Book Review | Long Dark Dusk by J. P. Smythe

The moment she learned the horrible truth about her life on Australia, the derelict ship overrun with violent gangs, Chan Aitch made it her mission to save everyone she could from their fate worse than death. But her efforts were in vain. Now, everyone she cares about is dead or in prison, and Chan is more alone than ever before.

As the only person to have escaped Australia's terrible crash-landing back to Earth, Chan is now living in poverty on the fringes of a huge city. She believes Mae, the little girl she once rescued on the Australia, is still alive—but she has no idea where Mae is, or how to find her. Everything on Earth is strange and new, and Chan has never felt more lost.

But she'll do whatever it takes to find Mae, even if it means going to prison herself. She's broken out of prison before. How hard could it be to do it again?

***

Having horrified and amazed readers in equal measure across the first two volumes of The Anomaly Quartet, and doubled down on darkly character-focused dystopia in The Testament, The Machine and latterly No Harm Can Come to a Good Man, James P. Smythe has gone from strength to strength since his underrated debut in 2010. In so doing, he's demonstrated that he's not just a jack but a master of all the trades he's tried—a mastery that, on the back of last year's Way Down Dark, evidently extends to the young adult market.

Book the first of The Australia Trilogy read, as I said, "like a lesson in how to bring your fiction to a more sensitive sector without sacrificing the parts that made it remarkable." It didn't talk down to its audience. It didn't diminish the darker parts of its narrative. It didn't hold back in any measurable sense.

To discuss Long Dark Dusk, nor can I. I have to hit on what happened in the last act of Way Down Dark. I have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the Australia.

The thousand-some souls aboard the Australia believed it to be a generation ship blazing a trail through space in search of a world where humanity, having bled Earth dead, might put down renewed roots. They were wrong. In actual fact, the Australia was a prison ship in stationary orbit around the very planet its inhabitants thought they'd left so long ago; a planet, ravaged but not ruined by environmental catastrophe, whose people, roughly a hundred years hence, see that positively apocalyptic period as little more than a bump in the road. As an embarrassment, even.

To wit, when Way Down Dark's central character Chan managed to crash-land the ailing Australia just outside of walled-off Washington, she and the scant other survivors of the disaster weren't exactly welcomed:

I was meant to step off the ship, having saved the lives of the people I cared about, the good people who did nothing wrong, who didn't deserve the fate—the curse—that had been put upon them. I was meant to look back at everything I had lost—my mother; my childhood; even Agatha, so recently departed—and still see something resembling the future I had dreamt of. Mae would be there and we would be a family. Family is what you make it; that's something I learned. It's not blood. It runs deeper than that, and stronger.

That's how it was meant to go.

But it didn't. (p.105)

Book Review | Way Down Dark by J. P. Smythe

There's one truth on the Australia: you fight or you die. Usually both.

Imagine a nightmare from which there is no escape. Seventeen-year-old Chan's ancestors left a dying Earth hundreds of years ago, in search of a new home. They never found one.

The only life that Chan's ever known is one of violence, of fighting. Of trying to survive in a hell where no one can hide. The Australia is a ship of death, of murderers and cults and gangs.

But way down dark—into a place of buried secrets, long-forgotten lies, and the abandoned bodies of the dead—there might be a way to escape.

***

Calling all authors with plans to ply their darker brands in the young adult market: Way Down Dark is like a lesson in how to bring your fiction to a more sensitive sector without sacrificing the parts that made it remarkable.

The sensational start of J. P. Smythe's Australia trilogy is to sinister science fiction what Joe Abercrombie's Shattered Sea series has been to fantasy of the grimdark variety: a nearly seamless segue that doesn't talk down to its audience or substantially scale back the stuff some say is sure to scare younger readers away.

To wit, it doesn't get a great deal more miserable than this—appropriately given the tone and tenor of Smythe's other efforts. Consider the fact that Way Down Dark opens on its main character murdering her own mother a macabre case in point.

