As Peter Russell has a failed marriage, used to make porn films and lost one of his children to a serial killer, he's got plenty of guilt to manifest and a dead daughter keen to embrace him. Unfortunately it comes with some major side effects - like seeing the dead, screwing with space/time and manifesting as real whatever guilt you might be carrying around. This is the ultimate 21st-century consumer fantasy: a mobile telephone that costs nothing to run and works for a year without recharging. Until Arpad Kreisler creates the Trans, that is.
Every great consumer product brings its own anxiety with mobile phones, it's the possibility that using them may rot our brains. Greg Bear is one of SF's most interesting writers - which makes Dead Lines something of a disappointment. This is fiction to stand alongside that of Calvino and Borges.ĭead Lines, by Greg Bear (HarperCollins, £17.99) City of Saints and Madmen draws together all Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris novellas, including The Transformation of Martin Lake, which won the World Fantasy award. And what he sees turns him from a minor hack into a guilt-ridden genius and the city's greatest painter. At first Lake thinks the invitation a cruel joke set up by friends he soon realises that it is anything but. It has become impossible even to collect one's post without declaring allegiance to the greens or the reds (named for Bender's favourite and least favourite colour, respectively). Ambergris is riven by factions for and against the greatness of the city's late despot and composer Voss Bender. A stunning debut.Ĭity of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer (Tor, £12.99)Ī minor artist in the city of Ambergris, Martin Lake spends his days drinking and lazily pastiching himself with collages cut from cheap magazines, until he receives an invitation to a beheading. The Year of Our War occasionally loses its way, but Steph Swainston has hidden a study of guilt and addiction inside a novel about sexual politics, and wrapped the lot in some of the weirdest and best fantasy written in recent years. Unfortunately the Insects are winning, Jant is losing his battle against addiction and most of the Circle are more concerned with sex, violence and squabbling with each other than with doing their job. Together the 50 immortals make up the Circle their job is to help mortals fight the Insects, ant-like creatures who switch between dimensions. He does this because immortality can be taken away at any time.
Jant carries the emperor's orders to the other immortals and to the kings, princes and governors of the FourLands. God is on holiday and the FourLands are ruled by an emperor with the aid of 50 immortals, one of whom is Jant, a drug-addicted angel and one-time street kid. The Year of Our War, by Steph Swainston (Gollancz, £9.99)
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