Review - Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland

Deathless Divide

Justina Ireland
Titan Books, 4 February 2020
PB, 576pp

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of Deathless Divide.

Picking up exactly where 2019's Dread Nation ended, Deathless Divide takes forward the story of Jane McKeene and her... well maybe I shouldn't say friend... associate, perhaps? Katherine Devereux after the Survivalist town of Summerland falls to the zombie ("shambler") horde.

Seeking refuge in the nearby town of Nicodemus, Jane and Katherine soon find old enemies catching up with them - shamblers without, and humans within...

I loved Dread Nation. In Ireland's alt-nineteenth century, the US Civil War was overtaken by a zombie plague. Young people of Colour are dragooned into training schools, learning to fight the shamblers - and none gives a better fighting education than Miss Preston's, where young women are taught and polished to be "Attendants", defending fine ladies from the undead tide. It is, at the same time, a shrewd commentary on racial prejudice, an exciting (if at times gruesome) fantasy adventure and a fine coming-of-age story.

In taking things forward, Deathless Divide has high standards to meet but in fact it surpasses the first book. Told in alternate chapters from the viewpoints of Jane and of Katherine, this story gives us in effect the tale of a stormy but growing friendship. Spiky and distrustful, Jane makes it hared for anyone to get near her, and her first meeting with Katherine wasn't auspicious. To a degree they are now thrown together. The situation in Nicodemus - another Western town best by shambles - is uncannily similar to that of Summerland, with no way for the young women to escape so that they have to depend on each other. Fortunately, the one thing they each have going for them is their fighting skill, something that enables them to respect each other even when feelings are high.

And then Ireland shakes everything up and this book changes...

Deathless Divide is, simply, stunning. Moving from the plains of the Midwest to the golden state of California, Ireland continues to deepen, and to explore, her imaginary world, while also - and doesn't this seem unlikely but it works so well - using the fantasy, fictional setting to starkly depict the situation of people of colour in the Old West. From the higher prices charged them for goods to being burned out of desirable areas of San Francisco to the ruses mean ing that, despite the abolition of slavery, they're still subject to the control of their former owners, this all feels very real indeed.

The situation is one that Jane and Kate are very familiar with, and they're young women of great determination and courage. They are not about to give up. But Ireland shows the debilitating effect of the inequality. Following events in Nicodemus, Jane is bent on revenge and, having to survive in a pitiless world, she loses pity and does things that are gradually destroying the Jane we first met in Dread Nation. That is the whole crux of the book - Jane's descent, and Katherine's determination (despite their differences and initial dislike) to pull her back. It is, at its heart, a tale of friendship. In Deathless Divide, against a backdrop of horrors, little kindnesses and attentions matter - taking in a stray child (or for that matter, a stray dog). Sharing food. Politenesses that seem more appropriate in a genteel drawing room than on a rough trail. Katherine's determination to continue with her corsets, even if they have to be loser than she'd like.

It's a sweeping, compelling story, that defies the normal fantasy goal of achieving Big Things. Here the Big Things (the driven scientist hunting for a cure for the zombie plague, the avenging bounty hunter tracking down their prey) turn out to be hollow, or equivocal, while the things that make us all human - the things that make life a bit better - are celebrated and bring salvation.

An excellent read, deserving of wide attention and also great fun. Strongly recommended.

For more information about Deathless Divide, see the Titan Books website here.

Review - The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Cover design by Will Staehle

The Future of Another Timeline
Annalee Newitz
Orbit, 24 October 2019
PB, e, 340pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of The Future of Another Timeline to consider for review.

In 1992, Tess attends a concert in Irvine, California. It's one of her favourite punk-feminist bands and she's revisiting her youth, listening to music she grew up with.

Also in 1992, also in California, Beth lives with a manipulative, controlling father and a tuned out mother. She finds release in stolen moments with her friends, parties, a few drugs - and attends that same concert, where something bad is going to happen.

And in Chicago, in 1893, a group of women put on a show at the World's Fair, challenging the moral puritanism of their time by exhibiting sensual, erotic dances from North Africa.

One of them, oddly, is Tess...

This is a book about time travel, timelines, destiny, history and struggle. In Newitz's universe, the world contains five "Machines" - inscrutable, geological structures that allow for travel backwards in time. Of almost unimaginable age (they seem to have been created in the Ordovician era - look it up!)  their origin and purpose is mysterious, but humanity has learned enough to be able to use them, crudely, and a complex etiquette has been evolved over the generations permitting different ages to share this gift without (too many) dire consequences.

