Libriomancer - Jim C. Hines

Before I talk about Jim C. Hines' newest novel Libriomancer, I wanted to briefly address his recent decision to withdraw from a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with the Fantasy Subreddit community. The Fantasy Subreddit is made up of nearly 18,000 highly engaged readers. It's a wide ranging group of fans, some of a more literary bent and some Sandercrombiefuss fanboys of the highest order. I've been a member for a few months now and I've really enjoyed my experience there.

Hines backed out of his AMA when a thread, in an unrelated Subreddit, came to his attention. The thread was providing a forum for rapists to discuss their crime. It's a disturbing series of comments. So many comments when I can't imagine anyone being interested in reading it. In that way, I support Hines' decision; he's long been an advocate for the awareness of violence against women. His decision regarding the AMA is wholly consistent with his position. I'm also disappointed that the result of his decision was a loss for the Fantasy Subreddit, although I in no way begrudge it.

Putting that aside, I think the situation raises important questions. Questions that will only become more prevalent in an ever expanding on-line world. On a massive site like Reddit, which prides itself on providing an unfiltered mechanism for discussion, how do we hold separate units accountable? Do we punish users completely unrelated to the material we find offensive? How do we regulate it? Should we regulate it?

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Upcoming Ace/Roc, DAW Releases - Fall/Winter

Now that we're at the halfway mark for the year, I thought it would appropriate to point out all the novels coming out from August-December that strike my fancy. I'll be breaking my posts down by publisher. Below are the novels coming this Fall and Winter from Ace/Roc and DAW that will be must reads for me. The truth is though, I can't read them all. So I'll be looking forward to seeing what interests you.

Here's what caught my eye:


The King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence (August)

The Broken Empire burns with the fires of a hundred battles as lords and petty kings battle for the all-throne. The long road to avenge the slaughter of his mother and brother has shown Prince Honorous Jorg Ancrath the hidden hands behind this endless war. He saw the game and vowed to sweep the board. First though he must gather his own pieces, learn the rules of play, and discover how to break them. 

A six nation army, twenty thousand strong, marches toward Jorg's gates, led by a champion beloved of the people. Every decent man prays this shining hero will unite the empire and heal its wounds. Every omen says he will. Every good king knows to bend the knee in the face of overwhelming odds, if only to save their people and their lands. But King Jorg is not a good king. 

Faced by an enemy many times his strength Jorg knows that he cannot win a fair fight. But playing fair was never part of Jorg’s game plan.

The truth is, I've already read this and it's amazing. Next!

Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines (August)

Isaac Vainio has spent the past two years working at the Copper River Library in northern Michigan, secretly cataloguing books for their magical potential, but forbidden from using that magic himself . . . except for emergencies. Emergencies like a trio of young vampires who believe Isaac has been killing their kind, and intend to return the favor. 

Isaac is a libriomancer, brilliant but undisciplined, with the ability to reach into books and create objects from their pages. And attacking a libriomancer in his own library is never a good idea. 

But vampires are only the beginning. This was merely the latest in a series of attacks against members of Die Zwelf Portenære, a secret organization founded five centuries ago by Johannes Gutenberg to protect the world from supernatural threats. But things are worse than Isaac imagined. An unknown killer of unimaginable power has been torturing and murdering humans and vampires alike. And Gutenberg, now more than six hundred years old, has disappeared. 

As Isaac searches for Gutenberg and the murderer, hoping they aren’t one and the same, he uncovers dark secrets about magic’s history and potential. Secrets which could destroy Die Zwelf Portenære and loose a magical war upon the world. If Isaac is to have any hope of preventing that war, he will have to truly master the magic of libriomancy.

I've wanted to read Hines for a while, but more because I wanted to read him than because I wanted to read his goblin novels. Not that I don't like goblins. They just don't grab me. 

Libriomancer on the other hand looks like a tremendously fun young adult urban fantasy novel. It couldn't come at a better time for Hines who received a Best Fan Writer Hugo nomination. Could this be a big coming out year for him? I'm pretty sure this book is waiting for me on my doorstep right now, so stay tuned!

