Author: R.V.V.Greene

Publisher: Angry Robot

Premise: A little over a thousand years from now, mankind has fled a dying Earth and founded a dozen or so colonies that now communicate and trade via sub-light Trade Ships. This wasn’t always the case, but the secret of “worm drives,” along with a lot of other dying Earth technology, has been lost. Thanks to relativity, the people who crew these ships experience history differently – while a few months may pass on a round trip between two colony worlds, twenty years may have passed on the worlds themselves. Some people live their lives on the trade ships, others work a few trips as crew and then settle on a colony world, the lives they left behind now relegated to history.

One such ship is the Hajj. Aboard, Adem Sadiq is a life-long crew member and a part of the family that controls and flies the Hajj. It is (for reasons that become clear quite quickly but aren’t exactly what they initially seem), time for Adem to get a wife. This is arranged by his family – but, because of the relativity effect, said arrangement is made before said wife is even born. Said wife is then genetically tailored and educated according to the design of Adem’s family. Enter Hisako, the co-protagonist of The Light Years.

Execution: The differing perspectives on history between those who see it unfold at different speeds combined with the designer bride idea gel together well and feel coherent. The first half of the book concerns itself with Hisako growing up, being educated, being talented, discovering that she’s a contract bride and trying to come to terms with this while the society around her creaks ever more at the seams from the constant influx of refugees from other (failing) colony worlds. Meanwhile, Adem is pootling around space in his family spaceship, noticing much the same general decline but more preoccupied with making music. Oh, and there’s a secret plot afoot and a villain aboard, both of which unfold with a sense of inevitability rather than as surprise twists, and neither of which directly involve Adem for quite a while. Eventually Hisako comes aboard and events unfold steadily towards their predestined (again, no great twists or surprises) conclusion.

Either of The Light Years twin premises could sustain an entire novel on their own and possibly an entire trilogy. It’s also a short book, and as a result The Light Years tends to touch on the surface of the questions it raises but never goes in deep. The arranged marriage between Hisako and Adem, for example: Hisako clearly had no say in the matter, Adem is largely going along with what’s been asked of him, yet they both remain largely calm and rational about their situation. The Light Years does a lot of good work setting up why they both have mixed feelings about it: Hisako might never have ever existed without it and has lived a somewhat privileged life because of it, while Adem was quite happy with his other lovers. When Hisako comes aboard, the crew (particularly Adem), fall over themselves once she’s aboard to give her has much space and freedom and agency as they possibly can; while at the same time the story never forgets that she’s had little choice in the decisions that have defined her life. However, it then largely leaves this hanging as a philosophical question for the reader rather than trying to dig into the meat of its own premise. It repeats this pattern throughout, the overall result being a sense of a lot of well-constructed questions for which the narrative doesn’t attempt to offer any answers.

Personal summary: The Light Years feels like the opening volume of a series: well-constructed concepts set up to be explored in depth in later instalments along with two central characters forced into a relationship but whom I never felt I got to know. The result for me was thought-provoking read rather than one that engages on an emotional level.

Narration: In keeping with the dual protagonist approach of the story, the audio production uses two narrators, one for Adem’s chapters and one for Hisako. Both narrators are clear and offer a ‘deliver the story’ rather than ‘deliver a performance’ approach to the narration (those who tend to listen with a high level of background noise may appreciate that delivering a ‘performance’ isn’t always a good thing). The dual narrator approach has the significant drawback that none of the background characters end up having any distinction – everything is either in Adem’s voice or Hisako’s voice. As a consequence, I occasionally lost track of which character was speaking whenever there were more than two characters in a scene. In my recording, there was a chapter towards the end that is repeated, once in each voice.

Disclaimer: This review was based on an Audible download provided for free by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

General notes on my approach to reviews are here: Review Philosophy (03/08/2021) | Stephen Deas.

