Book Review | Symbiont by Mira Grant

The SymboGen-designed parasites were created to relieve humanity of disease and sickness. But the implants in the majority of the world's population began attacking their hosts, turning them into a ravenous horde.

Panic spreads as these predators begin to take over the streets. In the chaos, Sal and her companions must discover how the parasites are taking over their hosts, what their eventual goal is—and how they can be stopped.

***

On the back of the unsightly excitement of Parasite, something like rigor sets in as the second half of what was a duology turns into the middle volume of a tolerance-testing trilogy. Symbiont isn't a bad book by any means—it's accessible, action-packed, and its premise remains appallingly plausible—but absent the ambiguity that made its predecessor so unsettling, it's  lamentable for its length and lack of direction.

The first part of Parasitology chronicled the apocalyptic consequences of SymboGen's latest and greatest innovation: the ubiquitous Intestinal Bodyguard—a magic pill meant to protect against allergy, illness and infection—was a worm which, in time, turned; a symbiotic organism supposed to support its host yet set, instead, on supplanting said. Before long, of course, this conflict of interests turned the population of San Francisco and its suburbs into zombies of a sort—sleepwalkers, as Mira Grant would have it.

The transition went differently for a few folks, though. After a catastrophic car crash, and at the cost of her every memory, Sally Mitchell's parasite saved her life... or so she thought.

Book Review | The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, the near-future Three-Body Trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience a multiple-award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author.

The first book in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, begins against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, when a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and begins planning their introduction to Earth. 

Over the next few decades, they establish first contact via very unlikely means: an unusual online video game steeped in philosophy and history. As the aliens begin to win earthbound players of the game over to their side, different schools of thought start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

***

What would you do to save the world?

That is, the planet as opposed to the people—we're the problem, after all—so better, perhaps, to ask: what would you do for a solution? Would you kill your own comrades, if it came to it? Would you sacrifice yourself? Your sons and daughters? Would you betray the whole of humanity today for a better tomorrow?

These are some of the provocative questions posed by The Three Body Problem, the opening salvo of Galaxy Award-winner Cixin Liu's fascinating science fiction trilogy, which takes in physics, philosophy, farming and, finally, first contact.

But it all begins in Beijing in the 1960s, when Ye Wenjie watches in horror as an unrepentant professor is beaten into oblivion by four fourteen-year-olds "fighting for faith" (p.19) at "a public rally intended to humiliate and break down the enemies of the revolution through verbal and physical abuse until they confessed to their crimes before the crowd." (p.11) The subject of this so-called "struggle session" is Ye's father, in fact, and his is a death she'll never forget:

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race. [...] This thought determined the entire direction of Ye's life. (p.28)

Book Review | Breakfast with the Borgias by DBC Pierre

The setting: a faded, lonely guesthouse on the Essex coast. Outside, it's dark, and very foggy. Inside there's no phone or internet reception, no connection with the outside world.

Enter Ariel Panek, a promising young academic en route from the USA to an important convention in Amsterdam. With his plane grounded by fog at Stanstead, he has been booked in for the night at the guesthouse. Discombobulated and jetlagged, he falls in with a family who appear to be commemorating an event.

But this is no ordinary celebration. And this is no ordinary family.

As evening becomes night, Panek realises that he has become caught in an insidious web of other people's secrets and lies, a Sartrian hell from which for him there may be no escape.

***

I haven't been so relieved to finish reading a novel in recent years than I was Breakfast with the Borgias. 

This from someone who's had to review some utter rubbish: books which tested my patience from the first page. Here, however, we have a completely different beast. Coming as it does from the Man Booker Prize winning author of Vernon God Little, it's no surprise that Breakfast with the Borgias is brilliantly written; that its themes are thoughtful, its execution deft; that its gregarious cast of characters come alive even as its slight story excites.

The trouble? The tension. It's almost intolerable. Especially in the first section, DBC Pierre's inaugural Hammer Horror is intensely stressful, like a bad blind date you can't escape.

Book Review | Irregularity, ed. Jared Shurin

During the Age of Reason, the world’s greatest minds named, measured and catalogued the world around them.

They brought order and discipline to the universe. Except where they didn’t.

Irregularity collects fourteen original stories from extraordinary literary voices, each featuring someone—or something—that refused to obey the dictates of reason: Darwin’s other voyage, the secret names of spiders, the assassination of Isaac Newton and an utterly impossible book.

