Eric Brown – The Serene Invasion

ericbrown-thesereneinvasionIn 2025, the Serene arrive from Delta Pavonis V, and change mankind’s destiny forever. The gentle aliens bring peace to an ailing world – a world riven by war, terrorism and poverty, by rising conflicts over natural resources – and offer an end to need and violence. But not everyone supports the seemingly benign invasion. There are those who benefit from conflict, who cherish chaos, and they will stop at nothing to bring back the old days.

When Sally Walsh is kidnapped by terrorists and threatened with death, it seems that only a miracle can save her life. Geoff Allen, photo-journalist, is contacted by the Serene and offered the opportunity to work with the aliens in their mission. For Sally, Geoff, and billions of other citizens of Earth, nothing will ever be the same again…

My first encounter with Eric Brown’s work was his wonderful Kéthani, which I adored. It  was followed last year by The Devil’s Nebula, the first in Abaddon’s Weird Space series, which I also enjoyed immensely. And I’ve had his Kings of Eternity on my shelves since it came out and keep meaning to read it as Brown’s SF seems to click for me. So when Solaris sent me an eARC for the book I immediately added it to my reading queue to be read around publication date. Two and half months later, here we are, and I finally got to confirm for myself that Eric Brown really does seem to tickle my science fiction bone, because I really enjoyed The Serene Invasion.

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By Mieneke Published 31 May, 2013 Posted in review, science fiction Tagged: | Leave a comment

Ben Galley – Dead Stars: part one

bengalley-deadstarsoneThe sky is falling.
The world trembles beneath it.
Emaneska is crying out for a saviour.

Somebody is hunting down the Written in the wilds. Murdering and skinning them alive. Who? A mere girl. A girl who was born to rip the stars from the sky and bring them crashing down to earth. The direst enemy Emaneska has ever faced.

In the wake of the Battle of Krauslung, the world has changed. For the darker. For the stranger. Magick swells like a storm, spilling from the stunned lips of farmboys and milkmaids, burning spell books to cinders at the lightest of touches.

As Krauslung unknowingly balances on a knife-edge, tension mounts. Insidious whispers have begun to spread, drawing new enemies to the surface. Discontent, fear, betrayal… it seems that the girl is not the only enemy Emaneska must face.

Who can stand in their way? Will it be a pair of struggling Arkmages, one blind, one Written? An Albion maid, on the cusp of her wedding day? Three shadows of gods? Or will it be a ghost, a bloody rumour, lost in a dark world of murder and bitter memories?

One question above all lingers on their lips:
Where in Emaneska is Farden?

Dead Stars is the concluding novel to Ben Galley’s Emaneska series. The book is so big; Ben has released it in two volumes, the first of which I’ll review today. Discussing this book will unavoidably provide spoilers for books one and two, The Written and Pale Kings respectively. If you want to remain unspoiled for the prior books, please click away or skip to the last paragraph of this review.

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By Mieneke Published 30 May, 2013 Posted in fantasy, review | Leave a comment

Guest Post: Ben Galley on The Business Mind of an Indie Author

bengalley-thewrittenAt the start of the year I broke my own rules and read and reviewed a self-published author. I took Ben up on his offer of review copies for the first two books in his Emaneska series The Written and Pale Kings, since I’d read some good reviews and I’d read a really interesting interview with Ben on Mark Lawrence’s blog. And I was glad I did, because I really enjoyed the books, despite having some trouble getting into the story at the start and once I’d finished Pale Kings, I was glad that the concluding volumes Dead Stars parts One and Two would be released later in the year as I wanted to know how Farden’s story would end. This Friday sees the publication of both volumes of Dead Stars and today, in honour of Ben’s completing his first series, I bring you a guest post on how he manages to juggle writing, publicity, and all the other parts of self-publishing, without losing his enjoyment of his craft. Here’s what Ben had to say.

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By Mieneke Published 29 May, 2013 Posted in article, fantasy, guest post | Leave a comment

Richard Parker – Scare Me

richardparker-scareme“When did you last google yourself?”

Wealthy businessman, Will Frost, gets woken in the middle of the night by an anonymous caller, asking him exactly this.

When Will goes online, he finds a website has been set up in his name, showing photographs of the inside of his home, along with photographs of six houses he’s never seen before.

In the first of these strange houses, a gruesome murder has already taken place.

