Competition: win copies of Edge of the World, Kevin J. Anderson’s new fantasy [closed]
Kevin J. Anderson has over 16 million books in print, in 29 languages worldwide (that’s a hell of a lot of books). He is the author of The Saga of Seven Suns, numerous X-Files and Star Wars novels, and the co-author of the bestselling Dune prequels and sequels. Now he has turned his attention to epic fantasy with The Edge of the World, the first volume of the Terra Incognita series.
Here’s a taste:
After generations of friction, the leaders of two lands meet in the holy city of Ishalem to bring an end to the bloodshed and to divide the world between them. Sadly, this new spirit of fellowship is shortlived. A single tragic accident destroys, in minutes, the peace that took years to build. The world is once more cast into the fires of war – and this time the flames may burn until nothing remains. From the highest lord to the lowest servant, no man or woman will be unchanged by the conflict. But while war rages across both continents, a great quest will defy storms and sea serpents to venture beyond the horizon, where no maps exist – to search for a land out of legend. It is a perilous undertaking, but there will always be the impetuous, the brave and the mad who are willing to leave their homes to explore the unknown. Even unto the edge of the world …
Whether you’re the highest lord or the lowest servant, you could win one of three copies if you can answer the following question:
In which of these fantasy classics is the world NOT described as flat, with an edge that it’s possible to sail off:
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis
- The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
- The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks
Kill & Cure, by Stephen Davison
Stephen Davison’s Kill & Cure ticks all of the medical thriller boxes. There is an “evil” company out to protect its research at all costs, a group of scientists putting themselves in harms way to outwit the company, and the man of the hour, in this case named David Stichell (called Stich), who rises up to outwit the inevitable police chase and find the truth. This is, in the end, a decent but not exceptional thriller, but the surprises that Davison has managed to fit into his debut novel make the book a quick read and fun few hours.
Surprise number one is David Stichell himself. He is not a top research scientist; he is a children’s chiropractor. Just the fact that he is one step out of the research that lies at the centre of the thriller helps the novel move forward more quickly. The explanations that Stichell receives don’t feel redundant because he needs them as much as the reader does. It makes the invariable scientific conversations seem much more natural as the main character is coming at it with no experience. The science is not seamlessly woven in, (and without the excuse of Stich’s ignorance, would seem heavy-handed indeed) but it isn’t too obscure – the usual genetic manipulation of seemingly perfect medicine. Read more
Hodd, by Adam Thorpe
It’s hard to think of an English folk hero with more reasonance and broad appeal than Robin Hood, as testified to by the sheer number of times his story has been turned in to films and TV series. With Ridley Scott’s version, starring Russell Crowe, hitting the big screen this year, and the BBC’s primetime adaptation reaching its third series, Adam Thorpe’s new novel is a timely reminder that the origins of the story almost certainly have very little to do with men in green tights, dispossessed nobility or doing anything for the benefit of the nameless poor.
Hodd is certainly an ambitious piece of work: it purports to be the English translation of copy of a Latin manuscript, discovered by a British army officer in a bombed out church during the Great War. Said officer, also a scholar, takes it upon himself to translate and annotate the manuscript, and we also have occassional interjections by Thorpe himself and several other ‘unknown hands’. It’s so utterly consistent and compelling that you feel if Adam Thorpe had teamed up with a master forger instead of a literary agent, quite a few people might have been convinced to rewrite history for real!
The Secret Life of Words, by Henry Hitchings
Please welcome the newest addition to the Bookgeeks crew, Ben Parker, who kicks off by reviewing a book that takes as its subject the very tools of the reviewer’s trade – words…
We are currently experiencing the fastest pace of neologisms, adoptions and coinages since the time of Shakespeare, thanks in part to the popularity of English as a second language, as well as to the rapid development of technology. This growth is bringing English close to a million words, with the Global Language Monitor currently estimating that the milestone will be reached on the morning of 10th June 2009. It seems, therefore, an ideal moment to look back at the story of English.