***

Most books are dedicated to people near and dear: to friends or family members of the minds behind the literary leaps such documents detail. Sometimes other authors or artists—figures of miscellaneous inspiration without whom some key element of the texts in question may have foundered or failed—are acknowledged in the aforementioned fashion. It's a rare thing, though, to see a dedication made not to a someone, but a something.

Irregularity is exactly that. It's an anthology dedicated to an idea, to an abstract: "to failure," in fact—though the text itself is a tremendous success. As an enterprise it is "no less than wonderful, and it seemed to me that every man of scholarship, every man of imagination, regardless of his language or place of birth, should find in it something extraordinary." (p.156) Lo, like The Lowest Heaven before it, the latest collaboration between Jurassic London and the National Maritime Museum showcases an audacious assemblage of tales arranged around an inspired idea: that we as a people were in a way robbed by the Age of Reason. 

Richard Dunn and Sophie Waring explain:

For this volume authors were asked for stories by the history of science from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. [...] It was an extraordinary period that saw important institutions created, amazing inventions, the harnessing of new power sources, countless discoveries and a tireless drive to classify almost everything. 

But there is a danger in hindsight. Science does not progress through a simple succession of ideas and inventions. False leads abound, and the theories and inventions that now look to have been the clear winners were not so obvious at the time, when alternative lines of attack showed equal promise. (p.284)

It is these false leads that Irregularity is interested in, in the main; these attempts "by the process-minded men of the Age of Reason to exert dominion over the mysteries of Creation." (p.128) To know is a noble goal, no doubt, but at what cost does understanding come?

Book Review | Ajax Penumbra 1969 by Robin Sloan

San Francisco, 1969. The summer of drugs, music and a new age dawning. A young, earnest Ajax Penumbra has been given his first assignment as a Junior Acquisitions Officer - to find the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon, a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. After a few weeks of rigorous hunting, Penumbra feels no closer to his goal than when he started. But late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he stumbles upon a 24-hour bookstore and the possibilities before him expand exponentially. With the help of his friend's homemade computer, an ancient map, a sunken ship and the vast shelves of the 24-hour bookstore, Ajax Penumbra might just find what he's seeking...

***

Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore was, without question, one of last year's most endearing debuts. A short novel about a tech-savvy shop assistant drawn inexorably into what is a magnificent mystery, at least initially, Robin Sloan's fontastic fantasy began brilliantly, before revealing itself to be a book about the absolute good of Google—and as I concluded in my review, "that's not what I come to my speculative fiction for, frankly."

Happily, this brief prequel isn't half as distracted as the originating fiction, in large part because it's set in the sixties: in 1969, specifically, during the last days of the Summer of Love.

But that's not what motivates our narrator. That's not why he's travelled to San Francisco. As one of his accomplices allows, "drugs, music, a new age dawning... and you came for an old book." (p.39)

A Junior Acquisitions Officer for the Occult Literature Department of the library of a college known as "the Harvard of Northwestern Illinois," (p.10) young Ajax Penumbra is blessed with a quest, outlined here in an effective second-person address:

You learn that the Tycheon—as it is more casually know to the approximately three people alive who care about its existence—did not enjoy a large print run, but the few copies that ever existed made quite an impression. It is, apparently, a book of prophecy, and Brindle's file is full of suggestive scraps. In 1511, a merchant in Liverpool extolls its virtues. Almost a century later, in 1601, a fortune-teller in London cannot work without it. The fortune-teller's apprentice praises the Tycheon just as effusively, but apparently misses an important prediction; he is murdered in 1657. The trail goes red, and cold. Your quest begins. (p.17)

Penumbra's investigations soon lead him to San Francisco, where he hopes to locate the last known owner of The Craft of Fortune. Sadly, he finds no trace of William Gray.

As a last resort, he asks around in an array of likely locations, including the 24-Hour Bookstore a Mr Mohammed Al-Asmari mans. Here, he shares his story, only to be told by the owner that this William Gray isn't an individual at all—it's a ship, long since sunk in an area of the Bay that has lately been reclaimed.

He walks the city, dispirited. It is something, he tells himself, to have determined the fate of the William Gray and the book he sought there. But it is still a failure. His first assignment as a Junior Acquisitions Officer, and it came to nothing. 

Carol Janssen found the Book of Dreams in a remote Peruvian village. Another acquisitions officer, Julian Lemire, pulled the diary of Nebuchadnezzar II out of an active volcano. Langston Armitage himself has traveled to Antarctica twice. Now, Penumbra has come so close to his own prize, and yet it is beyond his reach. A whole city blocks his way." (p.29)

There are glimmers of hope, however: tunnels have been dug under the city to make way for the BART, which is to say San Francisco's revolutionary rapid transit system. If one of these is near the rotten wreck of the ship, and if Penumbra can access it somehow, then perhaps... perhaps there's a chance. Assuming the book isn't already ruined. That's a lot of ifs, admittedly, but our man means to make sure.

