#Review - City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky

City of Last Chances
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Head of Zeus, 8 December 2022
Available as: HB, 512pp, audio, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781801108423

I'm grateful to Head of Zeus for sending me an e-copy of City of Last Chances via NetGalley to consider for review.

I think there is a theory that while science fiction is a literature focussed on change and development, fantasy is, rather, focussed on restoring what has been lost. "Space: the Final Frontier" vs "Return of the King", or something like that, with a good outcome seen either as transformative progress, or regression to The Golden Age.

In his new novel City of Last Chances, Adrian Tchaikovsky creates a whole world poised on the knife edge between these alternatives. He introduces us to Ilmar, also known as the City of Bad Decisions, a place with the reputation of being a last refuge for the unlucky, the stateless, the desperate. (I'm reminded of the nickname for Oxford, "City of Lost Causes"). There are rumours of a way out - a gateway out of misery - but the price of passage is high, leaving most of the malcontents, runaways and displaced populations stuck in Ilmar, their unique and disparate cultures decaying on that great compost heap of a town.

The Ilmari themselves have their own problems, though, now being ruled by the Palleseen, who, recently invaded, hanged the Old Duke, made Ilmar part of their Sway,  and set out imposing their ideas of perfection. (The Palleseen idea is a thing called 'The Perfecture', a glorious model society which all nations should want to be part of - those that won't sign up are clearly backwards, disruptive and sorely need to be brought to help).

The participants in this story are many and varied; among them are refugees who have settled in Ilmar (some after escaping from the Pels); factions among the Ilmari - most of whom are notionally part of a 'resistance', something Tchaikovsky shines a rather merciless spotlight on; and the Pels themselves. There are also hints of darker, older powers perhaps best alone. That gives a great many viewpoints including - to mention just a few - the last remaining believer in God; a man who's stepped out of another world where he was prepped for a merciless war, but who's lost his wife and is set only on finding here; an idealistic student radical; a foot soldier for the criminal gangs; a union organiser who's seen and suffered; and an cynical old academic who gives a nod to revolution in his classes while cutting deals with the Pels in the shadows.

That last is something of a theme here. The disparate rebel factions - students, aristocrats, thieves' syndicates and smugglers - have quite different views about how to free themselves from the Pels' yoke, and when a seemingly innocuous incident blows up into riot and uprising, nobody has a plan, or much of an idea how to proceed (apart from  raking off all they can in the chaos). That unfolding response, and countermoves by the occupiers, forms the texture of this story, together with desperate attempts, by a number of the characters, to track down the missing artefact that sparked everything off. That's important, because an avenger seems to be hunting down all those who may have secured the treasure. The decisions made here, by everyone, will determine who lives and who dies as the flame of revolution spreads...

City of Last Chances is a weighty and absorbing book, one I'd place far, far away from the run of fantasy or SF. Tchaikovsky clearly isn't buying into that simplistic binary that I mentioned at the start. The past of Ilmar isn't a desirable state to be brought back, but no future looks bright either. Better perhaps to remain on that knife edge, maintaining a complex relationship with the Pels. But that takes a lot of work and has a cost. Perhaps it's easier just to bring out the banners from the days gone by?

Nor will you find heroes or villains here. More or less everyone is - as in real life - out for themselves (I'd exclude from that idealistic student Lemya) or at least heavily conflicted. Take that union leader, for example, Father Orvechin. He's focussed on improvements in the conditions of his workers and, in the longer term, perhaps the overthrow of the Pels. But the factory owners who oppress his people are native aristos, not Pels, and the factories are kept turning by demons who are themselves enslaved, oppressed workers - workers that Orvechin is willing to see kept in their bonds, because they're not his people, though he knows that one day this will haunt him.

This whole sense of Ilmar as a nest of collaboration, compromise and negotiation with power, and that maybe that is just about the best things can be, is revisited and reworked throughout the book. The Pels themselves are split into different blocs who are willing to cuts deals when it suits them. The aristocrats ('Armigers') desire one future, the siblingries (unions and workers' guilds) another. At times they cooperate, at others they don't. The same goes for the other actors here. Picture a giant game of repeated Prisoners' Dilemma, played out in real time, with magic, lost deities and demons thrown in too, and you get some idea of the complexity and fascination of this book.

