Revivified Review: Crown Duel and Court Duel, by Sherwood Smith

This review was written originally in 1999 for SF Site, about two YA novels by Sherwood Smith, one called Crown Duel (1997), the second Court Duel (1998). At the time I rather grumpily concluded my review with a plea to buy the books quickly as they might go out of print soon. The publisher's representative politely but a bit peevedly responded that they actually were pleased with the novels and would be keeping them in print. And they were true to their word -- in 2002 the two novels were rereleased in a single combined volume, simply called Crown Duel. (Apparently, Sherwood originally wrote the novels as one unified story -- though it's fair to say that original two parts are divided sensibly, and really do work has halves of a diptych.) As far as I can tell, the books remain in print -- at least, they are available at Amazon -- and they are considered among Sherwood Smith's most popular novels. (For me, they rank that the top of her work, along with Inda. They really are immensely pleasurable reads.)

I've made mild revisions to the text below, mainly to avoid really out-of-date remarks.

Revivified Review: Crown Duel and Court Duel, by Sherwood Smith

by Rich Horton

Many longtime readers of SF and fantasy cut their teeth on young adult or juvenile novels: for SF, perhaps Robert A. Heinlein, or Andre Norton, or Sylvia Louise Engdahl; for fantasy, The Hobbit, or Norton again, or perhaps Lloyd Alexander.

I remember with fondness the days of the so-called "Juvenile to Please Adults" books, and I still read with pleasure Heinlein's juveniles, for instance. I celebrate all attempts to publish full-fledged SF/fantasy for young adults which will still be good reading for, say, me. [To this end, Tor's Jupiter series of YA Science Fiction deserves praise, and Jane Yolen's now defunct series of YA Fantasy, published by Harcourt Brace, deserves praise, and lamentations at its end. -- The Jupiter series is also long gone, and really didn't last very long, alas!]

Sherwood Smith, co-author (with Dave Trowbridge) of the much prized, hard to find, space opera series collectively titled Exordium, and of a few novels with Andre Norton, wrote five YA fantasies for Jane Yolen Books. The Wren Trilogy is an engaging series of books about 12-year old Wren, and her discovery of her magical abilities amidst threats of war. Better still are The Crown and Court Duet [now simply the one book Crown Duel (with one pendant short story)]: two books set apparently in Wren's world [actually the Wren books are set in a different universe] featuring 16-year old Countess Meliara Astiar, and her bumbling but passionate entrance into the worlds of politics and war.

The first book is Crown Duel. Meliara, who narrates the books, and her brother Bran are struggling to make ends meet after the death of their father. They are now Count and Countess of Tlanth, a remote hilly portion of the Kingdom of Remalna. The corrupt King is raising taxes, and, worse, appears to be ready to violate the Covenant humans have with the mysterious hill folk. Humans have agreed to leave the forests undisturbed, especially the beautiful colourwood trees, and in exchange the Hill Folk supply the humans with magical firewood.

Meliara and Bran are very poor, partly from trying to deflect the burden of taxation from their people--thus, they live more like peasants than peers. The two are just reaching the age at which they will start to pair, and eventually marry. But Meliara, at least, evinces no interest in such things.

As the book opens, the political situation comes to a head, and Meliara, Bran and their people rise in revolt. Smith entertainingly describes an ill-run war, which after some early success leads to humiliating defeat for the undermanned Tlanth people. Meliara is captured, and taken to the Remalna capital city. She encounters the Marquis of Shevraeth, proud commander of the King's forces, whose skill had turned the tide against Tlanth, and takes a sudden fierce dislike to him. The book continues with harrowing escapes, nicely described wandering through the backroads of the country, and a final confrontation with the King's forces.

Court Duel takes up after the war. The bad King has been vanquished, and the Marquis of Shevraeth is the leading candidate for the throne. The court is full of political wiles, however, and some people think Meliara or her brother should either push their own claims or support another.

Meliara at last consents to spend some time in court and we are treated to some entertaining descriptions of artificial court life and manners, including details resulting from things like not being able to use wood for furniture. She is a fish out of water, and finally finds a secret friend, with whom she exchanges a series of letters in which she is able to express her concerns about the false nature of court life, even as she begins to understand the reasoning behind the rules.