The Secret Life of Words by Henry Hitchings has the subtitle ‘How English became English’ and is the best account of this story that I have read so far. It is more in-depth than Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English and less academic than David Crystal’s The Stories of English, both excellent books in their own right. What makes Hitchings’ book stand out is the easy balance he has achieved between historical narrative and celebration of language.
Read more
Competition: win copies of Alex Bell’s new novel, Jasmyn [closed]
Following on from her spledid debut The Ninth Circle (which our own Simon A called “a great, character-driven, urban fantasy novel”), the fantasy-fiends over at Gollancz have give us three copies of Alex’s second novel to offer to you lovely people as prizes. Jasymn looks set to do for fairytales what The Ninth Circle did for angels and demons, and to be in with a chance to win, all you have to do is answer this simple question:
What did Jack exchange for some magic beans in the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk?
a. A sheep
b. A zebra
c. A cow
Could we make it any easier?
Ice Cold, by Andrea Maria Schenkel
Andrea Maria Schenkel’s Ice Cold is a darkly unsettling crime novel set in Thirties Germany with the unique twist that Nazis play virtually no part whatsoever. Instead this is a grim tale of rape, murder, fragile dreams and lost lives – and a sad and desperate story it is too.
The novel begins with an official letter ordering suppression of any news regarding the crimes and execution of a man guilty of a decade long series of rapes and murders in the country lanes around Munich. The execution follows immediately after and the rest of the novel looks backward to tell how he and his victims cross paths over the course of the preceding ten years.
Competition: good things come in threes! [closed]
Good things certainly come in threes this week. To celebrate the conclusion of two very enjoyable trilogies, Orbit have given us threes sets of both of them as prizes. Three lucky winners will each receive:
- Brian Ruckley’s Godless World trilogy: Winterbirth, Bloodheir and the final instalment, Fall of Thanes, as well as…
- Sean Williams’ Astropolis trilogy – Saturn Returns, Earth Ascendant and the third and last volume, The Grand Conjunction
All you have to do to win this frankly rather spiffing prize is answer one simple question:
Since we’re talking about third books, tell us this: which is the third book of the Bible?
a. Leviticus
b. Numbers
c. Joshua
The Adamantine Palace, by Stephen Deas
Stephen Deas’ The Adamantine Palace drops the reader directly into the action. In fact, flings or tumbles may be a better word considering that, within the first ten pages, a woman falls to her death from the back of a dragon. That ride is only the beginning of a wild journey that stretches across an entire world. Deas’ universe is a wild mesh of queens, dragons, towers, soothsayers, strife, and war – with a host of characters rushing and flying all over the landscape.
There are a lot of characters in this book and a lot of plot to spread around. This keeps the book moving at a frantic pace (and leaves a lot to be explored in further novels) but, especially in the beginning, keeping the shifting and intriguing of one set separate from the rest is quite tiring. But first, the dragons. Deas’ dragons are not mere beasts of burden or psychically bonded pets, they have a purpose – there are war dragons, hunting dragons, and one very special, completely white, dragon. There are implications that the dragons used to fly free, but they are now broken and trained in infancy to bear the knights and hunters of this world on their backs. The dragons have been bred for their jobs, but they contain reminders of their wild nature and are even less controlled than their handlers believe them to be. Read more
The Unknown Knowns, by Jeffrey Rotter
Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said:
There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.
He’s right of course, but his tortured attempt at expressing something we all ought to intuitively understand saw him widely slated in the media for communicating so poorly, and fortunately gives Jeffrey Rotter the title for his debut novel, a tale about the ‘War on Terror’ (inverted commas essential) that functions both as a madcap tale of two equally delusional misfits, and as an allegory for the collective insanity that overtook public policymakers in the US and other countries (including my own) in the aftermath of 9/11.
