Battle of the Books, Bracket Six

Announcing Bracket Six of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books!

Battle of the Books continues with Bracket Six. For why we decided to do a Battle of the Books, click here. For the rules, click here.

Previous Battle of the Books winners have been Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear, The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner, The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis, The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi, and Harmony (alt.human in the UK) by Keith Brooke.

Aaron will review and judge Bracket Six, which features a new group of sixteen (16) contenders. (Amy pulled together and formatted all the book cover graphics.)

We've selected four "seeded" books -- four we are especially looking forward to (marked with asterisks) -- placed one seeded book in each quarter of the bracket, and then filled in the rest of the bracket randomly.  Here are your matchups.

First Quarter of Bracket:


Ari Marmell
False Covenant
(Pyr)
vs.
Clay and Susan Griffith
Vampire Empire:The Kingmakers
(Pyr)




Ross S. Simon
The Snow
(Damnation)
vs.
Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston
Earth Unaware
(Tor)***

Second Quarter of Bracket


Sam Sykes
The Skybound Sea
(Pyr)
vs.
Nancy Kress
After the Fall Before the Fall During the Fall
(Tachyon)***



B.V. Larson
Technomancer
(47North)
vs.
Rachel Coles
Pazuzu's Girl
(JournalStone)

Third Quarter of Bracket:


Tim Lebbon
London Eye
(Pyr)
vs.
Liz Williams
WorldSoul
(Prime)



James S. A. Corey
Caliban's War
(Orbit)***
vs.
Robin D. Laws
Blood of the City
(Paizo)

Fourth Quarter of Bracket:


Bernd Struben
The13th Zookeeper
(Strider Nolan)
vs.
Megan Powell
No Peace for the Damned
(47North)



Ian McDonald
Be My Enemy
(Pyr)***
vs.
Rowena Cory Daniells
Besieged
(Solaris)

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Some notes on the field:
-- Several of the books are difficult to classify, but by my best count, 6 are science fiction, 4 high fantasy, 3 urban fantasy, 1 YA fantasy, 1 YA science fiction, and 1 horror.
-- The field is comprised of eight men, five women, and three collaborations (James S.A. Corey is two people).
-- The contestants include 5 books from Pyr, 2 from 47North and 1 each from established publishers Orbit, Paizo, Prime, Solaris, Tachyon, and Tor and small publishers Damnation, JournalStone, and Strider Nolan.
-- 4 of the books are labeled as book one of a series, 7 are books continuing an existing series, 1 is a tie-in to the roleplaying game Pathfinder, and the rest appear to be stand-alone books.

We will begin announcing results on Wednesday, and try to make a Battle of the Books post every other day from then until we are done. Best of luck to all the competitors!

"The Visited" by Anaea Lay :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My story recommendation of the week is for "The Visited" by Anaea Lay, from the April 2013 issue of Lightspeed magazine. This is Anaea Lay's second SROTW.

"The Visited" is the obituary of musician Manuel Black, written by a former fan and lover. Black became a huge celebrity, because his music somehow helped people to make sense of the "Visitation," when everyone in the world had a vision of an unnaturally beautiful man or woman, accompanied by an intense sense of longing. But our narrator was a devoted fan even before the Visitation; here she describes his earlier work:

It’s still him, but now he’s angry. He hasn’t found his Morrisonian black leather pants yet, but he’s not afraid of the audience anymore. Curls fly around his face as he stares them down, challenging them to answer the questions he raises with his lyrics, to justify the world in the face of his seething despair and melancholy. Critics of the time wrote the music off as angst-ridden wankery. Audiences found it unpalatably depressing and turned instead to catchy dance pop. Listen to it now and you’ll realize his melancholy was a foreshadowing of the post-Visitation malaise waiting for all of us, that his anger was founded in an optimistic belief that things could be different if we’d just bother to acknowledge they ought to be.

In this elegantly written story, Lay makes no attempt to explain what the Visitation really was. Her focus is on the enigmatic Manuel Black, and how an artist's work can transform the meaning of what is happening in his audience's lives, to tragic or transcendent effect.

