Guest Post | "The Inverted Image" by Tom Pollock

So... The Glass Republic. I loved it.

One of the things that fascinated me most about the book was its preoccupation with perfection and reflection, so when the opportunity arose to have the author blog about something for The Speculative Scotsman, it didn't take long to for me to come up with a potential topic for Tom.

Alas, the blasted Book Smugglers had already booked the author for a post about beauty, but Tom, ever the gentleman, was willing to approach the idea of the images from another angle. And in the end, I think it worked out well. Fittingly, in fact, you could consider the guest blog below the mirror image of Tom's contribution to SFF In Conversation.

***

As a child I was pathologically drawn to things that looked like doors but weren’t: picture frames, fire places, bookcases, a rectangular pattern of cracks in a brick wall, or in the bark of a tree trunk. When I was eight, the first thing I used to do when I went into any room was try and discover the piece of furniture that was hiding the secret passage.

The thing that fascinated me most, though, was mirrors (which wasn’t, I hope wholly narcissism). A mirror was more than a potential hidden door, it was a doorway, a hermetically sealed world, teasing my delusional childish mind with the space sealed behind the glass.

Mirrors as portals onto fantasy worlds are nothing new. Lewis Carroll nailed it so hard that going "through the looking glass" has entered the lexicon as a euphemism for any strange situation.

So, when the time came to create London-Under-Glass, the city of the Mirrorstocracy, the inverted doppelganger of the fantastical London of The City’s Son, I knew I wanted the mirror to be more than a doorway. I wanted it to be founding principle of the entire world.

In London-Under-Glass, everything is built on reflections. The citizens are living reflections, laminates of the images of their doppelgangers in our London, built up layer after layer, day after day, until they become conscious. The buildings are warped and distended the way we see sometimes see them in our mirrors, swollen in odd places by clots of the precipitecture than falls from the sky.

In London-Under-Glass it snows brick dust, and hails slate. It literally rains cats and dogs because all of these things are caught in the river’s reflection, churned and broken by the tide and eventually evaporated and rained back down on the city. The citizens of the mirror city are used to this, but even they are occasionally unnerved when the droplets coalesce into whole faces in the puddles who try in vain to whisper secrets to them before the tyre of a passing car dashes them away.

All of that was fun, worldbuilding-wise. But the thing that really helped me with the story was the trial that such a world presented to my lead character, Pen.

In the first book, Pen was possessed by a parasitic creature made of barbed wire (work with me). She’s still bearing the scars of that attack, on both her face and her heart. Now she has to enter a city where how you look is everything, where image is substance. "Into that world inverted" she goes, and to survive she has to turn her scars into tools, her wounds into weapons. In a book about mirrors, it had some symmetry.  

***

Thank you a thousand times, Tom, for stopping off at The Speculative Scotsman to share a bit about how the Mirrorstocracy came to be.

Now get back to work on Our Lady of the Streets! :)

Book Review | The Glass Republic by Tom Pollock

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Pen's life is all about secrets: the secret of the city's spirits, deities and monsters her best friend Beth discovered, living just beyond the notice of modern Londoners; the secret of how she got the intricate scars that disfigure her so cruelly - and the most closely guarded secret of all: Parva, her mirror-sister, forged from her reflections in a school bathroom mirror. Pen's reflected twin is the only girl who really understands her.

Then Parva is abducted and Pen makes a terrible bargain for the means to track her down. In London-Under-Glass, looks are currency, and Pen's scars make her a rare and valuable commodity. But some in the reflected city will do anything to keep Pen from the secret of what happened to the sister who shared her face.

***

As a people, we are plainly preoccupied with the picture of perfection; obsessed, essentially, by being beautiful. But image isn't everything, much as it may look that way in the day to day. As the protagonist of Tom Pollock's striking second novel suggests, "This thing — beauty? — it's arbitrary. People just make it up." Then again, as Pen's new partner in thought-crime counters, "Just 'cause something's made up, doesn't mean it's not real." (p.255)

All too true. So what's a poor, disfigured girl to do? A girl whose trust in another — her best friend Beth, no less — led to her being embraced by the barbed wire arms of The City's Son's big bad? Whose scars, even after extensive reconstructive surgery, are "a dozen mocking, mirroring mouths" (p.7) which mark Pen out as other amongst her fearful peers? Why, travel to an alternate dimension where our preconceived ideas about beauty have been completely reconceived; where she's celebrated, instead, as the most gorgeous girl in all the world!

Welcome, one and all, to The Glass Republic.