Meliara remains confused about who her real friends are, and about whether the Marquis -- who is clearly capable but whom she still distrusts -- or some other claimant, should be King. The matter is pushed to a head by a very interesting, slightly underused (I thought) character, a man named Flauvic who also has a claim to the throne, and who has spent some time learning powerful magic in a foreign kingdom. The general shape of the ending is easy to see in advance, but the details are nicely revealed.

Both these books are, first of all, great reads. Very few books keep me up at night to finish them, but Crown Duel did, and I took an unplanned extended lunch break to finish Court Duel. They are nice formal contrasts: the first almost all action and war, the second more magic and formal court life. If I had a mild complaint, it would be that in both books the Hill Folk serve as sort of dei ex machinae. But this is minor, and does little to detract from the pleasures of reading these two books.

I'm not quite ready to rule on how these would appeal to the supposed target age group (teens, I would think), though I'm sure I'd have loved them then, just as I did now. Among other things, they feature a well-done, very understated, sexual tension, never vulgar, that greatly enhances our interest in the main characters. The world they inhabit isn't quite fully-furnished; I don't think books these short can do that, but the odd details are telling and nice. Highly recommended. [I do believe these have proved popular with younger readers as well as adults -- and the details of the world they are set in are very much filled in in a long series of novels Smith has published, set in various places in this world, and set over a long time. There is one prequel to Crown Duel: A Stranger to Command (2008).]

Repurposed Review: To the Stars (aka Return to Tomorrow), by L. Ron Hubbard

This an extended review I wrote back in 2001, on the occasion of the nomination of L. Ron Hubbard's short novel "To the Stars" for a Retro Hugo. I go into some detail at the end to explain why I found the novel both better written than anything else I've read by him, and also morally vile.

It appeared, interestingly, in the February and March 1950 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. The April issue featured another  Hubbard story ("Greed"), and then the May issue featured "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science". A few more stories appeared in other SF magazines in 1950, but, essentially, the Dianetics essay marked a very sharp divide in Hubbard's career: he wrote no more science fiction after than (until Battlefield Earth.) His only later appearances in Astounding were Dianetics-related articles. "To the Stars" itself was published in book from by Ace in 1954 as Return to Tomorrow. I've only read the Astounding serial, so I don't know if the book version differed. In 2004 it was reprinted under the original title and subsequent editions have retained that title.

To the Stars (aka Return to Tomorrow), by L. Ron Hubbard

by Rich Horton

As I've been reading late '40s and 1950 issues of Astounding, I've come across several Hubbard stories. They are bad -- that's all I can say. Very carelessly written, very silly in plotting and very stupid as far as the SFnal content. The worst of the bunch are the putrid "Ole Doc Methusaleh" stories -- an unsympathetic and uninteresting lead character, with a servile alien slave (who just loves being a slave -- hates it when Doc tries freeing him), and with an insipid beautiful girl per story, plus just idiotic "medical" mysteries for plot material.  Gaah!  

Basically, I expected the same of "To The Stars". I have to admit, I didn't get that. "To the Stars" is much more tightly written than the rest of the Hubbard I've read. The characters are implausible and stereotypical, but still more deeply felt, more lived in. The story is actually gripping, and Hubbard takes on some intriguing philosophical ideas, with some interesting twists on them. And at times it's genuinely moving.

So, is it good?  Here I have to depart somewhat from the purely fictional values. Though I will say that the above paragraph may overstate things a bit -- to some extent the above is a reaction to my low expectations, which were exceeded, and while the story is what I've said, don't forget the caveats -- stereotypical characters, in particular.  And while the prose is better than Hubbard's average, it's not great stuff. And the ideas -- well, it's perhaps necessary to discuss the story, and spoil it, to deal with those. For those who don't wish to have the story spoiled (though why would most people care about this one?), I'll say briefly that in the end I found some of the ideas presented sufficiently repugnant that even if the story were wholly successful on craft terms I wouldn't recommend it.

I'll describe the story in more detail, then, below, after some spoiler space.

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Spoilers follow.

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The story opens with a bit of infodump. Humanity has more or less spread to the stars, but light-speed restrictions apply. As a result, colonies are formed, but mostly abandoned. Only a few ships make what is called "The Long Passage". The main drawback is that the crewmen of the long passage find themselves isolated from their home cultures -- by the time they've made a loop around a few planets and returned to Earth, though they may be only a few months older, decades will have passed on Earth. For that reason, while insystem spaceship jobs are somewhat prized, very few people sign up for interstellar jobs.

