BFS members should have received their email detailing how to download their digital copy of the Spring BFS Journal. From this edition, the Journal is available as a PDF, epub and mobi for all your ereader needs.

The email also includes details of how to download issue one of Shelflings. Shelflings, compiled and typeset by Stephen Theaker, is a new BFS ezine featuring reviews that were commissioned and edited by Craig Lockley, Phil Lunt and Jay Eales for the British Fantasy Society website, with some reviews that were commissioned by Peter Coleborn and Jan Edwards.

If you have problems with your ebook editions please contact Journal Production Manager Cavan Scott (journal@britishfantasysociety.org) and don’t forget you can discuss any of the BFS’s publications on our forum HERE

QUEEN RAT by Kim Lakin-Smith.

Murkee. £4.99.

Reviewed by Elloise Hopkins

Princess Ratiana Clementine Saint John of the submersible Victoriana is about to become a queen. Unfortunately to do so she has to get married and that is way down on her list of priorities behind learning to run the Victoriana, learning to fight with proficiency and most of all, vexing her parents. At 14 she is now old enough to become queen and awaits the arrival of her betrothed.

The Aesthetes are perceived as weak, precious perhaps, and Rat, as she likes to call herself, simply can’t imagine Prince Simeon being at all suited to her. It seems the prince has the same opinion of Princess Rat, with her boyish clothes and manners to match. The betrothal has to begin with a series of trials set by the four submerged communities, and Rat and Simeon will have to learn to work hand in hand if they are to triumph.

A young adult steampunk novella wouldn’t fall into my usual reading wish list but I’m always open to new suggestions and I have to say I’m glad I got hold of this book. It was a quick and enjoyable read and a pure run of escapism. The worldbuilding is its biggest strength by far and I found myself in a world where something as simple as looking at the time becomes a beautifully descriptive piece of prose.

Considering the length of the piece, the characters, even the supporting cast, are surprisingly well detailed and likeable in their not always favorable portrayal. The relationship between the two heirs is forced to develop as the trials go on and the result is a story that perhaps whilst not as tension-filled as it could be, is well told and blends elements of steampunk and our own world perfectly to create a believable alternate reality.

LORDS OF WATERDEEP

Wizards of the Coast / rrp £39.99

Reviewed by Phil Lunt

Waterdeep: A “City of Splendours” from the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of Forgotten Realms. In this new board game offering from Wizards of the Coast, you get to rule the place as one of the Lords of Waterdeep. It does what it says on the tin, pretty much…

It’s a game for 2 to 5 players, and the goal is simple: Earn as many Victory Points as you can over 8 rounds of play. The player with the most Victory Points at the end of the 8^th round is the winner!

Each player picks a Lord to play as at random, and the choice of Lord effects how they play the game. Some Lords score extra Victory Points at the end of the game dependent on how many “Commerce” quests they complete, or how many buildings they own, for example.
The Agents who work for each player are taken from one of five organisations that the player aligns themselves with at the beginning of the game; these are the City Guard, Knights of the Shield, Harpers, Red Sashes or Silverstars. Each player has a limited number of Agents to play with, determined simply by how many people are playing the game – this helps to stop the game going on for hours and hours. A full 8 rounds of play can be over in just a couple of hours.

Each round is broken down into turns where each player gets to place an Agent in one of the many buildings of Waterdeep to help further their interests in the city, such as: the Builder’s Hall which allows new buildings to be constructed; The Grinning Lion Tavern which is a favourite haunt for roguish adventurers; or Aurora’s Realms Shop which is a haven for trading and gold.

Depending on where the Agents are placed the player can either construct new buildings, hire adventurers, accumulate gold, gain quests or win Victory Points. The player can then, if they have the resources available, complete these quests to win further Victory Points.

Each player also picks up “Intrigue” cards during play which can be played either immediately or if they place agents in specific locations. These cards can be used to help or hinder other players to further your own goals.

At its heart this is an asset management game but one that is fun to pick up and play over and over again. The board, manual and all playing cards are beautifully illustrated as one can expect of something from the D&D stable. Initial set-up is a tad time consuming but once everyone was familiar with the structure of the game the play was fairly pacey. It’s good to play at the beginning of a night of gaming to get everyone warmed up or, heck, just play it through a few times. There are enough variables in the game to keep things fresh and everyone thinking. It reminded me of a more complex version of the popular game Carcassonne in many ways, and that is definitely not a bad thing.

