Book Review | Acadie by Dave Hutchinson

The Colony left Earth to find their utopia—a home on a new planet where their leader could fully explore the colonists' genetic potential, unfettered by their homeworld's restrictions. They settled a new paradise, and have been evolving and adapting for centuries.

Earth has other plans.

The original humans have been tracking their descendants across the stars, bent on their annihilation. They won't stop until the new humans have been destroyed, their experimentation wiped out of the human gene pool.

Can't anyone let go of a grudge anymore?

***

What do you do when you've burned every bridge, dithered over every significant decision and looked askance at every last chance? Why, if you're Duke, an unusually lawyer who blew the whistle on the Bureau of Colonisation for bad practice, you eat and drink your way through your savings until a stunningly beautiful woman called Conjugación Lang turns up at your table with a solution to your otherwise unsolvable problem:

"What if I were to offer you a way off this howling nightmare of a planet? Right now." 

"You have some kind of magic spaceship that takes off through seven-hundred-kilometre-an-hour blizzards?" 

She wrinkled her nose and grinned coquettishly. "Oh, I have something better than that." (p.26)

And she does. Something Better Than That turns out to be the name of a tattered old towboat sitting in Probity City's spaceport. "The words [...] were sprayed on the side of the tug in Comic Sans, which really was the least of the little vehicle's problems. It looked as if it could barely get off the ground on a calm midsummer's afternoon, let alone reach orbit in the middle of an ice storm." (pp.26-27) But looks, as Dave Hutchinson's twisty new novella takes pains to teach its readers repeatedly, can be deeply deceiving.

Something Better Than That ultimately does just what Conjugación promised: it almost instantly spirits Duke off to the Colony, a distant solar system several million souls have made their home under the leadership—like it or lump it—of Isabel Potter, a previous professor of molecular biology at Princeton known by the Bureau as "Baba Yaga, the Wicked Witch of the West. [Duke] actually knew someone who had invoked her name to make her children go to bed. She was Legend." (pp.36-37)

Book Review | Europe in Winter by Dave Hutchinson

Union has come. The Community is now the largest nation in Europe; trains run there from as far afield as London and Prague. It is an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

So what is the reason for a huge terrorist outrage? Why do the Community and Europe meet in secret, exchanging hostages? And who are Les Coureurs des Bois?

Along with a motley crew of strays and mafiosi and sleeper agents, Rudi sets out to answer these questions – only to discover that the truth lies both closer to home and farther away than anyone could possibly imagine.

***

Both in Britain and abroad, so much has changed in the years since the release of Dave Hutchinson's Arthur C. Clarke Award nominated Europe in Autumn that the mind positively boggles. In 2014 I described its depiction of a Europe decimated by division "as plausible as it is novel," but I'll be damned if it isn't beginning to look visionary.

What shape the differences democracy has recently wrought will take is, as yet, anyone's guess. Everything's up for grabs, not least the ideals we hold nearest and dearest—just as they are in the world of the Fractured Europe sequence: a manic mosaic of "nations and polities and duchies and sanjaks and earldoms and principalities and communes." (p.12)

The situation was, if anything, even worse the further East you went. Beyond Rus—European Russia—and Sibir was a patchwork of republics and statelets and nations and kingdoms and khanates and 'stans which had been crushed out of existence by History, reconstituted, fragmented, reinvented, fragmented again, absorbed, reabsorbed and recreated." (p.43)

But that's not all—hell, that's not even the half of it—as readers of Europe at Midnight will recall. That "mad story about a family of wizards and a map" elaborated brilliantly on the existence of a place called the Community: an impossible plane of space modelled on idyllic little England. Next to no one knew about it till now, but having kept its distance for decades, the Community is finally making its presence felt by way of a revolutionary railway.

The Line is being laid all across the continent, connecting the Community to the real world in a real sense, and although most folks don't mind, there are, of course, those—now more than ever there are those—who want to keep the outsiders out, and are willing to do whatever it takes to make their isolationist case. To wit, Europe in Winter opens on an awful atrocity, as a train packed with passengers travelling along that mathemagical track is attacked.

You'd think the authorities would come a-running with such loss of life rife, but Europe is so splintered that no one of its gaggle of governments wants anything to do with it. Even the innumerable NGOs are steering out of fear, such that solving the problem, if it's going to be solved at all, falls, finally, to the Coureur and erstwhile cook Hutchinson introduced us to in Europe in Autumn.

Book Review | Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson

In a fractured Europe, new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight. 

For an intelligence officer like Jim, it’s a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns a new and unknown national entity which may or may not be friendly to England’s interests. It’s hard to keep on top of it all. But things are about to get worse for Jim. 

A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has come who may hold the key to unlocking Europe’s most jealously-guarded secret...