Readers, I'm relieved to report that Ajax Penumbra 1969 is a delight. It might well be more satisfying than the book it introduces, and the fact that it's substantially shorter is one of the secrets of its success. At a hundred pages at a push in Atlantic's handsome new hardcover, and only then including several appendixes—namely an interview with the author and the first chapter of Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore—Ajax Penumbra 1969 is never in danger of overstaying its welcome, nor are there any of the pointless packing peanuts of plot that proved such a problem in the author's other novel.

It's a far tighter text than Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, all told, and it follows that this focus leaves little room for the extended digressions that distracted in Sloan's debut. Crucially, Google hasn't happened yet, and though one subplot involves an early attempt at networking—"using a computer is just not a thing that a person does" (p.12) in 1969, but never mind—even this section serves a pair of purposes, adding as it does to our understanding of Sloan's central character, as well as laying the groundwork for his future fascinations.

Ajax Penumbra 1969 boasts a narrative never less than neat, a spectacularly rendered setting and another array of charming characters—oh, Mo! I enjoyed your company so—all the while maintaining a markedly better balance between what's plot and what's not than evidenced in its predecessor. What we have here is a perfectly pleasant prequel to one of last year's most promising novels that reminded me of the reasons I was so sweet on said. I can only hope Sloan has more such stories in store.

***

Ajax Penumbra 1969
by Robin Sloan

UK Publication: June 2014, Atlantic
US Publication: September 2013, FSG

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Book Review | Tigerman by Nick Harkaway

Lester Ferris, sergeant of the British Army, is a good man in need of a rest. He's spent a lot of his life being shot at, and Afghanistan was the last stop on his road to exhaustion. He has no family, he's nearly forty and burned out and about to be retired.

The island of Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester to serve out his time. It's a former British colony in legal limbo, soon to be destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution—a down-at-heel, mildly larcenous backwater. Of course, that also makes Mancreu perfect for shady business, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: listening stations, offshore hospitals, money laundering operations, drug factories and deniable torture centres. None of which should be a problem, because Lester's brief is to sit tight and turn a blind eye.

But Lester Ferris has made a friend: a brilliant, internet-addled street kid with a comicbook fixation who will need a home when the island dies—who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted son. Now, as Mancreu's small society tumbles into violence, the boy needs Lester to be more than just an observer.

In the name of paternal love, Lester Ferris will do almost anything. And he's a soldier with a knack for bad places: "almost anything" could be a very great deal—even becoming some sort of hero. But this is Mancreu, and everything here is upside down. Just exactly what sort of hero will the boy need?

***

I don't doubt that it's difficult to be different, but Nick Harkaway makes it look obscenely easy. In just two books, he's made such a mark on the landscape of imagination that his legions of readers will come to Tigerman bearing certain expectations: of an endlessly energetic narrative that streaks about like something stung, complete with a cacophony of lively characters and replete with ideas which bleed bananas.

This isn't exactly that... but it is undeniably of the award-winning author's oeuvre.

Whereas The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker were noisy novels, with ninjas and ass-kicking grannies, mad monks and clockwork killers, Tigerman, by comparison, is quiet. Being the origin story of a superhero and his sidekick, it's not silent, not entirely, but it is... stealthy, yes. Sneaky, even. All in all a much softer, sweeter and more surprising something than I had imagined.

Book Review | Defenders by Will McIntosh

The invaders came to claim Earth as their own, overwhelming us with superior weapons and the ability to read our minds like open books.

Our only chance for survival was to engineer a new race of perfect soldiers to combat them. Seventeen feet tall, knowing and loving nothing but war, their minds closed to the aliens.

But these saviors could never be our servants. And what has been done cannot be undone...

***

Having stormed onto the scene with Soft Apocalypse, moved a great many with the heartbreaking Hitchers, and taken on relationships by way of Love Minus Eighty, Will McIntosh is back to asking the big questions in Defenders, a fearsome fable about humanity's inherent barbarity which begins in the wake of an alien invasion.

It's 2029, and our species is all but beaten. "Humanity had been whittled from seven billion to under four in a matter of three years. They were surrounded by the Luyten, crowded into the cities, starved of food and resources. All that seemed left was for the Luyten to wipe out the cities." (p.101-102) They don't have to, however. Silly as it sounds, the Luyten are interstellar starfish with telepathic powers, so the second someone decides to do something, they're aware. Accordingly, plans are pointless; plots to take back the planet are basically fated to fail. Hope, it follows, is almost a forgotten commodity.

