Review - The Misheard World by Aliya Whiteley

The Misheard World

Aliya Whiteley
Solaris, 24 February 2026 
Available as: HB, 272pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(HB): 9781837866915

I'm grateful to Solaris for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Misheard World to consider for review.

Oh this is a tricksy book. How much to say in a review? That's also tricky.

To start as the book starts, then, Elize Janview is a soldier, in an army, fighting an existential war against a deadly enemy. She's fighting for the South, against the North, in a struggle that follows a long period of coexistence. (If you're asking, South of what? North of where? those are good questions - but I won't enlighten you, you'll need to read the book). 

The war started after the North used a dreadful weapon against a city where people from North and South lived together, worked together, made art together. Now the South is desperate to copy that weapon, before the North can use it again. And there's an urgency since the North is winning and war comes closer and closer. 

We see Elize and her comrades defending Crag, a fortress used as a prison for captured soldiers from the North. Whiteley's portrayal of Elize and her little circle is great, showing the moments of boredom made bearable by endless gambling, bets on anything and everything. The food. Elize's helping out in the bakery. It all helps build up a picture.

Then, suddenly, the South has a stroke of luck. The notorious Northern spy, Marius Mondegreen, has been captured! His great enemy, the Allynx Syld, will interrogate him at Crag - and Janview is invited to witness the process. Surely Mondegreen (a magician who goes by the stage name 'The Misheard Word') will reveal the secret of the Weapon?

So the first part of this story proceeds. The land where North and South fight has, perhaps, something of the Ruritantian about it, these two minutely realised antagonists lying in mountainous country apparently isolated from anywhere else and in a seemingly pre-Modern world. Distrust abounds between the two (and did before the War) so things in Crag are complex - though perhaps Crag forms a third little world, with North and South again living and working together. 

And at the heart of that is Mondegreen's interrogation. It's clear that something lies between him and the Allynx (a Northern title) but we don't learn what until the final catastrophe, after Crag's fall when he and  Janview are on the run. Then there's a whole different story that she finds incomprehensible and unlikely, though for us, reading this book, it will be more familiar and will put the nature of Janview's world in a rather different perspective.

For her, though, she's now forced to choose between impossible absurdities. A survivor of that terrible weapon - one of few - she had joined the army to get revenge. Now she's faced with the possibility that her time has been wasted, that her enemies are elsewhere (but where?) and that her world may be doomed.

In The Misheard World, Whiteley deploys a brilliant concept, a wonderfully realised nesting of realities that operates on multiple levels. There's the question of what's really going on, the answers to which emerge, but only in part, as a result of the interplays between those realities. There's a question behind that - a why and how question - that isn't answered, but which preys on the mind of the reader: you will perhaps create your own answers to that. Finally, there's the wonderfully realised story of Mondegreen and the Allynx who, as I have said, have History - they almost step off the page (the kind of thing that could easily happen in this book) as real, living people with their own history and setting.

And of course, there's Janview who is also vivid and rather touching in her impossible situation.

How does it all end? Whiteley very definitely leaves that open. The book is in the end, I think, about how reality is written, and rewritten, and part of that concerns just what we mean by "end". This author refuses to be definite, and I loved the way she achieved that.

A mind-bending, worlds-spanning SFF treat that you really mustn't miss. Strongly recommended.

For more information about The Misheard World, see the publisher's website here.

Review - For the Road by Stark Holborn

For the Road

Stark Holborn
PS Publishing/ Absinthe Books, August 2025
Available as: HB, 62pp, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781803945286

I'm grateful to the author for giving me access to an advance e-copy of For the Road to consider for review.

In the tradition of the gritty Western, Jesse Bartos is running - from what, from whom, to where are unclear, possibly as much to him as to the reader. Jumping from a train, clutching the precious suitcase he daren't open, he ends up stranded at a dusty railroad halt miles from nowhere. A place where the train never comes, the tracks silt over with dust. Where everything is faded, broken or despairing.

There is I think a powerful melancholy to places like Dawn's Holt, places where people only come to be somewhere else. Get stuck there and you may lose yourself, like the body buried at the crossroads whose ghost doesn't know which way to turn. All the imagery here is of death, of letting go, of being carried away - from the dust which sweeps into every corner, to the scraggy hens laying their sulphurous, inedible eggs to the motorcycle gang that periodically threatens to sweep Jesse away. (Would that be to lose himself further? Or a redemption, a way out? Clues are scant.)

Is Jesse going to die? Does he want to? Can he save himself, either by riding away with the biker gang, finally catching the train - or staying put, making a life with Reo, the son of the family living at the station house, who captivates Jesse.

Holborn's writing here blends the Western and the mythological, the strange tales and origin stories of the little family echoing heroic legends of birth and creation from the elements. How come they are here, in the desolate station? Why are they engaged in a losing fight against the ruling powers and principalities, one with which Jesse's fate - and perhaps his own history - are entangled?

A powerful story of sense and feeling, For the Road systematically anatomises a life and portrays a young man who has, though misfortune, come to a turning point, a junction (or, as I said, a crossroads) where things may go different ways. Dawn's Holt (not "halt" - a "holt" is a refuge...) provides Jesse with a little respite, but not much, a time in which choices can be made. This short book shows which ones he selects, and why. It's powerful, concentrated and enthralling, a book to be inhaled as much as read, and then to be considered and turned over after.

Recommended.

For more information about For the Road, and to buy the book, see the publisher's website here. 

Blogtour Review - The Transcendent Tide by Doug Johnstone

The Transcendent Tide (Enceladons, 3)
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 14 August 
Available as: PB, 283pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788626

I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of The Transcendent Tide to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

In the third and final part of The Enceladons Trilogy, we follow the mysterious jellyfish hive mind to the Arctic Ocean where the refugees from Enceladus have sought shelter. While the story could continue - and perhaps one day it? - this book draws a line, of sorts, for now, indicating what the presence of this peaceful, aquatic species may mean for Earth and its natives. Sandy reappears of course, as do Lennox, Vonnie, Ava, Chloe and Heather. 

Heather, ever restless, burdened by her life, chose to join with the Enceladons, to become, not one of them but more like them. Even this has not though wholly healed her mental wounds and she has also become concerned that Enceladons themselves may have changed, at last reacting to human aggression not by withdrawing but by retaliating. Boats have been sunk, hunters found dead. Heather wants to know more.

Lennox and Vonnie have been hiding out evading the authorities while missing their connection with the Enceladons. Ava has been caring for baby Chloe, but meets a crisis that she believes on Sanday can help her with. At the same time Lennox and Vonnie are tracked down by a mysterious billionaire, Karl Jensen, who clearly knows more than he should about the Enceladons.

I have been impressed by the way that Doug Johnstone has made each of the books in this series a different story, not just a recap of the same story. In Book 1, The Space Between Us Heather and Ava in particular had difficult personal circumstances which intertwined with an almost Buchan-esque flight across Scotland, pursued by both the authorities and a vengeful husband. Sandy's true nature, and that of his fellow Enceladons, were revealed in the course of this, showing the peaceful Enceladons in contrast to the patriarchal human authorities and attitudes. In Book 2, The Collapsing Wave, a secretive US military operation imprisoned our heroes and sought to control - and perhaps destroy - the Enceladons. Again, human militarism and desire for control were shown, but on a wider stage than in Book 1 and perhaps with wider consequences

Now, in The Transcendendent Tide, just as they seemed to have achieved safety, new threats arise for the Enceladons - and for the little band of friends. Also threatened is Niviaq, an Indigenous Greenland woman who is well aware of the realities of colonialism and might therefore be expected to be wary of the mysterious space aliens as well as the  wealthy private organisation now operating helicopters, ships and private jets from a sophisticated base in her homeland.

I enjoyed The Transcendendent Tide as much for its moral dimension as I did meeting dearly loved, familiar characters. There is action and mystery here - what is Jensen really up to? What's been happening to the sinking ships? - but also a crunchy ethical debate. What steps is one entitled to take - perhaps obliged to take - in the face of threats to life and to a way of life? What might though be lost of a peace loving species take such steps? Heather perhaps acts here as something of a conscience, I liked the way she doesn't judge but wants to know. Her conversations with Sandy are frustrating, limited as ever by the different conceptions the two have of individuality (even after Heather's transformation) and she's forced to investigate herself. But she doubts her judgement and even more, her right to judge.

