Reviews

The Hidden Land is the second novel in Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country trilogy. Having accepted the Secret Country as real enough for the moment, the children must rise to meet the challenges they invented in the roles they were so eager to play in safe imagination. Yet they must do so without most of the strength and skills of the characters they are playing.

Prince Edward, the eldest of the five, now rules a country on the brink of war with the Dragon King. Painfully aware that he is only acting a role, he must lead his forces to victory while avoiding the growing suspicions of those around him. For if he is not Prince Edward, what has been done with the real Prince?

In Shadow Games , the first Book of the South in the Chronicles of the Black Company, we follow the Company on its journey southward towards the near-mythical Khatovar, a city not on any map, yet nevertheless faithfully recorded in the company Annals. Their quest does not lack for opposition, however, for the Shadowmasters are determined to bar their path, and there are hints that those long thought dead have come south to pursue old enmities as well.

A Knight of the Word is the second book in Terry Brooks’ loose trilogy The Word and the Void. This book focuses on John Ross and his crisis of faith, with Nest (from Running with the Demon ) trying to save him from himself. In my description of the first book in this series, I felt it was important to note that it wasn’t one of Brooks’ Shannara titles. The same applies here, but there’s also some stylistic differences from the first book in the trilogy as well. A more adult perspective, more grounded in reality and also more grounded in magic.

George RR Martin is a writer with a long, if less than best-selling, list of hits. His previous work includes science fiction like Tuf Voyaging, the tale of a solitary “eco-engineer” with the resources of an intersteller bioweapons facility at his command, or editing the Wild Cards collection, which featured short stories about the real problems faced by comic-book superheroes. He was established as publishable – but there was absolutely no hint of what would come.

Innocence is a sequel to the popular anime Ghost in the Shell . And it’s a sequel that gives the lie to sequelitis: Innocence may even surpass it’s predecessor.

Fans of Ghost in the Shell will recognize Batou, who returns in the sequel as the solemn, philosophical cyborg cop. Since the disappearance of the Major, his partner, he has withdrawn further and further into himself. He’s assigned a new partner and put on a case involving robots that are killing their human owners and committing suicide. As you might expect, this is used as an opportunity to explore some of the same themes as before. When we learn to manipulate the senses and memories of other human beings, how can you really know what’s real? What is it that makes a person human, if their body is merely a biological machine? What happens when the machines stop acting like machines, and start acting like humans?

Having crossed the Sea of Aboqua, Etjole Ehomba and his companions must find passage west across the Semordria Ocean somewhere in the Thinking Kingdoms. Though these kingdoms are supposed to be (and in some ways are) bastions of civilization, they harbor their own unique man-made hazards.

Surmounting obstacle after obstacle, the story remains fresh only in the strangeness of the situations; Etjole’s seeming invulnerability lends a faery tale quality to the writing that some might term ‘shallow’. Sadly, there is no real character development, despite ample opportunity for such, including the addition of another member to the party.

Fans of Robin Hobb’s Assassin series already know that they are in for an emotional roller coaster, but Assassin’s Quest in particular is very difficult to read. All of the supporting characters that Fitz loved and trusted have been wrested away from him by one manner of disaster or another. Those whose lives have included periods of major depression will recognize the symptoms and the self-destructive impulses. This is not a book for the emotionally fragile, but then, if you are still reading the series by this point it should be obvious. In a way, the book is noteworthy for that quality in itself: rarely does an author bring their main character so low and portray the results with such unsympathetic clarity.

Shadow Games is the first of the Books of the South, the second part of the Chronicles of the Black Company. Following the events of The White Rose and roughly contemporaneous with The Silver Spike , Shadow Games follows Croaker and the Black Company on the first steps of their quest to return to their origins… the almost-mythical city of Khatovar, across the equator and nearly seven thousand miles of marching from the Lady’s tower at Charm.

The best way to understand the world of Vlad Taltos, assassin, is to begin with the knowledge that he works almost exclusively for the elvish mafia. Yes, there are elves in the mafia. There’s also magical pollution, talking lizards, and lots of good swashbuckling fun.

I was first introduced to CS Friedman’s work with the Coldfire Trilogy, an excellent exploration of the consequences of introducing humans into a world where magic is shaped by belief – and thus gives life to our worst nightmares. I quickly located her other extant works, The Madness Season (with which I was similarly delighted) and In Conquest Born… which was a story with potential, but which ultimately disappointed me.