Alan Campbell – King Of Adventure

My review of Sea Of Ghosts by Alan Campbell is up now at Strange Horizons.

The book was selected for review by Brian O’Leary as a donor reward for contributing to last year’s Strange Horizon fund drive. I volunteered as I had been a fan of Campbell’s previous work. I’m very happy with the outcome – the pull quote for the review is “Alan Campbell might well be the best writer of adventure fiction in the UK at the moment” – and I hope Brian is too.

You might notice that the review is a little shorter than normal. This is because between reading and reviewing the novel, my son was born. This is awesome but it does mean my free time is a little squeezed. My reading rate has gone down to a book a month and my writing rate has dropped even further. I am planning to finish The Space Opera Renaissance this year though, honest.

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King Leopold Stickytoes

Alan Campbell on the ten worst stories he ever tried to write:

I found a document on my computer with the title, “Never Buy Radiators from Genies.” I didn’t remember writing it, so I opened it up. Inside the document I found this one sentence: Never Buy Radiators from Genies.

Tick Tock

My review of God Of Clocks by Alan Campbell is up now at Strange Horizons.

In my first draft I went off on one about the evils of trilogies, missed deadlines and modern publishing in general. Thankfully for you lot most of this got cut. However, I will take this opportunity to reproduce the full quote from Richard Morgan that I mention in the review:

See, I’d always talked a good fight about making each book in this trilogy a self contained novel, but it wasn’t until quite recently that I realised how deeply satisfied I was with the ending of The Steel Remains. Sure, there are loose ends, but when wasn’t that true of one of my books? But my characters all ended up where I wanted them to be, they bedded down into the consequences and outcomes of what they’d seen and done with the pleasing clunk of emotional deadbolts falling into place – so rolling them all out of bed again, splashing water on their faces and getting them to open up and let in the morning light has proved a lot more problematic than I’d expected. I started at least twice and then had to tear up what I’d written because it was some weak-assed shit. Worse still, when I did finally get onto what felt like the right track, it involved at least a couple of scenes that I really didn’t want to write. If you guys thought The Steel Remains was brutal, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It’s Not For You

My review of Nights Of Villjamur has generated quite a few comments over at Strange Horizons. In fact, more than any of my other ones. (Red Seas Under Red Skies, another “core genre” fantasy novel, is the only one that has come close.) The conversation – if you can call it that – continues in this thread over at OF Blog Of The Fallen.

As it happens, my next review for Strange Horizons is another fantasy novel: God Of Clocks by Alan Campbell. It will be interesting to see how many comments this (positive) review attracts.