All in all an exciting and satisfying end (or, I hope, pause?) in this evolving story, with tough choices for all.

For more information about The Transcendent Tide, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Transcendent Tide from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or  Waterstones.

#Blogtour #Review - Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze by Tom Mandrake, DJ Ben Ha Meen and Mellow Brown

Purple Haze

DJ Ben Ha Meen and Mellow Brown (writers), Tom Mandrake (artist)
Titan Comics, 27 August 2024
Available as: HB, 128pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787731899

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the graphic novel's blogtour.

From the publisher

This is a pure rock and roll space opera featuring the legendary Jimi Hendrix as you’ve never seen him before. 

Fully sanctioned by Experience Hendrix L.L.C.; Authentic Hendrix, LLC - this is the first ever full-length graphic novel inspired by the music of the legendary Jimi Hendrix – arguably the world’s greatest guitarist. 

This 21st Century psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll odyssey sees Jimi Hendrix embark on a quest to the very centre of the universe in search of a magical talisman powerful enough to unlock the incredible latent power of his music so that he can share it with a universe starved of the rock ‘n’ roll by a tyrannical intergalactic force hellbent on silencing all music from the universe and enslaving all life. 

What I thought

Space opera. Rock opera. Seemingly unrelated genres which the collaborators behind this graphic novel nevertheless pull together with aplomb. The result is great as an example of each, but put together, something much more.

Yes, we get zoomy spaceships, vivid alien worlds, combat and awesome vistas, that genuine sense of wonder that space opera must deliver. But we also get what is actually - so far as such a thing is possible - a pretty vivid visualisation of a musical high (is that a thing? I think it's a thing) as the central character here, Hendrix, takes to the stage on a galaxy-crossing tour. Lyrics stream by in a kind of diagetic cloud. The music ignites in the intense shades of a fiery sun, blazing across the page. At once, deeply SFnal, deeply musical.

But, as I said, there is more here too. The story finds Hendrix, mysteriously, playing on an endless tour in this far-future dystopia. The how and why of that's never explained, but that doesn't actually loom large in the story and it doesn't really matter. Rather we have this guitar hero pushing his message of peace and brotherhood in a galaxy embroiled in brutal war. He's doing all he can, he thinks.

But of course he's not (I had vibes here of Springsteen's No Surrender "There's a war outside still raging/ You say it ain't ours anymore to win" and there's a moment of realisation with attempts to coop the tour  for sinister purposes, a moment of truth and decision which leads to a fascinating quest. The ultimate test here is then very much one of those "surely there must be another way?" setups where, behind the spaceships and the zooming, the point is that the hero must, will, reject the constraints imposed on them and do the different thing. The Kobayashi Maru moment, in Star Trek language.

And who better, in such a moment, to use their humanity, their sympathy, their courage, than Jimi Hendrix?

A fine graphic novel with a powerful, beating heart. Recommended.

For more information about Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or Waterstones.

#Review - Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken Macleod

Beyond the Light Horizon (Lightspeed Trilogy, 3)

Ken Macleod
Orbit, 16 May 2024
Available as: PB, 400pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356514826

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Beyond the Light Horizon to consider for review.

In a complex and satisfying conclusion to Macleod's Lightspeed trilogy, we see the consequences for Earth politics and development of the discovery of faster-than-light travel, and of planets inhabited by other species, become clear.

On a near future Earth, there are three main powers: the Union, a post-revolutionary society run as an "economic democracy" which has originated from the European Union, the Alliance, comprising much of the anglo world, and the Co-ord, bringing together authoritarian Russia and China. The focus is on the Union, which has just caught up with the (secret) FTL capability of the other two powers, and especially on John Grant, a somewhat restless and buccaneering member of the Revolutionary class known as the responsables. It was Grant who sponsored the creation of the Union's first FTL craft, opening a bewildering array of opportunities which he's determined to exploit.

Many of the possibilities flowing from that raise challenging ethical questions - I nearly typed "new" before that, but actually they're not - about the impact of settlement and colonisation on indigenous populations. The flora and fauna in the new planets being explored are so different that the humans are slow - perhaps deliberately slow - in identifying sentient life. They need a lot of help from Iskander, the AI that enables society in the Union, to do this and Iskander's role is, to my mind, somewhat ambiguous here. At least one player, Marcus Owen, the English robot agent, regards it as dangerous to humanity. Equally ambiguous is the alien race known as the Fermi. It may be planning to defend life on, for example, Apis but in the meantime a great deal of damage is being done.

I found it - what's the work - bracing? salutary? - how deftly Macleod portrays realistic outcomes from this situation. The Union is not, for example, a society of self-denying socialist co-operators, at least not until Iskander channels and directs their activity, so there is a very enthusiastic response to the call for colonisers and pioneers without a great deal of thought as to the consequences. Grant and his circle react in a similar way, at one stage proposing a somewhat hare-brained plan to introduce a sort of whaling industry on an untouched world.

Equally impressive is the sheer breadth of imagination shown here in the range of life and of planets supporting it, which all have complex and vibrant histories. Wise societies, some of them, which have accepted natural limits to expansion: restless ones, others, which want to press on and outwards. There is perhaps a bit of s sense of a whistlestop tour at times, because with so much in the background to this trilogy there isn't time to visit most of it. Characters and vessels come and go, trading patterns emerge rapidly and some of the individuals we have been following through the three books are perhaps slightly overshadowed by the pace and scale of events. That is, I think, inevitable and Macleod still manages to give everyone a satisfying resolution, aided in one or two cases by the judicious use of temporal paradoxes (although I lost sight of Owen in the end and couldn't help thinking he was off somewhere engaged in mischief).

Macleod's writing is always engaging, whether it's dropping references to other classic SF with similar themes, such as to 'intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic', to wider SF (a 'hero of the Revolution' who rather decries her public image as 'Red Sonia of [the] Rising', a mention of 'Union Space Marines') or nodding to the agenda of a left-wing meeting with its essential 'any other competent business'. The latter illustrates a distinct point about these books - their mental furniture steers clear of assumptions of a wholly capitalist future (without though adopting the Utopianism of Start Trek). The Lightspeed trilogy is rooted in a very different and distinct conception of future history, making the outworking of the story especially interesting and valuable to me.

All in all, a fitting end to this trilogy which has challenged, intrigued and instructed. Great fun, and never less than thought provoking.

For more information about Beyond the Light Horizon, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Someone in Time (ed Jonathan Strahan)

Someone in Time
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Solaris, 12 May 2022
Available as: PB, 416pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781786185099

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Someone in Time to consider for review.

This is a collection of stories of time-crossed lovers, by some major names in contemporary SFF - there are stories here by Alix E. Harrow, Carrie Vaughn, Catherynne M. Valente, Elizabeth Hand, Ellen Klages, Jeffrey Ford, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Margo Lanagan, Nina Allan, Rowan Coleman, Sam J. Miller, Sameem Siddiqui, Sarah Gailey, Seanan McGuire, Theodora Goss and Zen Cho.

As with any such collection, part of the fun was reading pieces by authors I hadn't encountered before, as well as recognising the styles and approach of some I was more familiar with, and seeing how those addressed the overall theme of the anthology. Blending time travel and romance sounds straightforward, but it's not just a matter of two time travellers (or a time traveller and a citizen of the past or future) falling for one another, is it? With the possibilities of forbidden knowledge from another timeline, or of losing a lover in the multiverse, or, with whole futures at stake, having to do the Right Thing, there is much to explore.

Among my favourites were Allan's story The Lichens, in which future time-adventurer Joe (Josephine) falls for Helen, a woman living at the time of Culloden. It has a sense familiar in her writings of taking part in a wider universe with various mysteries alluded to but left unresolved. I enjoyed Joe's and Helen's delicate dance around each other, expressed by each separately in the idioms of their own times which combine to create a narrative with emotional depth. 