I once had a friend, who had been a Deadhead in an earlier phase of life, try to explain what compelled fans to follow The Grateful Dead from concert to concert, but I didn't understand the communal experience he was describing. "The Visited" is a piece of fiction, a form of art, yet it enables me to appreciate my friend's real-world experience in a way his factual words couldn't——and oddly enough, that's just what this story is about.

Book Review Teaser :: God's War by Kameron Hurley

New on Fantastic Reviews is Patty's review of God's War by Kameron Hurley.

Here's a some from Patty's book review of God's War :
Kameron Hurley has a serious thing for bugs. Inventor of a subgenre of the New Weird, she initially described her first novel God's War as "retro-cyberpunky," but added: "It's funny, when you don't have a word that describes exactly what you want, you sort of just cobble them together from existing words. Because I think what I meant was, you know, steampunk without the steam, but with a little cyber, only organic-cyber...er, organic punk? er...Bugpunk."

For Hurley, bugs are integral to credible world building. And for the most part, it works, as shown by the novel's 2012 Nebula Award and James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award nominations. Bugs enrich the landscape of God's War to the point where they are a fact of everyday life and a major component of the economy....Bugtech is used for powering automobiles, practicing medicine, detecting weapons, and other feats of magic/science....

God's War occurs on the planet Umayma, colonized thousands of years ago by humans. The two countries where most of the action takes place, Nasheen and Chenja, have been involved in a centuries-long war whose reasons for fighting have been forgotten.

The protagonist is Nyx, a solid woman, broad through the hips and breasts, and heavily muscled. In short, she's a brick house. Her physical aspect only reinforces her unstoppable nature. Like the terminator, she just keeps coming back....

To read the entire review -> God's War

Book Review Teaser :: Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

New on Fantastic Reviews is Aaron's review of Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear.

From Aaron's book review of Range of Ghosts :
Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear won the very first bracket, the Winter 2012 bracket, of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books, and a wonderfully deserving winner it was.

Elizabeth Bear is still a fairly new author - her first novel Hammered appeared in 2005 - but it feels like she is a veteran of the field. She has already published over twenty books, ranging between science fiction and fantasy in both series and stand-alone books, and she has won the Campbell Award for best new author and two Hugo Awards for her short fiction.

Range of Ghosts is the first in Bear's epic The Eternal Sky fantasy trilogy, drawing heavily on the history of the Mongol Empire. As the story begins, the Great Khagan has died, and his descendants have fought a bloody battle over succession, the kind of civil war that actually fractured the Mongol Empire. Temur, grandson of the Great Khagan, fought on the losing side for his brother. Temur survived the battle only because he was so grievously wounded he was left for dead....

...Our second major viewpoint character is Samarkar, from the neighboring Rasan Empire. Samarkar has willingly left her powerful family and undergone surgery leaving her barren, so that she may train to be a sorceress. Sent to investigate reports of dark sorcery, Samarkar encounters Temur...

To read the entire review -> Range of Ghosts

“The Long View” by Van Aaron Hughes :: Patty’s Story Recommendation of the Week

Hi.  Let me introduce myself: I'm Patty Palko, a new reviewer to Fantastic Reviews.  I thought that my first post should concern Aaron's story "The Long View" just published in the March/April 2013 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I was afraid that Aaron would be too humble to tout how great this story really is.  So, I thought I would do it for him.

"The Long View" follows genetic engineer Emzara Ghali-Gordon on a trip into deep space with a shipload of colonists.  Many authors have used faster-than-light drives, suspended animation, or multi-generational ships to bridge long travel times.  Instead, Aaron's Ghali-Gordon is responsible for altering the settlers' genetic code to slow their bodies to 1/20th their normal speed.  Aging a mere 6.25 years for a 125-year journey is an ingenious method of allowing humans to explore the universe.  As a doctorate holder in the biological sciences, I was impressed with how well the science and complications of gene therapy were communicated.

