A Time for Grief, the second Shadows of the Apt companion book, consisting of ten short stories, gives us a world of fragile peace. While Spoils of War focused on the pitfalls of war, A Time for Grief tries to convince the reader that times of peace can be nearly as dangerous, and even outright lethal to some – especially to academics. And, with Czajkowski being in a good writing form, it generally succeeds.
The stories in A Time for Grief are a diverse mix: they’ve been coming up slowly, one at a time, since 2008. The most recent stories were written in 2017, but the nine-year gap between the oldest and the newest is practically invisible. It’s pretty clear that Czajkowski never really left the world of Shadows of the Apt and, in a way reminiscent of the late sir Terry Pratchett uses his creation to form a timely commentary on universal problems of our world, from poverty to prejudice. Some of the stories have already appeared on the author’s website, some were written specifically for the new volume. Their timeline covers a span from before the Empire in Black and Gold (the first installment in the Shadows of the Apt series) to events well after The Seal of the Worm (the last, tenth part of the series). The stories cover a swath of the world, from the far deserts of Spiderlands to the farthest reaches of Commonweal, with special nods to Helleron as the center of deadly vice ;).
