10 Temmuz 2012 Salı
9 Temmuz 2012 Pazartesi
Ready Player One Contest and New Artamon Extract News (by Mihir Wanchoo)
To contact us Click HERE
In the U.S.A., to celebrate the release of the Ready Player One trade paperback, author Ernest Cline is holding a contest inspired by the plot of his novel. He has hidden an "Easter egg" in the text of both the hardcover and paperback editions of Ready Player One.
If readers can find this hidden clue, it will lead them to the first of three increasingly difficult video game challenges. The first video game challenge is an Atari 2600 game that contains another Easter Egg that will lead you to the Second Challenge. Completing the Second Challenge will lead you to the Third and Final Challenge.
The first person to complete all three of these challenges will win the grand prize, a 1981 DeLorean automobile, complete with a Flux Capacitor! Ernest Cline will be driving this DeLorean across the U.S. on his book tour this June, so contestants will have a chance to see the grand prize in person at each of his book signings. For more info on the contest rules check out this blogpost.
Sarah Ash has been a favorite of mine since I started reading fantasy and her Tears of Artamon trilogy along with the Alchymist's Legacy duology remain my perennial favorites. Recently she has started releasing chapter excerpts of the sixth Artamon book tentatively titled "Drakomancer".
According to an earlier blog post of hers, "Drakomancer" was previously titled "A Shiver of Silver", and is set in Francia (or, to be accurate, a little kingdom of Francia called Sapaudie) and in Allegonde at least a hundred and twenty years or so before Lord of Snow and Shadows takes place. The first chapter along with the second chapter can be read over HERE.
The author has said that she will most probably be posting one chapter from this book every month depending on the reader interest. This is an unfinished story and most likely will be finished upon the dictates of the readers. So feel free to send the author an email or three if you are a fan of the Artamon world (like me)and want to know more...
Note: DeLorean photo courtesy of Ernest Cline, "They were Seven" picture courtesy of Marcelle Natisin. Contest Announcement via Philippa Cotton.
In the U.S.A., to celebrate the release of the Ready Player One trade paperback, author Ernest Cline is holding a contest inspired by the plot of his novel. He has hidden an "Easter egg" in the text of both the hardcover and paperback editions of Ready Player One.
If readers can find this hidden clue, it will lead them to the first of three increasingly difficult video game challenges. The first video game challenge is an Atari 2600 game that contains another Easter Egg that will lead you to the Second Challenge. Completing the Second Challenge will lead you to the Third and Final Challenge.
The first person to complete all three of these challenges will win the grand prize, a 1981 DeLorean automobile, complete with a Flux Capacitor! Ernest Cline will be driving this DeLorean across the U.S. on his book tour this June, so contestants will have a chance to see the grand prize in person at each of his book signings. For more info on the contest rules check out this blogpost.
Sarah Ash has been a favorite of mine since I started reading fantasy and her Tears of Artamon trilogy along with the Alchymist's Legacy duology remain my perennial favorites. Recently she has started releasing chapter excerpts of the sixth Artamon book tentatively titled "Drakomancer".
According to an earlier blog post of hers, "Drakomancer" was previously titled "A Shiver of Silver", and is set in Francia (or, to be accurate, a little kingdom of Francia called Sapaudie) and in Allegonde at least a hundred and twenty years or so before Lord of Snow and Shadows takes place. The first chapter along with the second chapter can be read over HERE.
The author has said that she will most probably be posting one chapter from this book every month depending on the reader interest. This is an unfinished story and most likely will be finished upon the dictates of the readers. So feel free to send the author an email or three if you are a fan of the Artamon world (like me)and want to know more...
Note: DeLorean photo courtesy of Ernest Cline, "They were Seven" picture courtesy of Marcelle Natisin. Contest Announcement via Philippa Cotton.
“Giant Thief” by David Tallerman (Reviewed by Sabine Gueneret)
To contact us Click HERE
Official David Tallerman WebsiteOrder “Giant Thief” HERE (US) + HERE (UK)Read An ExcerptHERERead ReviewsHERE
AUTHOR INFORMATION: This novel by debut author David Tallerman was published by Angry Robot in early 2012 with book number two following in October 2012. David Tallerman is a productive reviewer, and has written many short stories, published in markets such as Flash Fiction Online, Bull Spec, Lightspeed, and Digital Science Fiction.
FORMAT/INFO: Giant Thief is 384 pages long. January 31, 2012 marked the North American Mass Market Paperback publication of the book via Angry Robot. The UK version was released on February 2, 2012. Cover art was provided by Angelo Rinaldi.
OVERVIEW: “The sun was going down by the time they decided to hang me.
In fairness, they hadn’t rushed the decision. They’d been debating it for almost an hour since my capture and initial beating. One of the three was in favour of handing me over to an officer from amongst the regulars. The second had been determined to slit my throat, and was so set in his opinion that I’d hoped he might make a start with his companions. On that basis, I’d decided to lend him my encouragement. “He’s right, you know. It’s quick, but painful, and less messy than you might expect.”
All that had earned me was a particularly vicious kick to the forehead, so I’d settled for the occasional nod or mumble of assent instead.”
Giant Thief is the first volume in a trilogy following the adventures of thief Easie Damasco. A petty thief, selfish, and never at a loss for words, Damasco finds himself spiraled into a conspiracy that is bigger than him… Will he manage to overcome his nature to save himself, and his fellow travelers?
Nearly hanged by commoners for stealing their food, Damasco is saved by Lord Warrior Moaradrid and forced to join his army. During his first battle, Damascoends up commanding Saltlick—a very strong giant, who blindly obeys whoever is his chief. Seizing this opportunity, Damasco steals as much gold as he can in Moaradrid’s tent and leaves on the giant’s back. But why is Moaradridso determined to get him back? It can’t be for the few pieces of gold he has stolen, or for the simple rock that came with them. Or can it be?
As the stone quickly reveals itself to be the emblem of the giants’ ruler (and all giants will blindly follow the one who holds it), Damasco is made a prisoner and forced to join Estrada, the fierce mayor of Muena Palaiya, in her mission to save the region of Castoval from Moaradrid’s army. Now, Damasco has to choose where his allegiance lies…
ANALYSIS: Without a doubt, Giant Thiefis an interesting book to read, thanks to its main character Easie Damasco, who is witty and charming, which creates many comical situations in the story as he finds himself dragged into an adventure that is “too big for him.” Aside from these humorous moments, the plot in Giant Thief is classical for a fantasy novel—with its share of fights, feasts, desperate situations and twists—yet genuinely enjoyable.
As for the other characters, I found them a little pale and too single-minded to my taste. For instance, Moaradrid is just a one-dimensional villain, obsessed by his quest to become king of Castoval (but why?); Estradais heroic and self-sacrificing to the point of stupidity; and the giants are a mix of strength and blind obedience that I found credible, but lacking in originality.
Yet the major problem with this novel is the world-building, which seems to come off as a fairly classical medieval fantasy world, but really isn’t described enough. As a result, I found myself slightly bored from time to time.
Still, overall Giant Thief is an entertaining fantasy novel, with a strong enough main character to make me look forward to the next volume in the series. I just hope the sequel will do a better job of fleshing out the supporting characters and the world they live in, without sacrificing Easie Damasco’s charm and cunning…
Official David Tallerman WebsiteOrder “Giant Thief” HERE (US) + HERE (UK)Read An ExcerptHERERead ReviewsHERE
AUTHOR INFORMATION: This novel by debut author David Tallerman was published by Angry Robot in early 2012 with book number two following in October 2012. David Tallerman is a productive reviewer, and has written many short stories, published in markets such as Flash Fiction Online, Bull Spec, Lightspeed, and Digital Science Fiction.
FORMAT/INFO: Giant Thief is 384 pages long. January 31, 2012 marked the North American Mass Market Paperback publication of the book via Angry Robot. The UK version was released on February 2, 2012. Cover art was provided by Angelo Rinaldi.
OVERVIEW: “The sun was going down by the time they decided to hang me.
In fairness, they hadn’t rushed the decision. They’d been debating it for almost an hour since my capture and initial beating. One of the three was in favour of handing me over to an officer from amongst the regulars. The second had been determined to slit my throat, and was so set in his opinion that I’d hoped he might make a start with his companions. On that basis, I’d decided to lend him my encouragement. “He’s right, you know. It’s quick, but painful, and less messy than you might expect.”
All that had earned me was a particularly vicious kick to the forehead, so I’d settled for the occasional nod or mumble of assent instead.”
Giant Thief is the first volume in a trilogy following the adventures of thief Easie Damasco. A petty thief, selfish, and never at a loss for words, Damasco finds himself spiraled into a conspiracy that is bigger than him… Will he manage to overcome his nature to save himself, and his fellow travelers?
Nearly hanged by commoners for stealing their food, Damasco is saved by Lord Warrior Moaradrid and forced to join his army. During his first battle, Damascoends up commanding Saltlick—a very strong giant, who blindly obeys whoever is his chief. Seizing this opportunity, Damasco steals as much gold as he can in Moaradrid’s tent and leaves on the giant’s back. But why is Moaradridso determined to get him back? It can’t be for the few pieces of gold he has stolen, or for the simple rock that came with them. Or can it be?
As the stone quickly reveals itself to be the emblem of the giants’ ruler (and all giants will blindly follow the one who holds it), Damasco is made a prisoner and forced to join Estrada, the fierce mayor of Muena Palaiya, in her mission to save the region of Castoval from Moaradrid’s army. Now, Damasco has to choose where his allegiance lies…
ANALYSIS: Without a doubt, Giant Thiefis an interesting book to read, thanks to its main character Easie Damasco, who is witty and charming, which creates many comical situations in the story as he finds himself dragged into an adventure that is “too big for him.” Aside from these humorous moments, the plot in Giant Thief is classical for a fantasy novel—with its share of fights, feasts, desperate situations and twists—yet genuinely enjoyable.
As for the other characters, I found them a little pale and too single-minded to my taste. For instance, Moaradrid is just a one-dimensional villain, obsessed by his quest to become king of Castoval (but why?); Estradais heroic and self-sacrificing to the point of stupidity; and the giants are a mix of strength and blind obedience that I found credible, but lacking in originality.
Yet the major problem with this novel is the world-building, which seems to come off as a fairly classical medieval fantasy world, but really isn’t described enough. As a result, I found myself slightly bored from time to time.
Still, overall Giant Thief is an entertaining fantasy novel, with a strong enough main character to make me look forward to the next volume in the series. I just hope the sequel will do a better job of fleshing out the supporting characters and the world they live in, without sacrificing Easie Damasco’s charm and cunning…
Spotlight on July Books
To contact us Click HERE
This month we are featuring 36 books. There are more than twice as many new sff and related releases this month in traditional publishing not to speak of the countless indies from Amazon and Smashwords but we are limiting ourselves to books that will be reviewed here or are similar with such. For the full schedule of July 2012 titles known to us, you can consult the Upcoming Releases page.
The release dates are US unless marked otherwise, though for books released in the UK and US in the same month but on different dates we generally use the US date and they are first edition unless noted differently. The dates are on a best known basis so they are not guaranteed; same about the edition information.
Since information sometimes is out of date even in the Amazon links we use for listings, books get delayed or sometimes even released earlier, we would truly appreciate if you would send us an email about any listing with incorrect information.
*********************************************************************
“The Wizard and the Warlord” by M.R. Mathias, July 1, 2012. Published by Amazon Digital (FAN). “The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection” edited by Gardner Dozois, July 3, 2012. Published by St. Martin’s Griffin. (ANTHO)“Other Worlds Than These” edited by John Joseph Adams, July 3, 2012. Published by Night Shade Books. (ANTHO). “War Maid's Choice” by David Weber, July 3, 2012. Published by Baen. (FAN).“Spin The Sky” by Katy Stauber, July 3, 2012. Published by Night Shade Books. (SF).
“Thieftaker” by D.B. Jackson, July 3, 2012. Published by Tor. (AH).
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“Advent” by James Treadwell, July 3, 2012. Published by Atria. (FAN).“The Gilded Rune” by Lisa Smedman, July 3, 2012. Published by Wizards of the Coast. (FAN).“The Hollow City” by Dan Wells, July 3, 2012. Published by Tor. (MISC).
