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.
After finishing the excellent (if not as good as the first) second Tyrant Philosophers book, House of Open Wounds, I took a crack at a much shorter novella that had been offhandedly recommended on an RPG podcast and boy, do I wish I hadn't.
A Short Stay in Hell sounds like a cracking idea: a guy dies, ends up in Hell, which is a functionally-infinite library containing every possible book, that he can leave if he finds the book that exactly describes his life with no factual, grammatical or spelling errors.
Unfortunately, it is let down by some truly pedestrian writing, is wildly unevenly paced, and will not shut up about the main character's Mormonism. It doesn't interrogate any of its ideas. It doesn't seem to have a point, or even an opinion. It'll skip over centuries of time to fixate on a single conversation that doesn't expand on anything, just restate previously-established concepts from a different (but agreeing) character's point of view.
At least it's short; I finished it in an evening. But I wouldn't recommend it. Read City of Last Chances instead, of you haven't already (and read House of Open Wounds if you have).
Another disappointing read was The Shortest History of Japan, a breezy run through several millennia of Japanese history that somehow makes it all totally forgettable.
The biggest fault is its habit of jumping around within the broader eras; a chapter will be about, say, the Tokugawa shogunate, but one paragraph will cover events from 1685 before the next jumps back to 1672. It leaves the actual cause-and-effect really muddled (complicated further by the clan names, frequent leadership changes and shifting alliances).
And it's not even the shortest history of Japan. Bill Wurtz's effort might not have any more context than Lesley Downer's, but at least it's chronological (and entertaining).
Just finished The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson. Books of this size, in this genre, and promising (or threatening) sequels can be off-putting, and I've read more than a couple that were real slogs (looking at you, Priory of the Orange Tree).
This, though, was magnificent.
The structure and pacing are unusually episodic, which normally I'd find annoying in a story of this length, but here it builds on itself in such a satisfying way—and still managed to surprise me and let me feel clever when I worked out pieces of the puzzle.
I'm very much looking forward to the second book now, though it's not due until next summer (presumably the paperback will take even longer). Highly recommend checking this one out, if you're into low-magic fantasy and political intrigue.
