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 | The Race by Nina Allan

In a future scarred by fracking and ecological collapse, Jenna Hoolman's world is dominated by illegal smartdog racing: greyhounds genetically modified with human DNA. When her young niece goes missing that world implodes.

Christy’s life is dominated by fear of her brother, a man she knows capable of monstrous acts and suspects of hiding even darker ones. Desperate to learn the truth she contacts Alex, who has his own demons to fight. Last but not least there's Maree, a young woman undertaking a journey that will change her world forever.

The Race weaves multiple together story threads and realities to take us on a gripping and spellbinding journey.

***

If I were to start this article by stating that The Race is the best debut of the year to date, I'd be telling the truth, to be sure, but I'd be lying to you, too—and that's as apt a tack as any I could take to introduce a review of a book as deceptive and self-reflexive as said.

You see, it might be that I was more moved by Nina Allan's first novel than by any other released in recent months—emotionally and, yes, intellectually—but The Race was not released in recent months, not really: NewCon Press published an earlier edition in 2014, which, even absent the substantial and supremely satisfying expansion Allan has added for Titan Books' new and indubitably improved take two, went on to be nominated for the BSFA's Best Novel Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Prize and the Kitschies' Red Tentacle. And although The Race is indeed Allan's first novel proper, it is, in a sense, a cycle of stories that share subjects and settings, not unlike several of the aforementioned author's earlier efforts, such as Stardust and The Silver Wind.

So it's not really a debut and it wasn't really released this year, which leaves just one of my first line's facts unfudged. Happily, The Race actually is amazing, and if you haven't read it already, don't let this second chance pass you by.

The Race is a book about longing, and belonging. It's a book about identity—how it's formed for us, and how we go on to fit it to ourselves or else ourselves to it. It's a book that teaches us the value of family; the damage those nearest and dearest to us can do, and the good things, too. It's a book that instructs us to take the measure of our previous experiences before moving fully into the future.

It's a book, for the first hundred pages and change, about Jenna Hoolman, who lives in a former gas town with what's left of her family; with her brother Del and his oddball daughter Lumey. Sapphire's glory days are long gone, alas. "It's what you might call an open secret that the entire economy of Sapphire as it is now is funded upon smartdog racing. Officially the sport is still illegal, but that's never stopped it from being huge." (p.11)

Smartdog racing is the practice of gambling on greyhounds that have been genetically engineered to have an lifelong link with their runners, which is what the men and women who train and care for these incredibly clever creatures are called. Some people believe they're mind readers, but not Jen's boyfriend Em:

"I think true telepathy—the kind you see in films—is probably a myth. But something approaching it, definitely. A kind of empathic sixth sense. The work that's been done with the smartdogs is just the start. All runners are natural empaths to an extent, we've known that for a long time. The implant is just a facilitator for their inborn talent. Children like Lumey though—children who don't need an implant at all to communicate—they're the next stage. A new race, almost. And yes [...] that would make her very valuable indeed." (pp.129-130)

Valuable enough to kidnap and hold to ransom, to truly devastating effect, not least because the only way Del knows how to raise the money to buy Lumey back from her captors is to wager a sizable sum on his smartdog, Limlasker, winning the Delawarr Triple. "What it came down to was this: Del was proposing to bet his daughter's life on a sodding dog race." (p.67) The race Allan's title refers to, right?

Well, you know... yes and no.