A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 28

Epic fantasy has been the most commercially popular strand of the fantastical genre, but it has certainly come in for criticism from more literary quarters. In the late 1970s Michael Moorcock dismissed the genre as being simply "Epic Pooh" (an overwrought version of children's stories like Winnie the Pooh) and M. John Harrison (author of the Viriconium sequence of surreal fantasies) decried the genre for the "clomping foot of nerdism" in its overreliance on worldbuilding and trying to rationalise what should remain irrational. The genre has also been criticised for often descending into being "Medieval Europe with Dragons" rather than trying to be something weirder and more thought-provoking. Not everyone from the literary end of the spectrum agrees with this - Gene Wolfe is a huge Tolkien fan, for example - but it's certainly a point of view with some significant adherents.


Starting in the 1990s, fantasy began to move in slightly odder directions less reliant on dragons and magic and pseudomedieval Europe. Garry Kilworth employing Polynesian mythology (complete with a vast number of tiny gods and some very strange customs) in his Navigator Kings trilogy can be seen as part of this, as can some of the more bizarre concepts in works by Steven Erikson and Glen Cook. But it took a series of novels published between 2000 and 2006 to really ramp up these elements. This period became known as the New Weird.

Perdido Street Station & The Scar

Published in 2000, Perdido Street Station was the second novel by British author China Miéville. His first novel, King Rat (1998), had been an urban fantasy indebted to the likes of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996), but Perdido Street Station was something different. It was set in the sprawling, uncertain cityscape of New Crobuzon, a city of squalor and beauty where insects make art and the government dines the ambassadors of hell. Cactii-people live and trade alongside the inhabitants of a thousand lands and the city is linked by elevated railway lines carrying souls to work and destinies and deaths. It is part steampunk, part urban fantasy, part horror and part Alien.

Perdido Street Station is a remarkable novel, utterly beautifully written and powered by an imagination almost unmatched in the modern fantasy genre. The city of New Crobuzon lives and breathes in a way few fantasy metropoles ever achieve. Miéville populates his city with strange people but also gives them a feeling of how they live and work day-to-day. New Crobuzon is both weird and workable. Oddly, despite Harrison's criticisms of traditional fantasy and lauding (and some might say foreshadowing) of the New Weird, this works mainly because Miéville invests strongly in worldbuilding, making the city work and feel real. It even first saw light in a home roleplaying campaign which Miéville used to develop the location before trying to realise it in prose.

If Perdido Street Station works as a fantastic piece of atmosphere and mood, it's less successful in working as a structured novel, as the basic plot boils down to a bug hunt for a monster. It's the incidents along the way and the people the reader meets that makes the book so fantastic. It falls to the successor (not a true sequel), The Scar (2002), to really sing on every level. This book starts off as a travelogue, with the core characters departing New Crobuzon in search of the mysterious floating city of Armada, located somewhere in the vast ocean. As the book continues it invokes elements of Moby Dick whilst also remaining very much its own beast. The story is far more original and strange than Perdido Street Station, the characters more vivid and the situations more bizarre whilst also remaining a compelling read. It's Miéville's masterpiece.

Miéville has only released one novel since set in the same world of Bas-Lag, namely the excellent Iron Council (2004), but he has explored other worlds and settings in his fiction. Un Lun Dun (2007) and Kraken (2010) are urban fantasies set in London, Embassytown (2011) is science fiction flavoured by the New Weird and Railsea (2012) is set on a world where the ocean has been replaced by an endless landscape of train tracks. The Tain (2002) is a post-apocalyptic tale. His most successful post-Bas-Lag novel is The City and the City (2009), a weird tale that features one city split into two parallel realities where the people of one side can see those of the rest but cannot interact with them on fear of abduction by a supernatural force. Miéville will publish two novels in 2016, This Census-Taker and The Last Days of New Paris, but it appears that a return to Bas-Lag is not in the cards for the near future.

