Book Review | Revenger by Alastair Reynolds

The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilisations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives. And there are vast fortunes to be made, if you know where to find them...

Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It's their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds which have been hidden away, booby-trapped, surrounded with layers of protection—and to crack them open for the ancient relics and barely-remembered technologies inside. But while they ply their risky trade with integrity, not everyone is so scrupulous.

Adrana and Fura Ness are the newest members of Rackamore's crew, signed on to save their family from bankruptcy. Only Rackamore has enemies, and there might be more waiting for them in space than adventure and fortune: the fabled and feared Bosa Sennen in particular.

Revenger is a science fiction adventure story set in the rubble of our solar system in the dark, distant future—a tale of space pirates, buried treasure and phantom weapons, of unspeakable hazards and single-minded heroism... and of vengeance.

***

Fresh off of finishing the magnificently ambitious Poseidon's Children trilogy and collaborating with fellow science fiction superstar Stephen Baxter on the rather marvellous Medusa Chronicles, Alastair Reynolds returns with a stirring story about a pair of sisters who enlist on a spaceship and set about looting the rubble of a ruined universe. Featuring dollops of derring-do and not a few space battles too, Revenger might be Reynold's most accessible solo effort yet, but there's no dearth of darkness in this light-looking bite of a book.

The universe has seen better days, I dare say. Aeons on from the forging, so many civilisations have risen and fallen that the current population of the Congregation live every day as if it's apt to be their last. Piracy is inevitably prevalent, but rather than stealing from one another, most pirates plunder the remnants of ancient races from the hundreds of thousands of dead worlds distributed in the distance.

Most pirates, but not all. Not Bosa Sennen, who has carved out a terrible legend for herself in the blood and the bodies of those unfortunate enough to have found themselves near the nightmarish Nightjammer: a sneaky little spaceship with black sails, according to the tales, the better to board you before you know it.

Pol Rackamore is one of the scant few souls to have come face to face with Bosa Sennen and survived, though not without paying a perilous price: the loss of his dear daughter. He'll see her again before Revenger is at an end, however—as will Adrana and Arafura Ness, the well-to-do young women at the centre of Reynolds' enticing text.

When said sisters, so long under the thumb of their failed businessman of a father, hear that Captain Rack is hiring, they jump at the chance to crew the Monetta's Mourn for a couple of months. They hope to "go out, just for a while [...] then come back home, and share what we've made." (p.15) Needless to say, dear daddy doesn't agree, but then, he can't stop them, can he?

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.

Book Review | The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

My name is Hope Arden, and you won't know who I am. But we've met before—a thousand times.

It started when I was sixteen years old.

A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger.

No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit, you will never remember who I am.

That makes my life difficult. It also makes me dangerous.

***

Life is complicated—not least because it's so frickin' unpredictable. But there are a few things you can be sure of. One day, you and I will die; come what may, there'll be plenty of taxes to pay along the way; and, as Isaac Newton concluded, for every action, an equal and opposite reaction will happen.

In real terms, that means that what we do dictates what is done to us. Hurt someone and you can expect to be hurt in turn. Make someone happy and perhaps they'll pay that happiness back. This behavioural balance relies on our ability to remember, however. Without that... well, what would you do if you knew the world would forget you?

You'd let loose, wouldn't you?

Hope Arden, for her part, does exactly that in Catherine Webb's third novel as Claire North, which, like Touch and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August before it, is an engrossing, globe-trotting interrogation of identity that sits comfortably between Bourne and Buffy.

For a while after I'd been forgotten, I toyed with becoming a hitman. I pictured myself in leather jump suits, taking down my targets with a sniper rifle, my dark hair billowing in the wind. No cop could catch me; no one would know my name. I was sixteen years old, and had peculiar ideas about 'cool.'

Peculiar, to be sure, but so is Hope's very particular predicament.

You'd be forgiven for forgetting someone you see on the street; even someone you speak to, briefly. But neglect to remember your best mate and that relationship's in dire straits. Fail to recognise your son or your daughter and you've got a problem with a capital P. North's poor protagonist has had to deal with that every day since she came of age, in her every interaction with everyone she's ever met. Never mind the network of people she'd need to know her if she had a hope in hell of holding down a normal job: she's a complete stranger to her parents, and her closest friends look at her like an interloper.