It was because she had a reputation. Her reputation meant that I was always left alone, because so many others on the ship were scared of her. Only when she became sick did that change. Not that anybody knew what was wrong with her for sure, but there were rumours. Rumours are nearly worse than the truth, because they get out of control. People started looking at me differently, pushing their luck, sizing me up. They wanted to see just how weak she was now, and how weak I was. [...] Power is everything on Australia. Power is how they rule; it's how they take territory, make parts of the ship their own. But, somehow, our section of the ship stayed free. Somehow—and part of me wants to lay the responsibility at my mother's feet, though I know it can't all have been her doing—we stayed out of it. (p6)

And so a plan is hatched, to keep the three free sections of the ship safe by showing the Lows that Chan and the others under her mother's purported protection should be taken very seriously indeed.

Book Review | No Harm Can Come to a Good Man by James Smythe

How far would you go to save your family from an invisible threat? A terrifyingly original thriller from the author of The Machine.

ClearVista is used by everyone and can predict anything.

It’s a daily lifesaver, predicting weather to traffic to who you should befriend.

Laurence Walker wants to be the next President of the United States. ClearVista will predict his chances.

It will predict whether he's the right man for the job.

It will predict that his son can only survive for 102 seconds underwater.

It will predict that Laurence's life is about to collapse in the most unimaginable way.

***

Pay attention, people of America, for today is a day unlike any other.

Today, I want to talk to you about tomorrow; I want to talk to you not about what the world was, but about what the world will be. Today, it is my tremendous pleasure to introduce you to your next president, so put your hands together, please, for a father, a son and a husband—for a family man who can. For a soldier, a senator, a standard bearer of vibrant views and vital values. Ladies and gentlemen... Laurence Walker!

A word to the wise: he's the kind of guy who'll look you in the eye whilst telling you what he's going to do for you. And unlike the other lot, he'll follow through, too:

That's been one of his major arguments the last few years: politics has become about empty words and even emptier eyes, promises made that are for self-aggrandising reasons rather than because somebody believes that they are the right thing to do. This is how he's become popular, a man of the people. (p.24)

But politics is power, and power, of course, corrupts, so how can a man of the people—a good man, goddamn—hold the highest office? According to ClearVista, the simple fact of the matter is... he can't.

Book Review | The Echo by James Smythe

Twenty years following the disappearance of the infamous Ishiguro — the first manned spacecraft to travel deeper into space than ever before — humanity are setting their sights on the heavens once more.

Under the direction of two of the most brilliant minds science has ever seen – that of identical twin brothers Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen — this space craft has a bold mission: to study what is being called ‘the anomaly’ — a vast blackness of space into which the Ishiguro disappeared. Between them Tomas (on the ground, guiding the mission from the command centre) and Mira (on the ship, with the rest of the hand-picked crew) are leaving nothing to chance.

But soon these two scientists are to learn that there are some things in space beyond our understanding. As the anomaly begins to test the limits of Mira’s comprehension — and his sanity — will Tomas be able to save his brother from being lost in space too?

***

Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen have had exploration on the brain since they were bairns building backyard spacecraft out of discarded cardboard and handfuls of old wires and hard drives. Now the twins — identical but for a birthmark that sets Tomas apart — are all grown up and about to do for real what they've always dreamed.

When the Lära lifts off, one of the brothers will be on board; the other — the loser of the game they always play to resolve such situations — will man the microphones back at ground control. Their mission, should they choose to accept it — and indeed they do — is to investigate the anomaly Cormac Easton and the crew of the ill-fated Ishiguro stumbled into some twenty-three years ago.

In that time technology has obviously evolved... as has the anomaly this quartet revolves around; astronomers can now see it quite clearly, because of course it's grown closer. But the enterprising twins bring a crucial difference of opinion to the table too: a sense of scientific efficiency that the missing ship lacked.

