Review - Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway (Cal Sounder, 2)

Sleeper Beach

Nick Harkaway
Corsair, 10 April 2025 
Available as: HB, 312pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781472158895

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

Sleeper Beach is the second book featuring Cal Sounder, PI in a near-future, fractured reality. In the first story, Titanium Noir, we saw (spoilers!) Cal fatally injured and treated with the drug T7, which prolongs life and increases body mass, strength and endurance. 

Five years on, Cal is still learning to live with his new body and with the profound change to his status in his own - and wider society's - perception. Cal is now a "Titan", one of of a tiny number of reengineered supermen (and women) who seem set to inherit the earth, poisoned and heated as it is. Titans can live for hundreds of years, with many acquiring great wealth over their prolonged lifetimes. They have a different view of the world, losing track of relationships and of the lives of the ephemeral "baselines", many of whom are resentful, forced to the sidelines of life in what is a nakedly capitalist, dog-eat-dog world.

Despite his new status, Cal continues to do what good he can, rather than allowing himself to be enfolded by the cushion of money and privilege that might be afforded by his girlfriend's, Athena's, membership of the powerful Tonfamecasca corporate family. This is how he comes to be investigating the suspicious death of a young woman in the seaside town of Shearwater. Harkaway lovingly portrays the atmosphere of the peeling resort/ fishing town, a place dominated by the Esrkine family who've been having trouble with their workers. It's a complex plot featuring potential revolutionaries, trades unions and family tensions all of whom have only one thing in common - a preference for Cal to mind his own business. Lurking in the background is the mysterious organisation the 1848, a revolutionary sect that may or may not exist and may or may not be set to avenge the massacre that happened some decades earlier in a place called Tilehurst.

That name is one of the few familiar anchors for me to the present - I regularly travel through Tilehusrt on the train, although it's not the small city portrayed here - the action in the book taking place in a strange, almost dreamlike place that's hard to connect, either spatially or temporally, to now. From the hard boiled tone of the narration one might think the story was based in the US, but other place names, and the geography, seem frustratingly off for that. Maybe there's more going on here than one might think - perhaps Cal, who is our narrator, is already succumbing to the Titan outlook, telescoping time and the b brief lives of baseline humans. Perhaps history is being rewritten, and the centuries the Titans have allegedly been around for are a myth, or something worse? It's all tantalising.

Harkaway is certainly having fun with all this, and, I felt, perhaps poking fun at another current project, the continuation of the George Smiley books. There's perhaps a thin line between Cal's profession and that of the spy, the Communist organisation in the shadows suggests, of course, a subtle enemy and I definitely spotted allusions ion the language - as for example when there is a need for a "legend for a girl". 

But the fun doesn't take over. Cal is not in fact a spy, he is a hardboiled detective - a man who may walk down the mean streets but is not himself mean, hard though it may be to grasp his humanity changed as he is - and in Sleeper Beach he does just want he ought to, carrying out the instructions of his mysterious client, who may or may not be fatale, she is definitely femme but not a stereotype dangerous blonde, to discover who is the murderer. There may or may not be a Titan angle here - it's so easy for them to become killers, so easy to escape justice. There may or may not be a political angle. Cal makes alliances and enemies, explores the roots of the town and spends a great deal of time on that beach where the hopeless come to let their lives drain away.

It's a glorious book, a knotty detective mystery wrapped round a peeling dystopia. I can't think of anything quite like this series. It's got noir, obviously. It's got echoes of M John Harrison's Viriconium. It's got a scorching moral centre as Cal processes the nature of the creature he's become and debates its right to exist. So maybe add Frankenstein to that mix? And I could go on. It's weird, it's sad, it's fun and it's all its own thing.

Strongly recommended.

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

#Blogtour #Review - Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

Notes From The Burning Age
Claire North
Orbit, 22 July 2021
Available as: HB, 403pp, e, audio 
Source: ARC kindly provided free by the publisher
ISBN(HB): 9780356514758

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance review copy of Notes from the Burning Age to read and consider for review.

Before I start this review I should probably declare a bias - I adore Claire North's books and I've been loving her novels exploring individuals with weird abilities, or curses. Notes from the Burning Age is a little different, featuring ordinary people albeit in a weird future, but I still came to it expecting brilliance and I wasn't disappointed. 