It's a credit to her character, then, that Hope—"having no one else to know me, having no one to catch me or lift me up, tell me if I'm right or wrong, having no one to define the limits of me"—still holds the sanctity of human life in high regard. So scratch that career as an assassin.

Book Review | Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive... and even evolve.

***

World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar rewrites the rules of the short story collection in Central Station, an ambitious assemblage of thirteen tales tall but indubitably true that are all the more remarkable when read together.

"Substantially different versions" (p.251) of eleven of the efforts it collects were previously published, in various venues, between November 2011 and September 2014, and the handful of them that I read then impressed me immensely. 'The Smell of Orange Groves' and 'The Lord of Discarded Things,' for instance, represented intimate glimpses into the lives of a few of the disaffected folks who call the "bordertown" (p.34) at the base of the Central Station spaceport home.

In one, after decades in the Belt, birthing doctor Boris Chong returns to his roots to tend to his ailing parent, only to end up hooking up with his childhood sweetheart Miriam Jones, who's grown older in the intervening years—as has he—and adopted a boy. In the other, Ibrahim, an alte-zachen man, or "junk gypsy," (p.48) finds a genetically modified messiah in a small shoebox, and resolves to raise him himself—free of his fate as far as is possible in a place like Central Station, which is so rife with religion that it boasts a "faith bazaar." (p.23)

They were little things, those stories; lovely, and lively, and large of heart, but little, admittedly. Not so in Central Station, which generously extends the two tales I've touched on at the same time as seamlessly stitching together their characters and narratives with those of the other eleven featured here.

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 | Morning Star by Pierce Brown

I rise into darkness, away from the garden they watered with the blood of my friends. The Golden man who killed my wife lies dead beside me on the cold metal deck, life snuffed out by his own son’s hand.

Autumn wind whips my hair. The ship rumbles beneath. In the distance, friction flames shred the night with brilliant orange. The Telemanuses descending from orbit to rescue me. Better that they do not. Better to let the darkness have me and allow the vultures to squabble over my paralyzed body.

My enemy’s voices echo behind me. Towering demons with the faces of angels. The smallest of them bends. Stroking my head as he looks down at his dead father.

“This is always how the story would end,” he says to me. “Not with your screams. Not with your rage. But with your silence.”

***

Pierce Brown has several times cited Star Wars—specifically the original trilogy—as a influence of no small significance on the fan-favourite series Morning Star completes, and it's fair to say the pair share a double helix here and a structural strand there.

Like A New Hope before it, Red Rising introduced an almost recognisable galaxy ruled by an evil empire; an evil empire whose merciless machinations gave the saga's protagonist—here, the Helldiver Darrow—a very personal reason to rebel against said. It was a bloody good book, to be sure, but as nothing next to Golden Son, which scaled up the conflict and the cast of characters introduced in Red Rising marvelously, in much the same way The Empire Strikes Back improved in every conceivable sense on its predecessor. It also ended with a catastrophic cliffhanger... which we'll get back to.

In short, it shouldn't be such a surprise that the pattern which held true in books one and two of Brown's breakthrough also applies to the conclusion. For better or for worse, Morning Star is this trilogy's Return of the Jedi—though there are, thankfully, no Ewok equivalents in evidence.

The end begins with Darrow locked in a box.

Time, to wit, has lost all meaning to the Reaper, but he's been in this almost-but-not-quite-carbonite contraption for nearly a year. In the process the young man who freed Mars has lost much of his mind, and all of the carefully-carved body that helped him pass for a Gold in the colour-coordinated caste hierarchy of the sinister Society. He's so far gone, in fact, that he's seriously considering killing himself when a duo of deeply-embedded rebels finally spring him from the Jackal's base of operations.

Darrow may be back in play from this point on, but Brown is smart not to simply dismiss Golden Son's devastating denouement. The Reaper, returned, is no longer a leader. He has to be carved all over again, and retrained as if here were a new recruit to the cause. "Like a prisoner who spend his whole life digging through the wall, only to break through and find he's dug into another cell," (p.70) he feels beaten, defeated—which is understandable, because he was.

