Fantasy

The world is ending. It has ended before, and it will end again. In N.K. Jemisin’s sixth novel The Fifth Season, Father Earth himself is the enemy, rupturing the world’s only continent through quakes, volcano eruptions, tsunamis and storms every couple of decades and sending its people into chaos as a result.

For some reason, fantasy dealing with Christian angel mythology and particularly Lucifer and fallen angels has always appealed to me as an idea, but it’s not often that any of it is actually good. Danielle Trussoni’s Angelology, Clive Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels and Andrew E. Maugham’s Convivium are all examples of novels dealing with those themes that are not necessarily bad but have left a lot to wish for. The House of Shattered Wings is not a perfect book, but when it comes to taking on angel mythology, Aliette de Bodard succeeds where most other authors seem to fail.