Mike Finn

Joe Abercrombie's talent is to make an experience so real that you feel you're there.

He turns an incident when a boat, being portered over a mountain, slips its ropes and must be held fast by an exceptionally strong man a great personal cost, into something filled with tension and pain and sweat and stoic selfless bravery that bypasses analysis and hits your emotions like an injection of adrenalin to the heart

The world the action takes place in is original, credible, richly detailed and very strange.

The main character is likeable, intriguing and not human.

The plot feels like a thriller wrapped around a treasure hunt.

Wonderful stuff.

This alternative Britain, where everyone owes a decade of slavery to the magic-using elite, is grimly plausible. Take away the elite's use of magic and you're close to how Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk believe England should be.

The main characters are all under twenty. Their inexperience helps with the world-building but it also gives a YA tone that dampens the rage I should be feeling at these magical Tory Tyrants.

Maureen McHugh's science fiction short stories are always stimulating. Today, on tor.com, one of her most recent short stories is available to read for free.

'Yellow And The Perception Of Reality' is about a woman trying to uncover how her physicist twin sister came to suffer brain-damage in a lab accident which also killed two of her sister's colleagues.

If you enjoy this story and want to read more, take a look at her collection 'After The Apocalypse'.

This Friday I'm escaping into the realms of fantasy with the help of some of the strongest voices around.

I'm starting with 'A Dead Djinn In Cairo' short story by P. Djèlí Clark (2016), set in an alternative Cairo where the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities investigate disturbances between the mortal and the (possibly) divine.

After a five year gap (how did I let .that happen?) I'm returning to the sword and sorcery of 'The Shattered Sea Trilogy' with 'Half The World' by Joe Abercrombie (2015).

'Gilded Cage' by Vic James (2014) kicks off her 'Dark Gifts' series about a modern Britain enslaved to a magic-using elite. That's something that becomes easier and easier to imagine as we ride the COViD-19 waterslide off the edge of the Brexit cliff so, after sitting on my shelf for more than two years, this book's time has come.

Finally, I'm reading 'City Of Bones' by Martha Wells (2007) published a decade before Murderbot came along and tell a story of magic, ancient technology and a humanoid race created to help mankind survive.

'A Dead Djinn In Cairo' by P. Djèlí Clark (2016)

I think P. Djèlí Clark is a fantasy writer to watch. He has a distinctive voice, a different way of looking at the world, proudly pushes aside anglo-centric views of fantasy and gives us something fresh and compelling. Best of all, his books are fun to read. His novella, 'The Black God's Drums' was one of my favourite reads last year. I'm catching up on his back catalogue while I wait for 'Ring Shout' to come out in September.

'A Dead Djinn In Cairo' is only forty-six pages long but I know Clark can pack a lot into a few pages so I'm looking forward to spending time in an alternative Cairo in 1912 and following Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities as she investigates an odd suicide and finds all kinds of trouble.

'A Dead Djinn In Cairo' was longlisted for a Hugo. You can find it and the rest of the nominees in 'The Long List Anthology Volume 3: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List'.

'Half The World' by Joe Abercrombie (2015)

Joe Abercrombie is one of the leading British fantasy writers, with three successful trilogies 'The First Law', 'The Shattered Sea' and 'The Age Of Madness', two standalone novels and a collection of short stories to his name.

I read 'Half A King' (2014), the first book of his 'Shattered Seas' trilogy, in March 2015. This was my response:

'I just finished this today and I’m sitting here slightly stunned. It’s been a long, long time since I read something so packed with betrayal, violence, and dramatic plot twists which is also written by someone who draws vivid characters, creates a whole new mythology and has an ear for language and rhythm that lifts his prose almost into a song at times.'

I should have bought ' Half The World' when it came out later that year but I got distracted, didn't buy it until 2018 and haven't gotten around to reading it until now. I'm hoping this is going to be one of those 'Why did I wait so long?' experiences that will prompt me to roll straight on to the third book, 'Half A War'.

