When I read 'March of the Meek', the first instalment in Marvin North's trilogy, 'Searching for the Eminent', it was all I had to go on and, while I enjoyed it, I had a lot of questions. North had a very deliberate approach that worked less as a standalone novel and more as the beginning of a series. It sets the stage, it introduces the characters and it rolls the credits, because answers presumably aren't going to show up until book two. Well, here's book two, because he kindly sent up the other two books, not having run screaming into the night after my review of their predecessor.

Given what 'Towards the Apocalypse' does and where it goes, I absolutely must compare the two, because they fit together well, progressing a broader story forward, but in a fascinating manner, because they're often very different indeed.

'March of the Meek' was fundamentally a fantasy novel, albeit one that's set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. The location is a city, Last Theli, which believes it's the last city on the planet, but it feels like a modern city that's devolved for the most part into a fantasy framework. There's magic, for a start, and people fight with swords and farm crops, given that all the animals are gone. However, there's also an RM Mart, a grocery store that sells a line of protein bars, so it's not all mediaeval. In my review, I suggested that it felt "like two parallel worlds bleeding into each other."

Well, it turns out that that's kind of what's happening, but those parallel worlds aren't located on the other side of a rip in the timespace continuum; they're on the other side of walls that enclose the slums of the city impeccably well. We realise how well when Rekco Curse, protagonist of book one and here five years older, decides that he doesn't want to be a mere guard patrolling the city walls and would much rather use his skills as a warrior working for the all-powerful Runic Guard. So he wanders off to figure out how to sign up, which he doesn't realise is a really bad idea, and finds himself whisked away from an opportune end by Dim Smithy, Remote Scholar.

And suddenly, we're in a science fiction novel, a far more modern city, with trains and skyscrapers and motorcycles that dematerialise when their journey is over to rematerialise where they began. Sure, all this is driven by magic rather than high tech, but the result is often very much the same, just as there are still swordfights in this modern city, even if characters charge them to start. Thus Reko gets to walk between these worlds simply by knowing where the doors are and having a pass that allows him to open them. That's because he's promptly hired as Dim Smithy's bodyguard.

I have to say that, as much as I seem to have predicted this in my review of the first book, this isn't remotely what I expected that prediction to mean. North caught me totally by surprise, though it was a better surprise than perhaps I might be suggesting. This works and perhaps the key to why is a comment much later in the book. The world isn't dying, as everyone we met in book one thought; it's being murdered. Of course, that leads to a bevy of new questions to sit alongside the old ones, not least why, how and by whom, along with what can our protagonists do about it.

Another thing to say about 'March of the Meek' is that it's a highly focused story, featuring not a lot of locations and not lot of characters. We learn a lot about Rekco and the other two primaries, a young asshole of a wizard called Kyoku, who clearly has serious powers, even if he's still honing them, and a young lady called Cathy Wyman, who lives in a man's world not only because it's run by men but because a notable aspect of this post-apocalyptic civilisation is that women can rarely conceive and, when they do, give birth to a heck of a lot more boys than girls. We don't learn much about pretty much anyone else, other than building a myth around Rekco's father, Rekston Curse, who may or may not be dead and may or may not be buried.

North takes a very different approach here. Those three characters are still our protagonists and they dominate proceedings accordingly, but there are now many others too in a broad variety of roles, from those pivotal to the story to those there to flesh out details. As Rekco's, and thus our, worldview expands, so does North's approach to the writing. I don't know if that was deliberate on his part or not, but writing a highly focused and limited book when the primary character only has highly focused and limited access to his world makes sense in the context we learn here, as North writes a broader and open book as that primary character gains broader and open access to that world. That really makes me wonder about what's to come in book three!

I'm not going to run through all the characters or where they fit, but I will note a couple of things. One is that there's a third world in Last Theli, in the sense of another district that's kept separate from the other two, and that's the Underworld, run not by a Mayor but by a Queen, who goes by the unusual name of Maneuvers. She's an interesting character, who quite literally fought her way to the throne, even though she's a burn victim. The other is that the Underworld, as well as many of the other locations we visit on the expanding map of 'Searching for the Eminent', are rooted in fantasy rather than science fiction. So, while this is a science fiction novel and trilogy, it remains a fantasy novel and trilogy too.

But wait, there's more. While some locations here play out as one or the other, especially fantasy, with Dim Smithy's job as a Remote Scholar requiring him to travel outside the city to visit smaller settlements, where they encounter fantasy characters living fantasy lives under clear threat from fantasy dangers, others embrace other genres too.

The district that embraces this science fiction angle leads to this also counting as a technothriller, albeit one that's grounded in magic. The thriller aspects involve plenty of intrigue, with threats against city leaders by what we presume is a fantasy analogue of a terrorist organisation, even if it might be the side of the good guys. And we shift firmly into action mode in the Underground for a tournament of fighters. While the framework is of fantasy, it plays with videogame logic, pitting characters with wildly different talents against each other, magic wielders against ultra-trained swordsmen or hulked up brawlers, which seems fundamentally unfair but works well enough.

And all of this makes 'Towards the Apocalypse' both a natural continuation to 'March of the Meek' and a thoroughly different novel in a whole slew of ways. While there are definitely tropes in play and some plot conveniences, North kept me on the hop throughout and I'm still trying to work out where the series is going. This is fascinating genre-hopping and I want to dive into the third book, 'The Collapse of Reality', a title that I'm now seeing very differently after reading this. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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