Or there's Sam J Miller's Unabashed, or: Jackson, Whose Cowardice Tore a Hole in the Chronoverse, which is a story of a lost love, a young man who's lost his just-met boyfriend and sees through a whole life all the ways that things could have gone differently. More, he inhabits a myriad of possible worlds of regret and self-blame - a vivid way to bring to life those times when the multiverse tips and it's impossible inability to fix it. This reminded me of themes in Miller's forthcoming collection Boys, Beasts and Men. 

And in Ellen Klages' Time Gypsy, there's a glimpse of California in the bad old days as time travel enables a moment heroine to travel back to the 50s to unravel an issue of scientific attribution. It's so vividly imagined - both the casual sexism and homophobia, and the human connections that route around it. I simply love Klages' writing.

But really, all of the stories here are excellent. In Alix E Harrow's Roadside Attraction, I loved the idea that a working time "machine" - actually, a sandstone obelisk in a remote rural community in the US - could become one of those local attractions that brings in a trickle of tourists and has an extensively stocked gift shop. Such is the fate of the object here, which attracts Floyd Butler - heart not really broken by Candace Stillwater - to seek out adventure. The presence of time travel is almost incidental, simply providing a means of escape as Butler runs into increasing levels of danger rather than face what his heart is telling him. A beatifully imagined story, all the more so for the balance between the personal and the cosmic.

In a slightly different conception of time travel,  Zen Cho's The Past Life Reconstruction Service imagines a service that can immerse the subject in their own previous incarnations. It's time travel, but then again, it's not. Setting the scene, perhaps, for self-discovery rather than messing with the timeline (an issue many of the stories here have to navigate) we see Rui, a brilliant film director who is stymied creatively after the poor reception of his most recent film, distract himself by exploring past iterations of himself, taking in different genders, different periods of history, and even different species - in one iteration, he has the life of a cow. Each time, a perplexing presence appears - can that be telling him something?

Seanan McGuire's First Aid takes Taylor back in time for research purposes. It's a strictly one-way trip, intended to immerse the subject in her era so that she can bury notes for the future, and the prep is extreme - including surgery to help her blend in with the folk of Elizabethan England. You can't prepare for every eventuality, though, and surgery can't anticipate matters of the heart. This was a sweet story juxtaposing the grim near-future financial necessity which drives Taylor to do what she does and the possibility of fining something - someone - that can redeem her from it.

Moving from time exploration to the "Time Police" idea which had to feature here, Sarah Gailey's I Remember Satellites features a young woman being sent back for a "short straw" operation. You'll recognise the setting, though the names have been changed. It's a sacrificial assignment to change the the past - or, perhaps, prevent it being changed, but the reality of what's going on is less important than the dilemma here: the pull of love against duty as two young women, far away from home, weigh their passion against world-changing consequences.

The Golden Hour, by Jeffrey Ford, introduces its time traveller in the first sentence. Our narrator's encounter with him is slightly beguiling, allusive, taking place in a quiet town that seems to be nowhere in particular or perhaps, everywhere at once. It's a story of quite observation and the working out of a puzzle, whose nature isn't actually revealed until almost the end. 

Also among my favourites here, Elizabeth Hand's Kronia takes this sense of wonder, of having no firm ground, even further. It's a story that, read closely, seems to contradict itself, presenting alternatives and crossings over, enhanced by being written in the second person and therefore posing the question, is this being told to the Other or is it somehow hypothetical? Sometimes I thought it was one, sometimes the other, but the sense of possibility seems very apt for the story of a romance, or a potential one.

If I had to name an absolute favourite in this book it might well be Bergamot and Vetiver by Latanya Lakshminarayan. This none has it all. There is a hopeless quest for a lost love, a burning injustice to be resolved and a massive, irredeemable tragedy. We see a traveller from the - a - future visit a past, a past which, unknowing, she is bound to affect. Positing the advanced technology and knowledge advantage of the future as a potential source of exploitation, Bergamot and Vetiver is I think the story here that seems to question the whole ethical basis of time travel, not just point up its potential unintended consequences.

Catherynne M Valente's  The Difference Between Love and Time is very difficult to sum up. Of all the stories here, it's perhaps the most distinct, introducing us to "THE SPACE/ TIME CONTINUUM" as a character ('It is, as you have probably always expected, non-linear, non-anthropic, non-Euclidean, and wholly non-sensical'). It is also dangerous to fall in love with, or dangerous not to fall in love with, depending - in this surreal, Cubist painting of a narrative, all truths are true and all untruths as well, the beginning is the middle and the end, the beginning. 

Romance: Historical by Rowan Coleman was always going to delight me, because it's a story about a bookshop. Beth, a young assistant who wants nothing more than to disappear into the bookshelves, finds that something else got there first. You'll find no time machines or paradoxes here (well, not exactly any paradoxes) but instead rather a sweet romance, the more so for being clearly, hopelessly, doomed. Really enjoyable.

The Place of All the Souls by Margo Lanagan takes us both to a near future bless with longevity but perhaps cursed by infertility, and a Victorian past, linked by time travel, and is one of the few stories here that examines infidelity and jealousy as a daughter learns some truths about her mother. It rather splendidly illustrates the theme of love finding its way, as does Timed Obsolescence by Sameem Siddiqui which imagines a future where one can employ a time-traveller to go back and record a Significant Moment featuring an ancestor. But where there are employees there will be office romances, whether the employees are desk bound or ferreting back through the timelines.

In A Letter to Merlin, Theadora Goss gives us the real background to The Matter of Britain as a dying woman form the future endlessly revisits one corner of history - or mythology - seeking to change the timeline. But that aspect is actually almost incidental, what really impressed me here was what is only hinted at, an interior view of the whole fantastical tale of Arthur, Guinevere and Merlin which would make a cracking novel, I think. 

Carrie Vaughan's Dead Poets features one of the most inventive methods of time travel I can recall, although in a sense it's of a piece with several stories in this book that portray it as a mental exercise, rather than the creation of elaborate physics. That's in keeping with the theme of the story: 'The study of literature is the process of continually falling in love with dead people'. And how. The protagonist here follows her heart and in return, receives a wholly unexpected insight into one of the darkest love stories of history. Creepy, beautiful and entrancing, this one is simply glorious.

So - time travel as accident, as profession, as mental exercise; alternate timelines precious and to be preserved (until forbidden love says otherwise) or the subjects of manipulation and exploitation, love both attained and deferred, its object gloriously present or lost in a myriad of dimensions, realities and alternatives - they're all here, and much more. A collection that will get the pulse racing in place, or evoke a sigh in others. But always fun, readable and heartfelt.

For more information about Someone in Time, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The This by Adam Roberts

The This
Adam Roberts
Gollancz, 3 February 2022
Available as: HB, 304pp, audio, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781473230903  

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The This via NetGalley to consider for review.

'In the Bardo, subject and object are the same.'

As always with Adam Roberts' books, The This fizzes with ideas, the story illustrating, looping around, and developing, themes from philosophy, physics, popular culture, literature, religion, music (and doubtless more I didn't spot. Roberts is, in the best sense of the word, a clever author - not because, or not only because, of this incredible hinterland, but because he is able to share it without making the reader feel they've missed stuff. Rather, one feels gleeful about what one has spotted. 

It helps that while the background (as I learned from the Afterword) may be in Hegel, the actual argument and case developed in the book is very plain to see whether or not you have read that philosopher. The points we see made are about a person versus a collective society, about loneliness ('the odd thing about loneliness is the way it's both an intensely isolating , individual experience and the one thing most widely shared by human beings'), about the experience of loss, about that weird thing we call death. They are all integrated into a portrayal of modern life that feels right (right as in, convincing, real, authentic).

Rich lives that modern life. He's possibly one of the many lives (an entire page of them farmers! But also I think I saw Billy Bragg lyrics?) lived by the "you" that comes and goes from the Bardo in the bewitching opening section of the book. This section allows Roberts free rein devising inventive micro-stories (whole lives told in a sentence or a paragraph, many bringing in those references I mentioned above). Rich is, at least in this life, not really rich - that's more of a nickname - but he is comfortable enough, in his Putney flat, to survive on occasional bits of work from the gig economy. Sometimes he even has a bit of cash left over to pursue his hobby of collecting... cash, in the form of rare banknotes. (We get a couple of pages of digression musing on the nature of banknotes as essentially known lies).

