Fantasy and science fiction: Swashbuckling action, postmodern humour and deliciously grim quasi-medieval homage

‘Twice upon a time – for that is how some stories should continue – there was a mother whose daughter was stolen from her.’ So begins John Connolly’s The Land of Lost Things (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99), the long-anticipated sequel to The Book of Lost Things (2006), which opens with Ceres watching over her comatose daughter Phoebe and reading fairytales to her child. But when Ceres dips into The Book of Lost Things, Ceres quickly finds herself in the land of Elsewhere and setting out on an epic adventure with The Woodsman as they seek to free Phoebe from dark forces that reach out from the fantasy world to ensnare unwary children – and sometimes adults too… What follows will wholly satisfy fans of The Book of Lost Things. The tale is fully immersed in the otherworld of fantasy and fairytale – it features giants, harpies and dryads – even as Connolly delivers a nod-and-wink commentary on folktale staples, while also knowingly folding the sequel into the original tale’s domain (”By the standards of The Book of Lost Things a telepathic bond formed with a tree spirit barely counted as worthy of mention.”). For all the swashbuckling action and postmodern humour, however, the novel is also a quietly profound journey to the heart of the human condition, which is “often to be lost, confused or anxious, but finally to comprehend that, at crucial instances, we will find ourselves lost precisely where we were meant to be”.

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Communications Breakdown (MIT Press, £21) is a collection of stories responding to the question posed by its editor, Jonathan Strahan, in his Introduction: What happens if communicating the future itself breaks down when technology is used and misused? The result is a largely bleak assessment of where we might find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic world devoid of wifi. Premee Mohamed envisages the “insane panopticon” of an AI-driven Big Brother in At Every Door a Ghost; in Tim Maughan’s My City is Not a Problem, London finds itself at the mercy of “a Marxist Hal 9000″; Elizabeth Bear investigates the travails of a punk anarchist squat in the wake of a hurricane in a world where weather reporting has been privatised (”Fortunately, anarchists are pretty good at building communities …”). Lavanya Lakshimarayan’s Less Than is arguably the pick of the bunch, playing out in a future India under an oppressive regime and exploring “the weaponization of religion against queer identities”. Taken all together, though, it’s stellar stuff.

RJ Barker’s new fantasy trilogy begins with Gods of the Wyrd Wood (Orbit, £20), in which the “clanless” ex-soldier Cahan du Nahare grubs a living as a forester in the northlands of Crua. Political developments far from home conspire to draw Cahan into defending his local village, however, and soon Cahan finds himself battling imperialist forces who seek to subdue “Crua’s one true deity, the forest”. Barker’s world-building is superb, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has read The Bone Ships (2019) or his Wounded Kingdom trilogy, and Crua reads like a deliciously grim quasi-medieval homage to Westeros et al, with a primitive theology that is exploited by the malevolent warrior-priests of the cowl-rai, who possess the ability to maim, torture and kill with their extra-sensory powers. While Cahan’s quest is rather circular and occasionally repetitive over the course of the 622-page novel, the character himself is a classic lone hero who reluctantly saddles up to defend those who cannot defend themselves.

There is “a rift in metaphysical space” in David Connor’s Oh God, the Sun Goes (Melville House, £16.99), which investigates what might happen if the sun were to someday disappear. Setting out to discover the whereabouts of Sol, the narrator criss-crosses Arizona on a journey that gradually becomes a trek through “a non-physical space” beneath “the bright sunless sky of the mind”. Can the mysterious Dr Higley, the doyen of helioseismology, help? It’s hard to say, because Higley has been comatose ever since the sun vanished. A Kafkaesque post-apocalyptic yarn, Oh God, the Sun Goes is an intriguing but not especially thrilling take on how the world might look when “words no longer meant anything”.

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Finally, Garth Nix has finally compiled his Sir Hereward and Mr Fitz stories into a single volume that is economically titled Sir Hereward and Mr Fitz (Gollancz, £22). The former is a Quixotic young knight who operates on behalf of the Council for the Treaty for the Safety of the World, travelling about, eliminating threats emanating from unlicensed gods, while his Sancho is a magic-making wooden puppet with “a pumpkin-sized papier-mâché head”. Taking on all-comers – cannibals and scholar-pirates included – the pair are fantasy fiction’s answer to Jeeves and Wooster, this always providing you can imagine Bertie as a qualified artillerist and Jeeves wielding a sorcerous sword. Yes, it’s as bonkers as it sounds, and it’s all utterly delightful to boot.