Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations can co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But peace has also made humanity complacent.
Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the 21st century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the start of the Trisolar Crisis, and her presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?
***
The translation and publication of Cixin Liu's Three-Body books has been a singular highlight of the science fiction scene in recent years. The Hugo Award-winning opening salvo of said saga took in physics, farming, philosophy and first contact, and that was just for starters. The world was wondrous, the science startling, and although the author's choice of "a man named 'humanity'" as that narrative's central character led to a slight lack of life, The Three-Body Problem promised profundity.
A year later, The Dark Forest delivered. Bolstered by "a complex protagonist, an engrossing, high-stakes story and a truly transcendent setting, The Dark Forest [was] by every measure a better book" than The Three-Body Problem. Not only did it account for its predecessor's every oversight, it also embiggened the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy brilliantly and explored a series of ideas that astonished even seasoned science fiction readers.
But "no banquet was eternal. Everything had an end. Everything." (p.27) And when something you care about does approach that point, all you can do is hope it ends well.
In the latest novel from one of the UK's greatest writers we return to the Dream Archipelago, a string of islands that no one can map or explain.
Alesandro Sussken is a composer, and we see his life as he grows up in a fascist state constantly at war with another equally faceless opponent. His brother is sent off to fight; his family is destroyed by grief. Occasionally Alesandro catches glimpses of islands in the far distance from the shore, and they feed into his music—music for which he is feted.
But all knowledge of the other islands is forbidden by the junta, until he is unexpectedly sent on a cultural tour. And what he discovers on his journey will change his perceptions of his country, his music and the ways of the islands themselves.
Playing with the lot of the creative mind, the rigours of living under war and the nature of time itself, this is Christopher Priest at his absolute best.
***
Pro tip, folks: never, ever, ever ask artists where they get their ideas from. It's not a trade secret or anything so sensational—it's just a silly question in the eyes of the aforementioned, and at best, silly questions beget silly answers, such as the bit about the Bognor Regis-based ideas dealer Neil Gaiman used to use. The fact of the matter is that art is inherently personal, and people, whatever their superficial similarities, are completely unique, so what inspires one person in one way isn't likely to inspire another, and if it does, it'll be differently.
That's just one of the lessons the eventually-fêted composer Alesandro Sussken learns in The Gradual: a dreamlike diatribe on the source of song and scene and story and so on, arranged, somewhat like a literary symphony, around one man's lifelong journey through the tides of time.
Like The Islanders and The Adjacent and a bunch of other Christopher Priest books before it, The Gradual takes place in the Dream Archipelago, which is to say "the largest geographical feature in the world, comprising literally millions of islands." The Susskens—a family of musicians, mostly—live on Glaund, which is at war with Faiandland, and has been for as long as anyone can remember, for reasons no one can rightly recall. This sort of thing is not uncommon in the Dream Archipelago, so Alesandro doesn't take it too personally... that is, until his older brother Jacj is enlisted.
Years pass. Indeed, decades do:
Jacj's absence was eternally in the background of everything I did. Whatever had happened to him gave me feelings of dread, misery, horror, helplessness, but you cannot work up these emotions every day, every hour. I feared for him, was terrified of the news that I felt would come inevitably: he was dead, he had gone missing in action, he was horrifically wounded, he had deserted and been shot by officers. All these I pondered.
Yet the time went by...
As time tends to. Inevitably, Alesandro has to direct his energies elsewhere, and perhaps it's the fact that Jacj may yet be out there somewhere that leads to our hero's first fascination with the world outwith his.
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.
"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.
Turn down Slade Alley—narrow, dank and easy to miss, even when you're looking for it. Find the small black iron door set into the right-hand wall. No handle, no keyhole, but at your touch it swings open. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't quite make sense; too grand for the shabby neighbourhood, too large for the space it occupies.
A stranger greets you by name and invites you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't.
This unnerving, taut and intricately woven tale by one of our most original and bewitching writers begins in 1979 and reaches its turbulent conclusion around Hallowe'en, 2015. Because every nine years, on the last Saturday of October, a 'guest' is summoned to Slade House. But why has that person been chosen, by whom and for what purpose?
The answers lie waiting in the long attic, at the top of the stairs...
***
Though there have ever been elements of the speculative in David Mitchell's fiction, his Man Booker Prize longlisted-last, released in 2014, was the first to fully embrace the form. Section by section, The Bone Clocks revealed itself to be "a soaring supernatural sextet" somewhat taken with time travel and very interested indeed in immortality. Unfortunately, the protracted finale of Mitchell's sixth made a middling meal of the same fantastical flourishes that had been so appealing when presented with more measure—an oversight I'm pleased to say he sets right in his laconic new novel.
Comprised of a collection of interlinked short stories, Slade House shares a world with The Bone Clocks—such that the Shaded Way has a pivotal role to play and Spot the Horologist is the game of the day—but where said setting was once an expansive canvas spattered with the stuff of science fiction, in this book it becomes the close-cropped backdrop of a hypnotic history of haunting.
For all that it has in common with The Bone Clocks, Slade House'scharacters and narrative notions are its own—excepting, perhaps, the presence of little Nathan Bishop, the central character of the first section of this text: an extended version of the same short Mitchell shared by way of the "diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjacket" of Twitter in the lead up to the publication of its predecessor.
Reiterated, 'The Right Sort' does not stop with Nathan lost in the gorgeous grounds of Slade House, which, like the text itself, are basically "a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever." (p.119) Instead, he ends up in the Victorian property proper, where the owners, Norah and Jonah, proceed to essentially sup his soul.
"It's not as if Norah and Jonah go 'Wooooooh' or drip ectoplasm or write scary messages in mirrors," (p.63) but they are, as it happens, as good as ghosts—or rather as bad.
A vast conflict, one that has encompassed hundreds of worlds and solar systems, appears to be finally at an end. A conscripted soldier is beginning to consider her life after the war and the family she has left behind. But for Scur—and for humanity—peace is not to be.
