Emerging from Jodi Taylor’s bestselling series The Chronicles of St. Mary’s, Lady Amelia Smallhope and Pennyroyal are a time-travelling duo who have a complicated relationship with the Time Police, and not least because the TP’s MO is to “just kill everyone in sight and set fire to what’s left”. The Ballad of Smallhope and Pennyroyal (Headline, £20) is an origins story in which we first meet the aristocratic Amelia at her beloved (if crumbling) old pile of Starlings, where she encounters Pennyroyal as he attempts to steal her deceased mother’s diamonds.
She’s a troublemaking teenager bent on revenge; he’s an ex-butler turned criminal mastermind with a barely suppressed instinct for violence and an invisible pod (or “shed”, as Amelia calls it) that allows him to flit back and forth through time. How could it possibly go wrong? This breezily irreverent tale is told by Smallhope, whose take on the world is as comically (and morally) skewed as that of any character dreamed up by Jasper Fforde and Kyril Bonfiglioli (possibly due to her regular habit of mulling over her options by having “a drink and a think”).
A standalone novel that touches on the pair’s previous adventures and embraces exploding condoms, bona fide Neanderthals and a jaunt back to Stonehenge 3½ millennia ago, The Ballad of Smallhope and Pennyroyal is a delight from start to finish.
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Despite its title, Brandon Sanderson’s The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Mediaeval England (Gollancz, £22) isn’t a time-travelling tale; instead it opens with a man who can’t even remember his name waking up in the midst of an impressive scorch-mark in the rural depths of an alternate dimension. Mistaken for a wizard by the magic-loving locals, and unwilling to disabuse them of their delusion until he has the wherewithal to find his way back home, our reluctant hero – Johnny – soon finds himself battling with gods, rapacious lords, Viking-style raiders and romantic feelings for Sefawynn, a bardic spell-weaver who is the only native to see Johnny for the charlatan he truly is. Smart, funny and revelling in upending the fantasy genre’s tropes, The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook is probably the only guide you’ll ever need if you find yourself unexpectedly dumped into another dimension.
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Set in present-day Seoul, Kim Ewhan’s The Black Orb (Serpent’s Tail, £14.99), translated by Sean Lin Halbert, opens with Jeong-su running for his life from “objects of pure terror” – spherical orbs two metres in diameter that have simply appeared on the city’s streets and begun absorbing people into their insatiable maws. With the military unable to cope and the government flying off into self-imposed exile, society quickly descends into anarchy; conspiracy theories abound as to whether the objects are black holes, UFOs or even some manner of geometrically perfect monster. Kim Ewhan’s set-up is terrific, bringing to mind a 1950s B-movie or an updated take on The Day of the Triffids, but once the objects are finally confronted, the second half of the novel becomes a series of repetitive twists that fail to deliver on the concept’s promise.
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In Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil (Orbit, £20), Rae – in hospital for cancer treatment – is “not an escape artist but an art escapist, running away to imaginary lands”. Absconding from the oncology ward into the pages of the “Time of Iron” fantasy saga, Rae is transformed into Lady Rahela, a self-styled “treacherous, power-hungry bitch” at the court of Octavianus, Eighth King in Waiting for the Emperor. There Rahela teams up with the sociopathic killer Key and the scheming lady-in-waiting Emer, and sets out to live up (or down) to the legend of the Beauty Dipped in Blood. There’s a little too much metafictional emphasis at times on how princesses and villains tend to behave in classic fantasy tales, but otherwise Sarah Rees Brennan – herself a cancer survivor – has delivered a joyous celebration of Lady Rahela’s wicked triumph against the odds.
A black hole, writes Adam Roberts in Lake of Darkness (Gollancz, £22), is “an annex to reality in which the logic of place stops being operative”. That logic doesn’t prevent Captain Raine of the Sa-Niro slaughtering his entire crew at the urging of “the Gentleman”, whose voice emerges, claims Raine, from the depths of the black hole around which the Sa-Niro orbits. A scholar of the sociopathic killer popular in the fictions of the 20th and 21st centuries, Saccade is dispatched to discover the truth of Raine’s ramblings, and finds herself navigating an improbable world that owes as much of a debt to Dante, Milton and Alice in Wonderland as it does to theories of dark matter and Hawking radiation (we presume that Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris was a considerable influence too). Terrible musical and literary puns aside, Roberts’s 24th novel delivers a powerful blend of mythology, philosophy and cutting-edge science.
Declan Burke is an author and critic. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