The Year of Our War

Published in 2004, The Year of Our War is noted for its vivid (and occasionally hallucinogenic) prose and its success in taking the old fantasy standby - a civilisation defended by some huge threat by a massive wall - and turning it on its head. The enemy this time is a race of insects, but humanity is defended by a race of super-powered immortals who serve as rulers and defenders and generals. The weirdness is generated by Jant, the main protagonist, who is a drug-addict and sometimes wastrel but also someone who can visit a supernatural realm of the undead where he can gain vital clues about the enemy. The immortals are riven by internal dissent, politics and love feuds that sometimes distract them from the threat that looms in the north. It is a strange and odd book that, as with Miéville, actually features some pretty robust worldbuilding and well-paced plot developments.

This was the first book in The Castle Series, and was followed by No Present Like Time (2005) and The Modern World (2007). Steph Swainston has since published a prequel, Above the Snowline (2010). However, she also vocally criticised the modern requirement by publishers and the marketplace for authors to engage in social media, marketing and networking, feeling this took too much time away from writing. She has since taken up a day job in chemistry, but continues to write a fifth book in the series in her own time.

Other Works of the Weird

After Miéville, the most successful author of the New Weird is Jeff VanderMeer (he even co-edited an anthology called The New Weird in 2007). His novels and short stories set in the fantastical city of Ambergis - Cities of Saints and Madmen (2001), Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009) - proved both popular and influential, as did Veniss Underground (2003), set in a different milieu but likewise bizarre and strange. His most recent major work is the Southern Reach Trilogy, an original take on the haunted lighthouse trope.

The most surprising book of the period is K.J. Bishop's The Etched City (2003), mainly because the author has not so far followed it up with any other work. Although not as well known as Miéville, Swainston and VanderMeer, Bishop's book may be the most succinct summing-up of the subgenre of the bizarre.

The New Weird never really went away, but it did start to drift into other forms of fantasy. Alan Campbell's superb Scar Night (2006) brings together the New Weird with elements of urban fantasy. It is somewhat let down by its less ambitious sequels, Iron Angel (2008) and the disappointing God of Clocks (2009), which relies on a retcon ending. Mark Charan Newton's Legends of the Red Sun series (starting with Nights of Villjamur in 2009) may be seen as an attempt to merge the New Weird with the Dying Earth subgenre popularised by Jack Vance in 1950. It is a strong and original voice, hampered by a far too-rushed conclusion.

More recently the New Weird has kind of merged into fantasy as a whole. Francis Knight's Rojan Dizon trilogy (starting with 2013's Fade to Black) feels like it should be New Weird, set as it is in a towering vertical city inside a mountain, but it is played more straight as a standard urban fantasy with epic undertones. Luke Scull's Grim Company trilogy is much more set in a post-New Grim sword and sorcery world, but the immortal god-sorcerers and their ability to warp reality results in strange and bizarre consequences (and otherwise sets his work aside from the likes of Joe Abercrombie, to whom he shares superficial similarities).


As the 2000s started in earnest, traditional epic fantasy remained popular but perhaps less so that in the previous decade. Publishers looked for different kinds of fantasy, from the baroque oddness of Miéville to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink fantasy of Steven Erikson, but if there was one direction that epic fantasy was taking it was into darker territories, where philosophy and morality and ideologies were entwined and complicated, resulting in some of the most interesting - but also controversial - works published in the history of the genre.

Drakenfeld by Mark Charan Newton

The Royal Union has bound the nations of the Vispasian continent together for more than two centuries, with the ultranational police force known as the Sun Chamber being essential for enforcing peace between the kingdoms. Lucan Drakenfeld, an officer of the Sun Chamber, is recalled to his home city of Tryum by the death of his father. However, whilst setting his father's affairs in order, Drakenfeld becomes embroiled in politics and murder. There are forces in Tryum that would see it reach out and become the great empire it used to be, forces that would kill to make that happen...and other forces who would kill to ensure it doesn't.

Drakenfeld is Mark Charan Newton's sixth novel and the first in a new series set in a fantasised Rome (sort of) featuring Lucan Drakenfeld as a private detective (or the equivalent thereof). Drakenfeld is an enlightened man living in unenlightened times, a man who believes in the Union but has to deal with the nationalistic forces that threaten to tear it apart.