That may make the story sound academic or dry, but it's really not. It's passionate, urgent and angry. Tchaikovsky's central theme of compromise and collusion is shot through it, pulling against and reinforcing individual motivation is countless ways, different for every character.While there are so many of these that one can't really anoint any as the focus, they are all intricately, convincingly realised and the business they are about gloriously integrated with the setting and the wider history that is sketched. There was only one point at which a particular strand seemed to me to jar - when a mysterious assassin, otherwise not included in the story, played a part on behalf of unknown employers whom we never hear any more about. Apart from that very brief interlude though, this book was a marvellous symphony of clashing goals, missing information and immediate danger that had me hooked throughout. I would strongly recommend it.

For more information about City of Last Chances, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Sea Change by Nancy Kress

Sea Change
Nancy Kress
Tachyon Publications, 22 May 2020
Available as: PB, e
Read as: advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781616963316 (PB) 9781616963323 (e)

I'm grateful to Tachyon for providing me with an advance e-copy of Sea Change.

In a near-future USA, beset by economic difficulties and climate collapse, Renata is an agent for a mysterious opposition group, the Org. Seeing the Org's identification mark - a particular shade of paint - on a vehicle, she steps in to handle what may be a major breach in security.

The fact that the "vehicle" is a self-propelled GPS guided house makes the opening sentence ('The house was clearly lost') one of the weirdest I've recently come across. That is, though, the only fantastical aspect to this deeply convincing fable. As we get deeper into Renata's - she is the narrator of the story - life, we learn about the catastrophe that has ruined the US: basically a bit of GM-gone -wrong. The explanation of that is wholly convincing, as also the political consequences (a drastic turn against GM, meaning that Renata's "rebel" group is pro GM and determined to do it right, against the desire of most of the population. Their agenda is to combat rising sea levels, temperatures and hunger. In age when 'anything can be hacked' they operate like spies from the 1940s, all dead letter boxes, recognition signs and absolutely no tech.

That was quite a lot for me to swallow, being instinctively suspicious of GM technology, but that didn't prove a barrier to falling into, and enjoying, this book. There is so much here to enjoy. Wrapped up with Kress's story of how the world went bad there's a tender, infuriating, on-off love story between Renata and her ex-husband Jake, an actor: Kress really captures that can't-be-together, can't-be-apart thing that haunts some couples (in one place, early in the chronology, Renata compares Jake to Richard Burton: fateful, given his and Elizabeth Taylor's stormy relationship).

There's a narrative of Native rights (or perhaps I should say wrongs) - Renata's cover identity, protecting her as a courier for the Org, as as a lawyer taking large pro-bone cases for Native Americans and through her voice Kress narrates the legal bind in which they find themselves when seeking justice (whether defending themselves or prosecuting those from outside who wrong them). There's also a tragic strand about a young boy whose death is tied up with the environmental themes heres.

It's a lot to  pack into 192 pages and that inevitably means there are places where the narration has to fill us in on those legal niceties, or a decade of economic turmoil, or the highs and lows of Renata's and Jake's relationship. Yet the narrative drive and the interest never flag, and there's a genuine sense of jeopardy here right till the last page - as well as a mystery concerning Renata's cell in the Org.

The book also has some sharp writing and insights. 'Minutes snailed by', for example, or 'Childhood doesn't really end until both your parents die' or 'It isn't the past that creates the future. It's how you interpret the past.' Or - and getting his back to the point - 'Anyone who would trust online celebrity sites would believe in leprechauns, elves and the wholesomeness of high-fructose corn syrup'.

All in all a plausible future, credible, relatable characters and a great deal to think about in this one. I'd strongly recommend.

(And - a coincidence, this, only affecting me - until last month I'd never heard of the Snoqualmie Pass but I've now read two books, in as many weeks that mentioned it. Weird or what?)