Yet from the beginning, it is clear that this is a tale of loss:

What makes a person decide to desert everyone she knows and leave the whole world behind?  My name is Emzara Ghali-Gordon, and the first time I did it was easy.

Through the well-integrated flashbacks, Emzara describes her history as jabaan, or "coward," for fleeing her native Egypt due to its unprogressive ways.  As the story advances, her actions result in an emotional impact wrapped within an unexpected ending.  It's time well spent following this sympathetic character to find what she gains, and loses, along the way.

(If you like "The Long View," I recommend my favorite Hughes story "The Dualist," from the anthology Writers of the Future Volume 27.  There is some damn fine storytelling in those pages.)

Battle of the Books, Bracket Five :: Wrap-up

We have just concluded Bracket Five of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books. There were good, competitive matches along the way, perhaps even some upsets. Hope you had a good time!

Congratulations to Keith Brooke's Harmony (aka alt.human), winner of Bracket Five of the Battle of the Books! Let's give a round of applause for all the participating books!

To see the whole bracket, click here.

All sixteen of these books are now available. Listed below are the featured books, sorted alphabetically by author. Click on the book title links to go that book's most recent book battle review.

The Croning by Laird Barron (Night Shade)
Paradox Resolution by K.A. Bedford (Edge)
This Case Is Gonna Kill Me by Phillipa Bornikova (Tor)
Harmony by Keith Brooke (Solaris)
The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown (Abaddon)
Kangazang! Star Stuff by Terry Cooper (Candy Jar)
Wildcatter by Dave Duncan (Edge)
A Guile of Dragons by James Enge (Pyr)
Ghost Key by Trish J. MacGregor (Tor)
The Express Diaries by Nick Marsh (Innsmouth House)
Nightglass by Liane Merciel (Paizo)
Railsea by China Miéville (Del Rey)
Fated by Alyson Noël (St. Martin’s)
City of the Fallen Sky by Tim Pratt (Paizo)
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (HarperCollins)
Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem (Solaris)

Some of these books and authors may be new to you, but after reading Aaron's book descriptions and battle reviews, I hope some of them sparked your interest. Perhaps we introduced you to a few new books. Only one book can win the bracket, but there were many good books in the competition.

Battle of the Books match-ups are decided based on reading a sample of the book. Most upon reading a mere 25 pages or 50 pages. So if a good book starts slow, in this review format, it may face an uphill battle. These matches are inherently subjective. Battles are decided based on which book the reviewer, Aaron, would rather continue reading.

Stay tuned for Bracket Six of Battle of the Books. We have another sixteen books lined up for the next competetion. Aaron will be reviewing. We'll be announcing the new group of contenders soon.

Battle of the Books, Bracket Five, Championship Round :: Harmony by Keith Brooke vs. The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers

We have arrived at the championship of Bracket Five of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books. In one corner we have Harmony by Keith Brooke, a science fiction novel set on an alien-occupied Earth. In the other corner we have The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, a near-future science fiction novel featuring a virus that kills pregnant women. So two books in the SHTF ("shit's hit the fan") sub-genre of SF. I (Aaron) have read through page 200 of Harmony and The Testament of Jessie Lamb, and the book I most want to continue reading to the end will be the champion of Bracket Five of the 2012 Battle of the Books.

Harmony: Solaris paperback, June 2012, 413 pages, cover art by Adam Tredowski. Harmony (published in the UK under the title alt.human) reached the championship by defeating Wildcatter by Dave Duncan in the first round and The Croning by Laird Barron in the second round, then edging Railsea by China Miéville in the semifinals.

