FIRETHRON
by Sarah Micklem
HarperCollins, £6.99; 383pp

THE STORMCALLER
Tom Lloyd
Gollancz, hardback £18.99, paperback £12.99; 438pp

FIFTY YEARS AGO writers confidently predicted the existence of orbital spacestations and that people would be living on the Moon before the turn of the century. As it has turned out, the price is too high for even the wealthiest nations, so humanity looks fated to remain earth-bound for centuries. It is a real downer for those who feel, like a character in Adam Roberts’s new novel Gradisil, that “humanity must grow out from this conker we call world and into the solar system as a whole”.

But how? In Gradisil, rocket science is ditched for orbital planes powered by the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Suddenly, escape is possible. Only a few decades from now, the space above our atmosphere has become “the uplands”, home to a new breed of wealthy, self-sufficient pioneers who prefer to live outside the reach of laws and taxes, looking down on Earth, breathing in the bottled air of freedom and moving their little tin can homes to avoid unwanted visitors.

Roberts supplies convincing details to make such a life seem almost within our grasp — his characters are flawed, cranky and driven. At times, this is reminiscent of the best of Robert Heinlein — although Heinlein would not have approved of Roberts’s depiction of the American military mind.

Sarah Micklem’s first novel Firethorn might be categorised as “low fantasy” both because it is told from the viewpoint of a low-born woman (not a warrior or nobility) and because the fantastical elements are so restrained that they might pass as real life. It seems more like an historical romance — except that its feudal, clan-based, polytheistic society does not exist outside the author’s imagination.

A casual encounter with a knight makes the young woman called Firethorn trade in life as a drudge for the more exciting, if much riskier, life of a camp-follower. Sire Galan and Firethorn are in love, but Micklem does not gloss over the inequalities of their relationship or the harshness of their life She is every bit as good at depicting the violent excitement and confusion of battle as she is at making us feel the conflict in Firethorn’s heart. As the love affair progresses, Firethorn’s knowledge of herbs gives her a reputation as a “greenwoman” and healer, although this makes her more enemies than friends. This is powerful stuff, with a level of physical and emotional realism that is too often missing in fantasy.

Another first novel, The Stormcaller by Tom Lloyd, comes down squarely on the high fantasy side. It has noble warriors, evil elves, trolls, demons, Gods, vampires, witches, dragons, unicorns, curses, spells, battles, prophecies, mysterious runes, secret societies, magical armour — the lot. At times, the complicated back-story and sheer number of characters and competing forces overwhelm Lloyd’s ability to make sense of it all but, despite the rather pedestrian prose, it gallops along with scarcely a dull moment.

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