Margaret R. Taylor's Blog

I’m so glad to be wrong about a fantasy trilogy. By mistake, I started the Daevabad Trilogy at an awkward place—the beginning of the second book—because I mixed up City of Brass with Kingdom of Copper. At the start of Kingdom of Copper, the three main characters, Nahri, Ali, and Dara, are reeling from the events of the first book. I thought that they were flailing about with no motivation, and that the worldbuilding was too cute. Why was “grand vizier” spelled “grand wazir?” Why should I care wh...

I’m a fan of Jonathan Stroud because of his awesome Bartimaeus series from the early 2000s. As part of my quest for literary comfort food during the pandemic, I looked up what he’d written lately. Boy, was I rewarded.

The Lockwood & Co. series describes an alternate universe where, starting in the 1960s, ghost hauntings get much, much worse. As the ghostly epidemic spreads across Britain, private ghost-hunting agencies spring up to keep hauntings in check. Also, onl...

A world that vaguely resembles Industrial-Revolution Japan reels from the aftermath of a cross-continental war. Humans, demons, half-demons, and cats are all nursing old wounds and scheming against each other. Meanwhile, a young half-demon, Maika Halfwolf, has an eldritch abomination in her arm thats getting more powerful by the day. She has to cut it out of herself before it causes a fate far worse than another war.

Monstress is produced by a creative duo, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. As...

WEAPONIZED CARTESIAN DUALISM. That’s all you need to know about how awesome this book is.

It’s World War One, and British soldiers are trained that if they die, they should report to headquarters and tell a medium the last thing they saw, to coordinate with military intelligence. Naturally, a ghost and a medium work together to solve the ghost’s murder because that’s the coolest thing you can do with this magic system.

Ghost Talkers is surprisingly light-...

I’ve been looking forward to the finale to the Amberlough Dossier series for some time, and Amnesty did not disappoint. If Amberlough was like fantasy Cabaret and Armistice was like fantasty Casablanca, then Amnesty was like the fantasy Nuremberg trials. Gedda is trying to put itself together after seven years of OSP rule, and trying to work out how much each person is guilty for what happened. It’s a meditation on what justice is and whether anybody can get it. None of the main characters g...

Although I fully expect her to bite it within the next few weeks.

I love that Brienne isn’t sexy. I’ve seen plenty of women warriors in TV and movies, but they wear suspiciously sternum-cracking armor, they’re magically better at combat than the men around them, and they look fabulous. Hollywood’s compensating for sexism, sure, in the laziest way possible.

In Rogue One, for like three seconds we see one of the fighter pilots say something like, “Yep, got it.” And … she’s wearing a regular ol...

Why didn’t I learn about Malcolm X in school? Before I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I was vaguely aware that X existed, and that he was more militant than Martin Luther King.

X had an extraordinary life, and Alex Haley (of Roots) convinced him to tell him his story in a series of interviews. Then Haley crafted those interviews into this book. During his life, Malcolm X went through the foster care system, shined shoes, wore a really regrettable zoot suit, dodged the draft twice, deal...

The Traitor Baru Cormorant was recommended to me at last year’s 4th Street Fantasy convention. It has a great premise: a fantasy set in a world without magic magic, where the magic system comes from politics and economics. Young Baru Cormorant grows up on a Polynesia-like island that gets colonized. She decides to rise through the ranks of her colonizers’ society and destroy it from within.

But it didn’t work for me. Baru’s story contained so much gratuitous misery and awfulness that it had t...

[image error]While reading “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, I wondered who this Kij Johnson was and where I could find more of her work. Turns out she also wrote The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. No wonder this novella is so good.

The “Man Who Bridged the Mist” has a perfectly shaped plot. The story opens when Kit Meinem, an engineer/architect, rolls into town with a suitcase full of plans for a bridge. It closes just before the bridge opens to the public, as Kit prepares to move on.

Normally you’d expect Ki...

[image error]It’s a solid middle book.

Three years after the events of Amberlough, three Geddan exiles cross paths in the tropical nation of Porachis: Lillian DePaul, a press attaché blackmailed into serving fascist Gedda’s foreign service; Aristine Makricosta, a smuggler who got out of Gedda early and went (mostly) legit; and Cordelia Lehane, a railway bomber on the lam. They draw each other into a plot to do a de-kidnapping.

Donnelly, who was a debut author with Amberlough, hits her stride here. She’s i...