THE WITCHER 2: ASSASSINS OF KINGS – ENHANCED EDITION

Developed by CD Projekt. Published by Namco Bandai / Xbox 360 (PC version is available) / £39.99

Reviewed by Phil Lunt

Based on The Witcher series of books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the game continues the story of Geralt of Rivia, one of the last of the Witchers: monster-hunters trained and mutated from an early age, across a land simply known as The Continent.
Within this land are many regions, all with tenuous relationships toward each other which lead to much in-fighting and political wrangling. Add to that racial tensions between humans and non-humans – mainly Dwarves and Elves – and you’re sitting on a powder-keg waving a lit match.

From the intro movie you can see that this is going to be a messy, bloody, affair. And it is. Assassinations ahoy, but then that’s in the title so you’d probably be annoyed if there weren’t.
Gameplay begins with Geralt working as bodyguard to King Foltest of Temeria as Foltest leads an assault against rebellious noble families who have kidnapped his illegitimate children, and heirs to his throne. Political shenanigans afoot, Foltest himself is assassinated and all fingers point at Geralt. Thus the set-up is complete.
Geralt must clear his name by finding out the identity and motives of the real assassin. The Scoia’tael, a guerrilla “terrorist” faction of Elves and Dwarves, were seen assisting the real assassin to escape so they’re, naturally, the first port of call… but this is just the tip of the iceberg and going down that rabbit-hole opens a whole other can of worms, to squeeze in a few mixed metaphors.
Are the Scoia’tael the real bad-guys of the piece? Are they actually going to help you? Would the guys you fought side-by-side with earlier in the game gut you like a fish as soon as shake your hand? The plot really does twist and turn like a twisty, turny, thing. It took me a while to get to grips with but once I understood it (not saying I do, fully, but run with me here) I was hooked.

The game then runs in sweeping chapter arcs where your actions really do count and affect the direction of later gameplay. Missions can be picked up from lead characters throughout as well as you optionally taking up “side-quests” from notice boards. Geralt is a monster-hunter by profession, after all, so why not do the public a favour by hunting monsters for gold?
This is a game were exploring and getting stuck fighting monsters pays off. The more monsters you kill, the more you learn about them and it’s ok to run away from any fight and have a breather/put away your sword (or try to, at least). A lot of the time, it’s the only way to survive.

Combat is a mix of fairly standard “strong yet slow” and “weak yet fast” attacks combined with parry/riposte defences, magic and thrown object/placed trap moves. I might be getting old but this can be damned tricky to deal with at times, especially when dealing with multiple foes… There is a simple and effective targeting mechanic in place but these guys don’t hold back, whether it’s humans or pointy-teethed, goblin-like, Nekkers that you’re fighting. This is excellent gameplay and shows off some good computer AI but can be bloody frustrating! It’s definitely a game that requires you to save often and get used to seeing the “game over” screen.

It firmly has a place amongst all other RPG games, too. If Kingdoms of Amalur:Reckoning is The Hobbit and Skyrim is Lord of the Rings then The Witcher 2 is most definitely Game of Thrones (even though The Witcher series has it’s own film and TV versions, internationally named The Hexer, I’ll admit to never seeing them so can’t use it as a point of reference here.)
For starters the “18” rating is there for a reason. There is nakedness and swearing from the start, even some C-bombs get in there. However, it’s not over-used… it’s there for a reason and that is to further emphasise how gritty and dark this place is. There’s none of your complaining about taking an arrow to the knee every 5 minutes here, no sir.
This is gritty and dark and no holds barred. It’s the story and setting that hold it all together. And, boy, what a setting! The graphics are extremely good, as we’re used to now, in this current generation of games. It’s a medieval world were the bright, colourful, clothes of the nobles are just as eye catching as the muck on the streets… or the bodies hanging by a noose in the town square.
Life is cheap in this world and pleasures, small and large, are grasped whenever and wherever they can be. This is most likely why the brothel in the town of Flotsam is doing so well!

