Wolfsangel by MD Lachlan (Gollancz)
Werewolves have had a bad press recently, thanks to the thinly disguised chastity sermons of Twilight.
Growing fur at full moon just doesn’t feel like fun anymore. New writer MD Lachlan offers a more sophisticated narrative, set in a cold, relentless Viking world where succession and power dominate — where gods become men, men become wolves and women become somebody only outside their rigid social roles.
The book offers far more than plunder, adventure and dark magic, though all those are there. Lachlan brings to vivid life characters driven to become other to survive – abandoned girl children starved and drugged into witchery, pretty girls scarred to evade rape, Loki fleeing into mortality from his murderous divine family and the twin, boy-wolf heirs at the heart of the story.
And he does it in language that offers the cadence and music of an authentic Norse epic.
The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross (Orbit)
Charles Stross’s Laundry series (this is volume three) focuses on the branch of the British Secret Service that handles the cold (and fiery and slimy) war against really alien intelligence.
The books operate at several levels– as affectionate but not craven riffs on Ian Fleming, as urban fantasy, as straight-faced, speculative explorations of the science and mechanics of demons, and as finely comic, post-Dilbertian takes on the everyday horrors of working in an organisation.
Some critics have suggested that Stross is more adept at ideas than action or plot but for readers of speculative fiction that’s a strength rather than a weakness.
The Fuller Memorandum has plenty of taut, convincing action and a genuinely intriguing mystery at its heart. Whichever level you read it on, the Laundry books remain the classiest examples of their genre around. Unmissable.
Wireless by Charles Stross (Orbit)
Wireless is a collection of nine short stories and novellas (one co-written with Cory Doctorow) that predominantly display the harder science-fiction side of Charles Stross’s wide-ranging imagination.
Written between 19 98 and 20 08, the stories range from the alternate scientific history of “Unwirer” to the wildly comic sex-and-space-opera “Trunk and Disorderly” to “Down on the Farm”, an episode of anti-demonic espionage too short to make a full-blown Laundry novel.
The writing is sharp, witty and precise and the imagined worlds beautifully realised. The best speculative writers generate astounding ideas about the future based on only the minutest shifts from current reality.
Stross is certainly one of the best and, if you are new to his work, this collection is an excellent place to start.