“Wake of the Bloody Angel” by Alex Bledsoe, July 3, 2012. Published by Tor. (FAN). “The Broken Isles” by Mark Charan Newton, UK July 5, 2012. Published by Tor UK. (FAN). “The Sacrifice Game” by Brian D'Amato, July 5, 2012. Published by Dutton. (SF/MISC).
*********************************************************************
“Shadow” by Will Elliott. UK, July 5, 2012. Published by Jo Fletcher Books. (FAN).“The Chemickal Marriage” by G. W. Dahlquist, UK July 5, 2012. Published by Viking. (MISC). “House of Shadows” by Rachel Neumeier, July 10, 2012. Published by Orbit. (FAN)“The Prisoner of Heaven” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, US 1st, July 10, 2012. Published by Harper. (MISC). “Some Kind of Fairy Tale” by Graham Joyce, US 1st, July 10, 2012. Published by Doubleday. (FAN).
“Sharps” by K.J. Parker, July 17, 2012. Published by Orbit. (FAN).
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"The Coldest War” by Ian Tregillis, July 17, 2012. Published by Tor. (FAN).
"Queen's Hunt” by Beth Bernobich, July 17, 2012. Published by Tor. (FAN).“Shine Shine Shine” by Lydia Netzer, July 17, 2012. Published by St. Martin. (MISC).“Empty Space: A Haunting” by M. John Harrison, UK July 19, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (SF).
“Cuttlefish” by Dave Freer, July 24, 2012. Published by Pyr. (YA)."Jack Glass” by Adam Roberts, UK July 26, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (SF).
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"Trinity Rising” by Elspeth Cooper, UK July 26, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (FAN). “The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat” by Harry Turtledove, July 31, 2012. Published by Del Rey. (AH).“The Crown of the Usurper” by Gav Thorpe, July 31, 2012. Published by Angry Robot. (FAN).“vN: The First Machine Dynasty” by Madeline Ashby, July 31, 2012. Published by Angry Robot. (SF).
"Exile: The Outcast Chronicles” by Rowena Cory Daniells, July 31, 2012. Published by Solaris. (FAN).
“The Wanderers” by Paula Brandon. July 31, 2012. Published by Spectra. (FAN).
*********************************************************************
“Carry The Flame” by James Jaros, July 31, 2012. Published by Harper Voyager. (SF).“Forge of Darkness” by Steven Erikson, UK July 31, 2012. Published by Bantam UK. (FAN). “Odd Apocalypse” by Dean Koontz, July 31, 2012. Published by Bantam. (MISC).
“Yok” by Tim Davys. Release Date: July 31, 2012. Published by Harper. (MISC). “Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart” by Caitlin R. Kiernan, July 31, 2012. Published by Subterranean Press. (COLL).
“The Woman Who Married a Cloud” by Jonathan Carroll, July 31, 2012. Published by Subterranean Press. (COLL).
The release dates are US unless marked otherwise, though for books released in the UK and US in the same month but on different dates we generally use the US date and they are first edition unless noted differently. The dates are on a best known basis so they are not guaranteed; same about the edition information.
Since information sometimes is out of date even in the Amazon links we use for listings, books get delayed or sometimes even released earlier, we would truly appreciate if you would send us an email about any listing with incorrect information.
*********************************************************************
“The Wizard and the Warlord” by M.R. Mathias, July 1, 2012. Published by Amazon Digital (FAN). “The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection” edited by Gardner Dozois, July 3, 2012. Published by St. Martin’s Griffin. (ANTHO)“Other Worlds Than These” edited by John Joseph Adams, July 3, 2012. Published by Night Shade Books. (ANTHO). “War Maid's Choice” by David Weber, July 3, 2012. Published by Baen. (FAN).“Spin The Sky” by Katy Stauber, July 3, 2012. Published by Night Shade Books. (SF).
“Thieftaker” by D.B. Jackson, July 3, 2012. Published by Tor. (AH).
*********************************************************************
“Advent” by James Treadwell, July 3, 2012. Published by Atria. (FAN).“The Gilded Rune” by Lisa Smedman, July 3, 2012. Published by Wizards of the Coast. (FAN).“The Hollow City” by Dan Wells, July 3, 2012. Published by Tor. (MISC).
“Wake of the Bloody Angel” by Alex Bledsoe, July 3, 2012. Published by Tor. (FAN). “The Broken Isles” by Mark Charan Newton, UK July 5, 2012. Published by Tor UK. (FAN). “The Sacrifice Game” by Brian D'Amato, July 5, 2012. Published by Dutton. (SF/MISC).
*********************************************************************
“Shadow” by Will Elliott. UK, July 5, 2012. Published by Jo Fletcher Books. (FAN).“The Chemickal Marriage” by G. W. Dahlquist, UK July 5, 2012. Published by Viking. (MISC). “House of Shadows” by Rachel Neumeier, July 10, 2012. Published by Orbit. (FAN)“The Prisoner of Heaven” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, US 1st, July 10, 2012. Published by Harper. (MISC). “Some Kind of Fairy Tale” by Graham Joyce, US 1st, July 10, 2012. Published by Doubleday. (FAN).
“Sharps” by K.J. Parker, July 17, 2012. Published by Orbit. (FAN).
*********************************************************************
"The Coldest War” by Ian Tregillis, July 17, 2012. Published by Tor. (FAN).
"Queen's Hunt” by Beth Bernobich, July 17, 2012. Published by Tor. (FAN).“Shine Shine Shine” by Lydia Netzer, July 17, 2012. Published by St. Martin. (MISC).“Empty Space: A Haunting” by M. John Harrison, UK July 19, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (SF).
“Cuttlefish” by Dave Freer, July 24, 2012. Published by Pyr. (YA)."Jack Glass” by Adam Roberts, UK July 26, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (SF).
*********************************************************************
"Trinity Rising” by Elspeth Cooper, UK July 26, 2012. Published by Gollancz. (FAN). “The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat” by Harry Turtledove, July 31, 2012. Published by Del Rey. (AH).“The Crown of the Usurper” by Gav Thorpe, July 31, 2012. Published by Angry Robot. (FAN).“vN: The First Machine Dynasty” by Madeline Ashby, July 31, 2012. Published by Angry Robot. (SF).
"Exile: The Outcast Chronicles” by Rowena Cory Daniells, July 31, 2012. Published by Solaris. (FAN).
“The Wanderers” by Paula Brandon. July 31, 2012. Published by Spectra. (FAN).
*********************************************************************
“Carry The Flame” by James Jaros, July 31, 2012. Published by Harper Voyager. (SF).“Forge of Darkness” by Steven Erikson, UK July 31, 2012. Published by Bantam UK. (FAN). “Odd Apocalypse” by Dean Koontz, July 31, 2012. Published by Bantam. (MISC).
“Yok” by Tim Davys. Release Date: July 31, 2012. Published by Harper. (MISC). “Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart” by Caitlin R. Kiernan, July 31, 2012. Published by Subterranean Press. (COLL).
“The Woman Who Married a Cloud” by Jonathan Carroll, July 31, 2012. Published by Subterranean Press. (COLL).
"The Sacrifice Game" by Brian D'Amato (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu)
To contact us Click HERE
Official Brian D'Amato WebsiteOrder "The Sacrifice Game" HERE
Read FBC Review of “In the Courts of the Sun”
INTRODUCTION: In 2009, Brian D'Amato published the superb In the Courts of the Sun first in an announced trilogy called The Sacrifice Game. The novel was a combination of near-future extrapolations, time travel and a wonderful recreation of the Maya world of the 7th century, all narrated by unlikely hero Jed de Landa, or more precisely by Jed 1 and Jed 2 as the novel uses a form of time travel which leads to an instance of the consciousness of Jed to be time shifted to the brain of Chacal, a star Maya ball player of the Harpy clan of Ix.
Here is my description of Jed in the FBC review linked above:
"born in 1974 and displaced from his native Guatemalan village by military action, Jed is taken as a young age to the US and grows up in foster care in Utah, exhibiting physical frailty since he suffers from hemophilia so any wound or cut is potentially fatal, while showing great mental agility especially in fast numerical computations and ability to play games of skill and chance".
I was entranced by the novel and its fascinating narrator and I kept looking for the second book in 2010, 2011 and then sort of forgot about it. Imagine my surprise to recently discover that the 2nd Jed de Landa novel that bears the trilogy title, The Sacrifice Game will be published on July 5.
As the blurb of the novel includes a major spoiler for the ending of In the Courts of the Sun, I will not include it here just in case you have not read that but are intrigued by the above and want to pick it first, but I will note that The Sacrifice Game starts precisely where the earlier volume ends and the rest of the blurb is both true and misleading in the sense that there is no more "Jed", but Jed 1 and Jed 2 who diverged markedly - to say the least - in the first volume and some of the blurb refers to one, some to the other...
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: "Sometimes—at times like this, I’d say, especially—one might as well just go with the cliché: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than crushed, but really, why bother? Crushed pretty well does the job.
What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I—even I—was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed—that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of Game of Thrones, I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.
Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought...."
The Sacrifice Game is even badder, crazier and more explicit and brutal than In the Courts of the Sun - which was not tame by any stretch - as it is almost all narrated in the same unforgettable voice of Jed de Landa, though Jed 2, the 660's Maya one and to whom the stream of consciousness musings above belong, carries on for most of the book.
Structurally, The Sacrifice Game starts with Jed 1 in the modern world after his momentous decision at the end of the last book and deals with its implementation and a few consequences, but soon it moves to the Maya world where the book just explodes as it gets even better than In the Courts of the Sun with unbounded sense of wonder, meticulous research and all around inventiveness that matches anything I've read in sf set on an alien world; of course here we are still on Earth, but in a civilization where the author hits the sweet spot in the mixture of alien and familiar in describing it:
"A brace of bearers brought in the white-wrapped ball Hun Xoc had brought back from 31 Courts, holding the too-potent bundle with wooden hands, and tied it to the service cord. An umpire inspected the knot, signaled, and the ball was hoisted up, hanging above the central marker stone.
“Now, One, Two, Four, Five, Seven, Nine, Thirteen,” the Magister Ludi chanted, switching from the second-person plural imperative to the apostrophic tense you used only when speaking to gods,
“Now Twenty, Fifty-Two, Two Hundred Sixty,
O Night, O Wind, O Day, O Rain, O Zero,
Now, guests, inspect 2 Creeper’s blood-washed head.”
2 Creeper had been the greatest Ixian ballplayer in living memory, but he’d sacrificed himself thirty-nine solar years ago after an ankle injury. The Ball had been wound of white rubber around 2 Creeper’s skull as a hollow center—to increase the bounce—and then baked black and studded with painted thorns, like little nails. Finally the ball had been purified in two kinds of blood and then washed in original water boiled over the offering fires of both houses’ grandfathers-houses."
Lady Koh, ultimate Sacrifice Game player of the age and big time politician to boot, 2 Jeweled Skull, leader of the Harpy clan in Ix, second most powerful man there, adoptive father to Jed/Chacal, currently in the contest of his life with 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the Ocelot clan supremo of Ix, Hun Xoc, son of 2JS, lead ball player of the Harpies team and Jed's main adviser/friend, 1 Gila, right hand man of Lady Koh and war leader of her followers are back, while of course quite a few new Mayan characters appear. As excerpted above there is one unforgettable game of hipball for the fate of Ix and by extension, our heroes and life as we know it, not to speak of many other goodies which I do not want to spoil for you...
There are quite a few twists and turns and the author manages a rare feat as first person narration goes; while it would be a major spoiler to talk about it in detail, I am sure any attentive reader will observe it by the end of the novel.
The last few chapters that take place back in the modern world have a thriller-ish feel to them - after all the book is set in 2012 close to 12-21-12 and the race to avoid the ultimate "doomster" is the main storyline in the contemporary part of the novel.
The Sacrifice Game has another surprising but fitting ending giving the book the feel of a complete experience which also leaves one quite in the dark about where the series will go next as it's supposed to be a trilogy.
Overall The Sacrifice Game - top 25 novel of 2012 and currently in the number two slot - came with very high expectations and I was really surprised by how effortlessly it blew past them and offered the most sensual and visual reading experience of the year for me.
