War in Heaven by David Zindell

David Zindell’s space opera books, that started with the stand-alone Neverness and continued with his REQUIEM FOR HOMO SAPIENS trilogy (of which this volume is the conclusion), always scratch that itch I have for DUNE-like space opera. You’ve got the baroque world-building of a far, far future of humanity in an interstellar diaspora that combines elements of medieval and pre-industrial societies with ‘magical’ technology and gleaming ships that fold space; you’ve got bizarre human enclaves (sometimes almost reminiscent of Jack Vance, though with less obvious caustic humour) so that societies of warrior-poets, pilot-mathematicians, scientist-philosophers, autist-savants, and priest-kings all rub shoulders in a bewildering and colourful throng; you’ve ... Read More

Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien

This is the first work that showed us how J.R.R. Tolkien's obsessive perfectionism was a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gave us the wonderfully deep world and implied distances of THE LORD OF THE RINGS; and on the other hand it left us with a jumble of tales in various states of revision and development that had to be compiled by Tolkien's son Christopher into some form as The Silmarillion... a jumble of tales that, if they had been finished, would have given us a truly staggering body of work.

Just reading the fragment that makes up the entirety of "Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin" makes me weep for what might have been. Given the chance to expand even half of the partial tales from The Silmarillion into something equating the full treatment of THE LORD OF THE RINGS would have been a wonder indeed.

Even given th... Read More

The Book of Lost Tales 1 by J.R.R. Tolkien

My first attempt to read The Book of Lost Tales 1 was made way too early in my life and made certain that my response was to put it on the shelf and decide that all of this background stuff, especially taken from this early phase in Tolkien’s life as a writer, was way too different from the Middle-Earth stories that I loved for me to waste any time on it.

Looking at where the bookmark from my first attempt still sat when I picked it up again, I noticed that I didn’t even get much beyond the first several pages of the introductory chapter “The Cottage of Lost Play.” I remember thinking that it was just altogether too twee for me, what with the Eldar of Middle-Earth still being referred to as ‘faeries’ and the, to me, bizarre structure of a wanderer coming to a tiny cottage (bigger on the inside than the outside) peopled by dancing and singing children and adults who primari... Read More

Galveston by Sean Stewart

This may be Sean Stewart's best novel, though it is not my favourite. Here we see Stewart displaying full mastery of his prose, his characterization, and his depiction of a fully realized magical world. Be warned though, neither the characters, nor the world presented, are always pleasant to behold.

We follow the story of Josh Cane, a young man with a chip on his shoulder due to the constrained circumstances of his life that are the result of his father's loss of a pivotal game of poker. Add to this the fact that Josh lives in a world after the occurrence of a magical apocalypse wherein everyone has to work hard to survive, not only due to their physical circumstances, but also due to the perilous proximity of the magical Otherworld, and you have the makings of a pretty downbeat story. Stewart himself has described this book as: "...your Basic "Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Everything, Girl becomes her Own Evil Twin, Boy... Read More

The Chasch by Jack Vance

The Chasch (originally published as City of the Chasch) is sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars as envisioned by Jack Vance. It is an entertaining Planetary Romance tale (or Sword & Planet if you prefer that designation) that describes the adventures of Adam Reith, Earthman and sole survivor of the Explorator IV, a starship that is destroyed by unknown forces while in orbit above the planet Tschai. Reith is a Scout, meaning that he is a jack-of-all-trades uniquely equipped for survival in a hostile and alien environment. Good thing too, since Tschai is a world in turmoil that will throw everything it has at Reith.

Once the basics of mere survival are attained, Reith begins to explore this strange new world and finds a menagerie of aliens and apparent humanity lo... Read More

Clouds End by Sean Stewart

I love Sean Stewart, and I wish he hadn't given up on writing fantasy. His books are always a treat and pay back tenfold the effort put into them by the reader. Clouds End was Stewart's "pure fantasy" novel, in contrast to the mixed urban fantasy with science fictional elements type of story that characterizes the majority of his works. I have to admit that the first time I tried to read this book I didn't like it. I still think that Stewart wasn't fully successful in realizing what he was attempting, but Clouds End still has some of Stewart's best writing and character development, and a marvelous vision of a magical world.

Stewart has said that he wanted to write an epic fantasy in the mould of Tolkien, but from his own agnostic perspective as opposed to the religiously infused one of Tolkien. The world he create... Read More

Desolation Road by Ian McDonald

I was reminded, while reading Desolation Road, of two authors in particular: John Crowley and Gene Wolfe. This is not to say that I think Ian McDonald was in any way aping them or merely writing some kind of amalgamated pastiche, but there were elements to his tale that made both author’s names spring to mind. I think the first one was Wolfe, largely because of the way in which McDonald made the magical seem almost commonplace (or was it that the commonplace was made to seem magical?) in a way that reminded me of the inversions of the various aspects of the world in both Wolfe’s NEW SUN and LONG SUN series, not to mention the presence of time-travelling Green Men, technological angels and various other oddities. It is almost as though Read More

The Night Watch by Sean Stewart

Sean Stewart is one of those writers I used to buy sight unseen (before he unfortunately dropped out of writing novels and decided to devote his time to writing interactive online games). His books tend to be very character driven, something I personally like, and he has an individual writing style that manages to be “writerly” without getting bogged down in stylistic tricks.

