(5) ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY –

SHADOWS OF THE APT / TALES OF THE APT (2008-2018)

Like my previous entry, this entry particularly resonated with me as reflecting my own unwritten story idea involving the same premise – but then Adrian Tchaikovsky went ahead and wrote it. And it’s awesome.

I have always been fascinated by insects, so one of my unwritten story ideas involved high fantasy with insect-people. They were essentially human, but with the skin or hair coloring of their insect species, as well as other physical attributes that did not radically alter their otherwise human appearance – wings for example (in the style of the butterfly or other insect wings occasionally depicted on fairies), perhaps antennae and so on.

I imagined the insect-people as essentially divided up into realms according to the three great species of social insects – bees, ants and wasps, although there would be different realms of each (corresponding to different sub-species or types). Each of these realms would also include other thematically similar insect-peoples – for example, bee-kingdoms (or more precisely, bee-queendoms) would include other pollinating insects, such as butterflies.

As for antagonists, one was spoilt for choice – flies or locusts as marauding hordes (the Locust Horde!), various parasitic insects (fleas, mosquitoes and so on) as blood-sucking bandits or brigands, arachnids such as spiders or scorpions as monstrous figures. However, I imagined the most dangerous and recurring antagonists as the fourth great species of social insects – termites. In fairness, I didn’t get much beyond imagining the various insect-people societies, although I did imagine my main protagonist as a mantis warrior.

And then I found Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt series, which effectively does just that – a high fantasy set in a world of insect-‘kinden’, humans who have adopted some of the characteristics of their insect-types (or arachnid-types) through their magical Art from the dangerous and giant fantasy insects (or arachnids) of this world. Ant and beetle kinden dominate the so-called Lowlands (not surprisingly, given the sheer prevalence of those insect species in our world).

Even more intriguingly, it is a world in which magic is being replaced by science – an industrial revolution by the technologically Apt peoples of the title, matched by a political revolution, in which the more mundane but Apt ants and beetles have ousted the more magically-minded moths and mantises (although mantis warriors are still legendary). However, the antagonists are not termites, but the growing and ruthless Wasp Empire.

Of course, Tchaikovsky is a little too fond of spiders for my arachnopobia (even if spider girls are notoriously hot) – a fondness that extends across his fantasy or SF works, not just the spider-kinden in this series. Perhaps because Tchaikovksy is secretly a spider himself, or maybe a man-shaped swarm of spiders, without a shred of normal human arachnophobia to show for it.

So – damn you, Adrian Tchaikovsky, for conceiving and executing your insect fantasy first, in such an epic series! And I love it!

SF & HORROR

Tchaikovsky straddles both fantasy and SF genres – his Hugo Award-winning Children of Time series is an example of the latter but of course also features his beloved spiders.

For that matter, Shadows of the Apt has more than a touch of SF to it – and on occasions I almost thought it had a similar premise as the Children Time series with human (and arthropod) space colonists. Setting aside those thoughts, it was interesting to have a fantasy world increasingly eschewing magic for industrialization and technology.

And it wouldn’t take too much tweaking to adapt his premises to horror. Because, you know, spiders – perhaps not to Tchaikovsky who loves them, but to an arachnophobe like myself.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(6) JAMES MORROW –

GODHEAD TRILOGY (1994-1999)

Religious and philosophical satire clothed in absurdist Vonnegutian fantasy – Morrow takes the Nietzschean theme that God is dead and makes it flesh, literally in the form of a two mile long corpse – or Corpus Dei – in the Atlantic Ocean.

This is the premise of the trilogy as a whole – particularly the opening of the first novel, Towing Jehovah. God is dead and the Vatican charges Captain Anthony Van Horne to tow the Corpus Dei with a supertanker to the Arctic Circle, to preserve it from decomposition, for possible resuscitation or at least for time to ponder the theological questions of the Deity’s death.

My favorite is the second of the trilogy, Blameless in Abaddon, where theodicy is made flesh – theodicy being the theological study of the problem of evil or suffering In the manner of the biblical Book of Job. It turns out that there’s life in the old God yet – and He’s about to be prosecuted in the World Court for the suffering of His Creation.

In the third book, The Eternal Footman, the last remnant of the Corpus Dei, God’s grinning skull or Cranium Dei, is in geosynchronous orbit over Times Square and Western civilization is collapsing as a people become ‘Nietzsche positive’ with their awareness of impending death (literally embodied in their own double or ‘fetch’).

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(7) WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER –

RESUME WITH MONSTERS (1995)

Great Cthulhu in a cubicle!

Yes – we’re talking a light fantasy evocation of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

Spencer delightfully combines a playful comedic style and observational humor to fantasy themes, as in Resume with Monsters, which combines the Cthulhu Mythos with satire of the corporate cubicle drone workplace.

Philip Kenan may not be the most reliable narrator of his experience as a worker in dead-end office cubicle drone jobs – between bouts of therapy and his unrequited quest to win back his ex-girlfriend Amelia, although he saved her (and quite possibly the world) from some…thing at their mutual previous employment (“the Doom That Came to MicroMeg”). Now he is routinely alert to signs of otherworldly incursions at his workplace.

Or perhaps he is simply lapsing into mental breakdown or outright insanity, symptoms of his obsession with H.P. Lovecraft’s “monsters” (his therapist noting that Lovecraft “was not in the pink of mental health”). An obsession born of his father’s own obsessive narration to him of the stories of Lovecraft, identifying it with the ‘System’ – “don’t let the System eat your soul”. An obsession that Philip Kenan tries to keep at bay by the equally obsessive emotional talisman of his own Lovecraftian novel, “The Despicable Quest”, which he has been constantly rewriting over twenty years until it has swollen to two thousand pages. Or perhaps all of the above.