We'll get back to the inverted landscape of London-Under-Glass in time, but before that, let's recap. The Glass Republic begins a couple of months after the unhappy ending of Pollock's phenomenal first novel. Pen — aka Parva "Pencil" Khan — was a standout supporting character in said who was butchered come its cruel and unusual conclusion. To wit, I was keen to see what fate awaited her in book two of The Skyscraper Throne, however I hadn't expected her to take Beth Bradley's place as protagonist.

Beth isn't absent the narrative, exactly, though her role is rather reduced, in part because she must come to terms with what she's become: something hardly human, she feeds "on the city around her with every step [...] drawing power and information through the bare soles of her concrete-grey feet." (p.27) She carries an iron railing around as an extension of the urban environment she represents, and speaks to streetlight spirits without sound. Beth, then, figures into the fiction from time to time, but her intermittent chapters are largely devoted to foreshadowing; setting up certain secondary story threads Pollock plans, I presume, to pay off in the concluding volume of his terrific trilogy, namely next year's Our Lady of the Streets.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves again. The Glass Republic is for its part about Pen's plight, primarily. At the outset, she's trying to immerse herself in the mundane, the better to forget the incredible events she was caught up in some four months ago. To that end, she's returned to school, but to ingratiate herself amongst a new group of friends, she's asked to explain her mutilated face. She does so honestly — not that anybody believes her. Cue the smoothest recap I've read in recent memory:

I was kidnapped by a living coil of barbed wire — the servant of a demolition god whose fingers were cranes. I was its host, and it sent me to kill Beth Bradley, but she freed me from it instead. I held the monster down with my body while she cut it off with a sharpened park railing. (p.5)

Well, quite.

Predictably, things between Pen and her new schoolfriends go from tolerable to terrible in short order. Seeking solace from their spite, she turns to a reflection of herself... yet Parva is no mere mirror image. She's an esteemed member of the mirrorstocracy:

The girl on the other side of the glass had come from [Pen] — she was composed of all the infinite reflections of her that had been caught between the two mirrors — but that was when their coexistence had ended. 

Pen and Parva had diverged from that moment in time like beams of refracted light; now Parva had her own feelings, her own life, built up in the weeks since she'd first stepped into whatever lay outside the bathroom door in the reflection. She drank wine, ate meat and swore like a squaddie with haemorrhoids. Much to Pen's chagrined envy, she'd even managed to land herself a job, although she wouldn't say doing what. (p.22)

After an upsetting incident, Pen escapes to the bathroom where she and Parva like to put the world to rights, but on this occasion, all she sees behind the mirror is a bloody handprint. It's apparent that Parva's in trouble, so Pen resolves to seek out the Chemical Synod — the same oily entities who helped Beth discover herself — praying that they may know a way for her to travel to London-Under-Glass.

They do. They possess "a compound fit to change sseeing into doing, a tincture to transform a window to a door: a portal primer, if you will, or a doorway drug." But the price of this prize is a painful prospect; no less than "a complete ssset of memoriess of a child, rendered from the mindss of her parentsss — not copiesss, you undersstand, but originalss." (p.65) Without telling Beth anything, Pen acquiesces — after all, this is her quest, to undertake on her terms — and into the mirror city she goes.

I've been banging on about being burned out on London as the backdrop for fantastic happenings for long enough now that I confess I did not relish the thought of another narrative set in the city, but The Glass Republic sidesteps that category smartly.

The larger part of the action takes place in London-Under-Glass, which, like Parva, is different enough from its original that it is independently interesting. The mirror city has its own aesthetics — asymmetry is valued highly, which is why Pen's scars make her the apple of everyone's eye — not to mention its own politics and media and economy and so on. Everything, right down to the weather, is similar, yet bizarrely set apart. As Pen observes, "it was as though the London she knew had run in the rain." (p.110)

She recognised the art deco horses of the Unilever building over her, and the old power station that housed the Tate Modern on the opposite bank, but they were taller here, and their shapes rippled as they rose into the sky, their familiar outlines bent by strange accretions of brick and stone. 

They look exactly like they look reflected in the river at home, Pen marvelled. Here, that's how they actually are. (p.102) 

Pen, in the interim, is an absorbing protagonist. She's reticent and introverted where Beth was ballsy and confident. She goes her own way rather than simply mirroring the development of our previous hero, which is especially refreshing. That said, I was as taken with Espel: a fierce steeplejill-cum-companion who both helps and hinders Pen throughout The Glass Republic. I can safely say that she balances out Pencil Khan's more passive aspects nicely; explaining much more than that would be to give what is a great game away.