This setup is not unfamiliar -- it's just a step away from implying Anderson's Kith, or Heinlein's Free Traders, or, much later, Vinge's Qeng Ho. But Hubbard doesn't go quite that far -- his long passage folk seem on the verge of creating such a society -- a society of space-based nomadic folk -- but they don't quite do that.

Anyway, the main character of "To The Stars" is Alan Corday, described as an Engineer Tenth Class. Apparently, Engineering is a hereditary position, and an Engineer Tenth is high status, but Alan's father has blown the family fortune, so he's kind of stuck -- he has a certain position to maintain, which he can't afford. He wants to marry his girl, but her family won't let him as long as he's broke. So he tells her he's going to work his way to Mars, and make his fortune there, then return in 5 years and they'll get married. We meet Alan at the spaceship yard -- every ship turns him down, as an Engineer Tenth Class is overqualified.  Finally he meets and down and out bunch, led by a charismatic captain, and before you know it, he's been drugged and shanghaied onto the Hound of Heaven. It's no surprise when we find that the Hound is on the Long Passage.

Alan finds himself designated something like Third Mate in Training. The captain treats him viciously, while Alan becomes motivated to repair the beatup ship, believing he'll turn it around in time to get back to Earth. He also gets involved in a mutiny attempt -- only to see it fail and one of the leaders be spaced. Eventually they return to Earth. Alan hasn't been paying attention to objective time -- he imagines only a few years have passed, but actually 60 or so years have passed. Alan's world is completely different -- two political upheavals have occurred, and now engineers are detested as former oppressors. Somehow he finds his fiancee -- she's completely nuts, apparently having constructed a fantasy in which Alan returned as promised and married her.

Bitter, Alan returns to the ship, as there is no place for him on Earth. The rest of the story follows his hardening into a potential ship captain, as the ship's crew exterminates an alien race on another planet, then returns to Earth, only to find Earth radically changed again -- and this time, the Earthmen try to steal the ship's cargo. After a bitter battle, the old Captain dies, but Alan manages to save the ship and vanquish the Earthmen. He finds himself promoted to Captain, and he finds a letter from the old Captain, telling him his mission. Oh, and then he tricks an engineer from Earth to get on the ship, knocks him out and kidnaps him to be a replacement engineer, despite the fact that this man is married.

Here's the deal -- the Long Passage is essential for humanity. So all this stuff is justified. The Captain's coldness and cruelty are necessary to create a new leader. The genocide of aliens is necessary to keep them from doing the same to humans. (Shoot first, try to make friends never.) And of course kidnapping is justified because new people are essential on the Long Passage.  It's all played perfectly straight -- I considered the idea that it was a satire -- after all, humanity is portrayed as pretty much thoroughly bad throughout -- maybe Hubbard was saying "All these evil acts are justified in order to save this evil species" -- if so, that didn't come through well.

The story itself, though broadly implausible in many places, is a pretty decent read, but the message is vile.

Reviews of Fitzgerald, Feeley, Kressel, Morrison, Fraser, etc.

Recent Substack Posts

Here are some recent reviews I've done on my Substack.

Human Voices, by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers

Cumberworld & Farther, by Gregory Feeley

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford

Moth, by James Sallis

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow

The Rainseekers, by Matthew Kressel

Mr American, by George Macdonald Fraser

Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov

Replanted Review: Deepdrive, by Alexander Jablokov

by Rich Horton

[I wrote this back in 1998, when the novel came out. I haven't revised it at all (save for a few bracketed additions] so what I say about the author is very out of date. It turns out that Jablokov took an hiatus from writing (or at least publishing) for nearly a decade after this novel appeared, Since he retunred, in 2006, he has published one more novel (Brain Thief (2010)) and quite a few shorter stories, which have continued to be very interesting.]

Alexander Jablokov's new novel [as of 1998] is Deepdrive.  I've been a fan of Jablokov's ever since reading his first short stories in Asimov's a few years ago.  I really liked his first novel, Carve the Sky, which was "baroque" and artsy, and his third novel, Nimbus, a kind of post-cyberpunk story.  And I've liked a lot of his short stories.

Deepdrive is his latest.  It's an Avon EOS hardcover, and I'd like to praise Avon for their practice of publishing lower-priced books.  Their pbs have been $3.99, and now I've seen a couple of hc's, in smaller packages, for about $15.  I think this is a good approach. [That comment didn't age well!]