Book Review | Medusa's Web by Tim Powers

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby south of Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this old house that is a conduit for the supernatural. 

Decorated by bits salvaged from old hotels and movie sets, Caveat hides a dark family secret that stretches back to the golden days of Rudolph Valentino and the silent film stars. A collection of hypnotic abstract images inked on paper allows the Maddens to briefly fragment and flatten time—to transport themselves into the past and future in visions that are both puzzling and terrifying. 

As Madeline falls more completely under Caveat's spell, Scott must fight to protect her. But will he unravel the mystery of the Madden family's past and finally free them... or be pulled deeper into their deadly web?

***

Damn near a decade since his last standalone, two-time Philip K. Dick Award winner Tim Powers paints a characteristically trippy picture of modern Hollywood in Medusa's Web, a tense time-travel thriller about addiction and the fault lines that families straddle. 

The far-from-happy family at the heart of this narrative are the Maddens, under ancient Aunt Amity—a half-mad matriarch and erstwhile author who owns the deteriorating estate where the bulk of Powers' tale takes place:

Madeline had moved out of Caveat seven years ago, leaving her aunt with Ariel and Claimayne and the solitary writing of her endless unpublishable novels. Scott had left six years before that, to get married, though when that Louise woman left him he hadn't moved back in. (p.58)

Neither Madeline, an astrologer, nor Scott, an artist, had planned to come back to the moldering mansion they left so long ago, but Amity Madden's explosive suicide necessitates a reassessment. Her hastily-written last will stipulates that this house in the Hills is theirs to do what they want with if they can stomach spending a week within its walls—so home they go, much to Ariel and Claimayne's dismay.

Although Caveat has certainly seen better days, Ariel and Claimayne see it as their hard-earned inheritance. Understandably, then, they do everything in their power to drive Scott and Madeline away... until the same secret that tore the Maddens apart to start—a stash of so-called "spiders"—resurfaces, endangering everyone in the property in the process.

Book Review | The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts

"I saw the John Carpenter film The Thing for the first time recently. That wasn't one of the VHS tapes they gave us, back then, to watch on the base. For obvious reasons. That's not what it was like for me at all. That doesn't capture it at all. They, or it, or whatever, were not thing-y. They are inhuman. But this is only my dream of them, I think."

Two men, alone together on an Antarctic research base. A killer. A sceptic. Alone for months on end. Separated by what they believe. Joined together by Fermi's Paradox.

Are we, indeed, alone in the Universe? Could it be that we are not alone but that we cannot know it? Could we deal with the horror of either answer?

Crossing the boundaries of time and space, the many threads of The Thing Itself weave both a terrifying adventure and a mind-blowing philosophical conundrum, reaffirming Adam Roberts' unique place in the SF canon.

***

At an Antarctic research station in the 1980s, two men at their end of their respective tethers, alone in this lovely if unlovable land but for one another and a copy of Emmanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, see something that cannot conceivably be:

There was a hint of—I'm going to say, claws, jaws, a clamping something. A maw. Not a tentacle, nothing so defined. Nor was it a darkness. It made a low, thrumming, chiming noise, like a muffled bell sounding underground, ding-ding, ding-ding. But this was not a sound-wave sort of sound. This was not a propagating expanding sphere of agitated air particles. It was a pulse in the mind. It was a shudder of the soul. (pp.25-26)

Sound familiar? Well, it is—for a fraction of a chapter.

Would you be surprised if I were to tell you that The Thing Itself is not—not even nearly—what it appears to be? If you answered yes to that question, I'd be given to guess you've never read an Adam Roberts novel. If you had, you'd know that this is not an author who likes to linger on any one thing for long, so though the first chapter has a handful of callbacks to John Carpenter's tentacular classic, the second is a short travelogue of sorts set in Germany almost a century earlier.

"Let me pick the threads of this story up again, rearrange the letters into a new form," (p.48) the next bit begins—which sentence, I'll confess, had me panicking preemptively at the prospect of a new narrative in every chapter. But although Roberts does repeatedly rewrite the rules of the tale he's telling, The Thing Itself is an easier and more coherent read than it appears.