Meanwhile, Pollock's monsters are awesome. I enjoyed the "sewermander" (p.35) — a bottle-sized dragon — particularly, but not all of the author's creations are so wonderfully whimsical. Be warned that there are also "nightmare things squatting fatly on heavy haunches with back-bent teeth and empty eye sockets." (p.54) And that's just for starters.

A year or so ago, I described The City's Son as "a tour-de-force in sophisticated urban fantasy — beautifully wrought, tightly plotted and fantastically finessed." Somewhat shockingly, it was also Tom Pollock's first novel. If anything, his second is better. Certainly, the prose is punchier, and it was pretty impressive to begin with. Add to that an awesome secondary world and a masterfully expanded cast of characters, and it's easy to see why this author is one of speculative fiction's most promising new voices.

The Glass Republic is not your garden variety urban fantasy. Instead, it's a text very much concerned with appearances, and indeed, what lies beneath these. In that sense — and many others, yes — it's such an unfettered success that the concluding volume of The Skyscraper Throne saga can't come soon enough.

***

The Glass Republic
by Tom Pollock

UK Publication: August 2013, Jo Fletcher Books

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Coming Attractions | An Invitation to the Afterparty

I'll make no bones about it, nor any rotten appendages: I loved Raising Stony Mayhall. Alongside The Reapers are the Angels, it was easily one of the best zombie novels in recent years. It demonstrated, as I wrote in my review for Starburst Magazine, that "whatever people may say, there's plenty life left in the undead yet."

Ever since the publication of Raising Stony Mayhall in late 2011, I've been wondering what Daryl Gregory would do next. Now, thanks to the new catalogue Tor put out recently... now I know.

I thought you should, too.

Afterparty promises to be "powerful, violent science fiction in the tradition of William Gibson and Peter Watts." I've grabbed a cap of the cover art from the catalogue — see above — and the blurb below:

It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen­-year-­old street girl finds God through a new brain-­altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide. 

Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-­government agent and an imaginary, drug­-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right. 

A mind­bending and violent chase across Canada and the US, Afterparty is a marvelous mix of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, and perhaps a bit of Peter Watts’s Starfish: a last chance to save civilization, or die trying.

There's been no word of a UK release date as yet, but Afterparty is slated for publication in the United States next April. I'll be there... how about you?

Before I say good day, let me flag up a few other notable new books brought to light by way of Tor's new catalogue, which you can read in its entirety here: there's The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell — the sequel to London Falling—a particularly promising new weird novel, namely Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson, and last but not least, The Revolutions, a "glorious planetary romance" by Felix Gilman.

Is it wrong of me to be wishing the days between now and next April away?

Book Review | The Days of the Deer by Liliana Bodoc

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It is known that the strangers will sail from some part of the Ancient Lands and will cross the Yentru Sea. All our predictions and sacred books clearly say the same thing. The rest is all shadows. Shadows that prevent us from seeing the faces of those who are coming.

In the House of Stars, the Astronomers of the Open Air read contradictory omens. A fleet is coming to the shores of the Remote Realm. But are these the long-awaited Northmen, returned triumphant from the war in the Ancient Lands? Or the emissaries of the Son of Death come to wage a last battle against life itself?

From every village of the seven tribes, a representative is called to a Great Council. One representative will not survive the journey. Some will be willing to sacrifice their lives, others their people, but one thing is certain: the era of light is at an end.

***

For generations, the Husihuilkes have lived off the land, making "use of all the forest and the sea could offer. Here at the Ends of the Earth, the Creatures faced the wind and the rain with strategies almost as old as the elements themselves," (p.6) and though they have become comfortable in the years since a real threat arose, they have not forgotten their nature. The Husihuilkes are a warrior people, the most fearsome fighters in all the Fertile Lands, and in the months to come, they will be called upon to take up arms again.

Why? Because there's a storm coming, of course! What epic fantasy saga would be complete without one?

As had happened every winter in living memory, another long season of rains was returning to the land of the Husihuilkes. The storms came from the southern seas, brought by a wind that spread heavy clouds over the Ends of the Earth and left them there until they had exhausted themselves. (p.5)

The Days of the Deer does not chronicle the Husihuilkes' war with the weather, however. Instead, the storm is an ill omen; a symbol of some encroaching force. But what shape will it take? And what might its appearance mean for the peaceable Creatures of the Fertile Lands?

