#Review - The Burning Time by Peter Hanington

The Burning Time
Peter Hanington
Baskerville, 6 July 2023
Available as: HB, 421pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529305265

I'm grateful to Baskerville for sending me a copy of The Burning Time to consider for review.

I was pleased, in reading The Burning Time, to become acquainted with Hanington's journalist hero William Carver, about whom he's written before. Carver is defiantly old school, insisting on his protégé Naz learning shorthand and hewing to the rules of investigative journalism. That marks him out at the BBC as "different" - yet thankfully this isn't a book about how the management want to rid themselves of an irritant, rather Carver is offered qualified support and he navigates a labyrinth of public-private collusion, spin, and cover-up that may go as far as murder.

The central issue is the environment and in particular the COP21 summit in Paris. The PM who's alluded therefore must be Cameron (supported by references to publicity stunts with huskies) although the corrupt culture against which Carver struggles may suggest a different, more recent PM.

The story is told through a number of viewpoints: Carver himself, of course, also Naz, the billionaire scientist and geo-engineer Clive Winner, his right hand woman Jennifer Prepas, and others. Skilful writing by Hanington means that the narrative is never obscured by the variety of plot strands this engenders, nor is it a case of seeing one set of characters bothered and bewildered by things that others - and we readers - know but they don't. Rather, there is a complex yet clear organic narrative being told across many fronts with most of it obscure to most of the participants.

The motives of those we see are correspondingly murky. Yes, we do see a killer at work - but their purpose and employers are not clear at all, while, obviously, creating a nice sense of menace as unsuspecting victims and potential victims go about their business.

A second strand of the story refers to the Pegasus spyware that was discovered being used to monitor, especially, environmental activists and covert activity in the UK targeting those engaged in lawful protest. That, too, will worry the reader that characters they care about may be menaced by those on the dark side. The sense of threat is in synch with wider events, the conviction over the past few years that there are forces who will not stand for change and who will lie, cheat and break the law to preserve their own wealth. Hanington's protagonists therefore seem firmly rooted in the real world, engaged in a very real struggle and subject to real dangers.

Not, then, anything like escapist fiction, but all the same, a tense and well paced mystery that will absorb and engage the reader.

For more information about The Burning Time, see the publisher's website here. 

 

#Review - The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

The Terraformers
Annalee Newitz
Orbit, 2 February 2023
Available as: PB, 338pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356520865 

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of The Terraformers to consider for review.

The Terraformers is, I think, Newitz's first book for several years and it is really good to see a new work from this author. It is an excellent of example of all that SF can be at its best - challenging, laden with breathtaking ideas, and epic in scale and conception (though in this case not length - it's refreshing to meet a book with a span of centuries and a planetary scale narrative that is not a trilogy).

Set some 60,000 years in the future, The Terraformers considers our future at a time when "people" have spread far and wide across the universe. Post the "Great Bargain" other forms of life than humanity - animals and plants, as well as various AIs, bots and hybrids of bio, tech and AI  - qualify as "people" and are entitled to a say in how things are run. This activity is overseen by "Environmental Rescue Teams", ERTs, whose focus is ecology, but more than that - one might almost say theirs is the science, or perhaps the engineering, of community, in the broadest possible sense.

So this book is filled with lifeforms designed, or engineered, for particular purposes - H. Sapiens may assume they are the default, the template, but they can be designed to be ultra-receptive to networks, or reworked as H. Varialis to breathe atmospheres of carbon and nitrogen. We meet sentient, flying moose, intelligent cows with bionic legs, and a cat reporter who forms a friendship with a flying train. Newton's audacious concepts only sound bizarre out of context: in the story they arise as almost inevitable in this future, and not just as technological maybes but as actual, living, feeling and suffering - well, people, which is the point, I think.

Troublingly for a future in which such a bewildering array of life is given a voice, and one in which there is radical acceptance of individuals (Newitz presents a variety of genders and all manner of romantic connections) economic and social inequality is as bad as ever, or perhaps worse. Corporates are able to, literally, build and own people, burning in rules to keep those people in their place. The Terraformers is about, among other things, how that process - built on the rock of private ownership - comes to be challenged.