Interspersed with Rich's story, Roberts has included chunks of social media, sort of. Status updates. Locations. Spam. Messages. Complaints. Puns (of course puns! 'He preferred Apple products to PCs, computer-wise. You might say: pomme? - cuter. You might say.' Roberts' way with puns is genius. They aren't just there to be funny, rather they're a tool that adds layers of meaning to the text). The way this material is arranged means that the flow of Rich's story is continually broken up. I had to keep going back and reminding myself where a sentence came from, before my attention was spammed, the whole experience of course redolent of the contemporary struggle for attention in the face of a torrent of jangling content - but also illustrating Rich's particular life as he twiddles and fiddles his days away supposedly working on his novel (an epic fantasy project). 

The story takes wing when Rich is allotted a job interviewing the representative of a company, the 'The This' of the title, which has developed an implant allowing social media to be literally pumped into the brain. Is The This a cult, as some allege? Rich is intrigued by his encounter, but soon discovers that The This may have plans for him. As the behaviour of the company becomes outright stalkery, it seems clear that Rich is somehow important - and not only to The This.

Several centuries on, Adan lives an, I suppose, even more modern life (it's the future so it must be more modern?) focussed on Elegy, an AI sex-toy that Adan is absurdly, sweetly, devoted to. But it's still a slacker existence similar to Rich's, buffered by his mother's money - until she defects to The Enemy. By Adan's time The This has metastasised into a formidable hive mind against which humanity - or parts of it - are at war. And Adan soon finds himself in the army. 

There are other strands too - a whole section set in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, expanding on the theme of the hive mind in an interpretation of that book that I'd never have considered but which fitted exactly with the idea of Big Brother. Some writers would take just that idea and make it into a whole story - by no means the only example in this book of Roberts' prodigality with ideas: basically he hoses the reader with them. Loneliness? Here is Father Mackenzie, caught as it were just out of the song, 'wiping his hands on his cassock and talking nervously about God's love'. Ah, we're doing Beatles, well, here is 'a car alarm... going off like Yoko Ono in full song'. The book is like a bulging sack of presents on Christmas Day, with treat after treat to unwrap.

Returning to Adan's story, though, Roberts uses it to add yet another thematic thread with a confused, panicked view of warfare - all fumbles and shock and confusion with comrades butchered and intentions muddled). It's a war in which Adan, inexplicably, seems to play a central role but his place - and importance - are no clearer than Rich's. I'd say the focus of the story switches from one to the other, Roberts giving us clear portrayals of both. Not necessarily people I'd want to meet or spend time with, they are both, nevertheless, rounded, actual characters, something that gives them a sort of edge over the various forces - the military, espionage agencies or The This itself - that are trying to manipulate them. The book returns in the end, I think, to deep questions: what it is that makes us human, whether mere happiness and contentment is enough to satisfy that nature, and what may lie beyond even something like The This which seems - in many respects - like a desirable endpoint for human evolution.

Clever, humane, absorbing and great fun, this is in my view Roberts' writing at his very very best. Just a glorious book to read. Get it now!

(The book also built my vocabulary. Evanishment? Haecceity? Velleities?)

 

#Review - Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod

Design by Duncan Spilling

Beyond the Hallowed Sky (Lightspeed Trilogy, 1)
Ken MacLeod
Orbit, 25 November 2021
Available as: PB, 336pp, audio, e
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356514796   

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Beyond the Hallowed Sky to consider for review.

Ken MacLeod is an absolute master of near future SF thrillers that intelligently reflect politics and society as well as science. So Beyond the Hallowed Sky is securely rooted in a not so far off* Scotland, part of a multi-nation Union that has undergone revolutionary transformation but in a low key way (the 'Cold Revolution'). It's set against the Alliance, an array of anglo powers who have recently restored democracy, and Co-ord (China and Russia). 

There's a lot of stuff about defections from one to the other (which seem fairly easy) and a glimpsed history that involves some nuclear exchanges, though I don't think all out war. But many here, including one of the main protagonists, John Grant, aren't keen on recalling history too much, either what they did (Grant is a responsible, a key figure in the Revolution) or what happened more widely. Macleod rather brilliantly portrays this future society through small details and hints, not outright description, so making it more of a living and breathing thing that if there were lengthy passages setting out what had happened or how things are structured.

A central theme of the story is, I think, one of technological change and transformation: what becomes of this world when a crazy, impossible idea - faster-than-light travel - turns out to be attainable (and actually, rather easy to realise). Evoking such upheavals as the launch of Sputnik-1 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, MacLeod shows how such an event - despite not having a direct impact, or much impact at all, on the ordinary lives of many people, might still play with the psychic moorings of a society, its sense of worth and purpose. He has I think further shocks in store for the folk of the 2070s because in another thread of the narrative we see attempts to come to terms with a truly alien sort of alien, one which seems intimately linked to our planet and its history and to be capable of great harm.

The way that this book brings together great themes - Space exploration! Aliens! FTL! - with the little details of individual lives - a boy and a girl meeting while out hiking, a trip on a ferry that will change lives, an evening spent in a bar listening to traditional music, the rhythms of life in a workplace - was for me one of its strengths. I enjoyed that this isn't for the most part "zappy" SF, although MacLeod shows himself more than capable of that when the story calls for it, as it does in the final quarter, when some concepts arise that - if I could name them here which I can't because of spoilers - would seem absurd in cold pixels. In context, however, and arising from the very ordinariness of much of the earlier story, they just makes sense and work.

Another theme, which is worth looking out for because it's so well integrated and embedded that it almost seems a matter of course, concerns the place of AI in these future societies. In Beyond the Hallowed Sky, it shows up incarnated in a sort of super-Siri virtual assistant available always and everywhere and charged with meeting needs before they're stated (the kind of thing I think that visionaries might hope could replace the action of markets?)  It also figures embodied in robots, given a remarkable amount of latitude, you might think, and there are some intriguing conversations about consciousness, conscience and freedom here which perhaps aren't quite so integrated into the narrative but were thought-provoking.

All that may make Beyond the Hallowed Sky sound over-ideasy, perhaps, but that would completely wrong. I love ideas in a book but more I love believable, quirky characters, especially the bad guys, an active and twisty plot, and being kept guessing about where everything bis going. And Beyond the Hallowed Sky scores very well on all that, and more, as well as being an engaging and complex opening to a trilogy whose subsequent volumes I'm already looking forward to reading.

To read more about Beyond the Hallowed Sky, see the publisher's website here.

----

*If I live to be 100 I'll be contemporary with the events of this book.

#Review - From the Neck Up by Aliya Whiteley

Design by Julia Lloyd

From the Neck Up and other stories
Aliya Whiteley
Titan Books, 14 September 2021
Available as: PB, 301pp, e
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN(PB): 9781789094756

I'm grateful to Titan Books for a free advance copy of From the Neck Up to consider for review.

From the Neck Up collects 16 of Whiteley's stories, originally published between 2014 and 2020. The longest ("Brushwork") is an 80 page near-novella, most though are shorter, between 10 and 20 pages. The themes are riotously diverse, but often concern - or are set among - environmental and societal collapse whose consequences are being explored. In many of the stories we're located in a sanctuary - literal or emotional - which has escaped the worst consequences of the catastrophe. 

That reminded me at times of Joan Aiken's stories in that, as did the skilful and even joyful juxtaposition of the weird and the normal. One can't, I think, fully appreciate the weird if it's presented in isolation, we need it to be interweaved with everyday life.

That's certainly true of the first story, "Brushwork", where we meet elderly Mel (many of the stories features older characters) who's working on a farm, tending melons in a greenhouse. Only gradually does Whiteley reveal the complexities of the setup; the catastrophe that causes Mel and her colleagues to be near prisoners, her background and the wrenching choice she was forced to make as things got worse  - and the extent to which she has, since then, been sheltered (though it might not seem like it) from the harsh world outside. But she won't be able to escape reality forever.

In "Many-Eyed Monsters"  the narrator is living an ordinary life until she begins to worry about something truly strange in her body. Initially trying to hide the problem, she's forced to accept that she is creating - or becoming - something new. Moving from unease, and the desire to suppress what is happening, she finds a sense of acceptance and solidarity. This story catches well, I think, the drive to try and contain the strange.

