Book Review | The Power by Naomi Alderman

All over the world women are discovering they have the power. With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain—even death. Suddenly, every man on the planet finds they've lost control.

The Day of the Girls has arrived - but where will it end?

***

In the periphery of The Power, a series of seemingly meaningless scenes shine an ultra-bright light on the core concerns of Naomi Alderman's astonishing new novel. These blink-and-you-might-miss-'em moments lay bare the working relationship between a pair of daytime television presenters whose respective roles reflect the devastating developments depicted in greater detail in the rest of the text.

Tom and Kristen are ineffably familiar figures, at first—as is their dynamic as a duo. The former is a moderately handsome middle-aged man who wears expensive suits and steers the show's serious segments; the latter is an improbably beautiful young woman dressed not to impress so much as to suggest whose most significant responsibility is to introduce the weather on the ones. In short, Tom is the host with the most, and Kristen is his sexy sidekick.

But when man's dominion over the wider world wanes, the parts our presenters have played to date are recast. Unwilling to accept this essential reversal, Tom has a live-on-the-telly tantrum. He's promptly replaced by Matt, a great guy, apparently, who's "a good ten years younger than Kristen." Matt laughs attractively and silently suffers "a gentle hand on his knee" while Kristen—now in less clingy clothes and finally wearing the glasses she's needed all these years, if only to give her gravitas—downright dominates their conversations.

The Power isn't about any of these people, particularly, but their changing situation effectively illustrates the revolution that results from the discovery of an organ of electricity in women.

To start with, there were confident faces on the TV, spokespeople from the CDC saying it was a virus, not very severe, most of the people recovered fine, and it just looked like young girls were electrocuting people with their hands. We all know that's impossible, right, that's crazy—the news anchors laughed so hard they cracked their makeup.

Crazy as the idea may be, it seems to be real. The first few viral videos of the eponymous power in practice are followed by hundreds and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands of others that aren't so easily explained away. The aforementioned organ of electricity—"a strip of striated muscle [named] the skein for its twisted strands"—isn't even exceptional, it appears. Every girl in the world has it, or will have it, and it can be "woken" in every older woman.

A multinational group of scientists is certain now that the power is caused by an environmental build-up of nerve agent that was released during the Second World War. It's changed the human genome. All girls born from now on with have the power—all of them. And they'll keep it throughout life, just like the older women do if it's woken up in them. It's too late now to try to cure it; we need new ideas.

Mayor Margot Cleary, one of The Power's four principle perspectives, thinks she might have them. She starts a private military corporation—ostensibly to train women in the ways of using their skeins sensitively, but if she so happens to end up with an army afterwards, then so much the better. An army might be hella handy in the coming months, especially if the men who see the power as a problem do what some of them are threatening to and declare war on women.

Book Review | Release by Patrick Ness

Adam Thorn doesn’t know it yet, but today will change his life.

Between his religious family, a deeply unpleasant ultimatum from his boss, and his own unrequited love for his sort-of ex, Enzo, it seems as though Adam’s life is falling apart. At least he has two people to keep him sane: his new boyfriend (he does love Linus, doesn’t he?) and his best friend, Angela.

But all day long, old memories and new heartaches come crashing together, throwing Adam’s life into chaos. The bindings of his world are coming untied one by one; yet in spite of everything he has to let go, he may also find freedom in the release.

***

Happy as I hope we all are, on the whole, I expect each and every one of us has lived through a few bad days too.

Now I don't mean those days when we have to deal with death or ill health or anything actively awful. I'm talking about those days that just suck a bunch; those days when nothing seems to go your way. Maybe it starts with a letter from the taxman and spirals up, up and away from there. Maybe the milk is spoiled so you can't have your morning coffee. Maybe traffic makes you late for work even though you left early. Whatever the particulars, these are the days when everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and damn your plans.

These days doesn't destroy us, because we're reasonably well adjusted human beings. Tomorrow's another day, we tell ourselves. It's not like the world is ending or anything. But it is in Patrick Ness' ninth novel. Like The Rest of Us Just Live Here and More Than This before it, Release is a smart and sensitive standalone story that mixes the mundane with the magical in order to underscore the extraordinary qualities of the ordinary. It's a brief book about a bad day as bold and as beautiful as any finely-honed tome about the rise of Rome.

The bad day I've been banging on about is had herein by a young man called Adam Thorn. Adam is a pretty typical kid. He's never done drugs or caught an STD or seen a psychiatrist or displeased the police. He probably did decently at school, and he's definitely been holding down an alright job at a warehouse run by an Evil International Mega-Conglomerate in the several years since. He doesn't deserve to be miserable, but he is—in large part because of his family.

They fuck us up, our families! They don't mean to, but they do, and Adam's family is no exception to that regrettable rule. His father's a pastor at The House Upon the Rock, his mother is Big Brian Thorn's number one one fan, and his older brother Marty does God's Work as well. Naturally, none of these things should stop them from caring for Adam like a good family would, except that he's gay, and with this, they are not okay. "There was always a wound, it seemed, kept freshly opened by a family who also kept saying they loved him."

