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Three Christopher Brookmyre books, all new to me!

(No US publisher. WTF?)

_A Snowball In Hell_
_Pandaemonium_
_The Sacred Art of Stealing_

Stealing and Snowball are, respectively, the third and second books in a trilogy where I have not read the first book. Also I read them in inverse order. Luckily they are fairly self-contained. The heroine is Angelique de Xavia, a Scottish police inspector who kicks arse. Both of the major criminals she faces here are executing clever crimes; one of them is also trying to keep it free of civilian casualties. The world clever keeps coming up; also beautifully complicated, snarky, and charmingly riotously funny.

_Pandaemonium_, on the other hand, is a slasher movie about demons killing teenagers in inventively gruesome ways. Interspersed with this is an intriguing SF story. Overall, it's Doom done properly.

For Heaven's Eyes Only, Simon R. Green
Against All Enemies, Tom Clancy and Peter Telep
After Hours: Tales from Ur-Bar, edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray
The Parasite, Neal Asher


IF you've been reading Green's series about the Drood family, their magic armor, and Eddie's semi-Bond-pastiche adventures, well... this is another one. If you haven't been reading it, there's not much reason to start. It's the fluffiest kind of lightweight fantasy adventurism.

Tom Clancy has finally done it: he's hired a ghost-writer who can't do Clancy's style at all. At all. I put down the book after 130 pages and haven't picked it up yet. It's not even competent war-porn. Avoid, especially if you liked _The Hunt for Red October_ and even if you liked _Rainbow Six_.

ON the other hand, a cabal of talented, mostly newer (last ten years) authors contributed stories to _After Hours_, and they were almost all quite successful. The conceit is that there is a bar, much like Cowboy Feng's place, which is run by Gilgamesh as the result of a curse explained in the opening story. Stuff happens through time and space, mostly interesting, mostly entertaining.

And finally, Neal Asher released an early trunk novel in which you can see quite a few of the ideas, gizmos and tropes that he returned to in his subsequent novels. Bloody and violent and full of technological fetishism in a space-opera universe; if you enjoy his later books, this is not noticeably inferior.

_Hexed_, Kevin Hearne
_Hit List_, Laurell Hamilton
_Deadline_, Mira Grant (the prolific Seanan McGuire)

_Hexed_ is the second book of the Iron Druid series. It is much like other urban fantasy second books, in that the author is clearly chuffed to have a successful first outing, wants to get on with a longer-term plot, and feels a need to make things blow up to indicate how cool this all is. In this book, the gentle humor is only slightly strained, the characters remain basically unchanged, and the explosions are quite dramatic.

_Hit List_ is the twentieth book of the Anita Blake series. Twentieth. This one mostly gets on with the plot and only breaks for long passionate overwrought sex scenes three or four times. None of the sex scenes require multiple chapters! Also, things blow up at the end and it is conceivable that Hamilton could wrap up the whole series next book, if she really wanted to. But what are the odds of that?

_Deadline_ is a pretty good sequel to the amazing _Feed_. Plot happens, danger from zombies is overshadowed by danger from shadowy conspiracies, and lots of stuff blows up, some of it in the plot. Actually, lots of it in the plot, and all of that at the end: this book drives up a steep mountain road in a rickety Jeep full of automatic weapons and stops just when it becomes apparent that the bridge is out and the reader is now at the top of a very, very tall cliff. Better hang on tightly, because the next book won't be out for a whole year.

If you locked Seanan McGuire and Daniel Abraham in a room with coffee, food and computers, do you think they'd run out of electrons before they ran out of stories?

_Red Gloves_, Holly Black

The sequel to _White Cat_ goes into the inevitable aftermath, generates new problems, and solves them in spectacular and sometimes disastrous fashions. I'm not sure exactly what "curse working" is a metaphor for. On its own merits, it has ethnicity, class, social acceptability, and elements of disease. Come to think of it, it's very much like _X-Men_'s treatment of mutant super powers.

Also, there is a plot and several well-developed characters, all worked into a good story.

_The Dragon's Path_ (Dagger and Coin #1) Daniel Abraham
_Leviathan Wakes_ (Expanse #1) James S.A. Covey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck)
_Hounded_, Kevin Hearne
_Hard Magic_, Larry Correia
_Irredeemable_, volumes 1-4, Mark Waid
_Welcome to Bordertown_, ed Black and Datlow
_All You Need is Kill_, Hiroshi Sakurazaka
_Fuzzy Nation_, John Scalzi
_Among Others_, Jo Walton


(What do you mean I have a backlog? What... oh.)

Let's start with the disappointing ones first. Some degree of spoilers, but not many.

_Irredeemable_. I have now read four volumes of this ongoing graphic novel about a Superman-analogue who does a face-heel turn. Sundry explanations ensue, but the story should have been over at the end of the third volume, when we discover that he was a psychopath all along, but very good at covering it up. Instead, the story continues and continues and drags on. I'm done.

_All You Need Is Kill_ has a sort of flowchart as a table of contents. In the course of the first few chapters, it becomes clear that the protagonist is caught in a time loop, and the flowchart is accurate. So it's self-spoiling, and the remaining questions are why and how this is happening. The questions are answered. Otherwise, this is one part _Starship Troopers_ (if you have powered armor in a book, ST references are obligatory), one part _Groundhog Day_ (ditto time loops), one part _The Triffids_, and one part first-person-shooter video game. It wasn't boring, but it didn't really say anything excitingly new, nor did I care about the characters.

That's it for disappointing.

