A delightful mix of high fantasy and futuristic speculation featuring royalty, noblemen, bandits, and other scoundrels.
Seven Italian-flavored confections from one of the prime architects of cyberpunk, who lives in Turin.
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Sterling, most recently with the novella Pirate Utopia (2016), a piece of what the Italians call fantascienza, an SF–adjacent combination of history and speculation. Here, he takes it to another level, labeling these seven stories as the work of Bruno Argento, his alter ego, a renowned dramatist who has driven the Italian subgenre into the mainstream. With an introduction by Sterling's spiritual offspring Neal Stephenson and a nod to Primo Levi, arguably the most famous denizen of Sterling’s adopted hometown, this collection resurrects some recent works published previously as e-books and introduces a handful of stories in a similar vein. “Kill the Moon” is endearing in its naïve imagination as it expounds on the embarrassment the narrator feels in 2061 about Italy reaching the moon. “Black Swan,” in the manner of Pirate Utopia, hinges on futuristic technology that serves as a MacGuffin but also plays havoc with history, postulating an alternative reality in which a journalist whose world features Nicolas Sarkozy as an underground terrorist suddenly finds himself presented with multifarious realities. “Elephant on Table” is less Matrix than Chaucer as the denizens of a medieval-flavored Shadow House navigate the inevitable politics of imperial power. “Pilgrims of the Round World” continues the royal drama as Sterling delivers a Shakespearean tale set a century or so before the bard took the stage. "The Parthenopean Scalpel," previously published in the collection Gothic High-Tech (2012), is rich but will probably carry more weight with readers familiar with Turin’s history. Finally, there’s “Esoteric City,” explaining how Italian hell is different from regular hell, and “Robot in Roses,” an imaginative take on the moral quandaries of Blade Runner, finishes the ride.
A delightful mix of high fantasy and futuristic speculation featuring royalty, noblemen, bandits, and other scoundrels.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61696-329-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tachyon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Weird and haunting and excellent.
The much-anticipated second novel from the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004).
The narrator of this novel answers to the name “Piranesi” even though he suspects that it's not his name. This name was chosen for him by the Other, the only living person Piranesi has encountered during his extensive explorations of the House. Readers who recognize Piranesi as the name of an Italian artist known for his etchings of Roman ruins and imaginary prisons might recognize this as a cruel joke that the Other enjoys at the expense of the novel’s protagonist. It is that, but the name is also a helpful clue for readers trying to situate themselves in the world Clarke has created. The character known as Piranesi lives within a Classical structure of endless, inescapable halls occasionally inundated by the sea. These halls are inhabited by statues that seem to be allegories—a woman carrying a beehive; a dog-fox teaching two squirrels and two satyrs; two children laughing, one of them carrying a flute—but the meaning of these images is opaque. Piranesi is happy to let the statues simply be. With her second novel, Clarke invokes tropes that have fueled a century of surrealist and fantasy fiction as well as movies, television series, and even video games. At the foundation of this story is an idea at least as old as Chaucer: Our world was once filled with magic, but the magic has drained away. Clarke imagines where all that magic goes when it leaves our world and what it would be like to be trapped in that place. Piranesi is a naif, and there’s much that readers understand before he does. But readers who accompany him as he learns to understand himself will see magic returning to our world.
Weird and haunting and excellent.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-563-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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A fast and fun outing in an immersive alternate world.
Following The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (2020), a rescue mission lands Susan on an entity’s radar.
Susan (art student, demi-mortal) and her boyfriend, Merlin, (gender shifting and nonconforming fashionista and left-handed bookseller) are still together but taking it slowly, especially because Susan’s not comfortable with the proximity to the supernatural Old World that Merlin represents (especially because her own Ancient Sovereign father is going to be waking at the New Year). But when contact with an ensorcelled map pulls Merlin into a pocket dimension out of time, Susan doesn’t hesitate to use her heritage and artistic ability to make a translocation map to get him back safely. Their dangerous jaunt reveals the existence of a supernatural serial killer—and draws its attention to Susan. While the booksellers unravel a pattern of murders going back decades, Susan tries to avoid being the next sacrifice while grappling with fears of losing herself to the Old World and being changed into something else. And the dreams she’s having of her father’s demesne, dreams that might be more than dreams, leave her convinced that a big change is coming. All plotlines are time-sensitive enough to put the dead in deadline, keeping tension high as they face a variety of threats. While Susan’s internal conflict gets repetitive, it pays off in the climax. The leads are White; the secondary cast’s racially diverse.
A fast and fun outing in an immersive alternate world. (Fantasy. 12-adult)Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-323633-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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