Structured as three episodes taking place over several centuries we see the development of a new planet, Sask-E, in its early days a "pristine" wilderness (only, not really), some time later with cities are being established, and then, in the third part, as those cities fall under the control of a particularly unpleasant corporate overlord pandering to a strain of H. Sapiens genetic particularity. Each time, it's ingenuity, solidarity and daring that saves the day, though most of the characters we meet don't overlap between the parts, even though these are recognisably stories of the same communities. (I was reminded rather of Asimov's earliest Foundation stories, visiting the same polity at interesting times during a long evolution, although the imaginative leaps here are much greater and the science social as much as physical).

The accent is, then, on people (of wide and diverse types) confronting "problems" - environmental, political and developmental - their interventions then being allowed to run and the results presented  centuries later. A risk with such a structure could be that really, we're just being given a kind of animated history: Newitz pushes back on that by making the main characters gloriously, passionately real, giving then lives, loves and involvements that both illuminate and transcend the development of the plot. Indeed, one senses that at some levels, aspects of these people have complicated, rather than facilitated, the author's plotting - but also that at another, they are the perfect illustration of a thesis that the future is diverse, and that it needs to be diverse. The "plot" therefore accommodates variety of both forms and opinions and apparent drawbacks of that - the awkwardness of decision making in the ERTs, for example - are really strengths.

It's a complex, thought-provoking and engaging book. Though I think it won't be for everyone - the story telling is in a very particular style and often the viewpoint characters are far form driving the plot -  it's a style that grew on me and that really pays off, suiting both the setting of the book and the duracxtion of the storyline. And behind that, Newitz really is a clever and accomplished storyteller, giving us something genuinely different and ultimately breathtaking.

Wonderful reading.

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

 

#Review - Emergency Skin by NK Jemisin

Emergency Skin

NK Jemisin

Amazon Original Stories, 17 September 2019

Available as: Audio, 1 hour 4 mins, e

Narrators: Jason Isaacs

Source: Audio subscription

ASIN: B07X4JS37T

Emergency Skin is a remarkable novella, not least for the fact that Jemisin tells a story in which we never hear directly from the point of view character.

He - though the pronoun is moot, for reasons developed in the story which it would be spoilery to give here - is on a mission back to planet Earth (or "Telos" as we're told it should be called) to collect biological samples needed by the distant colony which is his home. Earth is expected to be a hostile wasteland, given that the colony in question was established to house those who had fled environmental destruction.

We're given this in formation by a narrator who is apparently an AI designed to assist the protagonist with this task. We only hear the AI's side of the conversation, together with the voices of one or two people he meets on earth (no, it's not a desert). The AI is a marvellously querulous and elitist construct, reflecting, of course, the views of its masters and betraying their own elitist and blinkered thinking. It's lovely to hear this consciousness come up against the conundrum that Earth simply seems to have flourished ones its makers - supposedly the best, brightest and most innovative of humanity - shoved off.

Again, no spoilers, but Jemisin does gives us an object lesson here in thinking beyond the dreary and reductive worldview of the tech lords and their political lapdogs. It's an impressive argument, albeit necessarily compressed given the form (I would like to see it articulated at greater length, perhaps in a novel) - essentially a challenge to the economic orthodoxy that privileges immediate profit above all. And she shows how openness to alternative view points, and courage, can lead us to challenge even the most ingrained assumptions. That's a lesson needed now more than ever, I think.

In all, a thought provoking and satisfying novella, due in no small part to Isaacs' narration, which captures the cadences both of the smug AI and of several person whom the protagonist encounters on Earth. As I've said, we never hear his voice but the compelling dialogue almost makes you think you have.

I'd recommend. 

