Gollancz has acquired a three-book fantasy series by Stephen Hunt.  The first novel is titled In Dark Service, while the trilogy is called The Far-Called.  The first volume will be published in 2013.

Stephen is the author of six fantasy novels published by HarperCollins Voyager in the UK and Tor in the US, as well as in various translation editions, and runs the SF Crowsnest news and reviews site.

Here is Stephen’s introduction to the world on which this series takes place:

“Plenas has two unique characteristics worth noting, the first – and most significant of which – is that it’s a world on a mind-boggling scale where peddler caravans can take a thousand years to complete a limited circuit of their trade territory, a land where the guild of radio signallers can relay messages between their stations for multiple lifetimes and still never make a clean circumnavigation of the globe.

It is a world where, should a youngster be gripped by wanderlust, they can simply head off and travel with merchant nomads for their entire lifetime, taking in thousands of exotic nations, strange races and mysterious wonders, while still only travelling across a minute fraction of the globe.

The second distinctive facet of Plenas is that the land has no mineral resources worth mining except around the stratovolcanoes dotted across the world, massive shield volcanoes that stand about three times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level. These vomit out great gobs of ore-bearing rocks into the air for harvesting by sky mines, and this wealth is always jealously hoarded by the empires that rise to pre-eminence around the stratovolcanoes, growing rich with their monopoly over metals, crystals and coals.

Reliance on sustainable resources means that most societies, races and nations on Plenas are throttled somewhere between a Roman and Victorian level of progress, with only the great empires of the stratovolcanoes reaching a higher level of development.”

The deal for World Rights was brokered by the John Jarrold Literary Agency.

THE ISLANDERS by Christopher Priest

Gollancz, h/b, £12.99

Reviewed by Pauline Morgan

The word novel originally meant ‘of a new kind or nature, strange, hitherto unknown’ rather than specifically a long work of fiction. This book by Christopher Priest is published as a novel and fits very well into the former definition; whether it also fits the latter is something that could generate a lot of discussion.

The Dream Archipelago was a book published in 1999 and consisted mostly of stories written between 1978 and 1980. The five stories and the new, introductory piece (which is still fiction), are set on a distant planet that has most of the modern conveniences we are familiar with such as aircraft and computers. The Archipelago is an uncounted collection of islands girdling the equatorial regions of the world. To the north is a large continent on which there are two warring countries. They do most of their actual fighting on the southern continent but to get there the troop ships have to pass through the Archipelago. Sometimes they stop. Some islands have garrisons on them.

Priest started writing The Islanders as a gazetteer of the Dream Archipelago, pulling out of the original stories names, climates and histories, the kind of thing that would have gone into a Rough Guide. This accounts for the format as the entries are listed by alphabetical island name. It has evolved into much more and has become a tangled tapestry revolving around one incident on one island. A number of contemporary historical characters recur, each mention adding either to the knowledge of, or confusion left behind. To elicit the truth is like picking through a barrel of green apples to find the ripe ones.

The centre of the controversy is a mime artist known by the name of Commis who died on stage in a theatre on Goorn when a sheet of plate glass fell on him. Although it could have been an accident, the assumption from the start was that it was a case of murder for which someone had to be convicted.

Chaster Kammiston is an acclaimed novelist from Piqay who built his reputation around not being able to leave the island due to various superstitions. As his by-line is on the introduction, where he warns the reader not to trust the veracity of the entries the truth of this becomes highly suspect. He may or may not have been on Goorn at the time of the incident.

Esla Caurer appears on many islands in many guises. As a writer and social reformer she influenced many inhabitants. She is a teacher on Smuj, a manifestation on Derril, Kammiston’s lover on Piqay and the champion of a young man from Cheoner who was executed for a crime he probably did not commit.

Turning up on almost every inhabited island, and leaving in a hurry after possible sexual indiscretions is Dryd Bathurst, an artist as famous for his affairs as his renowned canvases. Another artist that has left her mark on the landscape is Tamarra Oy. Her installations are of a grander affair – tunnels bored into the rocks with varying effects.