Jim Rath is a classic nerd: a comic collector with few social skills. On the night the action commences his most peculiar hobby has driven his wife to leave him: Jim believes in the aquatic ape therory of human evolution, and has combined this with his fetish for superhero comics to invent a complete underwater civilisation: Nautika. Every available moment is dedicated to Jim’s dream of opening a museum about Nautika – he sketches out weapons and buildings, imagines customs and invents stories. He even spends hours standing on the bottom of swimming pools with a snorkel, trying to achieve the trancelike state known to Nautikons as ooeee. For Jim, once he imagines something about Nautika, it’s tantamount to it being fact, and we also get several extracts from Jim’s imagined history of Nautika, replete with preposterous sexual imagery and B-movie melodrama (for more of a flavour of Nautika, check out the book’s website: The Museum of the Aquatic Ape).
An Edible History of Humanity, by Tom Standage
As wide-ranging as its title suggests, this book offers a broad sweep of human history – from prehistory to current times – refracted through the prism of food. Standage begins by showing how early hunter-gatherer communities, where food was shared in an egalitarian way, change with the advent of farming into unequal societies, marked by social difference. The development of agriculture leads to settled societies, which in turn become industrialized. Having set out the fundamental role that food has played in human history in place, Standage then explores different aspects of food in relation to human society.
This exploration covers some well-trodden ground, such as the part that spices played in triggering European exploration and colonisation. Standage, however, also demonstrates how Europe was competing with the Muslim world for valuable trade routes. With the background news of Swine Flu spreading around the world, his description of how the Black Death arrived in Europe partly because of the spice trade makes for uncomfortable reading. Standage’s historical journey ranges from a look at how the potato fuelled the Industrial Revolution to an examination of Napoleon’s organisational skill in providing food for the French Army. A particular highlight for me was Standage’s fascinating account of the discovery of ammonia synthesis in 1909, as a result of which ammonium sulphate fertilizer could be processed. This discovery, as Standage demonstrates, was to revolutionize farming and food production.
The Death Maze, by Ariana Franklin
Ariana Franklin’s The Death Maze is the excellent second novel in the “Adelia Aguilar” historical detective series. The first, The Mistress of the Art of Death, was an exciting and fascinating journey into the medieval world of Henry II, and its sequel continues in the same vein. Adelia Aguilar is still Henry II’s secret weapon, a woman who can find the truth by interpreting the marks that death leaves on a body. She has changed, though, and her new life and family make the risks she must take in her search both more frightening and more understandable.
Adelia is no longer the complete outsider she was in the first book. Although her career as a doctor can still place her in jeopardy, she has a home, friends, and a child to tie her to her new home in England. Her focused and occasionally crabby nature will be familiar to readers of the first book, and she has lost none of her intelligence or her desire to heal and understand the world around her. She has carved a quiet life out in the fens and seeks to raise her daughter in peace and surrounded by her friends. Adelia is not allowed to languish long in the countryside, though, for soon the newly appointed Bishop of St Albans is calling on her to investigate a death that could destroy the fragile peace that Henry has created. Read more
Waiting For The Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England, by Nick Cohen
In his brilliant book What’s Left?, Nick Cohen told the peculiar and depressing story of how in the early part of the 21st Century the orthodox liberal left had contorted itself into support for positions it would previously have held to be abhorrently inimical to secular democracy. It was the story of a crisis in Western liberal thought, of how relativism, obscurantism and knee-jerk anti-Americanism had supplanted belief in universal human liberties, and how, incredibly, by turning its back on these hard fought for liberties the orthodox liberal left was openly giving succour and support to groups who never believed in them in the first place.
The follow up, Waiting For The Etonians, is an equally excoriating and bleakly funny collection of Cohen’s recent pieces from The Observer, The New Statesmen and others, set against the backdrop of the dying embers of the longest left leaning government in British political history. As such it is a development of the themes in What’s Left? rather than a new book in its own right, but it is still for the most part a riveting read.
