SCI-FI AND FANTASY | Daily Mail Online

Very strange, darkly hilarious and disturbingly moreish, this brilliant fantasy envelops us in its hallucinatory reality

SCI-FI AND FANTASY 

THE CURATOR 

by Owen King (Hodder £20, 480pp)

Crime and punishment, cruelty and kindness, hate and forgiveness . . . actually, there’s not much forgiveness on show in this intricately plotted and gruesomely detailed work set in an imagined 19th century city.

An idealistic revolution has expelled the old order.

Though the trams still run and Dora is moving up in the world, from maid to museum curator, unease creeps into the story like the cats that are everywhere: the slums, the grand hotels and the ruins of the Psykical Institute.

Very strange, darkly hilarious and disturbingly moreish, this brilliant fantasy envelops us in its hallucinatory reality, then grips like rigor mortis. All aboard the Morgue Ship!

It’s the Wild West but not as we know it. Instead of European settlers we have humans, elves and dwarves, and in place of Native Americans, we have Orcs — Greyskins

GREYSKIN 

by James Kinsley (Deixis £15.99, 244pp)

It’s the Wild West but not as we know it. 

Instead of European settlers we have humans, elves and dwarves, and in place of Native Americans, we have Orcs — Greyskins.

It’s a simple twist — and high risk — but it well and truly pays off.

A series of loosely linked stories introduce the players: bold women, shifty men, law-makers and law-breakers, all trying to make a life in a land that isn’t theirs.

We meet a lone woman farmer hiding a wounded orc from the sheriff’s lynch-mob, psychopathic and decent soldiers, a dignified orc negotiator trying to retain scraps of land for his people.

Bleak tales, beautifully told and shot through with grim humour, humanity and, well, orcish compassion.

When Harold Tunmore — genius and polymath — turns up on a mental ward after being lost for decades, almost all he has to show for his missing years is a sheaf of letters, written but never sent

ASCENSION 

by Nicholas Binge (HarperVoyager £16.99, 336pp)

When Harold Tunmore — genius and polymath — turns up on a mental ward after being lost for decades, almost all he has to show for his missing years is a sheaf of letters, written but never sent.

They describe a secret expedition to an impossible anomaly: a massive mountain that appeared out of nowhere and must be investigated.

But, and here’s the twist, they also tell a back-story that might explain why the whole thing is a deranged fantasy.

Myth, physics, religion and human nature . . . it’s all there in this brilliant, brain-twisting, high-concept tour-de-force that keeps you reading just as the scientists in the story are compelled to keep climbing.