***

A great many maps were made in Europe in the Middle Ages. Foremost among them were the Mappae Mundi: "maps of the world" meant not as navigational aids but to illustrate different principles—the earth's spherical shape, say, or its flora and fauna. Such scrolls represented repositories of medieval knowledge, but even the most definitive had their limits; here be lions and the like was oft-enscribed where the unknown roamed. The Ebstorfer Mappa Mundi, for instance, depicts a dragon to the east of Africa—also asps and basilisks, presumably because it was better to show something than nothing; better, according to that thought process, to invent the positively extraordinary than to admit the littlest deficiency.

In this day and age, we expect rather more from our maps than that. We demand that they are exact, in fact—detailed to the nearest nanometre at least! And perhaps they are. But you know what? I hope to God not. If we're to understand that modern maps are absolutely accurate, then there remains nothing about the world we do not know, and me... I love a bit of a mystery. Which might be why I loved Europe at Midnight. That and a hundred other reasons, even.


The second section of the sequence Dave Hutchinson kicked off with Europe in Autumn—an "awesome concoction of sci-fi and spies" which went on to be nominated for a whole hodgepodge of awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke—Europe at Midnight is damn near the definition of unpredictable. It doesn't pick up where its predecessor left off, with Rudi welcomed into another world; indeed, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the glorified postman who was our last protagonist. Instead, the story, told by two brand new narrators, starts in a strange country—one of the milieu's proliferation of pocket nations, maybe—called the Campus:

The Campus was made up of four hundred Schools, scattered over an area about two hundred miles across and surrounded by mountains. Opinions differed over whether we sat in the bottom of the caldera of an ancient supervolcano, which was a charming thought, or the crater of a colossal prehistoric meteor strike, but to be honest nobody was thinking very hard about those theories at the moment. (p.29)

Why? Because the Campus is under new management following the overthrow of the oppressive Old Board, which left a mountain of mass graves in its wake, and an impoverished population. Unfortunately, well-meaning as it may be, the New Board doesn't have the slightest clue what it's doing, and though he has his own array of failings, no one knows this better than Richard, or rather Rupert of Hentzau—The Prisoner of Zenda, anyone?—"the worst Professor of Intelligence the Campus had ever had." (p.19)

Said sorry state of affairs isn't on him, however:

Part of the problem was that we just couldn't trust the few members of the Intelligence Faculty who were left alive, so I'd had to rebuild it from scratch, mostly with people who immediately changed their minds when they discovered that intelligence work was less like a John Buchan novel and more like being a particularly nosy village postmaster. (p.19)

Poor Rupe clearly has his work cut out for him, but when he discovers the hastily-burned bodies of a host of human beings genetically engineered to have working wings and whatnot, he puts his other assorted responsibilities on pause to look into a sickening conspiracy which not a few folks from Science City are complicit in. Little does Rupe realise that his investigation will culminate in a catastrophe that could collapse the entire Campus...

Guest Post | "The Dawn of Autumn" by Dave Hutchinson

I said as much yesterday, but it bears repeating here: Europe in Autumn is awesome; a canny concoction of sci-fi and spies which took me entirely by surprise, largely because I wasn't familiar with its author beforehand.

In the weeks since reading it I have, however, gotten my grubby paws on The Push, and it was bloody good too. So it was with high hopes that I approached Dave Hutchinson about putting together a guest post for TSS, and sincere glee when he agreed.

As is my habit, I asked the author a selection of questions, with my fingers firmly crossed that he'd be able to come up with something fun in answer to one. What I didn't expect was for him to answer them all! Here, then, is an absorbing account of how Europe in Autumn came about which also takes in the relevance of short stories on the novel form, Dave's personal favourite pocket nation, and—last but not least—his ideas for a potential sequel.

***

Years ago, a friend of mine—oh, why not drop names? It was Stephen King’s Polish translator—told me that I was, at heart, a short story writer.

This was a little disappointing, as I’d just finished what would be my first published novel, The Villages. It had taken me over a year of very hard work and I was rather pleased with it. But then I had a think about what he’d said, and I realised he was right. Virtually everything I’d written since I began to write somewhere back in the mid-70s was short-form. Some of it was very short indeed.

The Villages itself grew out of a short story which I workshopped with some other writers. In the course of the workshop it was suggested that maybe the story could be the seed of a novel. When I expressed doubt about this—I think I actually said, "Are you out of your minds?"—someone suggested a simple way of doing it. “Just look at it as a novella and keep going.”

Of course, it wound up being more complicated than that. The story got rewritten and rewritten and sort of grew backwards and forwards and sideways until it was sitting buried, a little to one side of the heart of the book, like the grit in a pearl and only I could tell it was there.

After The Villages, I went back to writing short stories. And as time went on, the short stories got longer and longer. Where I had once been able to tell a story in a couple of thousand words, now my stuff felt uncomfortably rushed if it ran to less than about ten thousand. I don’t think I was getting more verbose in my old age, it’s just that the rhythm of the stories I wanted to tell needed space to breathe.

