Happy 60th Birthday to the LORD OF THE RINGS

Amongst other things going on today, it seemed to slip under the radar that it's also the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Lord of the Rings.

The Return of the King, being the third part of the novel, was released on 20 October 1955, completing the publication of the tome that had begun on 29 July 1954 with the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring. The Return of the King had originally been planned for release much earlier in the year, but Tolkien delayed it due to working on the book's appendices, to the annoyance of readers (yet another epic fantasy trend begun by the Tolkmeister).

All being well, the novel should be able to apply for its own bus pass in another seven years or so.

New STAR WARS trailer excites usually cool cynical people

The third and final main trailer for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens has been released. You may view it below.

The trailer has wracked up more than 14 million views on YouTube barely half a day after going online. It was accompanied by the release of tickets for the film in the United States. These have smashed all previous records by a factor of eight times, crashing cinema computer systems across the USA and unleashing hitherto never-experienced levels of mild inconvenience. The pre-interest in the film, which seems to dwarf even that of the prequel trilogy, means that there is an excellent chance that The Force Awakens could challenge Avatar for the title of most successful movie of all time.

The trailer - itself still holding back on telling us much about what the film is actually about - is the latest and apparently last step in a marketing campaign that has been relatively and unusually restrained by Hollywood standards. The film's storyline is still under wraps, only a few character names and their actors have been revealed, and the role that Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) will play remains a mystery, especially given his total absence from the movie's official poster. For a film out in just eight weeks and accompanied by a vast amount of merchandise, this is a remarkable achievement.

The trailers have also done a good job of targeting the nostalgia nerve centres of old-skool Star Wars fans, daring them to hope that the new movies will be excellent. They've certainly done a good job of making everyone forget that J.J. Abrams's last movie was the lamentable Into Darkness, which should otherwise inject some caution into proceedings (until you remember that that was also partly down to the less-than-talented scriptwriters, whilst Lawrence Kasdan is working on the new Star Wars movies and thus that makes it okay again).

The Force Awakens is merely the first in a sustained assault on the wallets - but hopefully not patience - of the movie-going public. No less than three Star Wars movies will be released in just eighteen months, with Star Wars: Rogue One following in December 2016 and then Star Wars Episode VIII in May 2017. A Han Solo origin film will then follow in 2018 and Episode IX in 2019. Further Star Wars films are likely after that point, although no release date has yet been set for Star Wars: The Fate of Jar-Jar.

Peadar Ó Guilín signs new book deal with Scholastic

Irish SF and fantasy author Peadar Ó Guilín has signed a new two-book deal with Scholastic Books in the United States. The first book released in this deal will be The Call, a novel set in an Enid Blyton-style boarding school but "with massive casualties and a severe lack of ginger pop".

Ó Guilín is a familiar face from Irish SFF fandom, a regular at Octocon and TitanCon, and the author of The Bone World Trilogy, the first of which, The Inferior, I reviewed to some praise a nontrivial number of years ago. Which reminds me that I still need to read the sequels.

David Fickling Books will publish the novel in the UK and Ireland. The Call is expected for release in early 2016.

Cover art for Scott Bakker's THE GREAT ORDEAL

Overlook Press have released the cover art for R. Scott Bakker's The Great Ordeal.

The book is currently scheduled for release on 5 July 2016. It will be followed an unspecified amount of time later by the fourth and concluding volume of The Aspect-Emperor, The Unholy Consult.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 20

The majority of works that caused seismic shifts in the fantasy field did so almost overnight: Terry Pratchett became a massive bestseller within just a couple of years of his first Discworld novel being published. Robert Jordan's books hit the bestseller lists almost instantly, as did Terry Brooks's. Tolkien took a decade or so, but only due to limited publicity and no paperback editions being available for The Lord of the Rings until the mid-1960s. But other works took a bit longer to really make their mark felt.

The HarperCollins Voyager preview booklet of A Game of Thrones, the first-officially available chunk of A Song of Ice and Fire. Released circa May/June 1996.

A Trilogy in [some] Parts

George Raymond Richard Martin (born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey) was a very well-known writer in science fiction and horror in the early 1990s. He published his first short story in 1971, won his first (of five, to date) Hugo Award in 1975 and released his first novel in 1977. His 1980 short story Sandkings and his 1982 vampire novel, Fevre Dream, were both hugely critically acclaimed and successful. However, his 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag crashed and burned spectacularly in terms of sales. He put his writing career on hold, but a meeting with a producer interested in making a film of The Armageddon Rag led to a new career in Los Angeles. He worked on the first two seasons of the relaunched Twilight Zone before switching to becoming a writer, script editor and producer on Beauty and the Beast. In 1987 his short story Nightflyers was also adapted for film.