The Magic of the Open Air has learnt beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will soon be a fleet from the Ancient Lands coming to our continent. It is known that the strangers will sail [across] the Yentru Sea. All our predictions and sacred books say the same thing. The rest is all shadows. Shadows in the stars and our books. Shadows that prevent us from seeing the faces of those who are coming. Who are they? Why are they travelling here? (p.57)

These are the questions that the central characters of Liliana Bodoc's debut are asked, and the longer they take to arrive at an answer—any answer—the worse the consequences will be. "The fate of everyone living in the Fertile Lands" (p.57) hangs in the balance, in fact... a responsibility so very terrible that it should be shared, surely, rather than shouldered by a single soul.

To wit, representatives of each of the Creatures who call the continent home—including Dulkancellin of the Husihuilkes—are called to the far-distant city of Beleram in the Remote Realm. There, they form a council of sorts, to talk about the right and proper response to this dangerous state of affairs. They're well aware that their situation grows more desperate by the day—or rather, some among them are; primarily our protagonist—but without more information, what else are they to do other than discuss and debate?

As they hum and hah, however, the host of Eternal Hatred—led by Misáianes, the Son of Death herself—draws closer and closer to shore.

"Hear this and remember. Misáianes came to destroy the time of mankind, of animals, of water, of living green and of the moon, the time of Time. Many will be intoxicated by his poison; many more will fall in battle. Better to fall in battle. [For] if we are defeated in this war, Life will fall with us. If we are defeated, light will be condemned to drag itself over ashes. And Eternal Hatred will stride through the twilight of Creation." (p.94)

Eternal Hatred, eh?

Initially, I cringed at the blunt terminology too, but the more I read of The Days of the Deer, the more fitting it felt. Above all else, this is an elemental epic, and its author is particularly interested in the opposition which exists between the aforementioned forces. Thus the Ancient Land's army of darkness and death invades a continent of bright light and life. The natural is set starkly against the unnatural; order against chaos; and this trend extends to the narrative's depiction of good and evil in the old mould. 

Ultimately, then, the idea of Eternal Hatred makes a certain amount of sense, but that doesn't detract from the bland fact of it at first. Nor is this the only obvious genre shorthand made use of over the course of The Days of the Deer: a book of broad strokes, at best.

That said, there remain reasons to recommend Liliana Bodoc's debut. Originally published in Argentina in 2000 as Los Dias del Venado, The Days of the Deer is the first part of an acclaimed fantasy trilogy—namely The Saga of the Borderlands—that has gone untranslated for thirteen years, and I am pleased to see it in English... though the translation is, I think, too literal. I'm certainly no expert, but I had Google go to work on a short Spanish language excerpt and it spat out something surprisingly similar to the text Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor Arendar render.

So there's an abundance of clunk and some frankly laughable Fantasy Capitalisation: a problem given how very seriously we're asked to take The Days of the Deer. Nevertheless, its setting is excellent. Both historically and ecologically, Bodoc develops her world deftly; if the characters who inhabit it lack life, the Fertile Lands themselves positively vibrate with vim and vigour and taste and texture.

I'm not quite convinced that the author is "the Tolkien of the Americas," as the publicity promises, but I can understand the comparisons. There's a fellowship and some songs; an unknowable evil and a complex yet credible setting. By and large, alas, this is unhelpful hyperbole, and it does The Days of the Deer few favours.

More useful is the cover quote from Ursula K. Le Guin, who, when asked who she admires within her genre, can only come up with one name: Liliana Bodoc's, obviously. Understand, though, that her genre—environmentally-aware fantasy, shall we say—must be a small one, because though The Days of the Deer is indeed decent, if it represents the best of anything, there simply can't be much competition.

***

The Days of the Deer

by Liliana Bodoc

UK Publication: August 2013, Corvus

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Guest Post | "Wait, Video Games Have Writers?" by Jay Posey

One of the subjects I touched on in my review of Jay Posey's debut was the idea of the novel as a collaborative process, because in much the same way that video games require the participation of their players, Three requires its readers to do a little of the legwork.

This wasn't something I minded in the slightest — rather than getting hung up on the lack of facts in the first act, I applauded the resulting sense of individual discovery — yet so many authors are content to spoon-feed us everything we need to know (and more) that I suppose I can see why some of Three's readers have complained about Posey's decision to leave certain elements of his narrative and characters to our imagination.

I can see... but I completely disagree. In fact, I think this approach is one of the book's biggest boons.