"Three Love Letters from an Unrepeatable Garden" describes not only an "unrepeatable" garden - one that can't be duplicated or, once lost, restored; its creator is gone - but seemingly one of those precious islands of beauty and normality (well, for certain values of "normal") left in a hostile world. That's why it needs protecting and nurturing. But if it's doomed anyway, might it not be justified to just, well, enjoy it before the end? Posing questions about the fragility of beauty and our duty to protect it, this one left me thinking hard.

Corwick, in "Corwick Grows", is one of those elusive islands amidst a wider world, always teasingly distant; the narrator has hunted for it but can't find the place until one day when they stumble into a remote farmhouse. Nothing will ever be the same again for them, or for Corwick - a place that seems to thrive on the imagination of its residents. Combining a calm acceptance of what is happening with a somewhat body-horror aesthetic, "Corwick Grows" suggests that some, at least, of those elusive places may be better left unfound.

"Loves of the Long Dead" takes an imaginative journey from Ancient Egypt to the abyss of the ocean to a modern research lab. When a spirit from the past seeks revenge, she becomes frustrated that time hasn't stood still and that the villain whom she hates no longer exists to suffer. Perhaps a substitute can be found...

In "Reflection, Refraction, Dispersion" the optical terms hint at some sort of visual phenomenon - the Effect - that is ill understood, indeed, whose nature and effects are argued and disagreed over but which seem to be dire (cancer? Suicide?) It is something to which Eliza, the narrator, was subject but about which she seems ambivalent. She does, though, want to understand and perhaps even re-experience it which leads her on a strange quest.

"Farleyton" is another of those islands of wholeness and order amidst a chaotic and sickening world. Many wish to travel there, lured by the stories of its wonders. Told in the voices of various groups - the enclave's guards, a travel agent facilitating migrants, workers seeking good jobs in the place, a girl en route to it - we see jarring and contrasting pictures, hinting that perhaps Farleyton is a different place to each, that perhaps it may not be able to be the same Heaven on Earth for all, that it may have limits, small print and abrupt endings. Trying to assemble a picture from the pieces given here is frustrating, suggesting truths that Whiteley avoids spelling out directly. One of my favourites in this volume.

"Into Glass" is a deeply weird story which opens with the unnamed narrator about to cut her sleeping lover with a scalpel. Only a small cut, the tiniest nick, blood from which she hopes will reveal something wonderful. It is an act that to her is deeply ominous - not just an assault, a violation of consent but a recapitulation of a dark history involving her parents and grandparent. But at the same it's a family inheritance, a gift. What to do? And what will happen? The story ponders the value of love - is it finite, can it be bled away? - as well as secrets. An achingly beautiful and sad story.

"Compel" posits an alien invasion, swift and sudden and complete, but not the normal death-ray wielding tripods, rather a glitch, an anomaly that leaves most humans literally speechless and lost. In face of this, Whiteley's narrator feels some duty to resist, but can only record, gradually losing coherence and the ability to tell what's happening - even as they start to grasp more fully the causes of the catastrophe.

"Chantress" is a fun story revolving around three women, the Chantress of the title, the Enchantress and the Disenchantress. Somehow unmoored from modern society - the Chantress has a mobile phone but signal is poor on the mountain - they seem to be acting out roles in a near fairy-story for the local villagers, but why, and where will it lead? Again, the mundane, human and normal are seen alongside the frankly weird.

"Blessings Erupt" is about Hope, a woman who has some kind of healing gift against the contamination caused in the near future by plastics and toxins. But it's a gift that takes its toll. Hope has the gratitude of so may whom she has saved, but she has become cynical about the whole process; are we to believe that she's now seeing through things to the truth, or has she herself become corrupted? In this story about a life drawing to its close we are also shown Hope's beginnings and left to wonder what version of the future is the truth. A moving and powerful story about community and responsibility.

"Star in the Spire" sees Sammie, travelling alone in the blighted waste of the future, find an oasis, a little patch of life and growth. But it also seems to contain death - there are some gruesome sights described. Whether, though, they represent a catastrophe, or a transformation, is very ambiguous.

In the titular story, "From the Neck Up", Megan is obsessed with decapitation and reality seems to meet her interest, offering a head if not on a platter, then on a bed. But despite being severed it seems to be a head with business of its own and not to be finished, not at all, with life. Veering from comedy as Megan tries to control the situation to a strangely moving depiction of the head's ongoing life, "From the Neck Up" was another of my favourites here, whether it's to be taken literally or as expressing something of Megan's (rather desperate) life and the changes she needs to make in it.

"The Tears of a Building Surveyor, and Other Stories" could be seen as the Walter Mitty-like fantasies of aging Violet - in a chaotic narrative of running away with a "chaperone", joining a nunnery, escaping a massacre and then becoming a clown - if it was not so touchingly and tenderly wrapped around glimpses of Violet's reality, of her life with Tom. The two ways of describing Violet's world are so different, yet so closely linked, that the reader needs, I think, to see them both as true to to unpick what each needs from the other. A beautiful, sad, and funny story.

"To the Farm" explores the potential darker consequences of artificial intelligence and both the limits, and unexpected graces, of love. Another very sad story (or it could be) leading up (as did "Brushwork") to a moment of letting go, of allowing for growth and change.

In the final story, "The Spoils" we return to a community living after some apocalypse (never made clear). They're an underground people, with a ritualised way of dealing with their world illustrated when a great beast - an Olme - is killed and divided between the community. Like a baffled Victorian explorer learning the customs of an unknown people, a lot doesn't make sense, even as it does. Again the story dwells on the different roles and lives of those who receive the body parts of the unfortunate Olme, and we might wonder why there is such a complicated routine here as there is no suggestion for example that they will all eat it. Some explanation is given when a daring member of the group decides to take her share to the surface, but story - both obscure and slightly menacing - leaves a great deal to the reader. A haunting story.

Altogether, there is a lot to think about bin these excellent stories. If you have read her Skein Island or Skyward Inn, you'll recognise some of the atmosphere, and themes, but the exploration of them across different fragments of story adds new depth (and enjoyment).

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Art of Space Travel and other stories by Nina Allan

Type by Julia Lloyd
Image by Vince Haig

The Art of Space Travel and other stories
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 7 September 2021
Available as: PB, 464pp, e
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN(PB): 9781789091755

I am grateful to Titan Books for a free advance copy of The Art of Space Travel to consider for review.

I'm always delighted to see a book by Nina Allan coming and The Art of Space Travel is a real blessing, collecting some fifteen years of her wonderful, closely examines, weird(ish) short stories. I really enjoy an authors' short story collection - it gives a glimpse into a body of their work, highlighting themes and concerns you might miss in a single story, even in a single novel. These fourteen stories give access to a backstage world, weaving together themes of art (music, film, painting), space travel (of course - but seen from the ground, according to those left behind), environmental collapse, encounters with the Other and alternate outcomes, sometimes dramatised by pairs of stories. So, one will read about the characters; see them off, as it were; have an opportunity to imaging what might have happened next; and then encounter them - directly or indirectly - in a later story, which gives a version of their fate, though necessarily, only one possible version of many. 

Amethyst is told in hindsight, the narrator recalling her childhood friend Angela from the days when they were growing up in an unnamed shabby seaside town. The town is interpreted through the lyrics of a local folk-rock group, Amethyst,  who sang of a  'Moon landing down on Silas Street' - setting up the story for an investigation of Silas Street and a connection to an incident which breaks up Angela's family.  This is an intriguing story, full of mood and possibility.

Heroes also tells us about growing up - Fin lives in a Sheffield suburb, liminal both in being outside the ring road and also potentially subject to future development. His fragmented family are on the fringes of the story, its centre being his friend Marten, a pigeon racing enthusiast with a mysterious past dramatised by the strange contents of his house and his relationship with the outsider nicknamed 'Bismarck'. Again, there are threads of possibility here and hints of a wider picture that we're left to imagine.

