Press Release Your Luck | Ravenstone Rising

News of a new challenger just hit my inbox, and considering the source, I thought you all might like to know a modicum more.

Ravenstone is "a brand new children's imprint" poised to join Solaris' genre fiction and Abaddon's pulp under the Rebellion umbrella next summer. But the press release says it better:

Rebellion Publishing is proud to announce the launch of its new line of Children’s and Young Adult fiction – Ravenstone.

Showcasing the very best in literature for the young, Ravenstone will publish one book a season. It will exist to highlight works of genre-busting adventure, and incisive and challenging writing.

Ravenstone’s titles will be published in hardback, paperback and e-book formats in the US and the UK, allowing new generations of readers the chance to explore new worlds and new horizons. They will be distributed by Simon and Schuster.

Editor-in-chief Jonathan Oliver said: “The Young Adult market is a vibrant and exciting melting pot of genres and ideas and I’m delighted to lead us into this territory with our new imprint.”

So far, so standard - this must be as inevitable a move as it is exciting - but alongside the above, Ravenstone announced their debut book: Johnny Cash's kid, John Carter Cash has had three children's stories and a biography published before now, but the new imprint insists Lupus Rex is his first novel proper. Here's a bit about it:

The imprint’s launch title will be the beautiful debut novel Lupus Rex, by the high-profile musician and writer John Carter Cash. To be published in June 2013, Lupus Rex will have enormous appeal to children and older readers alike. This astonishing new tale is in the tradition of Watership Down, The Rats of Nimh, the Redwall series and Duncton Wood.

Isyl and Cormo are two quail who must risk their lives when they are driven from their home by the crows when the Murder fractures over the decision of who shall rule the Tree. The disorder this brings to the region comes to the attention of the wolf Asmod and he sees an opportunity to make himself King. To restore order the quails must venture far from their home to seek an audience with a potentially dangerous ally, the hawk Pitrin. As the forest trembles with the approach of Asmod’s army, the two quail will find themselves entangled in an epic struggle, as they fight to bring peace to the Field.

This is a major release from a debut imprint and Cash shows himself to be a beautiful writer in his first novel. With a stylish and classic cover by Wicked series artist Douglas Smith, this tale of nature is full of strong characters and sets the bar very high for an emerging literary talent.

I don't know what it is about this blurb - no, scratch that: it's probably the nods to Redwall and Watership Down, which I loved as a little - but I'll be reading Lupus Rex as soon as ARCs are made available. You?

And I hope you'll join me in giving Ravenstone a warm welcome to the world. If it's all it appears to be - and with Jonathan Oliver at the helm, whose Magic anthology I'm adoring at the moment, I have hope - we could be in for an exceedingly exciting time.

Cover Identity | Tomato, Tomahto, N0S4A2, N0S4R2

Now Stephen King has been on an upswing in recent years, and I'm disappointed that he won't have a new novel published this winter, as has been the case since time immemorial, but I'll be honest: two books and a short story collection later, I've come to enjoy the work of his son Joe Hill as much if not more than that of his famous father, so hearing more about what's next from the author of Horns and Heart-Shaped Box is like music to my ears.

For a while now we've known its name: N0S4A2. We've heard that it will be about vampires, and "a very bad man called Charlie Manx with a very bad car," but beyond that, nary a whisper, and certainly no synopsis.

Sadly, we're still without one, but something interesting did emerge this week. Cover art!

That's the UK edition on the left. The infinitely less interesting North American cover art is opposite.

There's really no competition between the two, is there?

But do take note of the differing titles: Hill's next novel will be known as N0S4A2 in the US, whilst Gollancz have opted to retitle it N0S4R2. And... I don't get it. I'm British to the bone, but the North American l33tspeek makes more sense to me. Unless the stress on the "r" in the UK title means pirates are also involved.

So, pirates vs. cars vs. vampires? :D

No matter who wins, clearly, we lose.

Oh, but I kid! I can't wait for N0S4A2 / N0S4R2, which is penciled in for publication in both territories next April.

Meantime, me hearties, I'm putting my money on the cars.

Opinionated Speculations | Snob vs. Blog

So I had this whole other post all but good to go, then Mr Mark Charan Newton - author of The Legends of the Red Sun and The Lucan Drakenfeld Mysteries, which I'm awfully excited about - twittered a link to an article from The Guardian. The headline sorta says it all:

BOOK BLOGGERS ARE HARMING LITERATURE,

WARNS BOOKER PRIZE HEAD JUDGE

So proclaimeth Peter Stothard, lamenting the end of an era in his eyes. Specifically the era of literary criticism... because of bloggers. Because we're idiots and amateurs all!