In some ways, like a true gazetteer, this is a book you can dip in to. It is a selection of cleverly interwoven histories, stories and descriptions which up to much more than the individual parts. It is worth rereading sections to spot the clues planted and possibly missed as the heart of this book spirals around itself. Is this a novel? Yes. But please, beware of the insects from the island of Aubrac Grande.

THE SOOKIE STACKHOUSE COMPANION edited by Charlaine Harris

Gollancz, hb, £.16.99

Reviewed by Selina Lock

This is exactly what it says on the cover; a guide to all things Sookie Stackhouse. It includes a new short story, summaries of all the novels, information on the short stories, a guide to the creatures of the Sookieverse in her own words, a trivia quiz section, Southern recipes as would be eaten in Bon Temps, interviews with Alan Ball and Charlaine Harris, thoughts from fans of the series and entries on characters, events and settings in the books.

This is one for the hardcore Sookie Stackhouse book series fans, who will love the details and insights related.

For those that follow the books, the main point of interest is going to be the new eighty page short story ‘Small-Town Wedding’. Harris gives us a wider glimpse into the Sookieverse by sending Sookie to Sam’s home town as his date for a family wedding. This is set after the shifters have revealed themselves to the world and shows us how the revelation has split a community apart. As usual, Sam and Sookie find themselves smack in the middle of a dangerous situation, fighting to keep their loved ones and innocent people safe. We get to see some returning characters and some ongoing plot threads are resolved, so a must read for fans.

I would have preferred some of the sections to be more clearly labelled in the table of contents, as a section called Life in Bon Temps did not say to me that it was the summaries of each of the novels. If you’re a follower of the True Blood TV series, rather than of the novels, then most of the Companion won’t mean much to you, given the way the two series have diverged.

One to buy if you’re pining for the next Sookie Stackhouse novel, or as a gift for a loved one who is.

ARCHANGEL’S BLADE by Nalini Singh

Gollancz, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Pauline Morgan

For those unfamiliar with Nalini Singh’s creations, this is an alternative fantasy world. Top dogs are Angels, with Archangels in charge of large areas of the globe. Raphael is the Archangel of North America with his Tower headquarters overlooking Manhattan. These angels are not cute, benign creatures but are inhuman, compassionless and dangerous. You offend one at your peril. Angels Make vampires. It is in their nature to do so. New vampires are usually contracted to their Maker as a servant for a century of their new life. Sometimes a vampire decides he does not like his servitude and runs. Then a Guild Hunter is called in to bring them back for punishment. Most Guild Hunters are human.

In the first volume of this series (Angels’ Blood) Raphael, against his better judgment fell in love with the Hunter he had called in to help him resolve a situation. The dangerous cross-species romance is a feature of all Singh’s novels both in this and the Psy-Changer series. Each time, she takes a new couple and puts them in jeopardy.

Dmitri is a familiar character, having been introduced in Angels’ Blood. He is a thousand year old vampire. He is Raphael’s second in command and his Blade, the enforcer in his domain. Their connection goes back a long way to Isis, the angel who made Dmitri. By any account, Dmitri would be described as a ‘hard bastard’. He is capable of immense cruelty, especially to women (in a mental rather than physical sense) and expects others do exactly what he tells them or face the consequences. He answers only to Raphael. When an immature vampire’s head is fished out of the river, Dmitri asks for a Guild Hunter to assist in the investigation. Honor St. Nicholas is assigned.

Honor’s mental state is fragile. She was kidnapped and held for two months in a cellar by a group of vampires who derived pleasure out of tormenting and feeding from her. Although some of them were killed or captured during her rescue, the instigators of the torture have not been identified and are still at large after ten months. She is terrified that they will be waiting for her. She doesn’t want this assignment. She doesn’t want to be alone in the same room as a vampire but she is goaded into using what little dignity she has left and takes the assignment. From the start, Dmitri both attracts and repels her.

