The SF and fantasy round-up

David V Barrett discovers Lucifer in a north London dole queue and otherworldly children falling from the sky, as well as a welcome selection of criticism from the great Ursula K Le Guin...

Assassin’s Fate

Robin Hobb HarperVoyager 2018 Pb, 853pp, £8.99, ISBN 9780007444281

Lucifer by Moonlight

Patrice Chaplin Clairview 2018 Pb, 56pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781905570911

Spare and Found Parts

Sarah Maria Griffin Titan Books 2018 Pb, 407pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781785657054

Beneath the Sugar Sky

Seanan McGuire Tor 2018 Hb, 176pp, $17.99, ISBN 9780765393586

Dreams Must Explain Themselves

Ursula K LeGuin Gollancz 2018 Pb, 388pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781473205949

The Greenwood Faun

Nina Antonia Egaeus Press 2017 limited edition of 420 Hb, 180pp, £32 , ISBN 9780993527876

It’s over 20 years since Robin Hobb wrote Assassin’s

Apprentice, the first novel in what would become five linked trilogies, including novels about liveships, sentient ships made from the cocoons of dragons. Fitz, the bastard son of a prince, who trained as an assassin in the early books, and the Fool, his pale childhood friend who has numerous identities, male and female, set out to wreak vengeance on the city of Clerres for kidnapping and killing Fitz’s young daughter Bee. But Bee is alive, being taken to Clerres in fulfilment of ancient dream prophecies.

Hobb’s novels have always been way beyond most genre fantasy novels in being utterly believable, beautifully written and brilliantly plotted;

Assassin’s Fate is more brutal and more heart-rending than most.

But almost no novel, however good, needs to be 853 pages long; when Robin Hobb wrote as Megan Lindholm, her novels were a third the length and just as rich and satisfying.

Lucifer by Moonlight is a fictional spin-off from Patrice Chaplin’s semi-autobiographical books about her researches and discoveries around the border of Catalunya and France. Lucifer, thrown out of heaven millennia ago, hangs out in north London with no-hopers in the dole queue; he goes by the name Luc, or as a fur-wrapped streetgirl called Lucie Fur. At a lecture on how Lucifer has been misrepresented in popular culture, he causes a disturbance by protesting about some of the things said about him.

It’s a fascinating story, told with Chaplin’s usual wit, and nicely illustrated in colour – but £10.99 for a 56-page novella is pushing it more than a bit. In a post-apocalyptic Ireland teenager Nell Crane lives with her father, who makes biomechanical limbs for those born without them. She’s a geek; she far prefers to spend her time creating intricate devices than hanging out with boys. She’s reached the age where she has to make a contribution to society – so why not defy convention and make her own mechanical companion? Astonishingly, Spare and

Found Parts, a compelling coming-of-age tale, is Sarah Maria Griffin’s first novel.

Beneath the Sugar Sky, the third book in a young adult series by Seanan McGuire, is strikingly original.

Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children provides a safe place for young teenagers who, in a new twist on the word “wayward”, “fall through the cracks in the world where they were born”. They’ve lived in other worlds, some very different from our own; they’ve come back, and small wonder they’re confused, disturbed, unhappy.

A Japanese girl falls out of the sky into the school pond, and demands to see her mother, Sumi – who had been at the school not long before, as a girl, and had died, but had somehow lived on in Confection, a world made of cake, and had a daughter. But the daughter is beginning to fade away as the fact that her mother died before she was conceived begins to catch up with her… The students dig up Sumi’s skeleton and go to visit the Lord of the Dead to try to reunite it with the part of her that wasn’t bones – numerous classical tropes here – before heading to Sumi and her daughter’s world of Confection.

This is a truly bizarre tale that makes Alice’s Adventures look almost prosaic. If this is what today’s teenagers are getting to read (complete with the words “fuck” and “vagina”), there’s hope for the world. (But which one?) Ursula K LeGuin was not only a great SF writer ( The Left Hand of Darkness must rank in any Top Twenty of SF novels) but a fine critic. Dreams Must Explain

Themselves, published just after her recent death, is a selection for a British audience from four previous books of essays, talks, reviews and introductions to her own books. To quote from one speech: “Fantasists… may be talking as seriously as any sociologist – and a good deal more directly – about human life as it is lived, as it might be lived, and as it ought to be lived. For after all, as great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion and hope.” Nina Antonia’s The Greenwood

Faun is a beautiful piece of work: an illustrated cloth cover, gold-blocked, with a naked young woman lying in the arms of Pan; floral Victorian endpapers; and late-19th/early20th century illustrations in the text.

The text itself is strange and convoluted. Lucian Taylor, the character in Arthur Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams, writes a novel, The Greenwood Faun, then dies. It’s privately published in just 10 copies, which end up with a bookseller and his family. Everyone who reads the book is affected deeply, from Connie, the dreamy, otherworldly son of the bookseller to the unpleasant Giles, who married Connie’s sister Violet.

Connie is accompanied on his night wanderings around London by the ghost of the alcoholic poet Lionel Johnson, whose main claim to fame was introducing his friend Oscar Wilde to his cousin Lord Alfred Douglas. There’s a lunatic asylum; there are Pagan rituals in the woods. All fascinating stuff – but this physically lovely book is marred by careless copyediting.