Will is then told that his own family is in mortal danger.

The only way he can keep them safe is to visit each of the houses on the website in person – before the police discover what has happened there.

Seven houses.

Seven gruesome homicides.

Seven chances to save his daughter’s life…

As Exhibit A’s first signed title and as one of the launch titles for the imprint, Richard Parker’s Scare Me already had some major expectations attached to it. When the news broke in March that the film rights for Scare Me had been acquired by Relativity Media – the people behind Despicable Me, The Social Network, and Paul, to name a few – and they’d contracted Wentworth Miller – he of Prison Break fame – to write the script, expectations, well my expectations anyway, sky-rocketed. So did Scare Me take flight or did it crash and burn? It definitely soared and it flew by too, because it was nail-bitingly good and I had to keep reading to see how it would end. As Scare Me is so much a mystery thriller where the discovery of the how and why of the events is so central to the plot, it’s hard to talk about it without going into spoiler territory. I’m going to try and avoid spoilers though, so if I’m coming off as vague forgive me, but I’m trying not to mess up anyone’s experience with the book.

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By Mieneke Published 28 May, 2013 Posted in crime, review, thriller Tagged: | Leave a comment

Tom Harper – The Orpheus Descent

tomharper-theorpheusdescent2500 years ago, the philosopher Plato travelled to Italy on the trail of an ancient mystery – a riddle written in gold, pointing the way to an unimaginable truth. What he found changed him forever, and set him on the path to becoming the greatest thinker in human history.

Today, twelve golden tablets sit in museums around the world, each created by unknown hands and buried in ancient times, each providing the dead with the route to the afterlife. And archaeologist Lily Barnes, working on a dig in southern Italy, has just found another.

And then Lily vanishes.

Has she walked out of her job, her marriage and her life? Her husband Jonah, refuses to believe it. But no one can help him: not the police; not the secretive foundation that sponsored her dig; not even their circle of university friends who seem to know more than they’re saying. All Jonah has is faith, and a determination to do whatever it takes to get Lily back.

But like Plato before him, Jonah will discover the journey ahead is mysterious and dark and fraught with danger.

And not everyone who journeys to the place where Lily has gone can return.

I seem to have hit a dual-timeline streak in my reading. Of the past dozen or so books I’ve read, at least five had dual (or multiple) timelines. It’s an interesting realisation, and while probably not indicative of a trend in publishing – dual-timelines have been around for ages – as a reader, it does give me a clearer view of what can go wrong or right when such a construction is used. Tom Harper’s The Orpheus Descent is another dual-timeline book and one which does it very well, in my opinion. The two timelines are clearly linked, but not dependent on each other, however, the braiding of the two narratives enriches the story as a whole and gives it added depth.

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By Mieneke Published 27 May, 2013 Posted in historical fiction, review, thriller Tagged: | 2 Comments

Dan O’Shea – Penance

danoshea-penanceBorn and raised in Chicago, Detective John Lynch might just be about to die there too.

A pious old woman steps out of the Sacred Heart confessional and is shot through the heart by a sniper with what at first appears to be a miraculous and impossible shot.

Colonel Tech Weaver dispatches a team from Langley to put the shooter – and anyone else who gets in the way – in a body bag before a half-century of national secrets are revealed.

But soon the sniper strikes again. And Detective Lynch, the son of a murdered Chicago cop, finds himself cast into an underworld of political corruption, as he tries to discover the truth about what’s really going on – before another innocent citizen gets killed.

Penance is one of the two inaugural titles for Angry Robot’s new crime imprint Exhibit A. Launch titles always have a little extra pressure attached as they are the first time the new publisher or imprint gets to show their sensibilities and give the reader a taste of what they can expect when they see that particular publisher’s logo on the spine of a book. As such I was looking forward to see what sort of impression Dan O’Shea’s debut novel Penance would make.

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By Mieneke Published 24 May, 2013 Posted in crime, review, thriller Tagged: | Leave a comment

Character Query: Get Your Gargoyle Here

emmanewman-betweentwothornsLast February I reviewed my favourite debut of the year so far, Between Two Thorns by Emma Newman. Its sequel Any Other Name, will be out on June 6th and I plan to have a review for it up soon after. However, not only is Emma going to be doing publicity for the sequel, Angry Robot decided to send out the inhabitants from the Split Worlds out to do the rounds as well. I decided to take the opportunity to sit down* with one of my favourites from Between Two Thorns, the Gargoyle. He was kind enough to answer (almost) all of my questions frankly and I can’t wait to catch up with his story in Any Other Name. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to Gargoyle.

