Battle of the Books, Bracket Five, Second Round :: Nightglass by Liane Merciel vs. The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown

This third match in the second round of Bracket Five of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books features Nightglass by Liane Merciel against The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Nightglass: Paizo paperback, July 2012, 345 pages, cover art by Tyler Walpole. Nightlass advanced to the second round with a win over Paradox Resolution by K.A. Bedford.

Nightglass is a tie-in to the Pathfinder role-playing game. In the dark realm of Nidal, strange and unfriendly "shadowcallers" come to the home of our young protagonist Isiem, looking for young people with magical abilities. Isiem has no wish to go with them, but is forced to reveal his talents in order to save a friend. The shadowcallers take Isiem to Pangolais, to be trained in a dark type of magic. He proves quite adept, but has little enthusiasm for his new home.

The Devil's Nebula: Abaddon paperback, June 2012, 350 pages, cover art by Adam Tredowski. The Devil's Nebula reached the second round by defeating a "seeded" book, Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem.

The Devil's Nebula is the first volume in the Weird Space series. The series is set in the distant future, when humans battle an alien race called the Vetch. The three-person crew of The Paradoxical Poet arrives illegally on the evacuated world of Hesperides, in search of a lost work of art as well as wreckage from a mysterious alien spaceship, only to find a Vetch ship already there. After an initial contact with the Vetch, the commander Ed Carew leads his crew through the alien ship. The first 50 pages end with The Paradoxical Poet being captured by a human patrol vessel.

The Battle: The entries in the second round of this Battle of the Books continue to maintain a very high level. Nightglass gives us imaginative and evocative fantasy, while The Devil's Nebula is good fast-paced space opera. You could hardly go wrong with either one.

I loved the last scene of the opening 25 pages of Nightglass, but the next 25 pages begin with an even more vivid passage. Isiem and his friend and two other children from their village arrive in Pangolais, where they are immediately told "the Joyful Ones" must see them:

The ironwork on the pillars held odd, egglike shapes hoisted high above the children's head. They resembled huge maggots, pallid and featureless in their cocoons of bent metal——but as Isiem walked toward the first one, it blinked open eyes he had not known it had.

"Ah," the thing croaked in a rusty, gurgling voice. Its face was a soft white sack of flesh, its mouth a wet glimmer between pouches of suet. Yellow sand caked the corners of its pinkish eyes. Caged from the neck down in iron, the creature could not wipe the crusts away. "Young blood. Come, children. Let me taste you."

It was a man. Hairless, limbless, locked immobile on a pillar in this seldom-visited section of the Dusk Hall . . . but at one point he had been human, whatever he was now.

* * *

Isiem held back, too frightened to obey. The other boys quailed with him. Helis, casting an angry look over them all, shoved between them to approach the crippled man.

"I'm not afraid of you," she announced, crossing her arms and closing her eyes. "Do it."

"A lie," the limbless one replied, his words thick and wet with yearning, "but I will." His tongue rolled out——long, long, infernally long——and engulfed her head in its slimy, blue-veined coils. Helis issued a muffled protest, but the tonge wrapped around her face suppressed it.

Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwww! And I mean that in a good way.

The Devil's Nebula has also started well, with our main characters exploring an enigmatic alien ship, which suggests there is more at play in this future galaxy than they realized. However, although I don't have any complaints about The Devil's Nebula, through 50 pages it hasn't offered any passages quite so memorable as some of those in Nightglass. And while the characterization is certainly not bad, the characters are painted with a rather broad brush. Ed Carew is "a loner. He had no emotional attachments of any kind, and no wish to form them." One of his crewmembers, Jed, is found after their encounter with the Vetch "still cowering in the undergrowth."

So far I have the sense there is more depth to Isiem and the other characters of Nightglass, and I want to learn more about them.

THE WINNER: Nightglass by Liane Merciel

Nightglass advances to the semifinals, to face either A Guile of Dragons by James Enge or The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Bracket Five, First Round :: The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown vs. Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem

Continuing with the bottom half of Bracket Five of the Battle of the Books, we have The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown going up against Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

The Devil's Nebula: Abaddon paperback, June 2012, 350 pages, cover art by Adam Tredowski. Eric Brown is the author of over two dozen science fiction books and is a two-time winner of the British Science Fiction Award. The Devil's Nebula is the first volume in the Weird Space series. Brown has a second book in this series forthcoming, Satan's Reach, and further volumes are likely. Abaddon Books specializes in ongoing shared universe series, mostly fantasy and steampunk and zombies, but this new series is all space opera.

The Devil's Nebula takes place in a far-future universe, in which humans have battled an alien race called the Vetch. Ed Carew is the captain of the ship The Paradoxical Poet. His three-person crew has been dispatched to Hesperides, a former human colony evacuated when the Vetch captured this area of space. Their ostensible mission is to recover a rare piece of art inadvetently left behind, but a secondary objective is to find the wreckage of a mysterious spaceship that crashed on this world. When they arrive on Hesperides, Carew finds a Vetch ship has arrived ahead of them, looking for the same wreckage.

Deadfall Hotel: Solaris trade paperback, April 2012, 301 pages, cover art by John Kenn Mortensen. By my count, Steve Rasnic Tem is the author of eleven books, seven solo and four in collaboration with his wife Melanie, and a half-dozen chapbooks. His work emphasizes horror, but also includes a fair amount of fantasy and science fiction. He has won a World Fantasy Award, two Bram Stoker Awards, and two International Horror Guild Awards, among other honors.

The protagonist of Deadfall Hotel is Richard Carter, whose wife recently died when their house burned down. Richard was able to save their daughter Serena, and now he struggles to care for her while dealing with his own grief. A strange man named Jacob Ascher offers Richard the chance to succeed him as the manager of the Deadfall Hotel. The first 25 pages end with Richard and Serena arriving at the secluded hotel, which readers suspect is filled with supernatural presences.

The Battle: We have here two top-notch authors working at the top of their form, and now I'm supposed to try to justify putting down one of their books after only 25 pages.

Through 25 pages, The Devil's Nebula is engaging, fast-paced space opera. We have already had our first encounter with the bad-guy aliens, which ended in an interesting hint that maybe they aren't so bad after all, and maybe there's a greater threat lurking out there in the universe. At the same time, Brown has done a nice job of introducing the dynamic between his three human characters. I particularly like how Jed is the brash member of the crew, but when they get into a scrap, it's pint-sized Lania who suddenly steps forward to take charge.

The opening of Deadfall Hotel is by design less dramatic, as Tem hints at the strange nature of the Deadfall Hotel and slowly develops the relationship between Richard and Serena:

"Daddy?" came Serena's sleepy voice out of the back seat. "We're in the mountains already? Why didn't you wake me up?"

"They're not as close as they look, honey." But he wasn't really positive about that. . . .

"When I was little, I used to think all my good dreams floated up into the mountains," Serena said softly. "But the bad dreams, the nightmares, they floated down from the mountains, and through the city streets until they found the bedroom they were looking for. Isn't that funny, Daddy?"

On a sentence-by-sentence level, Deadfall Hotel is exquisitely written. Not that much happens in the first 25 pages, but the quality of writing by itself would be enough to get it past many first-round opponents. But unfortunatey for Tem, The Devil's Nebula is also very nicely written, and Brown has advanced the plot far enough in the opening section to get me engaged in the story. While both books are well done, that makes The Devil's Nebula a bit more difficult for me to put down.

THE WINNER: The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown

The Devil's Nebula moves into to the second round, where it will face Nightglass by Liane Merciel.

To see the whole bracket, click here.