Official Brian D'Amato WebsiteOrder "The Sacrifice Game" HERE
Read FBC Review of “In the Courts of the Sun”
INTRODUCTION: In 2009, Brian D'Amato published the superb In the Courts of the Sun first in an announced trilogy called The Sacrifice Game. The novel was a combination of near-future extrapolations, time travel and a wonderful recreation of the Maya world of the 7th century, all narrated by unlikely hero Jed de Landa, or more precisely by Jed 1 and Jed 2 as the novel uses a form of time travel which leads to an instance of the consciousness of Jed to be time shifted to the brain of Chacal, a star Maya ball player of the Harpy clan of Ix.
Here is my description of Jed in the FBC review linked above:
"born in 1974 and displaced from his native Guatemalan village by military action, Jed is taken as a young age to the US and grows up in foster care in Utah, exhibiting physical frailty since he suffers from hemophilia so any wound or cut is potentially fatal, while showing great mental agility especially in fast numerical computations and ability to play games of skill and chance".
I was entranced by the novel and its fascinating narrator and I kept looking for the second book in 2010, 2011 and then sort of forgot about it. Imagine my surprise to recently discover that the 2nd Jed de Landa novel that bears the trilogy title, The Sacrifice Game will be published on July 5.
As the blurb of the novel includes a major spoiler for the ending of In the Courts of the Sun, I will not include it here just in case you have not read that but are intrigued by the above and want to pick it first, but I will note that The Sacrifice Game starts precisely where the earlier volume ends and the rest of the blurb is both true and misleading in the sense that there is no more "Jed", but Jed 1 and Jed 2 who diverged markedly - to say the least - in the first volume and some of the blurb refers to one, some to the other...
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: "Sometimes—at times like this, I’d say, especially—one might as well just go with the cliché: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than crushed, but really, why bother? Crushed pretty well does the job.
What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I—even I—was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed—that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of Game of Thrones, I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.
Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought...."
The Sacrifice Game is even badder, crazier and more explicit and brutal than In the Courts of the Sun - which was not tame by any stretch - as it is almost all narrated in the same unforgettable voice of Jed de Landa, though Jed 2, the 660's Maya one and to whom the stream of consciousness musings above belong, carries on for most of the book.
Structurally, The Sacrifice Game starts with Jed 1 in the modern world after his momentous decision at the end of the last book and deals with its implementation and a few consequences, but soon it moves to the Maya world where the book just explodes as it gets even better than In the Courts of the Sun with unbounded sense of wonder, meticulous research and all around inventiveness that matches anything I've read in sf set on an alien world; of course here we are still on Earth, but in a civilization where the author hits the sweet spot in the mixture of alien and familiar in describing it:
"A brace of bearers brought in the white-wrapped ball Hun Xoc had brought back from 31 Courts, holding the too-potent bundle with wooden hands, and tied it to the service cord. An umpire inspected the knot, signaled, and the ball was hoisted up, hanging above the central marker stone.
“Now, One, Two, Four, Five, Seven, Nine, Thirteen,” the Magister Ludi chanted, switching from the second-person plural imperative to the apostrophic tense you used only when speaking to gods,
“Now Twenty, Fifty-Two, Two Hundred Sixty,
O Night, O Wind, O Day, O Rain, O Zero,
Now, guests, inspect 2 Creeper’s blood-washed head.”
2 Creeper had been the greatest Ixian ballplayer in living memory, but he’d sacrificed himself thirty-nine solar years ago after an ankle injury. The Ball had been wound of white rubber around 2 Creeper’s skull as a hollow center—to increase the bounce—and then baked black and studded with painted thorns, like little nails. Finally the ball had been purified in two kinds of blood and then washed in original water boiled over the offering fires of both houses’ grandfathers-houses."
Lady Koh, ultimate Sacrifice Game player of the age and big time politician to boot, 2 Jeweled Skull, leader of the Harpy clan in Ix, second most powerful man there, adoptive father to Jed/Chacal, currently in the contest of his life with 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the Ocelot clan supremo of Ix, Hun Xoc, son of 2JS, lead ball player of the Harpies team and Jed's main adviser/friend, 1 Gila, right hand man of Lady Koh and war leader of her followers are back, while of course quite a few new Mayan characters appear. As excerpted above there is one unforgettable game of hipball for the fate of Ix and by extension, our heroes and life as we know it, not to speak of many other goodies which I do not want to spoil for you...
There are quite a few twists and turns and the author manages a rare feat as first person narration goes; while it would be a major spoiler to talk about it in detail, I am sure any attentive reader will observe it by the end of the novel.
The last few chapters that take place back in the modern world have a thriller-ish feel to them - after all the book is set in 2012 close to 12-21-12 and the race to avoid the ultimate "doomster" is the main storyline in the contemporary part of the novel.
The Sacrifice Game has another surprising but fitting ending giving the book the feel of a complete experience which also leaves one quite in the dark about where the series will go next as it's supposed to be a trilogy.
Overall The Sacrifice Game - top 25 novel of 2012 and currently in the number two slot - came with very high expectations and I was really surprised by how effortlessly it blew past them and offered the most sensual and visual reading experience of the year for me.
Zelda Pryce: The Razor's Edge by Joss Llewelyn (Reviewed by Mihir Wanchoo)
To contact us Click HERE
Official Author WebsiteOrder the Book HERERead an excerpt HERERead FBC review of Omar The Immortal Read FBC’s Interview with Joseph Robert Lewis
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Joss Llewelyn is a pseudonym used by Joseph Robert Lewis for his Young Adult work. Being curious about world mythology since a tender age, he decided to write stories in which history, mythology, and fantasy would collide in unpredictable ways. He also likes writing about heroines that his daughters can respect and admire and took on this particular pseudonym as his daughters kept demanding more stories. Joe was born in Annapolis and went to the University of Maryland to study ancient novels, morality plays, and Viking poetry. He graduated with a degree in English Literature and currently lives in Maryland with his family, a needy cat, and a zombie fish.
OFFICIAL BLURB: Zelda Pryce builds beautiful machines that defy explanation and allow her to break into any building with ease. After burgling the Smithsonian, Zelda is hired to test the security of a prestigious museum overseas using her arcane instruments. And that’s where everything goes very, very wrong.
The museum never hired her. Someone else did. And when Zelda escapes from the authorities the only thing on her mind is tracking down the person who set her up and nearly destroyed her career. So she teams up with a charming English riskbender and a daring French alchemist to chase her quarry from Paris to Rome, from Castle Frankenstein to the Taj Mahal. Together they must escape all manners of strange traps and supernatural creatures, and only their arcane skills and tools will keep them alive.
Between saving the world, working with a flirtatious partner, and helping her little sister with her love life, Zelda has her hands full. But if she can’t catch the real thief in time, every arcane device in the entire world is in danger, and thousands of innocent lives could be lost.
FORMAT/INFO: Zelda Pryce: The Razor's Edge is 207 pages long divided over twenty six numbered chapters. Narration is in the third-person via Zelda Pryce solely. Zelda Pryce: The Razor's Edge is self-contained and ends on a clear note however is the first volume in the Zelda Pryce series with the second volume tentatively titled Zelda Pryce: The Clockwork Girl. There is also a note about Real Arcana present in the world as well as an “about the author” section.
May 16, 2012 marked the overall Paperback and e-book publication of Zelda Pryce: The Razor's Edge. Cover photo provided by Kornilovdream (Dreamstime) and the design was by the author himself.
ANALYSIS: After being introduced to Joseph R. Lewis’s writing in the form of the Other Earth books, I was very curious to see what else he has written. On checking his website I saw a brand new book being released called Zelda Pryce: The Razor’s Edge, two things nudged my curiosity, the reference to the classic Princess Zelda video games and the fact that this was going to steampunk-ish YA caper (of sorts) novel. I was partly right in my assumptions about those two nudges and here’s why.
The story opens up in current day wherein Zelda Pryce, our protagonist is currently testing the security of Smithsonian Museum of Arcane Science. She does manage to evade the security and procure the items as required but not without some high kinks on the way. Plus with regular phone calls from her sister Roxanne about her interests in arcane science, studies and life over all, she leads a life that can be deemed reasonable as befitting her persona. Soon after gig with the Smithsonian, she gets contacted for a new gig overseas in London. During the actual gig she realizes something is horribly off, combined with the presence of other people in the same place, she discovers that she has been mentally conned into following someone’s nefarious plan. Soon she learns from Yasmin Demir, a French DCRI agent that all is not well in the world of Arcane museums the world over. Soon Zelda will have to make a choice whether to go back to her normal life or to find out who is behind all of this.
If this book can be encapsulated in a single word, it would be FUN. Beginning from the first chapter, there’s a jovial undertone to this book that asserts itself in the dialogue as well as the inventions that abound the pages from cover to cover. The characterization ranging from Zelda, Clive & Yasmin are done competently as befitting a YA novel however we only get the story from Zelda’s point of view. The author though does his best to provide a decent background to the supporting cast however this move is hampered through the use of a singular third person POV. Going on to the second favorite part of the book, which was the presence of all these cool phenomena, gadgets and alternate arcane history, the author has created a world wherein magic is present but it is more akin to a science and is distilled by various famous historical personae, into its current highly evolved state.
Ranging from Chekov guns to Diogenes lamps to Occam razors to Nicomachean whistles to other cool but equally dangerous artifacts. The author has planned this world akin to the Harry Potter one but with a crucial difference, this is the age of science. Thereby having a cool machine-punk edge to history, the story gains a different edge more akin to the Scott Westerfeld Leviathan series but with a comical tone akin to that of the John Connolly Samuel Johnson series. Lastly there's no Link in this story and this Zelda does everything herself to save the world. The story does have a complete plot with room left for a sequel and readers who enjoyed this book will be glad to hear that Zelda will be back in the sequel tentatively titled “Zelda Pryce: The Clockwork Girl”.
What can readers look forward to in book, hilarious banter involving Zelda and her younger sibling Roxanne, action packed sequences in various international locales and overall a strong fun filled story to boot. With such plus features, it really becomes hard to point out any insufficiencies in this book but I think there might be some points to note. Primarily this book is equivalent to literary candy (as the author meant it to be); readers looking for a grimmer world setting akin to the current YA dystopian mold will not find it here. Also the author intentionally has made the series the way it is thereby choosing to disregard certain facts and history to make the story plot more accessible and if you can’t let go of your sensibilities completely then this isn’t the book for you.
CONCLUSION: Joseph Robert Lewis is a maverick writer and it shows in this YA outing, filled with colorful characters, fascinating gadgets and an action packed storyline. I strongly recommend this book simply because of its theme to be a funny book. If you haven’t read Joss Llewelyn yet then grab a copy at the earliest instant and you can thank me later ;)
Official Author WebsiteOrder the Book HERERead an excerpt HERERead FBC review of Omar The Immortal Read FBC’s Interview with Joseph Robert Lewis
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Joss Llewelyn is a pseudonym used by Joseph Robert Lewis for his Young Adult work. Being curious about world mythology since a tender age, he decided to write stories in which history, mythology, and fantasy would collide in unpredictable ways. He also likes writing about heroines that his daughters can respect and admire and took on this particular pseudonym as his daughters kept demanding more stories. Joe was born in Annapolis and went to the University of Maryland to study ancient novels, morality plays, and Viking poetry. He graduated with a degree in English Literature and currently lives in Maryland with his family, a needy cat, and a zombie fish.
OFFICIAL BLURB: Zelda Pryce builds beautiful machines that defy explanation and allow her to break into any building with ease. After burgling the Smithsonian, Zelda is hired to test the security of a prestigious museum overseas using her arcane instruments. And that’s where everything goes very, very wrong.
The museum never hired her. Someone else did. And when Zelda escapes from the authorities the only thing on her mind is tracking down the person who set her up and nearly destroyed her career. So she teams up with a charming English riskbender and a daring French alchemist to chase her quarry from Paris to Rome, from Castle Frankenstein to the Taj Mahal. Together they must escape all manners of strange traps and supernatural creatures, and only their arcane skills and tools will keep them alive.
Between saving the world, working with a flirtatious partner, and helping her little sister with her love life, Zelda has her hands full. But if she can’t catch the real thief in time, every arcane device in the entire world is in danger, and thousands of innocent lives could be lost.
