Category Archives: A Few Thoughts On

A Few Thoughts On: Ahsoka – E.K. Johnston

E.K. Johnston’s 2016 novel Ahsoka takes a much-loved Star Wars character from the small screen and brings her story into a different medium, picking up where she left off in her animated form and filling in some of the gaps in what happened next. A year after the establishment of the Empire and the horrors of Order 66, ex-Padawan Ahsoka Tano finds herself on a small moon in the Outer Rim, in the company of a close-knit farming community. All she wants is to rest and centre herself, but when the Empire arrives on Raada she’s forced to choose between continuing to hide herself and her powers, and taking a stand to protect the people who have taken her in and shown her kindness.

Continue reading →

A Few Thoughts On: Everybody Wins by James Wallis

Before I talk about James Wallis’ excellent board game retrospective Everybody Wins, out now from Aconyte Books, I have a confession to make: I enjoy a good board game now and then, but I’m really not what you’d call an aficionado. I’ve never played Catan, I have in fact only played three of the games featured here (Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride and Camel Up), and these days most of my involvement with any kind of games comes from reading IP fiction and enjoying the background rather than the games themselves. When Aconyte very kindly sent me a review copy of Everybody Wins I honestly thought I’d dip in and out of this very nicely-presented coffee table book, but right from the first page it had me hooked and wanting to keep reading, and what’s more it’s got me thinking about actually playing games again for the first time in…well, in ages.

Continue reading →

A Few More Thoughts On: Leech by Hiron Ennes

How do you review a book like Hiron Ennes’ Leech, a novel that’s as disturbing as it is compelling, in which a theoretically benign parasitical distributed consciousness has possessed the entire population of medical practitioners, but finds itself in unwanted, unexpected competition when it stumbles upon a new, opposing parasite? It’s a book that does things entirely its own way, with a blatant disregard for normal genre conventions that somehow really works but which makes it very, very hard to talk about without giving spoilers. Well, I did manage to write a review, which you can read here, but this book is so strange and so damn good that I want to tell as many people about it as possible. If there’s any author’s work that Leech reminds me of, it’s the brilliant Peter Fehervari, so I thought I’d add a few more thoughts about that comparison.

Continue reading →

A Few Thoughts On The Successors – Black Library Anthology

A collection of 13 short stories from 10 different authors, Black Library’s Warhammer 40,000 anthology The Successors looks beyond the usual First Founding Chapters of Space Marines and sets out to explore some of the Chapters who haven’t been seen as often in 40k fiction. It does actually feature some Chapters who have had plenty of their own stories before (Crimson Fists, Flesh Tearers, Soul Drinkers), but the majority of the stories focus on Chapters from the semi-familiar (Angels Penitent, Black Dragons, Carcharadons, Emperor’s Spears, Mortifactors) to the new or much more obscure (Consecrators, Iron Lords, Wolfspear). There’s even a rare Exorcists story, and most – although not all – of the stories take place in the ‘current’, post-Great Rift era of 40k.

Continue reading →

A Few Thoughts On: Legacy of Steel by Matthew Ward

I’m delighted to have another review live on the British Fantasy Society website, this time for Legacy of Steel by Matthew Ward – the sequel to Legacy of Ash, and the second book in the epic (in every sense of the word) Legacy Trilogy. I’m not going to just reprint the review – here’s the link to the BFS website so you can read it in full – but I feel like this article should be more than just a paragraph and a link. As such, I thought I would use this space to talk a bit about the series (so far) as a whole, and my experience of reading Legacy of Steel, which was a little unusual for me.

Continue reading →

A Few Thoughts On: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I adored Susanna Clarke’s debut novel Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell when I read it back in…I don’t know, 2004 or 2005, and I had been hearing great things about her second novel, Piranesi, since it was announced in 2020. It took me some time to get round to reading it, but I eventually settled on the audiobook edition, narrated by the wonderful Chiwetel Ejiofor, and listened to it over the space of a week’s worth of walks around Southeast London, at first pleasantly puzzled and then gradually, increasingly beguiled by its quiet, dreamlike depths. I had no intention of reviewing Piranesi, so I made no notes or took down any quotations, but after finishing it and spending some time mulling it over, I can’t help but want to talk about it. I’m not going to try and talk objectively like I would usually, because this is a book I loved so much I just want to sing its praises!

Continue reading →

A Few Thoughts On: What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

I’ve been reading and loving Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series ever since I picked up the first book in a London Waterstones back in 2011, but his 2021 novella What Abigail Did That Summer might just be the most fun I’ve ever had with this series! It’s set at the same time as Foxglove Summer, and explores what young Abigail Kamara – not yet a trainee wizard herself, but getting there – is doing while Peter Grant is up in Herefordshire searching for missing girls. What Abigail is doing, it turns out, is engaging in an unofficial investigation of her own to work out why teenagers are going briefly missing on Hampstead Heath only to reappear, somewhat confused, back with their families. Along the way she meets and befriends a slightly strange boy called Simon, does her very best to avoid as much adult involvement as possible, and makes good use of a small army of talking foxes.

Continue reading →

A Few Thoughts On: The Magos by Dan Abnett

The (unexpected) fourth book in Dan Abnett’s classic Eisenhorn trilogy, The Magos is an unusual book for a few reasons. Firstly, while it’s a (relatively short) novel in its own right it’s presented in a hefty volume with the full title of The Magos & the Definitive Casebook of Gregor Eisenhorn, alongside a dozen of Dan Abnett’s short stories which sit alongside his Eisenhorn, Ravenor and Bequin trilogies. More on these later. Secondly, it’s definitely part of the Eisenhorn series yet it’s a very different kind of story to Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus, told as it is in third person from the viewpoint of magos biologis Valentin Drusher, rather than in Eisenhorn’s own first person perspective. Thirdly, while it was published after Pariah, it works as an effective prequel to that novel, providing a natural evolution of Eisenhorn’s character between the end of Hereticus and the start of the Bequin trilogy.

Continue reading →

A Few Thoughts On: The Archive of the Forgotten by A.J. Hackwith

A.J. Hackwith’s The Library of the Unwritten was a pacy, darkly funny and deeply satisfying take on the interdimensional/time travelling librarian trope, and I loved it to bits. Its sequel, The Archive of the Forgotten, tries hard to dig into the relationships between the key characters, picking up the story as they’re still adjusting to the changes forced upon them, with Brevity now the new Librarian and Claire relegated to stewardship of the titular Archive. It’s a smaller-scale story in which the safety of both the Library and the Archive is at risk even as Brevity and Claire are at odds with each other, their friendship strained to breaking point. Sadly, while the world in which it’s set continues to be engaging, the story itself doesn’t live up to expectations.

Continue reading →

A Few Thoughts On: Servants of the Imperium

Black Library’s Warhammer 40,000 anthology Servants of the Imperium features a trio of novellas, all of which were first published as part of the ‘Black Library Novella Series 1’ back in 2018 – Auric Gods by Nick Kyme, Danie Ware’s The Bloodied Rose, and Steel Daemon by Ian St. Martin. As with its Age of Sigmar counterpart Champions of the Mortal Realms, this anthology has had a slightly strange release history, but it’s worth checking out for anyone interested in Imperium-focused stories a little different to the usual Space Marines fare. I’ll take a quick look at each novella and link out to my individual reviews, but before that I’ll talk a bit about the anthology as a whole and its unusual publication history.

Continue reading →