In this novel, Newton is doing several things. First of all, he's telling a fairly compelling murder mystery. Secondly, he's using the novel to comment on the state of epic fantasy and its conservative tendencies. A large number of interesting issues come into this, such as the fear of the people of Tryum towards 'the other' (Drakenfeld's assistant is a dark-skinned woman from a far distant nation) and kneejerk nationalism overriding the wider common good. There aren't lazy correlations with real-life events, but there's certainly some food for thought going on under the fairly straightforward surface.

In terms of character, Drakenfeld makes for a likable protagonist but not the most dynamic one. Drakenfeld is a good man, trusting (but not too much), loyal, dedicated and so on. He's also a little bit boring due to his earnest reasonableness with no apparent foibles. His sidekick, Leana, and redoubtable friend, the amable-but-prejudiced Veron, are both far more interesting but the strict, first-person POV means we don't get to know them very well.

In terms of writing, Newton knows how to tell a good story and does it quite well. However, the book suffers from an abrupt shift in gears and pacing towards the end of the novel that the writing never really pulls off. Suddenly what was an intriguing, well-played murder mystery turns into a full-on epic fantasy complete with marching armies, sieges and clandestine night assaults. This shift in gears is so jarring you may drop the book, and never really makes much sense. The worldbuilding is also flawed: the superb evocation of the faux-Roman atmosphere of Tryum and its people is let down by the later revelation that the 'continent' of Vispasia is actually only marginally bigger than Italy itself (oddly, given the variety of landforms mentioned in the descriptions of the various nations) and armies can be summoned, assembled, armed, equipped and sent into battle at just a moment's notice.

This conclusion saps a lot of believability from the narrative, and I was left wishing for a novel much more focused on the murder and perhaps on the political intrigue. The military stuff fails to convince, but at least it does upset the status quo and leaves Drakenfeld in a very interest place for the sequels.

Drakenfeld (***½) is, for most of its length, a compelling murder mystery novel with some great atmosphere and writing which abruptly shifts gears in the final chapters and fails to pull it off. However, it does a great job of establishing the character of Drakenfeld and the world of the Vispasian Union and certainly leaves the reader wanting to know more about his adventures. The novel is available in the UK and USA now.

The Broken Isles by Mark Charan Newton

Brynd Lathraea has saved the city of Villiren from the invading Okun. Jamur Rika has now made the city her new capital and declared herself Empress, but Brynd is concerned over her fragile mental state. As the invaders grow in strength and numbers, Brynd makes an important alliance, but one that may cost him the support of the people.

The Broken Isles is the fourth and concluding novel in the Legends of the Red Sun series which began way back in 2009 with Nights of Villjamur. Through that novel and its two sequels, City of Ruin and The Book of Transformations, Newton painted a convincing picture of a world slipping into an ice age, riven by internal conflict and external threats. It's definitely been one of the most interesting of recent fantasy series, fusing elements of traditional epic fantasy with the New Weird movement and with the Dying Earth subgenre.

The structure of the series to date has been to use a different main cast in each book, sometimes comprising new characters and sometimes promoting former minor, supporting characters to main character status. It's worked well in previous novels, but in The Broken Isles Newton has to combine all of these characters into one larger cast operating in multiple locations to address all of the numerous plot strands he's been developing. Unfortunately, this does not work very well. The Broken Isles is the big, epic finale to a fantasy saga but has the same page count as the novels that came before it (just under 400 pages in paperback). Suddenly having to handle a greatly enlarged cast means that each character now gets rather short shrift in terms of development and attention.

This problem extends to the plot and structure: the book opens with a chain of fleeing refugees who have to be saved from pursuit, whilst Brynd has to secure control of Villiren and deal with the increasingly bizarre Empress and secure an alliance with another faction of the alien forces and deal with cultists intent on resurrecting an ancient monster and deal with a racist crime lord determined to take control of the city and force foreigners out and save the entire Boreal Archipelago from annihilation at the hands of the Okun and their masters. The book's slim page count can't deal with the weight of all this at all.

The result is that The Broken Isles feels like a tremendously detailed outline for a much longer and, frankly, much better novel. Scenes, even momentous ones, are short and perfunctory. There are no subtle moments of revelation, with info-dumping and exposition being the order of the day to clear up mysteries that have been around from the start of the series. Newton's prose, which has been enjoyable and offbeat since the first novel, is here reduced to the most simple and prosaic. The pacing tends towards the staccato, with scenes feeling almost disconnected from events around them. Things happen but they have no weight to them.