The idea of nestled stories within stories recurs a lot in Allan's writing (including novels) and A Thread of Truth uses the technique perfectly, following a young man, Adam, as he overcomes his fear of spiders. In so doing he meets the mysterious Jennie, who tells a ghost story in a remote house in Suffolk. That story itself is perfectly framed and teasingly vague as to its age and setting: could it refer to Jennie's forebears? To her? (A Thread of Truth, like several of stories here, also has a key moment focusing on a crack in a wall or the ground...)

Flying in the Face of God is about space travel, or rather about those left behind. Anita's best friend Rachel is undergoing the preparation for space travel. It's never said outright, but it is clear this is a one way trip, or at least that any return will only be in decades or centuries. The preparation is personally transformative and hard to bear both for those taking part and their family and friends. Anita explores her feelings about it, drawing on insights from Rachel, from her own grandmother and letters and notes left by her own mother, who died when an earlier iteration of the space launch was sabotaged (something referred to elsewhere in Allan's stories, I think!)

Flying in the Face of God seems to be set in a world suffering climate change - a pool outside the school Anita attended seems to have dried up in the drought - and a similar motif appears in Microcosmos where a family (mum Bella, dad Doug, daughter Melodie) are driving for hours to meet a mysterious relative. It's sweltering - forty degrees in the car - and on arrival they find Ballantine's house near a dried up lake. There is a sense of mystery and menace hanging over things - while Ballantine seems to be regarded as undesirable, they're still trying to persuade him to come back with them where it's 'safe'. Yet Bella doesn't trust Ballantine at all. It's something to do with the research he's carrying to in his remote cottage, but we never learn what that is. It's lucky she doesn't know he showed Ballantine how to use his microscope to spot the tiny creatures in a drop of water, or that he gave her a letter to pass on to Aunt Chantal... that letter hangs, a secret, in the last line of the story. We don't know if it will be delivered, or when, it's a message in a bottle, cast away to the future...

I really, really loved Fairy Skulls, a nice little story in which Vinnie's girlfriend persuades her to spend her inheritance from Aunt Jude on a tumbledown cottage in the wild country south of London and then brakes up with her. Faced with no alternative, Vinnie goes ahead with the move then finds something peculiar living in the cupboard under the stairs. I liked the matter-of-fact way that Vinnie accepts and deals with her problem; the delicate balance between potential "Borrowers" style whimsy and something more menacing (those things bite!) and the hints that Auntie may have been involved in some very strange, not to say gruesome, goings on. 

The Science of Chance is set, like other of Allan's stories, in Russia, or perhaps I should say an ex Soviet Republic with overtones of Russia? It's an alternate timeline where the 60s went differently. There was a nuclear strike, to begin with, but also a different politics, teased but not given in detail - a mark of these stories, which often tiptoe round the big things, focusing instead on their impact on ordinary people. Here, policewoman Nellie, who's trying to identify a non-verbal and apparently lost young girl discovered at the local railway station. A very straightforward story, yet one which eventually leads to a choice between two explanations - one potentially very weird indeed, linking the story in to unnerving vistas of the potentially fantastical, the other, much less strange. And on the way Allan takes us through fascinating permutations of personalities, lives and histories - which absorb from start to finish. As so often in this book, the everyday seems to arise from something stranger, bigger, deeper rooted. 

Marielena has a similar atmosphere. In an unnamed English city (possibly London, but I wasn't sure), Noah, a refugee from a distant country where politics has made him unwelcome, survives amidst the cruelties of the hostile environment. It's an impoverished life - not only in financial terms but even more in the sense of being observed, resented, on sufferance, suspected - but he gets by, communing somehow with the mysterious Marielena, until the day he takes pity on an even more unfortunate person, the homeless Mary, who is being persecuted by a gang of youths. From that act comes a knowing, an understanding of wider things that places the story in a distinctly fantastical context. But Allan, having set that scene, steps back. The story ends where it ends, with us aware that there may be tremendous events coming that may concern both Mary and Marielena, but that Noah's reality stays as it is.

The Art of Space Travel, after which the collection is named, perhaps echoes Flying in the Face of God, being another story where space travel is happening - or being attempted - elsewhere, but the concerns of the main protagonists are more domestic, more personal. Emily is Head of Housekeeping at the Edison Star Hotel, Heathrow, her life being lived between mother Moolie, succumbing to early onset dementia in her home nearby, and manager Benny, currently stressed by two VIP guests, astronauts from said space programme. There's a thread of conspiracy (Moolie's condition possibly having been brought on by exposure to contamination from an air accident whose investigation she was part of) but in the 2070s this is left mysterious, it's not a driver of plot leading to a revelation. Rather the personal relationships, amidst hints of wider history, are the focus of the story.

Neptune's Trident takes place in a world where a series of catastrophes has been blamed on some kind of intrusion into electronic systems, leading to 'the clampdown', an attempt to take back control from whatever alien influence was lurking. It's not working, though, and as Caitlin hopes against hope that her brother Morrie, lost with his submarine, will return, she sees things slide, her friend Steph succumbing to a mysterious illness. It's an uneasy, liminal story, showing humanity teetering on the brink of something, but exactly what - I wasn't sure.

Four Abstracts follows up one of the earlier stories in the book (I won't say which - it might take away the fun!) Isobel is trying to come to terms with the death of her artist friend Beck at a comparatively young age from a hereditary condition. (Women struck by disease or accident are a bit of a theme in this collection.) Exploring Beck's life and art and also, the mystery of why and how she died, Four Abstracts both draws on, and casts further light on, its partner story, giving a glimpse into a wider (and weirder) world than either alone.

The Common Tongue, the Present Tense, the Known is also a partner story, following up on Microcosmos. We see Melodie as an adult, having been sent as a teenager to live with 'the Severins in Strasbourg' in the face of growing environmental catastrophe. She has only faint memories of her parents (so in a sense, we know more, from the earlier story) but is still fixated on Ballantine whose lesson with that microscope shaped her career. There are answers given here to some of the puzzles from the earlier story, but new questions arise.

The Gift of Angels: an Introduction is a deliciously clever story, focussed on a writer of science fiction stories, the September Queen books, set on an itinerant space freighter. They are inspired by the fact that the writer, Vincent Colbert, is the son of the astronaut Jocelyn Tooker, mentioned in The Art of Space Travel as one of the crew on a one-way mission to Mars. That story referred in passing to the unfair judgement being cast at a mother leaving her young son behind but not to fathers doing the same, but in a sense The Gift of Angels explores precisely that gap: Vincent was brought up by his less than adequate father and The Gift seemed to me to be in many ways about that loss, that abandonment. Set in Paris where his parents met, it sees Vincent come to terms with the need to write about his mother, but there is much more there than that - like so may other stories in this book it muses on the place of art, (both Vincent's writing and the 1960s French SF film La Jetée, whose themes and history the story keeps returning to). A moving and intricate story.

The final story, A Princess of Mars: Svetlana Belkina and Tarkovsky's lost movie Aelita is the newest in the collection and genuinely blurs the line between reality and fiction - narrated by an "I" who might very well be Allan herself, it exudes a deep knowledge, and skill in analysing, 20th century SF and in particularly, Soviet SF films - being focussed in particular on the history of a never-was Tarkovsky movie, Aelita. I think that's where we cross the line into fiction, signalled by a reference to the narrator being in Paris 'to promote the September King'(!) - other than that, they are seen indirectly, mainly through glimpses of a lifetime engaging with those films, starting on a dream Saturday afternoon in the 70s or 80s when the only alternative on TV was Grandstand. Nevertheless, it's an affecting portrait of a life, illuminated by insights about the place of creators and the difference between them and their art which - in dialogue with the eponymous actress - develops into a real focus for this story.

I found this a really strong collection. There is a sort of thematic space allowed by fourteen stories and dozens of characters - by possibly alternate versions of the same timelines, by dialogue between different points of view, often separated by decades. It's a book that had me flipping backwards and forwards, checking ideas about how the stories were related and comparing the outlooks of the various protagonists. 

I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Art of Space Travel, see the Titan Books website here.

#Review - The Somebody People by Bob Proehl

Design by Julia Lloyd

The Somebody People (Resonant Duology, 2)
Bob Proehl
Titan Books, 13 July 2021
Available as: PB, 663pp, e, audio 
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN(PB): 9781789094633

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of The Somebody People via NetGalley.