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By Mieneke Published 23 May, 2013 Posted in fantasy, interview Tagged: , , | 2 Comments

Midkemia Reread: Raymond E. Feist – Magician

raymondefeist-magicianrevedAt Crydee, a frontier outpost in the tranquil Kingdom of the Isles, an orphan boy, Pug, is apprenticed to a master magician – and the destinies of two worlds are changed forever. Suddenly the peace of the Kingdom is destroyed as mysterious alien invaders swarm through the land. Pug is swept up into the conflict but for him and his warrior friend, Tomas, an odyssey into the unknown has only just begun. Tomas will inherit a legacy of savage power from an ancient civilisation. Pug’s destiny is to lead him through a rift in the fabric of space and time to the mastery of the unimaginable powers of a strange new magic…

Magician is the first book in the Riftwar Cycle. First published in the United States in 1982, it has since been republished numerous times and published in over 25 countries. It’s also been published in two parts, Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master, in a revised, author’s preferred and a special 20th anniversary leather-bound edition, one of which resides in my bookcase. The fact that I went and bought the anniversary edition, despite being a perpetually short-on-cash university student, should be telling about how much I love this book. Still, it had been at least a decade since I’d read Magician and in that decade I’ve become far-wider and well-read in the genre. I finally read The Lord of the Rings, for one, and I discovered the online genre community, which has broadened my genre horizons immensely. So, taking that into account I was quite curious to see whether the book would hold up to my memories of it. Strangely enough, it both did and it didn’t. On the one hand, I recognised much more of its influences, while on the other I recognised its influence on what today we know as staples in the genre. And tossing all that aside, I still cared as deeply for its protagonists as I did the first time I read it.

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By Mieneke Published 22 May, 2013 Posted in fantasy, review Tagged: , | 1 Comment

Midkemia Reread: An Introduction

raymondefeist-magicianrevedThis month sees the publication of Magician’s End, the thirtieth and final book set in Raymond E. Feist’s Midkemia. The first book Magician, was first published in the UK in 1983, which means it also brings an end to a thirty year project for Feist. I first discovered Midkemia soon after I started reading fantasy books in 1994. After reading Eddings on the recommendation of a class mate and discovering Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar off of the horsey cover – I was fourteen, hush! – Magician, together with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon – was one of the first fantasy novels I picked up on my own. It blew my mind and I quickly collected all of the Midkemia books which had been published up until then, after which I followed along faithfully with each book that came out. For some reason though, once I hit Talon of the Silverhawk, I stopped following the books as closely, but I caught up in spurts up to Rides a Dread Legion. The publication of Magician’s End and the end of the Riftwar cycle seemed like a good point to reread – in some cases read for the first time – the entire cycle.

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By Mieneke Published 22 May, 2013 Posted in article Tagged: , | 3 Comments

Wesley Chu – Lives of Tao

wesleychu-livesoftaoWhen out-of-shape IT technician Roen Tan woke up and started hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumed he was losing it.

He wasn’t.

He now has a passenger in his brain – an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Now split into two opposing factions – the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix – the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet, and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes.

Meanwhile, Roen is having to train to be the ultimate secret agent. Like that’s going to end up well…

One of my favourite TV shows in recent years was Chuck. For those of you unfamiliar with the show: Chuck is about a regular geeky guy who one day wakes up to an email from his long estranged roommate from Stanford and opens it. Once he does a video starts playing and the next thing he knows he’s lying on the floor of his bedroom with a huge headache. Little does he know he’s downloaded a super computer into his brain and he is now wanted as a valuable asset for the CIA and other TLA’s. Not only does the Intersect, the previously mentioned super computer, allow him access to amazing amounts of data, he also has sudden access to incredible fighting skills. The series is wildly entertaining and if you haven’t checked it out, you really should. But how does this relate to Lives of Tao in any way, shape, or form? Because if anything, Lives of Tao‘s protagonist Roen, reminds me of Chuck a lot. Only instead of the Intersect, Roen is possessed by a symbiotic alien called Tao.

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By Mieneke Published 20 May, 2013 Posted in review, science fiction Tagged: | 1 Comment

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