Book Review | Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill

Humanity is extinct. Wiped out in a global uprising by the very machines made to serve them. Now the world is controlled by One World Intelligences—vast mainframes that have assimilated the minds of millions of robots. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality, and Brittle—a loner and scavenger, focused solely on survival—is one of the holdouts.

Critically damaged, Brittle has to hold it together long enough to find the essential rare parts to make repairs—but as a robot's CPU gradually deteriorates, all their old memories resurface. For Brittle, that means one haunting memory in particular...

***

C. Robert Cargill's first novel since the darkly delightful Dreams and Shadows duology is an intimate epic that plays outs like War for the Planet of the Apes with machines instead of monkeys. A soulful and stunningly accomplished work of science fiction set in a wasted world ruled by robots, Sea of Rust is a searching yet searing story of survival.

Sadly for our species at least, survival isn't in the cards. Sea of Rust takes place some time after the massacre of mankind, and as such, it has "a writhing mass of pseudo flesh and metal" (p.332) as its cast of characters. That includes our protagonist, Brittle: a Caregiver model manufactured to keep a widow company during the last days of the human race who has no-one but herself to care for now. But such is life in this devastated landscape:

The Sea of Rust [is] a two-hundred-mule stretch of desert located in what was once the Michigan and Ohio portion of the Rust Belt, now nothing more than a graveyard where machines go to die. It's a terrifying place for most, littered with rusting monoliths, shattered cities, and crumbling palaces of industry; where the first strike happened, where millions fried, burned from the inside out, their circuitry melted, useless, their drives wiped in the span of a breath. Here asphalt cracks in the sun; paint blisters off metal; sparse weeds sprout from the ruin. But nothing thrives. It's all just a wasteland now. (p.3)

A wasteland it may be, but Brittle—with most of the map memorised and emergency caches stashed away all over the place—braves it on a damn near daily basis. You see, the Sea of Rust is a lawless land, by and large, and to survive, you have to scavenge. To wit, Cargill's book begins with Brittle hot on the heels of a failing service bot who's here for the same reason as she: to replace his own broken bits and bobs. But Brittle's both wiser and wittier than Jimmy. She convinces him to shut down voluntarily, supposedly so that she can assess the damage to his dying drives. Then she scraps him for parts: an emulator, a sensor package and a battery. "All in all, it's a great haul." (p.16)

And that's Sea of Rust to a T, readers: it's dark, but it does has a heart, because in truth, Brittle could have just killed Jimmy. From a distance. Quickly. Instead, she took his impending death personally, and gave him hope before prying out his precious processor.

Book Review | The Boy on the Bridge by M. R. Carey

Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy.

The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world.

To where the monsters lived...

***

Whether it's a character that captures us or a narrative that enraptures us, a situation that speaks to something unspoken or a conflict that builds on something broken—who can say, on this or any other day, what makes a book a bestseller? The quality of a given novel has next to nothing to do with its success on store shelves, that's for sure. Plenty of bad books have shifted millions, and many more deserving efforts have come and gone to no such notice. It's a blessing, then, when a truly wonderful work of fiction becomes a bestseller... but it can also be a burden.

The Girl With all the Gifts was probably the best zombie novel to have been released in recent years, and it sold hella well—well enough to spawn a movie that was also pretty swell. But while the next book to bear M. R. Carey's name was a dark delight in its own right, Fellside didn't catch on in the same way, I'm afraid.

To wit, I wasn't entirely surprised when I heard that Carey's new novel was a sidequel of sorts to The Girl With all the Gifts. I was, however, concerned; concerned that setting a second story in the same world that Melanie and Miss Justineau so wholly inhabited ran the risk of diminishing their devastating adventures. Happily, The Boy on the Bridge bears its burden brilliantly, and I can only hope it's as blessed by the book-buying public as its predecessor.

It is, admittedly, a little derivative. And I don't just mean that it tugs on many of the same heartstrings The Girl With all the Gifts did—though it does, ultimately: The Boy on the Bridge is an equally bleak book, and equally beautiful, too. But that's not it either. I'm talking about the plot, which is, at least initially, almost a mirror image of its predecessor's: it's an apocalyptic road story about the relationship between a teacher and her unusual student.

Book Review | Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

“Am I a person or a weapon?” Borne asks Rachel, in extremis.

“Yes, you are a person,” Rachel tells him. “But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”

A ruined city of the future lives in fear of a despotic, gigantic flying bear, driven mad by the tortures inflicted on him by the Company, a mysterious biotech firm. A scavenger, Rachel, finds a creature entangled in his fur. She names it Borne.

At first, Borne looks like nothing at all―a green lump that might be a discard from the Company. But he reminds Rachel of her homeland, an island nation long lost to rising seas, and she prevents her lover, Wick, from rendering down Borne as raw genetic material for the special kind of drugs he sells.

But nothing is quite the way it seems: not the past, not the present, not the future. If Wick is hiding secrets, so is Rachel―and Borne most of all. What Rachel finds hidden deep within the Company will change everything and everyone. There, lost and forgotten things have lingered and grown. What they have grown into is mighty indeed.

