This column started out on the FT website with five appearances back in 2002, before moving to the magazine from 2007 to earlier this year; now it’s back again. As with its print incarnation I’ll aim to keep it roughly quarterly, but no promises. And I’ll still be reviewing the occasional SF&F novel in the pages of FT itself: look out for Félix J Palma’s fascinating time-travel novel The Map of Time in FT279.


I’ve said before that life’s too short for all those fat fantasy trilogies – but every rule has its exceptions. In my case these are Robin Hobb and Jacqueline Carey. I reviewed the first book in Robin Hobb’s excellent Tawny Man trilogy in my first column here in 2002, so it seems right to review her latest here on my return.
   
Hobb has really returned to form after her disappointing Soldier Son trilogy. Dragon Haven is the second volume in her Rain Wild Chronicles – her fifth trilogy since Megan Lindholm began writing as Robin Hobb in 1995. The grumpy, stunted young dragons which hatched out in book one (FT257:65) have set off up the Rain Wild River to find the legendary city of Kelsingra, accompanied by their keepers, a couple of hunters to find them all food, and the upper-class dragon scholar Alise Finbok.
   
This volume is all about relationships, deceptions and misunderstandings. And change. No one – human or dragon – ends the novel quite how they began, emotionally or physically. Being in such close proximity to dragons causes humans to grow scales; more important, though, is the relationship between dragon and keeper, nothing at all like the in-love “imprinting” of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon books. Hobb’s dragons are stroppy, arrogant characters who initially regard their keepers simply as servants to fetch them food and keep them clean; but as the story develops so does the bond between them. It will be fascinating to see where Hobb takes her characters and story in the final novel.

Tanith Lee has been pouring out excellent fantasy novels for adults and children for years. Greyglass is about a haunting – or is it? As a child Susan is dragged along as a regular duty to her elderly grandmother’s house by her mother. The grandmother is cold and uncaring, and leaves everything to a cat charity when she dies. The mother is useless at being a mother, and goes off to the States with her latest boyfriend when Susan is still in her mid-teens.
   
This short novel relates a series of visits to the house by Susan at 12, 16 and 19, then in her 30s – a house that has a presence about it. Is it the house itself, or is it the spirit of her grandmother? The eeriness is underplayed throughout, which makes it all the more disturbing. It’s a nicely written story, as much about the awkward relations between mothers and daughters as about the haunting – though the kafkaesque ending doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the novel.

I can’t quite figure out how to classify Sam Leith’s The Coincidence Engine. It’s a road novel; it’s a secret-government-department thriller; it’s a weird-science story. After a hurricane a passenger jet appears out of nowhere in Alabama – but it’s made out of baked bean cans and other junk. Out in the wilds of the Pyrenees an eccentric theoretical mathematician discovers a way of causing coincidences. A young British post-grad goes off to America to propose to his girlfriend, trailing coincidences behind him – and is also trailed by a couple of beautifully-drawn agents of the shadowy Directorate of the Extremely Improbable, plus a couple of rent-a-thugs.
   
The plot is less important than the string of improbable scenes, many of which are comic, but by no means all. An excellent first novel from the former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph.

It must be strange when a novel written over 20 years ago suddenly becomes famous. Tim Powers’ wonderful piratical romp around the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides, is the basis of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film – though there seems to be little similarity between the plots.
   
John Chandagnac goes to the Caribbean to find the uncle who stole his family fortune, and is captured by pirates. Within weeks he’s become one of them, renamed Jack Shandy, living under the rule of the infamous Blackbeard. The pirates are protected by magic – and some of them are long dead but still fighting. Jack falls in love with a girl from his original ship, but it turns out that her father, on board with her, had planned the pirate attack himself; he aims to use the deep magic of the Fountain of Youth to pour his dead wife’s soul into his daughter’s living body.
   
This is a dark, dark story but strangely full of life and hope and humour – and the pirates are beautifully drawn. Tim Powers is nowhere near well enough known in Britain; it’s good news that Corvus, a fairly new British SF imprint, are reissuing many of his novels.

I reviewed Robert J Sawyer’s Wake in FT265:61, not realising it was the first of a trilogy. I missed the second, Watch, but now here’s the third, Wonder. Observant readers might notice the initial letters: www. In Wake 16-year-old Caitlin Decter is given a computerised implant to cure her blindness; through a software upgrade to what she calls her eyePod she becomes aware first of the web, then of a nascent Webmind, a fully conscious entity that develops within the internet. In the second book apparently Webmind announces himself to the world, and the US government tries to shut him down.
   
Now, in Wonder, still just a few weeks after the events of the first novel, Webmind has to find ways to protect himself – and to establish a role for himself. The young Caitlin is thrust into the limelight, doing TV interviews on how she nurtured and taught the young Webmind. A US colonel tries to recruit hackers to kill Webmind, who he sees as a threat to humanity. The government of the People’s Republic of China once again tries to shut itself off from the western evils of the internet; last time it did this it resulted in the birth of Webmind, so what will happen this time? And Hobo, the artistic chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid who communicates through American Sign Language, comes literally centre-stage.
   
Robert J Sawyer is a multi-award-winning Canadian author who I first discovered with his astonishing intelligent dinosaur trilogy back in the early Nineties. He’s been writing about unusual varieties of consciousness and intelligence ever since, and always well-grounded in real science – another author well worth looking out for.



Dragon Haven
Robin Hobb
HarperVoyager 2010 pb, 570pp, £7.99
ISBN 9780007349104

Greyglass
Tanith Lee
Immanion Press 2011 pb, 191pp, £10.99
ISBN 9781907737046

The Coincidence Engine
Sam Leith
Bloomsbury 2011 pb, 271pp, £12.99
ISBN 9781408802342

On Stranger Tides
Tim Powers
Corvus 2011 pb, 405pp, £7.99
ISBN 9781848875128

Wonder
Robert J Sawyer
Gollancz 2011 pb, 340pp, £12.99
ISBN 9780575095083