I'm sure you've know the classic SF story A Sound of Thunder, where a traveller to the past inadvertently alters their own present by treading on an insect. That spectre - of a trivial change altering the timeline - haunts the world Newitz describes: there is consensus that such a thing couldn't really happen, that the broad outlines of history are stable - but really, how would anyone know? The central paradox at the heart of this book is that you wouldn't. Living in the present, the past is the past and it always was as it was.

Only that returning traveller might recall a different past... a world, for example, where abortion was illegal... and so there is scope for mischief.

The Future of Another Timeline is a book with a clear message, I'd even say a necessary message. It is really a book about a time war. Not the massed opposition of huge forces in direct conflict, but patient, cumulative snipping away, "editing", to tilt the balance one way or another. The two contending sides are the "Applied Cultural Geology Group", a loose alliance of women time travellers (in this world, "cultural geology" is the name for the study of time travel, based on the deep-time origin of the Machines) and a cabal of misogynists who want to prevent women's rights ever being won (and - as becomes clear - to push things towards a future which makes Margaret Atwood's Gilean look like a paradise of equality). We see the women meet, discover that a hostile edit has caused one of them to wink out of existence, forgotten by all but a traveller from the past. We  see the action they take.

We also see them encounter their pig-headed enemies in bars, theatres and concert halls across the past. This was where things slightly came apart for me. The antagonists - a mixture of real people, such as the Victorian moralist Anthony Comstock, and fictitious characters - comes across as pretty two dimensional. In various historical guises (sometimes literally) they're basically men's right "activists", alternately spouting overblown Victorian sexism,  the debased language of their modern chatboard forums, or pick-up artist jargon. They are as tedious and self-evidently wrong as you might imagine, and hardly seem like credible opponents for the women described here. While some vile things do happen to these women of the Group and to their allies, the two seem utterly mismatched. Indeed, final defeat of the men only seemed to be in doubt because of the women's (especially Tess's) scruples, refusing to kill or injure in service of the cause. (Tess does have her reasons, as we eventually find out.)

So I found that "Time war" angle, while interesting in concept (and involving some great worldbuilding) rather frustrating in practice. In contrast, another strand - that of Beth and family in the 1990s - was well realised with a couple of truly disturbing, brilliantly realised and complex characters. One of them is Beth's father, and the depths of his... wrongness... are painted subtly and slowly, building up to a really unsettling portrait and giving the reader - or at least this reader - many moments of fear for her and her friends. This is an alternate timeline where Comstock's meddling paid off, resulting in sweeping prohibitions which affect Beth, but it is not (yet) the utterly nightmare world that may yet come and the real tension comes from her claustrophobic, pressure cooker family situation. I would have liked to read much more of this strand: I felt Newitz's writing came especially to life here, even though more could possibly have been made of the links between her father's attitudes and the patriarchal drift of that timeline.

Instead, that theme - the origin and development of rules that trammel women - is much more the focus of the 1890s parts of the book, focussing on those dancers at the World's Fair who are the target of "Comstockery" aiming to shut down and even imprison them. Those parts impart a great deal of detail about 1890s attitudes and about the real Comstock's actual activities, but they do come over much more as conveying research, despite the strong female characters here - and real suffering. There wasn't, for me, as much heart in this bit as in Beth's story.

Technically it's all very well thought out and realised - in particular the handling of the time "edits" is impressive. The descriptions of their effects are done subtly and are reflected sideways rather than head on (we are not told what has changed but have to wait till the characters' memories reform to accommodate the new reality). This all felt very believable, as did the, literally, geological time travel tech whose existence and operation is simply a fact of life (so familiar that it features in TV dramas, and the phrase "lucky edit" is used for any fortunate occurrence, such as two friends encountering each other).

So, overall, I found this a fine book and a rattling good story, but one where the different threads felt quite assorted, with one much more readable and affecting than the other. It isn't only Beth's home life, there's a real affection to the accounts of gigs and scuzzy yard parties where she hangs out with her girlfriends (though a sense of menace hangs over those scenes too, I won't say why because spoilers), of female friends and the help they give one another, of love and loss. That's actually what remains most strongly with me from this book: fittingly, perhaps, the flattish male villains fade away while the edit preserves those determined and vividly portrayed women, whether comrades in arms, friends, or both.

