Book Review | Barricade by Jon Wallace

A fast-paced, droll and disturbing novel, Barricade is a savage road trip across the dystopian landscape of post-apocalypse Britain narrated by the cold-blooded yet magnetic antihero, Kenstibec.

Kenstibec is a member of the Ficial race: a breed of merciless super-humans. Their war on humanity has left Britain a wasteland, where Ficials hide in barricaded cities, besieged by tribes of human survivors. Originally optimised for construction, Kenstibec earns his keep as a taxi driver, running any Ficial who will pay from one surrounded city to another.

The trips are always eventful, but this will be his toughest yet. His fare is a narcissistic journalist who's touchy about her luggage. His human guide is constantly plotting to kill him. And that's just the start of his troubles.

On his journey he encounters ten-foot killer rats, a mutant king with a TV fixation, a drug-crazed army, and even the creator of the Ficial race. He also finds time to uncover a terrible plot to destroy his species for good—and humanity too.

***

Battlestar Galactica meets Mad Max in a dystopian debut that doesn't disappoint: a bona fide barnstormer of a book about a dysfunctional future in which people are a problem our genetically engineered successors have almost solved.

In the first, the Ficials were created to help humanity. To do our dirty work—to serve and slave and slog and so on—thus they were bred to be better. Some have superhuman strength, others endless endurance; many are exceptionally intelligent, most are massively attractive. None of them have a heart, however. Pesky emotions would only have distracted them from their duties.

What could possibly have gone wrong?

Only everything. Years before Barricade begins, the Ficials struck back against their masters... but not out anger. Rather, reason:

"Control was built as an incorruptible arbiter, a trustworthy leader."
"The thing is homicidal!"
"No, it is rational. It looked at the situation, concluded that it wasn't possible to save both our race and the planet, and presented its case to the Engineered race. They were convinced by its logic and started the cull." (p.151)

The cull: a plan to solve the planet's people problem, by ridding it of Reals completely. Brutal, to be sure, but brilliant in its simplicity. Sadly—for the Ficials, that is... if they had feelings, which they don't—humanity had other ideas. Millions did die, but many of us survived, by hiding in the countryside whilst our stymied successors settled in the cities; by erecting great barricades to make life difficult for the Ficials.

Things have been at something of a standstill since; a sustained state of stalemate neither side is able to break. Not easily, at least. But there are those who dare to dream. Who dare, indeed, to drive. Kenstibec, a Ficial made to make—a construction model—has earned himself a reputation by chaperoning clients from city to city in that exact fashion.

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?

Comic Book Review | Echo: The Complete Edition by Terry Moore

After 13 years and in excess of 100 issues of his hit comic book sitcom come conspiracy thriller Strangers in Paradise, you'd think the work of Terry Moore would be a known quantity. But no.

Echo has elements of the essentially self-published series with which its cult creator made his name, including realistic female leads, an unpredictable romantic triangle and some corporate corruption, but beyond these superficial similarities, it's a distinct thing both narratively and thematically, as delightful in its own right as it is demonstrative of Moore's myriad talents.

Like all the best things in life, it begins with a bang: an almighty explosion high in the sky, the fallout of a live munitions exercise gone awry. The Heitzer Nuclear Institute (hereafter HeNRI) has fashioned a battle suit from a revolutionary new alloy, but when project lead and pilot Annie Trotter dies during the final phase of its testing, all is thought lost.

That would be that... were it not for Julie Martin, an unfortunate photographer who happens to be in the desert when everything goes to hell in the heavens above her head. Instead, shrapnel from the battle suit adheres to her like a second skin.

As if Julie's life weren't complicated enough! In the midst of a long-delayed divorce, she's an emotional mess; meanwhile her sister needs round-the-clock care, her dog isn't eating, and now, to make matters worse, she's covered in shiny metal. At the hospital, immediately after her near-death experience in the desert, doctors dismiss Julie as a prankster, but when HeNRI is made aware of her involvement in the accident, its top dogs take her very seriously indeed. They dispatch NSB agent and mother of one Ivy Raven to bring their target in... at any cost.

State Park Ranger Dillon Murphy may be Julie's only hope when the company finally catches up with her, but he's Annie's man, and who knows what he'll do when he finds out about his new friend's ties to his partner's tragic passing?

There's so much more to Echo than the above, but I'm going to leave it at that for fear of spoilers. Half the fun of this wild ride is in seeing where it's headed next, anyway. One senses that was the case for Terry More, too, because the series changes gears repeatedly, sometimes suddenly, altering everything from the division between former friends and enemies to the very genre Echo operates in. At the outset, it seems to be a fairly straightforward superhero origin story, but the second arc is all horror and high-octane action, the third revolves around a biblical clash, and in subsequent volumes, far-fetched science fiction segues into oddly topical science fact.

Admittedly, all this gives Echo a bit of a schizophrenic feel. What it is at any given moment is no guarantee for what it was, or will be, and some sections are more successful than others: the subplot revolving around Hong the jawless is nonsense, and the middle act is painfully prolonged, but the beginning is brilliant, and though a fair few loose ends are left to dangle - such that you can easily see a sequel series - the climax still satisfies.