It has a special resonance for those, like myself, who have always suspected a connection – nay unholy collusion! – between the soul-destroying corporate workplace and the soul-destroying dark entities of the Cthulhu Mythos. In my own experience as corporate cubicle drone, I suspected that the mind-numbingly boring files simply could not exist for their own purpose but had to have a more substantial and sinister purpose in inducing a receptive state or lack of resistance to otherworldly invasion. Of course, I was too smart for them, as I simply didn’t do my files…

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(8) CHRISTOPHER MOORE –

ISLAND OF THE SEQUINED LOVE NUN (1997)

Christopher Moore is a writer of comic contemporary fantasy, who has combined the narrative voice (and Californian geography) of John Steinbeck and the comic absurdist fantasy of Kurt Vonnegut.

Like other writers, Moore has constructed his own storyverse, with its focus in California (Moore himself lives in San Francisco) and particularly the sleepy town of Pine Cove. Sleepy that is, until invaded by demons and their weary summoners (Practical Demonkeeping), Godzilla (the fantastically named Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove) or near-miss zombie apocalypses (The Stupidest Angel).

As for which Moore novel is my personal favorite, there’s some tight competition – such as the Bloodsucking Fiends vampire love trilogy set in San Francisco or A Dirty Job psychopompic thriller also set in San Francisco (which crosses over with Bloodsucking Fiends).

However, my personal favorite is yet another fantastically named novel, The Island of the Sequined Love Nun. In this novel, Moore steps outside the main Californian venue of his storyverse to the Micronesian island of the title of the Shark People. Protagonist pilot Tucker Case is fleeing the literal and metaphorical debris of an unfortunate incident involving alcohol, sex and a plane crash. Blacklisted as a pilot in the United States and pursued by the goons of Mary Jean Cosmetics for the destruction of their pink plane, he takes the only job opportunity available to him – flying between a tiny Micronesian island and Japan for “an unscrupulous medical missionary” and “his beautiful but amoral wife”. The latter is the eponymous blonde high priestess, impersonating the pinup girl on the sacred Second World War bomber of the island’s cargo cult, exploiting the Shark People for a sinister purpose. However, bomber pilot Captain Vincent Bennidetti may be deceased but has also ascended by the power of belief to present-day deity of the Shark People – and he is not about to abandon his flock without some supernatural intervention (and a talking fruit bat named Roberto). That is, when he’s not playing poker with his fellow deities – and losing to Jesus…

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(9) JAMES LOVEGROVE –

PANTHEON (2009 – 2019)

“Watch closely, everyone. I’m going to show you how to kill a god”

That’s not from James Lovegrove’s Pantheon series – it’s from the film Princess Mononoke – but it captures much of the same spirit (heh).

This is also a departure from the usual rule for my wildcard tenth place entry as the best entry from the present or previous year – that’s because I’ve only recently gotten into James Lovegrove’s Pantheon series and want to follow it through to the end of the series of nine books.

The premise of his Pantheon series is straightforward – each is a standalone story with a human military or paramilitary protagonist reacting to or resisting one of the titular pantheons of gods (and goddesses) literally returning to the modern world to rule it. Note that standalone as each story features only one pantheon at a time – they don’t return in combination or all at once, although that would make an interesting premise of competing pantheons. Obviously the titular pantheon in the first book The Age of Ra is the Egyptian one – the series continues through The Age of Zeus, The Age of Odin, and so on.

The premise of these series particularly resonates with me because it reflects my own unwritten – and let’s face it, only partly baked – story ideas involving the same premise, both for single pantheons and multiple pantheons returning in combination. So kudos for Lovegrove for actually baking the cake and icing it – although I suppose there’s still room for competing pantheons.

It’s a similarly dark premise to David Brin’s Thor Meets Captain America (and even more so its sequel The Life Eaters) – hence why I also like those works as well. And it’s a somewhat parallel premise to that of a higher entry on this list.

SF & HORROR

Demonstrating the overlap between the genres, The Pantheon series is also classified as military science fiction – which it definitely overlaps if you see the gods as alien or extradimensional beings or entities. I class it as fantasy because, you know, the antagonists are gods with supernatural powers.

Not much horror – although it wouldn’t take too much tweaking of the premise to adapt it to horror. Heck – a surviving older pantheon or god is the common premise of folk horror.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(10) LEV GROSSMAN –

THE BROKEN SWORD (2024)

As usual, this is my wildcard tenth place for most the newest entry of enduring interest, typically as best of the present or previous year – in this case published in 2024.

Lev Grossman isn’t a wildcard entry as I previously read The Magicians trilogy – which in a nutshell, combines a dark adult version of Hogwarts with a dark adult version of Narnia, Brakebills University and Fillory respectively.

In The Magicians, magic is dangerous. And it costs, usually in sacrifice or profound loss. That’s whether it’s the curriculum of spells in Brakebills University or other sources of magic elsewhere. To paraphrase Hemingway, magic tends to break everyone (although most of the magicians are somewhat broken in the first place) – but those that will not break, it kills.

The Bright Sword brings something of the same theme to Arthurian epic – or more precisely post-Arthurian epic:

“The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, complete with duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It’s also a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, trying to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves”.

Aspiring knight Collum arrives at Camelot to prove his quality for the Round Table – two weeks too late, as King Arthur has died at the Battle of Camlann with only a handful of his knights left, the self-professed dregs of the Round Table.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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