Yet there is somewhere a balance to be struck, between too much and not enough, and Jay Posey has a fascinating perspective on this question, informed by his day job making video games... as he explains.

***

In addition to being an author, I’ve also been very fortunate to get to do one of the coolest jobs in the world which is, of course, making video games!  Game development probably doesn’t rank quite as highly as, say, underwater photography, vacation tester, or bacon entrepreneur, but I think it’s still up there as one of those pretty cool jobs that lots of people wish they had. (Or at least, that they think they wish they had.)

But when you do the job I do — I’m a Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, where Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises were born — there’s a great conversation to be had that goes something like:

Interested Guest at Party: “So, Jay, what do you do for a living?”
Me: “I’m a writer.”
Interested Guest at Party: “Oh, wow, that’s so cool!  So, like movies?  Or books?  Or what?”
Me: “Video games, mostly.”
Suddenly Dramatically Less Interested Guest at Party: “Ooohhh, I thought you meant like a real writer.”

(That of course is completely made up, as I never get invited to parties.)

Some may be surprised to learn that, in fact, many real writers do work in the video game industry. Mary DeMarle, Amy Hennig, Rhianna Pratchett, Christy Marx, Marc Laidlaw, Anthony Burch, Erik Wolpaw, Drew Holmes, Andy Walsh, T.J. Fixman, Steve Jaros, Tom Abernathy, Aaron Linde, Richard Dansky. I could go on and on listing awesome writers who already work in games, but I won’t — even though I’ve left a bunch off the list and they will probably be letting me know via Twitter in short order. Sorry guys!

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, it’s sometimes hard to tell that great writers are doing great things in games from the final product. There are a lot of broken attempts at storytelling out there to be sure.  As an industry, we still have the habit of falling back on other media’s rules when we flounder (that’s why we still have so many cutscenes). There’s also a fairly frequent refrain that shows up in discussions of video game storylines that says what the Industry really needs is just to hire one or more big name Hollywood writers to come in and teach game developers how to write. Certainly, there are plenty of studios/publishers out there that could use a little nudge to help them see why hiring a professional writer early on might be a better way to go than asking an overworked developer to “slap some story on” at the end of a project.

BUT.

There are some important things folks should know.

On the one hand, Story is Story. Humans have been telling stories pretty much since the Dawn of Man. There are a number of aspects of telling stories that work regardless of whether you’re working on a long-form novel or on a video game. The importance of characters, how dialogue works, how to create intriguing plot twists and satisfying emotional pay-offs, all of these things (and more) are applicable to storytelling in a variety of different media, whether it’s radio, TV, film, prose, stageplays, comics, whatever.

On the other hand, every medium has its own particular strengths. Books give us access to a character’s internal life. Movies excel at visual storytelling. TV shows frequently tell us many stories at once, and episodically sustain us over the course of weeks, or months, or years. And all of those media have something in common: the writers control the characters.

The strength of games is their interactivity. While other media are primarily passively received, games are fundamentally active. Whereas a movie audience might be content to sit and watch events unfold on a big screen to characters they cannot influence, gamers expect to participate in their own experience. Which means as a writer of games, you can always count on having at least one wild-card in your cast: the player. 

Players want to influence and experience the world that a game lets them inhabit. Players want to matter.  Some of them want to be good citizens of your game world, role-playing the character you’ve asked them to be. Others want to interact however they see fit, and will run around jumping on boxes while you deliver important news about the alien invasion, or will pick-pocket the clothes off of every citizen in town.

Game writing is ultimately collaborative. As a writer, the story you write isn’t complete until the player engages with it and makes it her own experience. And while there have been many missteps, and will continue to be more along the way, I can assure you that there are already real writers in the industry who are passionately striving to decipher the power of video games as a story-telling medium, who are daily working to bring gamers amazing story experiences that are both personally meaningful and yet shared within a community, and who one day will, I believe, be heralded as heroes of the craft.

Or, at the very least, maybe as level 99 writers.

***

Jay Posey has been described as “fascinating,” “insightful,” “highly entertaining,” “extremely handsome,” and “one of the most dynamic speakers in the Posey household” by parties who may or may not have been biased or himself.

Thanks a million for the guest post, Posey!

With which, I'm going to give the floor to you folks. Any thoughts on the notion of the novel as a collaborative process versus the video game as an interactive narrative?

Book Review | Three by Jay Posey

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The world has collapsed, and there are no heroes any more.

But when a lone gunman reluctantly accepts the mantel of protector to a young boy and his dying mother against the forces that pursue them, such a man may yet arise.