Which isn't to say it's simple.

Book Review | The Promise of the Child by Tom Toner

In the radically advanced post-human worlds of the Amaranthine Firmament, there is a contender to the Immortal throne: Aaron the Long-Life, the Pretender, a man who is not quite a man.

In the barbarous hominid kingdoms of the Prism Investiture, where life is short, cheap, and dangerous, an invention is born that will become the Firmament’s most closely kept secret.

Lycaste, a lovesick recluse outcast for an unspeakable crime, must journey through the Provinces, braving the grotesques of an ancient, decadent world to find his salvation.

Sotiris, grieving the loss of his sister and awaiting the madness of old age, must relive his twelve thousand years of life to stop the man determined to become Emperor.

Ghaldezuel, knight of the stars, must plunder the rarest treasure in the Firmament—the object the Pretender will stop at nothing to obtain.

***

The year is 14,647 AD. Humankind has changed, fractured, Prismed into a dozen breeds of fairy-tale grotesques, the chaos of expansion, war and ruin flinging humanity like bouncing sparks around the blackness of space. Man has been resculpted in a hundred different places, and the world as he knew it—this world—is gone for ever. (p.96)

This is the posthuman premise of The Promise of the Child: an extraordinary space opera which charts the inexorable fall of an assortment of autocratic immortals in a milieu so elaborately imagined that immersion in it is as risky as it is rewarding. Taken together with its dizzying depth and intelligence, the debut of Tom Toner, a twenty-something science-fiction savant with a sweet spot for shark teeth, has an ungodly amount going for it.

If Hannu Rajaniemi had come up with The Culture, it would have read rather like this, I think. But like The Quantum Thief before it, The Promise of the Child has an approachability problem: absent the warmth and wit that made Iain M. Banks' books beloved, it can come across as cold, calculated and at points impenetrable.

The first difficulty those who do dedicate themselves to Toner's text will need to deal with is its stupendous setting: "an impossibly delicate, eleven-light-year-wide ecosystem" (p.276) known as the Firmament. Here, the aforementioned immortals—the Amaranthine—hold sway; that is to say, they do today, if only by dint of "the ratio of butlers, gardeners, housekeepers and paying tenants to the riff-raff that inhabited the thin wilderness—the Prism Investiture—that surrounded their huge and desolate estate, the twenty-three Solar Satrapies." (p.276)

But the Amarantine's grip is slipping, and quickly...

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...

Book Review | The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

A master storyteller at his best—the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.

Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.

There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. 'Afterlife' is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanours. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in 'Obits'; the old judge in 'The Dune' who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In 'Morality,' King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.

Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader. "I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."

***

"I never feel the limitations of my talent so keenly as I do when writing short fiction," confesses Stephen King in the introduction to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: an unusually introspective yet no less effective collection of eighteen variously terrifying tales, plus a few pieces of poetry, from the affable author of last year's similarly reflective Revival.

This is far from the first time King has discussed his "struggle to bridge the gap between a great idea and the realisation of that idea's potential," and although, as readers, we only have the end product to parse, the ideas the Edgar Award winner explores here—and the characters, and the narratives—are not at all inadequate. If anything, in dispensing with the hallmarks of Halloweeny horror to which his bibliography is so bound in order to investigate a goody bag of markedly more grounded goings-on, the stories brought together in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams number among King's most thoughtful and evocative.

Which isn't to say they ain't scary. They absolutely are! 'Premium Harmony,' 'Batman and Robin Have an Altercation' and 'Herman Wouk is Still Alive,' for instance, are still seething somewhere under this critic's skin, but said tales are scary in a more mundane way than you might imagine. Respectively, they address the mindless last fight between a man and his wife, the hellish senselessness of senility and suicide as a means of finally achieving freedom.

