowly into the open as the characters follow their own paths, looming larger and darker than anything the government could have expected. McDonald has created a rich, vivid thriller that is beautifully written.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Win a Pamela Freeman omnibus edition of The Castings Trilogy in our February Subscriber Newsletter Competition

The good folks at Orbit have given us TWO copies of Pamela Freeman's omnibus edition of The Castings Trilogy, taking in the books Blood Ties, Deep Water and Full Circle. The success of this trilogy helped Pamela secure a worldwide contract with Orbit for another series of books. It is an excellent series indeed!

Subscribers to Aurealis Magazine should refer to this month's aurealisXpress newsletter for details on how to enter.

Book Review | Sunshine State by James Miller

Little, Brown
Review by Lachlan Huddy

It’s all looking rosy for Mark Burrows at the outset of this near-future fever dream. Sure, there's some unfortunate more-or-less-global devastation wrought by climate change, but Burrows's native Britain has escaped the worst of it and the retired spy is looking forward to fatherhood. Cue the One Last Job. Burrows is called back into service and shipped out to Florida—better known now as the Storm Zone care of, well, guess—in pursuit of his ex-comrade and brother-in-law, Charles Ashe. Ashe has become something of a messiah to the various minorities and extremist groups who, unwelcome in an America now run by iron-fisted evangelical Christians, call the Storm Zone home. So begins Burrows’s descent into, yes, the heart of darkness. Nothing wrong with ripping off an English classic so long as your head and heart’s in the right place, and Miller’s intentions are fittingly noble in seeking to highlight the dangerous political forces at war for America’s soul. Of course Sunshine State suffers in comparison to its forebears (Ashe’s sympathetic villain also owes much to Milton's Lucifer of Paradise Lost), but playing runner-up to the canon is no shameful thing. Some have complained of Miller’s overwrought prose, and to be sure the pages turn a little purple at times, but it isn’t wanton; the technique builds atmosphere and sucks the reader irrevocably into the mind of a maddening man and a mad, mad world.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | Diamond Eyes by A.A. Bell

Harper Voyager

Review by Crisetta MacLeod

Into the life of a strange, demented, violent woman, cruelly constrained in an asylum, comes a new therapist with his own issues. Ben is the first person to get through to Mira. He begins to probe the dissociated world that she lives in; she is blind, but seems to see, and has extraordinary multi-faceted reflective eyes. As he begins to draw her out, he takes her back to visit the strange tree-home where she was raised. Meanwhile, two scientists are working on an infallible lie-detector using physiological and psychological input.

These two, in cahoots with Ben, begin to unravel just what it is that Mira ‘sees’. Then someone is murdered… Mira was not physically present, but she ‘saw’ what happened! Wild cross-country chases, layers of authority where the corrupt and the well-meaning are indistinguishable, and a lovable mischief-making asylum inmate whose deafness is a counterpoint to Mira’s blindness. What a rare and special tale! A. A. Bell has that much beloved faculty of good science fiction writers—she takes areas of science that are already understood, and squeezes them just a bit further so that the scientific basis of her story has a grounding in fact.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review: Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold

Baen
Review by Carissa Thorp

Miles Vorkosigan, Imperial Auditor (ie Investigator) of Barrayar, travels to the planet Kibou-daini to look into the business of cryo-preservation, an industry which is an obsession on Kibou-daini and has shaped the planet’s culture and political structure for ill. Fate provides Miles with access to the real story behind the PR and gives him the opportunity to protect Barrayar’s interests as well as undo an injustice.
I'm a big fan of Bujold and have been really looking forward to another Vorkosigan novel. It was worth the wait, especially because of the promising complications birthed by this novel for future books. However, this isn't a book I'd recommend to someone who hasn't read any Vorkosigan books before. Thankfully, because of the generosity and forward thinking of Baen and Bujold, I can let readers know that all Bujold's novels in this universe have been made available to download as ebooks, in a variety of formats, providing newcomers a way to try out the series, become addicted from the first chapter, then go out and buy all the books in hard copy, including Cryoburn. Which one do I recommend you start with? Cordelia's Honor, an omnibus edition that includes the novels Shards of Honor and Barrayar, starring Miles' mother and father; they provide a great background of the "universe" and the history of major series characters. It’s where I started and they remain among my favourites.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter

Gollancz

Review by Stuart Mayne

Hot on the heels of his near future world flood duology (Flood and Ark), Baxter is back on the flood theme with Stone Spring, a Mesolithic speculative fiction novel about what would happen if the North Sea hadn't flooded entirely.

As usual with all of Baxter's novels this is a well researched and lively written narrative of high excitement with the ability to delight and move the reader.

Ana is fourteen. Her father is missing, her mother dead. Ana lives on the coast of Doggerland, a vast and fertile plain that linked Britain to mainland Europe during the Mesolithic era. But the world is changing. The ice age is coming to an end and the glaciers are retreating and the seas rising. One fateful year a tsunami sweeps inland and scatters Ana's people. But if the people of distant Jericho could build a wall to keep the world out surely Ana's people could build a wall to keep the sea out?

As much as this is a book of environmental disaster and man's ingenuity to overcome natural disaster it is also, in Baxter's best skill, a story of family and the jealousies that lead man to do bad things to the one's we love the best.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Quillblade by Ben Chandler

Random House

Review by Carissa Thorp

Looking for something exciting and complex for your teen to read? Something you might also enjoy yourself? Quillblade is just the thing. 

Our heroes, the slave twins Lenis and Missy Clemens, are Keepers of a small group of Bestia aboard the Hiryū, an airship gifted to the Warlord of Shinzō by the Puritans. The Bestia are creatures that have “affinities” for elements, enabling them to power the world’s technologies, including airships. Lenis and Missy, themselves having affinities with the beasts, are essential to running the airship. Compelled to stay with the ship when it’s stolen the day after it arrives in Shinzō, they are pulled into a dangerous and mystical adventure they don’t understand.

Imaginatively inspired by Anime, Japanese culture, and world myth and history, the story tumbles head-long into a mysterious and thrilling plot set in a world that is obviously wide and deep, full of endless possibilities for more story. This is a good thing as there’s apparently six novels in the series. I finished Quillblade surprised that so much had happened in such a relatively slender novel; epic in a regular sized package. Full of great ideas that are familiar but never cliche, Quillblade is a top read.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | Elves – Once Walked With Gods by James Barclay

Gollancz

Review by Karen Simpson Nikakis

It is extremely difficult to think of elves without thinking of Peter Jackson’s rendition of Tolkienesque elves as being tall, slender and blonde. From the lithe athleticism of Legolas to the serene beauty of Galadriel and the wisdom of Elrond, Tolkienesque elves might fight with the required ferocity, but their motivations are lofty, and their more desired pursuits that of poetry and music. The contrast with Barclay’s murderous, treacherous and ethnically or ‘thread’ divided elves couldn’t be more startling. Gone too is the cool arboreal gloom usually favoured as elvish habitation, replaced with tropical, parasite infested jungles. The hero Takaar is in self-imposed exile and in his absence, the various ‘threads’ turn on each other. Aided by human mercenaries, no act is too despicable, no murder too bloody. And like the elves, it took me a considerable way into the narrative before I could work out whose side I should be on. This is the first book in a trilogy, but its darkness and reliance on the events in the back story, make me think it would be far better suited as Book Two.


This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.