On the brink of the ceasefire, Scur is captured by a renegade war criminal, and left for dead in the ruins of a bunker. She revives aboard a prisoner transport vessel. Something has gone terribly wrong with the ship.
Passengers—combatants from both sides of the war—are waking up from hibernation far too soon. Their memories, embedded in bullets, are the only links to a world which is no longer recognizable. And Scur will be reacquainted with her old enemy, but with much higher stakes than just her own life.
***
It was a long war. A hard war. A sprawling war between hundreds of worlds, in which millions of lives were lost... and for what?
For all the usual reasons, really. Power. Pennies. Practicalities. Politics. But at bottom, words were what caused the war between the Central Worlds and the Peripheral Systems: the words of two essentially identical texts, precious as they proved to people on both sides of the divide.
But now the war is over.
There was a problem, though. The skipships were the only way to send messages as faster than light speeds, so it took time for the news to spread. To begin with, not everyone believed that the ceasefire was real. Even when neutral peacekeepers came in to our system, the fighting continued. (p.10)
Scurelya Timsuk Shunde, the not-entirely-reliable narrator of Alastair Reynolds' new novella, is a soldier captured after the close of this conflict by a man who takes pleasure in other people's pain.
For a time, Orvin is content to torture her, but as peacekeepers close in on his position, he shoots Scur with a slow bullet—a dog tag with onboard storage—that he's modified to make as horrible as possible:
"Normally there's not much pain. The medics use a topical anaesthetic to numb the entry area, and the slow bullet puts out another type of drug as it travels through your insides. It goes very slowly, too—or at least it's meant to. Hence the name, of course. And it avoids damaging any vital organs or circulatory structures as it progresses to its destination, deep enough inside your chest that it can't be removed without complicated surgery. But this one's different. It's going to hurt like the worst thing you've ever known and it's going to keep burrowing through you until it reaches your heart."
"Why?"
Orvin let out a little laugh. "Why not?" (pp.14-15)
Scur doesn't expect to survive this evil ordeal, but she does. Just.
Later—exactly how long later I ain't saying—she awakens in a hibo capsule on a skipship packed full of prisoners of war. Immediately, one wonders: why is she among them? It must be a mistake. Either that or Scur isn't the telling us the whole story...
Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history, along with some handy robots from the far human future—all set down together on a Mediterranean island in the distant past.
They come from all eras of history. The student Simmea, born an Egyptian farmer's daughter sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D, is a brilliant child, eager for knowledge, ready to strive to be her best self. The teacher Maia was once Ethel, a young Victorian lady of much learning and few prospects, who prayed to Pallas Athene in an unguarded moment during a trip to Rome—and, in an instant, found herself in the Just City with grey-eyed Athene standing unmistakably before her.
Meanwhile, Athene's brother Apollo—stunned by the realisation that there are things mortals understand better than he does—has arranged to live a human life, and has come to the City as one of the children. He knows his true identity, and conceals it from his peers. For this lifetime, he is prone to all the troubles of being human.
Then, a few years in, Sokrates arrives—the same Sokrates recorded by Plato himself—to ask all the troublesome questions you would expect. What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell—a story of gods and humans, and the surprising things they have to learn from one another.
***
There's a touch of time travel in The Just City, and a rabble of robots that may well be self-aware, but please, don't read Jo Walton's thoughtful new novel expecting an exhilarating future history, or an account of the aggressive ascent of artificial intelligence. Read it as a roadmap, though, and this book may well make you a better person.
A restrained, if regrettably rapey fable with a focus on exposing the problems with philosophy when it's applied as opposed to lightly outlined, The Just City takes as its basis a certain social experiment proposed by Plato:
The Republic is about Plato's ideas of justice—not in terms of criminal law, but rather how to maximise happiness by living a life that is just both internally and externally. He talks about both a city and a soul, comparing the two, setting out his idea of both human nature and how people should live, with the soul a microcosm of the city. His ideal city, as with the ideal soul, balanced the three parts of human nature: reason, passion, and appetites. By arranging the city justly, it would also maximise justice within the souls of the inhabitants. (p.32)
That's the idea, at least. Alas, in reality, justice is far harder to achieve than the great Greek believed.
When a nymph named Daphne opts to be turned into a tree rather than share in eros with the god Apollo, said son of Zeus turns to Athene, the goddess of knowledge, to find out why the woman went to such lengths to avoid his affections. By way of explanation, Athene invites Apollo to participate in a realisation of the Republic. He takes her up on her offer by taking on the form of a mortal boy called Pytheas: one of ten thousand ten-year-olds saved, as their new masters would have it, from a life lacking liberty.
Simmea comes to the just city Athene teases into being with hope in her heart—hope that here, by learning to live according to Plato's principles, she can be her best self. She and Pytheas soon form a fast friendship; a friendship Kebes, who met Simmea at the slave market on the day their contracts were bought, and thinks Pytheas preternatural, simply cannot countenance.
But wait, what's this? Jealousy in the just city, where no one person is to possess, or be possessive of, another? "The ship was barely out of the harbour [and] already the seeds of rebellion were growing." (p.26)
In Jonathan Carroll's surreal masterpiece, Bathing the Lion, five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream. Some of these people know each other; some don’t.
When they wake the next day all of them know what has happened. All five were at one time “mechanics,” a kind of cosmic repairman whose job is to keep order in the universe and clean up the messes made both by sentient beings and the utterly fearsome yet inevitable Chaos that periodically rolls through, wreaking mayhem wherever it touches down—a kind of infinitely powerful, merciless tornado. Because the job of a mechanic is grueling and exhausting, after a certain period all of them are retired and sent to different parts of the cosmos to live out their days as "civilians." Their memories are wiped clean and new identities are created for them that fit the places they go to live out their natural lives to the end.
For the first time all retired mechanics are being brought back to duty: Chaos has a new plan, and it's not looking good for mankind...
***
Jonathan Carroll's first full-length work of fiction in six years is as rooted in the real as it is the surreal its synopsis suggests. Bathing the Lion is about a quintet of cosmic mechanics who can read minds and remake the mundane recovering their talents in advance of the arrival of a fearsome force called Chaos—which seems, I'm sure, like a properly science fictional plot. But it's not.
