Black Gate

Titanshade
By Dan Stout
DAW Books (416 pages, $26.00 hardcover, $7.99 paperback, $12.99 eBook, March 12, 2019)
Cover by Chris McGrath

Jake Peralta and I have something in common: a deep love for Die Hard. That was what got me into cop-centered stories (moving on from Pokemon and Power Rangers), leading me to the likes of Lethal Weapon, Nash Bridges and more. The reason I still love those stories is because of the focus on a dysfunctional, imperfect hero trying to grapple with internal and external pressures, and sometimes not handling them very well. That’s part of why one of my favorites shows of all time is Fringe – none of the characters are perfect, they all have demons, there’s a procedural element, and it’s a weird-frightening-amazing science fiction show.

Dan Stout manages to give the procedural a fresh twist with Titanshade, which centers on police detectives in a northern town trying to transition from oil to renewable energy, in a world populated by humans and other races. The cover looks like a rehash of Bright, which is just unfortunate timing, apparently, since this novel sold to DAW earlier. More importantly, Stout’s story is way more original and engaging (though I actually enjoyed Bright). It’s not just orcs and elves running around with humans; it’s Mollencampi, with multiple mouths and an array of expressions using their pincers, and Gillmyn, sort of like bipedal whales who more easily adapt to Titanshade’s cold. Oh, and they aren’t running around what’s basically present-day Los Angeles with fantasy creatures thrown in; Titanshade is built around a mountain formed from a dying god whose lifeblood gives the community heat, which is good since the material component for magic is running out even faster than the old oil reserves.

Between the 8-track players, disco music and pagers, the rampant police politics and focus on a detective past his prime paired with a young go-getter, Titanshade reads a lot like a love letter to shows like Miami Vice or Hawaii Five-0. But at the same time there’s a ton of nuance and breaking of traditional molds. Carter, our past-his-prime detective, is far from a carbon copy of Martin Riggs or Sonny Crockett, and the problems he and his partner Jax deal with are more X-Files than Blue Bloods. Limiting magic makes it a subtle tool throughout this novel, but a crucial component for the story, and the focus on moving away from oil makes me wonder if we can classify this as a solarpunk story (or maybe solarpunk-adjacent?).

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Cover by Julia Lloyd

M.T. Hill used to write under the name Matt Hill. Under that name he published the 2017 Philip K. Dick Award nominee Graft, which we covered back in 2016. Lots of folks really liked that book; Edward J Rathke called it “a brilliant eulogy for our ruined future” and Publishers Weekly said it “captures the dark underbelly of Manchester in visceral prose… [a] refreshing take on a futuristic mystery.” His follow-up Zero Bomb was released in March, and is already winning accolades. Here’s an excerpt from Paul Di Filippo’s Locus Online review.

The byline M.T. Hill is a not-too-opaque screen for the writer Matt Hill, whose two previous books under that name have been The Folded Man (2013) and Graft (2016). I mention this fact only because his third novel, Zero Bomb, is so good that you will want to snatch up copies of the first two, as I just did… It features a not-unfamiliar and especially au courant theme — near-future societal and technological collapse — but presents it in so poignant and authentic and original a manner… that it feels fresh, insightful and powerful.

Part I opens in the year 2030, and focuses on a man, approaching middle age, named Remi. Due to a family tragedy — the death of his young daughter Martha — Remi suffers a mental breakdown and abandons his wife Joan and every aspect of his successful life. He becomes more or less a vagrant temp-worker, gets hooked on the drug spark, recovers, and begins to lift himself out of the pit of despair and nihilism. When the tale really kicks off, Remi is a bike messenger in London… One day his current errand is short-circuited when a driverless car attempts to kill him. After that, the deluge. Remi is contacted by a cybernetic fox, who, we eventually learn, is named Rupal, and is one of the more charming personages in the story. The fox delivers a package to Remi with instructions for delivery. Arriving, coerced, at his destination, Remi discovers he has been enrolled willy-nilly in a conspiracy to topple the civilization of “automatic England…” The whole conspiracy is modeled on an old SF novel from 1971: The Cold Veil, by Laurel M. Brace. In fact, Brace might still be around and leading the movement. Part II leaves Remi behind and gives us an abridged sample of The Cold Veil itself. It’s a spot-on rendition of such an artifact from a different era.

Zero Bomb was published by Titan Books on March 19, 2019. It is 303 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $3.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Julia Lloyd. Read an excerpt at Tor.com. According to Hill’s website, Zero Bomb and his upcoming novel The Breach (Titan, March 2020) “share a fictional northern town called Dillock… but they’re otherwise standalone.”