Customer Reviews

Ink and Steel: A Novel of the Promethean Age

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Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age books have this much in common: heartbreaking, intense, complicated personal relationships, and politics that go way over my head. My solution is to read for the personal relationships and shrug off the politics, though that won't work for everybody.

This book focuses on Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, and on the Elizabethan reign, which is being subtly supported both by the magic in plays and verse and by the faerie realm. Marlowe, in the world of faerie, is drawn into a tangle of politics and relationships; Shakespeare, meanwhile, is called upon to support Elizabeth's reign with his plays and in other ways.

The book's great strength is in how Marlowe and Shakespeare feel completely like real people, complex and multi-dimensional and sympathetic but flawed. I have the urge to give Marlowe a hug and some hot chocolate, not that it would help! Bear also knows how to write sex scenes that are intimate and revealing but not mechanical, which sex scenes in books hardly ever are, and this is perhaps her best book yet in that regard.

Ms. Bear's prose is utterly beautiful and suits this Faerie story perfectly. But - these are NOT the fairies of fairy tales, these are the strong-minded, wilful, and (when necessary) vicious, inhabitants of a parallel universe, where time flows at a different rate, but whose borders with our own (or in this case, Elizabethan) world are blurred.

The adventures of Christopher (Kit) Marlowe (tragically, but not permanently, dead), along with a certain Mr. Shakespeare, and a cast of dubious supporting characters, faeries, goblins, lunatics, queens (real and faerie), lords, ladies and assorted low-life, are an absolute treat.

You could read the books just for the elegant poetic prose, which envelops you and the story with a style that is perfect - and then, almost as a bonus, you have this well plotted, intriguing, and surprising tale.

Highly recommended for anyone who has enjoyed Mary Gentle's alternate worlds of Ash, or the harder works of Ursula Le Guin, as well as the wonderful world of Neal Stephenson's baroque trilogy.

While Ink and Steel is part of the Promethean Age series, it's a great place to begin. I found it more accessible than either Blood and Iron or Whiskey and Water, the two earlier books in the series set in modern times.

The Prometheans are magicians, politicians, and spies working to influence the course of England's history. Christopher Marlowe -- aka Kit Marley -- writes magic-infused plays under the direction of Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster. However, the Prometheans are splintering into factions, and one of them has decided that Kit is a liability.

Kit's ignominious death leaves the Prometheans without their playwright. The young actor Richard Burbage suggests they recruit Kit's friend and roommate, Will Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, Kit awakens in Faerie under the care of Morgan le Fey and learns that his service is to be transferred from Elizabeth to her sister queen, the Mebd. He will live forever in the Faerie court, able to return to the iron world for only a few days at a time. And return he must, because Will is in way, way over his head. Together, Will and Kit are going to have to navigate the undercurrents of both queens' courts to learn who's working to thwart the Prometheans from within -- who is, in other words, trying to bring down Elizabeth, and by extension the Mebd.

English lit geeks: get thee to the bookstore! You are in for a rare treat. Bear lovingly brings Elizabeth's court to life, weaving fact and fiction into a wide-flung net of Promethean conspiracies: plagues, murders, illicit affairs, secret letters written in lemon juice and passed through Faerie mirrors. The cast includes not just Marlowe and Shakespeare but Jonson, Spenser, Nashe, Dekker, and half a dozen lesser known poets and playwrights; the entire Shakespeare family, Burbage and his players; Walter Raleigh, Robert Devereaux, and Edward de Vere; and Elizabeth herself. As in the lovely film Shakespeare in Love, we get to see these luminaries as real people, tramping through London's mud, suffering from fevers, battling stage fright.

There are so many things here to love. I laughed myself silly over the sly jokes and innuendo in the letters Will and Kit write one another, and the hilariously snarky dialogue between them and their fellow poets. Kit's posthumous misadventures in London are great fun, as are Will's attempts at skullduggery. But the real fun begins when Kit brings Will to Faerie.

Don't forget to pick up Hell and Earth as well, since these two books are really one novel that had to be divided due to its length. Despite that, the story ended far too soon. I wanted to remain in its world even longer, and had to content myself with flipping back to page one and starting again.

In her diptych, Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, Elizabeth Bear shows us the end of the story of the Promethean Age, when Faerie has been fighting a long war against technology, against Hell, and against those magicians, the Prometheans, who would still see it bound.

In the second volume of that series, when Christopher Marlowe, part of Lucifer's household, appears, he blazes across the page in such a way that I knew, then, that Bear had to write more of his story, and how he had gotten to be in Lucifer's household in the first place.

In Ink and Steel, the first of another diptych, Elizabeth Bear takes us back to the days when Christopher Marlowe is still alive (although not for long), and just as importantly, the early days of the career of one William Shakespeare, whose poetry and pose is as potent an armament as any Elf-knight's sword. For such poetry and pose are strong magic, magic that can be used for good, or for ill...

Shakespeare and his world is a popular choice for fantasy and SF authors. Ruled Britannia has him writing plays for a Spanish-installed Monarch. Sarah Hoyt's trilogy has Shakeapeare tangle with the land of Faerie. Neil Gaiman had Shakespeare meet one of the Endless. Poul Anderson's Midsummer's Tempest is a fine novel where Shakespeare's plays are fact. Bear is in good company here.

With chapters arranged like acts and scenes of a play, with florid, lush descriptions and prose, and the subject matter of Shakespeare and Elizabethan England and Elizabethan Faerie, the book, at least this half, reads and feels like a prose version of one of William Shakespeare's plays. Betrayals, forbidden and denied love, politics, unusual landscapes, engaging and multisided characters convince me that these are books that Bear not only enjoyed writing, but in a sense was born to write. This book (and I am sure, the second half, Hell and Earth) are the kind of books that an author has in mind when she decides to become a writer.

I think, too, that Bear hits it out of the park. I personally know that Elizabethan England is something that Bear knows a fair amount about, and that knowledge flows out onto the page. From the minutae of the changes in the courtiers and servants to Queen Elizabeth, all the way down to what a trip through the streets of London feels like, that knowledge is not dumped on the page, but, rather, flows into that previously mentioned lush text. And then there is Faerie, and even a trip into Hell. Bear is not afraid to make things happen and deliver on the page, consistently, for the reader.

This IS the first novel of two, and so the story does not end here, which may frustrate some readers. I suspect others may object to some characterizations of Shakespeare and Marlowe, but one might consider that Bear almost certainly knows more about the subject than me or you.

I look forward to finishing the Statford Man sequence in Hell and Earth and see just how Bear finishes off the story.

Bear is the best writer in SF&F, and regardless of what the litr'y Establishment thinks, Speculative Fiction is the most demanding of all genres.
No Literary writer, one suspects, would have the nerve, the chops or the soul to write a book that is a love story between Marlow and Shakespeare, much less throw Morgan le Fey and her son into the brew, but that is just one of the major themes Bear mixes into this wonderful book. Wonderful means "full of wonders."

But to me, the best part is the reality, effortlessly created (or so it seems) that can bring Will's wife Annie to life as a breathing character whose motivations and obligations ring true to life. All the other characters are equally vivid and real.

And the speech in the mouths of these people also is fluid and true and emotive. Mark Twain studied for years to recreate Elizabethean dialogue. For my money, Bear does it better.

Pretty good company, don't you know.

And the real reason that the Establishment ignores SF&F? They probably can't stand the comparison. Bear and her peers are creating a Golden Age of literature.

Outstanding! This first book in "The Stratford Man Duology" (coupled with the equally exquisite Hell and Earth: A Novel of the Promethean Age) envisions an extra-teeming Elizabethan England in league with the underground world of Faery to suppress the forces of Dark Magic. The Stratford Man is clever, soulful, courageous Will Shakespeare, pressed into service to work protective magic into his verse as a reluctant, but brilliant replacement for verse-master Christopher Marlowe, recently deceased. But the most triumphant performance is by Kit Marly (Marlowe) himself, newly resurrected in Faery--poet, spy, sodomite, lover of several important fairies, Devil's personal plaything, and, ultimately, lapsed atheist. Bear's delicious series is a triumph of poetry, audacious eroticism, tenderness, and unfettered imagination.

This was an amazing reading experience. I love Elizabeth Bear's writing, but to have her take on Shakespeare was like a dream come true. I just can't get over all the ways that she wove the biography and works of Shakespeare and Marlowe into this rich alternate view of the late Elizabethan period. I can't decide what to read next -- the sequel, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or Edward II!

Disclaimer, I'm a history buff and a trained literary scholar; I was familiar with a lot of the history and literature behind this book already (heck, my master's thesis is on Romeo and Juliet). But while that definitely affected my reading of the book, I don't think it was necessary to have that background in order to enjoy the novel. YMMV

lizabeth Bear's duology featuring an alternative version of the Shakespeare and Marlowe we know from history definitely one the best books I've read this year.

Imagine Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe in an Elizabethan setting paired with fairies and then add to that the appearance of Morgan Le Fey and her son as well as recurring references to both Shakespeare's and Marlowe's plays. Honestly this made me do two things: a) want to re-read my favorite Shakespeare works (mostly the tragedies) and b) switch classes for the coming semester from British Modern Literature to Renaissance. That really doesn't happen all too often, but those books totally motivated me to study the Elizabethan era closer.

In her extended author's note at the end of Hell and Earth, Elizabeth Bear calls this duology a 'disservice to history', but honestly I couldn't imagine re-vamping Shakespeare and Marlowe in any better way. She works with some popular theories concerning the two poets' lives and portrays her characters in a way that make them very realistic and complex. She states that the Marlowe-Shakespeare relationship she creates in The Stratford Man is almost entirely fictional, but then again it really does make you wonder "What if?" and I think that's been the intention of the book.

The other thing that really intrigued me about those books what its realism and how accurately Bear worked with the historical context such as society and political background. Of course the work is fictional in the end, but she manages to have to write about homosexuality, politics and the entire concept of the Prometheus Club very 'in context', which makes the story rounder and the fantasy elements fit into the concept without jarring.

These two books are definitely not quick reads for entertainment only. It took me about two to three days to get through each, not because of the size, but because of the content that's very heavy on history and politics and last but not least on the language. Bear doesn't use 100% accurate Elizabethan language in her dialogue (no 'here sitteth' etc. no worries), but it's more or less the speech characters would have used at that time.

Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth are chronologically set before the other two Promethean Age books Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water. I'm just starting Blood and Iron, but had no problems getting into the story and the whole concept of the Prometheus Club, even though the Stratford Man duology came out after the two aforementioned books. It's definitely a good starting point if you haven't read any of Bear's books yet. Definitely go for it :D

P.S.: This so made Kit Marlowe my favorite hystorical fantasy crossover character of all time :D I can't wait to read more!

This is the sort of tightly-interleaved story that I have come to expect, and I have the next one on pre-order so I will get it in three or so weeks, because yum. Let's see how much I can say without spoiling the whole series to date...

This is a story about the different burn rates of love, and how love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. This is a story that sets up the previous two books perfectly. This is a story that makes me want to go back and read Shakespeare's sonnets, which is NOT my usual impulse, but now they have a sort of compelling narrative structure. Fanon affecting the reading of the canon. This is a story that describes my version of Hell, and perhaps owes something to The Great Divorce. This is a story with hot sex in a variety of configurations. This is a story that made me think about the problems of dangerous childbirth as it affected the decisions of married people, which I had never really thought through, before. This is a story where words are almost the only currency, and the violence all circles around silencing and ownership.

This is a lousy story to start on a Sunday evening if you were planning to be a civilized person on Monday.

I know who the author is from her part in Shadow Unit, the online paranormal/FBI series, which I have reread enough times to slightly worry myself.
So I picked up Ink and Steel despite not having been thrilled with the first of the 'modern' books in the series because I was bored, like Shakespeare and wanted to support someone I sort of know (if you count following her blog as know) rather than closing my eyes and pointing at the sci-fi shelf in Barnes and Nobles. I am happy to say I ended up really impressed and happy with the result.
It's intricate, creative, a little over the top but not in a bad way, and honestly suspenseful. At a lot of points I had no idea where she was going with the whole thing, and I was equally happy with the ending and anxious to read the next one when I put it down. It's a fun read. Give it a shot.