I’ve since changed publishers, a parting of ways that was very mutual. I’ve written a crime novel for Arrow and I’m very happy with it. I’m now writing fantasy for Angry Robot. I like to think, as in the start of any new relationship, we’ve both put in the effort to make it work. COVID certainly isn’t helping. It IS nice, however, to have the same editor at publication as commissioned the books in the first place. With one exception, this is the first time in twelve books that’s happened.

I have a new agent too, this time because Robert had to quit for personal reasons.  We didn’t always see eye to eye but I can’t fault the effort he put in to getting I Know What I Saw  made into a novel that works.

Brexit is still a stupid act of national self-harm but I won’t bang on about it here. The facts and figures speak for themselves. If you don’t want to see them, you’ve already made that choice. There won’t be much politics here. We’ll back to reviews and giveaways and a little self-promotion and the odd extra scene that didn’t make it into the final MS and that sort of thing. It won’t be as regular as it once was, but it’s the books that matter, right?

Neither Gallow nor William Falkland look set to make a return through conventional publishing. Sorry. I’d love go back to both of them but I have to write what pays for the foreseeable future. There are still stories happening but they have to stay under wraps for now.

Thank you all for your support. Zafir, Gallow and Falkland are all as dear to me as they are because of you.

TTFN

-Steve-

will

be

…

…

.

.

^___^___^___^___^_________^___^_______________________________________

How is this so?

Well…

I guess it was the best part of two decades ago when one of the friends I used to game with decided they wanted to run a cyberpunk campaign. Back then cyberpunk was all the rage, Neuromancer was still vaguely new and everyone wanted to be Hiro Protagonist from Snowcrash (you haven’t read Snowcrash? Go away and do that. No, wait, go away and read LoneFire and THEN read Snowcrash. Snowcrash is a considerably better book. I wish it wasn’t so but there it is. Then again being not-as-good-as-Snowcrash is a bit like being not-as-hot-as-the-sun…)

I digress. So a few years earlier I’d played a few sessions in a different campaign with a character I’d come to very much enjoy, and so I imported it, and if Constantine here feels like a character imported from a table-top game, that’s because he is, but I’d like to point out that it was a VERY GOOD tabletop game, thank you.

About the same time it finished I was struggling to write my first novel (and it’s still not finished, so there you go). As something else to do I started to write the story we’d just played. For some reason – I think because I was acutely aware that it was a little TOO close to Snowcrash and also I was very much into Peter Hamilton at the time – I shifted the setting from near-future Earth to a proper Space Opera backdrop. After a few false starts it just poured out. I think what I was aiming for was Snowcrash meets The Reality Dysfunction. Had I been a vastly better writer, I might have reached somewhere close. I wasn’t and so I didn’t, but over the years I found I kept coming back to it now and then, polishing, revising. It has something I like. A certain rawness, a naivety maybe. Maybe it’s just because it reminds me of all those game sessions, banging our heads against a plot we didn’t understand and couldn’t do anything to stop. So I was tinkering with it, now and then, more than any of the old stories from that time.

Cut to a couple of years ago and a clear realisation that The Silver Kings was going to be the last Stephen Deas fantasy that Gollancz were going to publish, at least in the foreseeable future. Thing is, I have a stack more material already partially written and there are at least six or seven people who’d like to read it. So I’ve been looking at self-publishing (efforts so far are the shorts here and here), but damn is it a lot of effort. It’s not so much the effort in getting the formatting done right (don’t use any formatting people), but if you want anyone to know it exists then you have to market hard and you have to play the system.

Venture Press, apparently, can do that. So we shall see. I always had a soft spot for my sweary little effort at cyberpunk, even if it’s not desperately profound; but then the cyberpunk gaming wave was all about style and substance came after.

Lonefire is available from Amazon and only from Amazon as an e-book and I’ve got a little sample of it here.

