We of the Fantasy-Hive SPFBO 7 team may have been quiet but we have not been inactive. Since we last posted in October with the selection of our chosen finalist Shadows of Ivory by T.L.Greylock and Bryce O’Connor, our team of Theo, Belle, Scarlett and Calvin have been reading the other nine finalists and jotting our thoughts down in our Hive review documents. However, we have waited until everyone has read all the books before coming to our judgements and scores.

You can read our review of Shadows of Ivory here.

Over the next three weeks we will be posting three finalist reviews each week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday). We will be saving the three out of those nine that we liked the best for the final week, with our third favourite going up on Monday 25^th April, our second favourite going up on Wednesday 27^th April and our most favourite on Friday 29^th April. At this stage I can’t say which if any of them might prove more popular with us than Shadows of Ivory, as we haven’t confirmed any scores.

However, the other six reviews will be posted in a random order, so when our first review goes up on Monday it could be anything from our least favourite to our fourth favourite.

It’s also time to let you know that this is the last year that the Hive will be involved as a SPFBO judge. We were partly involved in the final stage of SPFBO4, and have been a full participant in SPFBO5 (Under Laura’s leadership) SPFBO6 (Under Beth’s leadership), and SPFBO7 (with me, Theo co-ordinating things) – but this will be our last SPFBO outing leaving at least one vacant blogging slot for SPFBO8. So if any blogs out there want to start brushing off their credentials and sounding out potential judging teams – now would be a time to start.

It’s been a great run and we’ve found some fantastic new books and authors, but SPFBO duties do place a significant time burden on the judges who give their time for free in a bid to help authors and readers alike.  I worked out the Hive judge’s time commitment.  20%x24 round one phase one books + 100%x6 semi-finalists + 100%x9 other finalists comes to the equivalent of 19.8 books read. For those of us who struggle to hit a Goodreads target of 40-50 books a year, this is a substantial proportion of our discretionary reading time.

I would like to say a thank you to a great team of Calvin, Belle, Peter and Scarlett, as well as Julia, Nils and Beth for backroom support and encouragement.  As our final finalist reviews drop over the next few weeks, I hope both readers and authors find inspiration and encouragement from our comments.  I know that SPFBO can be a bruising experience so thank you finally to those authors brave enough to pitch their books into what can be  a maelstrom of trepidation and excitement.

I thought I’d finish this post with some observations on the relationship between real life and fantasy stories as exemplified by this year’s SPFBO finalists.

I am drafting this post in March knowing it will be a month before it goes live. In the sequence of years so far in the terrible twenty-twenties, each year seems determined to outdo its predecessor in knocking the shine off the fresh-faced New Year’s Eve optimism with which we said good bye to one awful year and hoped for better things in the 12 months to come. It is hard to predict what kind of context this article will emerge into – will war and war crimes have become as swiftly normalised as death and pandemics, corruption and egregious dishonesty, or climate crisis denial and protest suppression? However, even before the war in Ukraine, our SPFBO 7 finalists had got me thinking how Fantasy and Speculative fiction are never entirely decoupled from the world the authors inhabit. For example, Stefanie Burgess – who wrote the SPFBO5 semi-finalist Snowspelled – explained that the 2016 American presidential election inspired her to write about a world where only women did politics and men confined themselves to magic and illusion.

Speculative fiction, in both sci-fi and fantasy forms, has a great tradition of holding a mirror up to contemporary society. The “Sad Puppies” campaign that there is some canonical perfection of perspective and character which had to be protected against deviation into diversity was rightly rejected. Fantasy narratives develop and adapt in response to their contemporary society and arguably do so more quickly than any other genre. Which is why many authors are rightly dismayed that the film makers still invest so much money and effort in revisiting and remaking decades old icons, rather than exploring vibrant new works.  Much as Aesop’s fables used animal analogues to interrogate human dilemmas and conflicts, so too fantasy fiction can use some unfamiliar contexts to present and explore some very familiar concepts. A safe space if you will in which entertainment also delivers some food for reflection. Self-published fiction, with its shorter time to market than traditional-fiction may serve as a windsock to show which real world issues are currently seeping into speculative fiction stories.  So, it is possible that within the pages of our SPFBO7 finalists we may discover a few emerging trends in speculative fiction thinking.

It is also true that just as the author writes from their own experience, the reader also sees the story through the lens of their own context. Barthes in The Death of the Author makes the point that the meaning of the text is not eternally determined by the author, but fashioned anew by each reader’s interaction with it. So – in this little exercise of drawing parallels between our SPFBO finalists and our contemporary travails, some may be intentional by the author and others may have been retro-fitted by me – but hey ho, here goes.

Urban Bleak – environments of poverty, inequality and exploitation.

In We Men of Ash and Shadow the enigmatic veteran Vanguard carries out clandestine operations for an unscrupulous overlord. The focus of the book lies in the city of D’Orsee where the populace are trapped between the twin perils of organised crime and political corruption. With lines like

“It all came down to who could tell the best lies” and

“Sadly, not even Henriette could control the actions of evil men. All the rules in the world did not matter to someone who was willing to break them”

The context and conflict feel painfully relevant in 2022.

