Ysabel – Guy Gavriel Kay
Simon & Schuster, 2007
421 pages
RRP: AU$29.95
ISBN: 978-0-7432-5251-5

Reviewed by Cat Sparks

Fifteen-year-old Canadian Ned Marriner is spending six weeks in France, accompanying his famous photographer father and entourage, worried about his doctor mother who’s on assignment for Medicines sans Frontiers in war torn Sudan. A chance meeting with history-savy American exchange student Kate in the Saint-Sauver Cathedral of Aix-en-Provence is followed by an encounter with a bald scar-faced man wielding a knife and a mystery: I think the world will end before I ever find him in time.

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Where’s My Jetpack? A guide to the amazing science fiction future that never arrived – Daniel H. Wilson, PhD.
Allen & Unwin Bloomsbury, 2007
192 pages
RRP: AU$22.95
ISBN: 978-0-7475-8286-1

Reviewed by Cat Sparks

I have to confess that I wanted to like this book long before I actually opened it. It’s a stylish-looking publication, all jet black and silver and shimmering electric blue. Author Wilson, whose previous title How to Survive a Robot Uprising also piques my interest, takes us through a selection of familiar SF tropes: flying cars, teleportation, unisex jumpsuits, space elevators, cryogenic freezing and ray guns, etc, outlines their position in our cultural consciousness, then explains where we’re at with them all, scientifically speaking, in terms of the here and now. Wilson writes with good humour and he knows his stuff.

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Black Powder War (Temeraire #3) – Naomi Novik
HarperCollins Voyager, 2007
RRP: AU$24.99
ISBN: 978 0 00 721916 2

Review by Cat Sparks

The fact that I am not overly fond of dragons and have not read the two Temeraire novels that precede this one (His Majesty’s Dragon and Throne of Jade) did not hamper my enjoyment of this book, although it is probably best to start at the beginning and read them in sequence if you’re interested.

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Relics – Pip Vaughan-Hughes
Hachette Livre Orion, 2007
276 pages
RRP: AU$22.95
ISBN: 978-0-7528-8124-9

Reviewed by Cat Sparks

“Every drunk is a magician,” states the opening line of this novel and in the case of Relics by Pip Vaughan-Hughes, the magic is all in the prose. The setting of this story is familiar enough to regular readers of fantasy. We begin with a tavern, drunken friends, the lure of gold coins, and a mysterious stranger. Novice monk Brother Petroc (Patch to his friends) is framed for the murder of a deacon by a sinister Templar Knight. He is forced to flee across rough country with his best friend, Will, at his side and a creepy relic, the hand of Saint Euphemia, stuffed inside his shirt. But Sir Hugh de Kervezey, the murdering Templar, is hot on their trail. When Will is slain, a terrified Petroc stumbles onwards, running first to his old Abbey, and then onwards again as he learns that his safe old life has been destroyed forever. Only one man can help him now, a Frenchman who collects precious curios and sails on a ship called the Cormaran.

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Empress of Mijak (Godspeaker vol. 1) – Karen Miller
HarperCollins Voyager, 2007
565 pages
RRP: AU$20.99
ISBN: 978-0-7322-8451-1

Reviewed by Cat Sparks

Empress of Mijak is the story of a girl: a nameless she-brat, purchased by traders in the Savage North, favoured as a rich man might favour a pet, told she is beautiful and precious, yet imprisoned as a slave. Hekat, as she names herself, takes the words “beautiful” and “precious” to heart and sees how she might make something of herself in the brutal city of Et-Raklion. When she learns of the fate traders Abajai and Yagji have in mind for her, she mutilates her own face and cuts herself an alternate destiny, one in which she catches both the god’s and the warlord Raklion’s eye.

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