This is nonsense, obviously. Then again, as one such charlatan, I would say that, wouldn't I?

If you haven't already, off you pop: read Alison Flood's interview in its entirety here — and give the comments a gloss if you have the time to. That's where the actual debate is taking place, after all... though it seems to me somewhat one-sided.

That said, it's easy to see why so many are railing against Stothard's comments. Essentially, his argument is that literary critics are in a sense superhuman; in their knowledge and understanding, in their wit and insight, literary critics, according to Stothard, stand apart and indeed above the opinion of the uninformed, unedited and one presumes unwashed that you and I number amongst. In this way the chair of the Booker Prize momentarily lowers himself to give us the bath we clearly dearly need.

Normal people, in other words, don't know what's good for them. Only literary critics do. Thus we should all shut up.

What whole-hogwash!

Or is it?

This may prove an unpopular opinion, but beneath Stothard's snobbery, I wonder if there isn't a glimmer of sense in his sentiments. Because there is a difference between bloggers and literary critics, isn't there? I don't believe it's half so simple as this old blowhard would have it - that one presents an argument whilst all the other has is an opinion - yet there is a split somewhere, surely.

I mean... take me. You all know I write for a fair few sites outside of The Speculative Scotsman, including Strange Horizons and The Science Fiction Foundation, but I certainly don't consider myself a literary critic, and I sincerely doubt many other bloggers would describe themselves thus.

Though please, feel free to disagree.

So there is, least as I see it, a difference. It's hardly killing literature, as per Stothard's discriminatory silliness, but it is changing it. Unrecognisably in certain respects.

For instance, folks tend to attribute Fifty Shades of Grey's mega-success to the phenomenon of self-publishing, but let's not kid ourselves: without word of mouth - without many millions of us contributing to that word of mouth, by blogging amongst other things - it would have come to nothing. In this case, literary critics can't be blamed. They had next to nothing to do with it.

And perhaps that's emblematic of what's really bothering Stothard. Because in ages past, literary critics did dominate. And now they do not. Now they're made to share the limelight with mere mortals.

How awful!

Book Review | The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

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On remote Rollrock Island, men go to sea to make their livings — and to catch their wives.

The witch Misskaella knows the way of drawing a girl from the heart of a seal, of luring the beauty out of the beast. And for a price a man may buy himself a lovely sea-wife. He may have and hold and keep her. And he will tell himself that he is her master. But from his first look into those wide, questioning, liquid eyes, he will be just as transformed as she. He will be equally ensnared. And the witch will have her true payment.

Margo Lanagan weaves an extraordinary tale of desire, despair, and transformation. With devastatingly beautiful prose, she reveals characters capable of unspeakable cruelty, but also unspoken love.

***

On our first sight of the sea-witch Misskaella, who haunts the shore of Rollrock Island, she's "sat exactly halfway between tideline and water, as if she meant to catch the lot of us." (p.3)

So fantasise the fearful children, at least, to whom the haggard old crone at the broken heart of this bitterly beautiful book represents "the face of our night-horrors, white and creased and greedy." (p.5) That would be the exact reaction Misskaella, in her more maudlin moments, mean to elicit, but her position, perched on a boulder on this borderline - with a foot on the land and a fin in the froth - signifies something else. It speaks of a love lost, and a life divided: two of the core concerns of Margo Lanagan's hypnotic new novel.

Initially, admittedly, this prologue is almost incomprehensible. But return to it - as I did immediately after finishing The Brides of Rollrock Island's masterful last chapter - and its intent is resonant, as pure and cold and clear as the godforsaken sea.

Of course, the old witch was young once, and it is the tall tale of her horrid origins that properly sets off this year's best contender. To begin with, wee Misskaella is an innocent, but the last of the litter's little life takes a dark turn when her dying grandmam comments cruelly on her "miscast" (p.16) appearance.

"Her face was all dismay, looking at me. My hand came up to touch my nose and mouth, but they were only the same nose and mouth I had always had; there was nothing new or monstrous about them." (ibid)

Indeed not. Yet nevertheless, Misskaella knows now that something - some strange quirk of chemistry - sets her apart from the island's other young 'uns, and hot on the heels of this question, an answer, for it seems she has some of the seal in her. Some sympathetic power over selkie-kind. Out of blubbery sea-skins Misskaella can call beautiful, wondrous women, and so she does in later life, for a substantial sum — though this is a twisted sort of torture to her, still all ugly and utterly unloved.

