“We can’t bring perfection to the world without the threat of force. The city of Ilmar may be not as strange and beautifully ugly as Miéville’s New Crobuzon, but it’s decidedly unpleasant in a oddly fascinating way. There’s magic - it’s fantasy after all - but really it’s more of a veneer for the social divisions and bureaucratic oppression musings, and the city and tone at times reminded me of China Miéville minus the overuse of thesaurus.
It’s odd and weird and a bit warped, and full of strange and often unlikable characters inhabiting a strange and decidedly unpleasant city that is teetering on the verge of major unrest, waiting for a tiny spark - a McGuffin, really - to set off a chain of disasters. It took me a little while to wrap my head and heart around the happenings in this one. (Mar.For some reason it often takes me much longer to love Adrian Tchaikovsky’s fantasy offerings even though I tend to have love-at-first-sight affairs with his science fiction. Agent: Simon Kavanagh, Mic Cheetham Agency. Readers with a bent for social commentary and solving puzzles will be doubly pleased. Tchaikovsky’s second-person narration neatly reveals his protagonist while masking just how his destiny will play out. Eventually adopted by the inquisitive ogre Lady Isadora, Torquell learns of the ecological crises that took the world from humans and gave it to the ogres, a situation he resolves to reverse. Turned fugitive, Torquell flees his depopulated village and explores the wider world, which is ruled by ogres and filled with teeming urban slums and churned-up battlefields for mock wars that inflict real wounds.
At over six feet tall, Torquell, mischievous human son of a village headman, stands above his fellow non-ogres both in height and temper, which leads to trouble with 10-foot-tall ogre and village master Sir Peter and his son, Gerald, a lout given to taunting the diminutive lower class. Tchaikovsky ( Elder Race) takes a sharp look in this twisty social satire at a world in which, due to genetic modification, the 1%, now called ogres, literally tower over the 99%.
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