But on isolated Easter Island, outwith the effective range of the invaders' pivotal abilities, some scientists make a breakthrough that levels the playing field, finally. Thanks to a tame alien, and the orphaned boy he's taken to talking to, they realise that serotonin—the same neurotransmitter which allows humans to feel happiness and sadness and so on—is tied to the telepathy that has allowed the Luyten to take over. Without serotonin, people would be practically catatonic, so removing the receptors it relies upon isn't a sensible solution... but what if we could genetically engineer an army that has no need of this neurotransmitter?

Book Review | Glow by Ned Beauman

A hostage exchange outside a police station in Pakistan.

A botched defection in an airport hotel in New Jersey.

A test of loyalty at an abandoned resort in the Burmese jungle.

A boy and a girl locking eyes at a rave in a South London laundrette...

For the first time, Britain's most exciting young novelist turns his attention to the present day, as a conspiracy with global repercussions converges on one small flat above a dentist's office in Camberwell.

***

Though admiring them is absolutely natural, it's not always easy to enjoy Ned Beauman's novels. Take Boxer, Beetle and The Teleportation Accident: two basically brilliant books, but both are unabashedly bizarre, and decidedly distasteful. No less so Glow, in which one of Britain's best and brightest new writers trains his tremendous talents on today as opposed to the improbable parts of the past he's explored before.

On the surface it sounds almost normal—a conspiracy thriller above a lovelorn Londoner caught up in a plot by an ailing organisation which aims to make massive amounts of money by monopolising the market for a revolutionary new recreational drug—but peer beneath this veneer and Glow is revealed to be as progressive, and at the same time excessive, as its predecessors.

Quoth the Scotsman | Claire North on The Theory of Everything

You'll have heard about Harry August: the title character of a nearly-here novel by someone calling herself Claire North. Furthermore, you may be aware that the first book to feature the fellow documents the highlights of his first fifteen lives—he's an immortal, after all, both blessed and cursed to live his life again and again until who knows when.

What you might not know is whether The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is truly any good, or just the latest in a long line of debuts perpetually pitched as the next next big thing. Well. Consider this confirmation: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is an extraordinary novel, as the publicity has promised. I'll be reviewing it in full at a later date, but for today, a quick quote.

It takes the form of a discussion between our protagonist and his friend and fellow academic, and it touches on two topics I've been dealing with whilst teaching recently: the inadequacy of studying any one subject without others to temper our learning, as well as the question of academic success versus actual education. Here, Harry's helping Vincent figure out his final year thesis:

The turning of the stars in the heavens, the breaking of the atoms of existence, the bending of light in our sky, the rolling of electromagnetic waves through our very bodies...

"Yes yes yes." He flapped his hands. "That's all important! But ten thousand words of thesis is... well, it's nothing. And then there's this assumption that I should focus on one thing along, as if it's possible to comprehend the structure of the sun without truly understanding the nature of atomic behaviour!"

Here it was again, the familiar rant.

"We talk about a theory of everything," he spat, "as if it were a thing which will just be discovered overnight. As if a second Einstein will one day sit up in his bed and exclaim, "Mein Gott! Ich habe es gesehen!" and that's it, the universe comprehended. I find it offensive, genuinely offensive, to think that the solution is going to be found in numbers, or in atoms, or in great galactic forces—as if our petty academia could truly comprehend on a single side of A4 the structure of the universe. X = Y. we seem to say; one day there will be a theory of everything and then we can stop. We'll have won—all things will be known. Codswallop." 

"Codswallop?" 

"Codswallop and barney," he agreed firmly, "to paraphrase Dr Johnson." 

Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place to the thorny issue of graduating with honours? 

He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. "That," he exclaimed, "is precisely what's wrong with academics." (p.190)

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August will be published by Orbit on April 8th, and you really need to read it: it's as good as guaranteed to be of the best books of the year.

Book Review | The Troop by Nick Cutter

It begins like a campfire story: five boys and a grownup went into the woods...

It will end in madness and murder. And worse...

Once a year, scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a three-day camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story and a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder stumbles upon their campsite—shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry—Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. An inexplicable horror that spreads faster than fear. A harrowing struggle for survival that will pit the troop against the elements, the infected... and one another.

