Black Gate

Turn Coat
Jim Butcher
Roc (576 pp, $9.99, April 2009 – March 2010 paperback edition)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

Private-eye wizard Harry Dresden returns in Jim Butcher’s Turn Coat though, in point of fact, he hasn’t been doing altogether that much investigating lately. Between wars with vampire courts and secret enemies finally getting the Black Council on the move, it doesn’t seem like Harry is going to have the opportunity to track down a missing person or provide evidence in a divorce dispute any time soon.

Butcher jumps right in with his trademark wit. The characters in Turn Coat are, by now, so familiar that they provide a little thrill of recognition just by being mentioned. Waldo Butters, for example, has next to nothing to do with the story, but I can’t help but be pleased to see him again because I like Waldo Butters. That is something that plays to Butcher’s strong suit: the dialogue and relationships are so easy and natural that they cannot help but be compelling, even when no one is doing anything.

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The Magicians
Lev Grossman
Viking (416 pp, $16.00, August 2009 – May 2010 paperback edition)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians makes an admirable attempt at an ambitious premise: is it possible to use the form and structure of Harry Potter to tell a story about ennui, dissipation, and cynicism? What is the difference between the childhood wonder evoked by the “you’re such a special child” childrens’ fantastic literature — with its black and white morality, its uplifting sense of meaning and hope — and the obdurate, insistent messiness of real grown-up life?

The Magicians follows Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant, industrious high school student who spends his time working obscenely hard at schoolwork for ends that are not entirely clear to him, as he is selected for and matriculates at a secret school for wizards in upstate New York. The story self-consciously mimics such similar novels as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, except it equally self-consciously subtracts the moral clarity, the battle against ultimate evil, and the soul-building trials of its main character’s childhood.

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Daemon World
Ben Counter
BL Publishing (414 pp, $7.99, 2009 (originally published in 2003))
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The world of Warhammer 40,000 takes ‘dark’ to a whole new level, with a constellation of warring races in various shades of gray (for example, the ‘good guys’ of the Imperium have no qualms about eradicating entire planets within their own empire), a bleak, medieval gothic aesthetic oozing with fanaticism, intolerance, and cruelty, and an essentially hopeless outlook for humankind.

Indeed, the series tagline, “In the grim darkness of the future there is only war,” gets at the heart of the 40k setting, though it misses somewhat the undercurrent of black humor and parody that have been present in this universe since its inception. But the enormously popular world of the 41st millennium is more than just a space opera version of Warhammer Fantasy – despite its space elves and orks, Warhammer 40,000 is a unique and appealing setting that has been steadily accruing a history and a body of lore for over twenty years, all of which makes it much more complex and interesting than it may appear at first blush. It is a richly detailed, dark fantasy of the future that synthesizes everything from Paradise Lost to Star Wars, H.R. Geiger to H.P. Lovecraft, Dune to Starship Troopers.

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A Magic of Nightfall
S.L. Farrell
DAW (656 pp, $7.99, March 2009 – March 2010 mass market edition)
Reviewed by Charlene Brusso

Fans of S.L. Farrell’s marvelous ability with character and world-building (check out the Cloudmage trilogy) will cheer at the arrival of the latest book in the Nessantico Cycle (sequel to A Magic of Twilight). Book two returns readers to the marvelous Renaissance style city of Nessantico, “the most famous, the most beautiful, the most powerful of her kind,” bustling with energy, ambition, magic (much of it unauthorized), and ever-rising intrigue. But this is a Nessantico 25 years after the events of Twilight, a shaky Nessantico and its powers-that-be set to tumble down the slippery slope that has been steadily growing steeper in the last few years.

Nessantico is the capital, both political and religious, of the Holdings, an immense and entrenched empire – immense, but half the size it used to be. To the east, rival nation-state Firenzcia is forming its own alliances with its neighbors. Likewise, the Concenzia Faith has undergone a schism. In Nessantico, the much-beloved Ana ca’Seranta still serves as the “real” Archigos, but rival Archigos Semini ca’Cellibrecca, a conservative religious hardliner, leads the faithful in Brezno in Firenzcia. Unlike Ana, Semini has no tolerance for heretics like the Numentodo, natural philosophers who’ve proven that magical ability has no link to religious faith.

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Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America
Robert Charles Wilson
Tor Books (624 pp, $8.99, June 2009 – May 2010 mass market edition)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America is not your typical story of a futuristic dystopian United States. There are no mutant cannibals, no hidden super-technologies, no weird psychics or alien visitations. Even “dystopian” isn’t quite right; Robert Charles Wilson’s 22nd century America has its problems, yes, but it is arguably not any more dystopian than any other civilization that crawled its way to the top of the heap in the last two thousand years. The story takes place after the End of Oil, a hotly-debated potential real-world crisis that, in this case, has caused America to revert to a feudal nation with Victorian values and technology.

In his imagining of this future America, Wilson has created a beautiful, brilliant narrative that smoothly carries its characters through the trials and tribulations of the eponymous Julian Comstock, heir to the Presidency of the United States — an office that has, since the End of Oil, become a position of dynastic, imperial privilege. The topsy-turvy, almost-apocalyptic future is a ripe breeding ground for social satire, casting clever barbs at our own past presidents who insisted on being referred to as Commanders-in-Chief by those Americans who were not actually in the army, at the religiously-motivated political institutions that seek to recast the American government as a branch of the celestial kingdom, or the industrialists and captains of industry that tacitly support an economic system so unbalanced that it almost couldn’t help but lead to a return to slavery.

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