Everything they did was wrong. I can pick holes. They launched from Earth, even though it made no sense, even back then. They spent money on automated systems because they believed they would add efficiency. They were wrong, as proven by their disappearance. They spent billions developing ridiculous gravity systems, something that the Russians prototyped back in the previous decade concerning gravitomagnetism. Any why? So that they could rest! So that they could feel the sensation of a ground beneath their feet! They took a journalist with them, because they spun their mission into something commercial, something outside science. They too a man who didn't serve a purpose with them on a mission that could have meant something. What did that cost them, that folly? They played everything badly, a product of moneymen rather than scientific design. It drove Tomas and myself insane. And when they went missing, the balloon deflated overnight. No more space travel. There is nothing new out there to find, and no glory to be garnered from dying in the cold expanse of space as they surely did. (pp.6-7)

There is, though... if not the glory of a great story then indubitably discovery. Thus the Lära launches, with our protagonist Mirakel — Mira to you and me — in charge of a complement of six scientists as luckless, ultimately, as the last lot.

Coming Attractions | The Echo by James Smythe

In a relatively recent edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus over on Tor.com, inspired as I was by the surprise arrival of Lavie Tidhar's new novel, I discussed how fantastic it can feel — as a blogger whose responsibility it is to be (almost) always on the ball — to be caught off-guard by a book from time to time. By something I just didn't see coming.

Well, I must have been off my game lately, because it happened again last week: I received a review copy of a book I hadn't heard a bit about, but which, now I know it exists, I can hardly restrain myself from reading. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Echo: volume two of The Anomaly Quartet, which I'm given to understand began back in January with The Explorer, "an introspective time travel novel from which you won't be able to look away [that] plays out like Moon meets Groundhog Day."

I bloody loved it, though I wasn't aware it marked the start of something grander.

If the truth be told, the idea of a sequel, even to a favoured fiction, doesn't usually move me, but the mere premise of The Echo excited me immediately:

Twenty years after the disappearance of the infamous Ishiguro — the first manned spacecraft to travel deeper into space than ever before — humanity are setting their sights on the heavens once more. 

Under the direction of two of the most brilliant minds science has ever seen – that of identical twin brothers Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen — this space craft has a bold mission: to study what is being called ‘the anomaly’ — a vast blackness of space into which the Ishiguro disappeared. Between them Tomas (on the ground, guiding the mission from the command centre) and Mira (on the ship, with the rest of the hand-picked crew) are leaving nothing to chance. 

But soon these two scientists are to learn that there are some things in space beyond our understanding. As the anomaly begins to test the limits of Mira’s comprehension — and his sanity — will Tomas be able to save his brother from being lost in space too?

I've got the a copy of the image adorning the front cover of the proof, too. Here is is next to the stark cover art of The Explorer:

The Echo will be published as a hardback by HarperVoyager on January 16th, whilst the ebook will be made available — for a limited time, I imagine — at the tiny price of £5.99. You can bet your last penny I'll have read and reviewed it well before then.

Book Review | The Machine by James Smythe

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Beth lives alone on a desolate housing estate near the sea. She came here to rebuild her life following her husband’s return from the war. His memories haunted him but a machine promised salvation. It could record memories, preserving a life that existed before the nightmares.

Now the machines are gone. The government declared them too controversial, the side-effects too harmful. But within Beth’s flat is an ever-whirring black box. She knows that memories can be put back, that she can rebuild her husband piece by piece.

A Frankenstein tale for the 21st century, The Machine is a story of the indelibility of memory, the human cost of science and the horrors of love.

***

Accidents... happen. Would that they didn't, but they do, and that's the truth.

Every day, mistakes are made—by every one of us, I warrant. Consequences follow; and often, they're awful, if not absolutely abhorrent. But in time, however hard the hardship, we come to see that what will be will be. After the fact, what torments us is the memory of what was, and is no longer; or the thought of things we would do differently, if only we could go back in time, with the benefit of hindsight on our side.

Of course we can't. That's not how the world works. The past is set in stone, and wishing we could change it won't get us anywhere. Regret, from a logical perspective, is entirely ineffective. That said, there's no getting away from it, is there? And it hurts just the same, even if it's meaningless.