To wit, the World Fantasy Award-winning author evidences precious little interest in the ultimate result of this clash between... not good and evil, exactly, but order and its opposite. Rather, Carroll restrains his tale to the strictly small scale, in the process pointedly refusing the reader's needs.
Bathing the Lion is a lot of things, but one thing it isn't is exhilarating. In fact, there's very little actual action. Instead, expect a whole lot of talking, some potted philosophy and a dream sequence that lasts the entire first act...
Not that we're aware of its nature, initially. By all accounts, Bathing the Lion's first third appears to be an introduction to the five former mechanics we foresee facing off against the coming Chaos.
New York City, 2141: Yojana Patel throws herself off a skyscraper, but never hits the ground.
Cornwall, 1640: gentle young Dora Predennick, newly come to Sweetclover Hall to work, discovers a badly-burnt woman at the bottom of a flight of stairs. When she reaches out to comfort the dying woman, she's flung through time.
On a rainy night in present-day Cornwall: seventeen-year-old Kaz Cecka sneaks into the long-abandoned Sweetclover Hall, in search of a dry place to sleep. Instead he finds a frightened housemaid who believes Charles I is king and an angry girl who claims to come from the future.
Thrust into the centre of a war that spans millennia, Dora, Kaz and Jana must learn to harness powers they barely understand to escape not only villainous Lord Sweetclover but the forces of a fanatical army... all the while staying one step ahead of a mysterious woman known only as Quil.
***
Three teens from three times run rampant in 17th century Cornwall in the frenetic first volume of Scott K. Andrews' TimeBomb trilogy, a paradoxical romp which, whilst engaging and entertaining, promises a little more than it delivers.
To wit, TimeBomb begins quite brilliantly, with a fleeting glimpse of future New York: a sprawling city in which forty-storey superstructures are "dwarfed by the looming organic skytowns that twined sinuously up into the cloud base." (p.3) Here, we meet Yojana Patel, the determinedly independent daughter of... a powerful politician, I think?
We can't be certain because Andrews doesn't dally. In a matter of moments, rather than give her pursuers the satisfaction of catching her, Jana has thrown herself off the roof of a great skyscraper.
Death, in her day, is merely an inconvenience—she has a state-of-the-art board embedded in her head to that exact effect—but this particular passing doesn't happen as planned. Jana, in fact, never lands.
Instead, a second or two into her fall, she felt a tug upwards. Her first thought was that it was a freak gust of wind momentarily slowing her descent, but the tug increased. It felt as if the gravity that pulled her down was fighting an opposite force that wanted to pull her skywards.
She opened her eyes and gasped. She was hovering in mid-air, surrounded by a halo of coruscating bright red sparks, like some kind of human firework. [...] Jana was so surprised by this that it took her a moment to realise that the world around her was darkening, as if a huge cloud was blocking out the sun. (pp.16-17)
In short, she goes into freefall—through time as opposed to space—before awakening, shaken, in the present day. Here, Jana joins forces with runaway called Kaz, who has been drawn almost inexorably towards Sweetclover Hall. As has Dora Predennick, a quiet Cornish lass from the past who, "in spite of all her natural meekness, humility and stay-at-home unadventurousness [...] was very formidable indeed when she was angry." (p.31) And having been forcibly transported over a time bridge, as she sees it, Dora's... pretty pissed.
Rebecca, a 15-year-old American, isn't entirely happy with her life, comfortable though it is. Still, even she knows that she shouldn't talk to strangers. So when her mysterious neighbour Miss Hatfield asked her in for a chat and a drink, Rebecca wasn't entirely sure why she said yes. It was a decision that was to change everything.
For Miss Hatfield is immortal. And now, thanks to a drop of water from the Fountain of Youth, Rebecca is as well. But this gift might be more of a curse, and it comes with a price. Rebecca is beginning to lose her personality, to take on the aspects of her neighbour. She is becoming the next Miss Hatfield.
But before the process goes too far, Rebecca must travel back in time to turn-of-the-century New York and steal a painting, a picture which might provide a clue to the whereabouts of the source of immortality. A clue which must remain hidden from the world. In order to retrieve the painting, Rebecca must infiltrate a wealthy household, learn more about the head of the family, and find an opportunity to escape. Before her journey is through, she will also have—rather reluctantly—fallen in love. But how can she stay with the boy she cares for, when she must return to her own time before her time-travelling has a fatal effect on her body? And would she rather stay and die in love, or leave and live alone?
And who is the mysterious stranger who shadows her from place to place? A hunter for the secret of immortality... or someone who has already found it?
***
The Seventh Miss Hatfield is seventeen year old Anna Caltabiano's second novel: a scientific romance, after a fashion, and indeed, an extraordinary feat for someone so young. I can't in good conscience recommend it, however—much as I might like to champion the work of such a promising new author.
It's 1954, and Cynthia, a lonely little girl on the edge of adolescence, has become fascinated by her new neighbour: a strange lady who has spoken to no one in the weeks since she moved into the street. The better to get a glimpse of this antisocial character, Cynthia puts away her doll one day to take Miss Hatfield a package the postman abandoned when she refused to open her door. To her surprise and delight, she's invited in for a glass of freshly made lemonade. Her host, however, slips some mysterious liquid into her drink: a drop of water from a lake discovered in the distant past by Ponce de Leon which immediately makes her immortal.
"I'm rescuing you from your life," Rebecca Hatfield reasons. "I know you're miserable. I've watched you playing with your doll. You don't fit in with your friends or your family. You can't fit in because you aren't meant to—you're meant for something greater than a normal existence." (p.22) Something more like the lot of a time-travelling identity thief, if you can believe it, as that's exactly what Miss Hatfield asks Cynthia to do: to pop into the past, pretending to be someone else, so as to steal a prized painting.
Otto Behr is a German agent, fighting his Russian counterparts across three millennia, manipulating history for moments in time that can change everything.
Only the remnants of two great nations stand and for Otto, the war is life itself, the last hope for his people.