This is a monumental shame, as Newton's ideas remain as fascinating as ever. The Mourning Wasp (developed with China Mieville) is a terrific creation. The idea of turning the invaders' own technology against them is a good one (the sort-of cultist storyline dealing with this is actually one of the better-handled ones in the book). The invading flying city is appropriately threatening. Frater Mercury's solution to the invading aliens is over-simplistic, but also appropriate to his character. But these moments are few and far between.

The Broken Isles (**) is an exercise in frustration. Mark Charan Newton is a talented writer, but this novel feels so compromised by word counts that most of the enjoyment has been leeched out of it, despite flashes of imaginative power. A tremendously disappointing conclusion to one of the more interesting fantasy series of recent times (and, alongside God of Clocks and The Born Queen, furthers something of a trend for Tor UK series to have disappointing finales). The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

New covers for Mark Charan Newton's LEGENDS OF THE RED SUN series

I'm now convinced that there's some kind of market research going into Mark Charan Newton's Legends of the Red Sun novels, namely just how many bad covers can you give them before they stop selling. Check out the new covers for Nights of Villjamur and City of Ruin:

Well...at least the first guy doesn't have a hood. But that's probably the only good thing that can be said about them. Given the inherent visual possibilities in the cities, the winter-ravaged landscapes and the invading horde of weird monsters, I don't really understand why it's seemingly impossible to give these books good covers. Oh well.

New Mark Charan Newton series announced

Tor UK have signed up Mark Charan Newton for a new fantasy series, starting with a two-book contract. Provisionally entitled Drakenfield, the new series will be a first-person narrative featuring a private investigator solving crimes in a fantasy world. Newton claims this series will dial down the 'weirdness' from his Legends of the Red Sun sequence and be more like historical fiction, citing C.J. Sansom as a possible reference point. The first volume is very tentatively set for publication in mid-2013.

Mark Charan Newton's THE REEF released as an ebook

Mark Charan Newton's hard-to-find debut novel, The Reef, has been re-released as an ebook by Tor UK.


Originally released in 2008 as a limited print edition by Pendragon Publishing, The Reef is set in the same world as Newton's Legends of the Red Sun sequence, but thousands of years and many thousands of miles removed from the events of that series. It's a strong debut novel and well worth checking out.

The Book of Transformations by Mark Charan Newton

Emperor Urtica rules over a nation threatened from within and without. Hordes of invading creatures are threatening the northern islands, where the city of Villiren is commanded to hold out against impossible odds. However, with most of the imperial armies dispatched to Villiren, political intrigue and anarchic violence are taking hold of the streets of Villjamur, the capital. To combat the threat, Urtica recruits three individuals and transforms them into super-powered warriors, the Villjamur Knights, but must use a mixture of threats and promises of rewards to keep them in line.


Meanwhile, a priest arrives in Villjamur on a quest that has already seen him marked for death by the region's dominant religion. He seeks to expose a lie that has defined the history of the Boreal Archipelago, but in doing so may trigger events that he and the world are unprepared for. Far to the north, Dartun Sur and his band of cultists have returned from the invading creatures' homeworld and rush back to the capital to reveal their findings...in a manner that no-one is expecting.

The Book of Transformations is the third and penultimate volume in The Legends of the Red Sun, following on from Nights of Villjamur and City of Ruin. Like the earlier books in the series, it places a number of self-contained narratives in the context of a longer, more epic story. This time around Newton gives us the story of Lan, a woman born in a man's body, who undergoes a sex-change operation fuelled by magic (or, more accurately, relic technology) only to find herself pressganged into the Knights and kept in service by blackmail.

It's unusual to see transgenderism raised as an issue in a secondary world fantasy novel, but Newton ties it in expertly with the book's overall theme of personal transformation, whether it's physical, spiritual or ideological. Almost every character is undergoing a metamorphosis of some kind, some voluntary, others not, and Lan's transformation is handled sensitively and fits in with the overall theme of the book very well.