***

Following his triumphant trek through Area X in the cerebral Southern Reach series, Jeff VanderMeer mounts a more modest yet no less affecting expedition into uncharted territory by way of Borne, a surprisingly beautiful book about a blob which behaves like a boy and the broken woman who takes him in.

Her name is Rachel, and when she was little, she "wanted to be a writer, or at least something other than a refugee. Not a trap-maker. Not a scavenger. Not a killer." (p.37) But we are what the world makes us, and no poxy author would have lasted long in the world in which this novel's narrator was raised:

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world. (p.37)

There is hope even in this haunted hellscape, however, and it takes a strange shape, as hope tends to: that of "a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colours" (p.6) Rachel finds in the festering fur of a skyscraper-sized flying bear called Mord.

She brings the titular thing, Borne-to-be, back to the Balcony Cliffs, a broken-down apartment building where she lives and works with Wick, her sometime lover and a secretive biotech beetle dealer who pushes a memory-altering product "as terrible and beautiful and sad and sweet as life itself." (p.7) Out of the gate, Rachel intends to give her purplish prize to him to pick at—but something, the beginning of some instinct, stays her hand. Instead, she places it in her room, and tries to take care of it.

"This required some experimenting, in part because [she] had never taken care of anyone or anything before," (p.17) but equally because her amorphous mass is a complete mystery. Certainly Wick has never seen its like, and having worked once for the Company, he has seen everything there is to see. To wit, Rachel treats this colourful clump like a plant to start; reclassifies it as an animal after it starts to move around her room; and then, when it shocks her by talking, she takes to behaving around it as she would a baby boy. She talks to him; teaches him; comes, ultimately, to love him—and he her in turn.

Book Review | Waking Hell by Al Robertson

Leila Fenech is dead. And so is her brother Dieter. But what's really pissing her off is how he sold his afterlife as part of an insurance scam and left her to pick up the pieces. She wants him back so she can kick his backside from here to the Kuiper Belt.

Station is humanity's last outpost. But this battle-scarred asteroid isn't just for the living. It's also where the dead live on as fetches: digital memories and scraps of personality gathered together and given life. Of a sort.

Leila won't stop searching Station until she's found her brother's fetch—but the sinister Pressure Men are stalking her every move. Clearly Dieter's got himself mixed up in something a whole lot darker than just some scam.

Digging deeper, Leila discovers there's far more than her brother's afterlife at stake. Could it be that humanity's last outpost is on the brink of disaster? Is it too late for even the dead to save it?

***

On the back of one of the best debuts in recent memory, Al Robertson rounds up a brand new cast of characters for his second successive stop at Station. Absent "the dynamic duo" (p.173) that was Jack and Hugo—respectively "an accountant of the future [and] a psychotic virtual ventriloquist's dummy," in the words of the award-nominated author—Waking Hell isn't as compelling as Crashing Heaven, but between its excellently embellished setting and a narrative that boasts more momentum than most, there are moments when it comes close.

As of the outset, much has changed on Station, the battle-scarred asteroid where what's left of humanity lives under the purview of a pantheon of corporate gods:

Two and a half years before [...] Jack Forster, Hugo Fist and Andrea Hui had worked with the Totality to release the dead from semi-sentient slavery. But the Rebirth was just the start of a longer coming of age. It was one thing for ten thousand weaveselves to be reborn as fully self-aware continuations of ended lives—quite another for them to come to terms with that new start, both as individuals and as a group, and understand what to do with it. When Leila stepped out of the sea and into her new, post-mortal life, she became part of that conversation. (p.23)

The hero at the heart of Waking Hell has had to hoe a hard road in the years since her resurrection as a fetch. Initially, those like Leila Fenech were seen as sub-human, to be used and routinely abused by the living before being disposed of, like so much deleted data. The events of Crashing Heaven changed that; now, fetches finally have rights.

Still, there's resistance, including an organisation of individuals who damn near decimated the dead in an act of technological terrorism that'll stay with Leila to her last day. Luckily for her, she had her brother Dieter—a hacker with a particular fascination for the past—to lean on when the fanatics attacked:

When the Blood and Flesh plague shattered the deep structures of her memory, completely disordering her sense of herself, Dieter had helped her rebuild. He'd taken her out of the Coffin Drives' convalescence unit and back to his weavespace. Then he'd opened up his own memories of her life to her. They became a template, guiding her as she remade the structures of her past. He'd helped her heal when even the Fetch Counsellor had given up on her. 

Now he needed her just as much as she'd needed him. And she could only watch. (p.14)

She could only watch as he dies, infected from the inside out by an infernal artefact that feels like it fell straight out of Hellraiser—and by design, I dare say. Early on, at least, Waking Hell has a lot in common with a horror novel: it's all unsettling silences and gruesome goings-on, monsters and murders, and beyond these, thar be bees! Bees and some bloody ugly bugs. But for better or for worse, Robertson reverses gears too soon for these potentially interesting elements to have a dramatic impact on the narrative. What Waking Hell is is a solid science fiction sequel, despite the departure of its first act.