The Night Watch is the story of a future earth in the year 2074 after an inundation of magic has flooded the world (this flood started soon after WWII in Stewart's timeline) and only pockets of human civilization are left in the sea of wild and magical frontiers (in this the story can be seen as a member of the same universe as Stewart’s Resurrection Man and Galveston). The novel concentrates on two societies, the Southside, which is a relatively technological and militaristic state located w... Read More

Merlin’s Ring by H. Warner Munn

H. Warner Munn’s Merlin’s Ring is one of the odder fantasies I have come across in my reading, but also one for which I have a deep affection. The book is equal parts pseudo-Arthurian Romance (in both the medieval and modern sense of the word), era-spanning historical fantasy à la Edwin Arnold’s Phra the Phoenician, and epic hero’s journey; there is even some mild pulp sci-fi thrown in for good measure. Despite (or maybe because of) all of this melding and mixing, Merlin’s Ring manages to be something all its own.

Written by one of the old standbys of the Weird Tales pulp magazine (Munn was an associate of H.P. Lovecraft and Seabury Quinn) Merlin’s Ring was probably Munn’s masterwork. It is actually the second volume in a series of stories that purport to... Read More

Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright

[At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Islandia is a keeper. It’s one of those books that lives on your shelf and which you gaze at lovingly from time to time, considering whether this is the time to crack it open again or not. You don’t want to do it too often for fear that you might dilute some of its power (and let’s be frank: it’s a looong book), yet you don’t want to let your immersion in its world go too long between visits. This is one of those books that I would use to refute M. John Harrison’s argument that world-building is the death of good fiction. This work by Read More

Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling

What a great read this was. I've never been much of a fan of cyberpunk and I'm not particularly a fan of the authors generally noted to be founders of the genre (William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc.), but I really loved Schismatrix Plus and it has put Bruce Sterling near the top of my list for sci-fi writers. Sterling does an excellent job of melding his cyberpunk ethos with a space opera-ish background that is combined with the 'Grand Tour' of the solar system structure (cp. The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley or Vacuum Flowers by Mic... Read More

The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick

I must first off state that I am generally not an avid lover of the short story. There are a few writers that I think really excel in the genre and whose stuff I will read without hesitation (Edgar Allen Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fritz Leiber), but in general I am often underwhelmed by the format. Keep that in mind when I say that Michael Swanwick’s collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow was quite good, but didn’t blow me away or make me into a believer.

The various Darger & Surplus tales (“The Dog Said Bow-Wow”, “The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Fun”, and “Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play�... Read More

Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia by E.R. Eddison

Like The Worm Ouroboros, Mistress of Mistresses is a book that only E.R. Eddison could have written and is one that is likely to garner an even smaller following than the admittedly obscure Worm. For my part I think that Mistress of Mistresses, and its subsequent sequels that make up the ZIMIAMVIA trilogy, is perhaps Eddison’s best work. It may not be as approachable as The Worm Ouroboros (and boy is that saying something!), but I think its greater depth and scope make for what amounts to a truly impressive achievement.

The main character is Edward Lessingham, that enigmatic figure last seen in the prologue to the The Worm Ouroboros whose dream sequence led us to Eddison’s Mercury and then, to m... Read More

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James
reviewed by Terry Lago

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary contains eight tasty little nuggets of supernatural horror that I found very satisfying. In each of them the story is told second or even third hand by a genial narrator whose acquaintances, who are themselves of a decidedly scholarly bent, have been the victims of supernatural intrusion into our world. Often the stories revolve around an ancient artifact able to invoke the otherworldly that is discovered by these particularly luckless individuals (though they often feel themselves lucky indeed when they first make their discoveries). The tales are all good, but my favourites were “Canon Alberic's Scrap-book”, “Lost Hearts”, “”The Mezzotint”, and “Count Magnus”. I found myself thinking of both H.P. Lovecraft (in James’ use ... Read More

The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright

I was really disappointed with The Phoenix Exultant, the second novel in John C. Wright’s THE GOLDEN AGE series, especially considering how much I had enjoyed its predecessor, The Golden Age. In many ways The Phoenix Exultant just did not feel like a true continuation of the first book.

One of the major stumbling blocks for me was that I just couldn't believe the way Wright handled the voices he used for the characters in this volume. Considering his mannered and baroque set up in the previous volume I found the dialogue to be way too colloquial (and 20th century colloquial at that). Maybe Wright was trying to show Phaeton “stepping down” a level, both socially due to his exile and intellectually due to his loss of certain artificial brain upgrades, but it really grated on me. Atkins and Daphn... Read More