Acts of Violence by Ross Harrison

Publisher: Shadow Archer Publishing

Publishing Date: January 18th 2014

As his nose cracked under my knuckles, I reflected on how much I hated violence.

Ross Harrison doesn’t waste words , he drops us straight into the action and the mind of his main character, Jack Mason.

Jack wanted to be a policeman, he has been kicked out of the academy, applied for a P.I. licence to anybody who could listen, human or alien, and was denied, now, in a backwater city on a backwater planet where just about every member of the police is in the pay of the local kingpin, he tries to make a difference with a collection of fake badges, weapons and a lot of attitude.

There’s something in Jack’s past, an unsolved disappearance that has one of the local officers hot for his blood, and when a barmaid meets an untimely death after Jack brought her home, Detective Lawrence sees his chance and seizes it. Luckily for Mason someone else wants him and breaks him out of jail.

As we follow Jack’s attempts to solve the murder and save his skin the plot twists and turns like a mountain trail, the author guides us with a deft hand and assured, well flowing prose to a final twist that caught me completely by surprise and left me reeling, with a closing scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a  Japanese or Hongkongese film noir

The writing is very sensorial, the constant rain (is there any noir in which it doesn’t rain all the time?), the smells, flavors, sounds and feel of Harem are all around us as we follow  Jack, but always under tight control, the writer doesn’t let his descriptions run loose and is able to portray characters and situations with just a few words ( The old lady down the hall had probably twitched her last curtain is a personal favourite).

If I have an issue with Acts of Violence it is with the SF elements. When mr. Harrison sent me his book for review,  he warned me that SF was just the backdrop of the story and that proved to be true. We have some futuristic technology, hints of a vast universe with faster-than-light travel capabilities and alien cultures, but hints are all we get in this novel (although there are more books sharing this setting). I would have liked to be able to delve a bit deeper in this universe, maybe through conversations or news broadcasts or even some backmatter (forgive me, one of the things I really loved about Dune and The Lord of the Rings were the maps and the appendixes).

In any case, if you like well-written noirs, Acts of Violence is highly recommended.

Provoke Not The Children by Michael W. Anderson

Publisher: Michael W. Anderson

Publishing date : January 19th 2014

In a few years’ time, in the U.S.A., maximization of personal potential is everyone’s duty and the main obstacle to reaching one’s full level is…child rearing. Parents are required by law to hire a parent-by-proxy, a professional who, supposedly, will be better at such a specialized and delicate endeavour than amateurs who just happen to share genetic material with the child, coincidentally freeing the parents and allowing them the option to maximize (which seem to be short-hand for ‘get as rich as possible’).

Enters Chase Stern, Proxy Review Officer, half security agent, half social worker. Not keen on maximization he’s seen as a misfit by just about everybody who is somebody, first and foremost his ex-wife. Even his work-partner sees him as somebody who is too involved in the job.

Chase knows the system is broken, sees it every day in the Deep Suburbs, where the poor live and he cannot let things lie, for the sake of the children. His reports are at the root of a lobbying effort that brings about the demise of the proxy industry.

Another writer could have stopped there, with an easy ‘and they lived happily ever after’, but that’s only the beginning of Provoke Not The Children. How does one go about reintegrating children who have been by all counts abandoned in the care of paid strangers and often abused, when not left to fend for themselves, into the same society that rejected them?

As Chase discovers, there is no easy answer, and even the best intentions can have horrifying consequences. We hear little of the smaller children (runts,as the teens call them), but the society that comes out from the enclave devoted to the re-education of the teenagers is a chillingly logical, high-tech version of Lord of the Flies.

Chase is our guide in this specific hell, he is committed, driven one could say, but not perfect. He can be too focused on the big picture and (like so many of us) a paladin of the cause who finds it difficult to deal with the individual victims, or even like them (there are a few scenes with his own children where I would have liked to shake him), when push comes to shove, though, he comes out as a decent human being brave enough to do what is right, no matter the personal cost.

The fact that we see everything through Chase’s eyes is, for me, one of the limits of the novel. In my opinion the other characters aren’t developed to the same extent and we don’t get to see the reasons behind some of their choices or positions beyond what Chase witnesses directly or tells us.