Elsewhere, Newton's skills with atmosphere remain strong, with the snow-shrouded streets and rooftops of Villjamur remaining an evocative setting for the action. Character-wise, he gives us some memorable newcomers and brings back a couple of older hands (though not many; the book takes place simultaneously with much of City of Ruin, so the characters from that book are not present) to keep the plot ticking over. This is where the book starts to run into problems: there are a lot of characters doing a lot of things that need to converge for a grand, world-shaking finale that is undoubtedly meant to be epic, jaw-dropping and leave you on the edge of your seat until the final book is released next year. Unfortunately, this doesn't really happen.

The narrative seems to run out of drive some distance before the end. The problem is that Newton is at his best when engaging with interesting issues in a manner that is thoughtful and based in characters' emotions. That's not to say he can't do great mayhem - City of Ruin had some splendid battle sequences - but to do so he needs to root scenes of chaos and combat with characters we've become emotionally invested in. Book of Transformation's key weakness is that there's so much going on we haven't really had time to get really acquainted with the characters to make the huge scenes at the end of the novel come to life. In particular, whilst Lan is well-written, her two fellow Knights are much more lightly-sketched with only hints at depth rather than real exploration of their characters. Hinging so much of the climactic action sequences on their exploits thus falls flat. Similarly, the priest Ulryk is an interesting character with great potential, but he never really comes to life, and Inquisitor Fulcrom's desire to help him feels a bit random, something that has to happen for the plot to work regardless of whether or not it makes sense in terms of character motivation.

The cumulative effect of this is that instead of a vast, awe-inspiring and grand climax, we get something that is, at best, perfunctory. On an intellectual level, lots of interesting things happen at the end, but there is little emotional power to them. Newton's prose, which can be richly atmospheric, feels flat and rushed as he moves to the climax. Scenes featuring huge amounts of devastation in which hundreds of people die feel distant and unengaging, whilst the arrival of what is apparently a major new character at the end passes by with little impact. The problems with the climax are in fact highlighted by how good the first half of the book is, particularly the success Newton initially experiences in exploring these themes of transformation and alteration.

The Book of Transformation (***½) starts off promisingly with some well-realised characters and ideas being explored, but then it tails off as the climax approaches. The ending of the book feels rushed and under-written in comparison to what has come before, but Newton manages to hold things together just well enough to make the final novel an interesting prospect, provided he can avoid the same issues next time around. The novel is available now in the UK and on import in the USA.

New cover art for 2011

Some new cover art, unearthed by the cover-watchers at Westeros.org:


The Mandel Files is a US omnibus of Peter F. Hamilton's excellent Greg Mandel Trilogy: Mindstar Rising (1993), A Quantum Murder (1994) and The Nanoflower (1995). These were Hamilton's first novels, set in a southern England in the late 21st Century devastated by civil war and climate change, and followed the adventures of detective Greg Mandel as he investigates various high-tech mysteries. The omnibus launches on 26 July 2011.


City of Ruin is the second novel in Mark Charan Newton's Legends of the Red Sun series. Already available in the UK, this American edition hits on 28 June 2011.


The American edition of China Mieville's new novel, Embassytown, arrives on 17 May 2011. This is Mieville's first SF novel.


The seventh book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series, Heirs of the Blade, arrives in the UK on 17 August. I am currently reading the second novel in the series, Dragonfly Falling, and hope to have a review soon.


Launching on the same day is Col Buchanan's Stands a Shadow, the sequel to the intriguing Farlander.

New cover art for Mark Charan Newton's BOOK OF TRANSFORMATIONS

Mark Charan Newton has published the new cover art for The Book of Transformations, the third volume in the Legends of the Red Sun series:


Previous iterations of the cover faced a mixed reception, so, echoing Nights of Villjamur, the hardcover will just have a cityscape image.

More on the book, including a cover blurb, over at Mark's blog.

City of Ruin by Mark Charan Newton

The Jamur Empire is riven by internal turmoil and the threat of external invasion. Chancellor Urtica has usurped the throne and seized control of the capital, Villjamur, but the rightful empress, Rika, has fled the city with her sister Eir and their protector, the redoubtable swordsman and con-artist Randur. They decide to head for the far northern city of Villiren, where their potential ally Commander Brynd Lathraea of the Night Guard and his loyal troops have been dispatched, but the journey is fraught with danger and unexpected encounters with both allies and enemies.


