In spite of being on opposite sides of the law, Cyril and Aristide are lovers, for whom part of the thrill is keeping each other on their toes. Cordelia Lehane is a sharp, streetwise performer, and makes ends meet by being the Bumble Bee’s top dancer while dealing drugs on the side. Aristide Makricosta is a smuggler and wildly popular emcee at the Bumble Bee Cabaret, and has worked hard to disguise his class and ethnic origins in the big city. Focused on spies, smugglers, and cabaret performers, Amberlough’s particularly interested in the complicity and resistance of those who tell lies in the spotlight in order to operate honestly in society’s shadows.Ĭyril DePaul is a bored spy from a wealthy family, and wears the trauma of past fieldwork in a scar across his stomach. Amberlough makes an interesting point of comparison: The four federated states of Gedda begin as diverse, semi-autonomous entities, and the novel charts the fall of decadent, liberal, politically regional Amberlough to Tatié’s conservative and aggressively unifying One State Party (called Ospies). It was very much about how a single, profoundly united society could fracture along its fault-lines into civil war while the environment it takes for granted begins to crumble. The last in-depth review I did of a single book for this column was of Fran Wilde’s Cloudbound, during which I marvelled at how well it anticipated our current problems with populist demagoguery, media manipulation, and fake news. So this month I want to write about Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough. Series: The Tales of Gorlen VizenfirtheĪs the present US administration’s modelling of old-school fascism dips into self-parody-two days into Passover saw Sean Spicer claim that Hitler “never gassed his own people”-well-meaning folk keep finding new ways to discuss whether or not it’s all right to punch Nazis.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.

Amberlough book