Clean by Alex Hughes (September)

Adam used to work for the Telepath’s Guild before they kicked him out for a drug habit that wasn’t entirely his fault. Now he works for the cops, helping put killers behind bars. His ability to get inside the twisted minds of suspects makes him the best interrogator in the department. But the cops don’t trust the telepaths, the Guild doesn't trust Adam, a serial killer is stalking the city—and Adam is aching for a fix. But he needs to solve this case. Adam’s just had a vision of the future: he’s the next to die.

This falls into the 'I don't read urban fantasy, but try it sometimes' category. Clean has an intriguing conceit. For some reason anytime something talks about a Guild with a capital G, I get excited. Who knows why?


Slow Apocalypse by John Varley (September)

Despite wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as 9/11, the United States’ dependence on foreign oil has kept the nation tied to the Middle East. A scientist has developed a cure for America’s addiction — a slow-acting virus that feeds on petroleum, turning it solid. But he didn’t consider that his contagion of an Iraqi oil field would spread to infect the fuel supply of the entire world... 

In Los Angeles, screenwriter Dave Marshall heard this scenario from a retired U.S. Marine and government insider who acted as a consultant on Dave’s last film. It sounded as implausible as many of his scripts, but the reality is much more frightening than anything he can envision. And now he must protect his wife and daughter from the coming apocalypse that will alter the future of Earth — and humanity...

Tom Clancy has called John Varley the best living American writer. While he's received some critical acclaim over the years, he's never quite broken through into the big bucks. He says on his website, "I will say to you that this novel is NOT like anything I've written before. I am so pleased to see my old friend George RR Martin raking in the dough; this is my attempt to reach a larger audience, like he has..." Sounds interesting to me.

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman (October)

In the year 1348, Thomas, a disgraced knight, comes upon an orphan of the Black Plague. An unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that the disease is only part of a greater, more significant cataclysm — that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven. 

Is she really blessed? Or is it delirium? As hell unleashes its fury, as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself in a macabre battleground of angels and demons, sinners and saints, and a damnable struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.

Buehlman gained some recognition last year with his debut novel, Those Across the River. More of a gothic horror novel, I'm not sure how much it resonated with the kind of folks who read this blog. It certainly didn't hold any interest to me. His second novel seems much more in-line with what I generally expect from Ace. It might bear some similarities to Teresa Frohock's Miserere: An Autumn Tale that I liked so well last year, perhaps?


The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick (November)

Two science fiction masters—Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick — team up to deliver a classic thriller, in which one man uncovers the secret history of the U.S. space program... 

A half-century after the first moon landing, NASA is plagued with public disinterest and budget cuts. Still, public affairs director Jerry Culpepper does his job, trying to drum up interest in the legacy of the agency. Then a fifty-year old secret about the Apollo 11 mission is revealed, and he finds himself embroiled in the biggest controversy of the twenty-first century, one that will test his ability — and his willingness — to spin the truth about a conspiracy of reality-altering proportions...

I've never been a big fan of collaborations because they usually mean a big name author is sticking their name on it and the much less experienced author is doing the writing. See Tom Clancy or James Patterson. That isn't the case with The Cassandra Project as both McDevitt and Resnick are recognized at the top of their field. Either way, they had me at "secret history of the U.S. space program." God I love secret histories!

***

Anything catch your eye? Anything else from the Penguin imprints that I didn't mention for the second half of the year?

Throne of the Crescent Moon - Saladin Ahmed

A few weeks back I heavily criticized a debut sword and sorcery novel for lacking character, plot, and... well... substance.  When I did that, I opened myself up to the criticism that a sword and sorcery novel lacks those things on purpose.  They're all about fun and adventure.  I knew that was wrong, but didn't have a way to prove it.  I do now.  Saladin Ahmed's sword and sorcery novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, is a superficial adventure novel at first glance.  It also possesses tremendous heart and soul.  Not soul in a Biblical sense, although there's some of that too; I mean soul like Barry Gordy.  Every note in Ahmed's debut comes from an authentic place, a cultural awareness not unlike Motown in the 1960's.