Dmitri’s initial reaction is try to find a way of seducing Honor without her reacting hysterically. She is a woman and a challenge. He decides to help her track down the vampires that held her captive to give her closure and to use her gratitude to help her open up to his seduction. Gradually he realizes he wants more than just another conquest. Memories of his wife and children before he was Made begin to surface and we see a different aspect of Dmitri and begin to understand why his outward persona is as tough as it is.

Those who choose to read Nalini Singh’s novels don’t do it just for the supernatural elements – here angels and vampires – but also for the erotic sexual element. As the relationship between Honor and Dmitri develops, so does the explicit nature of the text. For those who desire a plot driven story, there will be disappointment as the crises, though important for the characters, are allowed to take second place to lust. There are some complex scenarios within the novel but they are not allowed to really develop and engage with the reader. It is a question of knowing what kind of book you want to read before you choose this one.

THE CLOCKWORK ROCKET: ORTHOGONAL BOOK 1 by Greg Egan

Gollancz, 362pp l/f p/b, £14.99

Reviewed by R A Bardy [@mangozoid]

I should offer a disclaimer here before we get going: I would not consider myself much of a scientist in any shape or form, and as such a lot of the more complex physics in our own world are completely alien to me. Thus, when I tell you that Greg Egan has effectively ‘rewritten the physics textbook’ in order to bring Clockwork Rocket to the masses, it should come as no surprise that this is quite possibly the hardest of ‘hard SF’ – and to me, one of the hardest to review, so my apologies in advance…

To try and sum up: Yalda is the main protagonist and belongs to a truly ‘alien’ species of near-amorphous shapeshifters for whom a ‘usual form’ is six-limbed with eyes to the back and front. They are indeed truly alien, with their own reproductive processes, societal norms, etc., but the situation Yalda finds herself in is one many can relate to: she is a loner in her own society, one generally made up of male and female twins (she is a ‘solo’), and her love of science puts her at the forefront of a daring escapade to save her planet from inevitable destruction by Hurtlers (increasingly regular meteor strikes on the planet). The plan, as such, is to basically transform an entire mountain into a rocket, and send it into space along a trajectory that will effectively cross time: it will travel much faster for those travelling on the journey than for those back on the home planet, so the idea is that the ship goes off on a jaunt to research a potential solution to the Hurtler problem, hopefully to return with the answer through generations of research and experimentation, despite only a handful of years passing on Yalda’s home planet. Of course, Yalda and her cohorts encounter hostility, resentment and outright scepticism throughout the book, but when they bear witness to a neighbouring planet effectively destroyed by the Hurtlers, all of a sudden it doesn’t seem like such a bad gambit…

Clockwork Rocket takes at least 200 pages to get going – no kidding – and in that time we are introduced to a variety of concepts and the ‘new physics’ of Egan’s universe which encompasses so many theorems related to light, distance, time, etc. that it’d be too complex to try and explain them all here. Egan himself has written literally thousands of words on the subject on his website (www.gregegan.net), and this book has so many diagrams and explanatory text that at times it felt like I was back at college and crawling through a Physics textbook.

Make your way through this mire of detail and there is a good core story at the root of it, and even some of the characters will resonate (unusual in an Egan story?). For my part, it felt like too much of a struggle for very little pay-off, especially when you consider that this is only the first part of a trilogy.

WAR IN HEAVEN by Gavin Smith

Gollancz, 513pp l/f p/back, £14.99

Reviewed by R A Bardy [@mangozoid]

Gavin Smith’s sequel to Veteran is like an intergalactic, interplanetary version of the original, and recounts the tale of ex-vet-now-celebrity ‘icons’ Jakob Douglas and Mudge as they go one more round with Rolleston, the psychotic ex-military leader turned amorphous one man god-to-be, who is intent on unleashing Demiurge onto an already struggling and embittered humanity in an effort to use the ultra-powerful AI to effectively consume humanity and redefine the parameters of what a single entity is capable of…

Phew… As such, it’s also a rollicking read, filled to the brim with big guns, bodily cybernetic enhancements, macho muchness, and lots and lots of violence. Indeed, the violence is everywhere, and the majority told once again in grittily horrific and brutal style from a first-person perspective, namely Jakob’s.