Beauty and the Beast ended, slightly controversially, in 1990 after the writers had killed off lead character Catherine, played by Linda Hamilton. This led to the conclusion that while even the Terminator couldn't kill Linda Hamilton, George R.R. Martin could (slightly erroneously, as the show's producer actually had to make the final call on how to writer her out). Ratings dropped, the fans got angry and the show had to be shut down. Back home in Santa Fe, Martin began writing a science fiction novel called Avalon. His prose writer career had been revived by the release of several successful short fiction collections and a new "fixup" novel (several short stories combined into a cohesive narrative) called Tuf Voyaging. Starting in 1987, Martin had also begun editing the Wild Cards series of collaborative superhero anthologies, which soon proved extremely successful.

After several months of working on Avalon, in the summer of 1991, Martin suddenly got the idea for a scene in which a young boy goes with his father to watch a deserter being beheaded, after which he finds some direwolf pups in the snow. This scene led to others, and soon the SF novel was forgotten. Martin produced over 100 pages and a map into the fantasy story before he was called back to Hollywood to work on a TV project called Doorways, which never made it to the screen. Returning to the fantasy story after almost two years away, Martin realised he was still full of ideas and enthusiasm for it. He had a title in mind: A Song of Ice and Fire, a trilogy consisting of the novels A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter.

That plan didn't long survive contact with the word processor.

A first edition of A Game of Thrones on sale at the 2014 Worldcon.

A Storm of Sales

Martin sold his fantasy "trilogy" to American and British publishers in 1994, for quite impressive sums of money. Martin ending his long exile from writing novels was in itself exciting, but publishers were almost giddy at the prospect of a respected, long-standing writer trying his hand at fantasy, not to mention that the sample chapters and outline were compelling. Both sides of the Atlantic deployed similar strategies to get fantasy fans and the book-buyers for the stores excited. In the United States all of the chapters from the POV of Daenerys Targaryen were pulled out and assembled into a stand-alone novella called Blood of the Dragon. This novella won the first Hugo Award for the series in 1997. In the UK HarperCollins simply pulled out the first 100 pages or so of the novel and published them as a stand-alone novella.

A Game of Thrones was published in August 1996, but the early marketing work didn't seem to have paid off. The book sold okay, but not as much as either publisher had hoped. There had been plenty of positive reviews, but also a few that had been more mixed or negative. In the UK, the biggest genre magazine SFX published a notoriously negative review which, at a time when the Internet and its formidable powers of book recommendations were still in their infancy, seemed to drive off at least some prospective buyers. In America the problem was more down to an oversaturated market and the underwhelming (if flashy) cover design.

Fortunately, the publishers had faith in the book. In the States they relaunched it with a new cover design and pulled in some heavy-weight blurbs. Anne McCaffrey, Janny Wurts, Katharine Kerr and Raymond E. Feist (among others) gave really strong soundbites but it was the ringing endorsement of Robert Jordan which had the biggest impact. Sales rose sharply, accompanied by rapidly-spreading word of mouth and the help of the nascent Internet.

Sales improved again after Robert Silverberg published Legends, an anthology featuring new short stories set in the signature worlds of major fantasy writers. Martin contributed a story called The Hedge Knight. Readers picked up the anthology for the Terry Pratchett, Robert Jordan or Stephen King contribution, read Martin's, and then picked up the main novels as a result. Combined with growing word of mouth and stronger reviews (SFX this time gave a much most positive review), these factors helped push A Clash of Kings onto the lower rungs of the bestseller lists. In 2000 A Storm of Swords debuted at #11, before A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons nailed the top spot.

And introducing Ser Not-Appearing-In-The-Book

A Dance of Delays

The writing of the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire proceeded relatively smoothly. The publication dates (August 1996, October 1998 and July 2000) were quite reasonable, sales rose steadily and the critical acclaim only got bigger with each new novel. However, Martin was struggling with structural issues behind the scenes. He'd started the series with multiple characters in the age range of 3 to 14, planning for each novel to span months or years so they would grow up relatively quickly. But by the end of the third novel less than two years had passed and the characters were still a long way from adulthood.