In Harmony, Earth has been taken over by multiple races of aliens, who have herded all the humans into "Ipps," Indigenous Peoples' Preserves. Our teenaged hero Dodge inhabits the caves of the Craigside Ipp. Refugees from the nearby town of Angiere arrive, reporting that humans have been eradicated from that town. Our second viewpoint character, Hope, was among those who left Angiere just in time. Hope previously escaped some sort of hospital, where she woke with severe memory loss. Dodge knows there is something strange about Hope, because she lacks the "pids," personal identifiers, aliens have placed in all humans' bloodstreams. When aliens seize the leaders of Craigside, Dodge finds himself suddenly in authority, desperate for a way to save his community from the attack he fears imminent. One possibility is to bolt for "Harmony," a fabled city where humans and aliens live as equals.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb: Harper Perennial trade paperback, May 2012, 240 pages, cover photo by Clayton Bastiani. The Testament of Jessie Lamb advanced to the championship with wins over This Case is Gonna Kill Me by Phillipa Bornikova in the first round, A Guile of Dragons by James Enge in the second round, and Nightglass by Liane Merciel in the semifinals.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb is the memoir of a teenager imprisoned by her father (for reasons I don't want to say, since they are not expressly revealed unil halfway into the book, but careful readers will know long before that). In Jessie's near-future world, bioterrorists have unleashed the MDS virus, which makes it fatal for any woman to become pregnant. Scientists, including Jessie's father, work desperately to find a cure. The best they have managed so far is to create a vaccine to immunize frozen embryos, permitting healthy children to be born to comatose "Sleeping Beauty" mothers, who will never wake. Deprived of its future, society is rapidly deteriorating. Jessie experiments with various protest groups but finds little comfort there. Finally, Jessie makes a momentous decision that her parents refuse to accept.

The Battle: I am required at this point to name a winner, and I will wish to justify my selection, which may misleadingly suggest that one of these novels is flawed. So let me first say that these are both excellent books, and either would be a worthy Battle of the Books winner.

In Harmony, Keith Brooke does an outstanding job of taking our own planet and turning it into a bizarre and frightening place. Here, for example, is Hope first arriving in Dodge's town:

She had understood those people [in Angiere], she had known how to get the right responses from them.

But here . . . she did not know what to make of a club where grey-skinned, bug-eyed aliens went to have their skin painfully flensed with metal graters, or where liquid was poured on a creature that was something like a slug on many legs, the liquid attracting a seething mass of bugs to eat the creature's flesh. She was strangely disturbed by the alien scabs that latched onto buildings and watched everything that passed with individual slow-moving eyes, colours flashing across their crusty surfaces. She did all she could to avoid the humans she came to know as nearly-men, the ones with dead emptiness in their eyes and alien growths on their bodies, with twitching faces and limbs and naked bodies covered in scars and filth and bruises.

Brooke conveys the strangeness of his transformed Earth and its various types of alien occupiers so effectively that it feels as if the humans, like native Americans today, have become outsiders in their own land. Even better, Brooke shows us this strange landscape through the eyes of a likeable young protagonist, who faces a host of challenges, some quite familiar and others nearly beyond our comprehension.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb also features an appealing young protagonist, who similarly has to navigate becoming an adult against the backdrop of an awful future. Jane Rogers tells Jessie's story through superb prose, including an exquisitely written scene where Jessie loses her virginity, then afterwards remembers that her boyfriend is soon to leave on a dangerous protest:

I couldn't bear to be left on my own, I was so sensitised I needed him to keep his arms around me at all times. It was like I had been peeled. When he asked, "What is it?" I told him, and he hugged me and said he'd be back soon. But I couldn't help it, and I cried. "Stop it," [he] whispered, "stop it, stop it," and he licked the tears off my face like a dog until I couldn't help laughing, and he called me an idiot. . . . Part of me wanted him to stop talking and just start kissing me again, my blood was fizzy and it made my whole body tingle. But another part of me wanted to have my clothes on and be outside in the cold night walking home, breathing the dark air and letting the thinking bits of me catch up with the feeling bits.

The battle between these two excellent novels comes down to their respective stories.

Early on, I felt that Rogers was effectively using Jessie's personal struggles to suggest the larger societal turmoil caused by the MDS epidemic. But in the second hundred pages, the balance has shifted, with nearly all the focus on Jessie's personal decision and her resulting conflict with her parents. What is happening with society at large, including whether the human race will survive at all, has been relegated to the background. After 200 pages, it is apparent that Rogers is using MDS to frame various metaphors about parent-child relationships, gender issues, etc., but society's battle with the MDS virus is rather tangential to the book's actual plot——how Jessie's story ultimately plays out will do nothing to resolve the larger story about the death, or at least transformation, of society as a whole. This is not a criticism of Jessie Lamb. Rogers deliberately chose to keep a narrow focus to her tale and for the most part it works, but it's an authorial choice that, in the end, makes it a bit easier for me to put the book down.

Meanwhile, Harmony is also very closely tied to a single young protagonist. But, unlike Jessie Lamb, Brooke's protagonist Dodge finds himself in a leadership role where his decisions carry consequences for many other people. The first 200 pages close with a harrowing scene, which requires Dodge to react quickly. What's more, there have been plenty of hints to suggest that Dodge and Hope will be the key figures in a greater story that will impact all of Earth. And that compels me to keep reading Harmony to the end.

THE WINNER: Harmony by Keith Brooke

Congratulations to Keith Brooke, who is our fifth Battle of the Books winner, joining the illustrious company of Elizabeth Bear, James Renner, Ian Tregillis, and Paolo Bacigalupi. We will feature Harmony in a full review at Fantastic Reviews, and we will also try to arrange an interview with Keith Brooke (who has already blogged about the Battle of the Books, so we hope he'll be open to that).

Thanks for joining us for Battle of the Books #5. Stay tuned for Battle of the Books #6, which will feature yet another array of talented authors, including James S.A. Corey (aka Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck), Orson Scott Card, Nancy Kress, Ian McDonald, and many others.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

I drafted this back in the Fall, when The Hobbit was first hitting the theaters but neglected to post it. So belatedly, the Book of the Week is The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, the second in the legendary Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is the 1965 Ace Books "pirated" edition, the first American paperback, with cover art by Jack Gaughan.

I previously covered the story of Ace's unauthorized edition of Lord of the Rings, and you certainly don't need me to tell you who this fellow Tolkien was. So let's use this space to discuss another aspect of the Lord of the Rings intellectual property rights, unrelated to the dispute with Ace Books. I confess I've never watched the animated Lord of the Rings films, so I was not aware of this oddity until researching the Ace editions for this blog.

It seems that when Ralph Bakshi was creating the 1978 animated version, the studio persuaded him to adapt the three books into two films. (That's not as odd as it sounds, since Tolkien himself never conceived of the story as a trilogy.) So for the first film, confusingly released (over Bakshi's objection) under the title The Lord of the Rings, the studio only acquired the film rights to The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. That left the door open, when Bakshi ended up not making the second film, for Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. (who did the previous animated version of The Hobbit) to make the 1980 animated edition of The Return of the King. The trouble is, they only had rights to the third book, so most of what occurs in the second half of The Two Towers, including the defeat of Saruman and what happens in Shelob's lair, is omitted from any of the animated films. Thankfully, Peter Jackson came along and made the whole issue moot.

Battle of the Books, Bracket Five, Second Semifinal :: Nightglass by Liane Merciel vs. The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers

Our second semifinal in Bracket Five of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books features Nightglass by Liane Merciel against The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers. The book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 100 pages will reach the championship round.

Nightglass: Paizo paperback, July 2012, 345 pages, cover art by Tyler Walpole. Nightglass reached the Final Four by defeating Paradox Resolution by K.A. Bedford in the first round and The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown in the second round.