But imagine there was a machine... a machine that could take the pain away, by meddling with your memories. Would you use it? And if you were to, what would you lose?

These questions get to the essence of those that have been playing on Beth's mind at the beginning of James Smythe's devastating new novel:

"She's thought about it, sometimes: as she's tried to get to sleep, lying in bed, thinking about how easy it would be to wear a Crown, to press the buttons and to talk about Vic and herself, and their old life together. To talk her way through everything that she's lost. To press the PURGE button and feel it all drift away. Vic used to say that it felt like when you take painkillers for a wound. He said that they gave him heavy stuff after the IED went off and put its shrapnel in his shoulder and his neck, and once he'd popped them there was a sense that it had once hurt, but that it was like an echo of the pain was all that was left, or the memory of the pain. Like it's been rubbed hard and then left alone. That's what the Machine did." (p.17)

Or rather, that's what the Machine was supposed to do. In practice, it broke its impossible promises. It took people like Vic—men and women who were damaged or disturbed in some way, as Vic was when he came home from the war to his woebegone wife—and extracted from them their most terrible memories; those that certain specialists decided had caused whatever trauma.

Predictably, perhaps, it didn't work. Certainly not like the Technicolor promotions promised. Instead, the Machine left a great many of those souls who used it lost, "like coma patients." Now, there's such a number of them that they've been cruelly christened the vacant, because "there's nothing inside them. They might look the same, they might smell the same, but they're different. The person that they were is gone. [...] So what's left?" (p.65)

Only a signature of sorts:

"The Machine, filling in the gaps with things that didn't stick, stories of its own creation to cover up the cracks. And what makes her think that it will be so different this time? Because the stories are Vic? From his own mouth, 100 per cent pure and unfiltered, every part of his life spilled on to digital tape? She doubts herself. She doubts the Machine." (p.123)

But what else does Beth have left?

These doubts discomfit her, but for better or for worse—what do you think?—Beth has already made her decision. From the very outset of this nightmarish tale, she systematically puts into action the plan she's dreamed of since the day the Machine took her husband away: she's going to evict Vic from the care home he's been wasting away in, and simply rebuild him, memory by individual memory... using a treasure trove of precious audio recordings, untested equipment bought at an exorbitant cost from an anonymous seller, and advice from the internet.

Easy to see where she might have gone wrong, isn't it?

Precise and provocative, The Machine is a powerful parable about memory and regret which grips from the get-go and refuses to let you loose until after its horrendous ending. Like The Explorer before it, it's a spare story—so short and sharp that it cuts into one like a blade through butter—that you'll have a hard time forgetting.

The narrative, for instance, is simple, yet insidious. Smythe divides it into three parts, each of which unfolds from Beth's relentless perspective. Before the treatment, there is hope: we glimpse light at the end of the tunnel, albeit fleetingly. But the path to that point is long and dark; accordingly, things get a tad desperate amidst the middle third, which chronicles the hasty recreation of poor, vacant Vic via the machine. After the treatment, at the last, it all starts to come apart—just as these characters should be coming together—when the walls Beth has built, brick by deliberate brick, are exploded. A terrific trick.

To his credit, Smythe isn't content to mess around, ever. He pursues the dreadful descent that awaits at the end of this novel doggedly, barreling headlong towards unconscionable horror—horror that the reader feels from early on, though we do not know what shape or state it will take until it is upon us, teeth bared and bloody like a beast from the deep.

Yet inevitably, it is no such thing. The horror of The Machine, despite its title, is all too human. Beth has been playing god. Giving life (and taking what remains away) when she has no business interfering with a man's mind—as her only friend takes perverse pleasure reminding her. But we are set against this self-righteous specimen, even as the depths of Beth's complicity are made plain, because our entire experience arises from her perspective. We have found shelter inside her head, as she has herself in a sense. We feel, finally, the same as she: the same terror, the same guilt. Her dreams and her doubts alike are ours, and this gives The Machine great power.