Another issue I have is with the pacing: there are chronological jumps that come unexpected and move us beyond a possible climax, for instance we go from an audit with a senate commission about the proxy industry to three months after the President of the US has made his decision known and Chase fills us in with a recap. I experienced a few ‘Wait, what?’ moments, expecting  some ‘stepping-stone’ resolutions that, in novel-time, were already behind me.

All in all, though, for me, Provoke Not The Children is a very solid first offering from an author I’ll be keeping an eye on.

The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

Publisher : Roc (USA), Gollancz (UK)

Publishing date: August 18th 2015 (Roc), August 20th 2015 (Gollancz)

Were I to sum up de Bodard’s House of Shattered Wings in one word, I would say layered.

At first glance it could seem a pretty straightforward story, a sort of Game of Thrones between immortals who reign over pieces of a once great city now struggling to survive in the aftermath of the Great War, but it goes far beyond that.

De Bodard drops us right into the middle of events, just like the newly Fallen who will be called Isabelle, we find ourselves in the ruins of a Paris devastated by a magical war . Slowly, as we progress, the setting unfolds: the Fallen, very literally angels cast out of Heaven, rule what is left of Europe, and, as colonial powers, much of the rest of the world. They are immortal or very nearly so (although they can be killed) and possess an innate magic that is a remnant of their angelic nature.

…But when they first reach Earth they are in shock, wounded from their Fall and helpless, and their magic, the essence compenetrating their bodies, is free for the taking of anyone callous or desperate enough to be willing to hack a semi-conscious victim to pieces.

Isabelle narrowly escapes such a fate, thanks to the head of House Silverspires, Selene, who also brings back to the House, as a prisoner, Philippe, the enigmatic Annamite gang-member who she caught literally red-handed and who wields a kind of magic Selene has never experienced before.

We see the unfolding events and understand the history of this version of Earth through the eyes of Selene, Fallen head of Silverspires after the disappearance of its founder,      Morningstar; of Philippe the Annamite veteran turned gang-member; and of Madeleine, the human alchemist of the House .

And through them, what could have been a purely escapist, vaguely horrorific story reminescent of a gothic novel becomes a meditation on power, justice, choice and mortality.

Houses are the only bastion against chaos, is it right to do everything to protect one’s House, even though Houses are responsible of the current situation to start with?

When does the need for justice turn into ruthless vengeance? A sorely wronged student of Morningstar and an  equally wronged Philippe give far different answers to this question.

What consequences have long term power and privilege on those thus endowed when they have no one to answer to?

Among the characters in the novel I was most captivated by Philippe, the outsider. For reasons that are revealed in the course of the novel, he is almost a mirror image of a Fallen, but with one fundamental difference: Phillippe is, in the dephth of his being, human, something none of the Fallen has ever been.

I’ve seen some readers complain about de Bodard’s ‘telling and not showing’, in my opinion that expression has been bandied about so much without really explaining its meaning, than some readers throughly misunderstand it.

Nowadays many novels with several points of view are narrated in alternating first person, Madame de Bodard in The House of Shattered Wings writes in third person limited and the ‘voice’ might sound strange to readers not used to it, but that’s a far cry from telling us what a character does as opposed to showing us their actions and underlying emotions.

If you are looking for a fast read that will keep you entertained for a few hours  (nothing wrong with that), then House of the Shattered Wings isn’t the right novel for you, but if you want something that will stay with you long after you have closed the book and make you think, I highly recommend it.

Lion’s Blood (Insh’Allah Book 1) by Steven Barnes

Publisher: Spectrum Literary Agency Inc.

Publishing date: December 8th 2011 (e-book, first hardcover edition February 13th 2002).

Every now and then, either on LiveJournal or one of the various blogs and sites about books I read, I find threads recommending books by writers of color or alternate history titles: Lion’s Blood (Insh’Allah) is both (and, just FYI, I consider alternate history to be a subset of fantasy, if you don’t, feel free to skip this one).

i discovered Steven Barnes’ works years ago, via his cooperation with Larry Niven, the Dream Park series (I don’t know a single role-player who could resist the idea of a whole park devoted to live-action role-playing with the help of cutting-edge technology), so, having read very good thing about Lion’s Blood, I went for it and wasn’t disappointed.

