God's War by Kameron Hurley

Bugged Out
Woman who's so tough she took one look at The Expendables and pissed herself laughing? Check. Mysteriously robed dude with his little creepy crawly friends? Check. Plus the dismembered head and gorgeously tiled background make this a double cover win for being both beautiful and specifically relevant to the story. Extra special bonus points for featuring dark skinned protagonists (because, you know, the characters are dark it would be nonsensical to have white people on the cover, they may as well have a picture of a roller coster) especially considering the picture they nearly ended up with.

The Angry Angry Caterpillar
On a desert planet with multiple suns, two powerful countries, the heavily religious Chenja and the 'ungodly' Nasheen, have all but wiped out each other's menfolk fighting their centuries old holy war. Nyx is trying to scrape out a living in Nasheen, a country now run by women while all the men are sent to the front to fight. After losing her coveted position as a Bel Dame assassin and finishing a prison sentence, she runs a small bounty hunting service with the help of her rag tag crew featuring a shapeshifter, a teenage weapons expert and her subpar magician Rhys, a man capable of controlling the ubiquitous energy all their technology runs on. Bugs. 
Accepting a suspiciously well paid mission for the Nasheen Queen, Nyx is trailing a missing off worlder who claims to possess the power to finally end the war. But in which side's favour?


Entomology 101
What an incredible world Ms Hurley has created here! We've all seen desert based worlds before in sci fi and fantasy, they can be (ironically) rather fertile settings for writers to explore, although too often you are left with a Dune or Firefly taste in your brain. What I enjoyed about God's War was the way she completely embraced this arid environment as her world, and then fully mapped out of all the problems it would cause with things like travel, health and food and how civilizations would adapt to these difficulties. No hermetically sealed underground cities or widely available flying machines here. Here people deal with the deadly environment with nothing but the basics. They develop cancers as easily as we grow our nails, with a war-zone choking on deadly gases clean organs are freely traded for cash and male children are smuggled across neutral borders to save them from a lifetime fighting at the front. Weirdly it seems so alien and at the same time familiarly human.

Personally, my favorite part of this world was the technology. Everything on this planet, from weapons to cars to radios, is run using bugs. Creepy crawlies spill out of exhaust pipes on organically run cars and seal up wounds. They can be controlled to varying degrees by the magicians, men and women born with this ability that sets them apart and, they seem to think, above everyone else. Nyx's magician, Rhys, is not exceptionally gifted but as a devoutly religious Chejan man in very prejudiced Nasheen, he's got little option but to stay with Nyx and aid her on any mercenary work she picks up. Regardless of how much he may disapprove of the work and, especially, the woman herself.

"Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jaks, and lost it two rounds later when Jaks hit the floor like an antique harem girl.  

Nyx lost every coin, a wad of opium and the wine she'd gotten from the butchers as a bonus for her womb. But she did get Jaks into bed, and - loser or not - in the desert after dark, that was something.

"What are you after?" Jaks murmired in her good ear. They lay tangled in the sheets like old lovers: a losing boxer with a poor right hook and a tendency to drop her left, and a wombless hunter bereft of money, weapons, food and most her clothing.

"I'm looking for my sister," Nyx said. It was partly the truth. She was looking for something else too, something worth a lot more, and Jaks was going to help her get it."

Nyx is a deeply complex character and I loved her complete honesty in everything she did, even when telling an outright lie. It's fair to say she's not your average 'kick ass heroine' (which is a good thing, no tight trousers and an alpha male for her) she's barely even heroic, except maybe in her ability to withstand punishment. Nyx deals with all types of pain in this book and it gets pretty graphic at points, but then I love those stories where the protagonist spends most of the book just barely surviving and trying to pull bits of themselves back together, so it wasn't a problem for me (see also the brilliant Samuil Petrovich by Simon Morden). Her former Bel Dame sisters made for incredibly effective villains, they are ruthless in their pursuit of Nyx and her crew and I found myself truly believing that they wouldn't stand a chance against the trained assassins.

God's War is a beautifully scenic story about violence and desperation on a planet that's learned to live around the constant every day horrors of war. It's characters are flawed and imperfect but lovable, and the reluctance to admit trust between Nyx and Rhys was just so much more satisfying to read then the usual pinned on romance that a lesser writer would have shoe horned in here. The next installment, Infidel, is out next month so now is the perfect time to pick this diamond up.