The Somebody People picks up where The Nobody People, one of my favourite books of last year, paused. As Proehl notes in his acknowledgements, it is more like the second half of a story than a sequel and if you haven't read the first book yet there would be a lot of value in reading one immediately after the other as there are many linking storylines, key events and things whose significance evolves from one book to the next. I didn't do that of course, but I still found The Somebody People an exciting, satisfying and cathartic ending to the whole story.

The first book introduces the idea of "Resonants" - individuals with what we'd call superpowers. Their number has apparently been increasing through the second half of the 20th century and The Nobody People tells how they are eventually forced to go public provoking a storm of prejudice and, eventually, persecution.

That story was told partly through the eyes of Avi Hirsch, a journalist injured while embedded with the Army in Iraq, and we saw his increasing obsession with the Resonants alongside the slow collapse of his marriage to Kay. By the time The Somebody People opens, Hirsch is out of the picture but his daughter Emmeline features in the second book as do many of the characters from the first one. There are also some flashbacks to the earlier life of Kevin Bishop, the mysterious head of a school for Resonant kids in New York, including one that describes how it all started

Alongside the treatment of Resonants as a persecuted group, The Nobody People also pointed to a militant faction among them and this - and the reason behind it - features strongly in the present book, set a decade or so later following a Civil War in which the Resonants and in particular that Black Rose Faction gained the upper hand. There is an atmosphere of ethnic cleansing and segregation in the background of The Somebody People with battle lines drawn and the survivors of Bishop's circle seeking to defeat the evil that seems to be driving the Faction. The action to that end is complex, with multiple plot threads and various characters trying to cope, principally Fahima Deeb who's managing badly in the absence of ex-girlfriend Alyssa. Alyssa is a "baseliner" ie a "normal" person - referred to by the hardliners in the Black Rose Faction as "damps" - and had to leave New York during the "evacuations".

It's all fast moving and Proehl throws in concepts such as multiple timelines, extra-dimensional spaces and something very close to possession, to support or impede our heroes as they try to safeguard humanity and see off the Faction. There's a haunting sense of moral ambiguity (I love the smell of moral ambiguity in the morning...) as we know that the extremes seen here are in part a reaction to the persecution shown in The Nobody People. Characters here are damaged in various ways, physically and mentally, by what was done to them, or suffering from guilt at what they have done. There is a real sense in Proehl's writing that people make mistakes and do bad things for good reasons. There is also more than attach of PSTD in many of them. It all feels very real for a world with superpowered inhabitants - the stress is on the human dimension not the wondrous abilities - and there are very few characters I didn't have at least a sneaking sympathy for.

My favourites were possibly the gay couple Dom(inic) and Clay, Resonants with secure middle class jobs and an adopted boy at a prestigious school, who become concerned about what is happening around them and about his future and - rather than seeking sober advice - embark on what I feel are some spectacularly ill thought out plans, landing themselves in the centre of the action as a result. I enjoyed that despite it all, they seek to secure their relationship and protect their boy and that they are in a sense ordinary people who for most of the story are just trying to survive but who achieve some very brave things. Most of all, despite those dubious decisions, their hearts are always in the right place. 

But there are many others here worth a mention. Kimani, perhaps, whose special power is to be able to create a room, outside space, which she can make appear anywhere on Earth (oh please, I want that ability!) and who uses it to shelter Emmeline. There's something special about Emmeline, and one of the themes of this book is her discovering that for herself and trying to learn how she can avoid being used by others, inevitably bringing her into conflict with both "sides" here.

In short, The Somebody People is both a rattling good story in its own right and an excellent completion of The Nobody People, teasing out themes that were sketched there and creating a wholeness to the story that confirms it is, indeed, a unity. I would recommend.

For more information about The Somebody People, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Residuum by Dominic Dulley

Cover by www.headdesign.co.uk

Residuum (The Long Game, 3)
Dominic Dulley
Jo Fletcher Books, 18 February 2021

Available as: PB, 497pp, e

Source: Advance e-copy

ISBN: 9781529410747

I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for an advance e-copy of Residuum via NetGalley.

Residuum is the third part of The Long Game, after Shattermoon and Morhelion. (Note - there are spoilers here for those previous books).  SFF being what it is, I suppose that means it may be the final part of a trilogy - or perhaps not, there are some intriguing threads here and I hope there will be more books.  What's undeniable is that Orry (Aurelia) Kent, the hero here, definitely deserves a break, after losing her father to space pirate Cordelia Roag, losing her ship, hooking up with morose loner Mender, and helping the Imperator out of several nasty scrapes.

And at the start that's just what she's doing, relaxing with her brother Ethan on the pleasure planet, Halcyon.

However it isn't long before Orry's in trouble again, fomenting revolution and on the run from the Arbiters. Whereas in previous books Orry and Ethan were in control (kind of), running some grift or other largely with personal gain in mind and only reluctantly getting drawn into Galactic politics, here trouble comes looking for them and the book is essentially a series of heists and escapes as they attempt to turn the tables on whoever - whatever - has them in its sights. They'll make some strange friends on the way (perhaps...) and get deeper into the mysteries hinted at in the previous books: the fate of the race known as the Departed and its sought-after tech, the militaristic Kadirans, and the secrets kept by Roag.

It's a fast and furious story, matching Orry and co's talents (we must also include Quondam, the renegade Kadiran, and Dainty Jane, the sentient ship) against increasingly deadly environments, from a planet infested by rogue, human-eating tech to a waterworld run by cephalopod warlords. That means that an aspect I loved before, something I'd tentatively describe as a sense of cosiness, is lacking. What I mean by this is the situation of the small crew on a small ship, isolated and slightly bored on their long journeys but capable, between them, of dealing with pretty much anything that comes along. The more frantic pace here diminishes that, meaning less time spent on the travels and generally interacting and less attention given to the remarkable ship, Dainty Jane. (She does, though, have some excellent scenes of her own).

However that didn't actually diminish my enjoyment of the book. In a sense Orry has grown rather, though these stories, going from having to step up in Shattermoon after the attack by Roag and her father's death to someone who can drop in confidently on Fleet Admirals and demand support. She's also developed something of a moral core, looking rather disdainfully at the Ascendancy and its Ruuz aristocrats (hence the opening scenes on Halcyon). Watching her engage with a series of challenges, leading up to a true Galaxy-menacing threat, was enthralling, making for an addictive book that simply demanded I keep turning its pages. It's all I might have wishes for as a fulfilment for The Long Game (as I said, I hope there is more to come). The writing is also, as in the previous books, smart and on-point and the characters, with whom we're now pretty familiar, engaging and fun to be with.

I'd recommend Residuum, although it really needs to be read in sequence. (But then, if you haven't read the first two books you shouldn't be down here at the end of this review).

For more information about Residuum, see the Jo Fletcher Books website here.

 

Review - The Evidence by Christopher Priest

Cover by Tomás Almeida

The Evidence
Christopher Priest
Gollancz, 15 October 2020
Available as: HB, 312pp, audio, e
Source: Copy bought from Wallingford Bookshop
ISBN: 9781473231399

For me, a new novel by Christopher Priest is always an Event and this one had me awake till after midnight: I couldn't stop till I'd finished it.

The Evidence takes us back to the Dream Archipelago, in a story that plays with - and critiques - the rules of detective fiction, as well as taking in feudalism, the world financial system and the literary scene.

Todd Fremde is a successful crime writer, living a comfortable life on the island of Salay Raba, the fourth: a warm and pleasant place, if overrun in parts by financiers and bankers. Certainly a world away from the bitterly cold and industrialised nation of Dearth, where he's gone to give a talk on "The Role of the Modern Crime Novel in a Crime Free Society". This gives Priest a wonderful lunch for the story as we follow the slightly nervous and peevish Fremde on his journey - a two day sleeper ride across Dearth, with a flight beforehand. I'm not a natural traveller and I slightly sympathised with Fremde's niggling concerns - about missing connections, being late, having to travel as advised with extra bulky, thermal clothing, missing his usual routines - while also thinking: two days closeted in a sleeper cabin - what an opportunity to catch up on the reading! At the same time, there are some oddities slipped into the story, and if you read Priest's last Dream Archipelago story, The Gradual, you may feel that the central figure, an artist despatched on a lengthy cultural jaunt, may be something of an innocent abroad, likely to run into all sorts of trouble.