But in a world where realities shift and memory is never constant, nothing is certain, least of all the chance of a future with his Russian love...
***
It's 2999, and what do you know? The world is at war... or else what's left of it is.
Only "the remnants of two great nations" remain—Russia and Germany, refreshingly—and having lasted this long, and suffered so much over said centuries, neither side will accept anything less than the eradication of its eternal enemy. Thus, they fight. But with the Earth a nuclear blast-blackened shadow of its former self, the only battleground they have at hand is the past:
The thing is, we're both spread thin. I mean, three thousand years, and only a couple of hundred agents to police them. No wonder we miss things. But then, so do they. It's a game of chess—the most complex game imaginable—only the moves can be anything, and the board...
The board is everywhere and any time. (p.16)
Our narrator Otto Behr is, at the outset, an agent engaged in an operation in the latter days of the Crusades when he's pulled out of the period to assist with a major manoeuvre in World War II era Germany. Here, another operative has been helping Hitler win the coming conflict at the same time as attempting to temper his more monstrous qualities. Sickening as it is, Seydlitz's plan is borderline brilliant, and abominably ambitious. It's "a direct assault upon the very heartland of Russia—and if this works..." (p.34) why, if this works, the long war will be all but won.
You might think that'd be that, but it's not, natch:
You see, nothing is ever straightforward in Time. If we both did the same old things, time and again, it would soon become predictable. And though the aim is to win—to eradicate the enemy—there is also a feeling, and I know I'm not alone in this, that the game is of itself a satisfaction, and a deep one at that.
I like to outguess them, to prove myself not only quicker and tougher, but also smarter than they are. They outnumber us three to one and they are good [...] but we are better. We have to be simply to survive. (p.139)
Surviving what's to come will be all the harder, however, because Russian agents have been aware of Germany's great operation from day dot, and before it can come to something, they step in, seize Seydlitz, and use his DNA to infiltrate the future, too.
No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes.
Until now.
As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. "I nearly missed you, Doctor August," she says. "I need to send a message. It has come down from child to adult, passed back through generations from a thousand years forward in time. The world is ending, and we cannot prevent it. So now it's up to you."
This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.
***
You will die, one day. As will I. Our time will come, and we will go. As the most memorable character in Claire North's astonishing novel notes, that is "the fundamental rule of this universe. The very nature of life is that it must end." (p.235)
Many of us spend our days denying death, yes, but whether it is conscious knowledge or not, the inescapable fact that the worst will occur factors into our every decision. The paths we take, the choices we make—all are dictated by the finiteness of our futures. With just one life to live, our achievements are all the more meaningful. With no guarantee, really, that there's more than this, our mistakes have to matter.
But what if they didn't? What if death were not the end? What if there were... exceptions?
According to North, they're called "kalachakra," or "ouroborans," (p.41) and Harry August—whose first fifteen lives this dense text documents—is one of an exclusive few: an immortal among us, blessed—or cursed, depending on your perspective—to be born again... and again... and again.
When teenage Pen inherits the job of caretaker for a London building with no doors and only a secret entrance from the caretaker’s lodge — which she must never use — little does she know it will lead her into unbelievable danger. For Azmordis, also known as Satan, a spirit as old as Time and as powerful as the Dark, Immortality is running out.
In the house with no front door, a group of teenagers are trapped in assorted dimensions of myth and history, undergoing the trials that will shape them to step into his cloven footwear — or destroy them. Assisted by only by an aspiring teenage chef called Gavin and Jinx, a young witch with more face-piercing than fae-power, Pen must try to stop the Devil’s deadly game plan — before it’s too late.
***
A dead man lives in Temporal Crescent. A Mr. Andrew Pyewackett, to be precise. He passed away seven years before the events of The Devil's Apprentice, but he's stuck around since to be sure that the unholy house he spent his lifetime looking after is left to someone sensible, someone undaunted by its particular... idiosyncrasies.
He has the ideal man in mind — Bartlemy Goodman, of no fixed above — alas, no one has been able to find the fellow, and in the period his lax lawyers have been looking, Pyewackett has gone to pieces. Quite literally. As he admits, "I simply can't go on like this. [...] Flesh and blood won't stand it. Let's face it, they aren't meant to. Look at me, I'm already falling to bits — every time I remove my socks several toes fall off. I need to get out of this body and move on. Arrangements will have to be made." (p.14)
These arrangements are as strange as the circumstances which made them a must. Pyewackett instructs the family firm to appoint Penelope Anne Tudor — Pen to you and me — as interim executor of his remaining estate. She's to move into the adjoining property, which comes complete with a brilliant butler and its very own pair of haunted falsers, the better to continue the search for the lost legatee.
Thing of it is, Pen's only thirteen, and her grandmother will never go along with this madness... will she?
She would never be allowed to stay in Temporal Crescent and do her job. And she wanted to. She wanted it more than anything in her life. It was maturity, responsibility, freedom. She had decided she wasn't worried about the danger element — a house surely couldn't be dangerous, with or without a front door. Whatever might happen, she would handle it.
If she got the chance. (p.40)
She gets the chance.
Let us pause before we talk about the plot proper to consider this: one of my only problems with what is otherwise a magnificent new novel. Pen's gran is an absolute pushover. She takes precious little convincing in the first instance, is largely absent after the fact, and when there's a murder outside 7A several weeks later, dear old Eve expresses her regrets and then simply goes about her business. Which seems, in short, to be shopping.
This is one of the genre's peculiar problems. Reminiscent of modern horror's struggle to strand its characters in isolated environments in a world where such places are truly few and far between, the YA narrative must arrange, often implausibly, for its pubescent protagonists to be let loose by the adults in charge of their care; adults who would in all probability spoil the fun for everyone. In The Devil's Apprentice, Jan Siegel simply dismisses the need for a decent rationale as to why Pen and her pals can run riot, and that did bother me a bit.
Besides this, though, The Devil's Apprentice is fantastic fun, especially once we find out what the house is all about. No. 7 Temporal Crescent isn't haunted, as it happens. Instead:
"It's something called a space/time prison," Pen said. "I don't know what that is, but all the doors open on different bits of the past, or magical dimensions, and if you go through you'll get lost, sort of absorbed into history. Like if you're in the eighteenth century, that's where you think you belong. It stops people going around changing the course of events." (p.92)
As soon as Pyewackett passes on, Pen sets about investigating No. 7 in earnest. By the time Gavin Lester let himself into the adjoining quarters she's already been attacked by a velociraptor, so Pen is happy for him to help. He's looking for Bartlemy Goodman too — Gavin believes Bartlemy may be the man to teach him how to be Great Britain's best chef — as is Jinx, a little witch who comes a-calling because she's intercepted whispers from double-dealing demons about a unique job opportunity.
No one believes in the Devil any more. He went out of fashion with wimples and witch-trials, made a brief comeback with the powdered wig, the bal masque and the Marquis de Sade, popped up in the London smog somewhere between the crinoline and the bustle, and vanished for good into a world of kitsch horror films in the mid/late twentieth century. Evil went on, of course, but Evil is made by humans; we need no supernatural help for that. But there is someone who feeds off our evil — who feeds it and feeds off it — the Rider of Nightmares, the Eater of Souls, the God of Small Print, and if he no longer wears horns and a tail that is merely a matter of style. Modern thinking belittles him, superstition touches wood for him, children dance around his maypole — but never widdershins, always with the sun. He hides in folktale and fear, in legends and lies — don't speak his name, or he may hear you, don't whistle, or he may come to you. If you believe in fairies, don't clap, for there are darker things than the sidhe in the World Beyond Midnight. Call him a myth, call him a fantasy, for myth and fantasy do no exist.
He exists. (pp.49)
He indubitably does in The Devil's Apprentice,and indeed, he's looking to train his eventual successor, who he's decided must come from the mortal realm.
To be completely clear, Jinx doesn't want the job: she wants to stop whoever does. Because better the devil you know, you know?
She and Gavin and Pen are in any event a terrific trio of troublemakers who work wonderfully as one. Pen is our resident sceptic. Pyewackett hiring her "was the most magical thing that had ever happened to her, except she didn't believe in magic. Unlike her friends, she didn't read fantasy books — in fact, she read very little fiction at all since she couldn't see the point of it, though her grandmother had ensured she had a basic knowledge of all the classics. But Pen preferred facts. [...] In her view, imagination just got you into trouble." (p.24) Jinx the witch is by definition Pen's polar opposite, though they get on pretty well for all that, whilst she and Martin are at odds with one another from the first, which needless to say leads to some smartly barbed banter.
In Jan Siegel's capable hands the entirety of The Devil's Apprentice is rather smart, in fact. The novel's long chapters are punctuated by ominous interludes set elsewhere and elsewhen which do a great job of enlivening the story's more mundane moments... though there are few of these, in truth. Accordingly, the plot is a joy: the premise all potential — above and beyond what goes on in this novel — and in execution even better, equal parts chilling and thrilling.
Take, say, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman as a base. Fold in a little K. J. Parker, perhaps, and fill with Jasper Fforde a la The Last Dragonslayer. Season to taste with finely ground J. K. Rowling and serve with a generous helping of Diana Wynne Jones' wonderful whimsy. It may be that I've been mainlining The Great British Bake Off in recent weeks, but Gavin — the would-be cook of this delectable new book — would approve, I'm sure.
Jan Siegel has been silent, sadly, since the unceremonious sinking of her Sangreal trilogy in 2006. A young adult fantasy for all the family certainly wasn't what I expected from her new novel, but with a hint of the sinister and a smidgen of silliness, it's such bloody good fun that it's a pleasure most piquant to welcome her back to the business of witty literature.
Don't go anywhere, eh? Pretty please with a temporal cherry on top!
In a relatively recent edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus over on Tor.com, inspired as I was by the surprise arrival of Lavie Tidhar's new novel, I discussed how fantastic it can feel — as a blogger whose responsibility it is to be (almost) always on the ball — to be caught off-guard by a book from time to time. By something I just didn't see coming.
Well, I must have been off my game lately, because it happened again last week: I received a review copy of a book I hadn't heard a bit about, but which, now I know it exists, I can hardly restrain myself from reading. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Echo: volume two of The Anomaly Quartet, which I'm given to understand began back in January with The Explorer, "an introspective time travel novel from which you won't be able to look away [that] plays out like Moon meets Groundhog Day."
I bloody loved it, though I wasn't aware it marked the start of something grander.
If the truth be told, the idea of a sequel, even to a favoured fiction, doesn't usually move me, but the mere premise of The Echo excited me immediately:
Twenty years after the disappearance of the infamous Ishiguro — the first manned spacecraft to travel deeper into space than ever before — humanity are setting their sights on the heavens once more.
Under the direction of two of the most brilliant minds science has ever seen – that of identical twin brothers Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen — this space craft has a bold mission: to study what is being called ‘the anomaly’ — a vast blackness of space into which the Ishiguro disappeared. Between them Tomas (on the ground, guiding the mission from the command centre) and Mira (on the ship, with the rest of the hand-picked crew) are leaving nothing to chance.
But soon these two scientists are to learn that there are some things in space beyond our understanding. As the anomaly begins to test the limits of Mira’s comprehension — and his sanity — will Tomas be able to save his brother from being lost in space too?
I've got the a copy of the image adorning the front cover of the proof, too. Here is is next to the stark cover art of The Explorer:
The Echo will be published as a hardback by HarperVoyager on January 16th, whilst the ebook will be made available — for a limited time, I imagine — at the tiny price of £5.99. You can bet your last penny I'll have read and reviewed it well before then.
I'm sure some of you were wondering what prompted me to post a belated review [link] of Blackout yesterday. Well, there's the short answer, and the long answer.
The short answer is, I've been sitting on it for something like two years to date, and I didn't want the week to begin without blogging about something on The Speculative Scotsman. I dare say it would have otherwise: I'm covering another tutor's classes at the education centre I work at this week, plus I have a few deadlines to attend to in the meagre remains of my free time.
