The Engineer Trilogy

Here's a quick shout-out for the excellent Engineer Trilogy by K.J. Parker (a pseudonym — she appears to be a woman who lives in England, but that is all we know). It's a triumph of zero-magic quasi-historical fantasy, full of complicated characters making moral compromises and changing the map of the world where they live. There are no fantasy cliches here; the characters don't putter along on the trails laid down by thousands of tramping fictional feet before them, but strike off cross-country, finding routes through bracken and up cliffsides that you'd never have noticed were there. The attention to detail — particularly as pertains to hunting, fighting, and engineering — is nothing short of daunting, and indeed the one flaw I might make note of is her willingness to detail-dump on the reader, about some fine point of hunting etiquette or the complicated motivations of her characters. But the prose never feels leaden, and the rate of sweaty-palmed page-flipping never flags.

Like those of Iain Banks (whom she mentions in one of the back-matter interviews), her books can be brutal and uncompromising and violent; if you're in the mood for hobbits and heroes, this might not be your teacup. You'll almost certainly be disgusted and enraged and disappointed by some of the things the characters get up to, as none of them are heroes (except the worst one of all), and the roles of protagonist and antagonist remain fluid to the end. But the mechanism as a whole is relentlessly sound, and I burned through all three books in short order.

Contrast this with Orbit's other big trade fantasy trilogy, Brian Ruckley's Godless World books. I read the first, Winterbirth, and found it entirely by-the-numbers: the callow true heir on the run from bloodthirsty usurpers, the wise warrior nature-loving elves-no-Indians-no-okay-elves who take him in, yadda yadda yadda. The second came out months ago, and I haven't felt any desire to pick it up. When I read fantasy, I say, "Give me something I haven't seen before!" (though I appear to be in the minority there, to compare the Amazon reviews of the two series).