FORMAT/INFO: Zelda Pryce: The Razor's Edge is 207 pages long divided over twenty six numbered chapters. Narration is in the third-person via Zelda Pryce solely. Zelda Pryce: The Razor's Edge is self-contained and ends on a clear note however is the first volume in the Zelda Pryce series with the second volume tentatively titled Zelda Pryce: The Clockwork Girl. There is also a note about Real Arcana present in the world as well as an “about the author” section.
May 16, 2012 marked the overall Paperback and e-book publication of Zelda Pryce: The Razor's Edge. Cover photo provided by Kornilovdream (Dreamstime) and the design was by the author himself.
ANALYSIS: After being introduced to Joseph R. Lewis’s writing in the form of the Other Earth books, I was very curious to see what else he has written. On checking his website I saw a brand new book being released called Zelda Pryce: The Razor’s Edge, two things nudged my curiosity, the reference to the classic Princess Zelda video games and the fact that this was going to steampunk-ish YA caper (of sorts) novel. I was partly right in my assumptions about those two nudges and here’s why.
The story opens up in current day wherein Zelda Pryce, our protagonist is currently testing the security of Smithsonian Museum of Arcane Science. She does manage to evade the security and procure the items as required but not without some high kinks on the way. Plus with regular phone calls from her sister Roxanne about her interests in arcane science, studies and life over all, she leads a life that can be deemed reasonable as befitting her persona. Soon after gig with the Smithsonian, she gets contacted for a new gig overseas in London. During the actual gig she realizes something is horribly off, combined with the presence of other people in the same place, she discovers that she has been mentally conned into following someone’s nefarious plan. Soon she learns from Yasmin Demir, a French DCRI agent that all is not well in the world of Arcane museums the world over. Soon Zelda will have to make a choice whether to go back to her normal life or to find out who is behind all of this.
If this book can be encapsulated in a single word, it would be FUN. Beginning from the first chapter, there’s a jovial undertone to this book that asserts itself in the dialogue as well as the inventions that abound the pages from cover to cover. The characterization ranging from Zelda, Clive & Yasmin are done competently as befitting a YA novel however we only get the story from Zelda’s point of view. The author though does his best to provide a decent background to the supporting cast however this move is hampered through the use of a singular third person POV. Going on to the second favorite part of the book, which was the presence of all these cool phenomena, gadgets and alternate arcane history, the author has created a world wherein magic is present but it is more akin to a science and is distilled by various famous historical personae, into its current highly evolved state.
Ranging from Chekov guns to Diogenes lamps to Occam razors to Nicomachean whistles to other cool but equally dangerous artifacts. The author has planned this world akin to the Harry Potter one but with a crucial difference, this is the age of science. Thereby having a cool machine-punk edge to history, the story gains a different edge more akin to the Scott Westerfeld Leviathan series but with a comical tone akin to that of the John Connolly Samuel Johnson series. Lastly there's no Link in this story and this Zelda does everything herself to save the world. The story does have a complete plot with room left for a sequel and readers who enjoyed this book will be glad to hear that Zelda will be back in the sequel tentatively titled “Zelda Pryce: The Clockwork Girl”.
What can readers look forward to in book, hilarious banter involving Zelda and her younger sibling Roxanne, action packed sequences in various international locales and overall a strong fun filled story to boot. With such plus features, it really becomes hard to point out any insufficiencies in this book but I think there might be some points to note. Primarily this book is equivalent to literary candy (as the author meant it to be); readers looking for a grimmer world setting akin to the current YA dystopian mold will not find it here. Also the author intentionally has made the series the way it is thereby choosing to disregard certain facts and history to make the story plot more accessible and if you can’t let go of your sensibilities completely then this isn’t the book for you.
CONCLUSION: Joseph Robert Lewis is a maverick writer and it shows in this YA outing, filled with colorful characters, fascinating gadgets and an action packed storyline. I strongly recommend this book simply because of its theme to be a funny book. If you haven’t read Joss Llewelyn yet then grab a copy at the earliest instant and you can thank me later ;)
8 Temmuz 2012 Pazar
July 3, 2012 Links and Plugs
To contact us Click HERE
Interviews and Profiles
Advice/Articles
News
Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
- Writing Bar interviews Margo Lanagan (video).
- Sense of Wonder interviews Madeline Ashby.
- The Skiffy and Fanty Show interviews Jane Rogers (podcast).
- The Shirley Jackson Awards interviews Jason Ockert.
- Reddit interviews Charles Stross.
Advice/Articles
- Bookslut (Colleen Mondor) on Young Indiana Joneses.
- Weird Fiction Review (Peter Straub) on Various Encounters with Karl.
- Omnivoracious (Susan J. Morris) on Character by Design: Three Steps to Creating Distinct Personalities.
- Locus Roundtable (Karen Burnham) on French Graphic Novels.
- Juliette Wade on Can I use signature phrases to distinguish between characters?
- Janice Hardy on Going Both Ways: Outlines for Plot, Pantser for Character.
- Angry Robot Books on The Copyeditor – what they do.
- Book Life Now (Kathe Koja) on What Humans Do.
- Book Life Now (Jason Heller) on Taft-Pedaling.
- Inkpunks (James Sutter) on Masters of the Controverse: Why Authors Should Speak Their Minds.
- The Enchanted Inkpot (Leah Cypress) on TOTW: Craft Books for Fantasy Writers.
- Jim C. Hines (Myke Cole) on Uniform in the Closet: Why Military SF’s Popularity Worries Me.
News
- Ansible 300, July 2012.
- Andre Norton Award Jury Announced.
Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
July 4, 2012 Links and Plugs
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News
Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues by Diana Rowland
- Apex Magazine (Maggie Slater) interviews Kij Johnson.
- The Shirley Jackson Awards interviews Glen Hirshberg.
- Lightspeed (Andrew Liptak) interviews Jake Kerr.
- Lightspeed (Robyn Lupo) interviews Aidan Doyle.
- Reddit interviews Chris Roberson.
Advice/Articles
- Strange Chemistry on Introducing the Vampire Academy Series.
- Smart Pop Books (Linda Antonsson and Elio M. Garcia Jr.) on The Palace of Love, the Palace of Sorrow.
- Apex Magazine (Christopher J. Garcia) on What It Is We Miss When We Don’t Read Fanzines.
- Book View Cafe (Deborah J. Ross) on Sexuality in Fantasy, A Few Thoughts.
- Ad Astra (Douglas McKinney) on The Universal Motivator.
- Ad Astra (Isaac Bell) on To the Stars, Through Difficulties.
- Bryan Thomas Schmidt on How Not to Approach an Editor.
- Black Gate (Howard Andrew Jones) on Confessions of a Guilty Reviewer.
- Black Gate (Ryan Harvey) on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 6: The Master Mind of Mars.
- Alan Rinzler on What should you expect from a developmental editor?
- Chuck Wendig on Ask A Wendigo: The Speed With Which One Ejaculates Prose.
News
- Harvey Award Nominations.
- Call for Papers: Representations of Ghosts in Media and Popular Culture.
- A&E Orders 10 Episodes Of ‘Bates Motel’.
- The Black Prism by Brent Weeks for $2.99.
- Weird Fiction Review (Adam Mills) on 101 Weird Writers Needs Your Help.
Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues by Diana RowlandThor Memes
To contact us Click HERE
The Filipino online community is no stranger to memes. Earlier this year for example, the Department of Tourism launched the "It's more Fun in the Philippines" campaign and both supporters and detractors used the slogan to great use.
Recently though, the country seems to have been obsessed with Thor post-Avengers, and here's some of the interesting photos I've found on Facebook. Some of them will be cultural specific, but what the heck.
Let's start with an easy one...
Sourcebased off the anime Toradora!
SourcePainter = Pintor
SourceSari-Sari Store
Source Filipino actor Joel Torre
SourcePhilippine Tarsier
Recently though, the country seems to have been obsessed with Thor post-Avengers, and here's some of the interesting photos I've found on Facebook. Some of them will be cultural specific, but what the heck.
Let's start with an easy one...
Sourcebased off the anime Toradora!SourcePainter = PintorSourceSari-Sari StoreSource Filipino actor Joel Torre SourcePhilippine Tarsier
July 5, 2012 Links and Plugs
To contact us Click HERE
Interviews and Profiles
Advice/Articles
News
Apex Magazine Issue 38
- Fantasy Book Addict interviews Blake Charlton.
- The Future and You interviews Chris Phoenix (podcast).
- SFX interviews Colin Cunningham.
- Suvudu (Matt Staggs) interviews Lincoln Child.
Advice/Articles
- The Qwillery on What's Up in 2012 for the 2011 Debut Authors (5, 6).
- Kirkus Reviews (John DeNardo) on SF Signal’s Guide to Finding the Best SF and Fantasy Collections.
- Space.com on New Particle at World's Largest Atom Smasher is Likely Higgs Boson.
- Smart Pop Books (James A. Owen) on A Moon...A Girl...Romance!
- The King of Elfland's Second Cousin on A Recipe for Revolution in Speculative Fiction.
- Flickering Myth on Richard Chew talks about the Oscars and BAFTAs.
- Shaun Duke on Top 7 Science Fiction and Fantasy Musicals.
- Fantasy Faction (Amy Rose) on The Fantasy Feminist: Part 2.
- Omnivoracious (Tamora Pierce) Reviews "Seraphina".
- Even Zombies Want To Play The New York Lottery.
- Kindle Daily Post (Susannah Sandlin) on How a Vampire Romance Was Born.
- Sci-Fi Fan Letter on Suited by Jo Anderton.
- Charles Stross on Why ebooks are not like paper books.
- Black Gate (Scott Taylor) on The Art of an inspired Fake…
- Gail Carriger on Gail's Favorite Comic Book Heroines.
- Jim C. Hines on David Constantine - Steampunk Before The Age of Steam.
- Locus Roundtable (James Morrow) on From Solaris to the Zone.
- Locus (Cory Doctorow) on Music: The Internet’s Original Sin.
- The Guardian (Jeff VanderMeer) on Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce.
- The Guardian (Alfred Hickling) on The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers.
News
- Cover Launch: TAKEN by Benedict Jacka.
- TTA Novellas and Special Offer.
- A New Judith Tarr Ebook.
Apex Magazine Issue 38
July 6, 2012 Links and Plugs
To contact us Click HERE
Interviews and Profiles
Advice/Articles
News
- Chuck Wendig interviews Alex Adams.
- The Shirley Jackson Awards interviews Ellen Datlow.
- Virtual Memories interviews Diana Renn and Paul Di Filippo (podcast).
- Tor Books UK interviews Mark Newton.
- John Scalzi's The Big Idea: Pamela Ribon.
- Ginger Nuts of Horror interviews Simon Maginn.
- The Bat Segundo Podcast interviews Brian Francis Slattery.
- Sci Fi Chick interviews SJ Kincaid.
- [SFFWRTCHT] A Chat With Author Jon Sprunk.
Advice/Articles
- Angry Robot Books Aliette de Bodard Looks Back on Her Aztec Saga of Obsidian & Blood.
- Brian Ruckely on News Epilogue! In Which I Talk (Literally, Audibly) About Names.
- John Anealio on 5 Favorite Musical Artists of Author Paul S. Kemp.
- io9 (Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders) on 10 Great Science Fiction Novels with Go-Back-To-Bed Depressing Endings.
- Forces of Geek on Make Your Own Geordi La Forge Visor.
- Listverse on Top 10 Science Fiction Weapons.
- Orbit (Ian Tregillis) on How to become a superhero.
- Smart Pop Books (Shanna Swedson) on Reporters in Spaaaaace!
- Night Bazaar (Carol Wolf) on Backing Up, Switching Out, Going Forward.
- Kristine Kathryn Rusch on The Business Rusch: Careers, Critics, and Professors.
- Justine Larbalestier On Research for Novels.
News
- TTA Novellas.
- Del Rey to launch in the UK in 2013, first books : Mark Hodder, Liesel Schwarz, Django Wexler.
- 2012 Andre Norton Judges Announced.
7 Temmuz 2012 Cumartesi
Eerie by Blake and Jordan Crouch (Reviewed by Mihir Wanchoo)
To contact us Click HERE
Official Blake Crouch Website
ABOUT BLAKE CROUCH: Blake Crouch was born in Statesville, North Carolina and graduated in 2000 with degrees in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina. He has written four previous novels and a host of short stories. Two of his stories have been optioned for film adaptation. Blake currently lives in Durango, Colorado with his wife. This is his debut collaboration with his sibling.
ABOUT JORDAN CROUCH: Jordan Crouch is the younger brother of Blake Crouch, Jordan attended the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and graduated in 2007 with degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Eerie is his debut novel.
OFFICIAL BLURB: TRAPPED INSIDE A HOUSE
On a crisp autumn evening in 1980, seven-year-old Grant Moreton and his five-year-old sister Paige were nearly killed in a mysterious accident in the Cascade Mountains that left them orphans.
WITH A FRIGHTENING POWER
It's been thirty years since that night. Grant is now a detective with the Seattle Police Department and long estranged from his sister. But his investigation into the bloody past of a high-class prostitute has led right to Paige's door, and what awaits inside is beyond his wildest imagining.
OVER ANYONE WHO ENTERS
His only hope of survival and saving his sister will be to confront the terror that inhabits its walls, but he is completely unprepared to face the truth of what haunts his sister's brownstone.
FORMAT/INFO: EERIE is 284 pages long divided over forty-four numbered chapters with an epilogue and a prologue set in October 1980. Narration is in the third-person via Grant Moreton and Sophie. EERIE is self-contained and ends on a clear note. The book also features an interview with the authors and includes a listing of Blake Crouch’s bibliography. EERIE was first published in May 2012 via the Pubit program of Barnes & Noble.
June 8, 2012 marked the overall Paperback and e-book publication of EERIE. Cover art and design provided by Jeroen ten Berge.
ANALYSIS: This is the first collaboration between Blake and Jordan Crouch and based on the blurb, was a book that I was very much looking forward to. This book was part of an experiment as it was released nearly a month earlier exclusively via the Barnes and Noble PUBIT program. This was an interesting move on the author’s part as usually Blake has been known to be more affiliated with Amazon. Blake has also spoken a bit about it on Joe Konrath’s blog about why he chose Barnes & Noble this time around and what the results were like. The resulting conclusions and author talk are interesting as past blogposts on Joe’s blog have been (go read it all).
The prologue of the story is set in October of 1980 wherein Grant and Paige Moreton are travelling with their father near the Cascade Mountains. Things soon take a drastically wrong turn and the story then skips thirty one years. Grant Moreton is a police officer who is searching for a missing man who is the third in line of such disappearances. After some diligent searching he turns across a surprising connection and one that goes back a long way. He manages to also locate his long disappeared sister Paige however Paige isn’t in the proper mood to communicate. Once however they do get talking is when he gets to know about the real reason behind the logic why Paige is being the way she is. Grant is soon sucked into the same quandary and he finds himself sharing a similar predicament.
The Crouch brothers show themselves to be extremely proficient in setting up the stage and adding some terrific elements of horror to the story. The story quickly opens up whilst introducing the characters and then settles on to its main hook, which is figuring out what is truly happening. The main story is focused on a single place and both the protagonists are trying to find out what is happening to them. The constant sense of claustrophobia is very well ensconced within the prose as the reader is thoroughly immersed and confused, at the same time. This atmospheric horror is very reminiscent of Stephen King’s Shining and for many readers will be a solid point in their enjoyment of this tale. The biggest plus point of the tale is the overall mystery that unfolds like one of the classic Twilight zone episodes or those of a Stephen King novel wherein the story twists in an uncertain direction and the reader is thoroughly bemused as to how its all going to end.
Another highlight is the prose, which seamlessly fits and is really hard to distinguish which Crouch brother has written what part and in this regard, it seems reminiscent of the other great writing duos such as Douglas Preston-Lincoln Child and Ilona Andrews. The brothers really don’t give any indication that this is their debut collaboration and thus the story is very polished. The characterization is also done well to highlight the sibling connections as well as their recent problems. The authors have also cleverly planned some misdirection in the story with a few twists so readers should be very focused while reading the book to decipher what all is truly happening. Lastly the mish-mash of several elements of this story have to be lauded, a bit of horror, a generous dash of thrills and some quirky SF touches make this story really hard to describe other than to say it's Twilight Zone-esque or even LOST-esque (to a very minor degree).
The only drawback to this story is its climax or to be more specific the plot resolution. As a reader I don’t expect to have a neat and clean resolution however in many cases even rough edged climaxes can be fulfilling. This sadly is not the case; the plot resolution seems a bit choppy if that adjective can be applied. The final twist of the story while being a thoroughly good one somehow takes a bit out of the story. From a storytelling perspective it’s has to be lauded as the reader will not be expecting it at all. But for me it didn't quite gel with the earlier direction of the story. The ending is the sole drawback in this fine collaborative effort that makes it rank at a solid three and half stars of a possible five.
CONCLUSION: EERIE by the Crouch brothers is a good horror story that will raise goose-bumps for most readers, tightly plotted and streamlined to give the readers a thrill ride as is the case with most Blake Crouch titles. EERIE is an excellent experiment albeit with a slightly confusing ending. Give it a read if you are a fan of horror stories with a touch of the weird. I look forward with great excitement to any future collaboration these two might write as well as their solo titles.
Official Blake Crouch Website
ABOUT BLAKE CROUCH: Blake Crouch was born in Statesville, North Carolina and graduated in 2000 with degrees in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina. He has written four previous novels and a host of short stories. Two of his stories have been optioned for film adaptation. Blake currently lives in Durango, Colorado with his wife. This is his debut collaboration with his sibling.
ABOUT JORDAN CROUCH: Jordan Crouch is the younger brother of Blake Crouch, Jordan attended the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and graduated in 2007 with degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Eerie is his debut novel.
OFFICIAL BLURB: TRAPPED INSIDE A HOUSE
On a crisp autumn evening in 1980, seven-year-old Grant Moreton and his five-year-old sister Paige were nearly killed in a mysterious accident in the Cascade Mountains that left them orphans.
WITH A FRIGHTENING POWER
It's been thirty years since that night. Grant is now a detective with the Seattle Police Department and long estranged from his sister. But his investigation into the bloody past of a high-class prostitute has led right to Paige's door, and what awaits inside is beyond his wildest imagining.
OVER ANYONE WHO ENTERS
His only hope of survival and saving his sister will be to confront the terror that inhabits its walls, but he is completely unprepared to face the truth of what haunts his sister's brownstone.
FORMAT/INFO: EERIE is 284 pages long divided over forty-four numbered chapters with an epilogue and a prologue set in October 1980. Narration is in the third-person via Grant Moreton and Sophie. EERIE is self-contained and ends on a clear note. The book also features an interview with the authors and includes a listing of Blake Crouch’s bibliography. EERIE was first published in May 2012 via the Pubit program of Barnes & Noble.
June 8, 2012 marked the overall Paperback and e-book publication of EERIE. Cover art and design provided by Jeroen ten Berge.
ANALYSIS: This is the first collaboration between Blake and Jordan Crouch and based on the blurb, was a book that I was very much looking forward to. This book was part of an experiment as it was released nearly a month earlier exclusively via the Barnes and Noble PUBIT program. This was an interesting move on the author’s part as usually Blake has been known to be more affiliated with Amazon. Blake has also spoken a bit about it on Joe Konrath’s blog about why he chose Barnes & Noble this time around and what the results were like. The resulting conclusions and author talk are interesting as past blogposts on Joe’s blog have been (go read it all).
The prologue of the story is set in October of 1980 wherein Grant and Paige Moreton are travelling with their father near the Cascade Mountains. Things soon take a drastically wrong turn and the story then skips thirty one years. Grant Moreton is a police officer who is searching for a missing man who is the third in line of such disappearances. After some diligent searching he turns across a surprising connection and one that goes back a long way. He manages to also locate his long disappeared sister Paige however Paige isn’t in the proper mood to communicate. Once however they do get talking is when he gets to know about the real reason behind the logic why Paige is being the way she is. Grant is soon sucked into the same quandary and he finds himself sharing a similar predicament.
The Crouch brothers show themselves to be extremely proficient in setting up the stage and adding some terrific elements of horror to the story. The story quickly opens up whilst introducing the characters and then settles on to its main hook, which is figuring out what is truly happening. The main story is focused on a single place and both the protagonists are trying to find out what is happening to them. The constant sense of claustrophobia is very well ensconced within the prose as the reader is thoroughly immersed and confused, at the same time. This atmospheric horror is very reminiscent of Stephen King’s Shining and for many readers will be a solid point in their enjoyment of this tale. The biggest plus point of the tale is the overall mystery that unfolds like one of the classic Twilight zone episodes or those of a Stephen King novel wherein the story twists in an uncertain direction and the reader is thoroughly bemused as to how its all going to end.
Another highlight is the prose, which seamlessly fits and is really hard to distinguish which Crouch brother has written what part and in this regard, it seems reminiscent of the other great writing duos such as Douglas Preston-Lincoln Child and Ilona Andrews. The brothers really don’t give any indication that this is their debut collaboration and thus the story is very polished. The characterization is also done well to highlight the sibling connections as well as their recent problems. The authors have also cleverly planned some misdirection in the story with a few twists so readers should be very focused while reading the book to decipher what all is truly happening. Lastly the mish-mash of several elements of this story have to be lauded, a bit of horror, a generous dash of thrills and some quirky SF touches make this story really hard to describe other than to say it's Twilight Zone-esque or even LOST-esque (to a very minor degree).
The only drawback to this story is its climax or to be more specific the plot resolution. As a reader I don’t expect to have a neat and clean resolution however in many cases even rough edged climaxes can be fulfilling. This sadly is not the case; the plot resolution seems a bit choppy if that adjective can be applied. The final twist of the story while being a thoroughly good one somehow takes a bit out of the story. From a storytelling perspective it’s has to be lauded as the reader will not be expecting it at all. But for me it didn't quite gel with the earlier direction of the story. The ending is the sole drawback in this fine collaborative effort that makes it rank at a solid three and half stars of a possible five.
CONCLUSION: EERIE by the Crouch brothers is a good horror story that will raise goose-bumps for most readers, tightly plotted and streamlined to give the readers a thrill ride as is the case with most Blake Crouch titles. EERIE is an excellent experiment albeit with a slightly confusing ending. Give it a read if you are a fan of horror stories with a touch of the weird. I look forward with great excitement to any future collaboration these two might write as well as their solo titles.
Winners of The Indie Day II Giveaway!!!
To contact us Click HERE
Congratulations to Rebecca Long (Florida) who was randomly selected to win a KINDLE FIRE and to Carl V. Anderson (Missouri) who was randomly selected to win a KINDLE TOUCH, courtesy of M.R. Mathias!!! Each winner will also receive the following titles for their new Kindle:
Happy 4thof July!!!
Congratulations to Rebecca Long (Florida) who was randomly selected to win a KINDLE FIRE and to Carl V. Anderson (Missouri) who was randomly selected to win a KINDLE TOUCH, courtesy of M.R. Mathias!!! Each winner will also receive the following titles for their new Kindle:- The Sword & the Dragon (Wardstone Book I)
- Kings, Queens, Heroes, & Fools (Wardstone Book II)
- The Wizard & The Warlord (Wardstone Book III)
- The First Dragoneer Prequel Novella
- The Royal Dragoneers (Dragoneers Book I)
- Cold Hearted Son of a Witch (Dragoneers Book II)
- The Confliction (Dragoneers Book III)
- Crimzon & Clover 1
- Crimzon & Clover 2
- A Tide of Shadows by Tom Bielawski
- Chronicles of the Nameless Dwarf (The Ant-Man of Malfen, The Axe of the Dwarf Lords, The Scout and the Serpent) by D.P. Prior
- Ghosts of the Asylum by Ty Johnston
- V Trooper: First Mission & V Trooper: The Demon by Thomas Rowe Drinkard
Happy 4thof July!!!
"The Sacrifice Game" by Brian D'Amato (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu)
To contact us Click HERE
Official Brian D'Amato WebsiteOrder "The Sacrifice Game" HERE
Read FBC Review of “In the Courts of the Sun”
INTRODUCTION: In 2009, Brian D'Amato published the superb In the Courts of the Sun first in an announced trilogy called The Sacrifice Game. The novel was a combination of near-future extrapolations, time travel and a wonderful recreation of the Maya world of the 7th century, all narrated by unlikely hero Jed de Landa, or more precisely by Jed 1 and Jed 2 as the novel uses a form of time travel which leads to an instance of the consciousness of Jed to be time shifted to the brain of Chacal, a star Maya ball player of the Harpy clan of Ix.