If the components of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams have a common denominator, and I dare say they do, it's death... but death by misadventure, or as a direct result of dubious decisions, or as something that simply comes, like the setting of the sun, as opposed to death by killer car, or wicked witch, or eldritch mist. According to Dave Calhoun, the elderly subject of 'Mr Yummy,' a bittersweet story set in an Assisted Living facility, "death personified isn't a skeleton riding on a pale horse with a scythe over his shoulder, but a hot dancehall kid with glitter on his cheeks." (p.350)

Death is depicted in countless other, equally ordinary ways over the course of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: as a name sketched in the sand in 'The Dune,' an unpleasant smell in 'Under the Weather' and an increasingly meek mutt in 'Summer Thunder.' King hasn't suddenly come over all subtle, but this collection clearly chronicles a gentler, more contemplative author than the purveyor of penny dreadfuls whose part he has played with such panache in the past.

Book Review | A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe

It is perhaps a hundred years in the future, our civilization is gone, and another is in place in North America, but it retains many familiar things and structures. Although the population is now small, there is advanced technology, there are robots, and there are clones.

E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person. He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human.

A wealthy patron, Colette Coldbrook, takes him from the library because he is the surviving personality of the author of Murder on Mars. A physical copy of that book was in the possession of her murdered father, and it contains an important secret, the key to immense family wealth. It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police. She borrows Smithe to help her find the book and to find out what the secret is. And then the plot gets complicated.

***

Gene Wolfe continues to play with the nature of narrators in his mostly notional new novel, a middling murder mystery explicated from the perspective of a posthumous author pretending to be a detective.

The story starts with Colette Coldbrook: sweetheart teacher, well-spoken socialite and, in the early parts of the narrative, something of a survivor. A year or so ago, she suddenly lost her mother; a little later, her father suffered a suspicious heart attack; and in the aftermath of that latter's passing, her beloved brother was straight-up strangled. She has no-one to turn to, now, and so many questions—not least about the unassuming book Conrad Coldbrook Junior found in Conrad Coldbrook Senior's safe.

Colette believes—with good reason, even—that Murder on Mars may be the key to understanding what happened to her family, and perhaps why, but beyond that, she doesn't have a clue what to do. The thought of reading this fictional fossil doesn't cross her ultra-modern mind for a minute. Instead, she does the other obvious thing: she rents out a so-called "reclone" of the author of the novel, E. A. Smithe, from her local library, and asks him to do the dirty work.

Now it might be that Smithe comes complete with most of his long-dead predecessor's memories, but he doesn't remember much about Murder on Mars—and to make matters worse, he's a copy of a crime writer rather than anything resembling a detective himself:

I was not the man I thought I was, the one whose name I used—whose name I still use right now, for that matter. I was somebody else, a kid who had been grown from that guy's DNA and loaded up with his memories, phony memories of things that never happened to me and never could happen to me. (p.36)

Thus, the investigation into the curious case of the Coldbrooks proceeds in frustrating fits and stuttering starts, regularly interrupted by Smithe's soul-searching and set back substantially when Colette is (apparently) kidnapped. "The more I thought about it the surer I got that there was something funny going on, but I could not even guess what it was." (p.106)

Book Review | Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson

Bats of the Republic is an illuminated novel of adventure, featuring hand-drawn maps and natural history illustrations, subversive pamphlets and science-fictional diagrams, and even a nineteenth-century novel-within-a-novel—an intrigue wrapped in innovative design.

In 1843, fragile naturalist Zadock Thomas must leave his beloved in Chicago to deliver a secret letter to an infamous general on the front lines of the war over Texas. The fate of the volatile republic, along with Zadock’s future, depends on his mission. When a cloud of bats leads him off the trail, he happens upon something impossible...

Three hundred years later, the world has collapsed and the remnants of humanity cling to a strange society of paranoia. Zeke Thomas has inherited a sealed envelope from his grandfather, an esteemed senator. When that letter goes missing, Zeke engages a fomenting rebellion that could free him—if it doesn’t destroy his relationship, his family legacy, and the entire republic first.

As their stories overlap and history itself begins to unravel, a war in time erupts between a lost civilization, a forgotten future, and the chaos of the wild. Bats of the Republic is a masterful novel of adventure and science fiction, of elliptical history and dystopian struggle, and, at its riveting core, of love.

***

In a world where the Powers That Be have deemed any and all secrets illegal, Zeke Thomas must go against the flow he's always followed when he inherits a sealed envelope containing information which could sink the system that's kept humanity alive since the Collapse.

