Release Date: 24/10/13
Publisher: Hodder
SYNOPSIS:
For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart. But there must always be an account...and the past has a habit of catching up to the present. Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism, - a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields - to answer one last, impossible question: What makes a hero?
REVIEW:
To be honest this is a superhero novel that has all sorts of origin threads that have been explored in recent films such as Captain America and a few of the other Marvel titles. The fact that one of the witnesses in the trial is Stanley Martin Lieber (who for those in the know is Stan Lee) goes to show how deep an influence that Mr Lee has had on Lavie.
Its definitely a quirky book, something pretty unique and when it delves into the second world war as told from a superhero point of view really takes the reader into an uncomfortable world that will dig itself in deeper into the psyche.
Add to this solid prose, some cracking characters and of course an overall arc that really gets to the heart of the matter makes this a book that will stay with the reader for quite some time.
BOOK BLURB:
A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees -- there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack. For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how? Like a steam-powered take on V for Vendetta, rich with satire and slashed through with automatons, giant lizards, pirates, airships and wild adventure, The Bookman is the first of a series.
REVIEW:
Angry Robot is fast building a reputation for bringing new talent alongside the less explored area’s of fiction to the fore. With this offering, they not only give the reader a new area to explore but a unique and novel storyteller to the masses.
In the same vein as Moore, Gibson and Powers the genre has not only grown but won over new generation as creative twists unfurl within this offering. Not only an interesting read but also one that leads the reader to ask more questions than is answered within the text supplied. Whilst this won't please everyone, it is a brave move by an author although at times it does feel that the reader has to have a knowledge of some of the literal characters wtihin to get some of the "in" jokes in much the same way that it happened with Moore. A promising start and I hope that the follow-ups are just as interesting.
Steampunk, I wrote back in 2005 (in “Some Notes Towards A Working Definition of Steampunk”, published in Apex Digest), “is to a large extent a cross-genre phenomenon.” And I qualified that by saying that steampunk tells stories “which discard the somewhat superficial distinction between “science fiction”, “fantasy” and “horror” (not to mention crime, historical fiction or romance).”
Which I suppose is why I love steampunk.I never really understood why people get so worked up about trying to distinguish science fiction from fantasy, literary fiction from crime, romance from horror (haha, just joking). Emma is both romance and literature, surely? And L.A. Confidential is, besides being a “crime” novel, also one of the great works of American literature. Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia is as much a work of fantasy as it is science fiction, just as Zelazny’ Lord of Light beautifully blends the two.More and more, crime narratives influence science fiction novels. Romance is shaping up modern fantasy. And all these genres feed back into the world of literary fiction – Number9dream or Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow immediately come to mind.As a writer, I have very little patience for the artificial borders of genre marketing. Zoran Živkovic argues for all non-realistic fiction to be called Fantastika, which I think is quite a wonderful way of putting it – at least if you care for that sort of thing. I prefer to simply think of genres as toolboxes sitting by the desk, waiting to be used – or, if you prefer, as stepping-stones in a stream where you can hop from one to the other at leisure (just trying not to fall into the water in the process!)In my new novel, The Bookman (released last week in the UK, with an American edition coming in August), I felt quite free to mix and match. There’s a bit of romance in there - a bit of mystery – a bit of the Gothic – quite a lot of adventure, and science fiction too. It’s a fun book, I think, paying homage to all those books I loved as a kid and still do today, from the Sherlock Holmes stories to the novels of Jules Verne. No one cared back in the nineteenth century whether something was a “genre”. They just told stories.My favourite steampunk books equally cross – and cross-fertilise – genres. Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates mixes time travel and Egyptian magic, history and fiction; in Paul di Filippo’s Walt and Emily two of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century go on a phantasmagoric journey into another world (and delight poetry-lovers everywhere by making nookie in the process); and zombies and scientists share the same world comfortably with a skeleton piloting a blimp in James Blaylock’s Homunculus.My favourite books mix tropes as if they weren’t even aware they existed. Michael Marshall Smith’s Only Forward begins as science fiction and ends as dark fantasy, while Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’ Feeling for Snow mixes a crime plot with hauntingly beautiful writing only to end unexpectedly as science fiction.And why not? I’m not arguing for the sort of “cyborgs vs. elves” books, but I do think a sort of conceptual surprise is essential for fiction, and old clichés can gain new life when re-investigated. Fiction doesn’t have to be fun, but there is nothing worse than a person – or a book – who take themselves too seriously. I once read an article by a science fiction writer describing the process of creation: “I begin with a spreadsheet and start running calculations...”To which I say, “Bah, humbug!”The thing is, I love the tropes of genre fiction. I love haunted Gothic mansions, and star-crossed lovers, eccentric detectives, dragons, kung fu masters, wizards and zombies, gunslingers and poker players, spaceships and wormholes – and giant worms, and giant robots too. And I love it when those old, worn tropes are twisted and changed, and books pull the rug from underneath our expectations – I love the way Philip K. Dick plays with reality in the same way I love the way Sylvia Plath creates beauty from horror. I love watching vintage David Lynch because I know I’ll end up saying, every five minutes or so, “what the f—k is going on?”So let’s not be purists. Let’s celebrate the fact we’ve had years and years and years of fiction, so many that they brought us Dracula and To Kill a Mockingbird, His Last Bow and Howl, The Three Musketeers and The Dumas Club, Great Expectations and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich...Or, as my publishers tend to tell me: “Stick a giant robot in it!”
Ed Note: We'll be reviewing Lavie's book upon its arrival so please stay tuned.