Remember what I said about it being SWEARY. There was point when the word fuck appeared on the first page more than forty times. It’s since been pruned… somewhat. Also prizes for spotting all the references to 80’s goth culture…

“In prose sometimes as elegant as a gold and glass airship, or as stark as a dragon destroying an entire city, the worlds Deas carefully built in his previous Memories of Flames novels are slowly torn apart. Bellepheros, Grand Master of the alchemists’ Order of the Scales, is kidnapped by Taiytakei slavers so their sea lords can exploit his control over immortal dragons. They need a dragon rider, so they capture the fallen dragon queen Zafir. The Taiytakei have also enslaved Tuuran, former soldier in the Adamantine Order that answered to Zafir, and Berren the Crowntaker, a warrior cast into another’s body through sorcery. Bellepheros is charmed by the compassionate witch Chay-Liang into building a dragon eyrie, Berren seeks to undo his curse with the help of Tuuran’s skills and companionship, and revenge-bent Zafir swears to destroy all Taiytakei everywhere with her dragon, Diamond Eye. All of them race toward a major clash that may appear in future books but is only hinted at in this installment. Deas’s dense tale unfurls a fantastic multiverse where a queen can become a slave but a slave can change worlds.”

It’s been a while since I got excited by a review, but for Publishers Weekly I make an exception.

Gollancz have kindly supplied the lettering to match the previous thief-taker books. There’s some more design work to be done and the colours are arbitrary at the moment, but I like the picture and the motif fits the story perfectly (a small band of thief-takers head out into the bay at night to investigate the arrival of a mysterious ship). So I’d like this for the cover, or something in a similar vein.

I found this particular piece here on deviant art. I’ve tried to contact the artist via Deviant Art’s message service, I’ve tried via the artist’s mail address given in his profile and I’ve tried via the contact link on his own web page, asking whether the rights to use the picture as cover art for a story are available for purchase. I’ve had no response. Too busy, not interested I don’t know. So OK, open call for submissions then. I’m looking for some cover art. I’m prepared to pay for it. The example here shows you what pretty well what I’m looking for (although if I’m comissioning from fresh I’d like something in portait format with bland areas of sky and sea for the title and the name, and might switch their positions).

So if anyone knows anyone who might be interested in taking on a commission like this, please let me know. Budget will be limited but I don’t expect artists to work for free. Meanwhile I continue my own searching, and if the original artist of this piece ever happens to get in touch, he’ll have first dibs. Suggestions here or via Twitter or e-mail me.

Last week I self-published a short story through Amazon. Here it is. It’s a story that appeared in the BFS anthology Unexpected Journeys published for World Fantasycon 2013. It’s about six thousand words. Problems I encountered with this first pipe-cleaning exercise

• I haven’t figured out how to make it available for free. Yet. It’s free if you’re signed up to Kindle Unlimited
• Getting a cover sorted out can be something of an arse. Note the lack of author name and title. I also have no idea how well this cover art comes out on a kindle for reasons…
• If you download a sample from Amazon, you’ll see the paragraph indent formatting is all off. I believe I have fixed that. I believe I have uploaded the fixed file. I believe I did that about a week ago. Yet still the file Amazon shows as its sample is the original published upload (my first major mistake was publishing before the formatting was right in the belief that I could change it later).

So I’m kind of torn. I’d like you to download The Sin Eater so that someone can tell me whether the formatting and cover are now present and OK (they’re not on my version, but I bought the original and I can’t seem to get an update to happen). But on the other hand you shouldn’t be paying for something that isn’t formatted right. So don’t buy my book, but if you happen to be able to get it for free and happen to have a look, please do let me know whether the paragraph indents are fixed (and as of writing they’re still not fixed on the Read-A-Sample sample, so if that changes I’d like to know too!) and whether the cover downloads OK.

[UPDATE: The feedback I've had so far is that it's all fixed. So, um, DO buy my book after all...

Lessons learned. I'm in the process of getting another story ready. A story about Syannis the thief-taker, a sort of the-beginning-of-everything companion to go with the end-of-everything Silver Kings. Hopefully I'll do better.

Some new reviews have shown up. One of Empires that actually likes it! Hurrah!

“All round a cracking piece of fiction and something that a lot of Science Fiction fans can really get behind especially as the tales not only keep you hooked but leave you wondering throughout if mankind can triumph against such odds. Magic.”