Fiction reflecting and commenting on the environmental catastrophe being visited right now on the planet has never been more important... or harder to do.  Given the scale of what is happening, there is a sense in which all future, or near future, set fiction must be climate/ environmental fiction. But authors face challenges. Make it unremittingly gloomy, and readers might stay away. But implying it's a trivial problem, easily solved, would be reckless and unrealistic.

In Notes from the Burning Age, North finds an ingenious solution. The book is set some way in the future - hundreds of years - in an era when people can look back to our "burning age" and judge it. From that perspective, they can report the catastrophe, but without living it. We can also see that, despite losses, humankind has found ways to mitigate its impact on the planet, limitations to prevent a repeat of the disaster. The book is full of fascinating detail about these, from dependence on bicycles and electric vehicles and use of solar, wind and tidal power, to building techniques using reasons instead of cement to a system of religion and ethics intended to stress interdependence with nature. This is propagated by the Medj priesthood, who 'bowed to each tree in turn and made libations to the kakuy whose gift they were receiving'.

This elusive concept of the kakuy is key to the civilization depicted here. Perhaps gods, perhaps demons, perhaps innate spirits of the forests, the mountains, the seas, the kakuy may be a pious myth, a real and ferocious force that rose in anger when humans defaced the earth, or a personification of the chaos and harm that came from that defacement. The Medj teaching is focussed on not rousing them again - if gods, they are gods who have no regard for Mankind, regarding us an irritant at best. Ancient religions flourish alongside this cult - at one point a character is rescued and sheltered by a Jewish community, and the domes on ancient mosques and churches still stand over the city of Isdanbul - but they are peripheral. 

Ven, the main character in Notes from the Burning Age, is a disgraced former member of the Medj, but hedges his bets about the kakuy. Others, ambitious men (mostly) who chafe under the limitations imposed following the Burning, do not believe, or actively despise the idea. Humanity is paramount, they insist, and only harm can come from denying that essential fact. The book, then, looks both back - at our burning age - and forward - at a potential future one, as humanity, like a dog returning to its vomit, forgets lessons learned and plots harm again. We see this as environmental destruction, seemingly undertaken to demonstrate human mastery, gathers pace. The story, from one perspective, is therefore a set of notes from the "future" burning age, to ours.

Located in Central Europe, the story depicts a loose federation of seven provinces supposedly united under a Council to ensure that "heresies" (the use of destructive, historic technologies) stay suppressed. It isn't clear whether similar conditions obtain elsewhere - there are brief mentions of the 'Anglaes islands' and their 'purity laws' and of an 'Amerika' with 'militia forts'. The the province of Maze is however flexing its strength, overturning the laws adopted for safety and to prevent the kakuy rising. Ven is close to that process, having fetched up as personal assistant to Georg Mestri, the power behind the Brotherhood, a social and political force dedicated to human potential (and to founding an empire with Maze at its head). 

Despite his background in the Medj, Ven comes to admire Georg, for whom he translates ancient documents, stolen by the Brotherhood, describing banned technologies (and including a lot of other rubbish scoured from ancient hard drives - Ven's background has given him some skill in recognising what might be useful). More "notes", this time from our "burning age" to the future one. From this position Ven's able to describe the rapid slide of Maze into militaristic dictatorship and then war, and the progress of espionage between the two sides, espionage that may make the difference in an otherwise uneven war. The book has plenty of excitement, with a mole hunt going on, conflicted loyalties, and a lot at risk on either side. That makes it a pacey and exciting read, even as North refuses to skimp detail of the environmental damage done in our time, and which is starting up again. Her descriptions of shrines made from ancient, sea-washed plastics, of part-ancient, part reconstructed buildings or of simply Medj shrines, and always arresting and often beautiful.

Hovering over everything in Notes from the Burning Age are moral choices, the foremost of which is perhaps, how much damage must one accept to preserve peace? In this book the environmentally sensitive way of life of the other provinces is threatened by Maze's revanchism. Will the other provinces receive enough warning? If they do, will they be willing too act?  Indeed, how can they act when they believe that warfare will wake the kakuy and bring ruin again? Again, placing the action in the future makes the story more palatable since it isn't finger-pointing at us, here, now - even if in reality we face similar dilemmas.