And its second, in a sense. This section is concerned with revenge, because while death is no longer the end in this milieu, Leila learns that for Dieter it will be. Essentially, he's been swindled into signing away the rights to his resurrection, ostensibly so that his sister will be looked after. And financially speaking, she is. Whoever the devil Dieter dealt with is, he's as good as his word. But rather than using the huge sum of money she inherits to live a right nice afterlife, Leila spends it in search of said devil's identity.

Then, with the help of a few friends—first and foremost a fraud investigator and an amnesiac janitor who aren't nearly as dreary as they seem—she sets out to bring the fight to the being that bastardised her beloved brother. Little does Leila realise that the being already has an army... an army it's planning to aim straight at Station. And as one of her new comrades says, "Of course you've got to look out for the people you love. [...] But if the whole of the rest of the world is in danger, you might have to start thinking a bit bigger." (p.147)

A bit bigger is actually a decent way of describing Waking Hell as a whole. It doesn't have the personality of Crashing Heaven—although its characters are a relatively rambunctious bunch, only the Caretaker entertains in the way Hugo Fist did, and I'm afraid he's far from front and centre—but it has scope and scale to spare. Nothing less than the fate of our race is at stake, and happily, there's more to humanity than the blasted asteroid Robertson's first novel focused on.

Leila's race to recover her brother—and, in so doing, save the day—gives us a window into this well-widened world, from the repellent reality underlying the weird and wonderful weavespaces people have created on Station to the scorched surface of the Earth humanity abandoned. And at the same time as casting the core conflict as increasingly crucial, the explosive expansion of Waking Hell's setting gives its narrative a frisson of the frenetic.

When I reviewed Crashing Heaven two years or so ago, I remarked that I hadn't a clue what the second of the Station books would look like. Given the devastating denouement of Robertson's dizzying debut, I knew it was destined to be different—but what those differences would be, I could only wait and see. That was enough to excite me. From here, however, it's much easier to conceive of an act three... and that's oddly disappointing.

An exploration of identity filtered through a revenge fantasy with a humble helping of horror, Waking Hell is fearsome, fast moving and fun—but it's also fairly straightforward, flat where the last book was full, and frankly much less memorable without Hugo Fist, who I really, really missed.

***

Waking Hell

by Al Robertson

UK Publication: October 2016, Gollancz

US Publication: April 2017, Gollancz

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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | The End of the Day by Claire North

At the end of the day, Death visits everyone. Right before that, Charlie does. Sometimes he is sent as a courtesy, sometimes as a warning. He never knows which.

You might meet him in a hospital, in a warzone, or at the scene of a traffic accident. Then again, you might meet him at the North Pole—he gets everywhere, our Charlie.

Would you shake him by the hand, take the gift he offers, or would you pay no attention to the words he says?

***

I've fallen for every one of Claire North's novels. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Touch and The Sudden Appearance of Hope have between them broken my heart and expanded my mind. They've thrilled me and they've chilled me. By way of them I've been exposed to new places, new ideas—new ways of being, even. But if I had to level a single criticism against her thoughtful body of work, it would have to be directed at its measure, because whilst her texts have tackled a great many meaningful themes, not least the array of ways we determine identity, I've found North's literary positions a little non-committal.

That's not the case in The End of the Day. This is a book with something to say; something important, if I may. It's slow to start, and oddly episodic even when the plot has picked up; its characters come and go with next to no notice; it's difficult, and confusing, and contradictory—but that's what life is like, right? And the messy, maddening, magical gift of life we've all been given, that's what The End of the Day deals in: not death... although its principal perspective is on her payroll.

Like North's other novels, The End of the Day is a high concept travelogue of sorts, but this fiction's frequent flier is Charlie, and Charlie just got hired! He's to be the Harbinger of the foremost of the apocryphal horsemen, of which singular position Death gives this description:

The Harbinger is a mortal, a bridge between this world and the next. In the old days I used eagles, but people stopped paying attention to them after a while—just birds in he sky—[so] I switched to humans a few thousand years ago. One must move with the times. (pp.12-13)

North doesn't waste any time reinventing the wheel here. Death appears in any number of forms over the course of the story. Sometimes he's male and sometimes she isn't; from time to time she has a scythe; here and there, horns protrude from his lumpen skull. "In all other respects he was the figure she had known would come, the god of the underworld, exactly as the stories said he would be." (p.14)

Charlie, on the other hand, is just a puny human.

Book Review | Babylon's Ashes by James S. A. Corey

A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood.

The Free Navy—a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships—has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them.

James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone. Outnumbered and outgunned, the embattled remnants of the old political powers call on the Rocinantefor a desperate mission to reach Medina Station at the heart of the gate network.

But the new alliances are as flawed as the old, and the struggle for power has only just begun. As the chaos grows, an alien mystery deepens. Pirate fleets, mutiny and betrayal may be the least of the Rocinante's problems. And in the uncanny spaces past the ring gates, the choices of a few damaged and desperate people may determine the fate of more than just humanity.

