Chaz Brenchley

Fun, takes a slightly weird turn in the 2nd half, which I was less amused by, but the basic story works very well, and is clever look at society.

Interstellar travel has been made possible by uploading consciousness to beam it to appropriate receivers, and decant yourself into the next body. Of course this has all sorts of problems and most of the galaxy has very strict rules regarding the identity, naming conventions and the like. However there are always exceptions, and one of those is show more Rotten Row, where pretty much anything goes. They have two Shutes so you can send yourself back and forth on the same day, and there all restrictions on bodytype have been disregarded, wings, fur, size and gender are all utterly optional. An artist visits hoping to be able to share mental holography of the denizens thoughts, but is almost immediately beguiled by a passing centaur. Of course some things never change, the rich can order any body they can conceive, while the poor try to earn a living as slaves to others literal designs.

The initial introduction to the world-building was the most interesting, with the look at what such a technology might do to things like art - original physical objects having to be shipped by actual tortuously slow spaceship (although the author fails to grasp how big space is, and long even light takes between stars), and culture. Gender and race become irrelevant when you land in whatever body is ready next, but identity the 'youness' remains critical. Religion gets only a passing glance, but like all traditions has managed to hang on and adapt. Once that's all established well enough with the Artist now exploring the fringes of acceptable behaviour, the plot they get roped into is less interesting, but serves well enough to deliver a resolution.

Clever, and an author worth looking out for. show less

Disclaimer: Daniel Fox is a friend of mine. However, I didn’t review the book just because he’s a friend — I whined shamelessly for an ARC because having read the first book in the trilogy, I very badly wanted to read the next one as soon as it was available in edited form, rather than waiting until it was on sale.

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Daniel Fox keeps up the quality and the pace in the second volume of his fantasy trilogy inspired by mediaeval China. The first volume, “Dragon In Chains”, told the show more tale of the boy Emperor’s flight from a rebel army, and the stories of some of those touched by the war. Now the Emperor has reached safety on the remote island of Taishu on the very fringe of the Empire.

Taishu may be remote, but no would-be usurper can afford to leave the Emperor there in exile. The island holds the jade mines that are the source of imperial power — and in this world, that isn’t just symbolic. This volume explores in greater depth the subtle magic that underpins imperial rule. And there is more than imperial magic. There are other intelligences in this world, and the human forces which are arrayed against one another are starting to learn just what it means to tangle such creatures into human battles.

It’s hard to review this book in any depth without giving major spoilers for the first one (which I’ve reviewed previously), because this trilogy really is a single novel in three volumes, not a series of three interlinked novels. But what I can say is that it follows each of the major characters and threads from the first volume, developing each strand of the story in a satisfying way. This is no wish-fulfillment story wherein the Hero is noble simply because he is the Hero, but a careful consideration of the cumulative effects of power — on those who have it, whether in name only or in reality, on those who desire it, and on those who are simply in its path. And like the first volume, it neither flinches from showing the horror of war, nor wallows in gratuituous gore.

This is a complex story with equally complex characters, which genuinely needs the three volumes to do justice to the tales it has to tell. But it’s beautifully constructed, and told in stunningly good prose. If you’ve not read the first book, don’t start with this one. It really is worth your while finding “Dragon in Chains” and reading that first, not least because part of the pleasure is watching how the characters are changing and growing in response to the upheavals in their world. But there’s no need to wait for the final book to come out, as “Jade Man’s Skin” offers enough intermediate resolution of plot threads to leave a reader feeling satisfied while still wanting to hear the end of the story. Go buy them now — this series is breathtaking, in concepts, in story and in prose.

Comment thread for this review at my Livejournal. show less

Third part of the medieval China-inspired fantasy by Chaz Brenchley writing under his Daniel Fox pen name. And make no mistake, this is the third and final part of a single story which began with Dragon in Chains, rather than the third of three novels. You'll need to have read the first two parts to get the most out of this book. Fortunately, that's no hardship. This is a complex story that needs the space to do justice to the lives of its characters.

At the end of the second part (Jade Man's show more Skin), the young Emperor had control of the island of Taishu, source of the jade that underpins imperial power, and was about to lose the city of Santung across the strait to the general who was attempting to overthrow him -- until the no-longer-chained dragon disrupted the petty wars of humans. In this volume the characters have to deal with the consequences -- the dragon will not permit boats to cross the strait unless they are protected by the presence of the Li-goddess of the sea, in the form of one of the children the goddess has taken for her use as a human avatar. As the humans play out their struggles for power, so do the dragon and the goddess, in a complex tales with many strands. It does not end in the boy Emperor winning back his entire empire, but that would not be the right end for this story, and it ends well enough.

As with the first two parts, this offers a thoughtful look at war and its aftermath, written in stunning prose. The trilogy is a long read, but well worth the time. show less

Chaz Brenchley has a fine track record of writing outstanding short stories, and that goes double for one particular class of short story, the ghost story. The set-up, the growing unease, the twist, the reveal - I simplify, I generalise, but still, these elements work brilliantly at short story length. But what happens when you try to sustain a ghost story at novel length?

Well, if you're lucky you get House of Doors.

This sequel (broadly speaking) to The Keys of D'Espérance might have been show more called The Doors of D'Espérance - it's about a house to which (the clue is in the name) people come when they are at the end of their tether, and about those people and what they find in that house. There are potentially any number of stories, visiting the house at different periods in history, and considering the various fates that might befall a large, remote, unbeautiful house (because Chaz Brenchley also writes well about houses).

House of Doors is set during the Second World War: D'Espérance is now RAF Morwood, a hospital for airmen with horrifying burns, and Ruth Taylor, recently widowed and looking for death, accepts a nursing post there. But before she can even enter the house, right at the door, she is met by - "of course" - the face of her dead husband.

Within the house she finds her patients, men whose injuries are - well, I used the word "horrifying" earlier, and I meant it. There is horror here, and though some of it is supernatural, more of it lies in the damage that the human body can sustain and still survive. These are the injuries that create the 'horribly disfigured' Phantom of the Opera horror, and I am, for reasons of my own, grateful for Chaz for not doing this, for making the reader aware of what his characters have suffered, of how they have been damaged by it and of the pioneering skills of those who treated them, but for pointing out too that after the initial shock, that 'horribly disfigured' face becomes just another familiar face.

I don't know whether a purist would accept House of Doors as a ghost story at novel length. It's a novel, certainly, an exciting, moving novel, and it has a ghost in it. But RAF Morwood has mysteries of its own, and these gradually reveal a story of war and how it is waged, heroism and what it costs. There's a wartime romance, which pulls off the trick of making sense to a modern reader while still making sense by the standards of the 1940s. What makes the ghost story central is an almost meta quality, the way the narrative takes the convention of the haunted house and turns it inside out, confronting the reader with questions about what it would mean to be haunted, how we might feel about ghosts if we thought of them as more than a thrilling fantasy. It invites you to be carried along by the story, but also to carry on thinking about what it means, long after you have reached the end.

Which I suppose makes it haunting at yet another level. show less