Ilmar itself has a history out of any number of medieval fantasy worlds of aristocrats, mages, soldiers, and monsters. Perhaps more important for story purposes is that Ilmar is also a city under occupation, its institutions and culture being slowly reshaped by the relentless, rigorous, and notionally rational conquerors from Pallesand, whose various department names all contain the telling descriptors ‘‘School’’ and ‘‘Correct’’ and whose failing grades are awarded in the Donjon or on the scaffold. But all those varied magics are lawful enough to permit exploitation, monetization, bureaucratization, and industrialization (including extracting and recycling and repurposing), so that magic blends seamlessly into technology, and everything from firearms to button factories can be powered or boosted by some kind of magic. This is, technically, a fantasy universe (or multiverse) populated by gods, demons, and magical practitioners of all kinds, both local and imported. Now, in The City of Last Chances, he demonstrates another way of navigating that permeable genre borderland in its portrait of the city of Ilmar, at whose outskirts lies the remnant of a forest that is a gateway to other realities. For example, Elder Race (2021) built a pseudo-medieval heroic fantasy world on an armature of science-fictional enabling devices, so that anything apparently magical was actually material technology – and yet the tale retained the flavor of fantasy (however interrogated). Cover by Joe Wilson.Īdrian Tchaikovsky clearly understands genre games quite thoroughly, since he has been working both sides and several alleyways of the great science fiction/fantasy divide in more than three dozen previous titles.
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