Deepdrive itself is set in a busy, well-imagined future.  The solar system is occupied (mostly benignly) by several different species of aliens: the Bgarth are burrowing on Venus, assisting with its terraformation; the Gunners are on Mercury, shooting at the Sun; the Ulanyi are on Earth, living in symbiotic relationships with nomadic human tribes.  And there are plenty more.  But none of the aliens will give humans the secret of the "deepdrive", which allows faster than light travel.  An alien from another species, the Vronnans, has showed up, apparently a refugee from his own people, and he is holed up on Venus.  Rumor says he wants to be rescued, and he might have something important, even a deepdrive, to trade.  Sophonisba Trust assembles a team, somewhat ad hoc, to go after the Vronnan.  The novel follows her and the members of her team, as well as the Vronnan, as a series of disasters propels them willy nilly towards learning more than they might want to know about Vronnans, the lost Martian slowship interstellar expedition, their own motivations, and how Ulanyi, Gunners, and other aliens tie into this.  And also, maybe, the secrets of the deepdrive.

It's all pretty cool, and well-imagined, distinctly "Sterlingesque" (particularly reminiscent of some Shaper-Mechanist stuff, like "Swarm"), and certainly exciting, and yet ...  It never quite won me over.  I dunno why.  Maybe it was too hard to follow all the threads.  Maybe I didn't quite believe in most of the characters (Soph was well done, also her ex-husband Lightfoot, but I was never convinced by the beautiful lesbian Ambryn Chretien or the big bodyguard Elward Bakst, both of whose motivations and abilities seemed to change to whatever the plot required).  But, I'm sort of worried, is my "Sense of Wonder" dulling?  What I mean is, I think maybe 20 years ago all the cool stuff, the aliens, the biotech, the plots within plots, would have overwhelmed me and carried me along.  And it didn't do that for me now.

On balance, I'd still recommend Deepdrive.  But I can't give it full marks. [Which may have been more my fault than Jablokov's!]

Reclaimed Review: Declare, by Tim Powers

Reclaimed Review: Declare, by Tim Powers

I'm reading Tim Powers' The Mills of the Gods just now, and I thought maybe I should repost something I wrote about him. Alas, I didn't write a full review of The Anubis Gates, by far my favorite of his books, when I read it long ago. Indeed, I find I haven't written much about him! But I did write this review, way back in 2001. (Indeed, I posted it on SFF Net on August 30, 2011 -- a terribly innocent time, in retrospect, with an event pending that could probably prompt a Powers-like book, far enough in the future -- it's still too soon now.)

Declare opens with a brief scene featuring a British Intelligence Captain driving a Jeep down Mt. Ararat in 1948, fleeing the deaths of several of his comrades. Then we switch to 1963, and we meet Andrew Hale, who, we learn soon enough, was that Captain in 1948.  He's a lecturer in  English at a University, but his past in Intelligence has caught up with him.  He's told by secret means to meet with his mysterious supervisor/recruiter at the shady, unofficial, branch of the British Intelligence that he has been a member of, and he learns that he is being provided with a rather uncomfortably cover -- he's being charged with treason and murder, which will make his flight to Kuwait and subsequent offer of his services to the Soviets more credible.  The real reason for all this is that in 1948 his mission was to foil whatever the Soviets were trying on Mt. Ararat -- but while he managed to foul up their plans, they also fouled up his plans, in part due to the treachery of Kim Philby, so that the potential for the Soviets to achieve what they want remains -- and now, in 1963, they are ready to try again.

From there the story proceeds on multiple timelines.  We learn in flashbacks of Hale's past -- his mysterious birth in Palestine, his Catholic upbringing by a single mother in the English countryside, his recruitment into a curious side branch of British Intelligence and his first assignment -- to let himself be recruited as a Soviet agent, to work in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941. In Paris his partner agent is a beautiful young Spaniard named Elena Ceniza-Bendiga, and she and Andrew fall in love, but she makes clear that her first allegiance is to international communism.  So when the Nazi's find them out, and they escape and are ordered to Moscow, presumably to be killed as blown agents, he ducks out on her and returns to England, where he learns, more or less, what's really going on.  

There follow episodes in Berlin in 1945, where Hale meets Elena again, as well as Kim Philby, the highly placed spy who Hale has always disliked and mistrusted.  The three meet again on Ararat in 1948, when Hale learns conclusively that Philby is a traitor, and also becomes convinced that Elena has learned to hate him.