'Gilded Cage' by Vic James (2014)

Vic James is another British fantasy writer dealing in magic and power, except her fantasies are set in an alternative version of modern Britain where all power sits with the magic-using elite. She has an academic background in history and experience in making current affairs documentaries so I'm hoping that 'The Gilded Cage' will owe more to British politics than Dungeon and Dragons.

'Gilded Cage' is the first book in the 'Dark Gifts' series, which has three books so far, so I'm hoping I'm going to want to get to the rest of them as soon as possible.

'City Of Bones' by Martha Wells (2007)

Martha Wells published her science fiction novel in 1993 and has been writing novels and winning prizes ever since. Until recently, she was probably best known for her fantasy series, the 'Books Of The Raskura', starting with 'The Cloud Roads.'

Then, in 2017, she published 'All Systems Red', the first novella in 'The Murderbot Diaries' and became a must-read science fiction writer for a much wider audience.

I've picked up 'City Of Bones' to see what Martha Wells' was like before the 'Books of the Raskura' or 'The Murderbot Diaries'. It's a story of a post-apocalyptic world, struggling for resources and control of ancient technologies in a desert world where humanity only survives with the help of a sentient humanoid race created to service them.

'Fingerprints Of Previous Owners' (2017) is an exceptional book: diverse, credible characters; beautifully crafted descriptions and perfectly inflected dialogue, and an innovative structure work together to deliver a view of the legacy of slavery, its modern faces and the ways in which a community descended from slaves deal with their heritage and their present challenges. 

This is not a polemic or a thinly-written anthem for the newly-woke. This is a novel that is firmly centred in the experiences, hopes, loves and frustrations of the people living on a small, formerly British, Caribbean island that once had a Plantation at its centre and the blood of slaves on its stones, and is now dominated by a foreign-owned, American-run holiday resort, built on the site of the plantation.

Most of the story is told from the point of view of Myrna, a young islander who spends her days supporting herself and her mother by working as a maid at the resort and spends her nights using her machete to cut her way into the thornbush-choked inland in search of all the things the older generations refuse to speak of.

The book opens with Event Management (white, brought in from off-island) at the resort curating the presentation of a fictional island and fictional islanders (black women, including Myrna, born on the island and employed as maids) to the tourists arriving by boat at the resort. The maids are required to dress in sheets so a white staffer, playing the role of Columbus, can deliver a narrative around 'Natives' welcoming Columbus the island hundreds of years ago. All the resort staff know that the islanders are descendants of African slaves and the original islanders who met Columbus were either killed or sent to die working in silver mines.

Here's Myrna, describes her work at the resort: 

'My ID tag said nothing but "Maid" but it was also my job to be silent and visible only when the tourists wanted to see me. "At work2 meant not just a place or a time. A being. A not being.'

Here is her description of taking part in the charade for the tourists, where, dressed as 'natives' in white sheets, they offer the tourists beads in exchange for pennies:

'Christine and I ducked our heads to remove strands of plastic beads and handed them to the tourists in exchange for pennies. I could see in their eyes the expectation of gratitude. Pennies, not worth stooping to the ground for back at their homes, were transformed through some sort of island alchemy. The alchemy of poverty.'

I felt this to be astonishingly powerful. It made me squirm because I could image myself both as 'native' and tourist and would have hated being either.

As the novel progresses, we learn about Myrna's life, her family (father and brother now dead. Mother a retired school teacher who now scavenges a living), Myrna's self-imposed distance from the islanders around her and her obsession with the inland and what lies buried beneath the bush there.

Change in the story is driven by the arrival of a black American woman, her whiter-than-white husband and their son and their white blonde, college-age nanny as guests on the island. It is the first time that a black woman has been a guest and neither the brought-in staff nor the islanders know what to make of it. The woman brings with her an old book, dating back to the days of the plantation, that Myrna yearns to read and which will change everything.

Myrna's narrative is interspersed with chapters called 'Bench Stories' Each has an islander sitting on a bench, telling a story from his or her life. We don't know until the final chapters of the book who the stories are being told to or why but they're no less powerful for that. They're basically short stories with a common context and they are so intense. I'd buy the book for them alone.