Martin Martin’s On The Other Side, by Mark Wernham
There’s something distinctly cinematic about Mark Wernham’s debut novel – perhaps that’s because it follows in the tradition of dark and satirical dystopia, a genre with notable successes in both book and film (with frequent crossovers): from the mind control of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the bleak streetscapes and casual brutality of A Clockwork Orange; from the grimy towers and ducts of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil to the seemingly idyllic but actually grim social stratification of Huxley’s Brave New World; there are echoes of them all in Martin Martin’s On the Other Side (with more than a little bit of Woody Allen’s Sleeper thrown in for good measure), and it’s a book that’s easy to picture on the big screen. That’s not to say that this is an unoriginal book, far from it – Mark Wernham knows his onions when it comes to skewering the ridiculousness of the present through the invention of a possible future, and it makes for an enjoyable read.
The hero is the fabulously named Jensen Interceptor (named after a 60s / 70s British GT sports car in case you didn’t know). Jensen was raised in an institution, a sort of baby farm, and then sent to a college which meant his entire direction in life from that point onward would be pre-ordained, as part of an overclass, a political and governmental elite that clearly runs the country. When they’re not at work (and even sometimes when they are) they are constantly popping all manner of chemicals to get them high, sharpen things up, and so on – the most ubiquitous is Boris, but during the course of the book Jensen is a walking pharamacy of stimulants, uppers, and downers. The main social activity is to visit Starfucks for casual sex (as in Brave New World, sex is seemingly totally divorced from reproduction) and yet more pills. All of this would be depressing enough, but the true shock is the sheer ignorance of this elite: Jensen doesn’t even know he’s named after a car, doesn’t know any history, has never been outside of his cushioned Central London bubble, and he’s clearly intended to be representative. The central premise for this dystopia, then, is “what would it be like if the idiots were in charge?”.
Consorts of Heaven, by Jaine Fenn
For her second novel, Jaine Fenn returns to the same universe in which her enjoyable debut, Principles of Angels, was set. Fenn is not writing a series of books, but like Iain M. Banks or Alastair Reynolds, she is gradually revealing a whole milieu in which she can set diverse stories – a universe about which she has clearly done a lot of thinking. Superficially, there’s nothing to connect Consorts to Principles - it’s set on a backward, inward-looking planet dominated by religion and tradition, and for much of its length feels more like fantasy than SF, as the trappings of space opera are replaced with character-driven storytelling in a setting that feels almost medieval.
We are introduced to Kerin, a widow, and her son Damaru, who is ’skytouched’ – a sort of idiot savant whose powers, gradually revealed, give the first hint that we are not just dealing with an ordinary pre-industrial society, as Damaru can rearrange matter with the power of his mind. When they find a stranger, naked and unconscious in a swamp near the village, Kerin takes him in and nurses him back to health, but he can’t remember anything about how he came to be there. He takes the nickname of Sais, and joins the others in assuming he must be a noble from far away.
I’m With The Brand, by Rob Walker
I’m With The Brand deals with the thorny issue of why we love our brands so much. Brands are, argues Rob Walker, the closest thing that many of us have to a religion. Even though we know that, for example Macs really are just as good as PCs and that brands like Nike are much the same as all the rest. Brands cause excitement in us – we become emotionally involved with them.
This book is about the way we are marketed to in an era where the old models of big agencies with big TV ads don’t get enough exposure to be useful. That said marketing budgets are going up, not down with budgets being spread ‘through the line’. Agencies and brands are finding new and stranger ways to make their product stand out from the crowd and appeal to new and old generations.
The Redeemer, by Jo Nesbo
Harry Hole, the connoisseur’s choice of angst-ridden, alcoholic, obsessional Scandinavian detective, is back. The Redeemer, the fourth Harry Hole book to be translated into English is also the first in which Harry is sober and free of his nemesis, the corrupt chief detective Tom Waaler, last seen in the previous episode, er, Nemesis.
