Read This: Hard Magic

Yesterday, Tor.com published an interview I did with Laura Anne Gilman, focused primarily on her latest novel, Hard Magic. It’s the first book in a series called “Paranormal Scene Investigations,” about a young Talent (we don’t call them “witches”) who joins a new agency that’s looking to develop a form of forensic magic to solve crimes perpetrated by and against the supernatural community.

So Bonnie Torres is plunged into an all-new work environment, forced to sort out the office dynamics even as the PSI team gets its first case—and as some within the “Cosa Nostradamus” (as the supernatural community of Laura Anne’s contemporary fantasy novels is called, springing off an earlier series of novels) make it abundantly clear they don’t want an independent agency poking into their affairs. Laura Anne moves the story at a brisk clip—this is a good place to start if you haven’t read her contemporaries before; even though the storyline runs concurrently to her Retrievers series, it does so in a way that requires no previous knowledge, and should even contain surprises for long-time fans.

3 August 2010 | read this |

Read This: Solomon’s Thieves & Prince of Persia

Although I’m not nearly as widely read in the genre as I would like to be, I’m a fan of the European graphic novel tradition known as bande dessinée, which Clive James has described as “an upmarket comic book,” which is an okay definition as far as it goes—I would specify that it’s a long-form narrative told in comics form and, generally speaking, outside of the superhero tradition. Rather than a series of comic book issues packaged together as “chapters” of a larger story, a BD commonly comprises a single, large-scale narrative, but that isn’t to say serialization never occurs—or, more to the point since I’m talking about Solomon’s Thieves, that stories can’t extend over several volumes.

Solomon’s Thieves is the first volume of a trilogy, written by Jordan Mechner and illustrated by the husband-and-wife team of Alex Puvilland and LeUyen Pham, which uses the 14th-century persecution of the Knights Templar, and the legends surrounding their lost treasure, as the springboard for a classic adventure yarn. There’s no occult conspiracy here; the long-standing rumors about the Templars are touched upon, but in a context that underscores the political intrigues within the French court that led to the order’s suppression. Although it’s somewhat frustrating that this volume, being only the first third of a larger story, is almost entirely set-up, it does an effective job of setting up the major characters and hinting at the dynamics that will unfold in future installments—and, in the meantime, there’s plenty of action: fight scenes like the one above, wild chases through the streets of Paris, and a pull-out-the-stops battle just before the cliffhanger ending. The artwork does a fine job of telling the story without calling attention to itself, equally effective in conversation and action scenes.

(more…)

2 August 2010 | read this |