Notes from the Burning Age shows how these choices are inescapable, and perhaps, that there are no good options. It's chock full of ideas, and North is able to paint even her villains as sympathetic (in a certain light) and her heroes as distinctly tarnished, ambiguous types. The dialogue is often brilliant (it always is in this author's books, but even so, here it's superb) with several layers of subtext to the conversations, and the action-y parts of the book (of which there are many) have the urgency and pace of a thriller. 

In short, I think Notes from the Burning Age is a joy to read, and shows North evolving as an author to address difficult themes as well as serving up a rollicking good story. I would strongly recommend it.

For more information about Notes From The Burning Age see the publisher's website here or any of the stops on the tour poster below.

You can buy Notes From The Burning Age from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Trials of Koli by MR Carey

The Trials of Koli (Rampart Trilogy, 2)
MR Carey
Orbit, 17 September 2020
Available as: PB, 445pp, audio, e
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN: 9780356513492

I'm grateful to Orbit and to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers for a free advance copy of The Trials of Koli to consider for review and for inviting me to take part in the tour.

This is the second part of The Rampart Trilogy and in discussing it below I'm going to include some spoilers for the first book, The Book of Koli. I make no excuses for that! The stories are tightly wound, with Book 2 a direct continuation of Book 1 and I think knowledge of the earlier instalment is necessary to get the most from this one. It doesn't work as a standalone.

IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK OF KOLI, DO THAT NOW, RIGHT?

I'll WAIT.

OK. With that out of the way, where are we at the start of The Trials of Koli? Well, Koli, Ursula-From-Elsewhere, the young woman Cup and Ursula's faithful walking drone, the Drudge, are on their way to London. This future, 150-200 years hence, is a world where 'Everything that lives hates us' (see, it can get worse than 2020!) Bio-engineered plants and animals, adapted to cope with climate change and environmental degradation, have turned on their makers (...unless they were deliberately weaponised...) Combined with dimly remembered wars and the rumours of wars, this has reduced humanity to a scatter of isolated communities hanging onto remnants of ill-understood 'tech' from the Old Times. In Koli's home village, Mythen Rood, operation of the tech has been captured by a single family, the Vannastins. Koli erred and strayed when he discovered this fraud and was then cast out, precipitating various changes and disasters in the village.

This story, as I had expected, follows Koli and his friends on their way to London. I was glad to see, though, that it also picked up events in Mythen Rood - hopefully meaning we'll see more there in the final part. Spinner, the young woman Koli was sweet on but who preferred a young Vannastin boy, features prominently as the family, and the village, try to cope with the aftermath of Koli's departure and with new threats from outside. The Vannastin monopoly on tech and the superstitious rigidity that maintains it are about to make it hard for the village to address the danger it is in. Will they be able to adapt?

Meanwhile Koli encounters new dangers and temptations, passing through a ruined Birmingham and eventually reaching a London very different from what we'd expect. The little group he's travelling in has not gelled: Koli is dealing not only with people brought up like him (such as Cup) but with Ursula, whose knowledge of the world and of tech is on a wholly different level, and of course with Monono, the AI which has bootstrapped itself (herself?) from his Sony music player. Monono has deep knowledge of the world and hinted-at abilities to influence it but she and Ursala are deeply at odds. Cup is also hostile, still attached to the death cult of Senlas. The dynamics are complicated, the  band always on the edge of falling apart.

I really enjoyed the divided focus between Koli and Spinner.  Spinner is a resourceful and cool-headed woman - in many respects, quicker and with greater insight than Koli - and it's rather fun seeing her go to work understanding and (in the best sense) manipulating the society she lives in, both for self-preservation and to try and improve things: whereas Koli in the first book was (and still is, to a degree) a dreamier person who rather tends to collide with the world, a step behind rather than half a step ahead. In fact I think I actually enjoyed this book slightly more than The Book of Koli (a high bar!) for that reason. It's a mark, I'd say, of how vivid and real Carey makes his characters that confronted with a similar situation they respond so differently but in both cases the responses feel absolutely true.

