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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : F : Furey, Maggie
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This fast-moving adventure opens Maggie Furey's second fantasy sequence, "The Shadowleague"; her first was the "Artefacts of Power" tetralogy, published 1994-7. The Heart of Myrial is set in a particularly artificial-seeming fantasyland which proves to be not a world but a technomagical construct, divided into isolated regions by sorcerous barriers of force. Thanks to the machinations of a bad guy who may have good motives, these "curtain walls" are now failing--the first symptoms being clashes between the enclaves' different environments, leading to prolonged descriptions of truly lousy weather. In theory the barriers are guarded by and can be penetrated only by Loremasters of the Shadowleague, a secret inner circle of representatives from this patchwork world's various species: humans, dragons, centaurs, wind-sprites, insectile aliens and more. In practice the Shadowleague is almost impotent.Against this complex background, various characters struggle across the landscape through terrible weather. A woman Loremaster and her irrepressibly feisty firedrake companion play leading parts in the large cast (many of whom suffer death or worse). After tortuous regroupings and plot twists centred on a particular city that houses a key magical shrine, book 1 concludes with a gory invasion of nasties through the holed curtain wall. It reads well enough, and of course there's more to come. -- David Langford
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Originally published 1997-98 as six slim volumes aimed at younger readers, these novellas now appear as an omnibus edition. Their shared setting is the evolved Web of 2027, a near-infinite interactive virtual reality whose potential for appalling booby-traps is exploited by the Sorceress. This aged woman plans to grab computerised immortality at others' expense, and reappears as the villain of each story. Baxter's GulliverZone features a VR theme park based on Gulliver's Travels, with the nice idea of equal rights for computer viruses; Bowkett's Dreamcastle is a more conventional D&D-style adventure game; Brown's Untouchable sees the Web from the viewpoint of a monstrously exploited Indian pariah-caste girl; Joyce's Spiderbite revolves around the secret world domination plans of the "Church of Planetology" which plants controlling "engrams" in young innocents' minds (hello, L. Ron Hubbard!); Hamilton's Lightstorm moves out into the real world of corporate ecological vandalism; and Furey wraps up the linked stories and finally deals with the arch-villain in Sorceress. There are no real duds ... but extra marks to Brown for setting and poignancy, Joyce for ingenuity of plot and payoff, and Hamilton for thoughtfulness about how even good guys may want to project a misleading Web persona. --David Langford
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