However, contemporary games may have spoilt us a bit. For example, some folk might bemoan the lack of any form of “fast travel” in The Witcher 2. Important quest locations are not always indicated. The map is good but purely illustrative for the most part. Wandering around, exploring intentionally or otherwise, and picking up everything you can find is key to the nature of the game. Your knowledge of the world around you is increased and added to your journal as you go along. All those things you pick up can be used to make potions, traps, bombs and enhancements to armour and weapons so they can be vital.

All in all I found it took a bit of getting used to but once immersed in the game, The Witcher 2 is dark, gritty, morally ambiguous and really rather excellent.

NOCTURNAL by Scott Sigler

Crown/Hodder & Stoughton, p/b, £12.99

Reviewed by Stewart Horn

Monsters hunt nightly for human prey in San Francisco. They vary greatly in appearance, from the apparently human to assorted grotesques. Some seem part-animal, with claws or talons or the heads of wolves or snakes. And they’re super-strong, fierce and cannibalistic, somewhat like the Nightbreed from Clive Barker’s Cabal. Some human characters develop a telepathic bond with these creatures, and we join them in their exploration and discovery of the monsters, the horrors hinted at and gradually revealed. Sigler shies away from any supernatural element, preferring his own brand of pseudo-science, which isn’t really any more convincing than demonic possession or the like but it’s fun to read and lets us get some good scenes with the pathologist.

It’s a furiously paced, plot-driven horror thriller, very much in the style of early Dean Koontz or Stephen King. The imagery is striking and it seems designed to be filmed, as if he had one eye on an adaptation when he wrote it, or perhaps he just has a very visual imagination. Despite a hefty word count, this is a quick and easy read, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The characters are engagingly quirky. There is an overweight, foul-mouthed Chinese cop who is gathering material for the TV cop show he’s writing. His partner the terminator is a highly efficient killer of bad guys. The smutty one-liner dialogue between these two is the source of most of the novel’s humour, and that humour is welcome because the story is relentlessly dark.

I had a few problems with this book. The witty dialogue is great, but it didn’t always ring true: I couldn’t imagine such light-hearted banter at scenes of carnage and death. The monsters are bulletproof and superfast healers, but their invulnerability varies to suit the plot: If you’re going to re-write the laws of biology you should at least make the new ones consistent. Also, I saw the ending coming from two hundred pages away.

This is not Sigler’s masterwork but, nevertheless, it is a hugely enjoyable read by an author who continues to grow, and whom I shall continue to follow and enjoy in the future.

THE ALCHEMIST OF SOULS (NIGHT’S MASQUE VOLUME 1) by Anne Lyle

Angry Robot, kindle edition, £4.49

Reviewed by Carl Barker

Upon reading the blurb for Alchemist Of Souls, one might be forgiven for initially attempting to directly compare it with the first of Marie Brennan’s Onyx Court Series. Certainly, it’s true that both books revolve around a common theme – that of otherworldly creatures (here the Skraylings) inhabiting an alternate Elizabethan England – but to so pigeonhole Anne Lyle’s debut novel as ‘more of the same’ would be to do it a grave disservice. This first volume in a planned series is an entirely different animal, in that it chooses to downplay the fantastic side of its tale to an almost unnoticeable level, choosing instead to concentrate on embellishing the more recognisable trappings of history with an attention to detail and characterisation.

The three central characters of Mal, Coby and Ned are each well fleshed out in their own right, allowing the story to lightly dance between several different viewpoints as what begins as an absorbing drama slowly evolves into something more akin to a whodunnit by the end of the book. Many of the more well-known characters from the period are introduced at various points in the book, as down-on-his-luck swordsman Mal is recruited into the service of Sir Francis Walsingham and made bodyguard to the Skrayling Ambassador. Forced to repel both physical and political threats from a variety of sources, Mal must uncover the secrets of the Skraylings whilst at the same time attempting to unravel both his own past and that of his twin brother Sandy.

