James Nicoll Reviews

2021’s The Witness for the Dead is the second novel in Katherine Addison’s Goblin Emperor secondary universe fantasy series. 

Thara Celehar used his ability to speak with the spirits of the dead to serve Maia, the newly appointed emperor. His reward: to be sent far from the emperor’s court to the city of Amalo. Ever dutiful, Thara serves the people of Amalo as best he can. He doesn’t regret leaving the luxury and intrigues of the court.

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Katherine Addison’s 2020 The Angel of the Crows is a standalone gas-lamp fantasy. 

Near-fatally savaged by a fallen angel encountered in Afghanistan, Dr. J. H. Doyle, late of Her Majesty’s Imperial Armed Forces Medical Corps, returns home to England. Doyle’s pension is small; living alone will be impossible. Doyle is forced to look for a flatmate. Doyle is painfully aware that it will be an odd flatmate indeed who will be able to tolerate the doctor’s quirks.

Odd flatmate found: Crow, a consulting detective. Crow is also an angel. 

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Addison’s 2014 novel The Goblin Emperor was a pleasant change of pace from so much of my current reading at the time (grimdark fantasies and War-On-the-Enlightenment SF). The world of her novel is deeply flawed; her protagonist, the goblin emperor of the title, is an abused, despised half-breed, hemmed in on all sides by the customs and laws of his land. It would have been comprehensible if he had spent his reign sticking the heads of those who had abused him on spikes. That is not the choice Maia makes. A protagonist who does his best to leave the world a better place than he found it really shouldn’t be something so rare that it catches my attention … but, alas, it is.

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