***

The Expanse made a tremendous first impression, and the next novels in the blockbuster space opera Leviathan Wakes started went from strength to strength, knocking the overarching first contact narrative out of the park at the same time as remaining satisfyingly self-contained. But then there was a wobble—a wobble of opportunity squandered that nearly drove this reader from the series. It fell, finally, to Nemesis Games to right not a sinking ship, but one that was at least listing.

I was delighted that it did. By contracting as opposed to expanding—by firmly and finely focusing on the characters that had been at its heart from the start—Nemesis Games recaptured the intimate magic that The Expanse's latter chapters lacked, and although it didn't address the presence of the protomolecule, something dramatic did actually happen in book five: something that completely changed the state of play across the Milky Way.

The Belt had finally shrugged off the yoke of the inner planets. They had Medina Station at the heart of the ring gates, they had the only functioning navy in the solar system, and they had the gratitude of millions of Belters. In the long term, it was the greatest statement of independence and freedom the human race had ever made. (p.18)

Said statement came at a cost, of course. You don't just get to declare that you're done with the people who've been keeping you and run off with their resources—not now and not in this near-future milieu. If no one's listening, you have to force the issue. You might even have to fight for that right.

Unfortunately for a huge hunk of humanity—for the folks who've made their homes on Earth and Mars and the Moon—the Free Navy didn't care about collateral damage when they conspired to fire asteroid fragments at the planet their oppressors were arranged around:

There had been thirty billion people on the overcrowded Earth, dependent on a vast network of machinery to keep them fed and hydrated and not drowning in their own waste. A third of those, by the more pessimistic estimates, had already died. Holden had seen a few seconds of a report discussing how the death count in Western Europe was being done by assaying atmospheric changes. How much methane and cadaverine were in the air let them guess how many people were rotting in the ruined streets and cities. That was the scale of the disaster. (p.33)

Essentially, it's the end of the world as we know it, and Marcos Inaros, the man behind it, feels fine.

Book Review | The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin

The season of endings grows darker, as civilisation fades into the long cold night.

Essun—once Damaya, once Syenite, now avenger—has found shelter, but not her daughter. Instead there is Alabaster Tenring, destroyer of the world, with a request. But if Essun does what he asks, it would seal the fate of the Stillness forever.

Far away, her daughter Nassun is growing in power—and her choices will break the world.

***

Middle volume syndrome sets in in the surprisingly circumspect sequel to one of the best and bravest books of 2015. Though the world remains remarkable, and the characters at the heart of the narrative are as rich and resonant as ever, The Obelisk Gate sacrifices The Fifth Season's substance and sense of momentum for a far slighter and slower story.

In the Stillness, a perpetually apocalyptic landscape which may or may not be our planet many generations hence, purpose is a pre-requisite. A use-caste, it's called. There are strongbacks and breeders and cutters and hunters, to name just a few, all of whom are defined by what they do; by what they can contribute to the communities, or comms, that they call home.

This is a hard world, however, replete with hard people. Season after Season—of widespread death by choking, boiling and breathlessness among other, equally unpleasant ends—has seen to that, so no comm will carry you if you're not prepared to pull your weight in some way. In the Stillness, there's just no place for waste.

No place for orogenes like our heroes, either. Able as they are to manipulate thermal and kinetic energy, orogenes, or roggas, have huge power, and with it, responsibility. That they could choose to behave irresponsibly, or behave in that fashion by accident, represents a risk most of the men and women of this world aren't willing to take. To wit, orogenes are either slaughtered as soon as they start exhibiting abilities, or sent to the Fulcrum, to be trained; some might say tamed.

Dear little Damaya, The Fifth Season's first perspective, was one such soul, summarily taken from her parents simply because she was different. At the Fulcrum, she was shaped—through pain and the promise of gain—into Syenite, said text's second perspective, but when, years later, she discovered the depths of the depravity underpinning this facility, she escaped, and again changed her name. As Essun, the third of The Fifth Season's three POVs, she met a man and had a family, all while hiding what she was, as well as what her children were... just as N. K. Jemisin hid the fact that her novel's seemingly separate narrators were one and the same.

That discovery packed a proper punch, but it's a known quantity now—as indeed is Essun's deception.

Book Review | The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

Deep in the jungle of Peru, a black, skittering mass devours an American tourist party whole. FBI agent Mike Rich investigates a fatal plane crash in Minneapolis and makes a gruesome discovery. Unusual seismic patterns register in a Indian earthquake lab, confounding the scientists there. The Chinese government "accidentally" drops a nuclear bomb in an isolated region of its own country. The first female president of the United States is summoned to an emergency briefing. And all of these events are connected.

As panic begins to sweep the globe, a mysterious package from South America arrives at Melanie Guyer's Washington laboratory. The unusual egg inside begins to crack. A virulent ancient species, long dormant, is now very much awake. But this is only the beginning of our end...

***

In recent years, apocalyptic fiction has gotten pretty political. Where once it was the preserve of the firmly fantastical or the nominally natural, like the rampaging rats of James Herbert's unforgettable first novel, or Michael Crichton's reconditioned dinosaurs, such stories have since taken a turn for the topical. Now we have nuclear winters to worry about, a cache of climate catastrophes, and the release of diseases genetically engineered to "solve" the planet's overpopulation problems. For those of us who read to escape the devastation of the day-to-day, it's all gotten uncomfortably current.