Equations of Life, Theories of Flight and Degrees of Freedom by Simon Morden

Some Trippy Shizz
I LOVE these covers, while I was reading them not a single day went by where someone didn't stop to ask me what I was reading because of the eye melting graphics. And I would proudly say "oh this? this is just the craziest story about a Russian physics student in post nuclear London and war has just broken out on the streets and ...........oh sorry I forgot you were there, go away I'm reading"

I would like to add that although I think these covers are the bees nuts I kind of hate the actual book titles, they're all a little vague and sort of cheesy sounding, which is probably why they've been relegated to the side and the publishers have just let the graphics do the selling. Smart move Orbit. Give yourselves a sweetie.

The Blurbington
Petrovitch likes being anonymous in the huge crowded city of the London Metrozone. He keeps his head down and spends his days battling nothing more life threatening then mathematical equations at the University, carefully never drawing attention to himself or his past. Unfortunately on the same day he witnesses a kidnapping, his altruistic side decides to act and he leaps to the rescue of one Sonja Oshicora. The only child of of a Japanese crime king pin who is now in Petrovitch's debt, much to the rival gangs' displeasure. Now Petrovitch needs to find a way of regaining his anonymity in a city filled with people looking to either kill or save him, all the while trying to figure out who the New Machine Jihad is and how they have managed to take complete control of the Metrozone and all it's inhabitants. Help rides along in the form of the apathetic Police Detective Harry Chain and Madeleine, a Catholic nun trained by the Order of Joan as a very effective killing machine. 

The Pizdets
I will warn you now, these books are relentless, non-stop action. Each only takes place over the course of a few days but Morden packs so much in to each you barely get any time to pause. Petrovich certainly doesn't, from the second he grabs Sonja Oshicora's hand in Equations of Life till the final page in book three he is subjected to every type of injury, pain and hurt imaginable. And he just carries on through it all with a single mindedness thats really quite endearing. Even though he's hardly a good guy (at one point he shoots a street kid in the foot, there's logic to it but it's not the behavior of your average hero) I found myself completely on his side throughout the whole three books. He's smart, in a way a

lot of characters aren't these days, he figures out solutions and enemies way before I did and better then that, his solutions to are almost always exactly the right ones. 

You know in those war movies where there's always that shouty American General demanding the President nuke all sons of bitches that so much as look at him funny? Petrovitch is that scientist guy who always comes through at the last minute with that technologically amazing alternative that saves everybody from sprouting extra radioactive limbs. He's like Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day, but very sweary, and Russian. Actually the constant Russian swearing was one of the things I loved bout Petrovitch, after reading all three books I'm having a difficult time not yelling yobany stos! every time I stub a toe or spill some coffee.

"'Why didn't the bastard ment tell me this in the hospital?' 

Petrovitch bent down to scoop up the crumpled form, and laboriously started to flatten out the creases over his knee.

'I'm sure he had his reasons. By the way, this is church. I'd appreciate you not swearing in it.'

Petrovitch considered his options. If the priest didn't hold to turning the other cheek, hitting him might end badly. But just skulking off didn't strike him as being appropriate either. 'Past' zakroi, podonok.'

Though the words were incomprehensible, his sentiment was resonant in his delivery. Father John's face grew hard, and he took a step forward. 'Get out.'"

There's a veritable zoo of amazing secondary characters as well, most who join Petrovitch's merry little band in the second book. And pretty much all women, brilliant, hardcore, indispensable women who are the only reasons he manages to survive an apocalypse caused by a computer, a war with a humongous army of violent barbarians (outies) and an international pissing contest with a puritanical America. He may have all the ideas and plans but these ladies are the ones who put them in to action and drag his weak arse out of danger whenever he manages to wander in to the line of fire. There's Valentina, a true Soviet communist to her red core and demolitions expert. Lucy, the schoolgirl found hiding in a bathtub from the outies who saves his life more than once. And of course Madeleine, the amazonian, Catholic trained bodyguard who does things to Petrovitch's synthetic heart that has nothing to do with the fact it's constantly malfunctioning. I adored all of these guys, they were all useful fully realised people, no extra bits of skirt who are only good for the hero to perv over in these stories, and I loved Morden for that. Also any writer that includes sly nods to The Princess Bride, Eddie Izzard and Zero Wing in their books is a-ok with me.

If you're looking for something clever, fast paced and exhilarating then you can't do much better than these three books. In Communist Russia book reads you.