Posts Tagged: Robert Jackson Bennett

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City of Stairs was my favourite novel of 2014. It goes without saying that I’m ravenously excited for this follow-up, City of Blades. Doesn’t hurt that the cover’s gorgeous to boot.

The city of Voortyashtan was once the domain of the goddess of death, war, and destruction, but now it’s little more than a ruin. General Turyin Mulaghesh is called out of retirement and sent to this hellish place to try to find a Saypuri secret agent who’s gone missing in the middle of a mission, but the city of war offers countless threats: not only have the ghosts of her own past battles followed her here, but she soon finds herself wondering what happened to all the souls that were trapped in the afterlife when the Divinities vanished. Do the dead sleep soundly in the land of death? Or do they have plans of their own?

City of Blades is due for release on January 26, 2016.

As the Hugo nomination period draws to a close, here are the items that will appear on my final ballot. If you’re unfamiliar with any of the items, I highly encourage you to check them out. 2014 was a wonderful year for genre fiction and art.

Note: If a category doesn’t appear or is incomplete, it’s because I either a) did not make any nominations, or b) will be undecided on some of the final inclusions until the final hour.
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2015 Hugo Nominations v 0.1
Best Novel

The flush of the 2014 Hugo Awards is fading, and, with the holidays just peeking around the corner, I wanted to take the time to discuss some of my favourite novels from 2014, the ones that, at this very moment, would comprise my nomination slate for the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Will it change by next spring when nominations are due? Undoubtedly.

These are all terrific novels, and, if you haven’t read them already, well, I envy you.

Best Novel

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Say hello to the best fantasy novel of 2014.

Even as I was startled by its twisted depth, I adored every moment I spent with City of Stairs. Colonialism lies at City of Stairs‘ centre, and RJB handles it with equal parts boldness and delicacy. The ruined beauty of Bulikov and its fallen gods haunted me long after I turned the final page.

Robert Jackson Bennett is best known for his contemporary fantasy and horror crossovers, such as American Elsewhere and The Troupe, so his move into more traditional epic fantasy put him on the radar of a lot of new readers, and the result is something special. On first reading City of Stairs, I described it to a friend as “China Mieville without the ego.” I’m not sure I still agree with that statement, because it’s unfair to saddle one writer with another’s baggage, but while reading City of Stairs I couldn’t fight the feeling that RJB was mixing and refining elements from some of my recent favourite fantasies. Other touchstones exists, such as Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire and Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, that place RJB among the most exciting and vibrant young fantasy writers working today.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Buy City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

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City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Buy City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

From circus life, to southern Americana, Bennett’s work is best known for examining the every day through a fantastical and revealing lens. “I saw notes of [Neil Gaiman] throughout,” said Justin Landon of Bennett’s The Troupe. “In the themes of gods and men, and the hidden worlds behind the curtain of reality. The City of Stairs, however, is Bennett’s first “secondary world” fantasy. A novel of “of statesmanship, spycraft, and diplomacy, set among ruined miracles and the fading divine,” as he described to Lightspeed Magazine’s Patrick J. Stephens.

City of Stairs was a book that kind of came in a flash,” Bennett said when I asked him to describe his latest novel. “I remember it very distinctly: I’d been reading Dark Star by Alan Furst, a terrific spy novel about a KGB agent in Nazi Germany, and I thought the Eastern European perspective was a really interesting and rare one: it explored how Poland was just wildly unprepared, operating as if this was still the 19th century, with 20th century warfare bearing down on them.

“And one day I was vacuuming the house and Turner Classic Movies was on, showing a 1930s satire about the nobility of a fictional Eastern European nation, and I thought it’d be interesting to write about a diplomat trying to navigate this densely complicated and Balkanized area, someone dealing with both the dreadful tedium of bureaucracy while also juggling the stressful, nervous-breakdown-inducing spycraft going on in the background.

“And I remember thinking, ‘Well, all these countries are mad at this diplomat. But why?’

“And the answer came back immediately: ‘Why, because her country killed all their gods, of course.’ And that was that.”

An atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city—from one of America’s most acclaimed young SF writers.

The city of Bulikov once wielded the powers of the gods to conquer the world, enslaving and brutalizing millions—until its divine protectors were killed. Now Bulikov has become just another colonial outpost of the world’s new geopolitical power, but the surreal landscape of the city itself—first shaped, now shattered, by the thousands of miracles its guardians once worked upon it—stands as a constant, haunting reminder of its former supremacy.

Into this broken city steps Shara Thivani. Officially, the unassuming young woman is just another junior diplomat sent by Bulikov’s oppressors. Unofficially, she is one of her country’s most accomplished spies, dispatched to catch a murderer. But as Shara pursues the killer, she starts to suspect that the beings who ruled this terrible place may not be as dead as they seem—and that Bulikov’s cruel reign may not yet be over.

“It felt like one of those rare watershed moments, and I instantly pictured this delicate,” Bennett described. “Highly political global state, where one empire has been dashed and another one’s arisen, but history weighs down on everything that’s happening in every moment. The gods are dead, sure, but if one nation remembers them, are they really gone? If they are still observing the practices of an absent god, can that god truly be said to be absent? And can anyone accurately remember history? Doesn’t the process of remembering something, by default, change it, warp it, twist it to your own ends?

“And that was what the book became.”

If this novel is a departure for Bennett, it comes with a lot of challenges and expectations for the Shirley Award winning author. Early buzz, however, is mighty fine. “[City of Stairs is] a rich, layered, thoughtful story, full of gods and magic and characters that feel unflinchingly true,” said Jim C. Hines.

City of Stairs is a book about how the past is both ever-present, and inaccessible, about absent gods who still subtly influence the modern world, despite their absence,” Bennett described to me. And, if that doesn’t get you excited, well, then… Bulikov help you. City of Stairs is due for release on September 9th, 2014 from Broadway Books.

The Troupe by Robert Jackson Bennett

Publisher: Orbit Books - Pages: 512 - Buy: Book/eBook

I admit, prior to reading The Troupe, I had no idea what vaudeville was all about. I had an idea in my head, based on implied fuzzy cultural memory, but it’s not something I’d ever taken a moment to actually look into. Having read Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and paged through Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine, two circus-themed novels from 2011, I classified Bennett’s novel in my mind as another entrant in this newly popularized subgenre. Vaudville isn’t the same as a circus, but I was expecting a similar type of novel where the setting is as much a character as the people that populate it. The Troupe shattered those notions. Plot and character driven, set against a vaudville background, Bennett’s novel calls to mind the stylings of Neil Gaiman and lives up to the comparison.

Sixteen-year-old pianist George Carole has joined vaudeville to find Heironomo Silenus, the man he suspects to be his father. As he chases down Silenus’s troupe, he begins to understand that their performances are unique even for vaudeville and strange happenings follow in their wake. It’s not until after he joins them that George realizes the troupe isn’t simply touring, and Silenus is hiding a secret as old as time itself. Told in a tight third person voice, The Troupe follows George through his experience as a vaudeville act, a lost young man searching for direction, and a chess piece in an endless metaphysical war. Not surprisingly, the novel is divided into three parts that roughly correspond to each of those story arcs, although none are entirely resolved until the final pages. Read More »