Meanwhile, in the year 1843, Zeke's time-removed relative, Zadock, has to leave his one true love languishing in her sickbed to deliver a highly sensitive letter to a legendary general embedded deep in the disputed territory of Texas.

An incredibly presented "illuminated novel" which, like last year's S., blends form and function with history and mystery to realise a reading experience that amazes from the first page, Bats of the Republic comes from the co-founder of a small press specialising in "strange and beautiful fiction and nonfiction" with a sideline in detail-oriented design, so the unusual shape Zachary Thomas Dodson's debut takes shouldn't be such a surprise.

And yet, the metatextual elements that make this reflexive narrative remarkable are so utterly abundant that they create a state of fantastic stupefaction. In advance of the actual start of the story, we're treated to an exquisite endpaper mosaic, two discrete family trees, a meticulous map charting Zadock's ill-fated flight, a selection of handwritten letters, the first of a few newspaper clippings, and the title page of a whole other novel, namely The City-State by E. Anderson—all of which is as good as guaranteed to make one go um. 

And Bats of the Republic has hardly even begun!

Book Review | The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. Living in their car, surviving on tips from Charmaine's job at a dive bar, they're increasingly vulnerable to roving gangs, and in a rather desperate state. So when they see an advertisement for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience—a "social experiment" offering stable jobs and a home of their own—they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for this suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month, swapping their home for a prison cell.

At first, all is well. But slowly, unknown to the other, Stan and Charmaine develop a passionate obsession with their counterparts, the couple that occupy their home when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire take over, and Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.

***

You can buy a bunch of stuff with money. You can buy board games, boxed sets, hot hatchbacks and huge houses—an assortment of objects and accessories and investments likely to lift your spirits for a few minutes and, if you're lucky, a whole lot longer. But, The Heart Goes Last asks, does that mean you can buy happiness? Its answer: hah!

Stan and Charmaine wouldn't have had any need to, till recently. When they were first married, their futures were bright; their futures were right. "They were so happy then. It was just like an ad." (p.276) The newlyweds were even considering kids when the bottom went out from under the economy and civilised society practically collapsed.

They were so sweet then, so hopeful; so young, not like the way [they are] now. And then it hadn't worked out, because of circumstances. And it was a strain, so many tensions, what with the car and everything, but they'd stayed together because they had each other and they loved each other. (p.153)

At the start of Margaret Atwood's first standalone work of full-length fiction for fifteen years, Stan and Charmaine have almost nothing but their love for one another—and even that bond has been stronger. Then they hear about something called the Positron project, an experimental private enterprise which promises a new way today and, if it works, a new world for the future:

Rather than festering in some deserted condo crawling with black mould or crouching in a stench-filled trailer where you'd spend the nights beating off dead-eyed teenagers armed with broken bottles and ready to murder you for a handful of cigarette butts, you'd have gainful employment, three wholesome meals a day, a lawn to tend, a hedge to trim, the assurance that you were contributing to the general good, and a toilet that flushed. In a word, or rather three words: A MEANINGFUL LIFE. (p.42)

The only trade-off is that participants must spend every other month in a prison—and while they're away, their so-called "alternates" come out to play...

Book Review | Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald

The Moon wants to kill you. Whether it's being unable to pay your per diem for your allotted food, water, and air, or you just get caught up in a fight between the Moon's ruling corporations, the Five Dragons. You must fight for every inch you want to gain in the Moon's near feudal society. And that is just what Adriana Corta did.

As the leader of the Moon's newest "dragon," Adriana has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, at the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation, Corta Helio, surrounded by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies.,. and each other.

***

I spent a little less than a week reading Luna: New Moon. The first hundred pages took me five difficult days; the remainder I sucked up like a sponge in a single sitting on the sixth; and on the seventh day, I rested, not because Ian McDonald's new novel is exhausting—though it is, initially—but because its denouement is so devastating I was rather a wreck by then.

Rarely have I finished a book feeling so differently about it as I did in the beginning. If I'd tried to review Luna: New Moon while picking my way through its tremendously dense first third, I'd have struggled to recommend it in any respect. Now, it's all I can do to resist shouting GAME OF THRONES IN SPACE, as I did on Twitter when I put paid to its last masterful chapter, and signing off with a statement of its unadulterated greatness. 

