The titular City of Last Chances is the city of Ilmar, a disparate and dangerous place where the local population are occupied by the Pallseen, a nation of serial invaders intent on unifying the world into conformity by insidiously replacing language and customs, and eradicating the history and culture of each land that they touch. Approximately every 8-10 chapters, there is a Mosaic chapter, which I would describe as a city-eyed view of happenings: summarising what is taking place throughout many areas of the city at the given time. As City of Last Chances progresses, we're updated regarding the potential revolution that is stirring underneath the surface: who will light the fuse, will the Palleseen military be prepared, what will the consequences be and what part will the supernatural elements of the city play? Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Tchaikovsky (Children of Time) makes the end of the world a personal affair in this humorous, sharp-edged novel. The unnamed narrator is the last temporal Continue reading »

But as we get into the swing of things, we see the same faces circling around again and again, and eventually have some chapters told from the same perspective twice, and something begins to emerge. It's nothing so simple as a single narrative, but there are a lot of threads being pulled in complementary directions, and a general movement ripples out to affect all the characters we see, and things begin to happen in Ilmar. 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%. At over six Continue reading » Overall, this was enjoyable, but not Tchaikovsky’s best. I want to compare it to the Mel Brooks film *History of the World, Part I*, for two reasons. First is that this book is far from Tchaikovsky’s best, but “Tchaikovsky’s best” is a high enough standard that this book is still much better than average. Second, this book didn’t really mesh into a coherent whole for me. I feel like Tchaikovsky had a variety of cool ideas that he’d come up with over the years and never gotten to use, and threw them together here to try to make them work. It’s still a good book, just a little discordant. Not that there wasn’t a part of him that wouldn’t have shaken that demon’s taloned hand like a brother, but that would have been a step too far. And so he watched the beast being enslaved to them ills again and knew that even as he fought every day for a better life for his people, he was a collaborator in a larger war. And he hated it. We ARE Struggling Together: Almost every one of the city various resistance factions hates the other groups, even though the Pals oppress all of them-the Siblingries dislike the Armiger families for being their long-time industrial overseers, the Armigers hate the Vultures for being criminals who would bring chaos to Ilmar if they came out ahead in a revolt, and everyone sees the Gownhall students as a bunch of inevitably doomed, naïve fools.The Ilmari intolerance for their occupiers sparks with every tighten of the thumbscrew and surely the sparks will ignite soon. Les Collaborateurs: Ilmari who join the Palleseen aren't uncommon, and can distinguished by their uniforms in a lighter shade of grey. The resistance groups hate them, and the Palleseen use them as Cannon Fodder. I would recommend this to anyone who is willing to take his/her time and absorb this slowly. If I had been prepared for this kind of read I would have probably rated it higher.

But the old ways and beliefs have a habit of perpetuating and there’s an ancient power to those customs that the Pallssen covet, as they do all power. If you are in the market for a superbly written, complex and intricately woven standalone fantasy, with a large cast of stand-out characters, world-building that is metered out at a brilliant pace and a plot that will keep you effortlessly intrigued throughout, then this will be one to read. This book however, has cemented - in my mind, Adrian Tchaikovsky as one of the finest writers of SFF active today. by commentators, guest bloggers, reviewers, and interviewees are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus magazine or its staff.City of Last Chances is a standalone novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The book explores the city and factions of the city of Ilmar, occupied three years ago by the Palleseen Sway, an all-conquering empire that seeks to “perfect” the world-and, with its control over Ilmar, potentially many worlds. For on Ilmar’s edge lies the Anchorwood, a grove of trees that, when the moon is full, becomes a gateway to distant, alien lands. The list of characters and factions is quite large and this makes eye-reading of this book much preferred to an audiobook. The descriptions are often quite dense and without infodumps, one have often to guess what is behind the introduced concepts, like, e.g. this piece from the early chapter (most places like Gownhall or people like Allorwen aren’t described in earlier paragraphs, a reader learns what is what on a fly): The novel is set in the titular city of Ilmar, suffering under the heavy boot of an occupation force left over from the city’s conquest three years earlier by the Palleseen, a people who seek “perfection” in themselves and others via “correct principles of law and thought.” While the city seems stable on the surface, it seethes with anger, resentment, greed, and ambition as various factions have their own view of what resistance looks like and who should lead any eventual rebellion should one occur, as well as who should benefit from it. These factions are not new-born from the conquest, but are long-standing opposed forces in the city: the criminal underworld, who have found little difference in the scorn with which they are treated by the overthrown duke and his aristocracy or the victorious Palleseen; the Armigers, the old families more concerned with a return to power rather than a return to independence; and the Siblingries, the factory workers who toil for the conquerors as they did for the upper classes before and feel oppressed by both. In the mix are the idealistic students of Gownhall University; the Allorwen, a downtrodden and mistrusted group of refugees from a land conquered earlier by the Palleseen; and most mysterious of all, the Indwellers, the enigmatic people who control the ways in and out of the Anchorwood, an ancient grove that acts as a portal through to other worlds for those who can pay the price of safe transport. We witness happenings that relate to the criminal underworld, academia, workers and demons, refugees and outsiders, forgotten gods, and magical artefacts from a wide range of perspectives. Ilmar is the novel’s main character though, and this includes distinct and atmospheric areas such as The Reproach, The Hammer Districts, and The Anchorage. I found The Reproach to be a haunting and intensely interesting part of the city and I adored my time reading about that area and its inhabitants most of all.