In some ways Koli is perhaps the least effective of his  group at dealing with the challenges they face. But that gives some distance and perspective, allowing him, to act as narrator and make judgements about what the others are up to. Cup is gradually thawing, understanding that she's no longer beholden to Senlas and coming to terms with the reality of being what Koli's society calls 'crossed' and what we would refer to as trans. Monono, we know from The Book of Koli, wishes to be free from the hardware that encases her. Ursula has her fears about that and her hopes for the future. Lots of sub-currents here, even aside from the gradual hints about what happened to "our" world. As Spinner asks, 'What were they like, our mothers' mothers and our fathers' fathers? Who did they hate so much tp spend the fruits of their learning and the cunning of their hands on engines of such terrible  cruelty? Was it their own selves?'

We don't learn what they were like - although we can guess: like us! - but we do learn some of their identities, these soldiers of the 'Unfinished War',  in what is actually a surprisingly moving moment, when a piece of neglected and abandoned tech speaks, reading out the names of 'these four, recorded KIA, [who] were my crew for four years'. They are ordinary names, Vincent Corke, Maria Ugonwe, Stephen Egerton, Elaine Sandberg. 'I carry Elaine in non-volatile storage. Vincent and Maria and Stephen are lost, except to my remembering. As long as I remember anything, I will remember them'.

The book doesn't though, in the main, look back but forward. Koli and Spinner are living in their now, with many challenges from nature, other humans and from their mothers' mothers and their fathers' fathers, such as the poisonous silver that falls with rain or snow or the rogue drones which can strike out of a clear sky. In their different ways they face those challenges with courage, imagination and hope. I look forward to reading the final part of the trilogy, to seeing what hope they can find for the future of their - our - world.

In short: this is an epic read, a glorious and involving story that you should certainly read.

You can buy The Trials of Koli from your local bookshop, or online from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

For more stops on the tour see the poster below: there have already been some great reviews, more are to come! And for more information about the book, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Agency by William Gibson

Agency
William Gibson
Viking, 23 January 2020
HB, 416pp

'Observe, orient, decide, act'.

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of Agency via NetGalley.

Sequel to Gibson's The Peripheral, Agency is a book that can be read as a standalone, although that leaves the reader with a  a job of catching up to do. Still, we are brought up to speed pretty quickly.

The book takes place across three alternate timelines - our world, albeit in 2136, and two versions of 2016, including one where the results of the UK's Brexit referendum and of the US's presidential election were different. With its events taking place in San Franciso, the latter timeline gives some quiet signs of hope in the US: a mural celebrating "the President's" courage, for example ('Her opponent loomed behind her, as he once actually had'). We don't see the outcome in the UK in this scenario. But Gibsons insists that people are generally no happier, not knowing what they've been saved from - and the "jackpot", a horrible future featuring decades of catastrophe, is still coming. Nothing immediately hangs on the difference in political outcomes and we don't see the longterm effects. Rather the conflict that motivates the book takes place under the radar and at a more personal level.

Gibson's conceit is that "our" timeline is the "real" one from which the others are "stubs", branches formed when somebody in "our" world communicates back to inhabitants in the distant past.. How such communication is possible isn't explained (I think that's where reading The Peripheral, which I hadn't, may help) but Gibson uses the idea with gusto, having the inhabitants of 2136 London intervene in 2016 for a variety of reasons - one is malicious and enjoys causing trouble, others see it as a hobby, while our main protagonists - a Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer and her sidekick, Netherton - seek to help. In particular, they're trying to prevent alt-2016 perishing in a nuclear war, and therefore seek traction in that world. (This is challenged by an indignant resident of one of the other timelines as simply colonialism)

At the other end of this process is Verity Jane, a young woman renowned in the tech world as the "app whisperer" and in the tabloids as Stetson Howell's ex. Howell is a powerful force in tech and having broken ups with him, Verity is of great interest to social media. When the book opens she's just about to take a new job evaluating an AI personal assistant for startup Tulpagenics - something that will change her life for ever.

The AI, Eunice*, becomes key to this story and the relationship between it - her - and Verity both touching and intriguing. As chapters alternate between San Francisco and London, we gradually see a more complete picture of what's going on, but to achieve that you need to get your head round some complicated setups involving tele-presencing between the two timelines (and occasionally, all three).

So you can have a character (generally Netherton) living in 2136 London but virtually occupying a drone in 2016 alt-San Francisco, interacting with the inhabitants there and observing that reality through a game-like interface while occasionally exchanging words with someone with him in the (2136) - the conversation also including other characters who are effectively dialled in to the events, from one or other of the timelines. I found it really confusing at times ('...his phone's feed provided by her device's camera. She couldn't see him, though he could show her what he was seeing'), and the descriptions of what was being seen on that virtual display sometimes took a lot of effort to interpret.