Part Lord of the Flies, part 28 Days Later—and all-consuming—this tightly written, edge-of-your-seat thriller will take readers deep into the heart of darkness and close to the edge of sanity.

***

Imagine how different the world would look if a real diet pill existed; if losing weight was a simple sugar solution away. Think for a minute about how dramatically that would change the day to day. It'd be revolutionary, in truth. And it would make certain people very rich indeed.

Dr. Clive Edgerton, for one, isn't in it for the money. It's the science that interests him: the science, in this instance, of adapting a hydatid for use in human hosts. Awful as the thought is, a tapeworm which could be introduced to our systems with one pill and passed after another—once it had done its dirty work—would be a great breakthrough... one the determined doctor is on the very precipice of making.

He's ready, if you can credit it, to start testing Thestomax in earnest: a fascinating narrative strand that The Troop simply isn't interested in. Instead, Nick Cutter—"a pseudonym for an acclaimed [Canadian] author of novels and short stories," per the press release I received—dubs Edgerton "Dr. Death" and treats his quest as the premise for an absorbing, albeit appalling body horror novel that reads like The Lord of the Flies meets Mira Grant's Parasite.

Book Review | The Lowest Heaven, ed. by Anne C. Perry & Jared Shurin

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The Lowest Heaven is a new anthology of contemporary science fiction published in partnership to coincide with "Visions of the Universe," a major exhibition of space imagery at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

Each story in The Lowest Heaven is themed around a body in the Solar System, from the Sun to Halley's Comet. The stories are illustrated with photographs and artwork selected from the archives of the Royal Observatory, while the book's cover and overall design are the work of award-winning South African illustrator Joey Hi-Fi.

***

Space.

The final frontier?

For now, that searching question stands an unfortunate fact. We want to know more, of course, but there is no clear need for the revelations we may or may not gain from our desired endeavours, or none that we can easily see.

And so we wait, painfully aware that — even if the Powers That Be see reason — we are lamentably unlikely to see a man on Mars in our lifetimes.

Maybe our children will. I want that for them.

But neither you nor I nor they, in their day, will find out what awaits on the other side of the interstellar space NASA's Voyager probe is on track to chart; the odds are simply not in our favour, I'm afraid. But we can wonder, can't we? We can imagine. We can read and write and damn it, we can dream.

So for the foreseeable, space may indeed be the final frontier in fact, but fiction, by its very definition, need not be held back by what is. Instead, its pioneers ask: what if? And occasionally, incredibly, what if is what is.

Come to that, science fiction and science fact go way back. Speaking of space, here's Dr. Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, introducing The Lowest Heaven, a truly awesome anthology published in conjunction with the opening of the aforementioned Observatory's "Visions of the Universe" exhibition:

"By setting human stories within that immense canvas writers can help us to see ourselves as part of the wider cosmos, and perhaps give us an inkling of what that might actually mean. No wonder that many of today’s professional astronomers can trace their interest, at least in part, to an early encounter with science fiction. 

"The connection between science fact and science fiction has never been more pervasive than it is today. The visual language of astronomy is everywhere in contemporary science fiction, from book covers to the backdrops of films and television shows. Vistas from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Cassini probe have inspired the scenery for Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, and with their enormous popularity these shows and movies bring astronomical imagery to a much wider audience. Artistic license even allows them to ignore the fact that that the original images have been enhanced and manipulated, and rarely show the Universe as it would appear to human eyes. 

"The connection works both ways. As yesterday's science fiction becomes today’s science fact it can sometimes seem as though we live in a science fictional universe. Above our heads, Arthur C. Clarke's geostationary satellites encircle the equator, while the imprints of human boots still mark the surface of the moon."

This back and forth between the actual and the fantastic underpins The Lowest Heaven's exploration of space, both as we know it and as we can only imagine it. To wit, each of the seventeen stories presented by Pandemonium's Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin over the course of this extraordinary ensemble is illustrated by a fitting image from the historical collection of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

Take the first fiction, for instance. 'Golden Apples' by Sophia McDougall — an alt-history author most known for revising the Roman Empire of yesteryear into a present-day dystopia — is a bittersweet, surreal story about a couple who feed their dying daughter with solid sunlight stolen from a local laboratory. Like the hand-painted magic lantern slide of sunspots dating from the late 1800s which accompanies it, 'Golden Apples' incorporates slivers of science into a fantastical canvas to tremendous effect.

The second short, 'A Map of Mercury' by Alastair Reynolds, comes complete with a photograph of a ghostly glove puppet: a surprising image, initially, but its unsettling elements speak to the stark art at the heart of this disconcerting dialogue between man and machine. Similarly, an equatorial cross-section of the earth and its atmosphere appends 'The Krakatoan' by Maria Dahvana Headley — a strange tale about a boy who visits a volcano in defiance of his absent father — while Archie Black's unspeakably bleak 'Ashen Light' is illustrated by an early negative of the Transit of Venus, which exposes the night as one of life's white lies.

Short of systematically showing how each of The Lowest Heaven's various visions relates to the accompanying artwork, suffice it to say that the plates are excellently selected, striking and suggestive. Most of the subsequent stories are equally inspiring, and though others are hard to parse — especially Adam Roberts' chronicle of a voyage 'From World to World Again, By Way of the Moon, 1726' — even these reveal feeling, and accumulate meaning.

"They came at last, after the dust had settled; and in truth it sifted but slowly to the ground; for weight on the Moon is less than on our world. For it is the efficacy of the various worlds to cast their charm upon men in divers ways; such that to stand upon 1 planet is to be made from stone, and upon another into cork. It is accordingly a different matter entire to stand upon the Moon as it is upon the Earth; in the former place the substance of that world causeth the body to become buoyant almost to the current of floating into the ayr; yet to return again to Earth is to become heavy again, with a sense of sinkage of body and spirit both."

Indeed, it is Roberts' long short which brings the core focus of The Lowest Heaven home. Whilst wondering what may have happened if humanity had tomorrow's technology at a point in the past, specifically during the golden age of exploration, the author of last year's fantastic Jack Glass hits on an idea that this anthology features frequently: the tragedy of the "boldness, and purpose, and hunger to travel to places that are new to [us having] departed out of the breasts of humankind."

The thought is voiced again in the next narrative, 'WWBD' — which is to say 'What Would Bradbury Do?' — by The Curve of the Earth's Simon Morden, who reminds readers that though "we can send all the robots we like, it takes humanity to put the soul into exploration." Later, in 'Only Human,' World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar wonders about "what could have been, and of what didn't," before concluding that "to do that is, after all, only human" too.

Truth be told, I'm loathe to talk about very many more of these stories. To touch on the sparkling Saturn Trees of Kaaron Warren's addiction allegory, the misunderstood beauty of 'The Grand Tour' James Smythe gives us, or the inhuman horror of Kameron Hurley's self-replicating spaceship. These are a few of The Lowest Heaven's finest fictions, but better, certainly, that I let you mine its many treasures in your own time.

There can be no questioning the value of this artful anthology: it's as inspiring as it is inspired. But The Lowest Heaven is also a timely and ultimately touching reminder of what we stand to lose by turning inwards as opposed to venturing again into the unknown. Granted, the universe is vast — and vastly dangerous, I dare say — but consider the wonders we stand to discover; the places, the races!

We cannot grasp what awaits us out there, but it behoves us, surely, to find out. So let us go once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our dead dreams.

***

The Lowest Heaven
edited by Anne C. Perry & Jared Shurin

UK Publication: June 2013, Jurassic London

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Book Review | Three Days to Never by Tim Powers

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When Albert Einstein told Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 that the atomic bomb was possible, he did not tell the president about another discovery he had made, something so extreme and horrific it remained a secret... until now. This extraordinary new novel from one of the most brilliant talents in contemporary fiction is a stand-out literary thriller in which one man stumbles upon the discovery Einstein himself tried to keep hidden.

When twelve-year-old Daphne Marrity takes a videotape labeled Pee-wee's Big Adventure from her grandmother's house, neither she nor her college-professor father, Frank Marrity, has any idea that the theft has drawn the attention of both the Israeli Secret Service and an ancient European cabal of occultists — or that within hours they'll be visited by her long-lost grandfather, who is also desperate to get that tape. And when Daphne's teddy bear is stolen, a blind assassin nearly kills Frank, and a phantom begins to speak to her from a switched-off television set, Daphne and her father find themselves caught in the middle of a murderous power struggle that originated long ago in Israel and Germany but now crashes through Los Angeles and out to the Mojave Desert.

To survive, they must quickly learn the rules of a dangerous magical chess game and use all their cleverness and courage - as well as their love and loyalty to each other - to escape a fate more profound than death.

***

Tim Powers is known for a number of notable genre novels, including the Locus and World Fantasy Award-winning Last Call, The Stress of Her Regard and its recent sequel, Hide Me Among the Graves, and On Stranger Tides, the so-called "inspiration" for the latest Pirates of the Caribbean affair. For all these, though, it's fair to say The Anubis Gates remains his most famous. Despite the critical and commercial success of the books above and beyond, nothing the acclaimed American author has written in the nearly 40 years of his career has caught on quite like that classic time travel narrative, so to see Powers return to this well-trodden trope is at once predictable and auspicious.