Happily, The Hatching hearkens back to the detached disasters of yesteryear. The end of the world as we know it isn't even our own fault in Ezekiel Boone's book—it comes about because of some damned spiders:

There are thirty-five thousand species of spiders and they've been on earth for at least three hundred million years. From the very origin of humanity, spiders have been out there, scuttling along the edges of firelight, spinning webs in the woods, and scaring the hell out of us, even though, with a few rare exceptions, they are no real threat. But these were something different.

These spiders are more like ants, in fact, in that they're essentially social: what they do, they do for the good of the group as opposed to their own individual ends, which means they can set their collective sights on bigger and better prey than bluebottles. Creepy as one arachnid is, in other words, it's got nothing on a sea of the beasties with an appetite for people.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves—a lesson Boone would do well to learn, because before the inevitable rise of the spiders, he gets bogged down in setting up a situation for them to chew through, and sadly, it isn't up to snuff, largely because it relies on a cast of conspicuously cartoonish characters.

Of these, there are those whose only role in the whole is to be summarily dispatched so as to show that the aforementioned arachnids are the real deal. That's clear—and effective, yes—the first time a spider eats its way out of one of their forgettable faces; by the fifth time someone is dispatched in that fashion, it's gotten a bit boring, and alas, The Hatching has hardly started.

Book Review | The Fireman by Joe Hill

No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the unborn child she is carrying comes to term.

***

Unlike some, I have a soft spot for Heart-Shaped Box, and a lot of love for Horns, but even I'd agree that NOS4A2 is Joe Hill's strongest novel—not least, I believe, because it's also his longest. The larger than life-sized story it told and the complex characters explored over its engrossing course simply couldn't have come to be without the room to breathe its length allowed, so when I found out The Fireman was similarly thick, I was pleased.

And it's an awesome novel, naturally: an apocalyptic parable written from the perspective of an infectiously happy heroine every millimetre as meaty and memorable as Ms. Vic McQueen, and whose hellish ex gives Charles Talent Manx a run for his money. But for all that The Fireman kicks off brilliantly and ends tremendously well, the middle section of the text—an epic in and of itself—tends towards the plodding and the predictable.

It begins with the world burning.

It's been burning for months, as a matter of fact, but only "in filthy places no one wants to go," you know. So sayeth Harper Grayson's asshole of a husband. And it's true that the first recorded cases of Draco Incendia Trychophyto—a spore that marks its hosts with gorgeous golden growths before causing them to suddenly combust—it's true, at least according to the news, that the so-called 'Scale originated elsewhere.

Some say the Russians engineered it. Others insist on the involvement of ISIS, or, failing that, fundamentalists fixated on the book of Revelations. Truth be told, its source isn't so important, because the thing about fire is, it spreads—and with it, this incipient sickness. Before long, "fifteen million people are infected. Maine is like Mordor now," Harper has it: "a belt of ash and poison a hundred miles wide. Southern California is even worse. Last I heard, SoCal was on fire from Escondido to Santa Maria."

With "her silliness and her sense of play and her belief that the kindnesses you showed other added up to something," said school nurse is just about the sweetest human being there's ever been, so whilst her increasingly hysterical other half hides, Harper helps, however she can. Alas, lending a hand at the local hospital leads to her developing symptoms of the 'Scale herself—just hours after she learns she's pregnant.

Book Review | The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin

In life I was a scientist called Fanning...

...then, in a jungle in Bolivia, I died...

I died, and then I was brought back to life.

Prompted by a voice that lives in her blood, the fearsome warrior known as Alicia of Blades is drawn towards to one of the great cities of The Time Before. The ruined city of New York. Ruined but not empty. For this is the final refuge of Zero, the first and last of The Twelve. The one who must be destroyed if mankind is to have a future.

What she finds is not what she's expecting: a journey into the past, to find out how it all began, and an opponent at once deadlier and more human than she could ever have imagined.

***

The epic journey that began in The Passage finally comes full circle in The City of Mirrors, a proper doorstopper of a novel that satisfies somewhat in spite of its sheer size and a hell of a hammy bad guy.

I have such fond memories of the beginning of this trilogy, which paired an awesome and expansive apocalypse—one up there, in my estimation, with the end of the world in Swan Song and The Stand—with a truly heartbreaking tale of loss on the small scale. By the denouement of that book, I had no idea where the story as a whole was going to go, but I knew that I wanted to know. And then... well.

The Twelve wasn't terrible. It had a couple of a kick-ass action scenes, and some stirring slower moments that allowed Justin Cronin to explore the emotions of his vast cast of characters. But almost every other inch of that many-inched monolith of a novel felt like filler; texture at best and time-wasting at worst. In that respect, The City of Mirrors splits the difference. It doesn't meander as much as its messy predecessor did, but nor, on the back of such bloat, and with more of its own to add to the tally, can it recapture the magic of The Passage.

