Science fiction and fantasy round-up

Time Out's round up of the best science fiction and fantasy books currently on the shelves

Whenever I am tempted to despair of the heroic fantasy, one comes along that is a lot more than competent. Tom Lloyd’s ‘Stormcaller’ was followed by two more which, without busting the stereotypes and formulas wide open, demonstrate just how much can be done with this genre. Joe Abercrombie’s ‘The Blade Itself’ (Gollancz £18.99) is in many respects another reprisal of the classic formula. Where it differs is partly that as the plot assembles an unlikely group of adventurers to serve as allies against invasion and magical incursion, Abercrombie makes it clear that these are not nice men and women. His heroine is a spoiled drunk, and his heroes a dumb ox barbarian, a swordsman and rake who is selfish to the point of sociopathy, and a crippled Inquisitor with a taste for torture.

They may not have redeeming features, but Abercrombie’s invention is so three-dimensional that we come to understand how, for example, ruthlessness in the service of the state is the one thing Glokta has left to cling to after his youth, health and looks were stolen from him. It will be fascinating to see where Abercrombie takes his plot and how he develops these characters in the next volume.

Abercrombie’s significant achievement pales beside Scott Lynch’s ‘The Lies of Locke Lamora’ (Gollancz £17.99), a book massively hyped, optioned for the movies and for once deserving every bit of the praise heaped on it. Locke and his gang, the Gentlemen Bastards, are slum-born con-artists in a standard fantasy city, outwitting the upper classes and the rulers of the underworld alike. Ah, we think, this is an entertaining romp into which darkness will only intrude in backstory.

And suddenly we are horribly wrong; Locke is double-crossed and most of his friends are butchered, and the game is suddenly being played for real stakes by a villain whose imaginative nastiness is disturbing. Locke himself, without losing our affection, proves worryingly good at vicious mayhem: playing for higher stakes improves his game. Lynch is a virtuoso plotter, who plays fair with us and keeps us bemused at every turn. Whereas I am looking forward to the sequel of Abercrombie’s book, expecting a certain comfortable familiarity, I have no idea at all where Lynch’s will take me.

Much of what is best in the fantasy genres is solidly entertaining commercial product. Justina Robson relaxes from her usual demanding speculations in establishing the first of a series, ‘Keeping It Real’ (Gollancz £10.99). A spectacular explosion has blasted the universe into a new shape, so that the human world finds itself in touch with elves, elementals and so on, all of them inhabiting their own version of Earth, a heartbeat or quantum fluctuation away. Elves tortured Lila almost to death; now she is a cyborg bodyguard preserving a renegade elf muso from magic and politics.

This combination of cyberpunk and the Byzantine twee ought not to work, but the icy intelligence Robson brings to her serious books applies in equal measure to her entertainments. There is also a passionate, wistful romanticism which never quite worked in ‘Living Next Door to the God of Love’, but breaks your heart in places here.

Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels are currently the most reliable post-‘Buffy’ supernatural thriller series on offer. Butcher’s new book ‘Dead Beat’ (Orbit £6.99) has wizardly investigator Harry up against some particularly nasty necromancers, his usual vampiric foes and his bosses on the White Council of wizardry with their pesky distrust of Harry’s low-life style and willingness to bend the spirit of rules. What stops these being routine – though routine is part of the point – is that Butcher is almost as cunning a plotter as Scott Lynch, and in this book pulls off a couple of audacious narrative coups by preparing them from the book’s opening. These are not funny books, though there are good jokes; their real wit lies in their dextrous manipulation of what we expect.

The Russian ‘Night Watch’ films are fascinating both in their passion and in what sometimes seems quirky inventiveness, sometimes brutal realism about Putin’s Russia and the way a metaphysical struggle between good and evil would work out there. The films are based on the books: Sergei Lukyanenko’s ‘The Night Watch’ (Heinemann £10.99) is so good that the film feels like a trailer for it. Roz Kaveney

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