An outstanding debut and Lyle is certainly a name to watch for the future. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

DEAD HARVEST (THE COLLECTOR: BOOK 1) by Chris F. Holm

Angry Robot, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Craig Knight

Sam is a Soul Collector, a courier of damned souls bound for Hell. When he’s sent to collect the soul of a young woman charged with the horrific murder of her family, Sam is convinced she is innocent and refuses to take her soul. His actions break an ancient treaty and an epic war between Heaven and Hell looks set to begin.

Dead Harvest is a strange mix – part detective novel, part supernatural story – and it works well. The idea of Soul Collectors has been done before but Dead Harvest puts a refreshing take on the concept by telling this story from the viewpoint of the Collector. Sam is a great character, a decent guy forced to do a job he hates because of crimes he committed when he was alive. Sam’s self-deprecating style and realistic acceptance of his fate allows the reader to warm to him very quickly.

Kate is the victim who has been targeted for collection. She is a sassy and strong female character who doubts her innocence. This works well in keeping the reader guessing as to whether she really is innocent or not.

Dead Harvest is told in the first person which gives the story the tone of a diary. Holm’s use of foreshadowing further encourages this but it is handled well and is by no means a bad thing. There are flashback scenes to Sam’s life every few chapters and although interesting as backstory, they tend to break up the flow of the main narrative and could perhaps have been placed a little better.

My only real gripe, and it isn’t that big a gripe, is the ending. The realisation of who is behind the events comes too suddenly and out of the blue that it threatens the believability of the story. If there had been a few more hints dropped from time to time, it would have been more realistic but as it stands it comes across as a little rushed.

Dead Harvest is a great story. Original, fascinating and absorbing from the onset, it captures the reader and describes an interesting supernatural world that sits alongside our own. If you like supernatural ‘who-dunnits’ then this is the book for you.

KULTUS by Richard Ford

Rebellion, p/b, £7.99

Reviewed by Jay Eales

Looking like the bastard son of Alex Droog and Spider Jerusalem, Thaddeus Blaklok looms out of a frankly awesome cover image by Frazer Irving. Unfortunately, I found the story itself struggled to live up to the wrapping.

Blaklok is a tattooed thug in the steampunk inspired city of Manufactory. His reputation precedes him, but like the disparity between contents and cover art, he rarely lives up to his promise, given the number of times he is coshed, beaten, crushed and ground down by the many groups of antagonists he faces along the way, while trying to find and keep hold of an artefact known as the Key of Lunos.

Chapter Twenty opens with the sentence “This was getting to be an annoyingly familiar situation”, as Blaklok is captured and bound for the umpteenth time in the novel. It was as though he was reading my mind. Despite this, as the book progressed, I found myself warming to the character, cipher though he is, and by the end, the prospect of further adventures for Thaddeus Blaklok did not fill me with dread. If Ford is able to broaden out the setting to incorporate more than a succession of runaround fisticuffs and magical fireworks, and delves a little deeper into the character, rather than waggling a handful of mysterious hints and sudden displays of power that give him a get out of jail free card just when he needs them, Kultus 2 might be onto a winning formula.

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.

DIARY OF A WITCHCRAFT SHOP by Trevor Jones and Liz Williams

NewCon Press, pb, £7.99.

Reviewed by Selina Lock

Liz Williams is best known as a science fiction and fantasy author, with works such as the Inspector Chen novels, but here she and her partner Trevor Jones give you an insight into the trials and tribulations of running a witchcraft shop inGlastonbury.

No matter what your views of witchcraft and paganism this diary is brimming with humour, honesty and downright strange occurrences. As evidenced by our own visit to Glastonbury when we found the Tor closed due to a man wielding a ceremonial knife. Apparently this kind of unusual incident can appear quite normal in a town that attracts a wide variety of eccentric people.

In part, this is the story of Trevor and Liz’s life, with the highs of knowing interesting people and the lows of serious illness. It is also a peek into the reality of the Glastonbury that is shaped by its history and connection to myths, magic and various religious beliefs. It bears little relation to the muddy music festival that has helped make the area famous…

I also enjoyed the digressions into the history of British witchcraft and the love/hate relationship residents have with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon books.

The only minor quibble I have is that it is not always obvious which authorial voice is speaking, which makes some of the entries slightly confusing. On the whole, this is a fascinating glimpse into someone else’s world.