Islington Crocodiles by Paul Meloy

Only a certain kind of writer can imagine genetically modified pandas munching on lawn furniture. But shooting the poor cuddly things in the face requires a whole other level of brilliance. Paul Meloy’s stunning collection of short stories, Islington Crocodiles, originally by TTA Press, now reprinted by Bad Moon Books, collects several short stories that have appeared over the years in British mags like The Third Alternative and Interzone, plus a few that are new to this collection.

Meloy’s stories are often set in dreamscapes–not pleasant, idyllic fields of dream, but bomb-blasted wastelands and rundown seaside towns filled with menacing childhood toys, dreams of broken bones and rusting innards. This decaying dream-reality often bursts into our world, in flickers caught out of the corner of the eye or glimpsed beneath a carnival tent, but unlike many stories the intrusions here are never vanquished at the end. For Meloy, the monsters under the bed are the status quo. The reality of these dreamscapes is made manifest by the many inhabitants that can exist in both worlds: the Firmament Surgeons, Paladins, Autoscopes, a Jungian constabulary doling out the barest bits of solace in the world, allowing quick flashes of sunlight in the darkness.

Meloy tempers the bleak pessimism of his stories with a black, sick humor. The kind of jokes that you know you shouldn’t laugh at, but can’t help yourself.

I highly recommend you check this book out. It is simply brilliant stuff.

Burton & Swinburne in The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

I have always been a big fan of Pyr Books. I can pretty much be assured that anything with the Pyr logo is going to be something I’ll like,  and the cover artwork is often breathtaking.

This latest book takes the cake. This is one of the most compelling book covers I have seen in a long time. And a cover blurb from Michael Moorcock does not hurt at all. I am getting this as soon as I can.

“This is an exhilarating romp through a witty combination of nineteenth-century English fact and fiction. Mark Hodder definitely knows his stuff and has given us steam opera at its finest…. A great, increasingly complex, plot, some fine characters, and invention that never flags! It gets better and better, offering clues to some of Victorian London’s strangest mysteries. This is the best debut novel I have read in ages.” —Michael Moorcock

More info on the book here.

Matter by Iain M. Banks

Iain M. Banks’ latest SF novel Matter is a welcome return to the environs of the Culture, and a welcome return to his estimable form after the earnest, but lamentable The Algebraist. Like most of Banks’ Culture novels, there are vast, powerful alien races; immense habitats housing trillions upon trillions, including the breathtaking interlaced orbital of the Morthanveld and the scattered Shellworlds (imagine a planet that resembles a Matrioshkin stacking doll, with multiple, concentric layers illuminated by artifical, mobile sunlets, each level populated by a Who’s-Who of galactic xenoforms). And like most of Bank’s Culture novels, none of this matters all that much.

What I mean to say is that Banks is less concerned with the razzle-dazzle of space opera tropes (though he is one of the best in the field to use them) than with the brutality–the humanity–that lurks ever present beneath the skein of the Culture’s alleged utopia. While whole planets may face annihilation and sentient Ships may die in suicidal cataclysm, it is a mere human hand reaching into the chest of a rival to crush his beating heart that is the engine of Matter. It is a novel that pits servants against masters, younger benighted races against the elder alien races that observe them, and above the elders there are the god-like beings that Sublimed or went Away. Imagine the Great Chain of Being writ large.

I think Banks uses the constructed Shellworlds to provide an apt metaphor for these ever expanding concentric rings of political and xenobiological association, and I think it is important to note that in the end it is a mere servant, Choubris Holse, who rises through the levels of his world, ascends into the many bewildering layers of alien societies, plunges back to the very bowels of his planet for a climactic glimpse of his WorldGod and the story’s denouement, and then returns home–a servant still, but now to something larger.

Matter is a great addition to the Culture novels and is probably one of the more accessible books for those new to Banks’ work. I highly recommend it. You can read an excerpt here.

If you are new to the Culture, you could start with Matter, but I would recommend starting with Consider Phlebas, the first published book (It looks like Orbit is reprinting some of his books in the U.S. starting next month) . Use of Weapons is my favorite, and one of the most brutal, of the Culture books.

UPDATE:

Paul Di Filippo has a good review up at SCI FI Weekly.

The Aviary by Jamie Tanner

 

It’s hard to give a sense of how great this book is without showing you all the pictures, but if you close your eyes and repeat over and over “porn, monkeys, robots, cat-headed people, sinister bird-man dolls, amputees, and penguins” then you may get a good sense of what’s going on. Very disturbing graphic novel. There is something very sinister about the story, and as each new, intertwining layer is revealed it becomes ever darker. I highly recommend that you check this out.

There is an excerpt in this month’s Weird Tales #347. (This I how I came across it in the first place.)

You can check out some panels here.