In The Mortal Blade we have another iconic city – the Eternal City, ruled by gods and demi-gods, peopled by mortals and the poor. Within that city the slum sector of the Circuits becomes a focus for insurgency as various political actors seek to inflame and manipulate events for their own long term aims.

Embedding one of the characters in an eventually unwelcome “peace keeping” force within that rebellious area is reminiscent of so many hotspots around the world – Belfast in The Troubles, Gaza now, Mogadishu in the 1990s. One of Mitchell’s protagonists – a young officer must choose between loyalty and integrity as he faces his own ‘Bloody Sunday’ moment. “He had finally been accepted, he realised. All it had taken was murder.”

In Norlyska Groans, the titular city is another setting-become-character in a grim world of corruption and inequality. While the whole book has a very Dostoevsky feel to its Russian aesthetic and crime and punishment narrative, it is in the embedding of inequality and demonising and criminalising of the poor that the book hit contemporary notes for me. The notions that: to be poor is not unlucky, just lazy; that wealth and privilege are a rightful “manifest destiny” rather than a legacy of good luck and exploitation; and that no-one is owed any social support came across in those two quotes.

“Neither the militslya nor the people care if you fail. It is neither the job of the institutions of the state nor that of your fellow comrades to support you.” (Libertarianism in its purest form!)

Or when describing executed corpses hanging on a gibbet

“A sign had been tacked to the base; the words sketched out in black paint. SEDITION it read. It should have said POOR.”

Legacy of the Brightwash takes us into another cityscape Yaelsmuir, peopled with the desperate, the criminal and the corrupt.  The exploitation of the magically talented goes beyond indentured service into a kind of enslavement – and it is an exploitation which the contemporary society can only rationalise by choosing to hate, fear and “other” those with this magical talent. A world which oppresses immigrants into supressing their own culture can never be a just one, as highlighted by this quote.

“He had been angry for a long time after his mother died, angry at the city that didn’t protect her, at the man who called the kindest gentlest woman he’d ever known a filthy Kaadayri whore while pummelling her to death, at the country that denied her and him their culture by making Kaadayri so afraid to live in their own skin that they didn’t teach their children their own heritage.”

Tumultuous Warfare,  a wider context of diplomacy and worlds convulsed by conflict.

In The Forever King a tyrant of dubious sanity launches an invasion of overwhelming force fuelled by personal hate to try and destroy a charismatic leader who has been a thorn in his side for some time.

The masses of his army, largely ill-trained conscripts, recruited by misinformation and radicalised by propaganda are driven forward as cannon fodder to be slaughtered by a resolute and determined foe acting in defence of their home city.

Er… ringing any contemporary bells for anyone?

In The Iron Crown we have a nation under threat from a re-emerging foe.

The protagonists’ efforts to stir up a response are somewhat hampered by the law that forbids even mentioning the foe’s name, nor admitting their power.

The inquisitors act as a not-so-secret secret police service. The control of information – including obfuscating evidence and disseminating misinformation – being a key part of what they do to keep a populace calm and complicit.

In Hall of Bones we have a distant but aggressive power led by a murderous tyrant who has happily slaughtered his own family for power and seeks to impose his authority on a collection of neighbouring countries that he believes implicitly belong within his sphere of influence.

Those countries must address their own internal feuds, divisions and historical hostility if they are to present a united resistance to the aggressor.

This task is made more difficulty by the fact that said aggressor has found ways to insinuate his influence in the highest echelons of power and compromise their political leadership and drives for unity. Sound familiar anyone? Or is that just me reading everything through Putin/Brexit tinged spectacles these days?

In Burn Red Skies we also have a mad tyrannical ruler seeking to intimidate his own country and expand it into an empire with acts of outrageous cruelty and brutal crimes against humanity – which again does have a sudden contemporary relevance.

We also have a wide variety of peoples with different powers and constraints that fuel their prejudices against each other, and a few conflicted but heroic individuals trying to undermine the tyrant from within.

Female Power – A gentler approach to political intrigue and women driving events

In Reign and Ruin we have the sultan’s daughter fighting with every weapon of precedence and rhetoric to secure her place as his heir and regent while also fashioning an alliance with a suspicious neighbouring realm to protect them both against an overreaching republic.

The threat that the prospect of marriage makes to her independence of thought and action ought to be an alien one in modern society.

However, with extreme right wing views gaining airtime in the west and an incoming South Korean president who “used his campaign to draw in young men with repeated rebukes of feminism,” it appears that the battle for equality is still a very current one.

In Shadows of Ivory again female characters have a prominence of perspective and influence.

Within the archaeological themes, there is also a sense of the corrupt but ultra-wealthy rising above the law and throwing their influence around in a way that echoes some contemporary inequalities in access to power and justice.

So that concludes my little exercise and I hope may have whetted your appetite both for the books and for the forthcoming Hive reviews.