Whilst writing the third volume in the series, he hit upon an alternate plan: he would bench the story for five years and pick up in Book 4 with all of the "training montages" and awkward growing up material having happened completely off-screen, allowing him to rejoin the narrative and get things moving towards a grand conclusion. In the event this proved unworkable, leading to a massive over reliance on flashbacks and exposition that bogged the novel down. Instead, he jettisoned that material and rewrote the book so it started immediately after A Storm of Swords. Pursuing this blind alley, backing up and starting again cost him over a year's work on the novel. The decision to push stories in the Iron Islands and Dorne to prominence also complicated events. In the end, the fourth book grew to such a huge size and went so far over deadline that drastic action was required.

At the suggestion of his friend (and later formidable fantasy talent in his own right) Daniel Abraham, Martin chopped the story in half by location. The characters in the south of Westeros had their stories told in A Feast for Crows, published in October 2005, and the remaining characters would appear in A Dance with Dragons, to follow, hopefully, a year later.

In event, Dragons was not published until July 2011 after additional structural nightmares, constant rewrites and a whole lot of complaining about it online.

"Let's get out of here."

"Where are we going?"

"Book Six."

A Feast for Viewers

By the time A Feast for Crows was published, worldwide sales of the series are guesstimated to have reached about 5 million. The series was big and the critical acclaim was strong, enough for Martin's Hollywood agent to make attempts to attract the interest of television and film producers. David Benioff, the toast of Hollywood for his fast and skilled scriptwork, was sent the novels and was hooked early on. So was his friend Dan Weiss, then working on the aborted Halo movie. They joined forces and suggested to Martin that they take the project to Martin's favourite TV network, HBO, the creators of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood and Rome.

The project was huge and ambitious, and HBO hesitated over the project, not sure if it was "them". They tentatively took it on, but then grew in confidence when another adaptation of books outside of their usual comfort zone, with the vampire drama True Blood, paid off handsomely. Even though it was almost sunk several times (by the 2007-08 Hollywood Writer's Strike and then a confusing and problematic pilot), the TV adaptation, under the title Game of Thrones finally hit the screens in April 2011 to almost-instant acclaim.

The success of the TV show boosted the sales of the novels by a staggering degree. Over nine million copies of the books were sold in 2011-12 alone. By the end of 2015, sales of the series had passed 60 million. Although still somewhat less than The Wheel of Time, the much smaller number of novels in the series meant that A Song of Ice and Fire has now beaten every other fantasy series by a living writer (bar only J.K. Rowling) in terms of actual readers. Whilst gratifying to Martin, this also meant that the number of readers excitedly waiting for the sixth and (planned) penultimate novel in the series, The Winds of Winter, had grown massively and exponentially. However, the rapid production schedule for the TV series also meant that planned plot points for later novels had to appear on TV as early as the fifth season, leading some to fear that the show would comprehensively spoil the books before the books could ever be finished.

A Song of Ice and Fire is the most popular epic fantasy series of the modern age, despite its incomplete status and lengthy between-volume gaps. But how the story affected people and the impact it had on the direction of the genre is a slightly different story.

New poster for THE FORCE AWAKENS

Lucasfilm have released the final official poster for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

The poster still lacks the "Episode VII" subtitle, which many were expecting to appear on the final version, but it's definitely dramatically appropriate and in keeping with the tone of the trilogy.

The poster also gives us another look at some of the new hardware in the trilogy, such as the new generation of X-wings and TIE fighters, the slightly modified Millennium Falcon and, in the top-right, what appears to be a new Death Star-esque space station or weapon.

More will be revealed in a new trailer, due to hit tomorrow, and of course the final film which is just eight and a half weeks away.

Satellite Reign

The world is controlled by ruthless megacorporations, the most notorious of which is Dracogenics. A group opposed to Dracogenics drop four skilled agents into their largest city, with a simple mission: build up the resources needed to destroy the corporation for good.

Satellite Reign is a real-time tactics game set in a cyberpunk city, some 200 years in the future. You control four agents, each representing a specific class (Soldier, Hacker, Support and Infiltrator), and have a mission to take down and destroy an enemy corporation. Thanks to resurrection technology, your agents are functionally immortal, but each time they regenerate they lose some of their abilities. Fortunately they can be restored by cloning citizens (and, eventually, enemy soldiers), but this comes at its own price of morality, time and the risk of discovery.