Daniel Abraham is prolific, and that's a good thing. Here we have an excellent Epic Fantasy with a Roman Empire-analogue in the past, Greek-style city-states, magic which is reasonably subtle (but not so much as with Walton, see later), and two amazing plots: one is about the banality of evil, and one is about medieval banking systems. It looks like he'll continue both those plots, since the series title is "Dagger and Coin". He does a good job wrapping up storylines just in case no sequel is forthcoming, but who are we kidding? There will be more, and they will sell nicely to the same crowd currently demanding a sequel to Sanderson's latest.

Daniel Abraham is prolific, and that's a good thing. Next we have a Solar-System set space opera that, modulo the absurdly efficient fusion drive, probably qualifies as Mundane. Part of it is police procedural, a small part political-revolutionary (does anyone think that Earth, Mars, the Asteroids and the Jovian moon colonies will all be happy under the same government? Yeah, right) and a large part is zipping around the system chasing or being chased. Again, a good wrap-up to storylines but a clear path forward to a sequel.

_Among Others_, by Jo Walton -- I just swallowed this whole. There is no clear path to a sequel, and I do not want one. This is the subtlest use of magic I've ever seen -- as our protagonist points out several times, all the magic works by coincidence and could have been random chance -- but that's just a feature. This is a story about the aftermath of heroic action, the process of making friends when you're a stranger in a strange land, and above all else, the importance of thinking about decisions before you make them. It's a very quiet book, and is chock-full of references to science fiction and fantasy books in a way which I suspect only about 20,000 people or so in the world will really get.

_Welcome to Bordertown_ is the new anthology of Bordertown stories. If you already know that shared-world series, I can summarize this way: the Border closed for 13 days in Bordertown, and in our world 13 years elapsed. Some of the stories are completely amazing (Charles De Lint's story is going to win an award, I think) and all are good, at the least. If you don't know the series, I'm not going to explain it to you: just go see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Borderland_Series .

_Hounded_ is a fairly conventional modern urban fantasy, with a slightly snarky male narrator. His schtick is that he's the last of the real Druids, two thousand years old and still pursued by ancient Celtic gods and godesses. He talks to his dog, who is fairly charming, and gains power by going barefoot upon the earth. If you like that sort of thing... turns out I do.

Going in a completely different direction, _Hard Magic_ is an alternate-history fantasy in which magic started appearing sometime in the 19th century, leading to appropriately drastic changes in the course of world events but an awfully high number of parallels, as well. Zeppelins, Hoover-era G-men, magical gangsters, the evil Japanese Empire, and a not-so-ancient hidden order of knight-wizards all play their parts. Some incredible gore occurs, culminating in a huge battle on board airships.

Finally: _Fuzzy Nation_. Apart from a slow early-middle section where it looked like Scalzi was going to railroad the plot in a particularly trite direction (he doesn't), this is a snazzy rewrite with a satisfying lawyer-prospector protagonist. Pay attention to what he doesn't say, it's important.

_Skeleton Crew_, Cameron Haley

Second book about a Latina magical gang lieutenant in LA. In the first book, it was clear that Domino's alignment was pretty gray. In this book, she is pretty clearly evil, but on the side of humanity versus anything else. There is a three hour zombie-hunting expedition in a hospital which does not appear to cause her much residual anxiety; any number of homicides, assassinations, and executions... really, as bad one might fear a magic-using organized criminal subchieftain to be. She retains a soft spot for dogs and children.

I'm growing less interested in her as a character.

Mobile LJ seems to have eaten my last review.

_The Information_, James Gleick

20% end notes, and he doesn't manage to say anything controversial. I suppose I am too deeply bedded in this field to wonder at it anymore. Might be a good book for students trying to figure out if they have an interest in theoretical/academic computer science.

_Fine Structure_, Sam Hughes, at http://qntm.org/files/structure/
_Tides From the New Worlds_, Tobias Buckell

Tides is a single-author anthology. It appears that I like Mr. Buckell's novels much more than I like his short stories -- my reactions ranged from "that's potentially cool" to "why?". Nearly all of them seem to take place in or near the ocean's shore, even on other planets.

I liked _Fine Structure_ an awful lot. It has a TV Tropes page and was originally started, I believe, on Everything2. The fragment-and-scene technique that John Brunner used in _Jagged Orbit_, _Stand on Zanzibar_, _The Shockwave Rider_ and so on is used to extraordinarily good effect, with individual entries ranging up to the length of long short stories and skipping around in time sequence. The book is a whole greater than its parts, detailing an entire cosmology through the viewpoints of a predominantly human cast. Greg Bear might be jealous. Everything is wonderfully interconnected, with clues liberally scattered yet not always obvious. I stayed awake late to finish this, and was happy that I did.

_Among Thieves_, Douglas Hulick

I didn't finish this. Perhaps I'll try again some other day.

There is a snarky first person protagonist. He lives in a fantasy medievalish city, with magic but no obvious non-humans intelligences. By all rights I should like this.

Nope. Not working for me.

_Seeds of Earth_ and _The Orphaned Worlds_, Michael Cobley


Books one and two of a trilogy.

The author's idea of promotional material: "A Space Opera saga in the grand tradition of Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter F. Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke."

He's wrong.

It's much more likely to appeal to people who liked David Brin's Uplift Trilogy, and especially those who think that it's a real shame Brin can't manage to write endings.
There are aliens with alien motivations, a deep structure to the universe (multiverse?) which is cinematically interesting, and cheap FTL and bypassing of rocket mass ratios to enable space dogfights and sneaking around other peoples' warships.

Is fun. Is not very deep, is not very serious, is only 2/3 done.