The most Mieville-like (it has gargoyles and a political revolution) of this year’s releases is Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone, which is a wonderful book.įinally CT readers might be interested in Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery, on the grounds that it is set in the USA after an economic collapse. Alternatively they may have figured that the New Weird crowd would find the book anyway, so they might as well try pitching it to the elf crowd to expand sales.Īlso, in recommending McDermott and Gregory I was, of course, thinking purely of debut fantasy. The first is that the Random House marketing people (who may not be genre experts) haven’t got a clue about subdivisions of fantasy but know what buzz words sell. There are two plausible reasons for that. I see from my own thoughts on Thunderer that the cover blurb described it as “high fantasy”. Or is there something relevant about the publishing trade that I’m just not getting here?Īpologies if I’m getting boring on this, but a few things occurred to me in the shower… Gilman’s book should be getting highly approving reviews in _Locus_, nominations for major awards etc, which could allow it to straddle the split between the more and less literary ends of genre but, to the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t been, and I suspect Bantam/Spectra’s marketing folks are at fault. But this seems downright odd to me – I don’t see what the publishers are getting by chucking it out into the generic fantasy market without some pointers that it should also be of interest to people who have different literary tastes (Monette’s books, in contrast, _have_ been cross-marketed as best as I can tell). For example, I’ve quite enjoyed Sarah Monette’s Mirador books, which are very nicely written indeed, but are marketed to the romance fantasy/mildly titillating slash market, this, presumably, being rather more lucrative than the literary fantasy market that folks like myself inhabit.
I can sometimes understand these kinds of marketing decisions. I think this misses its core market (hell, I think I _am_ its core market) – people who are looking for a standardized post-Tolkien ripoff are liable to be quite upset while people looking for a more challenging read, who would have bought it, if they knew what it was about, won’t. But that’s not how it’s been marketed – cover, blurb etc suggest a generic quest fantasy of the more or less inept and badly plotted variety. A short but intensely felt recommendation for Felix Gilman’s first book, _Thunderer_ (“Powells”:, “Amazon”:) combined with a query – why haven’t I heard about this book before? It’s _exactly_ the kind of sf/f novel that I like – a brooding, post-Mievillian fantasy set in a decaying city of uncertain extent and boundaries, with a keen ear for politics, character and language.
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