King of Thorns Fragments

From the blog of Mr. Lawrence:


A pre-chapter Brother-line: 
 You won’t see Brother Grumlow try to knife you, only the sorrow in his eyes as you fall.

 & a one of the deleted pre-chapter battle vignettes: 

 Nial Ravener, thirty-four, spear wound. Blue Moon Pass. Son of Graem and Nalla, raised in the Haunt. Husband to Erin. Father to Kai, Kelin, and Keris. The spear hurt less than the climbing. Nial pitched into the deep snow, almost grateful for the excuse to stop. He lay cradled in softness. Time was I could run all day. From valley to peak. Then time caught me up. A blessing to die in the snow. Clean, serene, where all sins are covered, in the purity of high places. No pain but the ache in his lungs and the memory of agony in his thighs. It felt good to be still, in a cool embrace, cold kisses on his forehead. Even the hot wet wound in his back seemed like release. Images of Erin at the cottage door. The children in the hay. Bright days of summer. Too bright. Nial turned to older days, dim yesterdays lit now by the last beats of his heart. He remembered his mother, framed in golden curls. How fiercely he had loved her.

He's getting quite good at the teasing isn't he?

In other news, I've survived my operation, and I'm going strong, thanks to the awesome pain medication.
Reviews for Sam Sykes Black Halo and Perdido Street Station by China Mieville following soon.

A Red Country Teaser

Look what I've found on Fantasy Faction.



The return of the Bloody-Nine!


In other news,  I'm going in for a minor operation tomorrow, but I should be able to post. It will knock me on my ass for a bit but it should not be a problem. Otherwise, I'll be back next week.

The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch

The Burb: They say that the Thorn of Camorr can beat anyone in a fight. They say he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They say he's part man, part myth, and mostly street-corner rumour. And they are wrong on every count. Only averagely tall, slender, and god-awful with a sword, Locke Lamora is the fabled Thorn, and the greatest weapons at his disposal are his wit and cunning. He steals from the rich - they're the only ones worth stealing from but the poor can go steal for themselves. What Locke cons, wheedles and tricks into his possession is strictly for him and his band of fellow con-artists and thieves: the Gentleman Bastards. Together their domain is the city of Camorr. Built of Elderglass by a race no-one remembers, it's a city of shifting revels, filthy canals, baroque palaces and crowded cemeteries. Home to Dons, merchants, soldiers, beggars, cripples, and feral children. And to Capa Barsavi, the criminal mastermind who runs the city. But there are whispers of a challenge to the Capa's power. A challenge from a man no one has ever seen, a man no blade can touch. The Grey King is coming. A man would be well advised not to be caught between Capa Barsavi and The Grey King. Even such a master of the sword as the Thorn of Camorr. As for Locke Lamora...


Now I know that the book has been out for quite some time. 2007 if I remember correctly. And I have read it quite a while ago. At the end of last year, Mr. Lynch sold some of his personal copies of his work on his blog and I was lucky enough to pick pne up. He was even nice enough to sell it to me for $1. The shipping was $17, so it worked out brilliantly since I only had $18 in my Paypal account. He's a good guy. 
When it arrived, I had to read it again. You cannot not read a book when you have it. That's just wrong.


Boy am I glad that I think like that.


Locke and his band of Gentleman Bastards - that's their gang name, and a cool damn name at that - are very, very good thieves. Amazingly good. They are so good that even the Capa does not know about their thefts. They rob the nobility blind with schemes in stead of robberies, and the schemes are always so elaborate and brilliant that the poor nobles take quite a while to realize what the hell has happened to their money.


There is magic in the world, but the bondsmages are the only practitioners, they are jealous, arrogant and insanely expensive to hire. They say it's safer to kill yourself than kill a bondsmage, since the whole order hunts you down as well as all those you care for and all you've made when you do. I find this a nice change of magic use than the normal wizards ruling over people or not being respected. They are basically mercenaries who can burn the world. 


The world itself seems to have been inhabited by an ancient race who has since disappeared out of memory. They left behind Elderglass structures which cannot be broken or melted. That is the extent of the influence of the ancient race in this book. No artefacts, no prophecy. Just awesome glowing buildings that make Camorr a little bit more interesting.


So, the magic is there but quite untouchable. No freaky prophecy to complete. No artefact to hunt. Just dishonest thieves trying to rob the nobility blind and try to survive. It sounds strange if you put it like that, but it's brilliant.