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

Review - The Silver Wind by Nina Allan

Cover by Julia Lloyd

The Silver Wind
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 10 September 2019
PB, 366pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Silver Wind to consider for review.

The Silver Wind feels to me like a key to Allan's writing.

Over the past couple of years I have loved her novels The Race, The Rift and most recently, The Dollmaker. In these (mostly) earlier stories loosely following the career of Martin Newland and of a group of characters round him whose histories, identities and lives shift, merge and overlap, I can see foreshadowings of themes and features of those other books.

The devastated south coast of England that is the backdrop to parts of The Race.

The theme of loss and abandonment central to The Rift.

Andrew Garvie, the marginalised (dwarf) protagonist of The Dollmaker, that book's quest for an elusive creator, Ewa Chaplin, and the intertwining landscape of her stories that forms the background to the story (including the alternate, militaristic England in which a famous actress departs or dies, and perhaps the germ of the "court dwarf" theme itself.

More fundamentally there's Allan's forensic, yet tender, sense of place - demonstrated in Garvie's journey through Reading to the West of England and in The Silver Wind through an almost passionate exploration of the Streets of Southwark, of the woods of Shooter's Hill, of South Coast towns. In her writing you almost know these places, you feel your feet wandering down alleys and lanes and you feel the strangeness when a step takes you out of your way.

I'm in danger of. dissolving into mere vapid praise. It's hard to write this review because my usual go-to move - lightly summarise the plot and draw out memorable incidents - just won't work. This is less a single story than a collection, but a collection in which every new story reworks, reinterprets, deconstructs or comments on the others.

The same characters recur but with drastically different histories. In the first, "The Hurricane" apprentice watchmaker Owen Andrews travels to London from Devon to take up a new post, leaving Newland and his sister Dora behind and remembered but peripheral. In another, set in that militaristic alt-world, Andrews is a master craftsman, holed up in a remote wood (hints of fairytale) who Newland, an estate agent, seeks out. In other stories the relationship between Newland and Dora is explored and Andrews is a marginal figure.

Yet behind these differences at the same time these are the same people, the stories are the same stories. Explanations in one story sometimes cast light on the others, sometimes not. We never learn what became of Andrews after he flees at the end of "The Hurricane", set seemingly in an alternate 1920s (but apparently warping to the present day at the end). Never, that is, unless the call back at the beginning of "Rewind" (which is surely looking back to the, or a, 19th century?) is the answer.  Motifs recur - the Circus Man on the beach in a South Coast seaside town, the lesbian "Aunts", an Uncle Henry who plays different roles. Most of all, perhaps, a sense of loss, of mourning a dead sister, a dead wife, a dead lover.

Complex, multilayered, multithreaded, this is less a collection of stories than its own mythology - in that respect it reminded me of M John Harrison's Viriconium stories - both unified and driven by the theme of time, time lost, regained, altered, of clocks and watches, of the mysterious tourbillon mechanism and i's creator, Breuget. Often introduced into the story as gifts (often from Uncle Henry) and referred to as "time machines" (a nice pun) the watches and clocks which Andrews constructs have abilities that go beyond merely marking time. They are active, though we never know the exact rules: it's as though the stories here are the same story, running through permutations and alternatives yet influencing each other as though different worlds overlap, a whole litter of Schrödinger's cats running round the house with different balls of wool, always separate , always entangled.

This book makes for rich, significant storytelling, storytelling where every word matters, every story is complete but the collection as a whole is also complete, adding whole levels of meaning. It's a book you can come back and reread, with new insights, where every different part adds much to the rest.

Very enjoyable, very thought-provoking and like a glimpse into an entirely new world. Finally, look at that glorious cover by Julia Lloyd - truly a thing of beauty!

Strongly recommended.

For more about this book, see the publisher's website here. You can buy it from your local bookshop, including via Hive Books, or from Blackwell's, Waterstones, Foyle's, WH Smith or Amazon.

Review - Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

Cover design by Sarah Anne Langton

Unholy Land
Lavie Tidhar
Tachyon Publications, November 2018
PB, 255pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via Netgalley. (I have also bought a signed copy - Forbidden Planet in London has them in!)