From a plot standpoint, Throne is about a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the subversive Falcon Prince.  In the midst of a brewing rebellion, a series of brutal supernatural murders strikes at the heart of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms.  The 60-year old Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, is the last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat and his young assistant Raseed bas Raseed, is a holy warrior whose swordsmanship is matched only by his devotion to God.  When they learn that the murders and the Falcon Prince's brewing revolution are connected, they find themselves in a race to save the life of the tyrannical Khalif.

Told through a surprising number of points of view (I count six off the top of my head), Throne is a quintessential sword and sorcery novel.  The characters are world weary, cynical, and fatally flawed.  They're common by birth, possessing a strength of will that is decidedly not.  Adoulla and Raseed are more heroic in nature than the traditional self-centered characters of Howard or Moorcock, but the in-the-moment, personal conflict, is very much in their image.  At the novel's conclusion I'd never once been surprised by the directions Ahmed chose to take.  What did surprise me, is that I didn't care in the least.  The characters, and the method and content of their interactions, are just that good.

When I say method, I am referring to Ahmed's prose and command of dialoge.  Throne reads like the debut novel of someone who spent years honing his craft.  Given the recognition that Ahmed has garnered for his short fiction, with both Hugo and Nebula Award nominations, I guess that's exactly what he's done.  Accessible is a term that's thrown around like a pejorative when it comes to literature, and some may levy that criticism here.  To me, it demonstrates a confidence in his craft.  He does not rely on verbosity to communicate his setting or his character's affectations, rather he uses their unique voices, providing ample beauty in construction of the whole, not the parts that constitute it.

Content is a slightly more murky discussion.  Ahmed uses his two primary characters to set up paradigms of extremism versus moderation, and cynicism versus optimism (among other things).   Adoulla, the old and skeptical realist, and Raseed, the young and energetic idealist, square off again and again in didactic discussions of their world view.  It should be noted here that Ahmed is an Arab-American and a Muslim.  As a White-American (which perhaps ironically includes those of Middle Eastern heritage) and a non-religious person, I read much of this interaction as a commentary on the disagreement in the Muslim world between fundamental and moderate Islam.  I can only imagine that a Muslim might read it more like a rebuke of the lack of respect toward Islam in the United States.  To others, it might be either, and both.  There lies the beauty of Ahmed's novel.

Another character, Zamia, a tribeswoman from outside the 'civilized' city, begins a similar discussion of old and new, tradition and progress.  Raseed is Adoulla's foil, but Zamia's counterpart is the setting itself -- the city of Dhamsawaat.  Drawing heavily from his heritage, Ahmed paints a world that would sit nicely in the Fertile Crescent.  Marketplaces and street vendors, methods of greeting and social mores, quotations from scripture and religious traditions, will all call to mind pictures of various Middle Eastern cultures, but also of a fully realized world that belongs to Ahmed alone.

Zamia, in her dedication to tribal ways, comes to all of this fresh.  Isolated and uncultured, she begins the process that many are forced to undergo in the developing world as familial and tribal affiliations are slowly eroded.  Far on the back-burner in Ahmed's narrative, it's an interesting thematic aside, and something that would bear further exploration in future novels.

As I began this review, I questioned whether I should mention Ahmed's background at all.  What does the fact he's a Muslim have to do with the quality of his novel?  The answer is nothing, and everything.  This is an unexceptional sword and sorcery story, but it is an unexceptional sword and sorcery story with an exceptional point of view.  It is Ahmed's point of view, Barry Gordy's 'soul', that makes Throne special; and it is his background that creates it as much as his talent as a writer.

Before too many reviews percolate out there, I want to put something to rest.  Throne is 288-pages long.  It's one of the shortest hardbacks I've held.  Ahmed does not have the market power of Brandon Sanderson, who put out a similar length novel last year (Alloy of Law).  Some might say that a 288-page novel isn't worth $25.  Trust me when I say, there's more in Ahmed's 288-pages than in many of his 600-page peers.

In case it hasn't been clear thus far, I loved this novel.  Saladin Ahmed joins a growing group of writers in genre fiction like Lauren Beukes, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tobias Buckell, Paolo Bacigalupi, and others, who redefine what the genre writer looks like, and more importantly what they sound like.  Consider Throne of the Crescent Moon among the books that I insist you read.

Throne of the Crescent Moon is due out in stores on February 7.  You can find the author in Twitter or on his website.