Three Days to Never isn't a new novel, strictly speaking - it was published in the United States in 2006 - nevertheless, it's new to me, as it will be to other readers who've had to wait for its belated British release this week. But better late than never, certainly — and that goes for those of you who missed it when it was new, too.

Considering the complexities of its exhilarating endgame, the beginning of Three Days to Never is suspiciously simple. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest the story starts slowly, but it does take Powers an age to explain the narrative's core conceit, which has our central characters inherit an improvised time machine following the puzzling passing of a batty granny with secret ties, it transpires, to both Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein.

That it takes the entire first act for Frank and Daphne Marrity to figure out even this little is an issue, admittedly, but not as big a one as it might have been, thanks in large part to Powers' protagonists: a deeply endearing father and daughter double-act who keep Three Days to Never interesting during the opening doldrums, and ground the narrative's especially incredible aspects afterwards. To be sure, they're a precocious pair, yet Frank and Daphne must be amongst the most charming characters the author has created to date.

To balance out the great equation, Powers provides two superficially fascinating antagonists, each of whom represents an outside interest in Frank and Daphne's magical swastika.

Wait, had I not mentioned the magical swastika?

Well... now you know.

Oren Lepidopt, however, knows more. In fact, after a close encounter with a holy wall in Jordan, Lepidopt knows certain things with absolute, unearthly certainty: he knows, for instance, that he'll never again hear the name John Wayne. He knows he'll never eat another tuna sandwich, or swim in the sea, or pet a cat, or see a film in the cinema. About the only thing he isn't sure of is how to safely extract the aforementioned artefact.

And the Mossad aren't the only organisation with designs on Grammar's golden swastika. There's also the Vespers:

"A secret survival of the true Albigenses, the twelfth-century natural philosophers Languedoc whose discoveries in the areas of time and so-called reincarnation had so alarmed the Catholic church that Pope Innocent III had ordered the entire group to be wiped out [thinking they] had rediscovered the real Holy Grail." (pp.76-77)

Blind since a nasty accident, yet still able to see through the eyes of anyone within a particular radius around her, Charlotte Sinclair epitomises the occult orientation of this secret society — that is as opposed to the Mossad's more spiritual principles. Haunted, if not necessarily daunted by the terrible things she's done, Charlotte hopes to travel back in time to undo all the wretchedness she's wrought... but her bosses have different ideas.

Charlotte and Lepidopt are fantastic characters in concept, and they do come into their own eventually, but  again, it takes too long, meanwhile the many others members of their respective groups feel faceless; excuses to infodump outside of the central thread, at best. Unfortunately this is not uncommon in Three Days to Never: Powers frequently interrupts the momentum of Frank and Daphne's comparatively fast-paced chapters to explain, in dizzying detail, what just happened — in addition to why and how and, tellingly, when.

So it starts uncertainly, and suffers from some dreadful talking heads, but take heart, genre fiction fans, because said sequences are the exception rather than the rule, and the whole thing finishes with a phenomenal flourish. Between these extremes, Three Days to Never is as thrilling as anything Tim Powers has written. There's espionage, obviously, and a neat take on time travel, but winningly, the tale also takes in physics and history, philosophy and literature.

Not all of these ideas succeed, indeed; together, however, the few which do trump the entire contents of three normal novels. Even if Three Days to Never can't quite exceed the high bar set by the author's most memorable other efforts - sadly, this isn't the second coming of The Anubis Gates - it is still a solid slab of smart, supernatural sci-fi, well worth looking into whether it's new to you or not.

***

Three Days to Never

by Tim Power

UK Publication: January 2013, Corvus

US Publication: November 2007, Harper

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Science Faction | Why Do Old Books Smell So Good?

Despite my initial resistance to books, the new breed, I do actually own an e-reader. We've talked about it before. In point of fact, it's a tablet in disguise - the original Transformer, if you must know - but after a period of experimentation with Aldiko and several other alternatives, the increasingly full-featured Kindle app has served me very well.

Well enough that these days, the ratio of my reading habits - which is to say the number of e-books I read versus the number of tree-books - is fast approaching 1:1. That said, if I love a book, I'll buy the hardcover, regardless of whether or not I already own an electronic copy. This has become something of an issue in itself... but it's not the issue I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about today is why I still tend to buy tree-books over e-books. There are many reasons, really, but whenever I have to rationalise my fondness for physical copies, one of the first factors I look to is, oddly, the aroma of a beloved old book. The savoury scent of printed paper. The musty wonders of something second-hand. The way that a simple smell can take you back years - decades, even - to the time you first read through a particular book. A favourite, say.