"Three years had passed since the liberation of the Homeland" (p.18) that ended The Twelve, and almost a hundred thousand souls now call the walled city of Kerrville, Texas home. Considering how catastrophic the survivors' situation seemed until recently, that's reason enough to be optimistic, never mind the fact that there hasn't been a single viral sighting since:

The age of the viral was over; humankind was finally on the upswing. A continent stood for the taking, and Kerrville was the place where this new age would begin. So why did it seem so meager to [Peter], so frail? Why, standing on the dam of an otherwise encouraging summer morning, did he feel this inward shiver of misgiving? (p.15)

Perhaps because Peter—the leader of the resistance that took down the Twelve viral progenitors, and in turn the millions of vampires they had sired—has lost his sense of purpose. Or perhaps because "people had begun to openly talk about moving outside the wall," (p.15) and he can't believe that the threat is actually at an end.

Book Review | Zero K by Don DeLillo

Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.

“We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?”

These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.”

Don DeLillo’s seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.”

***

"Everybody wants to own the end of the world," begins Don DeLillo's first new novel since Point Omega in 2010, and like the finest opening lines, Zero K's is soaked through with significance.

Fittingly for a work of fiction interested in "fathers and sons," this is a remark Ross Lockhart, a billionaire in his sixties, makes to Jeffrey—his aimless heir, and our narrator—as they stand in his opulent New York office, surrounded on all sides by abstract art and other markers of money: motifs readers will encounter repeatedly as they make their way through Zero K. It's important to note, furthermore, that this phrase is not spoken in the moment, but rather recalled by "a man propelled into obsessive reflection."

As to the words themselves... well. To own is to possess, yes, but these days, it also denotes domination, and this is what Ross wants: to use his dollars to dominate the end of the world. That's not to say the apocalypse, but the end of the world as we mere mortals perceive it, at the very end of our selves—in death.

Ross makes this startling statement, we learn a little later, because his second wife Artis Martineau is dying. But the owner and operator of the Lockhart fortune isn't a man so easily beaten. See, he's been led to believe that his riches might give her a future in the future, which is why he's flown her to the home of a clinical cult called Convergence, where—in exchange for substantial donation, I dare say—she'll be frozen at a temperature approaching absolute zero in her last moments, to be re-awoken one day, decades or centuries or millennia hence, when medicine is in a position to correct her condition.

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 | Down Station by Simon Morden

Mary. One slip, one weakness away from prison, fighting to build a future for herself out of so little.

Dalip. The gentle son of a Warrior tradition. A young man who must fight to be apart from his family.

Stanislav. Carrying the wounds of a brutal war.

They left London in flames and found a place where everything was different. A place that found you out. A place haunted by a man called Crows... 

***

Let's hear it for freedom.

Seriously: for freedom in all its forms—for the freedom to dream and the freedom to scream; for the freedom to be who we want to be, do what we want to do, love who we like and live the way we might—let's hear it!

Freedom isn't just fine, it's fundamental. We become who we become because of it. But in as much as the freedom to choose may shape us, our choices can come to contain us.

Down Station by Simon Morden is a book about breaking out of the frames we make of these freedoms, and it kicks off with a couple of Londoners losing everything they love—not least said city, which appears to burn to the ground around them in the beginning.

[Read more.]

They are Mary, a contrary teenager with anger management issues, and Dalip, a twentysomething Sikh with dreams of being an engineer. Both are working in the tunnels of the subway when the aforementioned catastrophe happens; a catastrophe that would have claimed their lives, in all likelihood, if they hadn't discovered a door that almost certainly wasn't there before. "A door that [...] more or less disappeared as soon as they closed it," (p.40) promptly depositing them in a landscape that looks absolutely natural—except, I suppose, for the sea-serpent, the wyvern in the sky, and the massive moon Mary and Dalip see it silhouetted against.

"Whoever first named it, named it right. Down is where we are," a man called Crows—another escapee from the world as we know it—explains a little later. "It is both a destination and a direction, it is how we fall and where we land." (p.126) And in Down, our everyman protagonists must discover themselves all over again if they're to stand a chance of surviving in a world which in a real way responds to their behaviour.

For Mary, an urban girl entirely out of her element, that's scary: "There were no rules. No one telling her what to do. No one to make her do anything. [...] What she was feeling was fear." (p.74) For Dalip, it's a little different:

Almost his every waking moment had been planned, since he'd been old enough to remember. This school, that club, a friend's house, the gurdwara, plays and concerts and recitals and family, so much family: brothers and sisters and cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts. The thought that he might be free of all that was... intoxicating. Even if it was just for a while, before someone was able to show him the way home. (p.64)

Alas, there are no someones coming. There's just Mary, Dalip, a few disappointingly underdeveloped supporting characters—here's looking at you, Mama and Stanislav—and the diabolical denizens of Down, one of whom generously tells our gang about the geomancer. Apparently, maps are the currency of this world most weird, and the geomancer makes them, so if anyone hereabouts can help them get home, it's her.

