Our first post of the New Year

Goodness me! Is it that time already? You know, I had every intention of posting every other day or so over the Christmas break, but family stuff happened, and I never did, so this post is a summary of some of the great reviews etc we’ve had over the last week or so.

Ok, first up – the first reviews for our January titles are in! Servant of the Underworld by the brilliant Aliette de Bodard, and Lavie Tidhar’s steampunk romp, The Bookman. Both reviews are by LoudMouthMan.

First up, The Bookman:

The punkgenre has a new term, BookPunk. The Bookman pokes at the fat and waddled body of steampunk with its walking cane and leaves it on the roadside with its fresh take on Victorian London without loosing any steam on its way.

Next up: Servant of the Underworld:

Forensic science and methodical investigation are not the first things to spring to mind when you consider the Aztec Empire, though with all those human sacrifices and heart ripping ceremonies I am guessing their priests would eventually have taken some intersting in how bodies stop functioning… Magic and Gods become tools of forensic divination and there is no easy get out in the plot here… This is Book 1 in a trilogy and I am eager to get my hands on the next book when it is released.

Another Servant of the Underworld review up at Fantasy Book Critic:

The world-building is exquisite and we *believe* we are transported to the 15th century Tenotichtlan and together with the superb voice they formed the main reason I enjoyed this book so much… Highly recommended… Ms. de Bodard is a writer to watch.

We think so, too. Winter Song by Colin Harvey was praised by Keith Harvey of Red Rook Review:

I felt that same attention to world-building in the myriad of details that Harvey sprinkled within the text to intimate or to suggest that a larger canvas, a more complex super-structure of culture, was operating somewhere behind the action of the characters of his novel on the icy world of Isheimur… Harvey seems to follow the Asimov model. That is he describes the most fantastical things in a clear precise way; he uses short declarative sentences to tell a most outlandish tale… As a result I found Winter Tale quite convincing and entertaining.

Over at Deadwood, Andy Remic’s fantastic Gemmell-esque gore-fest, Kell’s Legend gets the review treatment:

Kell’s Legend is an admitted homage to the tradition of David Gemmel’s Druss novels and the Sword and Sorcery stories that proceeded it. Andy treats us to a bit of the modern tendency for multiple narrators ala GRR Martin in his Sond of Ice and Fire… In telling the story his writing is crisp and not over descriptive but at times the ideas seem to come at you fast. As a reader you have to be willing to go along with him – he may make you wonder if you missed something so sometimes you have to be patient… he will explain there is just some violence that needs be done first.

Angry Robot has hit another genre nail on the head here and they have found something worthy of a read. Now I’ll have to find his other books…

That must be one of my favourite interpretations so far: “there is just some violence that needs to be done first”. Another favourite is from Donna Hanson’s World Con Cavalcade:

Weird unstoppable monsters and buckets full of dog shit, gore and intrigue.

Yeah – that sounds about right. Over at Exiled from Groggs, Moxyland gets a great review:

commentators have muttered things like “Post-cyberpunk”… But Beukes has certainly captured the zeitgeist and sharpened it… This is good SF – the extrapolations are all too real, all too obviously deriving their heritage from the world we see around us.

Angry Robot itself comes in for some New Year’s Eve lovin’ over at The World In the Satin Bag where we win their Best Publisher of 2009 award! Go us, go us, go us…

As well as the reviews listed above, a bunch of Angry Robot books appeared all over the blogosphere on various “Best of 2009″ posts – far too many to list, so to all those of you who loved our books enough to tell others about them, we salute you.

Here’s to 2010 being even more awesome than the preceding year!