But maybe I should explain.

Though I can see this story taking a lot longer than intended to tell, just as George R. R. Martin's bestselling fantasy saga has, Luna: New Moon is, at the time of this writing, the first volume of a proposed duology that should do for Earth's only natural satellite what McDonald did for India in River of Gods, Brazil in Brasyl, and Istanbul in his last adult narrative: The Dervish House.

In the five years since that latter won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the BSFA for Best Novel, McDonald has been busy with the Everness trilogy: a reality-spanning romp written for young adults but read by any number of readers older even than me. And perhaps that was the root cause of my problem with this novel; after Planesrunner, Be My Enemy and Empress of the Sun, I'd become accustomed to the aforementioned author at his most approachable. 

Luna: New Moon is no such thing, sadly.

Book Review | The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

The universe is a forest, patrolled by numberless and nameless predators. In this forest, others are hell, a dire existential threat. Stealth is survival. Any civilisation that reveals its location is prey.

Earth has. And the others are on the way.

The Trisolarian fleet has left their homeworld and will arrive... in four centuries' time. But the sophons, their extra-dimensional emissaries, are already here and have infiltrated human society and and derailed scientific progress. Only the individual human mind remains immune to the sophons. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a last-ditch defence that grants four individuals almost absolute power to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.

***

If The X-Files taught me one thing, it was to be afraid—to be very afraid—of escalators. I learned early to take the stairs, or else be consumed by Eugene Tooms. But the recently revived TV series taught me at least two things, in truth: that, and the fact that thinking of Earth as the cradle of all creation in the unimaginable vastness of the galaxy is an act of absolute arrogance.

I want to believe, in other words. Absent any evidence, however, belief is a difficult state to sustain. It necessitates a leap of faith I've never been able to take—though that's no longer a problem for the characters at the heart of the startling second volume of Cixin Liu's translated trilogy, as they, and humanity as a whole, have had that proof.

In The Three-Body Problem, our wildest dreams were realised in the same second as our worst fears: they are out there, and now that they know we're here, they're coming... coming to wipe out every last trace of humanity from the galaxy.

The thing is, they're going to take four hundred years to get here.

But when they do? We're toast, folks.

The assembly fell into a prolonged silence. Ahead of them stretched the leaden road of time, terminating somewhere in the mists of the future, where all they could see were flickering flames and the lustre of blood. The brevity of a human lifespan tormented them as never before, and their hearts soared above the vault of time to join with their descendants and plunge into blood and fire in the icy cold of space, the eventual meeting place for the souls of all soldiers. (p.43)

In this way, a great wave of defeatism sweeps the people, not least because they know that nothing they do now will have the slightest impact on the Trisolarans. The present-day generation's only potential legacy is laying out the groundwork for humanity to develop in centuries ahead. Today, the knowledge base just isn't there, nor indeed will it ever equal the quantum technology bolstering the Trisolarans' far superior force. That's because of the sophons: a mass of microscopic particles which interfere in certain experiments, establishing an energy-based barrier beyond which scientists simply cannot cross. We haven't hit it yet, but we will, one day. And then? Well, it'll be The End, my friends.

Book Review | Armada by Ernest Cline

Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he’s spent his life consuming. Dreaming that one day, some fantastic, world-altering event will shatter the monotony of his humdrum existence and whisk him off on some grand space-faring adventure.

But hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. He knows that here in the real world, aimless teenage gamers with anger issues don’t get chosen to save the universe.

And then he sees the flying saucer.

Even stranger, the alien ship he’s staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada—in which gamers just happen to be protecting the earth from alien invaders.

No, Zack hasn’t lost his mind. As impossible as it seems, what he’s seeing is all too real. And his skills—as well as those of millions of gamers across the world—are going to be needed to save the earth from what’s about to befall it.

It’s Zack’s chance, at last, to play the hero. But even through the terror and exhilaration, he can’t help thinking back to all those science-fiction stories he grew up with, and wondering: doesn't something about this scenario seem a little... familiar?

***

Isn't the world weird?