Oh, and it's my birthday today... but hey, who wants to celebrate being older?
But why Blackout? Why in the world has it taken me so long to publish this particular piece?
Well, because I always planned to review All Clear right alongside the first part of Connie Willis' wartime tome. It only seemed decent, considering they form a single story.
To do that, though, I'd have to read All Clear, and though I did indeed begin it immediately after finishing Blackout, I put it down soon afterwards. To the best of my recollection, I did this to remind myself that books could be good—
—but no, that's not fair. Blackout wasn't that bad. What I mean to say is that I started in on something else to remind myself that books could be enjoyable, as well as academic.
Anyway, All Clear has sat heavily in the bedside cabinet wherein I keep all the books I should really read ever since, and I realised, quite recently—whilst reading Life After Life by Kate Atkinson for review at a later date on Tor.com—that there's no reason a serious novel about the war couldn't be objectively entertaining, which Blackout (to my mind) simply wasn't.
So what happened was, I admitted defeat. I said to myself: Niall, you clearly don't want to read this book right now, and you certainly won't for a while after the lovely likes of Life After Life, so why not just file it away for the time being?
Well, dear reader... I did. And I immediately felt like a great weight had been sitting on me for years. A weight of words that I'm now without.
In Oxford, in England, in the year 2060, a trio of time traveling scholars prepare to depart for various corners of the Second World War.
Their mission: to observe, from a safe distance, the day-to-day nature of life during this critical historical moment. As the action ranges from the evacuation of Dunkirk to the manor houses of rural England to the quotidian horrors of London during the Blitz, the objective nature of their roles gradually changes.
Then, cut off from the safety net of the future and caught up in the chaotic events that make up history, they are forced to participate, in unexpected ways, in the defining events of the era.
***
Blackout is a huge book.
Or rather - scratch that - it's one half, indeed the shorter half, of a book more than twice the size of this vast first part. You see, All Clear picks up immediately where Blackout leaves off, essentially mid-sentence. Stopping at that stage would be akin to giving up on a quest when you've only just discovered your objective.
Admittedly I have a bit of a problem insofar as I finish almost everything I start. Simply put, I have a hard time giving up on any story, whatever its demerits. Oftentimes I wish I could just say thank you and good night... that enough is enough.
And halfway through Blackout, let me tell you: I had had enough.
It does, in its defence, get a good deal better thereafter. If it hadn't, I don't think I'd have started All Clear immediately after it stopped short, even given my aforementioned foibles. But three or four hundred pages of faffing later - and that's the politest way I can put it - things do begin to come together. Some of our characters even meet!
Wait, are we getting ahead of ourselves already?
Well, that's what time travel's all about, isn't it? And Blackout is all about the time travel, ostensibly. About a future, half a century on from where we are, in which the historians of Oxford University have quite cracked the past. If there's something they're not sure about, or some significant event they simply want to see for themselves, all these people need do is nip in and out of a neat machine.
Actually, I'm overselling it a bit. Is life ever so straightforward? It's certainly not for prospective time travellers, who have to cut through a whole ream of red tape before they can take to days gone by, and even then, things have gotten kinda crazy. As one historian observes:
"Linna says they're simply swamped over there. Ten drops and retrievals a day. If you ask me, there are entirely too many historians going to the past. We'll be crashing into each other soon." (p.25)
Little does Chris know that's exactly what's about to happen. In... oh, four hundred pages or so—and this is a generous estimation.
In advance of that, alas: a whole lot of nothing. In the future, where a murder of history majors are readying themselves to travel to London in the early stages of the Second World War—to the time of the Blitz, specifically—everyone's up in arms about their dates of departure to the past being shuffled around, seemingly willy-nilly, and no-one can get in to plead their particular case with the man in charge.
Not before time, Michael, Merope and Polly gather that there's nothing to be done, so they set off for the past, exceedingly ill-prepared for the hardships ahead, and woefully unaware—until, again, a very late stage—that something, somewhere, has gone very wrong. Months into their respective assignments they discover, to their horror, that the drops which deposited them in the past, and which they must also use to return to their present, more than a century hence, have summarily stopped working. And that's when Blackout finally kicks off.
Till then, the whole time travel aspect of Connie Willis' latest trip down memory lane seems, well... peripheral at best. There are a few rudimentary rules, foremost amongst them the laws of divergence:
"History is full of divergence points nobody could get anywhere near - from Archduke Ferdinand's assassination to the battle of Trafalgar. Events so critical and so volatile that the introduction of a single variable - such as a time traveller - could change the outcome. And alter the entire course of history." (p.47)
Beyond this, though, and the hateful bureaucratic nonsense with which Blackout begins, the business of travelling to the past is pretty much plain sailing - and deathly dull - until our characters realise that they've been misplaced. From bad to worse, it dawns on Polly that "this was time travel. No matter how long it took Oxford to locate another drop or check every department store and Underground station, they could still have returned to Oxford, sent a second team through and had them waiting for her outside Townsend Brothers that first morning." (p.437)
In other words, they're trapped. Something must have gone horribly wrong in the future because of their presence in the past. Or is it so simple? Are they merely over-thinking things?
As of the impromptu conclusion of Blackout, Michael, Merope and Polly each have their secrets and suspicions, but none of the three can be certain about what's truly going on.
Nor, indeed, are we. Assuredly I was unsure what to make of all this... this interminable scene-setting. Because that almost the entirety of what Blackout amounts to, ultimately: an excruciatingly detail-oriented introduction to some presumably bigger and you'd-best-hope better thing.
For starters, there's little to no character development at all. Our trio spend so long pretending to be period-appropriate people that we don't get a sense of who they actually are, so when they at least they catch up with one another, and drop the act, they seem like different characters entirely. Characters we know next to nothing about, here at the end of ten to twelve hours in their company; even less engaging characters than those we've spent so long getting to know, I would add.