Meanwhile, the mysterious Okun are massing on the island of Tineag'l, the population of which they have already slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child. The Jamuran armies are converging on the city of Villiren just across the straits from Tineag'l, ready to make a stand there against a remorseless enemy whose true capabilities and goals remain unknown. As Brynd organises the defence of the city, his own secrets are exposed by a local gang lord and he finds himself open to blackmail. In the city itself Inspector Jeryd does his part for the war effort by investigating the disappearance of dozens of civilians and soldiers in the past few months, a mystery that will lead to unforeseen ends.

City of Ruin is Mark Newton's third novel and the second book in the Legends of the Red Sun series, following on from last year's extremely well-received Nights of Villjamur. City of Ruin directly follows on from the previous novel. Although its central storyline - the defence of Villiren - is self-contained in this book, the character arcs continue from the first novel and some foreknowledge of those events is assumed.

In Nights, Newton deliberately held fire on some of his more fantastical elements for commercial purposes. The ambition of the Legends of the Red Sun series appears to be to fuse the originality and diverse influences of the New Weird with a more traditional epic fantasy narrative. This was evident in Nights of Villamur, but comes much more stridently to the fore in City of Ruin, with several nods to the work of China Mieville (one fairly obvious, the other possibly coincidental given how quickly this book came out after Kraken). The book's place in the 'Dying Earth' subgenre is also made more clear, with references to the shrunken red sun and a minor character who shares a name with one of Jack Vance's most famous characters (which, for those familiar with Vance, may briefly drag you out of the book, but is a very minor issue). Newton successfully achieves a feeling here of a vast history stretching back a quarter-million years with successive waves of civilisations rising and falling until the present day, whilst simultaneously expanding the scope of the world and story to a more cosmic level. This can be risky - Alan Campbell's initially excellent Deepgate Codex trilogy eventually collapsed under the weight of its vastly expanded scope - but Newton handles it well here.

Newton also flexes his full-on, all-out war scene muscles here as a desperate battle for the city of Villiren is mounted in the book's conclusion. Newton's background as an editor for Solaris and their former sister-company, the Black Library, comes to the fore here as a furious urban battle rages which I can imagine Dan Abnett nodding approvingly over. Newton brings together both established and new forms of magic and various creatures to create some very impressive and original combat sequences, and is not afraid to ruthlessly slaughter major characters (from both this and the first book) in offhand ways.

For those less impressed by war porn, there's the complex and convincing characterisation, convincing worldbuilding and increasingly accomplished prose to enjoy. The novel comes close to a maximum score, but falls short only due to the somewhat abrupt ending and a bit too much scene-setting for the third and fourth novels in the series which is not immediately relevant to this book.

City of Ruin (****½) is an excellent fantasy novel fusing elements of the New Weird and traditional epic fantasy into a satisfying whole. The novel is available now in the UK and will be published next year in the United States.

Is Science Fiction dying?

Mark Charan Newton asks on his blog if SF is dying and if fantasy is the way forwards.

The answer? No.

The slightly longer answer: Nope. The death of SF has been proclaimed loudly and in great pitying cries for forty or more years. Lord of the Rings was supposed to have killed off the genre, then later it was Donaldson and Brooks' introduction of the mass-market fantasy category in the late 1970s. SF has also supposedly almost killed itself off as well a few times, whether by the over-reliance on cyberpunk in the 1980s or the slight prevalence of 'quantum' works in the 1990s that didn't really engage the general public's imagination. More recently it is horror and urban fantasy which have been to blame. And SF is still here.

The first point to make is that SF has never done as well sales-wise as the other subgenres of speculative fiction, namely fantasy and horror, certainly not since the rise of those two fields as distinctive sales categories in the 1970s. Dune is the biggest-selling single SF novel of all time, selling 10 million copies since its publication in 1965. Lord of the Rings, which didn't hit the bestseller lists until around the same time, has outsold it by something like twenty times. The number of SF writers capable of hitting the bestseller lists, even in the 'good old days', has always been vanishingly small, and vastly outnumbered by those in fantasy and horror. This has not changed at all. This is of course related to the other point: since the emergency of fantasy and horror as separate fields, the number of authors in those fields and the number of books they write has almost always outstripped those of SF massively. In any given year the number of SF titles published will be a fraction of fantasy and horror, particularly urban fantasy at this time.

SF cannot do much better than it is at the moment for the simple reason that more people aren't writing SF in the first place.

Secondly, the truth of the matter is that British SF is doing very well indeed at the moment. American SF is not doing great, with very few up-and-coming new authors and some of the old guard (most notably Brin and Benford) not publishing new works recently. The feeling with American SF is that it has been conquered by media tie-ins and old-hand authors pumping out - often decent - new works in old series (like Weber and Bujold) rather than writers doing something new. There are some signs of life, like David Louis Edelman's trilogy and John Scalzi keeping the space opera subgenre ticking over, but broadly speaking, American SF is in a worrying state.

British SF on the other hand is doing excellently. We have Alastair Reynolds' new £1 million ($1.6 million at the time) contract and the news his books have recently passed the 1 million sales mark. Dan Abnett, Iain M. Banks and Peter F. Hamilton are all doing even better. Neal Asher, Justina Robson, Stephen Baxter, Richard Morgan, Charlie Stross, M. John Harrison, Paul J. McAuley and Adam Roberts' careers all appear to be in rude health. We have fresh young blood like Jaine Fenn and Gary Gibson who seem to have gotten off to terrific starts. Even new non-British SF authors like Hannu Rajaniemi (whose debut novel is published in 2010) are being eagerly talked-up by their British publishers.

Science fiction is a small field and, frankly, always has been. It's easy to say it's 'dying' just because fantasy and horror are so more noticeably prevalent, but that has always been the case. I haven't seen any evidence that British SF's sales are dropping alarmingly, and British genre publishers seem to still be be picking up new SF works and promoting them, which I would guess would not be the case if it was in freefall. The US field could be in better shape, yes, but hopefully that will come in time once a US publisher takes a chance and starts pushing SF in the same way the likes of Gollancz, Orbit, Tor UK and Voyager have been in Britain (and Pyr and Orbit USA are already making some moves in that direction in the US), at which point I think we will see American SF picking up as well.

Of course, what would be really helpful is if say one of those massive-selling urban fantasy/horror writers were to pen a science fiction novel that did really well. Or if a Pulitzer Prize-winning author wrote, for argument's sake, an alternate history novel. Or if a new, much-lauded author (helped by him being, say, the son of a major thriller writer) wrote an SF novel which was publicised as non-SF and sold really well and then he bigged up the genre in interviews. And of course, that's not getting into those mainstream authors who have openly committed genre and then tried to pretend otherwise (Atwood, James, Winterson), fooling exactly no-one along the way whilst still keeping SF viable.

SF remains a going concern and I think it will be around for a very long time to come.

The Reef by Mark Charan Newton

When I read Nights of Villjamur a few weeks back, I noted that the book was being marketed as the author's debut. However, I had noticed Mark Newton's name on another book in my local Waterstones. Some research quickly revealed that Nights is actually the author's second novel. The first, The Reef, was published last year by small UK publisher Pendragon. Having enjoyed Nights, I decided to give it a whirl.


In the city of Escha, a scientist named Manolin is trapped in a difficult marriage with a demanding and paranoid wife. When his mentor and friend Santiago DeBrelt suggests an ocean trip to investigate distressing news from a scientist on the island of Arya, Manolin leaps at the chance and soon a disparate crew of researchers are on their way to the distant island. Meanwhile, in the city of Rhoam, a rumel woman named Jella is putting into operation a plan years in the making, a plan to avenge herself on Escha, the city which destroyed her life and that of her people. Her mission takes her and her companions to the coast, and to a ship bound for Arya...