Speaking of which, I have a mind to spend a minute sniffing my first edition of The Scar, but for the sake of this bitty blog post - already many weeks in the making - I'll resist.

Now I'm not a complete idiot. I don't lead with my nose in altogether too many of my decisions, but when it comes to books, the smell of an old paperback means a great deal to me. Or rather, it did... before I watched the short video embedded below, which aims to explain some of the starter science behind that marvelous musk.

Fair warning and all: this clip has taken the wind out of my sails somewhat, so watch it at your own peril.

So how about now? Still love the smell of old books? Even now you know the aroma is essentially a combination of chemical reactions and rot?

Sniffing The Scar will never be the same again! :/

Smash Hits | Not The Psychic Scotsman

Local interest (at least for me) meets mad science in this report from Medical Express, by way of Salon Futura's Cheryl Morgan.

Did you know scientists at the University of Glasgow have figured out how to read minds? Apparently by decoding the patterns of certain brainwaves, some odds and sods about the Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology have figured out which patterns represent which emotions, in a series of experiments which equate to expensive games of join the dots with value-added electroencephalography.

For instance, take a gander at this here beast:

What this remarkable news means is that now, after centuries of ignorance, scientists will finally be able to tell whether you find this here Jack Russell adorable, or terrifying.

They will be able to do this... eventually. Probably.

Let's all of us say it at once: God love Scotch science! :)

All kidding aside, this could very well be important-ish news, in due course. Mostly I was just looking for an excuse to post that puppy picture. Because the internet can never have enough puppies, am I right?

Or is it the other way round?

***


Source: Medical Express

Fruit Machine Fight

Further to the somewhat heated discussion we all had a few weeks back, I came across this, the other day, on io9:

Accompanying which magnificence, a pull-quote from "Apples and Oranges," an article published in The Annals of Improbable Research in which Scott Sandford argues that it is not so difficult as one might presume to compare the hateful fruits in question. I give you his findings.

From which it is clear, at least in terms of the respective levels of infrared transmission of the monstrous orange and the evil apple, that the latter - much to my surprise - wins out.

Apples, thus, are better than oranges.

If push had come to shove, a couple of weeks ago, I'd have put my money on the orange, if I'm honest. Shows what an eejit I've been!

Why, The Chicken Did (Did Not! Did Too!)

The Metro stikes again!

For those of you who don't know what the Metro is, a little explanation: here in the UK, we have what is perhaps the most unreliable public transport infrastructure in the world entire. Picture the scene with me. You've got an important appointment in town, such as (it so happens) I did a few days ago. Your significant other has the car - she commutes to work, you see - and no matter how many delicious home-cooked meals you promise her, she's not coming home just to give you a ride, you lazy git you.

So you resign yourself to relying on public transport. At which point the voice of public transport - gruff and harassed and abrupt, I imagine it sounds a bit like Russell Crowe forced to engage in the art of conversation - comes booming out of the slightly overcast skies. And it says: You want a bus? Well, you can't have this one. Nope, nor this one. Why not try a train? Oh, it's been cancelled because the cloud cover looks a bit thick? Well, hell with you then. Thanks for playing!

To make up for its fundamental rubbishness, the king of public transport has ordained that those people who are (air-quotes) "lucky" enough to score a ride get a free newspaper. That's the Metro. It's basically a greatest hits of early editions; stories either pulled from other sources or hashed together by hack journalists. You don't want to read the Metro. Really, you don't. But it's free, it's right there - PLEASE TAKE ONE stamped on the blue aluminium boxes - and it's better, surely, than making eye contact with the great unwashed. So you browse your complimentary copy of The Metro and ditch it at the first possible opportunity. Very occasionally you learn a thing. The odds are about the same as winning the lottery, but from time to time, it happens.

A few days ago, then, the Metro ran a story about the chicken and the egg. (I know it hit MSNBC too - God alone knows where it started.) You know... that eternally baffling question - "which came first?" - and apparently it's been answered, once and for all. For definite this time. Here's the scoop.

Spoilers: it was the chicken.

But this is The Speculative Scotsman, not its sister site The Agricultural American, and here we pride ourselves on looking at all things through a thick veneer of cynicism. So. Has one of the world's greatest and most alluring mysteries been solved?

No.