Most of the book is spent with Locke as the POV, but he's one interesting bastard, that's for sure. There is quite a few curse words present in the book, but it fits in well with the world they move in and the culture thats present. If dragons eating Knights and wizards boiling soldiers in their armour is acceptable, a few f-bombs should really not put anyone off. 


The story has many a twist and turn. Not all of them done perfectly. One big scene in the book could have been done better. Some interesting characters  crying out for some extra development or back story does not get it, but since this was his first novel, it will be forgiven. The rest of the book is awesome.

The gods are interesting and out of the way, the character interaction and development is slick, the world seems well thought out enough for 10 more books.


The whole thief thing has been done before this book and since, but this one is on the top of the pile for  me.  


9/10.

A Red Country publication dates

"Make a mark in your diaries, for it looks like we now have some firm dates for the publication of (A) Red Country.

UK: Thursday, Oct 18th 2012.

US: Tuesday, Nov 20th 2012."

This news brought to you directly from Abercrombies blog. Something to look forward to!

King of Thorns Fragments 6

Gorgoth 


Gorgoth is like no other. There is no mould for the leucrota. Twisted by the Builders’ poisons they fall broken from the womb and follow strange paths as they grow. The ribs that pierce his flesh and reach from each side are black and thick, his hide more red than blood, and the muscle beneath surges as he moves. And though he is shaped for war and for horror, there are few men in Adam’s image whose approval would mean as much to me – and most of them lie dead.

Prometheus Trailer

I may be slow on the uptake, but this looks pretty damn good.

Caliban's War - Sample

Here's a sample of the first chapter of Caliban's war, the second book in the frankly brilliant Expanse Saga.



“Snoopy’s out again,” Private Hillman said. “I think his CO must be pissed at him.”

Gunnery Sergeant Roberta Draper of the Martian Marine Corps upped the magnification on her armor’s heads‑up display and looked in the direction Hillman was pointing. Twenty-five hundred meters away, a squad of four United Nations Marines were tromping around their outpost, backlit by the giant greenhouse dome they were guarding. A greenhouse dome identical in nearly all respects to the dome her own squad was currently guarding.

One of the four UN Marines had black smudges on the sides of his helmet that looked like beagle ears.

“Yep, that’s Snoopy,” Bobbie said. “Been on every patrol detail so far today. Wonder what he did.”

Guard duty around the greenhouses on Ganymede meant doing what you could to keep your mind occupied. Including speculating on the lives of the Marines on the other side.

The other side. Eighteen months before, there hadn’t been sides. The inner planets had all been one big, happy, slightly dysfunctional family. Then Eros, and now the two superpowers were dividing up the solar system between them, and the one moon neither side was willing to give up was Ganymede, breadbasket of the Jovian system.

As the only moon with any magnetosphere, it was the only place where dome-grown crops stood a chance in Jupiter’s harsh radiation belt, and even then the domes and habitats still had to be shielded to protect civilians from the eight rems a day burning off Jupiter and onto the moon’s surface.

Bobbie’s armor had been designed to let a soldier walk through a nuclear bomb crater minutes after the blast. It also worked well at keeping Jupiter from frying Martian Marines.

Behind the Earth soldiers on patrol, their dome glowed in a shaft of weak sunlight captured by enormous orbital mirrors. Even with the mirrors, most terrestrial plants would have died, starved of sunlight. Only the heavily modified versions the Ganymede scientists cranked out could hope to survive in the trickle of light the mirrors fed them.

“Be sunset soon,” Bobbie said, still watching the Earth Marines outside their little guard hut, knowing they were watching her too. In addition to Snoopy, she spotted the one they called Stumpy because he or she couldn’t be much over a meter and a quarter tall. She wondered what their nickname for her was. Maybe Big Red. Her armor still had the Martian surface camouflage on it. She hadn’t been on Ganymede long enough to get it resurfaced with mottled gray and white.

One by one over the course of five minutes, the orbital mirrors winked out as Ganymede passed behind Jupiter for a few hours. The glow from the greenhouse behind her changed to actinic blue as the artificial lights came on. While the overall light level didn’t go down much, the shadows shifted in strange and subtle ways. Above, the sun—not even a disk from here as much as the brightest star—flashed as it passed behind Jupiter’s limb, and for a moment the planet’s faint ring system was visible.

“They’re going back in,” Corporal Travis said. “Snoop’s bringing up the rear. Poor guy. Can we bail too?”