There's one where a man explains why he walks the island wearing an old sock with a worn violin hanging on his back. It is human, so full of remembered love and pain and present courage that it hurts.

When I finally understood what the Bench Stories were, their power was increased immensely and they ended-up re-framing the whole novel.

'Fingerprints Of Previous Owners' was beautifully written but I found it very hard to take. When I read a chapter that finally gave a view (albeit an owner's view) of plantation life, I had to stop for a while before I could read more. The details of the way in which the slaves were treated, punished, used, sold are not new to me. I grew up on Merseyside. We were taught all about the slave trade and its cruelties. There's a museum to it in Liverpool's Albert Dock, but this book made the things I'd been told real in a way that they hadn't been before. It was the difference between reading a map and walking the land. It was the difference between thinking about things happening to 'them' and imagining things happening to 'us'.

As I sat and took this in: what it means, what the wealthy English did, for decades, to hundreds of thousands of people, I understood the outrage behind pulling down Colston's statue in Bristol.

The main narrative, while staying a very human, quietly told but emotionally rich story, showed me the ways in which modern Corporate Colonialism carries the ethics of slavery with it. The removal of dignity. Turning local people into second class citizens. The assertion of the rights of the owners over the needs of the people. And the so-taken-for-granted-we-don't-think-about-it racism. And none of it sounds like an exaggeration or a distortion. It's simply a stark exposition of a global corporate culture that treats people as things.

I liked the ending of the novel. No magic solutions were offered. No battle cry was raised. But there was change. The kind of change that comes from people talking to each other about their past and their present and doing what they can to claim and keeps their identity and their dignity.

I strongly recommend the audiobook version of 'Fingerprints Of Previous Owners'. All the narrators do a great job, especially in bringing the rhythms of the language to life.

The first chapter filled with the dry, quiet, patient, gentle humour of the long friendship between Walt Longmire and Henry Standingbear as they try to find a new location for Katie's wedding when the venue on the Reservation becomes unavailable at the last minute.

There's a strong sense of place, a feeling of family and the easy companionship that comes from doing something important but not too challenging. Then, just as I was relaxing with Walt and Henry, taking in the beauty of the landscape, they see someone die and everything changes.

For me, this captures the spirit of the Longmire stories: men doing their best, taking their ease where they can but always keeping a weather eye for the next piece of misery the world will throw their way.

I'm deeply impressed by this book.

Except for one chapter, when she's ten turning elven, this is not the story of Eva's life. It's the story of the people whose lives she passes through and yet it doesn't feel disjointed.

Each chapter gives me a taste of a new life and each one is full of flavour. Nothing feels forced but each chapter adds a flavour to the dish and each flavour is like a triggered memory.

First, there's the wait to get the site to load

 Then, when you get there, so many people have been discouraged it's like:

 but I'm going to hang around and hope for the best.

Why was I so surprised by how odd this book is? It's right there in the title: 'Oddfits'. It's about people who don't fit in, who are so obviously and fundamentally out of tune with where they are that it's clear that, although they're here, they belong somewhere else.

Yet I didn't expect a Roal Dahl meets Kafka reading experience that made me feel so off-balance. That I, the reader, was the oddfit who can't quite grasp what is expected of me or what I should expect of the author. I'm not sure what's going on or what is likely to happen next. It feels like being thrown around on a fairground ride. The only option is to give up control and go with the ride. Which is part of why I hate fairground rides.

If I'm going to read this book to the end, I'll need to find a place to stand and quite soon.

I've just started 'No Fixed Line' by Dana Stabenow, the twenty-second Kate Shugak book. This morning, I picked it up eagerly, read to the end of Chapter Two and recognised that it brings me comfort to be back in Kate Shugak land. That's odd really as Dana Stabenow doesn't write cosy mysteries. Her books have very bad people in them. She confronts hate, corruption, misogyny, racism, greed and a hunger for violence. She looks at Alaska and sees both its beauty and its lethal indifference. She doesn't whitewash politics or history and she understands that even the people who think of themselves as the good guys sometimes betray themselves and the things they believe in.