#Review - Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Design by Jo Thomson

Hummingbird Salamander
Jeff VanderMeer
4th Estate, 15 April 2021
Available as: HB, 349pp, e, audio

Source: Advance e-copy, and audio
ISBN(HB): 9780008299316

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Hummingbird Salamander via NetGalley. I also listened to the audiobook, which is excellently narrated by Lisa Flanagan.

In Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer has written both a taut, twisty thriller (which has fun with some of the conventions of that genre) and a spot-on exploration of climate change and environmental degradation.

In, I think, a near future, but one very close to our now (anyone remembering the last eighteen months will recognise the background chatter and rising fear caused by a novel pandemic). The narrator is Jane - she tells us that's not her real name - telling her story after the catastrophe that it represents for her and family. That's catastrophe at a personal level, on top of the pollution laden skies, societal breakdown and spreading chaos that occasionally intrude.

Jane has a husband and daughter, although we never learn their names. She has a safe, well-paid middle class job in the security industry. She also has a sense of detachment from all this - again, there are passing mentions of one-night stands while she's away at conferences ('Never knew the last names.') That detachment seems to be rooted in her distinctly strange childhood, growing up on a farm with an abusive grandfather ("Shot"), a feeble dad and a mother who had mental health issues. And then there's the brother. As the story proceeds, Jane interrogates her past, matching up moments, memories and bits of her current experience with it. Notably she tells us much more about this, and in particular her experience with Shots - who seems to have beaten her and her brother, but also taught her to wrestle - than she does about that husband and daughter: as to the latter, it's really a series of missed opportunities and disengagement and indeed, a reckless attitude to whether what she's doing might get them into danger.

What she's doing... well, in the best thriller/ noir style, that all begins with a mysterious message, leading to a trail of breadcrumbs. Exactly why the message is for Jane, and why she is so drawn to follow it up - with many, later, regretful comments about how things would have been different if she'd turned aside at that moment - well, that's rather unclear for most of the story. 

The message is from Silvina Vilcapampa, a rebellious but recently deceased member of a South American family which has becomes rich, basically, from environmental destruction: mining, logging, trafficking in endangered species, you name it. They are not only rich but scary, responding to Jane's interest with guns, muscle and threats. But this is a thriller, and the Vilcapampas are not the only players here, VanderMeer weaving together a delightfully baffling and tense array of subplots as Jane attempts to discern the truth, find out if any of the actors here are potential allies, and solve the riddle that Silvina has set. Whether she's motivated by insatiable curiosity, boredom with her middle-class, middle-aged life, or a desire to fill in gaps in her own history, was something I mused on right the way through this book. Jane seems obsessed with Silvina, and the taxidermied hummingbird that forms the first message form her, obsessed to the point of of researching Silvina's life and following her travels as set out in her journal. The overt reason for this would be to discover a secret she suspects has been hidden - and presumably that's also the reason the Vilcapampas are so keen to stop her - but she knows so little of what it might be that there must, surely, be more going on than that.

Either way, the story Silvina tells, and Jane's lived experience - especially her comparisons between the wild world she exploited as a child on the farm and the tame, habitat-sterilised land that has replaced it - are intimately bound up with what we are losing as the planet is degraded: the book calmly describes extinctions, environmental stress and climate change, treading a narrow line between discounting them and portraying a future that is completely without hope. As the last words, addressed to a time one hundred year in the future, have it: 'Is there a hummingbird, a salamander? Is there a you?'

Above all, despite the temptation to identify Big Business as the Big Villains in all this (and the Vilcapampas in particular are clearly no angels), the confusion and complexity of the world is acknowledged. The book notes the damage done by those who see themselves as on the right side, by the most unexpected people, the seductiveness of the "means to an end" argument, the sheer ambiguity of living - as well as the inertia of living, the way that catastrophe does not, on the whole, come about overnight. The societal breakdown portrayed here is real and certain (and encapsulated in those closing words, I think) but it's something that the privileged are able to ignore for most of the time even so.