It's a morality play, in a way: a Frankenstein story for the 21st century, as the publicity puts it. But truer words have rarely been printed on a press release. The Machine is a phenomenal novel from the first, and this impression only grows as it goes, gathering gradually in advance of a finale which leaves the reader reeling, as if from a boxer's blow.

I have long thought of Adam Roberts as Britain's most overlooked genre author, but between The Testimony, The Explorer and The Machine—three tremendous texts published in quick succession—James Smythe has almost supplanted said in my estimation. Harrowing as it is, his latest is simply unmissable.

***

The Machine
by James Smythe

UK Publication: April 2013, Blue Door

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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | The Explorer by James Smythe

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When journalist Cormac Easton is selected to document the first manned mission into deep space, he dreams of securing his place in history as one of humanity's great explorers.

But in space, nothing goes according to plan.

The crew wake from hypersleep to discover their captain dead in his allegedly fail-proof safety pod. They mourn, and Cormac sends a beautifully written eulogy back to Earth. The word from ground control is unequivocal: no matter what happens, the mission must continue.

But as the body count begins to rise, Cormac finds himself alone and spiraling toward his own inevitable death... unless he can do something to stop it.

***

Hot on the heels of the apocalyptic vision described in his debut, rising star James Smythe returns to genre fiction with a deliciously different book from his first. An introspective time travel novel from which you won't be able to look away, The Explorer plays out like Moon meets Groundhog Day.

It's "a pulpy, sci-fi thing about a man who is trapped in a perpetual loop, a time loop, like so many other sci-fi stories wrenched from the back of magazines - there are no original ideas, not any more - but this one is more human, or trying to be." (p.234) In this, it succeeds indeed. The various incarnations of Cormac Easton alternate between ecstatic, distracted and tragic, meanwhile the other astronauts on the Ishiguro feel equally real.

Not that they live long enough to make much of an initial impression, because the author knocks the whole lot off in The Explorer's opening chapter, in what would be a comedy of errors under other circumstances. And our understandably manic protagonist is next: Cormac himself dies soon afterwards, only to open his eyes... and surprise! The spaceship and its crew, including a visibly healthier version of himself, have been miraculously restored around him, as if none of the hell they went through - the very hell they'll go through again unless our half-crazed narrator can change their fate - had happened.

We're getting ahead of ourselves already, however this is suspiciously fitting — after all, the beginning of the end is the end of the beginning in Smythe's superlative second novel, thus the short opening section of The Explorer is ingeniously designed to displace. But you must be wondering who the eponymous explorer is anyway, and what in the world he's doing in space... so I'll be kind, and rewind.

Not unlike his creator, Cormac Easton is a journalist. James Smythe still writes for The Guardian, contributing a regular Stephen King reread to rival Gracy Hendrix's epic endeavour for tor.com; The Explorer's central character, on the other hand, publishes in Time Magazine and the like. He and the other souls aboard the ill-fated spaceship were selected in a competition of sorts, details of which the author trickles out throughout.

A quick word to the wise: read these flashbacks carefully, because there's more to them - so much more - than meets the eye.

Anyway, in accordance with the Ishiguro's continuing mission, Cormac gets to boldly go where no man has gone before — so long as he blogs about his experiences on a daily basis. Thus, he engages with the fiction of the explorer more than the actual fact. The "great deceit" (p.101) of the spacefarer is a particularly striking instance of this:

"Astronauts were almost conceived by fiction, by books and television and movies, and then they became real, but those conceits created with the first image of a man travelling beyond the bounds of Earth, and heading towards the stars, those have stayed. The astronaut is alone. He drifts through space. He explores. He discovers. Since it all changed - since the India tragedy, the dearth of funding for governmental space agencies, the down-sizing of NASA - that was lost. Our purpose was to give that back. The people back home read my diary, a one-way transmission. We were like a television reality show, unaware of what was going on outside the TV studios; and then we made contact every few days, our faces beamed down to let them know that we were okay, that we were happy and doing our job, and exploring." (ibid)

The Explorer, then, is self-aware in all the right ways: not so much as to appear a postmodern parody, nor so little as to feel unbelievable. Somehow, Smythe's second novel is both relevant and resonant in contemporary terms, such that it hardly seems like science fiction — though many of the genre's traditional tropes are both present in the text and in full effect.