"And now I saw a seal-girl's face, straight on and lamp-lit, for the first time. Not quite human, she was all the more beautiful for that. Her dark features sat in the smooth skin like a puzzle of stones and shells; I wanted to look and look until I had solved it." (p.126) 

In time, taking a sea-wife for a bride becomes a tradition on the island, as unspeakable as it is irresistible. This progressively gentles Rollrock's men, and drives away all other comers, frustrated and enraged. Cannily, Lanagan moves away from Misskaella at this stage, so that the reader may see the slope become slippery through the eyes of a number of neat narrators, including a woman blithely betrayed by her husband and son; a young man who abandons his fiery fiance for the "straightness and [...] strangeness" (p.160) of a submissive selkie temptress; and a boy whose love for his mam knows no bounds, and whose mam's love for the sea acknowledges no bond — a mother and son whose actions will change the course of many more souls than their own.

The Brides of Rollrock Island builds and builds and builds in this way, brilliantly I dare say, until it ends — and just as well, because by then my emotions were about to spill over. I've not been more moved by a book in years.

In part, that's thanks to its unsettling subject matter, which is to say the systematic corruption of those all too human ideals of beauty and purity... though the author is never so crass as to say so in such terms. In fact, very little of Lanagan's latest is explicit - The Brides of Rollrock Island's soaring success is all in the implication - such that one must work at an understanding.

This question of accessibility is a moderate obstacle - I fear Lanagan's lyrical language will be too much for some, and too little for others - but only then at the outset. Indeed, ease of entry into the folksy fairy-tale before us is mirrored by the opening up of Rollrock's initially forbidding front face, as espied by a lady from the mainland:

"The island rose from the horizon. It looked like nothing so much as a giant slumped seal itself, the head towards us and the bulk lumping up behind, trailing out northeast to the tail. Its slopes were greened over, its near side all cliffs and cliff pieces, chewed off but not swallowed by the sea. Every cove and cave looked alike inaccessible to me, most treacherous and unwelcoming.

"But we did not head for that rough bit of coast as we drew nearer; instead we bore westward and around the head there, and once beyond that I could see where the land lowered itself more gently, making room for a town, a small town only, on the slopes above the two long moles built out from the shore." (pp.279-80)

As above, so below. Certainly there is a peculiar poetry to Lanagan's prose: a power - all her own - over those who push through the opaque prologue, and with my every word I would urge you to do exactly that. Other than the lackluster cover, there's nothing not to love about The Brides of Rollrock Island. It's a wistful book, but wondrous. It will break your heart, and remake it.

Surrender yourself, then, to Margo Langan's mesmerising new novel. Allow it to surround you like a shimmering second skin... finer, fuller, and freer, finally, than the first. The Brides of Rollrock Island is all that and then some.

... 

This review originally appeared, in a slightly altered form, on tor.com.

***

The Brides of Rollrock Island

by Margo Lanagan

UK Publication: February 2012, David Fickling Books
US Publication: September 2012, Knopf Books

Buy this book from

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Recommended and Related Reading

Comic Book Review | The Shade by James Robinson

By all accounts, the New 52 has been a huge success for DC Comics. The relaunch has reinvigorated sales across the board. It's brought forgotten franchises and characters to the fore like never before, yet creatively, I can't help but consider that ancient saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Take the Shade — not to be confused with Shade, The Changing Man: he was an outright villain initially, then an anti-hero, and in the mid-90s - when last we heard of him, excepting cameo appearances in Brightest Day and Blackest Night - a mentor to James Robinson's renowned reinvention of Starman. But whether the Shade was using his unearthly powers for good or evil, or some nefarious purpose betwixt the two, he's always seemed a self-important leftover of another era.

I wasn't always so cynical. Well, I was, but when I heard DC were planning to bring the Shade back as the star of his own series, with none other than James Robinson at the helm... for a while there, I had hope.

But folks? Don't fall for it. The Shade, I'm afraid, is the same as he's ever been, which is to say old, cold, and so full of himself one wonders why he hasn't ascended into the heavens already.