The game takes place entirely on one massive map divided into four districts. At the start of the game you are restricted to the Industrial District and have to undertake missions for local criminal gangs and your own bosses. These can involve rescuing someone from custody, assassinating targets or (most commonly) stealing enemy inventions. You can research new technology, such as weapons or augmentations (implants), or equipment such as better armour or energy shields. All of this requires money, which you can obtain through doing missions or hacking ATM machines. This is essential because as you complete missions and move onto new districts of the city, the objectives become tougher, the enemy gain better equipment and the odds start stacking up against you. Research and development is key to you maintaining an edge over the opposition.

Missions can be accomplished in multiple ways. You can sneak into facilities through stealth, perhaps through an air vent or hacking the security cameras and blast doors. You can send in all four team-members or hold some in reserve and send in your infiltrator (complete with his insta-kill melee weapons and cloaking device) alone. You can mind-control enemy soldiers into helping you out by opening doors or providing a diversion. Or you can wade in with all guns blazing and overcome the security forces through superior firepower and tactics. A combined stealth/cover system is employed to help this. Combat is in real-time and can get quite frantic, although an optional bullet time mode can slow things down and allow for more relaxed use of tactics.

Graphically, the game looks gorgeous with some excellent neon-lit buildings and a strong aesthetic style. When you zoom in things get rather less impressive, but you'll spend most of it zoomed out to a reasonable level. The game also features some amazing rain effects, ambient sound and low-fi music, not to mention a cyberspace view which transforms the game into Tron.

The gameplay is generally excellent, with your agents controlled through simple mouse commands and keyboard shortcuts. Like all the best games, Satellite Reign's systems are individually straightforward, but when combined can lead to some splendid sandbox moments, such as when an infiltration goes horribly wrong and you find yourself trapped in an alley, but then the automated turret you hacked on a whim a few minutes earlier suddenly opens up on the enemy and scatters them. It is extremely satisfying to recon a target location, formulate a plan and then successfully execute it, dealing with problems along the way. But it is more fun when things go awry and you have to improvise. The game is tough (especially at the start) but fair. When things go badly wrong and your party is wiped out, you generally know exactly why, how and how you can learn from the experience to improve next time.

There are a few minor issues. The story is pretty much non-existent, relegated to briefings on data consoles and an occasional transmission from your off-screen support. This makes some parts of the game (particularly the eyebrow-raising ending) resonate less strongly than they should. Research is also solely time-dependent, which means if you want to level up and get ahead of the opposition, you can simply spend a couple of hours standing around completing research projects one after the other without actually doing anything else. There's also a few buggy moments, such as when a character passes through a solid door and ends up trapped on the other end, or can't traverse an airvent without getting stuck in an animation loop. These latter issues are very few and far between, especially now the game's received a few solid patches.

For the most part, Satellite Reign (****½) is tremendous fun. Its freeform gameplay, satisfying combat and tremendous sense of atmosphere combine to create something extremely appealing and strategically satisfying, which doesn't outstay its welcome. The game is available now on GoG and Steam.

Comparison with Syndicate

Almost every review of Satellite Reign I've read has commented extensively on its comparisons to the 1993 cyberpunk classic Syndicate, one of my favourite games of all time. I didn't raise this in the main review because I suspect vast numbers of people (the probable majority) playing this game have never played Syndicate and indeed may not have been born when it was released. However, these are my views on how the two games stack up.

Satellite Reign shares a similar visual aesthetic and control scheme to Syndicate, but is much more sophisticated. Satellite Reign has hacking, stealth and cover systems, all lacking from Syndicate. Syndicate is more limited because its missions really revolve around either combat or persuading someone to join you. A few missions could be completed without a shot being fired but these were few and far between. Syndicate was also played on fifty different maps, each supposedly part of a different city, but these were very similar with no major shifts in visual style to differentiate the cities. Satellite Reign has more character and variation in its one city than Syndicate, its expansion (American Revolt) or sequel (Syndicate Wars) combined. Satellite Reign's class system also works better then Syndicate's "four identical people, each toting eight miniguns" approach.

On the other hand, the originals did do a few things better. Syndicate allowed you to use vehicles and its weapons were much punchier. The Persuadatron was ludicrously good fun, and much better than Satellite Reign's more limited person-hacking mechanic. Returning to base between each mission, allowing you to re-arm and research at leisure, was also more enjoyable than the stretches of Satellite Reign when you're just standing in an alley waiting for your shields to recharge or for that new gun to unlock through research. Syndicate Wars also had fully-destructible scenery and allowed you to rotate the camera 360 degrees. Satellite Reign's inability to rotate it more than a few degrees is just odd.

