![]() ![]() The arrangement of the four stories does at least suggest a chronology. As a sampler of what this world might yield, it’s fascinating, but anyone expecting a shape resembling a novel, or even a clear narrative arc, might come away disappointed. It’s a bit of a chimera, a suite of standalone stories with different themes, a common setting, and a few recurring characters, mostly the bad guys. Now they’ve returned to this world with two additional novellas, Bacigalupi’s “The Children of Khaim” and Buckell’s “The Blacksmith’s Daughter”, all four packaged as The Tangled Lands. Each wrote a novella set in this world, Bacigalupi’s The Alchemist and Buckell’s The Executioness, published as an audiobook by Audible and later in separate volumes from Subterranean Press (reviewed here in December 2010). Buckell & Paolo Bacigalupi joined forces to create a high-fantasy world with a lot of familiar late-medieval/early Renaissance trappings and one particularly neat device: every act of magic or spellcasting, no matter how small, fuels the rapid growth of dense, poisonous brambles already threatening to encroach the land. ![]() The Tangled Lands, Paolo Bacigalupi & Tobias S. ![]()
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