Of course, great stories can still be told about terrible people, and I was ready for this series to take its place amongst them. In my view, Robinson is a woefully underrated writer, and some of the artists involved in the New 52 take on The Shade were worth getting excited about independently. Count amongst the creatives: Darwyn Cooke, of Richard Stark's Parker fame and Before Watchmen infamy; Scary Godmother creator Jill Thompson; Top 10's Gene Ha; not to mention Cully Hamner; Javier Pullido; and Frazer Irving.

Unsurprisingly, then, The Shade looks fantastic. But here's the thing: in comic books - a storytelling medium wherein narratives are complemented by aesthetics, and vice versa - incredible art doesn't immediately equal a must-read series. Must-see, maybe - thus The Shade is absolutely that - but the experience of reading it is... testing.

It starts pretty poorly. With the Shade lamenting the month of October. With the so-called Master of Darkness' girlfriend threatening to leave him unless he has another bloody adventure already. I can only imagine Hope O'Dare wants some time away from her miserable man - soon enough we will sympathise - but as of the offing, their relationship feels false. Small mercy, then, that the author abandons it whole-hog once the actual story gets going, but given its essential irrelevance, why begin with it? Why not in medias res?

The whole of the opening arc, in fact, feels like a poor man's prologue. But don't stop believing, because from here on out, The Shade gets incrementally better. Beginning with the first installment of the three-part Times Past - which occurs in reverse throughout the series, until it begins again in the final issue - the Shade becomes embroiled in a plot involving his blood, both figuratively and literally. It transpires that this is a story about family; about the ties that bind us and how we strive to escape our origins, eclipsing ancient legacies with our own; and about how much easier it is to be evil than do good.

This last sets the scene for a legitimately interesting reflection of our man's murky origins: recombined insight into the circumstances surrounding his dark powers, and his life before he became the Shade. If the series started here, I'd recommend it to you almost wholeheartedly, but whilst it ends very well, I fear it puts its worst foot forward.

Overall, Robinson simply takes too long to find his stride, and even when he has, The Shade comes across somewhat overwrought. Push through the iffy offing and patient readers might find a lot to like, but given the limited scope of this limited series - a trade paperback edition of which will be available in early 2013 - The Shade misses the target as often as it hits it, squandering at least as much of its promise as it spends well. Bear that in mind before you buy in.

Book Review | The Map of the Sky by Felix J. Palma

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1898. New York socialite Emma Harlow agrees to marry well-to-do Montgomery Gilmore, but only if he first accepts her audacious challenge: to reproduce the Martian invasion featured in H.G. Wells' popular novel, The War of the Worlds.

Meanwhile, in London, Wells himself is unexpectedly made privy to certain objects, apparently of extraterrestrial origin, that were discovered decades earlier on an ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. On that same expedition was an American crew member named Edgar Allan Poe, whose inexplicable experiences in the frozen wasteland would ultimately inspire him to create one of his most enduring works of literature.

When eerie, alien-looking cylinders begin appearing on the outskirts of London, Wells is certain it is all part of some elaborate hoax. But soon, to his great horror, he realizes that a true invasion of the earth has indeed begun.

***

In the Author's Acknowledgements appended to the end of The Map of the Sky, both Felix J. Palma and the translator in charge of rendering the whimsical worlds of this Spanish language text into English make mention of "the crushing loneliness of being a writer." (p.593) Though indubitably true, nevertheless this is an assertion utterly at odds with the non-stop narrative of the novel, which so entangles its central character H. G. Wells in the lives of others, and the affairs of a nation - nay, an entire galaxy! - that he scarcely has time to take tea.

That said, one imagines our man would far rather the solitude of the writer's life:

"Herbert George Wells would have preferred to live in a fairer, more considerate world, a world where a kind of artistic code of ethics prevented people from exploiting others' ideas for their own gain, one where the so-called talent of those wretches who had the effrontery to do so would dry up overnight, condemning them to a life of drudgery like ordinary men. But, unfortunately, the world he lived in was not like that [...] for only a few months after his book The War of the Worlds had been published, an American scribbler by the name of Garrett P. Serviss had the audacity to write a sequel to it, without so much as informing him of the fact, and even assuming [Wells] would be delighted." (p.3)

The Map of the Sky unfurls with these words, which work overtime here at the outset of this massive melodrama to foreground Palma's unabashed fondness for the self-reflexive - because Wells would surely object to this text, too - as well as setting its strange but (to a point) true story going.