Overall, Satellite Reign is the more sophisticated, varied and compelling game, but there's a few things the old games (can still be picked up from places like GoG) still do better. Certainly Satellite Reign is a more than worthy successor, and a must buy for anyone who was a fan of the original games.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 19

The early to mid 1990s saw an explosion in the popularity of epic fantasy. Writers in the field went from a few dozen to hundreds as publishers chased the next Robert Jordan or Tad Williams. Sales were extremely strong, but market oversaturation led to a decline in the latter part of the decade. But several major, strong voices emerged from this period who would go on to great success.

The Last Wish

Epic fantasy is not just popular in the English language. Authors such as Tolkien, Pratchett and Jordan achieved fame worldwide, with translated editions of their books selling in their tens and hundreds of thousands, even millions, outside of their success in English. Some authors even enjoyed greater success: Tad Willias's SF/fantasy Otherland series sold very well in the USA and UK, but became a phenomenal bestseller in Germany. Paul Kearney had middling sales in English, but his books are quite popular in places from Spain to Israel.

More unusual, until recently, were authors from overseas being translated into English. Whether this was simple economics - the additional cost of paying a professional translator was not deemed worth it when there was so much homegrown talent available - is unclear. However, in the 2000s publishers began realising that by publishing non-English authors in the States and Commonwealth markets, they could often tap into a large back-catalogue of already-completed works. And the first author to benefit from this was Polish superstar Andrzej Sapkowski.

Sapkowski began publishing short stories about Geralt of Rivia, a "witcher" or monster-hunter, in the late 1980s. In 1990 he assembled these stories as The Witcher (re-released in 1993 in an expanded form under its definitive title, The Last Wish), which became a bestseller in Poland. Its success soon spread to the huge (and oft-neglected) Russian-speaking market as well as across Europe, from Spain to Germany. The book was followed by The Sword of Destiny (1992), a linked series of short stories which established the background and setting for a longer epic. This epic took the form of five novels, starting with Blood of Elves, published between 1994 and 1999 (with a prequel novel being published in 2012).

These books are notable for drawing on a broader range of European mythology than is the norm, and for a large degree of moral complexity. The reliance of the books on Polish wordplay for their humour made translating them challenging, and may have contributed to the delay in their appearance in English.

In 2007 the decision was made to bring the books into English. This was inspired by the release, by CD Projekt, of a tie-in video game called The Witcher. The game was a modest success and was followed by The Witcher II: Assassin of Kings (2011), which was a much bigger worldwide hit. This in turn was followed by The Witcher III: The Last Hunt (2015), which was a worldwide monster smash, selling six million copies in its first month on sale. The English translations proceeded in a haphazard manner, with the release of the later books delayed by immense legal complications. These were eventually resolved and the series was finally released in English to significant critical acclaim.

King's Dragon

Alis A. Ramussen started her writing career in 1988, publishing a stand-alone fantasy novel called The Labyrinth Gate, followed by the science fiction Highroad Trilogy in 1990. Sales were disappointing, so her publishers proposed switching to a pen name to relaunch her career. Now writing as Kate Elliott, her next project was the Jaran science fiction series. This was modestly successful, but she achieved greater popularity with the well-received Golden Key, a fantasy collaboration with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson. These marked out Elliott as an author watch.

Her next project, King's Dragon (1997), established her one of the top writers in the epic fantasy field. This was the opening volume of Crown of Stars, a series that grew to seven volumes and was completed in 2006. Crown of Stars is both a traditional epic fantasy and one that comments on the genre, with its strong female characters and deliberately low-scaled setting with armies typically numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands and a much greater emphasis on the power of religion. The series is also notable for being set in an overtly parallel-universe version of Europe rather than a more loosely "influenced by" setting. Its musings on faith and religious power are impressive (particularly the expectation-defying storyline of Alain), and overall it ranks as one of the more interesting and underrated completed series in the field.

Elliott has since written the remarkable Crossroads and Spiritwalker trilogies, as well as the Court of Fives YA series.

Wizards' First Rule

After the immense success of The Wheel of Time, Tor Books began looking for authors who could repeat Robert Jordan's success for them. In 1994 they published the debut novel by an American author named Terry Goodkind.