Bobbie looked around at the featureless dirty ice of Ganymede. Even in her high-tech armor she could feel the moon’s chill.

“Nope.”

Her squad grumbled but fell in line as she led them on a slow low-gravity shuffle around the dome. In addition to Hillman and Travis, she had a green private named Gourab on this particular patrol. And even though he’d been in the Marines all of about a minute and a half, he grumbled just as loud as the other two in his Mariner Valley drawl.

She couldn’t blame them. It was make-work. Something for the Martian soldiers on Ganymede to do to keep them busy. If Earth decided it needed Ganymede all to itself, four grunts walking around the greenhouse dome wouldn’t stop them. With dozens of Earth and Mars warships in a tense standoff in orbit, if hostilities broke out the ground pounders would probably find out only when the surface bombardment began.

To her left, the dome rose to almost half a kilometer: triangular glass panels separated by gleaming copper-colored struts that turned the entire structure into a massive Faraday cage. Bobbie had never been inside one of the greenhouse domes. She’d been sent out from Mars as part of a surge in troops to the outer planets and had been walking patrols on the surface almost since day one. Ganymede to her was a spaceport, a small Marine base, and the even smaller guard outpost she currently called home.

As they shuffled around the dome, Bobbie watched the unremarkable landscape. Ganymede didn’t change much without a catastrophic event. The surface was mostly silicate rock and water ice a few degrees warmer than space. The atmosphere was oxygen so thin it could pass as an industrial vacuum. Ganymede didn’t erode or weather. It changed when rocks fell on it from space, or when warm water from the liquid core forced itself onto the surface and created short-lived lakes. Neither thing happened all that often. At home on Mars, wind and dust changed the landscape hourly. Here, she was walking through the footsteps of the day before and the day before and the day before. And if she never came back, those footprints would outlive her. Privately, she thought it was sort of creepy.

A rhythmic squeaking started to cut through the normally smooth hiss and thump sounds her powered armor made. She usually kept the suit’s HUD minimized. It got so crowded with information that a marine knew everything except what was actually in front of her. Now she pulled it up, using blinks and eye movements to page over to the suit diagnostic screen. A yellow telltale warned her that the suit’s left knee actuator was low on hydraulic fluid. Must be a leak somewhere, but a slow one, because the suit couldn’t find it.

“Hey, guys, hold up a minute,” Bobbie said. “Hilly, you have any extra hydraulic fluid in your pack?”

“Yep,” said Hillman, already pulling it out.

“Give my left knee a squirt, would you?”

While Hillman crouched in front of her, working on her suit, Gourab and Travis began an argument that seemed to be about sports. Bobbie tuned it out.

“This suit is ancient,” Hillman said. “You really oughta upgrade. This sort of thing is just going to happen more and more often, you know.”

“Yeah, I should,” Bobbie said. But the truth was that was easier said than done. Bobbie was not the right shape to fit into one of the standard suits, and the Marines made her jump through a series of flaming hoops every time she requisitioned a new custom one. At a bit over two meters tall, she was only slightly above average height for a Martian male, but thanks in part to her Polynesian ancestry, she weighed in at over a hundred kilos at one g. None of it was fat, but her muscles seemed to get bigger every time she even walked through a weight room. As a marine, she trained all the time.

The suit she had now was the first one in twelve years of active duty that actually fit well. And even though it was beginning to show its age, it was just easier to try to keep it running than beg and plead for a new one.

Hillman was starting to put his tools away when Bobbie’s radio crackled to life.

“Outpost four to stickman. Come in, stickman.”

“Roger four,” Bobbie replied. “This is stickman one. Go ahead.”

“Stickman one, where are you guys? You’re half an hour late and some shit is going down over here.”

“Sorry, four, equipment trouble,” Bobbie said, wondering what sort of shit might be going down, but not enough to ask about it over an open frequency.

“Return to the outpost immediately. We have shots fired at the UN outpost. We’re going into lockdown.”

It took Bobbie a moment to parse that. She could see her men staring at her, their faces a mix of puzzlement and fear.

“Uh, the Earth guys are shooting at you?” she finally asked.

“Not yet, but they’re shooting. Get your asses back here.”

Hillman pushed to his feet. Bobbie flexed her knee once and got greens on her diagnostic. She gave Hilly a nod of thanks, then said, “Double-time it back to the outpost. Go.”

The rest can be read over here. The book will be released 26 June 2012. Leviathan Wakes was my best book of 2011, so I can't wait for this!