This is a bewildering and brilliant alternate history. Tidhar imagines a Jewish homeland that might have been, a tract of land actually offered (really offered, I mean, in real history) by the United Kingdom in high Imperial mode in Central Africa and considered, however briefly, as an alternative to Palestine. (The views of the previous inhabitants weren't, of course, canvassed).

What might our world be like, if that offer had been accepted? How would things stand in Africa? How would they stand in Palestine? What else would be different?

A man, Lior Tirosh, a writer, flies back to Palestina (that might-have-been state) from Berlin. He's a writer of pulpy detective novels, son of a famous general, returning to visit his ill father. Tirosh remembers, sometimes, a son Isaac; sometimes he doesn't. In his conversations with his agent he refers to a possible book casting an alternate universe Adolf Hitler as a seedy private detective.

Hang on... I read that book... it was A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar.

Tirosh has also written a book called Osama.

As has Tidhar.

There are layers and layers to this book. A writer returns to his homeland. A people find, or are given, a homeland. Another people loses theirs. Many are saved, or lost, and the world pivots. In the world Tirosh inhabits, for example, things turned out sufficiently differently that in a refugee camp, the "Red Swastika" is an equivalent symbol to the Red Cross, Crescent, or Star of David. Tidier isn't afraid to take his idea to shocking conclusions any more than he was in A Man Lies Dreaming. Yet even in this different world, echoes remain, with the same tragedy of people displaced, with echoes of genocide, camps, an armed struggle, and the same security response, as in our present day.

It's a deeply unsettling book, asking questions, perhaps, both about individual responsibility and about the shape of history. Through them all, Tirosh ambles, a bit lost, seeming to forget, at times, who he actually is. Affected perhaps by all the possibilities Tidhar has granted, he remembers who he might have been, as it were. That is both engaging - Tirosh is very human and hapless, not, for most  of the book, a fictional protagonist and also frustrating: he doesn't provide any answers (this isn't a book of answers).

The story also follows two others. There is Bloom, a security official in Palestina, and Nur, who seems to work for another agency from outside. It's not clear to begin with whether they are working together or at cross purposes, but they both seem to have an interest in the blundering Tirosh who himself increasingly assumes the persona of a gumshoe, setting out to ask questions and find the truth. But while he may have written about private eyes, he doesn't seem well fitted to actually be one. Is this real life, one may ask, or is it just a fantasy? Either way, bullets kill and walls divide. There is a kind of dead heart at the centre of this story with real consequences for those who might - or might not - have been saved if history had taken a different course.

It's a deeply troubling, deeply thought provoking read, no less for the lush evocation of the Jewish State in Africa: the colours and light of that continent, as well as the imagination Tidhar uses to weave his imaginary country. You might almost swear he'd been there.

I don't want to say exactly what happens in the end because there are twists that should only emerge slowly. It's the kind of book you may want to go back and reread, looking out for little hints once you really understand them. It's also a book that refuses to be sidetracked by action or plot, however tempting that may be: the final third could, for example, have been a great deal longer with much that is sketched out given in detail, but that would I think be to obscure the central idea behind too much running around and shooting. Instead Tidhar gives the bigger picture and leaves much of the detail to the reader's imagination - a risky judgement but one that really pays off since it lets this book be much, much odder that you might expect.

It's probably a bit trite to say that given the facts of actual Jewish history in the 20th century, alternatives, might-have-beens, other turns and possibilities, will always fascinate. As Tidhar explains in his Historical Afterword, speculative fiction was anyway part of the events leading to what would become Israel, long before that awful historical weight became a factor. But it's impossible to read this book without it provoking that sense of how different things might have been, and the good and bad that might have followed from that.

But perhaps that is true of all history, and isn't it really the basis of any fiction?

As you may guess, this book has left my head buzzing.

I'd strongly recommend you read it, and set yours buzzing too.

Other reviews of Lavie's books:

Central Station
A Man Lies Dreaming

Review - Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson

Europe at Dawn (Fractured Europe, 4)
Dave Hutchinson
Solaris, 1 November 2018
PB, e 320pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Europe at Dawn.

This fourth, and final, book in Hutchinson's Fractured Europe sequence is well up to the standard of the previous parts. Again, we're in a near future world where the population has been ravaged by the Xian Flu, Europe is divided (and dividing) into increasingly many fragments and life is complicated by the existence of the Community, an extra dimensional pocket universe where it always 1950s England. ("A place where tricky concepts like ethnic diversity and political correctness and sexual equality had never taken root, and gay rights were a misty fantasy... it was an awful place, and that was why so many of the English wanted to move there.")