I think, if I'm honest, the fairly ciritical SFX review was one of the most accurate. "One tenth Iain M Banks-lite … 90% is half urban thriller, half Michael Bay’s Transformers." I don't think that was meant in a good way, by the way, but for better or worse, it's on the nail. I note that Empires wasn't submitted for the Clarke award. Probably wise.

A new one up for The Royalist too.

“... an intriguing, drama-laden, heart-thumping crime thriller with historical accuracy and authenticity. I found myself sorely disappointed at the last page; not with the ending, but that it had ended!”

I struggle harder to find a critical alternate point of view with this one, but the guy on Amazon who doesn't like William Falkland for having a mindset that very accessible to modern thinking (as opposed to having a Seventeenth century mindset) has a point.

Anyway, I'm in an Empires frame of mind at the moment, so this week's giveaway is Robot Overlords by Gollancz's very own Mark Stay, who also wrote the script for the movie.

"The adults lost the war and now the kids must save the world! Robots rule the streets and the people are locked in their homes. Stepping outside risks being vaporised by a hulking Sentry or picked off by a lethal Sniper. Through the ruins of Britain a group of kids set out to join the Resistance. Hot on their heels however is their old teacher turned robot collaborator Mr Smythe."

The movie has a limited release in theatres and is on right now (Vue cinemas seem to be showing it), so there's some Easter viewing for you if you like 

Robot Overlords

Usual deal – comment on this post in some way before Sunday 5th  April and I’ll randomly select a lucky victim for a free copy. No one has complained (so far) about how long it takes me to get to the post office and post things, but it can take a while and if you live abroad then it can take even longer. Sorry about that, but they do get there eventually. Well, so far. Am currently a week behind with posting things.

2013 also saw the release of three Nathan Hawke novels in quick succession, much more swords and sorcery. Three novels in consecutive months, under a different name, straight into paperback (which isn’t the usual Gollancz way) and with those glorious covers with nothing but the artwork on the front. They didn’t sell terribly well either, although they did better than Dragon Queen. If there’s one ray of hope for Nathan Hawke it’s that there’s still a steady trickle of sales, and that the second and third books are selling close to as well as the first, which suggests that maybe, on the whole, The Crimson Shield is a strong enough story to make you want more.

On the whole, 2013 didn’t work (actually 2013 sucked for a whole variety of reasons, professional failure being the least of them). So just as well 2014 hasn’t been about fantasy nearly as much. As well as the second Zafir dragon novel, The Splintered Gods, 2014 saw historical crime fiction, The Royalist, military SF (Empires: Extraction) and a co-written SF game tie-in (Elite:Wanted). Turns out I was also a lot less productive this year than I was in 2013, writing only a little over two hundred thousand new words over the course of the year as opposed to over half a million the year before. That had a lot to do with needing to have a real job for a bit.

Will this year’s titles sell? The Splintered Gods won’t. I guess by now you either like my dragons or you don’t, so whoever liked Dragon Queen will probably get on with The Splintered Gods, but it’s definitely part two of a trilogy.

Elite: Wanted will probably do well enough. Don’t expect great depth of character or some startlingly original piece of world-building. It seems popular enough among Elite fans, but as with most tie-in fiction, it will doubtless struggle to reach beyond the game-playing audience. Whether there can be any more Ziva and Ravindra seems unlikely, and will depend very much on Frontier and their plans for further expansions of the game. Here’s a the most recent review I could find, which is fairly typical. “…a fast, frentic space opera that pays homage to Elite in the best possible way.” SFbook.com

Bulldog Drummond: Dead Man’s Gate is an e-book onyl novella I did for the small e-publisher Piqwiq. I have no idea AT ALL whether it’s selling any copies. The fact that the first novella went through three stages of editing and the second two are only going through one each smacks of desperately trying to save money, so I’m going to guess probably not, and apologise right now for the inevitable typos.