There are plenty of clever twists throughout, with some telling dialogue, brilliant descriptive work and a fair smattering of black humour, with my only gripe probably being a little too much introspection going on as Jakob goes from one extreme to the other in his efforts to procure what can only be described as a ‘reasonably normal’ relationship with Morag, his apparent girlfriend. I say ‘apparent’ because needless to say this relationship never seems to settle down, and even when he tries to leave it all behind and ‘make a break for it’, we find him drawn inexorably back into the thick of things, and at times it’s obvious that even Jakob doesn’t know why he’s bothering. This makes it harder to sympathise with a lot of the characters this time round, and although ultimately a very satisfying read, it’s actually a gratuitous experience, and fair to say it didn’t quite hold up in the same vein as the original Veteran, coupled with the fact that there’s a definite feeling at the end that we’re back to square one again, albeit with a trail of dead bodies behind us.

This is well worth a read, a must-have for military SF buffs and the author displays a genuine talent for putting the reader into the thick of things, but the characterisation efforts just felt a little lost in the shuffle.

THE MECHANICAL MESSIAH AND OTHER MARVELS OF THE MODERN AGE by Robert Rankin

Gollancz, h/b, £16.99 www.thegoldensprout.com

Reviewed by Matthew Johns

Rankin’s latest work is a foray into the world of steampunk but in his usual, inimitably surrealist, style. If you’ve ever read a Rankin novel you’ll be familiar with his love of word play, alliteration and puns so bad that they’re pure genius. These abound throughout this novel, which tells the tale of the legendary consulting detective, Cameron Bell (the spitting image of Dickens’ Mr Pickwick) and the music hall acts that are gradually disappearing one by one in puffs of smoke and piles of ash.

Bell has fallen in love with one of the music hall performers – Alice Lovell and her acrobatic kiwi birds – and faces a race against time to find the perpetrator before Alice tops the bill at the Electric Alhambra Music Hall and faces certain death.

In Rankin’s steampunk world, the British Empire has conquered Mars and a truce of some description exists between Venus, Jupiter and the Empire. During his adventures, Bell and his companions face dangerous adversaries from across the solar system.

Fans of Rankin will love this novel but if you’ve never dipped your toe into Rankin’s surreal waters now could be the time with this enjoyable romp across worlds and through space.

THE AFFIRMATION by Christopher Priest. Gollancz SF Masterworks £7.99

Reviewed by John Howard

The Affirmation was Christopher Priest’s sixth novel, first published in 1981. Never a prolific writer, Priest has published only six novels under his own name since. When it comes down to quality versus quantity, quality is the winner. This reprint from thirty years ago (yes really) is a reminder, confirming just how long ago the quality was in place and for how long it’s been maintained. The Affirmation also shows how enduring certain aspects of Priest’s fiction are: it has much in common (especially the Dream Archipelago settings) with his latest novel The Islanders (2011).

We open the book and find ourselves pitched right into the middle of Priest Country, confronting the resoundingly simple statement ‘This much I know for sure’. What we are told we know for sure is that the narrator is called Peter Sinclair and is twenty-nine years old. Sinclair lives in London, and his life is falling apart as he has lost, in quick succession, his job, flat, and girlfriend. Yet because we are in Priest Country, the most apparently simple and straightforward statement is anything but. (In his perceptive introduction, Graham Sleight draws attention to this and other possible signposts to attempt to keep in view on our journeyings.) This area of Priest Country is a London become unwelcoming and closing itself off. And then almost without realising it, as Peter makes a valiant attempt to get his life together, we follow him into one of Priest’s most vivid and colourful regions, the Dream Archipelago.

Those thousands of islands have become about as familiar territory as it’s likely to get. Nevertheless we are led out of the commonplace and away to places where we may or may not wish to go, and where we may or may not understand or come to achieve some understanding of them. Worlds and identities multiply and interpenetrate, even more subtly than they may seem to: in Priest Country reliability (and therefore unreliability) is always there, like sky or sea. The Affirmation is a deeply human novel in which creator and creation (and reader?) fuse; and yet a novel where reality is what’s on paper, what can be held firm and yet be always threatening to slip out of the hands, away and for ever slightly out of reach. Here that’s the only reality we’ll find.