Goodkind had come to writing relatively late in life, having had a successful career as a painter and cabinet-maker. Dyslexia had made him reluctant to tackle writing, but he overcame this to write Wizards' First Rule in 1993; Tor published it the following year, when the author was 46. The book was initially well-received and sold impressively, so Tor published several sequels. This became The Sword of Truth series, which by the time of its completion thirteen years later had expanded to eleven novels and sold over 25 million copies, making Goodkind Tor's second-biggest-selling author after Robert Jordan.

The Sword of Truth is unusual in that it is heavily influenced by the works of Ayn Rand, particular Atlas Shrugged and the socio-economic theory of Objectivism it popularised. Objectivism states that the will and importance of the individual is of paramount importance and that social systems should not limit the ability of the individual to seek happiness or promote their own success. However, some commentators have noted that this is merely a thinly-veiled excuse for unrestrained capitalist expansion and a justification for the selfishness of the privileged over the unlucky or socially-challenged. The Objectivist philosophy is fairly restrained in Wizards' First Rule but becomes more prominent in later novels (and then completely dominant in Faith of the Fallen, the sixth book in the series) when substantial chunks of the books are given over to the heroes of the series, Richard Rahl and Kahlan, expounding on the theory and its application to their fantasy world at some considerable length. Other political ideas also made their way into the series, such as Goodkind using carciatures of Bill and Hilary Clinton as villains in one novel and expounding on Communism as the primary evil in his world. Goodkind also began stating in interviews that he was not writing fantasy because he loved the genre, but because he saw it as a way of exploring "important human themes", to the bemusement of many reviewers and fans familiar with the series and concepts such as "nipple magic", the "noble goat" and "evil shapeshifting monster who attacks a primary protagonist whilst inexplicably disguised as a chicken".

Despite the naysayers, The Sword of Truth remains one of the biggest-selling fantasy series of recent times. Unusually, however, it's also a series whose profile and sales dipped as it continued. The concluding volumes reached the top of the New York Times bestseller lists, but Goodkind's attempt to launch a tangentially-related series set in the modern world, The Law of Nines, was not successful. A subsequent sequel series to The Sword of Truth, following up on Richard and Kahlan's later adventures, has also failed to achieve the same level of sales as the earlier novels. A television adaptation of the series, Legend of the Seeker, was also cancelled after two seasons (and having very little to do with the books). However, these failures are only relative, and Goodkind remains one of the more well-known - and some fantasy fans may say infamous - authors in the field.

The Baker's Boy

SFF publishing's ongoing quest to find the next big thing turned up an additional success in 1995. A British author residing in San Francisco, Julie Victoria Jones, had sent Warner Books a manuscript called The Baker's Boy, the opening volume of a trilogy called The Book of Words. With the trilogy already in an advanced state of completion, Warners (who used the series to reboot a moribund SFF line) decided to publish the series with a heavy blizzard of publicity, mirrored by Orbit Books in the UK.

The result was a trilogy that smashed onto the bestseller lists and achieved early critical acclaim, not for its story which was standard but for its dark sense of humour, overriding themes of tragedy and murky, complex morality. Jones also proved to be remarkably prolific, producing a fine stand-alone novel called The Barbed Coil in 1997 before embarking on The Sword of Shadows, a sequel series to The Book of Words, although not one that requires detailed foreknowledge of the original series.

Published in 1999, A Cavern of Black Ice represented not so much an improvement in quality but a quantum jump in skill and ability. Featuring substantially improved characterisation and prose skills over her earlier works, A Cavern of Black Ice was a fine fantasy novel that boded well for the rest of the series. Unfortunately, Jones's formerly spectacular production rate appeared to drop off a cliff, with long waits for the sequels: A Fortress of Grey Ice (2002), A Sword From Red Ice (2007) and Speaker for the Dead (2010). The fifth novel, Endlords, has been delayed several times.

Despite these disappointingly long waits, The Sword of Shadows remains one of the more accomplished works of epic fantasy of recent years. Its brooding, freezing atmosphere, its political intrigue and its tragic characters combine to form a series of much greater depth than some of its contemporaries, and if it ends strongly it could be regarded as one of the defining works of its time.