Empires: Extraction hasn’t been out for long and it hasn’t had many reviews, but so far they’ve all been pretty grim and they all like Infiltration better (OK, the two that I’ve read have. I haven’t read the SFX review), which largely sucks for me, but I can see their point that Gav’s aliens are better. Early impression is this is an experiment that didn’t work. I can’t see me and Gavin being asked to write a second pair of books in this form. There might be a different way to go forward.

The Royalist, by contrast, has enjoyed a rather kinder reception. Here’s the most recent review I could find; again fairly typical. “a very enjoyable and refreshing read that gave you a new understanding of the time and the New Model army and how it was anything but united” Reality is a Bore. A second William Falkland volume comes out next summer. If anything from this year is going to carry on, I reckon it’s this one.

2015: The Silver Kings comes out in the summer, the last of the dragon books I’ll be writing for a while. Like Dragon Queen it’s very much Zafir’s story, and all the better for it, though it does leave a few other things hanging as a result. That, for me, will be the pick of the bunch for next year because it’s so close to my heart. There are two more Bulldog Drummond novellas in the pipeline. Nathan Hawke has three Gallow shorts coming out in the first half of the year, and then I guess the title I’m most hopeful for is the second William Falkland novel: The Protector, but more about that closer to the time.

I have no idea what I’ll be writing in 2015. Another William Falkland novel, I hope. Maybe, if the Gallow shorts do well, there can be another Nathan Hawke outing.

In a couple of weeks the SF novels Empires: Extraction and Empires: Infiltration come out. Like Elite: Wanted, these both have a colon in the title and are coming out under the name of Gavin Deas on account of having been co-written with Gavin Smith. Unlike Elite, we each got to do our own whole novel in Empires. Although most of the events are set in 2015, Extraction starts twenty years earlier, in Bosnia, in 1995, with the massacre of Srebenica (or at least a part of it). Around that time I was exchanging a few letters with a Slovenian girl I’d met on a train a couple of years before and who happened to be into the same music as I was, and yes, OK, Slovenia wasn’t Bosnia, but it wasn’t exactly Scotland either. We didn’t talk about what was happening to what was once Yugoslavia, but it shamed me later to realise how ignorant I was, which is why this week’s giveaway is the way it is.

It’s also quite sweary, that opening chapter. I’m sure there are genteel squaddies out there, but I haven’t met them yet.

Other news: here’s a review for Elite: Wanted…

“I’ve enjoyed “Wanted” much more than I was supposed to enjoy any tie-in novel. Deas and Smith spin a mightily interesting yarn and I’ve especially enjoyed the way personal lives of characters influenced their decisions and often completely changed the course of events. This is in spirit of the original Elite which was not about heroes as such – it was more about small people trying to find their place in an endless, violently merciless environment. Having said that, the story does end up rather abruptly. Final 30-40 pages are some of the finest sci-fi I’ve ever read and admittedly I wanted to read more.” Upcoming4me

And here’s a review for The Royalist…

“Deas … integrates history and narrative knowledgeably, with wisdom that shines through in Falkland’s voice based on his experience of the tragedy of war.” The Historical Novel Society

The rest of the last week was spent working on a third Nathan Hawke story, Dragon’s Reach, which is centred around Oribas and Achista and what happens when Gallow isn’t around and the forkbeads are out for their revenge.

Now to the giveaway:

The covers are a bit of a clue as to the content. I think they’re well suited for what’s inside. In Extraction, it’s basically badass aliens, snarky spaceships and sweary SAS men. I think Gav give Infiltration a slightly darker, edgier feel, but then the novels have their differences in what’s going on around each protagonist. If you like you that sort of thing, the way the two novels both mesh and work on their own is pretty cool.

This week’s giveaway is a copy of Extraction and Infiltration. There’s a possibility I can get Gavin to sign Infiltration so they’ll be a matched pair. You can read the first chapter of Extraction here.

Usual deal – comment on this post before November 16th  and I’ll randomly select a lucky victims for a free copy. This week’s “game” isn’t game, really, but I’d like to know what else we should remember, lest we all forget. Or if that’s too touchy or difficult a subject, just comment and say “hi”  to enter.