![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Starting off with massive thanks to Orannia for telling me about these and lending me her copies (I'm ordering my own shortly, although the trick is going to be not ordering a bunch of other unread books as well)...
Kiram Kir-Zaki is happy and well-adjusted, has a supportive (and surviving) family (he’s gay, so his mother tries to match him up with a nice young responsible male pharmacist) and no magical powers whatsoever, which makes him massively unlikely as the protagonist for a fantasy novel – I can’t remember the last one who fit all these criteria – but ideal for me to read about. He’s also the first Haldiim – a nonwhite ethnic minority – to attend the Sagrada Academy, an all-male quasi-military quasi-nobility training centre, by right of being an engineering prodigy, and because he has a cheerfully if cautiously atheistic attitude to the dominant Cadeleonian religion, he ends up sharing a room with Javier Tornesal, the only surviving heir of a cursed Dukedom, and apparently a soulless being with special powers. What ensues is two books of action, world-building, romance (complicated by the Cadeleonian objection to homosexuality), culture conflicts and blends of magic and technology, and the first secondary world fantasy I’ve really enjoyed for ages.
( More details, mostly vague but a few spoilers. )
Wicked Gentlemen. Two linked novellas in a semi-Victorian fantasy world, the first from the point of view of Belimai Sykes, a Prodigial – descended from demons, addicted to drugs, available for hire (as an investigator) and with a black past, and the second from William Harper’s point of view, a captain of the Inquisition who suppress the Prodigals, who also has a mysterious past and, in the opening novella, needs Belimai’s help. Complicating matters again is their relationship, which starts off as sexual and then develops emotionally, neither of which are particularly well tolerated by their worlds.
( More specific discussion. )
So, in summary, I really enjoyed Lord of the White Hell - Wicked Gentlemen less so, but it was written earlier, and so now I really want to see what she does next...
Kiram Kir-Zaki is happy and well-adjusted, has a supportive (and surviving) family (he’s gay, so his mother tries to match him up with a nice young responsible male pharmacist) and no magical powers whatsoever, which makes him massively unlikely as the protagonist for a fantasy novel – I can’t remember the last one who fit all these criteria – but ideal for me to read about. He’s also the first Haldiim – a nonwhite ethnic minority – to attend the Sagrada Academy, an all-male quasi-military quasi-nobility training centre, by right of being an engineering prodigy, and because he has a cheerfully if cautiously atheistic attitude to the dominant Cadeleonian religion, he ends up sharing a room with Javier Tornesal, the only surviving heir of a cursed Dukedom, and apparently a soulless being with special powers. What ensues is two books of action, world-building, romance (complicated by the Cadeleonian objection to homosexuality), culture conflicts and blends of magic and technology, and the first secondary world fantasy I’ve really enjoyed for ages.
( More details, mostly vague but a few spoilers. )
Wicked Gentlemen. Two linked novellas in a semi-Victorian fantasy world, the first from the point of view of Belimai Sykes, a Prodigial – descended from demons, addicted to drugs, available for hire (as an investigator) and with a black past, and the second from William Harper’s point of view, a captain of the Inquisition who suppress the Prodigals, who also has a mysterious past and, in the opening novella, needs Belimai’s help. Complicating matters again is their relationship, which starts off as sexual and then develops emotionally, neither of which are particularly well tolerated by their worlds.
( More specific discussion. )
So, in summary, I really enjoyed Lord of the White Hell - Wicked Gentlemen less so, but it was written earlier, and so now I really want to see what she does next...