Hummingbird Salamander is not, at times, an easy book but it is a rewarding one and it's one I'd recommend. As a listener to the audio, I found Lisa Flanagan's dry, slightly insinuating tones always  absorbing and at times chilling, brilliantly animating Jane's reserved affect: here is a woman with secrets, are you really sure you want to know them? It might change you...

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

#Blogtour #Review - Goldilocks by Laura Lam

Goldilocks
Laura Lam
Wildfire (Headline) 30 April 2020 HB, 29 October PB
Avalaible as HB, 347pp, PB, e, audio
Read as: PB advance copy
ISBN: 9781472267641

I'm grateful to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and to the publisher for an advance copy of Goldilocks to consider for review and for inviting me to take part in the tour.

I'm sure it's happened to you, that moment when you pick up and read a book that seems so immediate, so relevant, so spookily prescient that you wonder off the author didn't, actually, have access to a time machine.

Well Goldilocks is one such book. Set against a background of environmental devastation - ravaged forests, rising seas, fires and pollution - Lam also gives us a creeping epidemic of misoyny, with women being progressively forced out of the workplace, stripped of their rights and generally written out of the script. All cheered on and celebrated by an incompetent, loudmouth US President.

And then, she throws in a novel virus sweeping the Earth... no, I'm sure this was written before the Days of Covid, but I do seem to smell advance info.

Laura Lam

All this is really just the background. It explains why a crew of five female astronauts - Valerie, Naomi, Hixon, Hart and Lebedev - have been rejected for the upcoming mission to scout out a new habitable planet which may save humankind. Rejected, in favour of a back-up crew of men.

It explains why they don't accept this and mount a daring raid, aiming to scoop prototype starship Atalanta from NASA's control and set off for the planet known as Cavendish.

And it explains the fury unleashed on them by governments, media and social media know-alls.

But there's more to the book than that. Lam draws out a rich emotional history between, especially, Valeria and Naomi. Naomi is Valerie's ward and the two (and Naomi's stepbrother Evan) have sparred for years. Valeria is driven,  indeed she is the inspiration behind the Cavendish project but she doesn't;t suffer fools and she doesn't brook opposition. Don't be misled by comparisons to The Martian - this book is about much more than some women surviving in space. A closer analogy might be Simon Mordern's One Way in which we have that survival strand but it's not just survival in a hostile universe but also survival in the face of the darkness of humanity. You can fix faltering ship systems (but oh, what a dilemma that throws up) or sort out the food supply but those men back on Earth are still not prepared to give up their shiny toys.

And when that begins to put strain on the unity of the crew - a crew which needs, above all, to remain united - well that threatens them all, and all of humanity, which is after all depending on this mission (even if it doesn't;t know that).

I loved the way that Lam sets this situation up as a plausible, organic outgrowth of character and of everyone's history. We are given vignettes of Naomi's and Valerie's earlier life, slowly painting the reality of their relationship. Lam takes her time here and at first I wanted the story to move a bit quicker, following the later timeline of the Atalanta's voyage, but have patience, there are nuances here and successive layers of revelation and truth which bear a slow unravelling. Not least, because we need to grow to like and understand Naomi and Valerie for the novel to have its full effect.

The other book I see Goldilocks compared to is, not surprisingly, The Handmaid's Tale in its depiction of a future, dystopian, misogynist society. The transition to that is portrayed here as being much more gradual, more subtle, than in Atwood's novel and in a sense that's much more chilling; it's also of course chilling because it echoes current developments rather accurately.

But really, Goldilocks (the name refers to the zone around a star - neither too hot, neither too cold - in which life may develop; also, perhaps, to someone having an interloper take over their chair, bed and porridge) is its own book, a bold and absorbing story that was very different from anything I'd read before and one which I'd enthusiastically recommend.

It's almost the end of the tour but there is another stop tomorrow and an impressive number of contributions before - look at the poster!

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

To buy Goldilocks - you should buy it - do try your local bookshop. Many are operating mail order and they really need your support right now. Online alternatives are available: over the past few weeks I've found it useful to check several sites and I would recommend Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, Waterstones and of course Amazon.