I picked this up without knowing anything about it and boy, did I luck out. This was great! The book consists of 4 novellas, 2 by each author, set in the same fantasy setting. There is a real depth and emotional weight to these stories which set them well above the norm. The setting is a world in which the use of magic is fairly widespread but comes with a cost – every time magic is used it spurs the growth of ‘Bramble’ – a toxic plant that is growing and overwhelming the land. The analogy to global warming and the use of fossil fuels is unmissable. And the philosophical questions that rise as well as the political ones when attempts are made to limit the use of magic.

The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi – great stuff. An Alchemist invents an alchemical device that burns up Bramble at a fast rate. He dreams of saving the world, but his invention is put to use by the mayor and magister of the City of Khaim to cement their own power and wealth. A cautionary tale about the danger of the control of technology falling into the hands of an elite.

The Executioness by Tobias S. Buckell. Another great story which expands the world of the Tangled Lands beyond the City of Khaim. The philosophical bent here is the idea of the circularity of violence – how it perpetuates itself. One particularly interesting revelation was that the creed of the raiders who have been slaughtering and kidnapping their way around the continent was actually one that abhorred violence and originally preached against it. An interesting insight in to how even seemingly benign religions can be twisted to violent ends.

The Children of Khaim by Paolo Bacigalupi. This was dark stuff. Very dark stuff. Showing the seedy underbelly of a feudal society in which life for the poor is cheap and how they are used as things – either cheap labour or to fulfill darker desires.

The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Tobias S. Buckell. This was a good story but perhaps the weakest of the 4 novellas due to the writing. A good editor might well have trimmed the fat off this story to make it tighter and more impactful. Having said that its still a compelling story with that blend of fairytale happenings and gritty realism that makes this entire book so compelling. ( )

Paolo Bacigalupi has made a career of climate science fiction, and in this novel turns (together with Tobias Buckell) to climate fantasy.

Overall, the analogy they've chosen--a strangling and toxic vine that is powered by the use of magic, anywhere, and has overtaken and threatened an entire civilization--is effective. They use it to explore a number of issues around climate change and its primary driver, the use of fossil fuels, including that it's so easy for people to justify their own magic (/fossil fuel consumption) even when they know the devastating effects it has, and that the powerful and wealthy are just as likely to take any promising solutions for themselves to continue their own use while utterly prohibiting it in the general population.

I also greatly appreciated the characters (generally balanced and representative with a number of non-cliched and complex women) and the structure of four loosely connected novellas telling four different stories, none of them happy or with happy endings, but all filled with protagonists determined to both survive and do the right thing. ( )

These short stories start in the middle and end in the middle of each conflict, which is going to make them less interesting to revisit for me. They are windows into this imagined world, and I really hope that more books set in this tangled land are released. A great exploration of the 'tragedy of the commons'.

Story two was the weakest from my perspective, it's also the story that tried to tell a larger story (army developed and sieging a city) within the confines of seventy-five pages, hard to do. ( )

four novellas from two very good writers, set in a shared world they jointly invented. in which magic is real, but comes at a cost that others pay, as the brambles thrown up by its usage proliferate and threaten to destroy the world. so, almost a set of fairy tales, in a very dystopic dying earth kind of setting. ( )

Magic causes bramble to grow; bramble poisons people into endless sleep and eventually into death, if they don’t get a mercy killing before that. Refugees clog the city of Khaim because they’ve magicked their own city-states to death; raiders kidnap children and kill young women to prevent further magic-users from being born and poisoning the lands around. When a brilliant inventor figures out a way to better destroy bramble, he also invents a way to detect who’s been using magic—and the latter turns out to be a lot more useful to the existing power structure. This is a series of setting-linked stories centered around the ways in which families are broken by power, climate disaster, and greed; the people who can’t stop using the magic that’s killing their society are very familiar, as are the people who would rather rule the ashes than have a voice in governing a healthy polity. ( )