That's what a man made of wolves says, anyway. Me, I'd struggle to trust a man made of wolves, but this lot are desperate, I guess. And they only grow more so when—what do you know?—they're attacked on the path to the geomancer's castle. By, ah... a man made of wolves.

Down Station is a little predictable, at points, but the Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of the marvelous Metrozone novels and late of the greatly underrated Arcanum keeps the pace at such a brisk pitch that you only notice the lows when they're over. In the intervening period, you've had such fantastic fun—think The Wizard of Oz with lashings of Lost—that it's easy to overlook the telegraphed turns the tale takes on the way to its eventual destination: a cracking battle between a much-changed Mary and a certain skyborn beast.

To wit, in terms of plot and pace, Morden's ninth novel is tight and taut—and I'd argue that its relative brevity is a boon to boot. At approximately 300 pages, Down Station is a ways off wearing out its welcome when the literary kitchen closes its doors; though the portion sizes might be on the slight side, chef serves up a satisfying three-course meal here, leaving readers stuffed enough, but not so full that they won't have an appetite for more when it's over. And in case you weren't aware, there will be more, folks: The White City beckons, and after that... why, this whimsical world is Morden's oyster.

Fingers crossed that he cracks the surviving secondary characters in The Books of Down yet ahead. Mary and Dalip ably showcase the transformative nature of choice and change I touched on at the top, but Dalip's impromptu instructor is so secretive he's hard to get a handle on, Mary's guardian angel is wasted in spite of a strong start, and although he shines sometimes, I expected much more of Crows, not least because he's such a central element of Blacksheep's exceptional cover art.

Then again, the Londoners above aren't friends or enemies yet—they're "just a bunch of people thrown together by the fact that [they] didn't die," (p.100) so there's hope for these folks, especially here, where they're free of "their hopes and dreams, their fears and nightmares, the past they'd lived and the future they were destined to live." (p.254) To paraphrase what might as well be the mantra of this narrative, it's what they do now that counts. Similarly, what Simon Morden does with The White City, now that he's introduced it so succinctly, will be what matters when The Books of Down are done.

***

Down Station
by Simon Morden

US Publication: February 2016, Gollancz

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

What if you aren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death?

What if you're like Mikey, who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school—again. 

And what if there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life? Even if your best friend might just be the God of mountain lions...

***

In the suggestive sentence attached to the first chapter of The Rest of Us Just Live Here, "the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate." (p.9)

The world is ending again, evidently. But never mind the Messenger—the impending apocalypse its presence heralds is not the point of Patrick Ness' latest revelation. There are indeed dark times ahead for the friends of indie kid Finn—this Immortals nonsense will lead to any number of melodramatic deaths—but the household heroes of The Rest of Us Just Live Here are safely outside of said circle.

That's not to say their days lack drama, or tragedy, but like you and me, reader, rather than the saviours at the centre of so many Chosen One stories, just living keeps them plenty busy.

We yearn the same, wish the same. We're just as screwed-up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else. And even if there's no one in my family or my circle of friends who's going to be the Chosen One or the Beacon of Peace or whatever the hell it's going to be next time around, I reckon there are a lot more people like me than there are indie kids with unusual names and capital-D Destinies. (p.35)

"Your humble narrator" (p.55) Mikey Mitchell has hit the nail on the head, here, and the notion that normal is not the same as insignificant informs every last aspect of the new novel from the mind behind A Monster Calls.

Book Review | Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub-Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.

Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.

Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.

***

In Salman Rushdie's first novel for older readers in something like seven years—an onion-skinned thing at once wise, wilful and winningly whimsical—a great storm signals the end of the world as we know it.

A state of strangeness reigns in the wake of this otherworldly weather. Lightning springs from fingers; a would-be graphic novelist dreams the superhero he conceived into being; an abandoned baby bestows "blemishes and boils" on those who tell tall tales in her pint-sized presence; meanwhile, an elderly gentleman who calls himself Geronimo wakes up one day able to levitate: which all sounds quite delightful, doesn't it?

Don't be fooled, folks. Many will perish in the next two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights. Wars will be fought and an awful lot—not least lives—will be lost. But every ending has a new beginning built in, and perhaps a better world will arise from the ashes of the last. Maybe Rushdie's plea for a future "ruled by reason, tolerance, magnanimity, knowledge, and restraint" will be accepted rather than outright rejected. Stranger things have happened.

The overarching narrative of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (hereafter just Two Years, if you please) is an encapsulation of exactly that argument—between the rational and the unreasonable. Representing these opposing perspectives are two long-dead men: the intellectual Idb Rushd and Ghazali of Tus, a sinister, fire-and-brimstone figure whose irrational rhetoric made a laughing stock of the aforementioned philosopher.

But Rushd's life was not all strife. For a little while, when he lived—a millennium or so ago, don't you know—he loved, and was loved by, a beautiful woman called Dunia who bore him many children.

Being a man of reason, he did not guess that she was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn, the jiniri: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular.

Generations later, in the present day, their disparate descendants—all one thousand and one of them—are all that stands between humanity and the dark jinn that declare war on the world at the behest of the disgusted dust that was once Ghazali.