After decades of dismissal, what was once the preserve of known nerds is now everyone's favourite field. Video games are a cornerstone of contemporary culture. There are characters from comic books wherever you look. The fundamental stuff of science fiction and fantasy has been embraced in a big way by the mainstream, and though there are those who still question the merits of the speculative, even these outliers have had a hard time denying the cultural cache it has accrued in recent years.

Fair to say, then, that geek has never been more chic—a zeroing of the zeitgeist Ernest Cline capitalised on to heartfelt effect in his first novel following the cult film Fanboys. A celebration of all things 80s bolstered by a cannily-characterised protagonist who came of age over its uproarious course, Ready Player One was smart, but it also had a heart.

Armada starts strong, by scratching a great many of the same itches Cline's debut did. It too worships at the altar of this new, nerd-friendly nostalgia. It combines space-based spectacle with a series of intimate interruptions. It's frequently funny and remarkably referential. But there's a but.

Book Review | Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now, we approach our new home: Aurora.

A major new novel from one of science fiction's most powerful voices, Aurora tells the incredible story of our first voyage beyond the solar system. Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, it is the work of a writer at the height of his powers.

***

Since the startling Mars trilogy, if not in advance of that, Kim Stanley Robinson has been seen as something of a standard-bearer for science fiction—and quite rightly. Again and again in the sixteen years since said series' completion, he's demonstrated himself capable of combining the very finest in futurism with the crucial components of sterling storytelling so many of his contemporaries unfortunately forget.

Aurora chronicles Robinson's return to science fiction in the first, after the about-turn he took in 2013, but to begin with, it reads distressingly like a retread. Its premise depends upon a generation ship hurtling towards the Tau Ceti system, where the two thousand-some souls aboard plan to carve out a new home for humanity—a notion set in motion by the same sort of environmental catastrophe Aurora's author has explored before, not least in the Science in the Capital saga. After their arrival, these cosmic colonists take on the deceptively complex task of terraforming, much as the men and women of the Mars trilogy did. In the interim, they eke out a existence of subsistence in biomes rather reminiscent of those Robinson detailed in 2312—biomes which our central character slowly explores in the course of a long wanderjahr that isn't dissimilar to the walkabout Shaman started with.

But readers? Read on. Because there's so much more to Aurora.

In a sense, sure, it's a bit of a best of. But the best of Kim Stanley Robinson is arguably the best the genre has to offer, and beyond that, the passage of time and a pinch of patience exposes this thoughtful space opera's primary purpose: to chart the rise of an AI.

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 | Crashing Heaven by Al Robertson

With Earth abandoned, humanity resides on Station, an industrialised asteroid run by the sentient corporations of the Pantheon. Under their leadership a war has been raging against the Totality—ex-Pantheon AIs gone rogue.

With the war over, Jack Forster and his sidekick Hugo Fist, a virtual ventriloquist's dummy tied to Jack's mind and created to destroy the Totality, have returned home.

Labelled a traitor for surrendering to the Totality, all Jack wants is to clear his name but when he discovers two old friends have died under suspicious circumstances he also wants answers. Soon he and Fist are embroiled in a conspiracy that threatens not only their future but all of humanity's. But with Fist's software licence about to expire, taking Jack's life with it, can they bring down the real traitors before their time runs out?

***

Seriously satisfying cyberpunk action meets thoughtful moral philosophy with a dash of detective noir and a supersized side of striking science in Crashing Heaven—the year's best debut to date, and make no mistake.

A pivotal part of its deceptively accessible premise is that the tale occurs in a world where gods (of a sort) walk among men. As the well-read will be aware, this is not a new notion; on the contrary, there have been any number of tremendous takes on the topic, even if we restrict our recollection to iterations of late—highlights like Robert Jackson Bennett's brilliantly built City of Stairs and N. K. Jemisin's hot-under-the-collar Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. So what makes this one worth writing home about? Why, the presence of a puppet, if you please!

Folks, meet Hugo Fist: a virtual ventriloquist's dummy designed by the pawns of the Pantheon—an assortment of incarnate corporate gods who represent the culmination of capitalism—to lay waste to the Totality: the rogue AIs that have taken over most of the solar system. Most of the solar system... but not all—not Station, the industrialised asteroid humanity has called home since poor planet Earth gasped its last.