To The Last Page

One thing you can say about Daniel Polansky's A City Dreaming  is that it's witty and not lacking in imagination - which might actually be two things, although the second is technically 'not' something. Anyway, sorry, that's the way Daniel Polasky plays with your head in this entertaining urban fantasy set in New York, although evidently he does it with considerably more wit and imagination. Essentially A City Dreaming  is a collection of related short adventures of an urban magician called M. M obviously wouldn't be so gauche as to walk around New York with a stick, a cloak and a pointy hat, but he has certain powers - not to mention a lot of bluff and nerve - that allows him to work on several levels of reality that coexist within the city, as well as associate with other mages of 'the Management' who operate there. They are, as you might imagine, quite a collection of eccentric, dangerous and quite touchy people in this line of work, some who can hold...

Alastair Reynolds is full of surprises, which I suppose is something you would like to think of as an ideal quality for a science-fiction writer. Whether its sprawling epic family dramas over a series of books ( Poseidon's Children ), hard-SF action drama (the Revelation Space  series), pulp-SF ( The Prefect ), short stories or one-off fiction ideas, there is always some new aspect of science to explore in relation to physics, time, technology, space travel, robots, alien life and humanity's place within it.  Reynolds' most recent work was a collaboration with Stephen Baxter ( The Medusa Chronicles ) that expanded on an Arthur C Clarke story to consider the future relationship between man and technology, so his new approach to his latest work Revenger comes as something of a surprise. The surprise is not so much in the content as the style. In terms of content, Revenger  is very much within the Alastair Reynolds vision of the universe. There's a little bit of a family ...

It's immediately apparent that while The Waking Fire  might rest on some familiar fantasy tropes, not least of which is the fire-breathing dragon on the cover. Anthony Ryan nonetheless clearly wants to depict a much more rich and varied fantasy world than the one we are more accustomed to seeing, and a rapidly changing world too, which is perhaps ultimately the direction that the Draconis Memoria series is aiming towards. There is certainly plenty of imagination and variety applied to The Waking Fire  then and great progress made over the course of nearly 600 pages of this first volume, but perhaps not enough originality here or deviation from the established fantasy template. The world of the Draconis Memoria series is a dark, steampunk style universe. At least that's the initial impression, but things move along rapidly here and inventions come quick and fast. Rather than steam being the force that metaphorically oils the wheels and drives the engines of this society it's...

It's not at all obvious where the mystery, crime or serious wrong-doing is for quite a long while into Sabine Durrant's new novel, Lie With Me , but there are a lot of warning signs being flagged up in relation to its narrator Paul Morris. It's suggested early on that he's writing from a prison or a place of confinement, and to be honest, even though the reason isn't clear, you wouldn't be a bit surprised that he's going to end up there one way or another. There are plenty of reasons not to like Paul Morris, and he's not at all shy of telling you about his failings, his deficiencies as a person and his unending capacity for lying. But can we believe Paul and is he the only one lying? There are a lot of other strange occurrences and erratic behaviour in the people around him, but then it's hardly surprising that they might be suspicious of a guy who constructs such a tissue of lies around himself and his lifestyle. The author of a moderately successfu...