Still less likely, the premise feels fresh. Conceptually, of course, The Explorer been done before, so its success rests on the author's shoulders only. As he asserts in the acknowledgements - wherein hats are tipped to a telling list of genre fiction's most influential figures, such as Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury - "story is the thing," (p.266) yet Smythe strikes an extraordinary balance between narrative and character. By pairing moments of pure exhilaration with excruciating emotion, he elevates events above and beyond the done-to-death loop at the core of The Explorer. Ultimately, Cormac's quest is the exploration of himself as much as anything else.

That said, a few elements of the whole fall flat. Cormac insists on seeing his story as cinema - as a movie instead of a sincere experience - giving certain proceedings a sheen of the unreal, and Smythe's prose is from time to time a touch verbose. In spots, The Explorer reads as raw and overwrought — by design, I dare say, considering the state and occupation of its central character... nevertheless, this decision detracts from the punch of some particularly pivotal points.

Otherwise, The Explorer is essentially exemplary: a short, sharp shock of a story from an author who deserves to do as well for himself as he does by us. It's perfectly plotted, smartly characterised and rife with insight and excitement. Then again, when a book begins by killing off its entire cast, up to and including the person who narrates the remainder, you already know you're in for something special, don't you?

This is that.

...

This review was originally published, in a slightly altered form, on Tor.com.

***

The Explorer
by James Smythe

UK & US Publication: January 2012, Harper Voyager

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Recommended and Related Reading

Quoth the Scotsman | James Smythe on Physical vs. Digital

Since the dawn of The Speculative Scotsman, e-books have gone from the margins to the mainstream.

I remember seeing video of a prototype of Sony's first e-book reader at CES years and years ago, and thinking this could change everything. I wanted one then and there... but when the time came that I could actually buy one, I held my horses.

I told myself was waiting for the next iteration. Then when the next iteration became available, I told myself... something else.

Eventually, however, be damned my doubts: I had my heart's desire. Not a Kindle, oh no! Ever the contrarian, I bought myself an Asus Transformer tablet, which - though it's beginning to look a little long in the tooth - I still use to this day. Primarily to read comics on, and e-books when needs must.

I'm just not a lover of electronic literature, by and large. I mean, I'll make do with an e-book - and these days, I often find myself with e-ARCs instead of physical proofs - but it simply isn't the same.

Before the tech savvy tell me what my problem is, I actually don't find the resolution of the text my tablet renders to be a problem. But I do mind the sluggishness of my micro-library. And I do wish Amazon would come the hell on and incorporate some of the software-side features of the Paperwhite line into the Kindle app.

But here I am having trouble articulating why I find e-reading such a sterile experience, when this whole post  is supposed to showcase a quote that captures my feelings exactly. It's from The Explorer by James Smythe, who's been rereading Stephen King for The Guardian recently, and it's short, but sweet:

"I always said that the thing I was saddest about, when they had pretty much stopped printing paper books, was that I couldn't tell how long was left until the end. I could find out, but that feel, that sensation of always knowing was gone. I used to love the way that the cluster of pages grew thinner in my hand, how I could squeeze it and guess the time it would take until it ended. I loved endings, when they were done well: I loved knowing that it was finished, because that was how it was meant to be. An ending is a completion: it's a satisfaction all in itself." (p.251)

Well said, James Smythe! I agree completely.

But who's with us, I wonder?

Ironically, the e-book of The Explorer is out on December 20th in both the UK and the US, but Harper Voyager aren't distributing the paperback till January 2013.

The far-flung future, in other words. :P

Never mind my trumpeting about time: I'll be reviewing The Explorer on tor.com shortly, and - spoiler alert - it's incredible. But resist the temptation, readers: wait for the physical edition!