A parallel path follows Hale's adventures in the Middle East in 1963, as he manages to get recruited by the Soviets for there new attempt at -- I won't say what -- on Mr. Ararat.  This involves trips to mysterious cities in the desert, meetings with curious entities, and another meeting with Elena and with Kim Philby, who has finally been exposed publically as a spy, and who is looking for escape -- either to France or Russia.  Finally, as we have known, the strange operation called Declare will be resolved, one way or another, on the slopes of Mt. Ararat, near a curious long buried wooden object -- perhaps a ship.

The book is always intriguing, and full of clever supernatural ideas.  The central supernatural entities here are djinni -- which Powers links to fallen angels.  He ties this in with the true stories of Kim Philby and his father, and with T. E. Lawrence, and with some mysterious cities in the Arabian Desert, and with meteorites, and spies, and Catholicism.  I found this all well-imagined, and consistent and comprehensible in a way that, for example, the ghosts in Expiration Date never managed to be for me.  There is also the love story between Elena and Andrew, which is well-told and very well resolved, but which didn't fully work for me, as the emotional element of it never quite came to life for me.  I think the other slight weakness in the novel is a certain implausibility in some of the spy stuff -- basically, it seemed to me that Hale's cover would never have held up as well as it did -- the Russians would have got just a bit skittish, and shot him out of hand.  Not that I'd know.  Powers also manages to work in some of his other recurring themes -- poker, and the injured hero, for two.  It's a very solid effort, just a whisker short of being exceptional, and it takes a place in my pantheon of Powers' books at the second level -- below my favorite, The Anubis Gates, but ranged somewhere with The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides as among the next best.

Rediscovered Review: Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah Ross

I resurrect another review of a rather nice original anthology from a small press, back in 2008. This review originally appeared in Locus, as a Divers Hand review.

Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah J. Ross (Leda (an imprint of Norilana Books, Winnetka, CA), ISBN: 978-1-934169-91-9, $11.95, 307 pages, tpb) February 2008

A review by Rich Horton

“Lace and Blade” is a term coined by Norilana publisher Vera Nazarian, for a sort of romantic subset of Sword and Sorcery: stories where the duels are as likely to be with wits as swords, and where women are as likely as men to wield swords (not to mention wits!). And here is a book composed entirely of such stories. Stories resembling older novels like The Scarlet Pimpernel – or newer novels like Swordspoint. I have to say first that this subgenre fits my tastes: I read more Georgette Heyer and Baroness Orczy than Conan in my formative years. And I add, then, that Lace and Blade delivers exactly what it promises; almost every story satisfies, with plenty of color and passion and wit and magic. I’m not sure any story transcends its mold: and so nothing here pierced me like Richard St. Vier’s rapier, but I really had fun.

A particular highlight is Sherwood Smith’s novella “The Rule of Engagement”, in which a woman is kidnapped by a man who hopes to marry her, and must find a way to engineer her escape without causing political issues, or harm to the man’s retainers. The story is satisfying in its scope, and hints at a fascinating backstory … all part of a grand fantastical history that Smith has been elaborating since childhood, and which is the source of her excellent Inda novels for DAW.

Tanith Lee’s “Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker, Priest” is also great fun – on a ship journey, a couple of swordsmen take a sudden inexplicable dislike to each other, to the point of proposing a duel. But a shipwreck intervenes, and the real story is eventually made clear on the (mostly swordless) island at which they end up. Most readers will see quickly the shape of the story, and the twist, but it remains a delight getting there.

Two stories very nicely use Spanish settings. Robin Wayne Bailey’s “Touch of Moonlight” has a Lady encountering an outlaw – rumored to actually be a ghost – while on a journey to ransom her younger brother. By the end, supernatural beings have been encountered – as well as, of course, more naturally beastly humans. In Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind”, a young man is being pushed to a marriage he fears will be loveless, in order to save his family’s fading fortunes. But the mysterious rider called the Night Wind may change his ideas … again, the reader will recognize immediately what’s going on, but the story still satisfies.

Dave Smeds, in “The Beheaded Queen”, features the most interesting main character, as indicated by the title. And her fate is treated uncompromisingly – her interest is seeing to the future of her son. Madeleine E. Robins’s “Virtue and the Archangel” reminded me just a bit of her wonderful Sarah Tolerance novels (how I wish a publisher would pick them up so she could write more), in telling of a woman led by circumstance to a not very respectable job as a private investigator – here she helps an old school friend to recover a lost jewel.

