Unlike Love and Romanpunk<\/a><\/em>\u00a0these four stories are not related to each other. Indeed, two of the stories (<\/span>The Fountain of Justice <\/em>and\u00a0The Subject of O<\/em>) don’t have any fantastical elements that I could see at all. The writing is excellent – I have heard\/read very positive reviews of Ms Sussex’s work elsewhere and I can see from the quality of this work that those reviews are well deserved.<\/p>\n My favourite story of the group was The Thief of Lives<\/em>. It was one of those stories where you don’t really know what is going on at the start (well at least I didn’t) and you become more oriented as things unfold. I really enjoyed the concept, and although I don’t have enough experience with writing and the publishing scene to know for sure, I suspect there might be some references that would amuse insiders.<\/p>\n Perhaps unsurprisingly, my other favourite of the bunch was the other story with fantastical elements Alchemy<\/em>. Set in ancient Babylon, it tells the story of a woman on a path to become a master perfumer and a demon with a fascination with the sciences who sees in her the opportunity to radically advance chemistry. The ancient world was beautifully rendered in this story and I found the description of the demon’s traversal of timelines intriguing.<\/p>\n The Fountain of Justice<\/em>\u00a0is a crime story with a sort of Underbelly (Australian crime drama for any overseas readers) feel to it. Again beautifully written but not as much my cup of tea.<\/p>\n I’m not really sure how to describe The Subject of O<\/em>\u00a0– it was an interesting read, but nothing speculative about it and I suspect meant for a different audience than me. Still, Ms Sussex’s writing is excellent and I liked the story without being totally captivated by it.<\/p>\n All in all, another excellent addition to the Twelve Planets series.<\/p>\n I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n <\/p>Hi,\n Welcome to Mark Webb’s author website. At this point the site is rather sparse – I’ve only recently started writing and there isn’t a lot to show for it right now. You can check out\u00a0my biography<\/a>, see …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[96,14,15],"class_list":["post-474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-lucy-sussex","tag-review","tag-specfic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1742,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions\/1742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}