Here is my description of Jed in the FBC review linked above:
"born in 1974 and displaced from his native Guatemalan village by military action, Jed is taken as a young age to the US and grows up in foster care in Utah, exhibiting physical frailty since he suffers from hemophilia so any wound or cut is potentially fatal, while showing great mental agility especially in fast numerical computations and ability to play games of skill and chance".
I was entranced by the novel and its fascinating narrator and I kept looking for the second book in 2010, 2011 and then sort of forgot about it. Imagine my surprise to recently discover that the 2nd Jed de Landa novel that bears the trilogy title, The Sacrifice Game will be published on July 5.
As the blurb of the novel includes a major spoiler for the ending of In the Courts of the Sun, I will not include it here just in case you have not read that but are intrigued by the above and want to pick it first, but I will note that The Sacrifice Game starts precisely where the earlier volume ends and the rest of the blurb is both true and misleading in the sense that there is no more "Jed", but Jed 1 and Jed 2 who diverged markedly - to say the least - in the first volume and some of the blurb refers to one, some to the other...
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: "Sometimes—at times like this, I’d say, especially—one might as well just go with the cliché: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than crushed, but really, why bother? Crushed pretty well does the job.
What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I—even I—was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed—that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of Game of Thrones, I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.
Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought...."
The Sacrifice Game is even badder, crazier and more explicit and brutal than In the Courts of the Sun - which was not tame by any stretch - as it is almost all narrated in the same unforgettable voice of Jed de Landa, though Jed 2, the 660's Maya one and to whom the stream of consciousness musings above belong, carries on for most of the book.
Structurally, The Sacrifice Game starts with Jed 1 in the modern world after his momentous decision at the end of the last book and deals with its implementation and a few consequences, but soon it moves to the Maya world where the book just explodes as it gets even better than In the Courts of the Sun with unbounded sense of wonder, meticulous research and all around inventiveness that matches anything I've read in sf set on an alien world; of course here we are still on Earth, but in a civilization where the author hits the sweet spot in the mixture of alien and familiar in describing it:
"A brace of bearers brought in the white-wrapped ball Hun Xoc had brought back from 31 Courts, holding the too-potent bundle with wooden hands, and tied it to the service cord. An umpire inspected the knot, signaled, and the ball was hoisted up, hanging above the central marker stone.
“Now, One, Two, Four, Five, Seven, Nine, Thirteen,” the Magister Ludi chanted, switching from the second-person plural imperative to the apostrophic tense you used only when speaking to gods,
“Now Twenty, Fifty-Two, Two Hundred Sixty,
O Night, O Wind, O Day, O Rain, O Zero,
Now, guests, inspect 2 Creeper’s blood-washed head.”
2 Creeper had been the greatest Ixian ballplayer in living memory, but he’d sacrificed himself thirty-nine solar years ago after an ankle injury. The Ball had been wound of white rubber around 2 Creeper’s skull as a hollow center—to increase the bounce—and then baked black and studded with painted thorns, like little nails. Finally the ball had been purified in two kinds of blood and then washed in original water boiled over the offering fires of both houses’ grandfathers-houses."
Lady Koh, ultimate Sacrifice Game player of the age and big time politician to boot, 2 Jeweled Skull, leader of the Harpy clan in Ix, second most powerful man there, adoptive father to Jed/Chacal, currently in the contest of his life with 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the Ocelot clan supremo of Ix, Hun Xoc, son of 2JS, lead ball player of the Harpies team and Jed's main adviser/friend, 1 Gila, right hand man of Lady Koh and war leader of her followers are back, while of course quite a few new Mayan characters appear. As excerpted above there is one unforgettable game of hipball for the fate of Ix and by extension, our heroes and life as we know it, not to speak of many other goodies which I do not want to spoil for you...
There are quite a few twists and turns and the author manages a rare feat as first person narration goes; while it would be a major spoiler to talk about it in detail, I am sure any attentive reader will observe it by the end of the novel.
The last few chapters that take place back in the modern world have a thriller-ish feel to them - after all the book is set in 2012 close to 12-21-12 and the race to avoid the ultimate "doomster" is the main storyline in the contemporary part of the novel.
The Sacrifice Game has another surprising but fitting ending giving the book the feel of a complete experience which also leaves one quite in the dark about where the series will go next as it's supposed to be a trilogy.
Overall The Sacrifice Game - top 25 novel of 2012 and currently in the number two slot - came with very high expectations and I was really surprised by how effortlessly it blew past them and offered the most sensual and visual reading experience of the year for me.
Official Brian D'Amato WebsiteOrder "The Sacrifice Game" HERE
Read FBC Review of “In the Courts of the Sun”
INTRODUCTION: In 2009, Brian D'Amato published the superb In the Courts of the Sun first in an announced trilogy called The Sacrifice Game. The novel was a combination of near-future extrapolations, time travel and a wonderful recreation of the Maya world of the 7th century, all narrated by unlikely hero Jed de Landa, or more precisely by Jed 1 and Jed 2 as the novel uses a form of time travel which leads to an instance of the consciousness of Jed to be time shifted to the brain of Chacal, a star Maya ball player of the Harpy clan of Ix.
Here is my description of Jed in the FBC review linked above:
"born in 1974 and displaced from his native Guatemalan village by military action, Jed is taken as a young age to the US and grows up in foster care in Utah, exhibiting physical frailty since he suffers from hemophilia so any wound or cut is potentially fatal, while showing great mental agility especially in fast numerical computations and ability to play games of skill and chance".
I was entranced by the novel and its fascinating narrator and I kept looking for the second book in 2010, 2011 and then sort of forgot about it. Imagine my surprise to recently discover that the 2nd Jed de Landa novel that bears the trilogy title, The Sacrifice Game will be published on July 5.
As the blurb of the novel includes a major spoiler for the ending of In the Courts of the Sun, I will not include it here just in case you have not read that but are intrigued by the above and want to pick it first, but I will note that The Sacrifice Game starts precisely where the earlier volume ends and the rest of the blurb is both true and misleading in the sense that there is no more "Jed", but Jed 1 and Jed 2 who diverged markedly - to say the least - in the first volume and some of the blurb refers to one, some to the other...
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: "Sometimes—at times like this, I’d say, especially—one might as well just go with the cliché: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than crushed, but really, why bother? Crushed pretty well does the job.
What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I—even I—was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed—that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of Game of Thrones, I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.
Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought...."
The Sacrifice Game is even badder, crazier and more explicit and brutal than In the Courts of the Sun - which was not tame by any stretch - as it is almost all narrated in the same unforgettable voice of Jed de Landa, though Jed 2, the 660's Maya one and to whom the stream of consciousness musings above belong, carries on for most of the book.
Structurally, The Sacrifice Game starts with Jed 1 in the modern world after his momentous decision at the end of the last book and deals with its implementation and a few consequences, but soon it moves to the Maya world where the book just explodes as it gets even better than In the Courts of the Sun with unbounded sense of wonder, meticulous research and all around inventiveness that matches anything I've read in sf set on an alien world; of course here we are still on Earth, but in a civilization where the author hits the sweet spot in the mixture of alien and familiar in describing it:
"A brace of bearers brought in the white-wrapped ball Hun Xoc had brought back from 31 Courts, holding the too-potent bundle with wooden hands, and tied it to the service cord. An umpire inspected the knot, signaled, and the ball was hoisted up, hanging above the central marker stone.
“Now, One, Two, Four, Five, Seven, Nine, Thirteen,” the Magister Ludi chanted, switching from the second-person plural imperative to the apostrophic tense you used only when speaking to gods,
“Now Twenty, Fifty-Two, Two Hundred Sixty,
O Night, O Wind, O Day, O Rain, O Zero,
Now, guests, inspect 2 Creeper’s blood-washed head.”
2 Creeper had been the greatest Ixian ballplayer in living memory, but he’d sacrificed himself thirty-nine solar years ago after an ankle injury. The Ball had been wound of white rubber around 2 Creeper’s skull as a hollow center—to increase the bounce—and then baked black and studded with painted thorns, like little nails. Finally the ball had been purified in two kinds of blood and then washed in original water boiled over the offering fires of both houses’ grandfathers-houses."
Lady Koh, ultimate Sacrifice Game player of the age and big time politician to boot, 2 Jeweled Skull, leader of the Harpy clan in Ix, second most powerful man there, adoptive father to Jed/Chacal, currently in the contest of his life with 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the Ocelot clan supremo of Ix, Hun Xoc, son of 2JS, lead ball player of the Harpies team and Jed's main adviser/friend, 1 Gila, right hand man of Lady Koh and war leader of her followers are back, while of course quite a few new Mayan characters appear. As excerpted above there is one unforgettable game of hipball for the fate of Ix and by extension, our heroes and life as we know it, not to speak of many other goodies which I do not want to spoil for you...
There are quite a few twists and turns and the author manages a rare feat as first person narration goes; while it would be a major spoiler to talk about it in detail, I am sure any attentive reader will observe it by the end of the novel.
The last few chapters that take place back in the modern world have a thriller-ish feel to them - after all the book is set in 2012 close to 12-21-12 and the race to avoid the ultimate "doomster" is the main storyline in the contemporary part of the novel.
The Sacrifice Game has another surprising but fitting ending giving the book the feel of a complete experience which also leaves one quite in the dark about where the series will go next as it's supposed to be a trilogy.
Overall The Sacrifice Game - top 25 novel of 2012 and currently in the number two slot - came with very high expectations and I was really surprised by how effortlessly it blew past them and offered the most sensual and visual reading experience of the year for me.
A Mini-Interview with KJ Parker (Questions asked by Liviu Suciu and Mihir Wanchoo)
To contact us Click HERE
KJ Parker at Wikipedia
Read KJ Parker's story Amor Vincit Omnia
Read KJ Parker's story Let Maps to OthersRead KJ Parker's story A Small Price to Pay for a BirdsongRead KJ Parker on "Cutting Edge Technology"
Read FBC Rv of Blue and Gold
Read FBC Rv of The Folding Knife
Read FBC Rv of Purple & Black
Read FBC Rv of A Rich Full Week (short story)
Read FBC Rv of The Scavenger TrilogyRead FBC Rv of The Hammer
Recently Fantasy Book Critic has been honored to participate in a round of interviews with K.J. Parker. We submitted a few questions and the author graciously answered three of them which I am presenting below. The first comes from Mihir and the other two from myself.
I would also note that the author's latest novel Sharps is already out at least from Amazon and I plan to publish FBC's review of it next Tuesday, July 10 (hint: it's my number 1 novel of the year to date), hopefully with a contribution from Mihir too, while KJ Parker latest story, Let Maps to Others, is also out, this time available for free courtesy of the wonderful Subterranean Press as are two earlier stories linked above and a fascinating article on the history of sword making.
Enjoy!
***************************************************************
1. You seem to buck the fantasy trend of long, fat book series as you mostly have written trilogies and standalone books, Could you expound on the reasoning or wish to write in such a manner?
Do please be careful what you say. It was reviewers complimenting me on writing magic-free fantasy that started me writing a whole slew of short stories about wizards. If I now decide to write a series so long, rambling and interminable that it makes the Wheel of Time look like a haiku, it’ll be entirely your fault.
Ideas come in different sizes. The aspect of writing I most enjoy is playing funny games with structure and form. The fantasy genre lends itself particularly well to a wide variety of forms, from three-minute songs to sonatas to symphonies to Ring cycles. It all depends on what you want to say next.
2. When reading Sharps, I thought the main characters resembled to some extent a few of your most interesting characters from earlier books - Suidas was not unlike the heroes of The Company, Addo not unlike Gignomai (The Hammer), Iseutz not unlike the heroine with the same name in the Fencer trilogy though with less baggage, while Giraut and Phrantzes were the seemingly expendable nobodies that appear in various places in your work, only to take over in crucial moments. Was that intentional or are you fascinated with several archetype characters so they tend to reoccur in your novels?
Although my books are primarily about characters rather than situations, ideas &c, I audition for characters to play parts that further a theme. The themes that interest me tend to call for particular types of character. I like to hire specialists. Incidentally, I’m interested that Addo reminds you of Gig; I’d have thought he was more like Miel Ducas, only with a vestigial backbone. He can’t be simply a rehash of earlier characters, since he’s based on my daughter’s latest boyfriend, who hadn’t appeared on the scene until long after Gignomai and Miel Ducas were safely in the can.
3. What is about fencing that fascinates you, as the subject is central to a trilogy, a standalone and appears frequently in all your other work?
The cornerstone of prose fiction is interaction between characters; interaction leads to conflict, conflict leads to drama (the dark side are they). Fencing is aggression, the urge to hurt and kill, formalized into a cross between chess and ballet; one famous definition of fencing is ‘a conversation in steel’. The late Arthur Wise, a leading authority on the history of combat, said that violence is above all a means of communication. Fencing is how my characters communicate with each other.
KJ Parker at Wikipedia
Read KJ Parker's story Amor Vincit Omnia
Read KJ Parker's story Let Maps to OthersRead KJ Parker's story A Small Price to Pay for a BirdsongRead KJ Parker on "Cutting Edge Technology"
Read FBC Rv of Blue and Gold
Read FBC Rv of The Folding Knife
Read FBC Rv of Purple & Black
Read FBC Rv of A Rich Full Week (short story)
Read FBC Rv of The Scavenger TrilogyRead FBC Rv of The Hammer
Recently Fantasy Book Critic has been honored to participate in a round of interviews with K.J. Parker. We submitted a few questions and the author graciously answered three of them which I am presenting below. The first comes from Mihir and the other two from myself.
I would also note that the author's latest novel Sharps is already out at least from Amazon and I plan to publish FBC's review of it next Tuesday, July 10 (hint: it's my number 1 novel of the year to date), hopefully with a contribution from Mihir too, while KJ Parker latest story, Let Maps to Others, is also out, this time available for free courtesy of the wonderful Subterranean Press as are two earlier stories linked above and a fascinating article on the history of sword making.
Enjoy!
***************************************************************
1. You seem to buck the fantasy trend of long, fat book series as you mostly have written trilogies and standalone books, Could you expound on the reasoning or wish to write in such a manner?
Do please be careful what you say. It was reviewers complimenting me on writing magic-free fantasy that started me writing a whole slew of short stories about wizards. If I now decide to write a series so long, rambling and interminable that it makes the Wheel of Time look like a haiku, it’ll be entirely your fault.
Ideas come in different sizes. The aspect of writing I most enjoy is playing funny games with structure and form. The fantasy genre lends itself particularly well to a wide variety of forms, from three-minute songs to sonatas to symphonies to Ring cycles. It all depends on what you want to say next.
2. When reading Sharps, I thought the main characters resembled to some extent a few of your most interesting characters from earlier books - Suidas was not unlike the heroes of The Company, Addo not unlike Gignomai (The Hammer), Iseutz not unlike the heroine with the same name in the Fencer trilogy though with less baggage, while Giraut and Phrantzes were the seemingly expendable nobodies that appear in various places in your work, only to take over in crucial moments. Was that intentional or are you fascinated with several archetype characters so they tend to reoccur in your novels?
Although my books are primarily about characters rather than situations, ideas &c, I audition for characters to play parts that further a theme. The themes that interest me tend to call for particular types of character. I like to hire specialists. Incidentally, I’m interested that Addo reminds you of Gig; I’d have thought he was more like Miel Ducas, only with a vestigial backbone. He can’t be simply a rehash of earlier characters, since he’s based on my daughter’s latest boyfriend, who hadn’t appeared on the scene until long after Gignomai and Miel Ducas were safely in the can.
3. What is about fencing that fascinates you, as the subject is central to a trilogy, a standalone and appears frequently in all your other work?
The cornerstone of prose fiction is interaction between characters; interaction leads to conflict, conflict leads to drama (the dark side are they). Fencing is aggression, the urge to hurt and kill, formalized into a cross between chess and ballet; one famous definition of fencing is ‘a conversation in steel’. The late Arthur Wise, a leading authority on the history of combat, said that violence is above all a means of communication. Fencing is how my characters communicate with each other.
"The Ghostwriter" by Zoran Zivkovic (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu)
To contact us Click HERE
Official Zoran Zivkovic WebsiteOrder The Ghostwriter HERE (UK print, drm-free ebook) or HERE (US drm-free ebook)
INTRODUCTION: Zoran Zivkovic is an author who should be a household name for any lover of Eastern European fantastica, that blend of the real and unreal set in a world that is both familiar and strange and whose best known practitioners in the Western world are probably Kafka, Bulgakov and Lem.
(some of the wonderful print editions I own of his books in addition to the various e's)
Over the past 10-15 years I have been reading various works of Zoran Zivkovic as they have been appearing in English, though I sort of lost track of his books in the past few years until yesterday and a pdf e-arc of The Ghostwriter courtesy of PS Publishing which entranced me from the first page, made me gather again the books I already have and buy a few more from Amazon Kindle for good measure, so now I have all his English language works except the last novel, The Five Wonders of the Danube which has not yet been published in the UK or the US. Expect more reviews of his work as I read or occasionally even reread them...
"A writer sits down to work, but who can resist the addictive temptation of the email inbox? Each message alert brings a new question and a fresh challenge, until a tangled web weaves its way around the hapless author. Yet all the while his cat, Felix, gets on with life regardless. Zoran Zivkovic’s hilarious new novella lays bare the oddities and absurdities of the writing life: the traps writers set for themselves and the snares readers lay for them. Here, too, are fascinating puzzles about the nature of authorship and the writer’s identity, the relationship between the writer and their work and between the writer and the reader, the reader and that which is read. Above all, though, it is a paean to the Cat, to a relationship which in its simplicity and innocence, its playfulness and affection, makes nonsense of all these human perplexities. "
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: "The Ghostwriter" is a lighter and funnier piece but with a serious underlying theme that took over my reading yesterday and I could not put it down until finished. The first few lines quoted below attracted my attention and from then on the virtual doings of our narrator and his email obsession as well as his adventures both past and present with his spoiled tomcat Felix proved impossible to resist.
"HAD THE EMAIL STARTED ANY OTHER WAY, I certainly would have deleted it immediately. For a long time I have saved almost every message and replied to most of them, but finally I came to my senses. Now I only save the ones that seem important because there is less and less time. But what writer could resist the flattery of a devotee, even an anonymous one?
Highly Esteemed Writer,
I am a great fan of your work. I have a business proposal to make in this regard. Would you be interested in hearing about it?
Sincerely,An Admirer"
So we meet the narrator, a quite successful but loner writer who is going currently through a "drought" and who has developed an email addiction. For a while now he has been entertaining long email conversations with four other persons, all identified by pseudonyms as he also uses one too, being "Felix" in cyberspace: "OpenSea" - a bitter unsuccessful writer, "Banana" a wannabe lady writer with a fixation on our hero, "Pandora" an elderly neighboring lady with an old dog and "P-0" a writer of pastiches (fan fiction) of our hero's work...
As it happens all four correspondents, the "admirer" and Felix the cat, gang on our hero in a convoluted tale that is both superbly brought together and utterly funny. The clues to the identity of the unknown correspondent are scattered throughout the story and if by the end you are still in doubt, an excellent afterword by Michael Morrison will spell it for you, but "The Ghostwriter" will enchant nonetheless and you may find yourself visiting Amazon and getting some of the numerous inexpensive drm-free ebooks of the author or some of the superbly realized print editions which are more boutique-like...
Overall The Ghostwriter is highly recommended and a very good introduction to the author's work.
Official Zoran Zivkovic WebsiteOrder The Ghostwriter HERE (UK print, drm-free ebook) or HERE (US drm-free ebook)
INTRODUCTION: Zoran Zivkovic is an author who should be a household name for any lover of Eastern European fantastica, that blend of the real and unreal set in a world that is both familiar and strange and whose best known practitioners in the Western world are probably Kafka, Bulgakov and Lem.
(some of the wonderful print editions I own of his books in addition to the various e's)Over the past 10-15 years I have been reading various works of Zoran Zivkovic as they have been appearing in English, though I sort of lost track of his books in the past few years until yesterday and a pdf e-arc of The Ghostwriter courtesy of PS Publishing which entranced me from the first page, made me gather again the books I already have and buy a few more from Amazon Kindle for good measure, so now I have all his English language works except the last novel, The Five Wonders of the Danube which has not yet been published in the UK or the US. Expect more reviews of his work as I read or occasionally even reread them...
"A writer sits down to work, but who can resist the addictive temptation of the email inbox? Each message alert brings a new question and a fresh challenge, until a tangled web weaves its way around the hapless author. Yet all the while his cat, Felix, gets on with life regardless. Zoran Zivkovic’s hilarious new novella lays bare the oddities and absurdities of the writing life: the traps writers set for themselves and the snares readers lay for them. Here, too, are fascinating puzzles about the nature of authorship and the writer’s identity, the relationship between the writer and their work and between the writer and the reader, the reader and that which is read. Above all, though, it is a paean to the Cat, to a relationship which in its simplicity and innocence, its playfulness and affection, makes nonsense of all these human perplexities. "
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: "The Ghostwriter" is a lighter and funnier piece but with a serious underlying theme that took over my reading yesterday and I could not put it down until finished. The first few lines quoted below attracted my attention and from then on the virtual doings of our narrator and his email obsession as well as his adventures both past and present with his spoiled tomcat Felix proved impossible to resist.
"HAD THE EMAIL STARTED ANY OTHER WAY, I certainly would have deleted it immediately. For a long time I have saved almost every message and replied to most of them, but finally I came to my senses. Now I only save the ones that seem important because there is less and less time. But what writer could resist the flattery of a devotee, even an anonymous one?
Highly Esteemed Writer,
I am a great fan of your work. I have a business proposal to make in this regard. Would you be interested in hearing about it?
Sincerely,An Admirer"
So we meet the narrator, a quite successful but loner writer who is going currently through a "drought" and who has developed an email addiction. For a while now he has been entertaining long email conversations with four other persons, all identified by pseudonyms as he also uses one too, being "Felix" in cyberspace: "OpenSea" - a bitter unsuccessful writer, "Banana" a wannabe lady writer with a fixation on our hero, "Pandora" an elderly neighboring lady with an old dog and "P-0" a writer of pastiches (fan fiction) of our hero's work...
As it happens all four correspondents, the "admirer" and Felix the cat, gang on our hero in a convoluted tale that is both superbly brought together and utterly funny. The clues to the identity of the unknown correspondent are scattered throughout the story and if by the end you are still in doubt, an excellent afterword by Michael Morrison will spell it for you, but "The Ghostwriter" will enchant nonetheless and you may find yourself visiting Amazon and getting some of the numerous inexpensive drm-free ebooks of the author or some of the superbly realized print editions which are more boutique-like...
Overall The Ghostwriter is highly recommended and a very good introduction to the author's work.
5 Temmuz 2012 Perşembe
Principles of Angels by Jaine Fenn
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Khesh City floats above the uninhabitable surface of the planet Vellern. It is a city of contrasts, with the rich and powerful living on the luxurious surface and the poor and downtrodden forced to live in the Undertow. The city is a democracy by assassination, where unpopular politicians can be removed by official killers known as Angels. When an Angel is brutally murdered, it falls to her nephew, Taro, to learn the reasons why.
Principles of Angels, the debut novel by Jaine Fenn and the first in her loosely-linked Hidden Empire sequence, is a far-future SF novel centred on two contrasting protagonists: Taro, a male prostitute trying to avenge his murdered aunt, and Elarn, a high-class singer who has been blackmailed into travelling to the city to commit a heinous crime. Taro lives in an underworld of crime and exploitation, but is idealistic, which leads him into becoming an agent for the Minister, the city's enigmatic ruler. Elarn is a more civilised character, out to do the right thing but trapped in a situation not of her own making, one which could have severe repercussions for the entire human race. Other major characters include the Minister himself, the Angel Nual and detective/info-broker Meraint. Fenn does an effective job of distinguishing and motivating these individuals, although the focus is firmly on the two main characters (who alternate POV chapters for much of the novel).
A thousand years before the events of the novel, mankind was ruled by an alien species, the Sidhe. Humanity broke free of their control and apparently destroyed them but, as the title of the series indicates, this may not be the case. Fenn does a good job of filling us in on this backstory by seeding the information into the text naturally, not relying on info-dumps. In doing so, she creates an intriguing universe which the reader definitely wants to see more of.
The plot unfolds at a good pace, helped by the book's relatively concise length (the novel is just over 300 pages long in paperback) which keeps events moving nicely. The writing is reasonable, though given the weird and unusual nature of the setting possibly a little too straightforward. Ultimately, events unfold in interesting enough a manner to make the sequels - Consorts of Heaven, Guardians of Paradise, Bringer of Light and Queen of Nowhere - appealing.
Principles of Angels (***½) is a decent debut novel, with well-drawn characters, a memorable setting and an interesting premise. The book suffers a little from too tight a focus on the two principals, which results in some of the more interesting side-cast being neglected, and also from a writing style that feels like it should have been bolder rather than settling for decent. It is still an entertaining book which effectively sets up a fascinating universe. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.
Principles of Angels, the debut novel by Jaine Fenn and the first in her loosely-linked Hidden Empire sequence, is a far-future SF novel centred on two contrasting protagonists: Taro, a male prostitute trying to avenge his murdered aunt, and Elarn, a high-class singer who has been blackmailed into travelling to the city to commit a heinous crime. Taro lives in an underworld of crime and exploitation, but is idealistic, which leads him into becoming an agent for the Minister, the city's enigmatic ruler. Elarn is a more civilised character, out to do the right thing but trapped in a situation not of her own making, one which could have severe repercussions for the entire human race. Other major characters include the Minister himself, the Angel Nual and detective/info-broker Meraint. Fenn does an effective job of distinguishing and motivating these individuals, although the focus is firmly on the two main characters (who alternate POV chapters for much of the novel).
A thousand years before the events of the novel, mankind was ruled by an alien species, the Sidhe. Humanity broke free of their control and apparently destroyed them but, as the title of the series indicates, this may not be the case. Fenn does a good job of filling us in on this backstory by seeding the information into the text naturally, not relying on info-dumps. In doing so, she creates an intriguing universe which the reader definitely wants to see more of.
The plot unfolds at a good pace, helped by the book's relatively concise length (the novel is just over 300 pages long in paperback) which keeps events moving nicely. The writing is reasonable, though given the weird and unusual nature of the setting possibly a little too straightforward. Ultimately, events unfold in interesting enough a manner to make the sequels - Consorts of Heaven, Guardians of Paradise, Bringer of Light and Queen of Nowhere - appealing.
Principles of Angels (***½) is a decent debut novel, with well-drawn characters, a memorable setting and an interesting premise. The book suffers a little from too tight a focus on the two principals, which results in some of the more interesting side-cast being neglected, and also from a writing style that feels like it should have been bolder rather than settling for decent. It is still an entertaining book which effectively sets up a fascinating universe. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.
Dungeons and Dragons 3 movie trailer
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A trailer has been released for the third movie based on the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. You may gaze upon it below, but I take absolutely no responsibility for anyone smashing their screens in horror at its quality:
The first film, simply entitled Dungeons and Dragons, was an famously rubbish, medium-budget movie released in 2000, starring Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch and Marlon Wayans. The sequel, Wrath of the Dragon God, was released in 2005 and was a near-zero budget movie starring absolutely no-one you've ever heard of. Whilst the first film was awful, it did have some basic watchability (due to the excellent 'down a pint every time Jeremy Irons either overacts or looks like part of his soul has died due to the dialogue' drinking game). The sequel was fifty times worse. If the trailer is accurate, the third will continue this decline in quality to hitherto unsuspected depths.
If you want to watch a decent D&D-based movie, I instead unreservedly recommend The Gamers II: Dorkness Rising, a very zero-budget indie movie made by fans with real talent and wit, and much more successfully nails what makes roleplaying games fun.
The first film, simply entitled Dungeons and Dragons, was an famously rubbish, medium-budget movie released in 2000, starring Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch and Marlon Wayans. The sequel, Wrath of the Dragon God, was released in 2005 and was a near-zero budget movie starring absolutely no-one you've ever heard of. Whilst the first film was awful, it did have some basic watchability (due to the excellent 'down a pint every time Jeremy Irons either overacts or looks like part of his soul has died due to the dialogue' drinking game). The sequel was fifty times worse. If the trailer is accurate, the third will continue this decline in quality to hitherto unsuspected depths.
If you want to watch a decent D&D-based movie, I instead unreservedly recommend The Gamers II: Dorkness Rising, a very zero-budget indie movie made by fans with real talent and wit, and much more successfully nails what makes roleplaying games fun.
Consorts of Heaven by Jaine Fenn
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It is a time of tribulation for Kerin. Discriminated against in her village for the circumstances of her birth, her son Damaru is skytouched and will soon be blessed by being raised to the ranks of the Consorts. Events are complicated by the discovery of an unconscious man in the mere outside the village. As Kerin helps him regain his health, his memory comes back in fits and starts...and indicates that Kerin's world and everything she knows may be a lie.
Consorts of Heaven is the second novel in Jaine Fenn's Hidden Empire sequence (which currently stands at four books, with a fifth out this year). It is not a follow-up to Principles of Angels, instead taking place roughly simultaneously with it but in a different part of the galaxy. It can be read independently of the first volume. The first novel was more overtly SF, with a dash of the New Weird added to it, but this second volume is more akin to traditional fantasy. It's set in a much more primitive world where some people have abilities that seem similar to magic.
As with her first novel, Fenn has created an interesting world based on some solid foundations, and seeing how this lines up with what was established in Principles of Angels can be fun. Also, as with her first novel, Fenn undercuts the premise and fascinating backstory with a fairly indifferent prose style. This is made even worse by featuring some considerably less-interesting characters than the first book. The major protagonists - Kerin, the amnesiac Sais and the priest Einon - have potential, but ultimately end up being fairly straightforward and predictable. The commentary on the planet's problems, such as being in the grip of a religious theocracy and its issues with rampant sexism, also disappointingly never rise above the obvious.
There are a few nice touches. A traditional SF mega-structure turns up later on in an interesting guise and, despite the primitive setting, we get a lot more information on how the basics of Fenn's SF universe work (such as how FTL is employed in the setting). But ultimately the novel, whilst certainly not disastrous, is not as engaging as its predecessor.
Consorts of Heaven (***) is available now in the UK and USA.
Consorts of Heaven is the second novel in Jaine Fenn's Hidden Empire sequence (which currently stands at four books, with a fifth out this year). It is not a follow-up to Principles of Angels, instead taking place roughly simultaneously with it but in a different part of the galaxy. It can be read independently of the first volume. The first novel was more overtly SF, with a dash of the New Weird added to it, but this second volume is more akin to traditional fantasy. It's set in a much more primitive world where some people have abilities that seem similar to magic.
As with her first novel, Fenn has created an interesting world based on some solid foundations, and seeing how this lines up with what was established in Principles of Angels can be fun. Also, as with her first novel, Fenn undercuts the premise and fascinating backstory with a fairly indifferent prose style. This is made even worse by featuring some considerably less-interesting characters than the first book. The major protagonists - Kerin, the amnesiac Sais and the priest Einon - have potential, but ultimately end up being fairly straightforward and predictable. The commentary on the planet's problems, such as being in the grip of a religious theocracy and its issues with rampant sexism, also disappointingly never rise above the obvious.
There are a few nice touches. A traditional SF mega-structure turns up later on in an interesting guise and, despite the primitive setting, we get a lot more information on how the basics of Fenn's SF universe work (such as how FTL is employed in the setting). But ultimately the novel, whilst certainly not disastrous, is not as engaging as its predecessor.
Consorts of Heaven (***) is available now in the UK and USA.
Eastbound and Down: Season 1
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Kenny Powers is a former baseball pitcher, noted for his powerful throws. He has been forced out of the game due to his drug-taking, partying, abrasive personality and use of steroids, all of which has also left him broke. Returning to his hometown of Shelby, North Carolina, he is forced to move in with his brother's family and take up a position as a temporary sports coach at his old high school. Powers is determined to both return to the major leagues and win back his old sweetheart, who is now engaged to the school principal, but finds it difficult to change his lifestyle and attitude.
Eastbound and Down is a HBO comedy show starring Danny McBride, who also co-created the series. It's strongly similar in style to the Will Ferrell school of comedy (Ferrell is a producer on the show and has a recurring role), based on social faux pas and inappropriate behaviour with awkward silences and a healthy dose of swearing and occasional gross-out moments. However, freed from the cliches of the two-hour comedy movie format, the show is more successful at achieving a decent level of characterisation and (mostly) avoiding mawkish sentiment.
McBride is the show's main star and makes the character of Powers work well. He's not a particularly sympathetic figure, especially as he himself is responsible for almost all of his problems, but is funny and possesses enough personality to make it plausible that he'd have so many friends and people who want to help him, despite his appalling behaviour. Most of the rest of the cast puts in good work, especially John Hawkes and Jennifer Irwin as Kenny's long-suffering brother and sister-in-law, but the show relies on McBride's performance in order to function and he does a good job with the more dramatic stuff (particularly the final episode, which Powers's ambitions and dreams are not so much crushed as painfully atomised) as well as the humour.
The show employs an interesting device where each episode begins the moment the previous ends (breaking this format once), with the story continuously developing over the six-episode season. Character relationships evolve fairly steadily (and amusingly), although Powers's nemesis, Principal Cutler, doesn't work very well. It's good to see Will Ferrell being used fairly sparingly, but also disappointing that Craig Robinson's hilariously inept rival baseball player doesn't get more screentime.
There are some problems with pacing. The show frontloads a lot of its best gags into the first episode and the rest suffer a little in the process, whilst a fair few characters are under-utilised. The short length of the season (six 30-minute episodes) also prevents a number of side-stories from being developed. This does result in a concise, focused series that is surprisingly restless, unwilling to settle into a predictable format and takes a major turn in direction at its conclusion.
The first season of Eastbound and Down (***½) is watchable, funny and overall enjoyable thanks to some good performances, but is slightly let down by uneven pacing, a fair few jokes and moments that fall flat. The show is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).
Eastbound and Down is a HBO comedy show starring Danny McBride, who also co-created the series. It's strongly similar in style to the Will Ferrell school of comedy (Ferrell is a producer on the show and has a recurring role), based on social faux pas and inappropriate behaviour with awkward silences and a healthy dose of swearing and occasional gross-out moments. However, freed from the cliches of the two-hour comedy movie format, the show is more successful at achieving a decent level of characterisation and (mostly) avoiding mawkish sentiment.
McBride is the show's main star and makes the character of Powers work well. He's not a particularly sympathetic figure, especially as he himself is responsible for almost all of his problems, but is funny and possesses enough personality to make it plausible that he'd have so many friends and people who want to help him, despite his appalling behaviour. Most of the rest of the cast puts in good work, especially John Hawkes and Jennifer Irwin as Kenny's long-suffering brother and sister-in-law, but the show relies on McBride's performance in order to function and he does a good job with the more dramatic stuff (particularly the final episode, which Powers's ambitions and dreams are not so much crushed as painfully atomised) as well as the humour.
The show employs an interesting device where each episode begins the moment the previous ends (breaking this format once), with the story continuously developing over the six-episode season. Character relationships evolve fairly steadily (and amusingly), although Powers's nemesis, Principal Cutler, doesn't work very well. It's good to see Will Ferrell being used fairly sparingly, but also disappointing that Craig Robinson's hilariously inept rival baseball player doesn't get more screentime.
There are some problems with pacing. The show frontloads a lot of its best gags into the first episode and the rest suffer a little in the process, whilst a fair few characters are under-utilised. The short length of the season (six 30-minute episodes) also prevents a number of side-stories from being developed. This does result in a concise, focused series that is surprisingly restless, unwilling to settle into a predictable format and takes a major turn in direction at its conclusion.
The first season of Eastbound and Down (***½) is watchable, funny and overall enjoyable thanks to some good performances, but is slightly let down by uneven pacing, a fair few jokes and moments that fall flat. The show is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).
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