The other stories come from Diana L. Paxson – an effective tale set in Brazil; Chaz Brenchley – sort of a pendant to his novel Bridge of Dreams, involving enough but perhaps just a bit too much a side trip and not its own journey; and Catherine Asaro, whose story was the only one here to really disappoint me.

Remastered Fantasy Magazine Review: Paper Cities, edited by Ekaterina Sedia

SF Site isn't the only place I reviewed for that has gone defunct. (Not by a long shot, alas!) I also did a number of reviews for Fantasy Magazine. Here's one, of a really fine original anthology, from 2008, that won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology -- but that, alas, seems hardly remembered at all now.

[I thought Fantasy Magazine was defunct -- but perhaps not, as I see there are issues as recently as late 2025 at the Psychopomp site (including some of the reviews I did for them back in the day): Fantasy Magazine.]

Remastered Fantasy Magazine Review: Paper Cities, edited by Ekaterina Sedia (Senses Five Press), ISBN: 978-0-9796246-0-5, $14.95, 288 pages, tpb) April 2008

A review by Rich Horton

Paper Cities is subtitled “An Anthology of Urban Fantasy”. “Ahhh!”, I thought, “A bunch of stories about irruptions of magic in a contemporary city. (Probably either Minneapolis or Seattle, or somewhere in Canada.)” Not sure how many of those I could have stomached all in a row, fine as they can be on occasion. But this book defines “Urban Fantasy” rather more expansively. Indeed, the great bulk of the stories are set in secondary worlds, albeit indeed in cities in those worlds.  There is no question that makes the book more interesting to me. In many cases the “urbanness” of the stories is sort of a side issue, at least in that many of the stories are not in any real sense about the experience of living in an urban environment. Which doesn’t mean they don’t work!

Instead, the single element that marks many of these stories as “urban” fantasy is the way that their fantastical cities are central to the interest of the narrative. That is, they are not just a backdrop, or a convenient setting, but integral to the story. Indeed, these are “stories about cities” more than “stories about living in a city”, if you see what I mean. So Cat Rambo’s  “The Bumblety’s Marble” is believably set in a fantastical city and redolent of that city’s atmosphere, as it tells of a girl happening onto the title marble, then feeling obligated to return to a boy she meets from the underworld who says it is his mother’s heart. And with Jay Lake’s “Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable”, a dark story of the initiation of a girl into an order of “Sisters” in the title city. And “The Title of this Story”, by Stephanie Campisi, about a man whose job is to assign names to things, and his difficulty titling an obscure religious book from a distant village. And Ben Peek’s “The Funeral, Ruined”, about a city of cremation ovens and Morticians, and a woman mourning her lover, whom she calls dead – but he, perhaps, disagrees. Richard Parks’s “Courting the Lady Scythe” tells of a lower class man’s infatuation with the Lady who serves as the executioner in his town. The results of his scheme to meet her are predictable, but well told. The story is at one level fairly traditional fantasy, but it does tell – sort of behind its ostensible central story – the story of a city.

Other fine stories turn on striking central images, as with Vylar Kaftan’s “Godivy”, a very odd very short piece about an ambitious office worker and his unusual office, complete with living photocopier. Or Kaaron Warren’s “Down to the Silver Spirits”, in which a couple find a highly unusual way to have a baby. Or Greg van Eekhout’s “Ghost Market”, about buying ghosts, of course, but more sharply about the worst consequences of such a market. And Barth Anderson’s “The Last Escape” is a oddball little piece about an oddball escape artist making trouble for the rulers of a curiously isolated island city in time of plague – central here is not so much an odd image as an odd character. One story I both enjoyed and found frustrating was Cat Sparks’s “Sammarynda Deep”, which tells a moving and original story of a woman coming to her lover’s home city after the war they fought in is over, trying to find him and learning why he left. I thought the point-of-view choices were a bit off, and the setup a bit too labored, but the story I detected behind all that is lovely.

There are other strong stories here, by the likes of Anna Tambour, David Schwartz, and Jenn Reese; and only a couple real disappointments, most notably Hal Duncan’s piece, which is, as ever with him, very strikingly written, but, as too often with him, doesn’t tell a coherent story. The book on a whole is a strong, original, selection; giving a useful reinvigoration to the idea of Urban Fantasy.