And whilst Willis' evocation of wartime London is especially authentic—rife with odds and sods of information as interesting as they are incidental—there's simply no momentum to the narrative, and not until the very end (which is to say at approximately the midpoint of the duology, were we to consider it as a single thing, as I gather the author intended) is there much more than the vaguest suggestion of jeopardy.
Splitting this story into two parts has done it no favours, I'm afraid. Now that all the players are arrayed about the stage, and the props are in proper order, I have reason to believe that All Clear will be a more satisfying experience than this never-ending fragment of a thing, but on its own, I'm sorry: never mind all the awards that the author has won for it—or so an assortment of committees insist—Blackout is a huge disappointment. Not an absolute nothing of a novel, no... but surely far too close for comfort.
When you haven't had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone.
If you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't.
But that's no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theatres of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: whether it was really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, the great Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini; and why a handsome, clever, charming, modest guy like him can't, just once in a while, get himself laid.
From the author of the acclaimed Boxer, Beetle comes a historical novel that doesn't know what year it is; a noir novel that turns all the lights on; a romance novel that arrives drunk to dinner; a science fiction novel that can't remember what 'isotope' means; a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it.
***
If Nick Harkaway hadn't already doubled down on his dazzling debut with this year's extraordinary Angelmaker, I wouldn't hesitate to declare The Teleportation Accident the spiritual successor to The Gone-Away World. It's incredibly intelligent, fantastically distracted, and I'd go so far as to say aggressively diverse. You won't read a more memorable novel about sex, obsession and the sticky stuff of science fiction this year, if ever.
Plus, it has funny... and in such tumultuous abundance!
"When you knock a bowl of sugar on to your host's carpet, it is a parody of the avalanche that killed his mother and father, just as the duck's beak that you new girlfriend's lips form when she attempts a seductive pout is a quotation of the quacking noise your last girlfriend made during sex. When the telephone rings in the night because a stranger has given a wrong extension to the operator, it is a homage to the inadvertent substitution of telegrams that terminated your adulterous cousin's marriage, just as the resonant alcove between the counterpoised struts of your new girlfriend's clavicle is a rebuttal to the apparent beauty of your last girlfriend's fleshier decolletage. Or this is how it seemed to Egon Loeser, anyway, because the two subjects most hostile to his sense of a man's life as an essentially steady, comprehensible and Newtonian-mechanical undertaking were accidents and women. And it sometimes seemed seemed as if the only way to prevent that dread pair from toppling him all the way over into derangement was to treat them not as prodigies but rather as texts to be studied. Hence the principle: accidents, like women, allude. These allusions are no less witty or astute for being unconscious; indeed they are more so, which is one reason why it's probably a mistake to construct them so deliberately. The other reason is that everyone might conclude you're a total prick." (p.3)
So begins The Teleportation Accident: lewd, shrewd and unconscionably crude. And so it continues, until it concludes with a final chapter as batty as it is brilliant. In the interim, between the offing and the ultimate ending - for there are in fact four finales - a veritable cavalcade of crazy. Crazy, I should say, in a good way — like our tortured twit of a narrator.
Egon Loeser is a sex-starved set designer based, at the outset, in Berlin in the 1930s, however The Teleportation Accident chronicles more than a decade in his ill-fitting shoes, taking in Paris, France and the New World of the United States in addition to time served in Germany. What compels Loeser to travel so widely is, of course, the object of his abject affections. Early on, he falls for Adele Hitler (no relation), basically because he's optimistic enough to think he has a chance with her. "For eyes as dizzying as Adele's to exist in the same body as a banal urge to get stoked over a desk by an unwashed playwright was a paradox as imponderable as the indivisibility of the Trinity," (p.50) he muses at one point, with not a hint of hope, so when she suddenly exits their shared social circle, Loeser resolves to follow the love of his life to the ends of the earth, if need be.
Well, need be indeed. But to be blunt, the upheaval isn't such a massive sacrifice. Loeser hates all his friends anyway — not to mention the unmentionable, that "by early 1933, even the most heedless and egotistical Berliner - so, ever Loeser - couldn't help but notice that something nasty was going on. At parties now, optimism had given way to dread, and yells to whispers — the really good times were never coming back, and to think what might come next was just too horrible. [...] German history was at a turning point," (p.47) and in Loeser's lizard-brain, any excuse to circumvent such a buzzkill is brilliant. If he can catch up with Adele as well, then so much the better.
So off he trots...
...right into the sights of a serial killer! Oh, and a double agent. Also various would-be war criminals. And neither last nor least, a mad scientist who, with his lovely assistant, a certain Ms. Hister, purports to be testing a prototype of the titular teleportation device.
All this hearkens back to a centuries-old murder mystery that has fascinated Loeser for all his adult life, involving Lavicini, "the greatest stage designer of the seventeenth century," (p.4) whose own so-called Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place brought about a tragic loss of life and limb in the theater where it was demonstrated for the first - and the last - time.
Is history about to repeat itself, one wonders? Or can Loeser, unlikely as it sounds, somehow save the day?
There are some incredible characters flitting about the periphery of The Teleportation Accident, including not a few famous factual figures... you know, the sort of historical so-and-sos you might be inclined to read a book about. Yet here we have the bawdy biography of Egon Loeser, whose only real goal in life is to get laid, by hook or by crook. Truth be told, though, for this particular tale, his off-kilter angle is the perfect perspective.
Meanwhile, certain events occur beyond the bounds of the no man's land the narrative of Ned Beauman's new novel nestles in — not least, as in Boxer, Beetle, the holocaust. However, the closest we get to the war proper is via a shred of a letter from Loeser's former friend Blumstein, who attempts to tell our self-centered storyteller a little about what his country of origin has become since he abandoned it in search of Adele. Alas, our man, in his infinite wisdom, discards Blumstein's desperate message after a paragraph, thus preventing us from ever hearing the end of the anecdote.