So why does reading a Kate Shugak story bring me comfort?

Because, at the heart of almost all of the stories, there is a refusal to abandon hope, to find the courage to persist and a determination not to look away. There's also friendship, community, love, independence and honesty. It's a home I'd like to have. A home I'd like to be able to live up to even though I know I'd probably fail.

So, after a prologue and two chapters where am I?

Well, there's the title. It's taken from a Robert Frost poem I didn't recognise called 'There Are Roughly Zones'. That was a gift because it showed me how little Frost I'd read and pointed me at his 'A Further Range' collection. It's also a perfect match for the way Kate thinks: that there are boundaries that mustn't be crossed and that becoming blind to those boundaries, failing to see that 'there are roughly zones' that keep us human, is how we become monstrous. 

Given that quote, I shouldn't have been surprised that, straight from the Prologue, Dana Stabenow starts to dig into the human consequences of one of the worst evils Trump has created, one that I think the rest of the world looks at and wonders why the rest of America allows it: the separation of children from their parents at the border. Keeping children in cages, sleeping on concrete floors. Destroying families by dispersing children across America without documenting where they went or who their parents were. All of it overseen by ICE, Trump's own SS.

Of course, that's my, entirely political neutral and objective, summary, not Stabelnow's. She's a more 'show don't tell' writer, so her prologue deals with two children, a brother and a sister, separated from their mother, kept in cages and then sold on to human traffickers. 

Then she gave me a chapter showing the fast, instinctive response of two young people who face a fierce ice storm to rescue any survivors of a plane crash, followed by a chapter with Kate at home, cooking and discussing the merits of college and the problems with the State defunding education. 

So, I know I'm home. I know things are going to get fraught. And I know I'm going to have to exercise control not to snarf the whole book down in a day, like a Labrador with fresh meat.

It brings me comfort to be back in Kate Shugak land. That's odd really as Dana Stabenow doesn't write cosy mysteries. Her books have very bad people in them. She confronts hate, corruption, misogyny, racism, greed and a hunger for violence. She looks at Alaska and sees both its beauty and its lethal indifference. She doesn't whitewash politics or history and she understands that even the people who think of themselves as the good guys sometimes betray themselves and the things they believe in.

So why does reading a Kate Shugak story bring me comfort?

Because, at the heart of almost all of the stories, there is a refusal to abandon hope, to find the courage to persist and a determination not to look away. There's also friendship, community, love, independence and honesty. It's a home I'd like to have. A home I'd like to be able to live up to even though I know I'd probably fail.

So, after a prologue and two chapters where am I?

Firstly, it looks like Dana Stabenow is going to dig in to the human consequences of one of the worst evils Trump has created, one that I think the rest of the world looks at and wonders why the rest of America allows it: the separation of children from their parents at the border. Keeping children in cages, sleeping on concrete floors.  Destroying family by dispersing children across America without documenting where they went or who their parents were. All of it overseen by ICE, troops own SS.

Of course, that's my, entirely political neutral and totally objective, summary, not Stabelnow's. She's a more 'show don't tell' writer, so her proluge deal with two children, a brother and a sister, separated from their mother, kept in cages and then sold on to human traffickers.  Then she gives me a chapter showing the fast, instinctive response of two young people who face a fierce ice storm to rescue any survivors of a  plane crash, followed by a chapter with Kate at home, cooking and discussing the merits of college and the problems with the State defunding education. 

So, I know I'm home. I know things are going to get fraught. And I know I'm going to have to exercise control not to snarf the whole book down in a day, like a Labrador with fresh meat.

One chapter in and this reads like a foodie version of ´Lake Webegoné.

Well, not quite a cliff-hanger ending but not quite a free-standing novel either. More like Part 1 of a spectacular Season Finale of a long-running show.

I'm very glad that Part 2. 'Battle Ground' will be in my library on 29th September.