So the narrative is neat, but don't buy this book for the story: buy it for the fantastic characters. As in Strangers in Paradise before it, Echo's main attraction is its core cast members, whose incremental development carries through the complete series. Never mind what everyone's up to — where Moore excels, on the writing side, is in showing how events affect them and their perspective. The Julie of the last chapter is a far cry from the Julie we meet in Echo's opening issue... and I've hardly said word one about Ivy Raven, my favourite character by a massive margin.

Art-wise, Moore is as impressive as ever, and his work here is particularly consistent. His set-pieces especially are extraordinary - sweeping and detailed yet clearly rendered - but even amidst a five-part arc that would be better entitled Talking Heads, his pencils demonstrate a mastery of the minute: facial tics, posture and body language communicate as much about Julie as her dialogue ever does.

That said, I could have done with a little less fan-service, sir.

But let's not end on a bum note. Like Jeff Smith's Bone bible, The Complete Edition of Echo represents tremendous value for money, collecting all 30 issues of the mostly monthly — and unlike the series on either side of it (though seemingly complete, Strangers in Paradise is due to return in 2013, meanwhile Moore views his gorgeous horror comic Rachel Rising as an ongoing endeavour) Echo is over, and there's a lot to be said for such singularly satisfying, self-contained stories in a landscape so prone to the bloated or overblown.

Book Review | Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut--young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers, Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If the world survives, that is.

***

Isn't it funny, how classics come to be? How some consensus arises that this story, rather than that one, will live on? Will be as or more meaningful decades or even centuries hence as it seemed upon its release?

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is one such success story: a classic in both the critical and the commercial sense. You might think that last an insignificant point, moot in many ways, but glowing reviews do not necessarily beget stellar sales, and only rarely do questions of quality play a part in the bestseller charts. Ender's Game, however, has remained in print for nearly 30 years, shifted many millions of copies, and spawned untold prequels, sequels and side-stories. There's an ongoing comic, an authorised companion to the Enderverse, and a movie adaptation in the making; next summer's genre blockbuster, by all appearances.

Add to that - on the other end of the equation - the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1985, the Nebula the next year, and a host of other prestigious proclamations of its general excellence. As one of its wiser characters asserts, "In all the world, the name of Ender is one to conjure with. The child-god, the miracle worker, with life and death in his hands." Ender's Game, then, is a known quantity of sorts. Or you would think it thus.

For my part, I came to Ender's Game with almost no knowledge of its plot... with not a notion about its characters, its conceptual concerns, its central narrative elements. All I brought to the table with me were my mixed memories of Card's last - namely The Lost Gate - and a rough recollection of the disturbing debacle over Hamlet's Father: ostensibly a retelling of the Shakespeare which went out of its way to expose, and I quote, "the dark secret of homosexual society." So perhaps not the most positive predisposition, but nevertheless, I expected Ender's Game to be tremendous. It's a classic, after all.

Now I'm in no position to dispute that, but were I... well I would, and I wouldn't. I'm in two minds, truth be told. Even now. I did enjoy Ender's Game. It's an interesting extrapolation of the prototypical super-soldier story, recast with innocent children in place of the usual convicted criminals or military guinea pigs. It asks some important questions about violence, retribution and responsibility. Its morals may be a bitter pill, but not an impossible one to swallow, and this is of course in keeping with the best sf.

Saying that, all the business in the battle room is basically space quidditch. Insipid stuff in other words. And then there's this, which I had to asterisk up just to get it into the system:

Alai cocked an eyebrow. 'Oh?'

'And Shen.'

'That slanty-eyed little butt-wiggler?'

Ender decided that Alai was joking. 'Hey, we can't all be n*ggers.'

Alai grinned. 'My great great grandpa would have sold him first.'

'Let's go get Bernard and Shen and freeze these bugger-lovers.'

The saving grace of Ender's Game is that the bigotry by the numbers above isn't in evidence altogether too often, but when it is, it's enough to make one wonder: is this really the sort of thing we want to expose generation after generation of potential science fiction fans to? Why do we hold up this, and not that, as representative of the best newcomers can expect?

Ender's Game is a product of its era in another sense as well. In terms of its ideas, however visionary they may have been in 1977, when the short story Ender's Game is based on was first published in Analog, they were surely less so in 1985, when the book proper was published, and less again when Card "updated" it in 1991, revising out some (but not all) of its political incorrectness. In the here and now, having had more than thirty years to mix with the stuff of contemporary sf, these ideas seem... tame. Stale, I dare say.

But that's the trouble with tribbles, isn't it? By today's standards, sure, Ender's Game feels for the larger part unremarkable, but to dismiss a classic because of the impact it's had is equally indecent. So I won't dispute the touchstone status of Card's supposed greatest... I'll only assert that the revelatory last act, around which every other element of Ender's Game is oriented, is astonishingly flat. I won't take the piss out of the twist - I didn't see it coming - but the unwieldy infodump which follows paints the pace of the tale to date in pedestrian shades, robbing this pivotal moment of much of its power.

On the one hand, I'm glad to have read Ender's Game at long last, and however dated it may be - and indeed, uneven - I enjoyed the experience enough that I might yet soldier on with one or another of the sequels, but never mind Orson Scott Card's recent fall from grace: I do not know that this dark parable is one for the ages in any case.

***

Ender's Game

by Orson Scott Card

UK Publication: December 2011, Orbit

US Publication: July 1994, Tor

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading