Review: Great setting, great premise, great characters
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 4, 2013
A great original setting and premise, by a very skilled writer. (I loved the Sabriel series, and this has much of the same tone, although both setting and premise are very different.) I picked this up after hearing one of the stories on Podcastle.Garth Nix seems to like to have guns in his settings, rather than going for the old sword-and-sorcery (not that swords are missing here - this is basically late-Renaissance technology, with wheel-lock pistols). Sir Hereward is an artillerist, and several things go satisfactorily boom.The rather creepy and precise sorcerous puppet Mister Fitz is a great character, as is the often-frustrated Sir Hereward. Together, they serve the Council for the Safety of the World as a kind of bomb disposal squad for unexploded otherdimensional entities.Far from the usual predictable fantasy fare, and, interestingly, self-published. Both novellas and the short story were previously professionally published elsewhere in anthologies or magazines, but Nix has used his author's rights to combine them into an ebook and publish on Amazon.