Dark Alchemy: Magical Tales from the Masters of Fantasy edited
by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
(Bloomsbury)
This collection of stories from some of fantasy’s biggest names is a gem for fans of the genre.
As a teenager I found a book by Elizabeth Hand called the Aestival Tide. It was a bizarre and terrifying vision of the future, blighted by nuclear disaster and man’s own monstrosity; a book that I couldn’t forget although I never found anything else by Hand … until now that is. Dark Alchemy, with its wicked little creations from great writers like Neil Gaiman, Eoin Colfer and Tad Williams, includes a short story by Hand, entitled Winter’s Wife.
Set in the frosty, backwater wilds of Maine, Hand’s tale concerns ancient magic and an environment that humanity is fast sacrificing to money and cynicism. Events unfold through the eyes of Justin, Hand’s teen protagonist who lives with his single mother next door to a woodsman living out of an old school bus. Their neighbour is the Winter that gives the tale its title and his Icelandic wife reveals herself to be something more than an outlandish woman from afar. Indeed she is beautiful, ageless, powerful and terrible, much like the rock to which she proves indelibly linked.
A real treat for any fantasy reader is the opening tale by Neil Gaiman. Like so many of his short stories, The Witches Headstone is both beautiful and eerily unexpected, a story about a boy being raised by the dead in a forgotten graveyard, with a guardian that nastily resembles a vampire, though you never know that for sure. Even a graveyard it seems has its own societal hierarchy — those buried in the proper way and those dead on the wrong side of the tracks so to speak (the ghosts of unconsecrated ground: the witches, the criminals and the suicides).
Gaiman’s young hero, Bod, sets out to help a young ghost who has been buried on unconsecrated ground. Her death was both cruel and unjust. As a young woman she was drowned and burned for being a witch. In true Gaiman style, it is not the dead who are terrifying but the living who are revealed to be truly dangerous. (The Guardian says that he is working on a new full-length book that took seed in Bo’s adventures.)
The book is a treasure trove of stories and a short note on the author precedes each tale, a nice touch for fantasy readers. Fantasy by its nature is not a genre enjoyed by everyone. But I challenge even the most pragmatic, realism-bound reader not to love this collection for the sheer delight of a good story.
The Well of Shades (Book III of the Bridei Chronicles)
by Juliet Marillier
(Tor)
Gwen Ansell
Druidism, shape-changing, scrying and the faerie folk scurry the plot along in Juliet Marillier’s epic, but its strength is not in these. Rather, it’s a carefully imagined alternate history of the Picts: Britain’s First People, thrown over cliffs by Gaels and Scots until none remained. The storyline focuses on the dilemmas of a ruler trying to keep his people safe; there are no surprises, but the writing is entertaining and the depiction of a largely unknown society intriguing.
Red Seas Under Red Skies: book two of the Gentleman Bastard sequence
by Scott Lynch
(Gollancz)
Gwen Ansell
Scott Lynch doesn’t explicitly cite Fritz Lieber as an influence. But the name wouldn’t surprise, because this sequence is uncannily reminiscent in mood (the plots are entirely Lynch’s own) of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: one large, thoughtful trickster; one small, witty one; picaresque adventures on the road and in various baroque cities, and the shadow of death lapping darkly at both their heels. Lynch puts words together neatly: humour and swashbuckle spiced with romance and horror. The books wouldn’t win any prizes for profundity, but for sheer escapism they’re some of the best around. If you demand deeper thought, read Lieber again.
The Last Wish
by Andrej Sapkowski, translated by Danusia Stok
(Gollancz)
Gwen Ansell
The success of the Night Watch trilogy has made readers and publishers keen to explore more of the world of Eastern European fantasy. Andrej Sapkowski is a cult writer in Poland, but his protagonist, Geralt the witcher, is a far more conventional hero than the shabby types who pound keyboards in the Night Watch office. Alchemically modified to resist vampire bites and poisons, the handsome, sword-wielding Geralt rids communities of supernatural hazards and usually finds a female (human or monstrous) both nubile and up for it. There’s a nice line in cynical dialogue and a longer-running plot line — this will be a series — interrogates how far misogyny directs witch-hunting. But the promise of games and ”more for your mobile” inside the back cover probably tells you most of what you need to know about the book. Think Black Crow with borscht.
Glasshouse
by Charles Stross (Orbit)
Gwen Ansell
We’ve seen only four of Charles Stross’s Orbit works in South Africa — Glasshouse is the fourth — but there’s much more writing to be discovered from this ironic, social satirist whose future dystopias always have something to say about today. The book takes a well-worn, hard SF theme — mental identity that can be preserved and moved between infinitely modifiable bodies — and constructs a neat thriller about a conspiracy to edit both consciousness and memories. Stross achieves the Swiftian feat of making readers laugh out loud while contemplating viscerally painful dilemmas and he writes like a dream.
Icarus
by Roger Levy
(Orion)
Gwen Ansell
Roger Levy specialises in SF dystopias and Icarus has two: a Year Zero neo-ÂÂCambodia with murderous child zealots and an underground world held together by fragile, human-ÂÂengineered ecology and rigid ideology. Unravelling the link between the two, and what a fundamentalist preacher on Earth had to do with it, propel the plot. Levy’s characters are convincingly human in their complexity and his storytelling is tight and satisfying. A thought-provoking exegesis of why information wants to be free.
