A Crown for Cold Silver - Alex Marshall

It seems to me that the biggest challenge of any fantasy writer is to find an innovative way to make its inevitable warring kingdoms storyline interesting, without straying too far away from the familiar aspects that define the genre in the first place. I don't think Alex Marshall comes up with anything new in A Crown for Cold Silver, certainly not with a rather bland generic title like that (even though it takes place on the 'Star', I don't think Star Wars is an option either), but there's strong characterisation here, a richly developed world that has potential for further expansion and plenty of meaningful incidental detail. Whether this is further developed remains to be seen, but the best thing about A Crown For Cold Silver is that even coming in at 650 pages, there's never a dull moment.

As conventional as it might sound, the best part of the book is the lead-up to the Big Battle. The battle could by no means be described as anti-climatic (the Star will never be the same again), but the greater achievement of the book is in the time it takes to develop each of the characters, revealing the formerly notorious Five Villains and the Stricken Queen, Cold Cobalt Zosia. Without any conscious planning on their part, these diverse characters become reunited after a fashion under the banner of a new "Zosia" who will stand up to the combined threat posed by Queen Indsorith's Crimson Empire and its uneasy alliance with the fundamentalist Immaculate religious order of the Black Pope, Darth Va... I mean, Y'Homa. It takes a while to work out where everyone stands and how this Empire operates, but it's a lot of fun getting there.

You can expect some of the familiar conventions, but done in a fresh way. There's precious little sorcery, but there most certainly are witches, devils, shamans and even mysterious Goddesses whose powers we've yet to see fully explored, as well as other otherworldly objects, such as Gates. It's the characterisation that is most memorable however, Maroto and Tapai Purna the strongest characters if not the central ones, but there are interesting aspects to Zosia, Portoles (Chewbacca?), Sullen and Hoartrap the Touch, few of them having anything in common, each of them with ambiguous and sometimes dubious motivations, but all of them fascinating to observe when they come into contact with one another.

It's Alex Marshall's nuanced characterisation, witty dialogue and imaginative manipulation of characters and situations into conflict with one another that make this work so well. There's plenty of incident, there's a whole world and political/religious conflict to work out along the way, but Marshall's writing never allows any aspect to be weaker than the other, and there's consequently never a dull moment when you're looking ahead to where it's going. There are of course a few twists to throw in to prevent you guessing how things will play out, and inevitably the promise of further developments to come in the Crimson Empire series, but as it is, A Crown For Cold Silver stands wonderfully on its own as a great new fantasy debut.