Locus, August 2013 by Locus Publications

Author:Locus Publications
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: fantasy, science fiction, publishing
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

That last work, an original long novelette or short novella, could justify the price of admission by itself (though sticklers for new material should also enjoy the author’s final story notes). It introduces tropes like Faerie and the sentient book into the messy, low-rent life of a female librarian, essentially via a passing encounter at a train station on the same day she loses her old job to budget cuts.

However broad the range of human emotions, from tender affection to wild desire, paranoid fears to homicidal madness, that pass through Pratt’s extraordinary places, nothing comes out wholly unchanged. Refusing to abide by old divisions between genres – or even the concept of ‘‘genre’’ and ‘‘mainstream’’ as different things – he brings new life to everything he touches.

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Where ‘‘Tolkienesque’’ once ruled supreme, elements from history and old SFnal notions have crept into the multi-volume saga. I’ll end with two examples, Naomi Novik’s Blood of Tyrants (eighth and next to last in the ‘‘Temeraire’’ series) and Stephen Hunt’s Jack Cloudie (the fifth adventure set in a partly steampunk world of opposing empires).

Novik uses the Napoleonic wars as a rough scenario while fiddling with reality enough to leave room for sentient reptiles with strange gifts like flight or breathing fire. Blood of Tyrants further extends the global voyaging of Captain Laurence and the dragon Temeraire to a stubbornly isolationist Japan, where they are shipwrecked and separated – profoundly in the Captain’s case, since he washes up believing that his domain is Navy warships. He’s still trying to reclaim his missing years with the dragon Air Corps when the travelers come back together and resume their diplomatic mission to China.

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