For more information about this book, see the publisher's website here. You can also buy it there or from Blackwell's from Amazon UK or Amazon US (sorry, I couldn't find on the other usual sites).

#Blogtour #Review - Shadows of the Short Days by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson

Shadows of the Short Days
Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson
Gallancz, 25 July 2019
HB, 528pp, e

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

Shadows of the Short Days is set in an alternate Iceland where instead of geothermal power, magic - seiðmagn - wells up from the ground and is harnessed to industrial and military use. While details are kept vague - everyone knows this stuff, right? - it's clear that the seiðmagn is toxic, mutating wildlife and poisoning the ground. Whether this has always been the case or there has been some recent cataclysm is not stated. The island is occupied, forcibly incorporated into the Kolkar "commonwealth" and one suspects it is that magical energy that they really want - possibly it is a rare commodity? Much of the motivation for the story is struggle against that foreign occupation and the oppression it brings.

This political setup of course reflects, to a degree, Icelandic history and the movement for independence in the 19th and 20th centuries. Fittingly then, the two central characters are both, in their different ways, rebels.

Garún is a "blendigar" - half-human, half-huldufólk, and subject to prejudice and discrimination on that ground. Huldufólk are something like are elves (one feature of this book is that the mythological creatures and things tend to be labelled in un-translated Icelandic - for example we also meet "Marbendill", which are mermen/ maids. While there is a glossary at the end, it was fun to encounter these creatures and concepts, which are very stark and strange, in a foreign language). There is a whole backstory to the huldufólk explaining why they're so reviled, hooking into a wider history of this alternate world. Garún is firmly part of the revolutionary movement, spending her nights grafitti-ing magical sigils across Reykjavík to provoke dissent and unrest. By day she's a struggling artist and a member of a Bohemian underground fuelled by the consumption of magic-infused drugs. (Vilhjálmsson has some powerful scenes documenting this). She also has a rather sad backstory - Garún is overall a very well rounded character with whom I strongly sympathised, her sense of rejection as a blendigar and the prejudice she meets coming through strongly.

Sæmundur, the other main protagonist, is equally well drawn although he's difficult to actually like. Sæmundur - obsessed, driven - is a student and part of the same set as Garún (they were together but split up several months before). He's more focussed - even fixated - on developing his magical abilities and studies at Svartiskóli, effectively a university devoted to "Galdur", a branch of magic concerned with the invocation and manipulation of demons. Sæmundur is at loggerheads with his teachers who regard him as a loose cannon, likely to go his own way and meddle with Things Better Left Unknown (they're basically right about this).

This world that Vilhjálmsson draws is, then, intricate, well thought out, and immersive. We can feel the wrongs being done to the people of Reykjavík (the city is surrounded by a wall, the better to maintain control). We can hear the beat and smell the drug-laden air of the parties Garún attends, taste Sæmundur's rage at being judged by his teachers, see the prejudice directed at the blendigar, huldufólk, Marbendill and other non-humans. It's a very strong background, and makes the story thoroughly credible and absorbing. That said, I did regret that there is almost no material from the viewpoint of the occupiers - a couple of scenes at most - which means their movements, motivations, reactions and plans are almost completely missing. The effect is that the resistance movement of which Garún is part seems simply to be kicking at a monolith. That doesn't make for any lack of drama, though: the scenes that describe the eventual conflict are excitingly written and pacy with real tension and terror for our group of rebels.

And I think terror is the right word - this book is very dark indeed. The opening section, showing Garún and Sæmundur going about their lives, gives a rather deceptive impression, suggesting that the darkness is only an incidental theme while it is, I think, actually rather the central feature in this book. Set around Icelandic Midwinter that's also rather fitting. But in the end this is I think a very bleak book even if it is a magnificently bleak book. It is certainly an enthralling and tasty read, genuinely different from the run of fantasy. You could, perhaps, fit it into the Lovecraftian things-from-beyond-time template, or the dystopian pattern of an oppressive state but that doesn't really work, this is a book that speaks for itself and - especially once that introductory third is past - both excites and appals with its weird, weird appeal.

A definite recommendation, you need to read this.

For more information about the book, see the Gollancz website here.