In the several years since his sensational debut, following which Wells traveled in time to the automaton apocalypse of the year 2000, the writer has attempted to settle - following his creating calling and making a wife of the love of his life - but when the publication of his new novel attracts attention from all the wrong sorts, history seems set to repeat itself. Then, when the publication of his new novel attracts attention from all the wrong sorts, history seems set to repeat itself.

Initially, Wells sits down with Serviss to excoriate the aspirant author for his audacity, but ever the gentlemen, he cannot quite bring himself to give the fellow what for. One liquid lunch later, the American sneaks his famous new friend into a secret room under the British Museum: a room indeed full of secrets, wherein the pair are aghast to espy, amongst myriad other marvels, a fin from the Loch Ness Monster, a flash of Henry Jekyll's transformative concoction... and the dessicated corpse of a Martian.

"Wells had decided to accept as true the existence of the supernatural, because logic told him there was no other reason why it should be kept under lock and key. As a result he felt surrounded by the miraculous, besieged by magic. He was aware now that one fine day he would go into the garden to prune the roses and stumble on a group of fairies dancing in a circle. It was as though a tear had appeared in every book on the planet, and the fantasy had begun seeping out, engulfing the world, making it impossible to tell fact from fiction." (p.253)

Thus The War of the Worlds informs much of The Map of the Sky, in the same way as The Time Machine formed the foundation of Palma's previous pastiche — yet this is but a glimpse of what is to come. Nearly 200 pages pass before our unnamed narrator cares to share the remainder of the alien invasion tale around which this novelty novel revolves, because - again in the mode of its successful predecessor - The Map of the Sky is a thing of three parts, and in the first, beyond the prologue's tantalising tease, the author opts to retell another classic narrative.

These days, Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell is better known as the novella which spawned Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World — not to mention John Carpenter's later, greater adaptation, nor the recent attempt at a revival of the franchise. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Palma conjoins the paranoid narrative threaded through the aforementioned iterations with the concerns of active Arctic exploration, such that The Map of the Sky's opening act rather resembles that Dan Simmons tome, The Terror.

At the behest of Jeremiah Reynolds, whose Hollow Earth theory has attracted the interest of various investors, the Annawan - captained by a fellow called MacReady, and counting amongst its crew a young Edgar Allen Poe - makes good time to the Antarctic, where Reynolds suspects the entrance to our world's interior must be. But when the long polar winter begins and the ship becomes frozen in, they bear unwitting witness to the last voyage of a flying saucer, whose pilot - a monster able to assume the form of any of the stranded sailors - I dare say does not come in peace.

Eventually, the author ties elements of this opening act to The Map of the Sky's overarching narrative, yet I fear part one - for all that it's a bit of fun - puts the book's worst foot forward. The plucky panache of Palma's elaborate prose is, alas, woefully unsuited to the atmosphere of unearthly terror he aims to recapture. There's simply nothing insidious about The Map of the Sky's first act, surrounded as it is by such silliness.

But hey, two out of three ain't bad, and The Map of the Sky regains lost ground when our lamentably aimless and still anonymous narrator returns to Wells, reeling from the realisation that "From the depths of the universe, intelligences greater than theirs were observing the Earth with greedy eyes, perhaps even now planning how to conquer it." (p.182) Here and hereafter the verve and vibrancy of Palma's prose flows more appropriately; in this relaxed atmosphere, the author's arch assertions do not stand apart so starkly; and though The Map of the Sky's characters are often comically cack-handed, they muddle through the alien invasion in a winning way.

In fact, in this section, and the book's final third - which returns readers to a central perspective from The Map of Time - The Map of the Sky comes alive. There's a whole lot of plot, but even as it accrues it's exhilarating - relentlessly referential yet unerringly entertaining - meanwhile the sense and sensibilities of the ladies and gentlemen on whose padded shoulders rests Earth's continuing existence endears deeply. In the interim, a blossoming love story is sure to warm your cockles, and the going is never less than lively because of the biting banter between certain stalwarts of the series.

Apart a shaky start, The Map of the Sky is a superb and eminently accessible successor to Palma's last, sure to satisfy newcomers whilst appealing equally to returning readers. Come the cacophonous conclusion, one can only wonder as Wells does:

"He had written The Time Machine and then discovered he was a time traveler. He had written The War of the Worlds only to find himself fleeing from Martians. Would he become invisible next?" (p.396)

Here's hoping!

...

This review was originally published, in a slightly altered form, on tor.com.

***

The Map of the Sky

by Felix J. Palma

US Publication: September 2012, Atria Books

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading