It turns out that there are a couple of points in common—they’re both set in London, and… er. No, I think that’s it.

It’s about fairies—excuse me, “Feyre”. I’d like to say that that’s the single silliest and most pretentious misspelling of “fairy” I’ve ever seen, but one of the subspecies of the Feyre is the “Fey’ree”. The Feyre are all aligned towards one or more of the Aristotelian elements, completed in the obligatory manner by “Void”. The Void fairies are the bad ones who refuse to breed with humans, and there’s a mystical barrier keeping them out of our world. But it’s breaking down… and our protagonist is a special, unique Void-fairy halfbreed, which nobody thought could ever exist. Of course, that particular plot point is resolved casually at the end, with a bit of waffle about unexpected heritages and nobody being able to predict what kind of fairy they’ll turn out to be.

A lot of the story concerns learning & mastering the rules of fairy magic, and working out what fairies can and can’t do. And if that last sentence didn’t seem wrong to you, you’ve been reading about a different kind of fairies to the ones I was brought up on. Honestly, this book would have been more readable and made more sense if it started with a crashed alien ship several millennia ago, and superstitious humans treating the advanced travellers as supernatural beings, because these are no kind of fairies I’ve ever heard of. At least Shevdon doesn’t abuse any of the traditional names, so if you do want to read it you can safely pretend they’re just space aliens.

The treatment of fairy tropes in the book is inconsistent, too. They can’t touch iron (it gives them electric shocks) but they’re absolutely fine with steel. Iron is intensely antithetical to magic, but at one point they get into an iron safe using fairy magic. Fairy magic interfaces nicely with technology (at one point, the protagonist uses a mirror to make a call to someone’s mobile), but they regularly use ignore-me-I’m-not-here fairy magic to conceal themselves, or large melee weapons, from security guards and nobody ever worries about being caught on CCTV.

The CCTV thing is a particularly London issue, but there are a few other places in the book which ring rather untrue to me, too. Fifteen quid for a taxi to Heathrow before dawn, for instance; things that eat London pigeons and apparently enjoy them; walking around next to the Fleet without protective gear, let alone falling in it and surviving… Shevdon’s done his headline research pretty well, it seems, but not bothered with the little things.

The writing style is flaccid, with a lot of just-past-tense first-person reflections, and a keen eye for cliché & the pointless minutiae of everyday life, whilst carefully avoiding little details that might enliven a scene beyond the bare-bones setting. It’s still readable, but one gets the feeling that writing is being treated as a necessary inconvenience involved in getting on with the plot, rather than the book itself.

The story’s nominally about the discovery of an unexpected new layer to life, replacing and changing all that’s gone before, but there’s very little sense of real dislocation or threat. The opponents we’re shown are dangerous enough, but they’re all predictable and well defined; there’s none of the lurking, numinous sense of unknown threat, or the unpredictable desires & disposition, that characterize things of faerie in English folklore.

If you have a few hours to waste and nothing better to hand, you won’t be harmed by reading this, but that’s the best I can say about it.

This one, on the other hand, will not be one of them. It reads as though Stiegler had found a comprehensive list of things to avoid doing if you don’t want to give offense, and then treated it as a how-to manual.

The main plot involves a series of huge death-dealing spaceships full of killer robots, which are called (without any explanation whatsoever) Shiva I to VI. Now, it might be possible to argue that this is a reference to Jewish mourning practice, but given the literary antecedents of huge unmanned spaceships on periodic courses through the solar system, it doesn’t wash.

Teams of dedicated and highly trained people, referred to as Angels, are sent up to perform suicide commando raids on the huge killer spaceships named after a Hindu god. Can we say “problematic”, boys and girls? I thought we could!

It’s not as though that’s the only offensive aspect, either. The national stereotypes are thick on the ground, from the flighty spendthrift South American woman (Hispanic, not indigenous, of course) to the upper-class British journalist whose foppish manner conceals a razor-sharp mind. Admittedly, the Chinese scam artist shows no discernable Chinese characteristics; he’s just a generic American like the entire rest of the book.

There’s an autistic child who’s treated only as a plot coupon (they use the phrase “idiot savant” in earnest), and all his implausibly miraculous accomplishments are laid at his mother’s door instead. And, of course, the reason she’s doing it is to earn enough money to find a cure for his autism.

In related disability news, though, there’s a prominent example of wheelchair non-fail—a character who’s lost both legs is treated entirely normally, and not made an object of pity. Of course, his Manic Pixie Dream Girl (who’s also a lethal killing machine, of course—you didn’t think this kind of book would let a heroine get away without that?) doesn’t hesitate to commandeer the controls when she wants to take him on a date.

All in all, this is really rather a special book, and only worth reading for curiosity value. Once I’d finished it, I ended up going straight to the bookshelf for Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark, for a thoughtful, sensible, nuanced treatment of autistic people instead, and I recommend you do the same.

This is a Baen Free Library book, which means you can buy, download, or read it online for free here.

I had this pressed upon me as a free gift at Eastercon LX, and I have no hesitation in saying it was worth more than I paid for it. I got at least 25p worth of entertainment from writing this review, after all.

There’s a half-decent novella in there, maybe a hundred pages of sparkling wit and madcap action; but it’s encumbered by four things.

The first is the author’s tin ear for dialogue, and inability to separate narrative voice from character; the second is the unoriginality of each tired set-piece scene, from the confrontation with Scotland Yard at the Scene of the Crime to the life-or-death struggle atop a speeding train and the hero’s unorthodox entry to a zeppelin in flight^[3]; the third is the glutinous web of what we’ll charitably refer to as plot that binds those scenes together; and the fourth is the excess two hundred pages of leadenly prolix padding that surrounds it all.

It’s written very much in the style of a Strand part-work, and each chapter takes care to recap large parts of the one before. To add to this weight of unnecessary verbiage, there’s also rather a lot of infodump exposition; it appears that Green had simultaneously been writing the roleplaying game sourcebook of the world, and by some budgetary exigence had been forced to combine the two projects into one.

The characters appear to have been ordered from a catalogue, possibly quite cheaply. I suspect that that would be because the millionaire playboy secret agent explorer^[4], the ex-prizefighter butler, the ruthless femme fatale villain, the incompetent police inspector, the amoral scientist, and the machiavellian politician would quite happily all roll up and fit in one cardboard tube.

About all I can say about the book’s ending is that it has one, and that the plot strand (there is only one) is resolved, and that in the proper style some of the enemies have escaped for the sequel. If we are lucky, there will not be a sequel.

As far as further detail goes, either I have blotted it from my mind in the last ten minutes or I found myself incapable of reading it with any attention due to the sheer horror of both the prose and the internal logic of the proceedings.

It reads as though the Good Doktor Frankenstein, despite his medical degree, had been unable to tell fresh corpse parts from the sundered limbs of Action Man, and instead of pulling the lever to surge life-giving electricity into his creation had instead attached strings and made it dance the Funky Chicken.

However, for reasons best known to himself, Palmer has chosen to cloak it in the trappings of a comic space opera – the kind of story usually described as a Zany Caper and lovingly wrapped in a cover by Josh Kirby (mayherestinpeace). The story opens with a ragtag bunch of misfits pursuing a career in piracy and kidnapping – IN SPACE! Complete with a kidnapping victim who isn’t what we think… but then that was the pirates’ plan all along, and it turns out they’re not just pirates but revolutionaries, and the story unfolds from there.

The end product reads as though Terry Pratchett, at the point when he first sat down to write The Dark Side of the Sun, had instead been hit by a stray particle of inspiration intended originally for the creative imagination of Alastair Reynolds. The first comparison I thought of was Rob Grant; or taken a little further, darker, more intense, it might have been Deathstalker. It’s almost certainly significant that all these examples are very British writers.

Palmer’s very good at pacing his revelations out, and we get a good idea of the backstory through the self-absorbed maunderings of Lena, the kidnapping victim, who is less an unreliable narrator than a flagrantly incompetent liar with intermittent flashes of self-awareness.

On the other hand, it’s hard to care. The characters aren’t exactly two-dimensional, but I’m up to page 346 (I write these reviews as I go along) and the only one I couldn’t summarize in a twitter-length is Lena. This is quite likely deliberate, of course – it’s absolutely standard for the comic-space-opera form that the characters don’t matter any more than the set, and what’s important is the mad hijinks and narrow scrapes.

The science is mostly based around string theory, though “rubber band theory” would probably be a more accurate name. This isn’t a criticism; I appreciate a good line in technobabble, so long as nobody cares if I skim-read it and get back to the interesting bits. The military strategy, on the other hand, is devastatingly incompetent. Sacrificing millions of soldiers to win a battle, without any narrative explanation of why a sneakier tactic wouldn’t work? That’s one thing. Doing so when you’ve already established that your civilization has more than enough skills and resources to build throwaway robots by the million? Oh, dear.

What we never see, throughout the whole book, is any of the Enemy. The Cheo (and yes, that is derived from “CEO”) we see at a distance in Lena’s diary-excerpt flashbacks, but only her descriptions – nobody else so much as gets a line or a name. Having finished it now, I get the impression Palmer was aiming to do a character-focused piece all about Lena, but didn’t know how to write anything SFnal except Red Dwarf episodes. That’s an unfair and sweeping generalization, I freely admit, but it’s abundantly clear from the tenor of his writing, and especially from his afterword, that he’s new-come to SF writing. I’m not sure how far his reading stretches; he namechecks Verne, Asimov, Orwell, Heinlein, Bradbury, Sturgeon, and “a host of others for creating the genre that is now the playground for a whole new generation of writers”, and more interestingly he names a couple of planets after Pohl and Kornbluth.

“It is a novel full of exaggeration and hyperbole. Spaceships travel amazingly fast, antimatter missiles are thrown like water bombs, some humans are genetically modified to swim like dolphins or run like panthers, the battles are astonishingly vast in scale, and anyone who doesn’t die horribly in combat can live for centuries in a state of perfect health and simmering libido.”

See, that’s someone who’s just discovered SF imagery and really wants to share it with everyone, but doesn’t realize that there are thousands of people in his own country alone who read hundreds of SF books a year and might well read nothing else. It’s so sweet!