Gollancz, the science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint of Orion Publishing, is auctioning off the perfect Christmas present for budding genre novelists – the chance to have your work reviewed by the world renowned publisher and help a worthy cause at the same time.

It’s one of a number of lots up for bidding on eBay to raise money for Orion’s chosen charity, The Samaritans, with 100% of the proceeds going to the cause. The winning bidder gets 10,000 words of their novel or story reviewed and edited by Gollancz Editorial Director Gillian Redfearn, editor for bestselling authors such as Joe Abercrombie. You can also bid to have new Gollancz editor Marcus Gipps review 15,000 words of your story.

If you or a loved one is a fantasy fan, there’s a unique and exciting chance to name a character in a future novel by Brandon Sanderson, the bestselling author of The Way of Kings and The Alloy of Law. There’s also an exclusive bundle of signed and limited edition promotional materials from Brandon.

Advice on how to promote your book from Gollancz Senior Marketing Executive Jennifer McMenemy, who has masterminded campaigns for many of Gollancz’s biggest names including Alastair Reynolds and Charlaine Harris, is also up for bidding, along with lunch in London with members of the Gollancz publishing team, with the opportunity to seek some advice.

Other auctions include signed books, lunch with an author and the chance to get a copy of every single arc proof produced by Gollancz in 2012. Gollancz proof editions, usually reserved for booksellers and media, are often hotly sought after by fans and collectors.

For the full list of items to bid on to help this worthy cause, please go HERE or search for seller id orionbooksforcharity on eBay.

KISS OF SNOW by Nalini Singh. Gollancz £12.99

Reviewed by Pauline Morgan

More and more writers are ignoring the boxes publicists want to put them in and blurring the edges in their work. As a result there is a small industry in trying to invent new categories to plaster on the bookshop shelves. It must therefore be very frustrating when a writer like Nalini Singh defies them. The alternative is to put the book in several places.

Kiss of Snow and the previous nine books in the Psi-Changeling series are science fiction in that they are set about fifty years in an alternative future. As psi powers developed in the population, it was realised that those with them were likely to go insane or otherwise self-destruct. A condition known as Silence was imposed. No Psi was allowed to have or show any kind of emotion. Intellect was all.

It is also fantasy as another respected segment of the population are the Changelings. The two important groups are the leopards and the wolves who hold territory in the environs of Los Angeles. Their outlook is extremely sensual, the complete opposite to the Psi. From the start of this series there has been tension between the Psi and the Changelings especially as a handful of Psi have broken Silence and joined the Changelings, rediscovering ways of interacting with others that they had never experienced before.

All these books are romances with a high sexual content, each focusing on different members of the groups. In Kiss of Snow, Hawke, the wolf alpha, is strongly attracted to Sienna, a cardinal X-Psi. This means that she has a very high level of psi powers but that her talent is to channel energy in the form of fire. The problem is that no X-Psi has survived beyond young adulthood as they have immolated themselves, and anyone in the vicinity. Thus, if Hawke takes Sienna as his mate, he is likely to lose her soon afterwards. The other romantically entwined couple are Lara, the changeling wolf healer and Walker, a Psi empath who is also Sienna’s uncle. Although most of the novel focuses on the way these two couples sort out their relationships, there is also a bigger picture to consider.

Among the Psi Council there are some that seek power more than others. Henry Scott and Ming LeBon are among them and the Los Angeles communities, especially the Changelings, have so far thwarted their efforts. Consequently, they intend wiping them out – a task made more difficult by the Psi the Changelings have taken in to their packs. Despite the dangers, the males, especially Hawke, are intent on pursuing their chosen females bringing the sexual tension and erotic elements to the fore in the novel. More attention needs to be paid to the Psi-Changeling politics if further books in this series are not to become predictable and merely vehicles to describe explicit sex.