As he does, and there is an element of SF to it, with the mysterious "mutability" which nobody can quite explain but which notices in Fremde's hotel room warn him about - but Priest's writing here almost makes it just one of things that you have to cope with in a foreign business trip. A strange foreign law, perhaps, a way of living, in a distant city, that you don't quite grasp, like the peculiarities of the Metro pricing. Certainly not something to worry about much. Especially not when a senior member of the local police (in a crime free society?) takes an interest in you, and insists on telling you about a strange case she was once involved with.

To begin with, Fremde hates that attention. He's already discussed the philosophy of the crime novel - the aspects which are deliberately unrealistic, the things one avoids as passé (the locked room, twins, the "perfect crime"), features of the market which drive the writing one way or another. Now (and here Priest writes with perceptible feeling) we get that horror of horrors for a writer, the fan who wants to suggest an Idea which surely only needs to written up to make a novel. As well as the palpable sense of unease from Fremde's travails in a foreign land, the book now picks up a dash of humour as Fremde has to try and control his annoyance. Eventually, though, he does become interested in the story he's being told - not so much as material, more from the nature of what he hears, and its connection to his homeland. Can it be a coincidence that he was invited to Dearth in the first place?

What follows is best not described in detail - that would spoil the enjoyment of the plot, which contains many little moments of recognition. I will only say that Fremde's life, and the sort of fiction he writes, seem to be crossing over - at many levels - as a result of his visit to Dearth. The concept of mutability becomes important - Fremde relates it to his writing (what's more mutable than fiction?) but it also proves to have real-world effects, serious ones for Todd and for his island.

In the background, this is the same Dream Archipelago we've become familiar with, the endless war between the two Northern states gridding on and escapees from their conscript crimes. In keeping with the detective theme, we also meet a grizzled ex-policeman with secrets (he, also, keeps trying to foist Ideas on Fremde) and another cop who never travels without an assault rifle. There are written confessions, obfuscated records and hints of a cover-up. 

It's an immensely enjoyable book where - in keeping with Fremde's theory of crime writing - the point is less to discover what happened, even where that seems to depend on the most outrageous of crime writing conventions, still less to establish guilt, but to tease out the relationships and personalities involved, to become acquainted with participants and come to know them.

Which is all very well, but there are people it's better not to be acquainted with...

I simply loved this book. It will appeal to the crime enthusiast, the SF reader, followers of Christopher Priest's fiction (onvioulsy) and those who enjoy an intelligent novel where all isn't as it seems.

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Design by Lauren Panepinto

The Ministry for the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson
Orbit, 8 October 2010
Available as: HB, 563pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN: 9780356508832

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of The Ministry for the Future.

There are two things I should make clear about The Ministry for the Future. First, it is a beautiful book, filled with hope and tragedy, and I loved it. 

Secondly, I think some readers will hate it. 

I'll try to explain why.

The Ministry for the Future is a sort of biography of the Earth over the next fifty years or so. Beginning with a cataclysmic heatwave in India in the 2020s - an event in which millions die -  it considers how humanity as a whole might tame its carbon habit. The means chosen in the first place is the creation of an organisation to speak up for the interests of future generations, of animals and plants.  Of course, once established, this organisation runs a risk of being a sop to the planet. It has to be better than that. It must influence, advocate, persuade, even twist arms. The Ministry faces the same problems as exist at the present - vested interests, the superrich, cognitive biases, apathy, fear of change and much of the book is focussed on diagnosing and addressing these.

Based in Zurich, this organisation attracts a talented group of lawyers, scientists, engineers, development workers and others who set about tackling the problem. The Ministry is personified in its head, Mary Murphy, a former Irish Minister for Foreign affairs. Murphy, though one of the most developed characters in the book, is only seen in glimpses - persuading at gatherings of central bankers or world leaders, living her (rather pleasant) life in Zurich, occasionally in meetings at the Ministry or elsewhere. In the final few chapters she does I think approach being a rounded character but for much of the book she's essentially a device to convey a viewpoint, a determination to see the work through, whatever it takes. (Early on, Murphy calls for a "black ops" wing of her organisation to apply pressure in deniable, if not frankly illegal, ways. We see some actions which possibly arise from that - though with this book it's always hard to tell, and there are many actors own this stage).

The other character we spend most time with is Frank May, a development worker caught up in that early heat wave and whose life is shattered afterwards. He becomes a drifter, living rough around Zurich and crossing paths with Murphy. Eventually they becomes friends, of a sort: perhaps he is her conscience. Frank is, though, for the most part rather one dimensional, essentially an embodiment of trauma and perhaps guilt.

There are others who we meet briefly, and sometimes return to. Most are there simply to narrate particular events or illustrate the scale of what's going on. So, there are geological engineers trying to prevent the glaciers from sloughing into the ocean. There are refugees narrating their journeys and eventual stalling in camps. There are privileged movers and shakers, for example at Davos. Protesters on the streets of Paris. And many, many more. Often these people are anonymous. More rarely we get names, and the story revisits some a number of times. Very occasionally they cross paths, and we'll suddenly realise who someone is, seen from a different perspective. I felt most of these characters were good representations of points of view or of happenings, but often little more. In some places, there are attempts, I think, to humanise them - for example by giving one person a tragic accidental death - but the sheer scale of the book and the number of voices involves militates against this, and given the scale of tragedy in the opening section, it's also curiously hard to care about such isolated events. In a different vein, there are even a few short chapters narrated by abstractions such the market, history, a photon, a carbon atom, or the Sun. 

Many sections of the book, though, while they may be loosely presented as analysis or reports by characters, are really articles or essays. The word "we" does a lot of hard work, introducing factual sections of the book as the experiences and offerings of particular populations or groups. There is an entire chapter, towards the end, which is a list, introducing the contributions and projects of a host of nations, alphabetically, to the problems of climate change and societal transformation. Hopeful and inspiring though it may be that these initiatives and approaches exist (and I believe they are all real) I would defy even the most completist of readers to actually, you know, read that chapter word for word.

Which has brought me to the reason some readers will, I think, not get on at all with The Ministry for the Future. It is very much its own type of novel: the author has thrown overboard most expressions of plot, character development or insight and indeed, largely of writing conventional fiction here. It is, in that respect, worlds away from New York 2140 which was similarly focussed on climate change but, recognisably, also a novel driven by its characters' lives and choices. 

For my part, I greatly enjoyed this book. I liked the way that Kim Stanley Robinson draws out an argument that addressing climate change will require not simply the spending of money or the passing of laws, but a complete reordering of society and its values ('What's good for the land is good for us'). At one level that makes it all seem even more daunting: at another it's a radical vision that feels achievable, paradoxically, not in spite of, but because of, the size of the task. 

I also enjoyed Mary Murphy's evolving quest, throughout this book, for the strongholds of power - pursuing the leaders, the legislators, the bankers, the economists (dismissed pretty scathingly) who all seem to shuffle off responsibility to others, combining handwriting with adroit passing on of the problem. To a degree, Murphy's approach correspondingly evolves into a kind of administrative ju-jitsu, using the system's flaws themselves for leverage on the problem. Is that feasible in reality? I don't know, any more than I know whether the idea of pumping out the water from the base of a glacier, to prevent it lubricating the ice and to slow down the rate of flow, is feasible. Thy book seems to have some good ideas which sound plausible, but I'm not a banker, I'm not an engineer, I don't know. 

All this may make The Ministry for the Future sound very dry, and indeed it is overwhelmingly factual, until the last 50 pages or so. But that's not so say there isn't excitement, even drama and danger here. A section towards the middle where Murphy is forced to trek through the alps at night (she's no climber) is a tense and beautifully described mini adventure. There are human-scale tragedies here alongside the planetary ones, even if they play a rather minor role in the book.

Above all I think this book does convey a sense of hope - something we certainly need right now. Remember, revolutions are built on hope - and if there's one thing this book does assume and, I think, go a fair way to establishing, it's the radical, the revolutionary, changes that are needed in the coming decades to avert catastrophe. So let's hang on to our hope!

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website here.