Nightglass is a tie-in to the Pathfinder role-playing game. "Shadowcallers" control the unpleasant region of Nidal. Our young protagonist Isiem, identified by the shadowcallers as having magical abilities, has begun training against his will in the shadowcallers' dark form of sorcery. This training includes requiring Isiem and his fellow students to practice torture on slaves, on each other, and even on the shadowcallers themselves. Those unable to master the magical techniques face dire consequences. Isiem is among the most talented of the new recruits, but he is beginning to realize that may be an even greater curse.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb: Harper Perennial trade paperback, May 2012, 240 pages, cover photo by Clayton Bastiani. The Testament of Jessie Lamb advanced to the Final Four with wins over This Case is Gonna Kill Me by Phillipa Bornikova in the first round and A Guile of Dragons by James Enge in the second round.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb is the memoir of Jessie Lamb, imprisoned by her father for reasons she has not yet revealed, although they are becoming pretty obvious by the end of 100 pages. Jessie lives in a near-future world where the MDS virus has made it fatal for any woman to become pregnant. Jessie has flirted with various protest groups, whose youthful idealism contrasts with her father's cynicism. Jessie's father is a scientist, and from him we discover that doctors have learned to induce comas to allow pregancies to come to term, although the "Sleeping Beauty" mothers will never wake. They have also developed a vaccine that can be used on embryos frozen before the spread of MDS (and thus not already infected) to make the motherless children immune to the MDS virus.

The Battle: Here are two very well-written books with interesting stories, but between pages 50 to 100 both authors have introduced unpleasant story elements, which make it a challenge for them to keep their readers engaged.

In Nightglass, Liane Merciel has the daunting task of showing us how her likeable young character Isiem becomes indoctrinated in very dark arts without rendering him completely unsympathetic. To her credit, she mostly succeeds. She manages to show how a young man who means well could be so overwhelmed by the evil system around him that he begins to lose the ability to discern right from wrong:

Was it wrong to torture a helpless slave, if serving as their practice subject was all that kept that slave alive? Was it still wrong if he inflicted the same pains on his closest friends, and suffered them in turn? Not eagerly——not because he was able to take any pleasure in it, as more devout Kuthites seemed to——but because he, too, survived only by the lash?

If it was not wrong, was it right?

Isiem didn't know. He was increasingly unsure whether he cared. Questions of that sort seemed relics from another world . . . They were things that existed in books, and they had no place in shadow-swathed Pangolais.

Isiem will soon participate in a ceremony of torture, in which one of his classmates plans revenge against a despised teacher. The teacher richly deserves what is coming, and Isiem will be at a loss whether to help the other student or try to save the teacher.

I admire Merciel's ability to show Isiem falling into evil even as he remains a mostly sympathetic character. That said, I don't much enjoy reading extended descriptions of torture, and since I don't have a clear concept of where the story is headed——one suspects eventually Isiem will rebel, but there is no hint of that yet after 100 pages——it's difficult to feel enthusiastic about continuing.

The story of The Testament of Jessie Lamb has taken some similarly distasteful turns, including a scene in which Jessie suffers physical abuse from her father and a flashback to when Jessie was assaulted and a close friend raped. But somehow these scenes have been less offputting than the torture and oppression in Nightglass, perhaps because I have a stronger sense how this brutality is advancing a larger, important story.

When Jessie learns that the MDS vaccine will only work if surrogate mothers sacrifice their lives to produce immune children, she is at first appalled. But her own awful experiences lead her to an epiphany (while observing sea horses at the aquarium whose males carry the young) that society cannot survive without its hope in the next generation:

I knew Dad and I were both thinking about those frozen embryos which can be put in a surrogate mother and vaccinated against MDS. It's exactly the same thing. It gives us a chance of survival. And quite suddenly it struck me how amazingly clever that was. I was thinking about the extraordinariness of the way sea horses must have evolved over thousands of years, and then about how humans know so much that within a space of days they can use their brains to choose to incubate their babies in a different way. The shining sea horses hung like question marks in the water, staring at me with their sideways eyes. I remember staring back at them and realising that human beings are beautiful and clever and ingenious.

I suspect Jessie's father is soon to have a reverse realization, that what he viewed as a hopeful development for society carries terrible implications for his family that will cause father and daughter to become violently opposed.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb mostly focuses on the small scale, on Jessie and her family and closest friends. But Jane Rogers is telling a big story, about what happens to all of society when it loses hope in the future. This is what science fiction is for, and I very much want to see where Rogers is taking this tale.