We are also in the world of Les Coureurs des Bois, an international networks of smugglers who refuse to accept the fragmentation, and work to ensure that "packages" can still be delivered across borders. That gives the book, especially the first half, an agreeable atmosphere of "tradecraft" as Situations, drop-offs, dust-offs, "jumps" and so on run past, at first seemingly unconnected but gradually joining up. We meet Alice, a young Scottish diplomat in Tallinn whose life ("Her crappy job, her dickhead employers, her bully of a husband") is about to be destroyed ("She had been constructed out of chaos by people who did not care about her"), Ben, a refugee trapped on a nameless island in the Mediterranean, and Meg, an English Colonel commanding Heathrow Airport (which, in the last book, was somehow moved into the heart of the Community). Hutchinson is very good at showing the reality of these lives in quite brief portraits - Alice's abusive husband and her daily frustrations ("she could feel her life with him slowly crushing her to death"),  Ben's desire, simply, to go North away from the chaos, Meg's confrontations with an American flight marshall who thinks he should be running things and an emissary from the Community who has old-fashioned ideas ("They didn't like hearing women swear. Well, fuck that.")

Indeed, he's so good at it that this book contains at least half a dozen separate stories, each of would easily furnish enough material for a full story. I could read a whole book about Alice or Meg. But we only see glimpses of Alice's life, and only a couple of episodes in Meg's: I'd love to have been able to read more about them, but the focus stays - as the separate strands come together - on the grand story Hutchinson's been weaving ever since Europe in Autumn. This book is fully part of that, ducking and weaving around the timeline and events already established (it must have been murder to keep all the events and characters in the rights places) and adding new depth and different perspectives to what we already know. That does mean you'll get more out of it if you have a fairly fresh recollection of the previous books, although there are enough hints that it also makes sense on its own.

Kind of... By the end of the book, Rudi himself - I did mention that Rudi's back, didn't I? No? Well, RUDI'S BACK! YAY! - is pretty bewildered by some of the revelations, and aghast at what the future may hold. But that's the nature of Fractured Europe, I think - there is no neat resolution, we don't get all the answers, and there is an unsettling sense that no-one is really in control. (Of course no-one is in control, ever, anywhere, but that's such a worrying idea that we spin conspiracy theories and postulate sinister masterminds: it's easier to believe a genius is running the show, even an evil one,  than accept the directionless, emergent chaos that is the alternative. Hutchinson refuses to comfort us by affirming that conspiracy rules OK, while not denying that there are conspiracies afoot).

Did I sound excited to meet Rudi again? of course I am. I just love Rudi. He's so capable, so resigned, so... upright. Surveying what's been done to Alice, "Rudi felt his heart break". Unlike others here, all he really wants to do is to run his little restaurant, not be swindled by the meat suppliers, and to keep the "cohorts of individual creeps, ghouls, crooks and gentleman adventurers" at bay. That sounds a tall order, in a continent where, seemingly, everyone wants to be a spy: I think that - despite the focus on spyycraft, the jargon - one of the targets of this book is the general obsession with espionage, with the glamour of it (at one point Alice meets a man she describes to herself as a "Poundshop Harry Lime" and reflects that she herself is therefore a "Poundshop James Bond").

Another focus is, clearly, the Little Englander mentality thats sees the preserved never-was of the Community as some kind of salvation, rather than a horrendous parody (make your own connection to current politics) and - in a wider sense - the current world trend towards extremes. Rudi is the perfect foil to this, a dignified, modest man with steel inside him, an inhabitant and product of deep Mitteleuropa. He is the counterpoint to the chaos and even, to a degree, the conspiracies. We can believe in Rudi and I salute Hutchinson for giving us that. More, his books take Europe seriously, as a place, not just colour: Hutchinson displays a familiarity with the places, the journeys, the ways of living. There's a cosmopolitanism here, a rooted cosmopolitanism, a sense we have to transcend the irritable scratchiness of nationality and resit the demagogues. It's a delight in countries and places and differences which is its own riposte to the narrowness of the Community and those who think like it.

This is, in short, a delightful book and also a serious book. I'm so glad that we have it to round off the Fractured Europe sequence. The whole thing is a considerable achievement, and while everything has to come to an end, I am also sad that this is the last book in Fractured Europe.