Hawkwood's Voyage

Paul Kearney, a writer from Northern Ireland, began his writing career with three stand-alone novels: The Way to Babylon (1992), A Different Kingdom (1993) and Riding the Unicorn (1994). These novels are notable for featuring characters from the real world intermingling with the fantasy world in some way. A Different Kingdom was particularly remarkable, coming across as a uniquely Irish spin on some of the same ground explored in Robert Holdstock's woodland fantasy, Mythago Wood. Riding the Unicorn hinted at a different direction for Kearney's work, featuring as it did massive battles and clashes between armies in a well-realised fantasy world.

Published in 1995, Hawkwood's Voyage was the logical next step in that process. Set completely in a fantasy world, the novel charts the clash between the western kingdoms of Normannia and the invading hordes of the Merduks of the east, who follow a different religion. The western kingdoms are divided by civil war sparked by an attempt by the fanatical Ramusian Church to press down on heretics and magic-users not sworn to their services. A number of these heretics flee into the western ocean as part of an ill-advised exploration mission seeking a rumoured new continent across the sea, whilst the kings of two of the great western nations break away in an attempt to protect their people. This leaves the eastern kingdom of Torunna to face the invaders alone, massively outnumbered and with only a single beleaguered fortress guarding the way.

The Monarchies of God, spanning five short novels published from 1995 to 2003, was a series ahead of its time. It was unusually bloody and grim, although never gratuitously so, but ended on a note of hope and cooperation. It featured vivid, memorable battle sequences reminiscent of David Gemmell, along with cynical military camaraderie in the style of Glen Cook. The religious turmoil is drawn straight from history (the opening fall of Aekir, the great religious centre of the east, is based on the capture of Constantinople in 1453), but the presence of werewolves injects a shot of sheer horror into the narrative at unexpected moments. The books are also remarkable for carrying a huge amount of plot and character development in relatively few pages (the combined page count for the series is roughly equal to George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords by itself). They also take place later in feigned history than most fantasy books, featuring gunpowder, arquebuses and cannons alongside the more traditional swords and crossbows. Other fantasy series have employed gunpowder (such as Tom Arden's Orokon sequence) but it remains an under-explored technology in epic fantasy.

An intermittent release cycle and the earlier books going out of print before the later ones could be published meant that The Monarchies of God did not achieve the success it deserved on its initial printing: its reissuing in two volumes (Hawkwood and the Kings and Century of the Soldier) by Solaris in 2010 proved more successful. Kearney has since written two volumes of a nautical fantasy series, The Sea-Beggars (the concluding volume has been held up by a rights dispute between the British and American publishers); a Gemmell-esque quasi-historical trilogy based on ancient Greece called The Macht; and a couple of tie-in novels for properties such as Primeval and Warhammer 40,000. His next book, The Wolf in the Attic, is a return to the more intimate, character-based fantasy of his early work. However, Kearney's immense skills at epic fantasy make him one of the more interesting, if underread, authors in the genre.

By the mid-1990s epic fantasy was looking for its Next Big Thing, a series that would come along and redefine the genre. Attempts to simply replicate Tolkien or Jordan hadn't really worked, and although some big sellers had emerged, there still wasn't any sign of a work that would elevate the genre further. When it did arrive, in August 1996, it wasn't from a bright and hopeful young author, but from a long-standing and respected author in the fields of science fiction and horror.

The Martian

The third manned mission to Mars goes catastrophically wrong when the team are hit by a powerful storm. Most of the crew manage to reach their spacecraft and escape, but astronaut Mark Watney is apparently killed. However, Watney survives. He is able to ensure his short-term survival by reaching the team's abandoned habitat, but he now has to survive potentially four years with extremely limited supplies and resources. When NASA realises that Watney has survived, they begin preparing a rescue mission, fighting the limitations of budgets, science and politics all the way.

The Martian is director Ridley Scott's adaptation of Andy Weir's critically-acclaimed 2011 novel. This is a hard science fiction movie following in the footsteps of films such as Gravity and Interstellar of at least attempting a more plausible and realistic view of space travel.

Ridley Scott's recent career has been patchy, with his 2012 movie Prometheus in particular attracting criticism for its inconsistent script and unrealistic portrayal of how humans would act and react in space. The Martian feels, in part, like an apology for that film. In fact, it's probably Scott's strongest movie since Gladiator. The script (by Drew Goddard) is relaxed and witty, and the tone kept deliberately light in places rather than dwelling on the existential gloom of Watney being trapped alone, millions of miles from the nearest human being and cut off from real time communications with home.