File Under: Science Fiction [Three For All | Apocalyptic Wasteland | A Journey Home | Fear the Weir]

***

Imagine a meeting of the minds behind the Fallout franchise and The Dark Tower saga. That's Three: a desperate western about obsession, regret and redemption set in the sandblasted wilderness of a world that's gone to hell in a handbasket. Not that we know when, or why... just that it has.

Nor does the author spend a great deal of time establishing the central character his debut is named after. However heroic, Three, we see, is frustratingly stoic: a bounty-hunter with an unspeakable secret. But in a very real sense, his silence is his strength, while what we don't know about the wasteland serves to make our journey through it that much more thrilling.

Some readers are likely to find this apparent lack of motivation and explanation unsatisfying, but Three isn't actually absent worldbuilding or character development at all; it just happens to happen in the background. Thus, there are few, if any infodumps, and the protagonist does not often monologue on his origins. Instead, we put the pieces of the puzzle together ourselves. We use our own imaginations to fill in the blanks.

Participation, then, is a prerequisite. Best to leave Three be, really, if you aren't prepared to play the game Jay Posey makes of it. But if you are? Then allow me an industry in-joke: it may just blow you away.

Let's back up a bit for a minute.

Three, when we meet, has come to town to cash in a bounty, but the agent who's supposed to pay him doesn't have enough Hard on hand to cover the outstanding amount, so he's made to wait.

Waiting, I'm afraid, isn't one of our man's many strengths:

"It was like this when he didn't have a job; something to find, someone to bring in. The restlessness was setting in, the need to move. To hunt. It was the third day in the same town. Might as well have been a month. There were benefits to being a freelancer, but down time wasn't one of them." (p.20)

That's where Cass and Wren come in: a Quint addict on the run from a special someone and her supernaturally sensitive son. Three doesn't take much interest when he first lays eyes on the pitiable pair, but their paths just keep on crossing. Soon enough he ends up saving them from certain death—all in a day's work, eh?—then, when he realises that they won't last long without his help, he reluctantly accepts the mantle of temporary protector.

And so the ragtag trio take to the wasteland... where there be Weir, I fear: a hive of cyber-zombies, in short, with burning blue orbs for eyes and the uncanny ability to track their targets' digital signatures. This is a particular problem in world where everyone (well, almost everyone) has come to rely on implants which connect them to the cloud.

By the by, there's more to Cass and Wren than meets the eye. Though he has no control over it, the little fella has a unique ability, and between her spiralling habit and her disgruntled former employers—a band of brutal brainhackers—Cass's past is catching up with her fast. Had Three known what a handful they'd be between them, things would have been different, undoubtedly, however "he was responsible for them now. And in a sudden flash he felt, without question, they were the mistake that would cost him his life. [But] he wasn't sure it was a mistake at all." (p.162)

And that's pretty much the plot. Again: not a lot, but enough—just—to get us going. Indeed, Three represents a real roller-coaster if we're willing to play our parts. To engage with the world and the characters and the narrative in the same sort of way we may in a video game.

Tellingly, Jay Posey has been involved in that very industry since 1998. Currently, he's a Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, the creators of two Tom Clancy-branded franchises—I give you Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six—and if these series haven't been especially progressive in terms of the tales they've told, they've made for great rides regardless. As sandboxes for incredible set-pieces and immersive gameplay experiences rather than solely stories, they've done the trick, I think.

This ethos—of encouraging the player to participate in the construction of each aspect of the entire—also applies to our role as readers of Three. I for one was perfectly pleased to do a little of the heavy lifting, because Posey makes discovery fun, and keeps things interesting in the interim.

Not to lean too heavily on the video game angle, but I delighted in identifying scenes from Three via that vocabulary. There are stealth sections, then, in between all the brawling; minibosses at the end of each act; collectibles and sidequests; moments that reminded me of objective-based multiplayer modes like capture and hold.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that Three is an unmistakable gamey debut. But this is no bad thing—and no surprise considering Jay Posey's professional pedigree. The premise is certainly nothing new, and at the outset, the characters are rather unremarkable, but the author's distinctive approach to storytelling superimposes a firstly fascinating and finally satisfying dimension upon what could very easily have been a bland book.

As is, it isn't. On the contrary, I had all the fun reading Three. Honestly, all of it.

***

Three
by Jay Posey

UK Publication: August 2013, Angry Robot
US Publication: July 2013, Angry Robot

Buy this book from
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IndieBound / The Book Depository

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