I've just finished Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
It's about a princess trying to prove her worth by recruiting a wizard to help defeat a demon.
Except the world they're on is a human terraforming colony, now post- (or pre-?) technological, thousands of years in the future. The "wizard" is an anthropologist from a later, more advanced period of Earth history than the original colonists, who spends most of his millennia in stasis while waiting for communications from Earth.
The chapters alternate between third-person fantasy from the princess' perspective, all flowery formal language, and a much more conversational first-person sci-fi for the "sorcerer". Language differences mean that the sorcerer can't explain that he's just a scientist and that his "familiar" is a robot, so he's mostly pretty grumpy about being dragged on a quest by an old friend's great-great granddaughter.
I bought Elder Race on aniki's recommendation (and because it was cheap on Kindle), and it is very good, but also surprisingly short.
Spoiler - click to showFinding the arch felt more like the end of act 1, and should have led to a withdrawal - and a much more severe reassessment of priorities from Nyr, DCS or no. The thief guy gets nothing to do except walk for a bit, and didn't really need to be there at all, beyond giving them directions at the speaking circle thing.
I like the concept and the plot, and it's well-written, but it could have done with being at least twice as long.
Just finished the first good fantasy book I've read in years, and it's by the same author as the posts above!
City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's set in the occupied city of Ilmar, a place that has more than a whiff of Ankh Morpork. And the reason I loved it, aside from his great writing, is that it's not the neat story most people would have written. The occupiers are a bunch of shits, so you sort of expect the narrative to be 'downtrodden populace fights back'.
Which it is, sort of, but there's so much history in the city that it's not that straightforward. So many warring factions, so many agendas, and a real appreciation that the original Ilmari rulers were almost as shitty as the new imperial occupiers.
Throw in a dash of really inventive fantasy, spooky forest portals, and university professors that fight back by chucking chairs out of top-floor windows (there's Ankh Morpork again), and I hoovered this up in a couple of days.
There are 4 books (groan), but they're all standalone. They just exist in the same universe.