"When Loeser heard the exiles whine, he sometimes thought to himself that he, too, had been dismissed from his vocation and forced out of his homeland. [But] his vocation was sex. His homeland was the female body. He felt just as lost as they did, but no one was ever sympathetic." (p.215)
For a brief period, this is fairly frustrating, but ultimately, I think, the author's decision is fitting, because besides its distressing setting, The Teleportation Accident is not otherwise a novel concerned with matters poignant or profound. If anything it's a farce, with hints of science fiction, noir and romance; it's a comedy of egregious errors, above neither slapstick nor pratfalls, complete with a darkly sparkling sense of humour and enough wit to sustain Britain for the foreseeable future. To intertwine such a frivolous thing with the unspeakable horrors of war would be to belittle both — a potential pitfall Beauman is wise enough, just, to sidestep.
The Teleportation Accident is absurd, assuredly, but not entirely amoral, and while it might take some time to become comfortable with its masterfully meandering narrative, the investment is well worth making, because Ned Beauman's second novel easily eclipses his first: an excellent debut, but The Teleportation Accident, its own right, is twice the book Boxer, Beetle was. It's much more coherent, and markedly more accessible. A one-hit wonder, then, this author is not.
As established, The Teleportation Accident is far from profound, but be that as it may, it is profoundly funny, and on the sentence level, simply exhilarating. The sheer irreverence of Ned Beauman's sophomore outing renders it nearly meaningless, yet in the final summation, The Teleportation Accident is only as incidental as it is, equally, essential.
When journalist Cormac Easton is selected to document the first manned mission into deep space, he dreams of securing his place in history as one of humanity's great explorers.
But in space, nothing goes according to plan.
The crew wake from hypersleep to discover their captain dead in his allegedly fail-proof safety pod. They mourn, and Cormac sends a beautifully written eulogy back to Earth. The word from ground control is unequivocal: no matter what happens, the mission must continue.
But as the body count begins to rise, Cormac finds himself alone and spiraling toward his own inevitable death... unless he can do something to stop it.
***
Hot on the heels of the apocalyptic vision described in his debut, rising star James Smythe returns to genre fiction with a deliciously different book from his first. An introspective time travel novel from which you won't be able to look away, The Explorer plays out like Moon meets Groundhog Day.
It's "a pulpy, sci-fi thing about a man who is trapped in a perpetual loop, a time loop, like so many other sci-fi stories wrenched from the back of magazines - there are no original ideas, not any more - but this one is more human, or trying to be." (p.234) In this, it succeeds indeed. The various incarnations of Cormac Easton alternate between ecstatic, distracted and tragic, meanwhile the other astronauts on the Ishiguro feel equally real.
Not that they live long enough to make much of an initial impression, because the author knocks the whole lot off in The Explorer's opening chapter, in what would be a comedy of errors under other circumstances. And our understandably manic protagonist is next: Cormac himself dies soon afterwards, only to open his eyes... and surprise! The spaceship and its crew, including a visibly healthier version of himself, have been miraculously restored around him, as if none of the hell they went through - the very hell they'll go through again unless our half-crazed narrator can change their fate - had happened.
We're getting ahead of ourselves already, however this is suspiciously fitting — after all, the beginning of the end is the end of the beginning in Smythe's superlative second novel, thus the short opening section of The Explorer is ingeniously designed to displace. But you must be wondering who the eponymous explorer is anyway, and what in the world he's doing in space... so I'll be kind, and rewind.
Not unlike his creator, Cormac Easton is a journalist. James Smythe still writes for The Guardian, contributing a regular Stephen King reread to rival Gracy Hendrix's epic endeavour for tor.com; The Explorer's central character, on the other hand, publishes in Time Magazine and the like. He and the other souls aboard the ill-fated spaceship were selected in a competition of sorts, details of which the author trickles out throughout.
A quick word to the wise: read these flashbacks carefully, because there's more to them - so much more - than meets the eye.
Anyway, in accordance with the Ishiguro's continuing mission, Cormac gets to boldly go where no man has gone before — so long as he blogs about his experiences on a daily basis. Thus, he engages with the fiction of the explorer more than the actual fact. The "great deceit" (p.101) of the spacefarer is a particularly striking instance of this:
"Astronauts were almost conceived by fiction, by books and television and movies, and then they became real, but those conceits created with the first image of a man travelling beyond the bounds of Earth, and heading towards the stars, those have stayed. The astronaut is alone. He drifts through space. He explores. He discovers. Since it all changed - since the India tragedy, the dearth of funding for governmental space agencies, the down-sizing of NASA - that was lost. Our purpose was to give that back. The people back home read my diary, a one-way transmission. We were like a television reality show, unaware of what was going on outside the TV studios; and then we made contact every few days, our faces beamed down to let them know that we were okay, that we were happy and doing our job, and exploring." (ibid)
The Explorer, then, is self-aware in all the right ways: not so much as to appear a postmodern parody, nor so little as to feel unbelievable. Somehow, Smythe's second novel is both relevant and resonant in contemporary terms, such that it hardly seems like science fiction — though many of the genre's traditional tropes are both present in the text and in full effect.
Still less likely, the premise feels fresh. Conceptually, of course, The Explorer been done before, so its success rests on the author's shoulders only. As he asserts in the acknowledgements - wherein hats are tipped to a telling list of genre fiction's most influential figures, such as Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury - "story is the thing," (p.266) yet Smythe strikes an extraordinary balance between narrative and character. By pairing moments of pure exhilaration with excruciating emotion, he elevates events above and beyond the done-to-death loop at the core of The Explorer. Ultimately, Cormac's quest is the exploration of himself as much as anything else.
That said, a few elements of the whole fall flat. Cormac insists on seeing his story as cinema - as a movie instead of a sincere experience - giving certain proceedings a sheen of the unreal, and Smythe's prose is from time to time a touch verbose. In spots, The Explorer reads as raw and overwrought — by design, I dare say, considering the state and occupation of its central character... nevertheless, this decision detracts from the punch of some particularly pivotal points.
Otherwise, The Explorer is essentially exemplary: a short, sharp shock of a story from an author who deserves to do as well for himself as he does by us. It's perfectly plotted, smartly characterised and rife with insight and excitement. Then again, when a book begins by killing off its entire cast, up to and including the person who narrates the remainder, you already know you're in for something special, don't you?