In terms of science, the movie is mostly plausible apart from a couple of issues. The film makes a deliberate choice not to replicate the effects of the low gravity on Mars (which is only one-third that of Earth). Whilst making shooting easier, it's a bit of an odd choice in a movie that spends so much time dwelling on the scientific challenges of a mission to Mars and also makes indirect use of the lower gravity in other parts of the film in sequences showing the various transfer craft launching from the planet. The other issue is that the ship that actually travels between Earth and Mars, the Hermes, is shown as being improbably large, sophisticated and even luxurious. But showing the likelier reality of the crew huddled in a fairly small vessel for months on end would be less impressive. Also, the storm seen at the start of the movie simply wouldn't happen in the way it does.

These issues can be bourne for the successes elsewhere. The cast is excellent, from Damon's marooned astronaut to Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Sean Bean leading the attempts to rescue him (Bean even gets a Lord of the Rings joke as a sly nod to the audience). Able support is provided by Michael Pena, Kate Mara and Benedict Wong. More impressively, the film knows how to deploy its talent to maximum effect, meaning that the familiar name-heavy cast never feels muddled or stuffed. Indeed, some actors like Sebastian Stan and Donald Glover put in solid, nuanced performances in impressively limited screen time, leaving you wanting more.

But the film's focus stays on Damon for most of the film, showing how he deploys humour and resolve to overcome the nightmare predicament he finds himself in. The film's commitment (a few forgivable lapses into movie illogic aside) to real science and its cooperation with NASA makes for an authentic-feeling, positive story. It may be too idealistic - the Chinese give up an important technical secret a bit too easily and the film occasionally feels like a recruiting tool for NASA - but it's good to see a film suggesting that humans can be better than they are now and showing that we can achieve the impossible, at a price.

The Martian (****½) is on general release now.

Scott Bakker's UNHOLY CONSULT split, to be published in 2016

Overlook have confirmed that the concluding volume of R. Scott Bakker's Aspect-Emperor series, itself only the second of three series in the Second Apocalypse mega-series, has been split in half due to length. The two new volumes, entitled The Great Ordeal and The Unholy Consult, will conclude the Aspect-Emperor series.

Bakker himself voiced this possibility a few months ago, when disclosing that the novel clocked in north of 300,000 words even before he added a substantial appendix to it. After a lengthy and odd delay after he submitted the novel for publication, Overlook finally confirmed they were moving ahead with publication plans three months ago.

The Great Ordeal will be published on 5 July 2016. The Unholy Consult will follow, likely between six and twelve months later.

The PR blurb follows:

The much-anticipated third installment of R. Scott Bakker’s acclaimed series, The Aspect-Emperor

Praised by fans and critics worldwide, R. Scott Bakker has become one of the most celebrated voices in fantasy literature. With The Great Ordeal, Bakker presents the long-anticipated third volume of The Aspect-Emperor, a series that stands with the finest in the genre for its grandiose scope, rich detail, and thrilling story.

As Fanim war-drums beat just outside the city, the Empress Anasurimbor Esmenet searches frantically throughout the palace for her missing son Kelmomas. Meanwhile and many miles away, Esmenet’s husband’s Great Ordeal continues its epic march further north. But in light of dwindling supplies, the Aspect-Emperor’s decision to allow his men to consume the flesh of fallen Sranc could have consequences even He couldn’t have foreseen. And, deep in Ishuäl, the wizard Achamian grapples with his fear that his unspeakably long journey might be ending in emptiness, no closer to the truth than when he set out.

The Aspect-Emperor series follows Bakker’s Prince of Nothing saga, returning to the same world twenty years later. The Great Ordeal follows The Judging Eye and The White-Luck Warrior, and delivers the first half of the conclusion to this epic story. Returning to Bakker’s richly imagined universe of myth, violence, and sorcery, The Aspect-Emperor continues to set the bar for the fantasy genre, reaching new heights of intricacy and meaning.

Update from Scott: 

Just got back to find there’s been some developments! I’d resolved to say nothing anticipating anything–it just makes me feel foolish anymore. Until we have all the details hammered out, there’s not much I can say except that Overlook’s July 2016 date is tentative. I fear I can’t comment on their press release, either. Things seem to be close, though.

I know it’s been a preposterously long haul, folks, but hold on just a bit longer. The laws of physics are bound to kick in at some point, after which I can start delivering some more reliable predictions.