THE WINNER: The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers

The Testament of Jessie Lamb advances to the championship round, where it will face Harmony by Keith Brooke.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Bracket Five, First Semifinal :: Railsea by China Miéville vs. Harmony by Keith Brooke

Our first semifinal in Bracket Five of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books features Railsea by China Miéville going against Harmony by Keith Brooke. The book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 100 pages will reach the championship round.

Railsea: Del Rey hardcover, May 2012, 424 pages, cover art by Mike Bryan. Railsea reached the Final Four by defeating The Express Diaries by Nick Marsh in the first round and Ghost Key by Trish J. MacGregor in the second round.

Railsea takes place in a bizarre world where trains travel rails criss-crossing a deserted tundra to hunt moldywarpes, moles that grow to incredibly vast sizes. The molehunters' homes are on "islands" somehow constructed above the railsea. People live in mortal fear of the earth, and indeed, the one time our young protagonist Sham actually touches the ground he is immediately attacked by vicious mole rats. Sham's train is commanded by a female Captain Ahab, whose "philosophy" hinges on finding the moldywarpe that took her arm. (It turns out that in this world, every train captain has lost a limb and is obsessed with the land creature that claimed it.) Sham and the captain find a photograph of a strange place where only a single line of rail crosses the land, but the captain does not share Sham's fascination.

Harmony: Solaris paperback, June 2012, 413 pages, cover art by Adam Tredowski. Harmony (published in the UK under the title alt.human) reached the Final Four by defeating Wildcatter by Dave Duncan in the first round and The Croning by Laird Barron in the second round.

In Harmony, the Earth has long been occupied by multiple races of aliens, who have herded humans into "Ipps," Indigenous Peoples' Preserves. Our teenaged hero Dodge scratches out a living in the Craigside Ipp, which is visited by refugees from another town, Angiere, where aliens recently slaughtered nearly all the humans. Dodge also rescues a strange woman who lacks the "pids," personal identifiers, aliens have placed in all humans' bloodstreams. Tellingly, her name is Hope. A single chapter from Hope's point of view tells us she was in Angiere just before its destruction, which likely was no coincidence. Meanwhile, Dodge learns that a group of aliens is trying to help the humans, while others would prefer simply to wipe us all out.

The Battle: My guiding criterion in the Battle of the Books is not which book is better but which book do I most want to keep reading. Usually those are the same——I'd rather keep reading the book I think is better——but not always. Case in point: if you ask me which, Railsea or Harmony, strikes me as a better book after 100 pages, I will hem and haw and sincerely tell you they are both very good, but in the end I will say Railsea is probably the better of the two. Both books are very much about cognitive dissonance, creating a sense of strangeness, and nobody but nobody does weird better than China Miéville. The railsea is a striking construct, and his multi-layered world is wonderfully memorable.

But Harmony also contains plenty of interestingly strange elements, for instance the way humans have learned to convey immediate emotional responses through alien clicks instead of facial expressions. And I'm more attached to Harmony's key characters, Dodge and Hope; the only character developed so far in Railsea is Sham, and he doesn't much grab me so far.

There is a terrific scene at the end of the first 100 pages of Harmony where the aliens carry off the leaders of Dodge's community, then an alien asks the remaining people who is their leader now, and Dodge is startled to realize they are all looking at him. This tells me much about his personality, and it suddenly makes those around him his people in a deeper sense, which makes me care more about what happens to them all. This in turn makes me care about where the story is headed. I want to know whether Dodge can navigate the strange alien politics he has been caught up in, and whether he and Hope and Dodge's people can survive, and perhaps even find their way to a freer life.

In contrast, in Railsea, it doesn't matter to me very much whether Sham finds the place with only one railway line, or whether the captain tracks down her great white moldywarpe.

But wait! some of you cry. If Harmony has stronger characters and a more compelling storyline, doesn't that mean it was really the better book all along? Hmm, I answer. You could be right. If so, then what you're telling me is the Battle of the Books format is the best way to test how good a book really is. What an intriguing suggestion!

THE WINNER: Harmony by Keith Brooke

Harmony advances to the championship round, where it will face either Nightglass by Liane Merciel or The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers.

To see the whole bracket, click here.