Alternate history is the realm of well-reasoned ‘what-ifs’ and I’d offer Lion’s Blood as an example of how it is done right (in this reviewer’s opinion, of course).

Barnes’ world has multiple points of divergence from history as we know it: Socrates didn’t die in Athens, but escaped to Egypt , Alexander didn’t go to India but went also to Egypt and proclaimed himself Pharaoh, Chartage defeated and destroyed Rome, in consequence no Roman empire was born, Christianity remained a minoritarian religion, and Islam became the main world power in the West (without Rome we don’t have either the Sacred Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire).
Later on, Abyssinian and Egyptian explorers colonize the New World, there is also a Norse colony (Vinland) and a Chinese one in the analog of California. The ‘revised’ world works like clockwork, perfectly logical I didn’t have any ‘wait, what?’ moments of dissonance at the world building while I can count many chuckles at cameos of familiar figures (like Leonardo ‘The mad Frank architect’ who found patronage in Abyssinia and killed himself trying out a  flying contraption from the top of Khufu’s pyramid).

The writing is very good, I found myself drawn in from the first page and remained fully engaged till the end (in fact I read the second half of the book in one sitting), I loved the pace too. Many contemporary novels seem to run full tilt from the beginning to the end, sometimes leaving me out of breath at the last page, with a vague recollection of the details but for the main plot. Lion’s Blood has its share of action, but has also quieter, meditative spots where characters consider things, grapple with moral dilemmas, see their perspectives shift, always staying well clear from gratuitus ‘navel gazing’.

Many readers of Lion’s Blood specifically stress one main point: this is a world where slavery is common and accepted, and the masters are black and the slaves white. Well, yes and no: in the colonies in the New World the masters are by and at large Islamic, not necessarily black (the Zulus don’t follow Islam and they are a power to be reckoned with but they are somewhat of an exception, and many of the main characters see them as incomprehensible), the slaves, though, are Western Europeans, those mentioned most often are from Ireland and Gaul (Sophia, though, is Greek and Aidan mention the existence of slaves in Ireland, so it’s not an ‘us against them’ thing).
Some reviewers mention this turning of the tables as a moment of realization, a ‘there but for the grace of God…’ that made them think about the slavery issue in a different light. Honestly it didn’t happen to me, I didn’t relate to Aidan’s tribulations differently than I did to Kunta Kinte’s reading Roots  . This difference in reaction gave me pause, I thought about it for a while trying to understand the reason for it, then it dawned on me.

First of all, in European history slavery wasn’t color-coded, it has never been. In olden times one could find oneself a slave for a lot of reasons, including debt, and we haven’t the ‘white/master, black/slave’ automated pairing (if anything we have the ‘black/ foreigner’ coding instead), moreover, for someone living on the Northern shores of the Mediterranean sea, till not so long ago, the possibility of finding oneself bid upon in the slave market of Tangiers, Tripoli, Algiers or Tunis wasn’t alternate history or a flight of fancy, it was a very real possibility implicit in every sea travel. In the history of almost every seaside village and town in Central and Southern Italy there are records of Turkish/Berber/Arab raids, with people taken away never to be seen again; people who left for a sea voyage and disappeared, their ship attacked by Barbary pirates; people bought back from the auction blocs by one of the religious orders who devoted themselves to the freeing of slaves like the Order of our Lady of Mercy  (the last time was in 1798, in Tunis the Mercedarians freed 830 slaves who had been taken prisoner in the raiding of Carloforte, in Sardinia). One of the lake towns a few kilometers  from where I live, Limone sul Garda (known internationally for the so-called longevity protein) was founded by people coming inland to escape Saracen raids.

I found this an interesting facet of cultural and world-view differences between the US and Southern Europe, one of the many things that often aren’t taken into account when we discuss things across the Atlantic in ‘the Age of Globalization’.

Back to the point: if you are looking for well written, engaging alternate history that will linger after you have finished the book and make you think Lion’s Blood is highly recommended.