There’s no sense of history, or of change. The names are all instantly legible – Oaktown, Kingswood, or Greywood, for instance. And I’ve heard Americans asserting that this makes them “sound English”. The thing is, though, that in Britain that’s a marker of newness, not of antiquity – if a place has a name that any English speaker can instantly understand, it’s not been around for very long at all.

The three examples I cited are all places in Britain, but in translation – Acton, for instance, the town in the oaks. Coed-y-Brenin, near where I grew up in Gwynedd, is Welsh – it translates as “the King’s wood”. Lytchett, in Dorset, and Llwydcoed near Aberdare both mean “grey wood”.

Names tend to stay the same, or at least the same at their root, while languages change around them. The River Avon, for instance – afon is the Welsh word for “river”, and in Irish & Scots Gaelic it’s abhainn, so what that means is that some dim Anglo-Saxon came along, said “‘ere, whatcha call that thing?”, the Celt he asked said “‘s a river, innit mate”, and the Anglo-Saxon put it down on his map as the River River.

Sometimes, though, two almost-parallel terms can survive alongside each other. For instance, the Welsh names for a lot of towns & cities begin with Caer (as in Cair Paravel – but pronounced more like “kyre”) and the English versions will usually end in -caster, -cester, or -chester. Chester itself is referred to on Welsh maps as Caer, and Gloucester is Caerloyw (“shining fortress”). But the two words, caer and castrum, aren’t from the same place at all – the Welsh just means an enclosed place, more or less the same as the hay component in southwest English placenames, while the English term is from Latin military terminology.

Actual castles in Wales (most of which were built by the English as instruments of subjugation) get referred to as Castell – Castell Harlech in Snowdonia, for instance.

“Snowdonia”, of course, is another example of the same linguistic layering and obfuscation. Any English speaker will vaguely recognise that the -ia suffix means “place of” or “around that sort of general area”, but “Snowdon” is the Saxon name for the highest mountain, meaning “Snow hill”. And in Welsh it’s Yr Wyddfa (though I don’t know the etymology) while the area is Eryri. It’s tempting to think that that means “eyrie” (since eryr means “eagle”), but it’s more likely just “highlands”. Of course, this isn’t just English nationalism (though that plays a large role) – Welsh place names are notoriously difficult for the English anyone else to get right.

Which name you use for a place can be highly politicised, too – mention in the wrong pub that you’re thinking of a trip to Derry, or to Londonderry, and you may well be In Trouble.

Tolkien, unsurprisingly, is very good on this. Fornost Erain became Norbury of the Kings, and Amon Sul became Weathertop, while the Tower of the Sun became the Tower of Guard.

Robert Jordan has instances of interestingness, too – Mafal Dadaranell became Fal Dara, and Al’cair’rahienallen became Cairhien. Of course, since we learn this from the Ent expy, it’s an obvious homage to Treebeard’s comment that the Land of the Valley of Singing Gold has become the Dreamflower, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

Juliet McKenna’s Einarinn books have a couple of instances of the same thing – Kel’Ar’Ayen (the new continent) becomes Kellarin over time. Though, oddly, there’s no sign of anything similar happening to the original continent of Tren’Ar’Dryen, and the name just falls out of use.

On the other side, we have David Eddings (yes, yes, cheap target, I know). In the world of the Belgariad, almost all countries have uniform naming schemes. The capital of Tolnedra is Tol Honeth, and the other cities are all Tol Something; the capitals of Arendia are Vo Mimbre, Vo Astur (ruined) and Vo Wacune (ruined and genocided). Everything in Gar og Nadrak starts with Yar, and everything in Cthol Murgos with Rak. Of course, there’s an in-universe explanation for this, in that the Gods really did just dump people down into a wide-open uninhabited land, but again that’s an in-universe explanation. We don’t see it except from characters in the narrative, so we’re entitled to treat it with Suspicion… especially considering that marginal savage demon-worshipping peoples survive in the icy or jungle-covered parts nobody else wants. They even wear feathers.

Raking through the shelf of books I might want to read again someday, but probably not, I found an even better example – Jane Lindskold’s Through Wolf’s Eyes. Flipping to the front of the guidebook for the map, I see New Kelvin and Dragon’s Breath by the Sword of Kelvin mountains. The White Water River runs down to the sea at Port Haven, passing by Stilled, Gateway to Enchantment, Plum Orchard, and (oddly) Zodara. Scattered across the rest of the map, we see Eagle’s Nest Castle, Rock Fort (by Broadview), Revelation Point Castle, and Good Crossing.

This is clearly a colonialist land, though we can hold out some hope for Zodara. Flipping through it – since I haven’t a clue what it’s like after so long – I see kings, queens, Grand Duchesses, both “societies” and noble houses named after animals, but no mention of where the colonists come from (except a tantalizing note at the top of the obligatory genealogical chart full of Adjectivenoun Names that some dates are in the “Gildcrest Colonial Calendar”) and no mention of any indigenous population. Not even any fairy mounds.

Seriously, this makes Eddings look good.