The Reef is an intriguing novel. Although the events that unfold have potentially huge ramifications for the continent of Has-jahn and the rest of the world, it's largely a small-scale story focusing on the island of Arya and those who visit it. Whilst the novel is apparently about a mystery - who is behind a spate of murders on the island - it's actually much more of a character study, particularly looking at the dynamics of relationships and desire. The book succeeds admirably at both tasks, with the mystery unfolding satisfyingly and the book's comments on relationships interesting and thought-provoking. Manolin is a sympathetic but flawed protagonist, and his companions are also well-drawn, as are Jella's crew of terrorists (although I'd like to have learned more about the enigmatic and lethal Allocen). Whilst Newton's prose has improved since The Reef, it's still nicely different to a lot of fantasy books out there, with its poised manners and stylistic speech inflections reminiscent of Victorian fiction. The worldbuilding is also top-notch. As far as I can tell, The Reef is set on the same world as Nights of Villjamur (they share the non-human race of the rumel), but in a more distant location, maybe the other side of the world, since none of the locations in either book is mentioned in the other. The 'Dying Earth' feel Newton is looking for with this world of ancient, forgotten technology is again successfully achieved here.

The biggest drawback to the book is that the ending is somewhat abrupt. It feels like the plot is building to something quite big, and whilst the events of the end of the book are undeniably large in scale, they also feel a lot more perfunctory than they should. In particular, the meeting of the two sets of characters is brief and somewhat unsatisfying (although with a nice twist). That said, the final chapter is quite well-written and leaves the reader feeling somewhat uneasy.

The Reef (****) is a very solid and enjoyable fantasy which achieves the enviable task of not actually feeling like an overt fantasy despite the near-constant presence of nonhuman species and fantastical concepts. It is available now from Pendragon Press in the UK, but not as far as I can tell in the USA.

Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton

Nights of Villjamur is the second novel by Mark Charan Newton, who has already published some short stories and is also known in the SF community for working for Solaris. The first novel in the planned four-volume Legends of the Red Sun series has already picked up an excellent review from Speculative Horizons.


The Jamur Empire sprawls across the Boreal Archipelago and is powerful and rich. However, scientists and cultists (wielders of an ancient, mysterious technology which generate magic-like powers) have warned of the coming of an ice age which will, for a minimum of fifty years, bring death and desolation to the islands. The Emperor has ordered the stockpiling of vast amounts of firewood and firegrain to get through the long winter, but the Empire also faces other threats. The Emperor is paranoid, seeing threats in every corner, but the succession is difficult for his elder daughter and heir Rika is estranged from him. His younger daughter Eir finds herself unable to ease her father's pain, but the arrival of the handsome and dashing Randur to teach her swordplay and dance allows some laughter into her life. However, Randur has his own mission to conduct in the city.

Meanwhile, the murder of a prominent city councillor sparks an enquiry from the experienced investigator Jeryd. As Jeryd closes in on the truth, he realises that the Empire is riddled with corruption and he faces danger from his own allies, whilst all the while trying to repair his damaged marriage. Elsewhere, Brynd, the commander of the elite Night Guard, has his own secrets to hide when he is dispatched on a mission of utmost importance to the Empire, but uncovers evidence of even direrer threats emerging as the ice sheets advance southwards.

Nights of Villjamur is a multi-stranded novel with several different POV characters and a multitude of storylines, some of which are linked and others which (so far) appear unrelated. The story of an empire under threat from within and without is not unusual in the genre, but what is (relatively) unusual is that the author brings an interesting prose style and a more measured pace to bear on the book. The storyline unfolds deliberately, carefully, and the book's rich writing draws you into its world, the story and the lives of the characters in an accomplished manner. It's not a frenetically-paced, page-turner of the book (at least not until the last fifty pages, when events kick up a gear), but instead a work that immerses you in its world and demands you pay attention.

The city of Villjamur and its surrounding islands are vividly described and the characters are fascinating. The form of magic (relying on ancient technology only dimly understood by those who wield it) is also quite intriguing, and the snowy, cold landscape is well-drawn. There are a few problems, however. The political landscape of Villjamur is not described in as much depth as it could have been, and the ongoing struggle between the Emperor and the Chancellor is described only in fits and starts due to our main POV in that area, Eir, having other concerns.

Aside from that, this is a polished and accomplished debut novel and is well-recommended.

Nights of Villjamur (****½) will be published in the UK on 12 June 2009 by Tor UK. US import copies should be available around the same time. The author has a website at this location.