Europe in Autumn started out as a completely different novel, set in three similar but separate versions of Europe. In the first, a journalist investigating what seems to be a routine Drugs Squad raid gone wrong in London suddenly finds himself in a reality where he never existed. In the second, a worker on the Warsaw Metro gets involved with a shadowy crime boss and a Continent-wide conspiracy. And in the third there was Rudi the Coureur, bless his little cotton socks.

The idea was to write the book in alternating chapters from the point of view of each of the characters, until somewhere near the end all their stories connected up, but early on I found myself more interested in Rudi’s story than the other two. Okay, I’ll put my hands up; the Rudi chapters were easier and more fun to write. Eventually, I shelved the other two stories and concentrated on Rudi.

I wound up writing the book the way I did for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Rudi chapters I’d already written were quite self-contained because I still wasn’t sure how they’d fit into the original book and I wanted to be able to swap them around if I had to.

Secondly, though—and more important, I think—by that time, I was reading a lot of Alan Furst. In case you’ve never read him, Furst writes these wonderful, atmospheric, almost impressionistic espionage novels set around the beginning of the Second World War—what someone once called "the midnight of the century." Many of his books tend to be structured as self-contained chapters within the larger narrative, the way each novel itself is just part of a huge mosaic picture of Europe on the brink of war. I liked that, and though I can’t pretend to be anything like as good as Furst, I thought I’d like to try and pull it off with Europe in Autumn. It’s a structure I find rather pleasing, and of course it keeps me in my comfort zone, writing a string of short stories and novellas which add up to a larger story.

Of the locations in the novel, I’ve only really been to London and Poland. I live in London, and I’ve visited Poland quite a lot. It’s a country I’m extremely fond of, but I didn’t want to prettify it. That’s for another book, maybe. A friend of mine says I "get" Poland and that’s really quite a compliment.

The other locations in the book really come mostly from research. I’ve never been to Prague or Estonia, for instance, although I really want to visit Tallinn one day. Again, though, I didn’t want to prettify any of these places. The central premise of the book, the engine that drives it, is fantastical enough; I wanted to balance that with as realistic and rational a picture of Rudi’s Europe as I could come up with.

Having said that, I was a bit cruel to Scotland. I have no idea—and I suspect no one else does, either—how Scottish Independence is going to shake out [you're scaring me, mate!—Ed.] but for the purposes of the book I needed it to happen in a certain way, a way in which I really hope it doesn’t happen. The bit about it being bankrolled by the Chinese was meant as satire, but since I finished the book there’s been news of Beijing investing heavily in the Manchester Airport redevelopment and the Prime Minister selling a large part of the nation’s supply of pig semen to them, so I have to wonder...

The Europe in Europe in Autumn is one of proliferating pocket nations, a place where U2 fans can set up their own little country, for instance. I’ve been asked a couple of times whether I’d like to set one up myself, and to be honest the idea never occurred to me while I was writing the book. I rather like the idea of a national park that’s a sovereign nation, though, so if I were to do it I think it would be splendid for the Peak District to declare independence and strike out on its own. No motor cars, no heavy industry. Just a big quiet place. I could do with living in a big quiet place.

At the moment, I’m working on a novel which is a sort of companion to Europe in Autumn. It’s not a sequel so much as something that happens in parallel to the action in the first book. Since I started plotting that out, I’ve begun to see possibilities for a direct sequel, picking up the action in Europe in Autumn maybe ten or fifteen years down the line. But we’ll see. That’s a way away yet.

Book Review | Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson

Rudi is a cook in a Krakow restaurant, but when his boss asks him to help a cousin escape from the country he's trapped in, a new career—part spy, part people-smuggler—begins.

Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation "Les Coureurs des Bois," Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line—a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-European railway line—goes wrong, he is arrested, beaten and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.

With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. 

With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws, Rudi begins to realise that underneath his daily round of plot and counter plot, behind the conflicting territories, another entirely different reality might be pulling the strings...

***

Maps are a way of rationalising landscapes, but what kind of map can help us come to terms with a country that changes every day? With a world that defies definition?

Dave Hutchinson's vision of Europe in the near future is as plausible as it is novel. In the aftermath of catastrophic economic collapse and a flu pandemic which led to the death of many millions, the Union begins to splinter:

The Union had struggled into the twenty-first century and managed to survive in some style for a few more years of bitching and infighting and cronyism. Then it had spontaneously begun to throw off progressively smaller and crazier nation-states, like a sunburned holidaymaker shedding curls of skin. 

Nobody really understood why this had happened. (p.27)

However unclear the reasons may be, "pocket nations" (p.27) now proliferate across the continent, each with its own borders and orders. Anything goes in some, whilst in others, next to nothing does. With more and more of these micro-countries appearing every year, a gap has opened in the market: there's a dire demand for people prepared to brave Europe's impossible topography in order to transport packages—or perhaps important persons—from state to state in spite of tight guidelines.

Some call the organisation which has sprung up to meet the needs of this new niche a company of "glorified postmen." (p.124) Others don't believe in them, even. But they exist, I insist, and they call themselves Coureurs.