The Modern World

I have a generalisation about science fiction and fantasy genre fiction; the former tends to be written by people who have interesting ideas but indifferent abilities to develop characters, to tell stories, to engage the reader. One often slogs through pages of mediocre prose in order to enjoy the little gems of speculation therein.

Fantasy, on the other hand, is afflicted by legions of writers who are perfectly capable of sketching an interesting character, of encouraging a reader to keep turning pages, but devoid of anything resembling an original idea, preferring to crib from the few giants of the genre, wrap their characters in silly names, churn out trilogy after trilogy, and get very rich indeed.

Steph Swainston is a fantasy writer. She is also producing the best, most interesting, and most importantly, original fantasy I have read in the 20-odd years since I started with Lord of the Rings. Since then I have read a reasonable chunk of fantasy, and Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy is the only work even in the same ballpark; The Modern World is the third book in a series.

Many of the central questions of The Year of Our War and No Present Like Time are to do with immortality: if immortality can be granted and revoked by one man, what would you do to gain it? What would you accede to in order to keep it? And how, then, once you won your prize, would you live with it? The Modern World continues with that theme, starting years after No Present, with Jant off drugs, away from the parallel worlds they give him access to, and back to his core job of fighting the hordes of insects invading his world.

It seems a step back from the previous novels in terms of complexity for much of the story; we are reset back almost, it seems, to the start of In The Year of Our War; the subjugation of Tris is barely mentioned. The only thing throwing us from an orderly, simple, boring, heroic fantasy piece is the simple task of retrieving a lost daughter.

Ahh, such a plain start I feared the promise of the series was fading. I should know better.We are again off at breakneck pace. In a few pages Swainston can cram idea sketches that would give a less able novellist the basis for a whole novel, a whole series, a whole career.

I cannot praise this series highly enough. It is, quite simply, the most engaging fiction I have read in years.

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