Fated by S. G. Browne

Book Club's January 2012 choice

Synopsis

Over the past few thousand years, Fabio has come to hate his job. As Fate, he's in charge of assigning the fortunes and misfortunes that befall most of the human race - the 83 per cent who keep screwing things up. And with the steady rise in population since the first Neanderthal set himself on fire, he can't exactly take a vacation. Frustrated with his endless parade of drug addicts and career politicians, it doesn't help watching Destiny guide her people to Nobel Peace Prizes. To make matters worse, he has a five-hundred-year-old feud with Death, and his best friends are Sloth and Gluttony. And worst of all? He's just fallen in love with a human. Sara Griffen might be on Destiny's path, but Fabio keeps bumping into her - by accident at first, and then on purpose. Getting involved with her breaks Rule No. 1 - and about ten others - setting off some cosmic-sized repercussions that could strip him of his immortality...or lead to a fate worse than death.

NEW EVENT: Richard (K.) Morgan signing

It's been a while since I've had a science fiction or fantasy specific event which I've been able to bring to your attention and then two come along at once (more on the second one when the details are ironed out - but its a doozy!).

First off is a signing with award winning Richard Morgan, signing in store on October 19th at 12.30pm:

Remember The Steel Remains? We read it wa-ay back in October 2009 so I don't blame you if you're a bit hazy, indeed many of you weren't even with us so long ago. Anyway, go read it if you haven't already - it's a brilliantly dark, gritty fantasy that sits on the boundary between science fiction and fantasy inspired by stuff like Moorcock's Elric and the Howard Conan stories (not the naff film...).

Richard made a name for himself with hard hitting, excitingly dark science fiction such as the Takeshi Kovacs books (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies) and his Arthur C. Clarke award winning Black Man, before moving over to Fantasy and writing the utterly superb and gritty The Steel Remains in 2008.

His new novel, The Cold Commands continues the adventures begun in The Steel Remains and is a hotly anticipated addition to the genre. If you're a fan of George R. R. Martin's brand of fantasy, or Joe Abercrombie, then you'll absolutely love these books. 

Richard has also written graphic novels, such as Black Widow: Homecoming, and was lead writer for the blockbuster videogame Crysis 2. 

So don't miss this opportunity to meet one of the top names in science fiction and fantasy, come along and get some books signed! 

See also - the official Richard Morgan website

- If you can't make the signing please contact the store and we can arrange for a reservation to be made and your book to be signed in absentia.

Official Facebook event <-- invite your friends!

Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman

Synopsis

The first love song in the world, as composed by a pig in the Garden of Eden…
The Devil, alarmed when his hobby of writing romantic fiction begins to upstage his day job…
A man finding love with someone who has an allergy to his happiness, another losing love altogether when his wife gives him back his heart in a Tupperware box…

By turns macabre and moving, horrific and laugh-out-loud funny, Robert Shearman's short stories come from a place just to the left of the corner of your eye. Following his World Fantasy Award-winning 'Tiny Deaths', this new collection puts a bizarre twist on the love story. What is love, why does it hurt so much, and how is it we keep coming back for more?

 - Winner of the Readers' Award in the Edge Hill Short Story Competition.

 - Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story Collection.

What Did We Think?

Much praise was meted out for this, the second collection of Short Stories we've read in our times as a book club.

We liked how Shearman uses the fantastic to express more "mundane" issues. In doing so he accurately and poignantly conveys emotions, concepts and ideas that few other fantastical authors are capable of expressing in their work (or mainstream authors for that matter). It was felt with almost unanimous consent that the stories in this collection make a connection with genuine human emotions, particularly (of course) that of Love.

Despite praising the use of the fantastic, it was also appreciated that Shearman seems to know the power of understatement - both in the amount of fantastic elements a story requires, but also in the prose used to tell it. Many, if not all, of the stories were paced superbly and felt natural at the lengths they were published in. At the same time it was noted, and appreciated, that several of the stories use rather clever narrative techniques and devices, however they are also used in the perfect manner so that they complement the story rather than draw unnecessary attention away from the plot or mood being evoked.

At some point in the session someone must have picked out pretty much every story individually as an example of one they really liked. Even "George Clooney's Moustache" which was, on the whole, found to be a deeply disturbing tale. On the whole the collection was praised for being consistently good rather than putting its best stories at the beginning and deteriorating over the course of the book, as can sometimes happen in such collections.

If anything a criticism of the book was (rather ridiculously) that the stories were so good that you couldn't read them too quickly in succession or they would erase the preceding stories from your mind - so captivating and intense is each narrative. For this reason it reassured at least one member of our group that the stories have been published separately as it was felt that with room to grow in isolation from the other brilliant tales in the collection, they would truly shine.

Votes were as follows: 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 7, 6

Next month's book is the rather more traditionally fantastic The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemsin.