Rogues

Paul Cornell

British author Paul Cornell is a writer of SF and fantasy in novels, comics, and television, one of only two people to have Hugo Award nominations for all three media. His urban fantasy novel London Falling is out from Tor, and the sequel, The Severed Streets, was released in December. He’s written Doctor Who for the BBC, and Batman and Robin for DC Comics. He’s currently the writer of Marvel Comics’ Wolverine. He’s had short stories published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Interzone, and many anthologies.

The fast-paced and rather strange story that follows is one of a series of stories that Paul Cornell has been writing about the exploits of spy Jonathan Hamilton in the Great Game between nations in a nineteenth-century Europe where technology has followed a very different path from that of our own timeline, exploiting the ability to open and manipulate multidimensional folds in space—stories that read like Ruritanian romances written by Charles Stross, as Hamilton battles to prevent disaster in a flamboyantly entertaining fashion reminiscent of the adventures of James Bond, or, better, of Poul Anderson’s Dominic Flandry, who may be his direct ancestor.

In this adventure, Hamilton finds himself locked in a life-or-death struggle with someone every bit as clever and dangerous as he is—himself.