Black Gate

Outpost (Donovan Trilogy #1)
By W. Michael Gear
DAW (432 pages, $26 hardcover, $12.99 eBook, February 20, 2018)

Any fans of Deadwood out there? I’m still pissed at HBO for canceling it (and really hoping these rumors of a movie pan out) because I’m a sucker for stories about “the frontier.” I fully accept that the American frontier in the Old West or the Age of Exploration or basically anytime one culture expanded into a new part of the globe, it was far from some Golden Age. But those time periods are interesting. Take people away from what they know and stick them somewhere totally alien, and the way they adapt and survive and either come together or kill each other has so much potential for great storytelling.

This is the part where I say “And this next book is no exception,” since I had a blast reading Outpost, the start of W. Michael Gear’s Donovan trilogy (and the first novel of his I’ve read). The setting is very Deadwood meets Avatar, set on a frontier colony that hasn’t been resupplied in almost a decade, on a planet filled with bizarre creatures and plants ready to kill the careless or unfortunate. Add in a bunch of new arrivals when the next resupply ship finally shows up, and what you get is an immediate clash of cultures between the freedom-loving colonists and the representatives of the Corporation, which basically runs Earth back home (maybe there’s some Firefly in here, too). Overall, the running idea with a lot of the main characters is the possibility of either losing yourself or remaking yourself in the frontier, with arcs that are diverse and often surprising.

One thing that Outpost also has going for it is the number of female protagonists, which is great in a subgenre that’s traditionally male-dominated (I feel like we’re saying that a lot these days, but it’s true and it’s awesome). But I also noticed immediately that a lot of these female characters are quickly and frequently sexualized and/or objectified by the male characters around them. That threw me out of the story a bit, since at the same time characters like Talina Perez and Supervisor Aguila are nuanced, badass and/or self-sufficient; I’d be very interested in the opinion of a female reviewer here*, to see if I’m being overly cautious (since this is something I try to be very careful with in my own writing) or there is anything problematic.

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The City of Brass
By S.A. Chakraborty
HarperCollins (544 pages, $16.99 paperback, $12.99 eBook, November 2017)

There are creatures and elements of the supernatural that appear in popular culture from time to time, earning a reaction of “ooh, look, it’s a ___________!” (At least from me; I don’t know about other people.) When I read the premise for City of Brass and saw that it focused on djinn and demons, I was intrigued right away – I mean, genies are cool.

The best part about Chakraborty’s take on djinn, ifrit and other associated beings is that they aren’t sensationalized or exoticized like we see on shows like Supernatural or Buffy. Between her personal background, a significant writing talent and what I can only imagine was a lot of research, Chakraborty creates a world that’s nuanced and detailed. It has exactly the vivid freshness we continue to need in the fantasy genre, as a balance for the variations on the same Eurocentric worldviews that are still widely common. When I teach my students about promoting diversity in speculative fiction, City of Brass will be one of the examples I hold up.

But the novel is much more than its world – at the end of the day, my interest is always characters. Our two main protagonists, Cairo street urchin Nahri and immortal warrior Dara, are great counterparts; they’re equally passionate and protective, but in different ways, and both are seeking to find their place in the world. I’ll admit that I groaned a bit at the first signs of romance between them (it begins early enough in the novel that I’m not really spoiling anything) but the way that this romance develops and progresses later doesn’t follow a typical narrative course, and so it won me over. Meanwhile, protagonist Alizayd’s journey is just as compelling, as he navigates loyalty to his family and his belief in what’s right, amid the cultural politics of the daeva.

That said, there’s so much built into City of Brass that I’d periodically lose track of certain details. For example, it’s mentioned early that Nahri aspires to escape Cairo and attend medical school; about a third of the novel later, when she’s working as a healer under very different circumstances and laments that old aspiration, I had to remind myself “Right, this is what she always wanted” because of how much had happened in between.

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Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach
By Kelly Robson
Tor (240 pages, $14.99 paperback, $3.99 eBook, March 2018)
Cover by Jon Foster

The other night I was looking out my window at the light snowstorm cascading onto Ottawa, after dealing with freezing rain and power outages, and trying very hard not to wonder what the world is going to look like in fifty years. I mean, we all ponder it sometimes, right? Maybe half the planet is underwater. Maybe we’ve developed solid, widespread renewables. Maybe we’re making plans to go somewhere else. Maybe we’ve moved everyone into skyscrapers like Kim Stanley Robinson suggests, to let nature rebuild?

Writers like to focus on what the near-future might look like a lot, which means it’s tough to come up with a unique take on it – and that makes Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach so impressive. (How’s that for a segue?!) In her novella, humanity isn’t just rebuilding from past ecological disasters – we’ve also figured out time travel, which makes long-term restoration projects suddenly less interesting. The corporate stranglehold in both arenas is just one piece of a world that feels like it could be decades ahead of us, instead of centuries. Between vivid, realistic technology like “fakes” for handling instant messaging and designer prosthetics, and slang nicknames like “hells” for underground habitats and “fat babies” for children born in creches, Robson gives us something instantly relatable but also fresh. (All of that sounds very review-y in its lingo, but it’s 100% true!)

On top of that, Robson gives us an octogenarian protagonist, Minh, who struggles with anything that isn’t done “her way” and is balanced with a youthful counterpart who’s just as stubborn and determined to succeed. There’s no preachiness about age in either direction, though; instead, the story hinges on Minh realizing things about herself and working with a team, as they face the very real dangers of 2024 BCE. That overlap between past and future is where the truly excellent tension-building presents itself, as the story jumps between Minh and her team preparing for their journey and the perspective of a Mesopotamian king, Shulgi, whose people are troubled by new stars and bizarre monsters. Knowing that the latter is obviously a bunch of time travelers and that things are going to horribly wrong is only half the fun; the rest is when the two timelines sink up, and you realize exactly where Minh and her team fit into Shulgi’s story.

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Soledad (Dark Republic #1)
By D.L. Young
Concordia (244 pages, $12.99 paperback, April 2016)

Planning on throwing yourself into the community of science fiction and fantasy writers? In North America, at least, be prepared to start humming, “It’s a Small World, After All” every time you go to a conference or festival.

When I was first breaking into the short fiction market, two of my stories appeared in Tides of Possibility, an anthology published through the Houston Writers Guild. It was in that anthology that I first came across a story by D.L. Young, “The Reader,” which among a solid collection really jumped out at me.

That was 2014. I went about my business, occasionally seeing tweets and posts by Young and other Tides contributors until they stopped showing up as often in my feeds, courtesy of analytics. Then this past fall at World Fantasy in San Antonio, I walked past a dealer’s room booth with D.L. YOUNG displayed on a big poster, and realized, “Holy @#$%, I know that guy!”

Which is the long version of how, after catching up with Dave about writing and whatnot, I ended up with a copy of Soledad, the first novel in his Dark Republic series. It’s a blend of near-future post apocalypse with what could be considered fantasy, focused on a young woman surviving in a blighted version of Texas, surrounded by people who want to use her ability to “read” people and determine their lies. Through a desperate quest for answers, we see a potential future where natural gas is gold, the United States wants nothing to do with Texas, and a sharp dichotomy between rich and poor is shown via Dallas, the last bastion of high-tech civilization in the region.

This is the point when I will honestly admit that it’s rare for a self-published book to really blow me away. There are a lot of reasons for that (which might be good material for another post) but for anyone who might be leery of self-pub in today’s oversaturated market: Soledad is an awesome novel. It’s got complex characters that blur the line between hero and villain and maintains a quick and effective pace with twists that I genuinely didn’t see coming.

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