This time round Harry is on the trail of a Croatian hitman The Little Redeemer who is in Oslo to kill a high-ranking officer in the influential Salvation Army. What follows is a race against time, Day of the Jackal type storyline as Harry tries to stop the incresingly desparate hitman before he can fulfill his contract. In addition, Harry must discover who took it out in the first place and why? Once more it is Harry’s obsessional insistence on digging deeper than his procedurally bound superiors would wish that uncovers the (inevitably shocking) truth. Read more
Competition: play your cards right to win the new Jake Arnott [closed]
Jake Arnott made his name with his gangster debut The Long Firm, but now he’s turned his hand to a very different period of history in his new novel, The Devil’s Paintbrush. Here’s a taste of what it’s all about.
Paris, 1903. Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, one of the greatest heroes of the British Empire, is facing ruin in a shocking homosexual scandal when he meets the notorious occultist, Aleister Crowley. As they set out into the night on a wild journey through the sinful city, the story of Macdonald’s tragedy begins to unfold – with startling revelations both for the General and the aspiring magician.
Those lovely people at Sceptre have given us some cool prizes to celebrate the release of the book on May 28th: the winner will receive a copy of the hardback, plus a pack of special commemorative playing card; and for four runners up, there will be a pack of the special cards.
To enter, all you have to do is answer the following question:
Which rock star sang a song named after Aleister Crowley?
a. Phil Collins
b. Neil Diamond
c. Ozzy Osbourne
Inside Straight, edited by George R.R. Martin
Reality television has come to the world of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Card series. Inside Straight, the first of the “new” releases from Tor, uses the Big Brother-esque reality show “American Hero” as a vehicle for introducing the next generation of aces, jokers, and characters, and it works superbly. There are certainly some familiar faces from the previous books, but the storyline is dominated by the new faces and a new set of struggles that makes the series feel both updated and fresh. No small achievement in a shared world series that is already over ten books long and has been published, in one form or another, for more than twenty years.
This addition focuses on a group of aces that are out for fame, fortune, and a chance to prove themselves a real “American Hero”. The book begins with the blog of Jonathan Hive, an ace whose particular power involves a swarm of biting, stinging insects, and Jonathan remains a constant voice in the chapters that follow: a little cynical, a little naive, and a window into both the competition and the various motives and responses of the aces themselves. Read more
The Bookgeeks Interview: Jay ‘Bird’ Dobyns, author of No Angel
Jay Dobyns, alias Jaybird, is an ATF undercover agent who infiltrated the Hells Angels motorcycle club from 2001 to 2003. He was offered membership into the gang after faking the murder of a rival Mongols Motorcycle Club member and providing ‘evidence’ of the staged murder to Hells Angels leaders. Dobyns and his partners worked undercover for 21 months leading to Federal arrests and search warrants on July 8, 2003.
He’s written a book about his experiences, No Angel (read Simon A’s review, and there’s competition to win signed copies too), and we talked to him about his reasons for writing the book and what he feels about the Hells Angels now.
No Angel, by Jay Dobyns
If you say “Hells Angels” to me, my first response is likely to be “right turn, Clyde” – the hapless Black Widows motorcycle crew, modelled on the Hells Angels and other Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMGs), were my first taste of outlaw bikers in popular culture, but they hardly inspired fear. Although they are now a worldwide organisation, the Hells Angels started on the American West Coast, and for many of us are quintessentially an American phenomenon (and an American problem). Indeed, as Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Special Agent Jay Dobyns says, in terms of organised crime they are probably America’s only true export.
No Angel is Dobyns’ account of a period of several years during which his mission was to penetrate the Hells Angels organisation in Arizona. Along with several other undercover officers, Dobyns, known as ‘Jay Bird’ to his biker associates, was looking to build a case against the Angels for drug running, racketeering and intimidation, something that American law enforcement has traditionally had a hard time doing because of the tight-knit structure and lengthy application processes of the OMGs generally. No Angel would be an interesting enough book if it was a dispassionate account of the operation and its aftermath – but what makes it so gripping is how close Dobyns came to going completely native.
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