Ilmar is vividly alive with ideas, conflicts, and a sense of its own history – a truly breathtaking fantasy city, down every street a compelling story.' David Towsey Ilmar is known as the city of last chances, a place where people go to be hidden or start again. Its residents are currently under the control of the foreign power of the Palleseen and their strict rules. As a centre of industry and education, it is a key place, but one that is known for its uprisings. If that was not enough, it rests on the edge of the mysterious Anchorwood, a place that people enter and never leave. Ilmar is starting to smoulder once again, and we follow several people as the powder keg starts to go off.I loved the world-building of this city, but I expected that: I read a review that compared it to New Crobuzon in the China Mieville novels and that obviously got my attention, as that fictional city haunts my dreams. The concept of the Reproach is fantastic! I also loved the multiple characters and their perspective on the events and their unfolding. Event never happen to just one person, and this multiple POV approach made the story rich and nuanced. From the idealist student, priest going through a crisis, mercenaries and factory works, you get a rich picture of a city on the brink of civil unrest. My single issue with City of Last Chances was, as noted in the intro above, my inability to really connect with the characters beyond one or two. Don’t get me wrong; they were all interesting. Rich, complex, well-characterized. But something — possibly the number of them, possibly the structure which had me shifting from one to the other, maybe their own often guarded nature — created a sense of distance. The exception for me was Yasnic, who won me over pretty immediately and for whom I had a soft spot all the way through to the end. Weird Trade Union: Although the Siblingries mostly function like normal unions, the fact that the factories they work in are mostly driven by demons means that they include hellieurs-sorcerers specializing in making contracts with demons-in their ranks. These two areas had me fascinated the entire time, and complemented the rest of the city and the story taking place within it so so well. This book reads like a collection of interconnected short stories. Each chapter, we are jumping POV to a different denizen of the city with fingers in different pies. As the book continues, the stories become more interconnected and we get repeats of the same characters.

Mind Virus: The Reproach's curse is a fantasy version of this. Someone afflicted by the curse begins to believe themselves to be a member of the old Varatsin ducal court, hallucinates the Reproach as it was during Ilmar's medieval period, and tries to draw the uninfected into the curse by calling them ancient titles.Oppression. Political intrigue. Colonization. Religion. Poverty. Bigotry. Magic. Demons. Worker's rights. Crime. Revolution. Wrongful incarceration. These are all a part of this story by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Badass Pacifist: After his life is saved by converting to Yasnic's religion, Ruslav is forced to become one, as committing violence will lead to his wounds reopening. This is best shown when God is forced to keep Ruslav alive after Yasnic's apostasy, which Ruslav puts to good use acting as a baton-proof human shield so the Gownhall students can rescue Ivarn. That being said, those external forces are something of a marmite aspect to the book. By the time I reached the end, I loved the role they had to play in the story, but they wouldn't be to everyone's taste, not least because they leave so much unknown and unresolved. They are a chaotic spectre hovering on the edge of reason and of the city, and to understand them would be to strip them of their magic, their mystique. But that absence of understanding is also an absence of resolution, and that isn't always everyone's cup of tea - especially when it feels, as this does, not like there areanswers but we just don't have them yet, but rather that there may be no answers at all. Some magic is beyond our knowledge, in this book and this world, and we must simply accept that. In many ways, the wood on the edge of the city and what lies beyond it, a portal to other worlds that is discussed by the characters in hushed whispers, with its strange guardians who operate on rules no one else understands, are an element of folklore, not of magic, in the way they act upon the story. Magic might have rules and explanations - folklore is deeper, older and more oblique. Ilmar, City of Long Shadows, City of Bad Decisions. City of Last Chances. City of Skip to the bottom of the review if you don’t have much time because I’m giving this book a 10. War Is Hell: One of the book's themes is that, even when resisting a hostile power is absolutely necessary, the actual fighting will always be something heartbreaking, terrifying, and painful, and while the students are shown to be one of the most moral resistance factions, they are also portrayed as naïve due in large part to a mistaken belief that War Is Glorious.