There is also a lot of tech speak. 'She's an intermittently hierarchical array, complexly coterminous' for example, or 'a locus of clonic indeterminacy' or 'competitive control areas'. The book is in one sense a lot of extended conversations, undertaken as characters run for their lives. But, new words to learn! At least now I know what "noetic" means.

I realise this may sound as if I didn't like the book. That's not so at all. I really enjoyed Agency and look forward to reading more Gibson. The stuff above doesn't really hold up the narrative or make the essentials hard to follow. And he has some mind-bending concepts - see the character who has had her animated tattoos removed and installed into the hide of an indoor yurt, so that as she sleeps she's surrounded by moving animal figures. Or the idea of an electronic privacy filter created by a circle of dancing bots swirling shawls made of a smart fabric. And there is some really smart, even beautiful use of language here ('Her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth...', '"...something like Uber," Eunice said, "but for following people"', 'that horror movie feel of any unoccupied cam feed').

Above all, the characters feel real, part of a community, a family, at home ion their places - whether that's Verity sofa-surfing in San Francisco or Netherton with his wife Rainey and his son of even Lowbeer in her preposterous mobile situation room. The book feels deep, these characters care for each other, they have history and have made compromises and they know better to raise certain issues or to do certain things, and Gibson communicates all this subtly, he shows it, for which I can forgive him any amount of tech speak and mind-bending multi-way situations.

It was great fun. But do read The Peripheral first.

For more about the book, including links to buy, see the Penguin website here.

*Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System

Review - The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man by Dave Hutchinson

The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man
Dave Hutchinson
Solaris, 3 September 2019
PB, 336pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with a free advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley to consider for review.

This is a slightly deceptive book (which to me is a Good Thing: see below for why) as despite the pulpy title (and image) Hutchinson delivers what seems at first to be quite a restrained story. Alex Dolan is a washed up journalist, cast overboard as media transforms and traditional titles founder, who is rescued from debt by billionaire Stanislaw Clayton ('Stan').

Clayton is pouring money into a new high energy physics project, the Sioux Crossing Supercollider ('SCS') designed to investigate and manipulate gravity - but things aren't going well and he wants to generate some positive publicity for the enterprise. So Alex is invited to stay in Sioux City, a slice of small-town America apparently preserved from ruin and decay by Clayton's billions. No, not apparently.  It has been preserved - or where necessary, rebuilt. The locals are in equal measure resentful to an all-powerful outsider and desperate for Clayton to continue his support, giving Dolan some difficulties in coming up with an interesting angle on the SCS.

It's a delight to read about Alex's encounters with Sioux City and its residents (both locals and the staff of the SCS), his very slowly growing misgivings that everything seems too perfect, and the undercurrent of weirdness that pervades Sioux City (from the basement full of guns in his rental house to yellowing newspaper stories describing strange past events). Hutchinson gives us an even paced, shrewd, and cooly perceptive vision of the place and its people, allowing it to unroll gradually, with the details of everyday life - getting lost on an unmarked road, dealing with a gonzo physicist who frequents seedy bars (OK, maybe that's not 'everyday') or playing chess with a neighbour - given weight and significance (as are the comparisons between pretty, lucky Sioux Crossing and the less well kept, indeed downright shabby, towns that surround it).

I found all this a joy. For the reader demanding instant action, little may seem to be going on but for me, it is all happening, even as Alex struggles to get a grip on the book Clayton wants written and small obstacles begin to appear in his way. Hutchinson has I think a real knack for getting under the skin of life, making the ordinary significant and drawing his readers in through detail and cool observations rather than lectures and infodumps.

But yes, there is a point where everything changes and this becomes a rather different sort of a book.  It's hard to say a lot about this for fear of spoilers. The weirdness begins to show more and more, and Alex becomes the focus for someone with a grudge. His discomfort with this is in no small part due to his having a connection with British intelligence, which makes cooperating with the Local Police Department to get to the bottom of the crimes rather difficult (and given how friendly the locals are, itself racks him with guilt and indecision). Strange things begin to happen, which both acknowledges and denied by those around him, the basic weirdness of Sioux City itself providing a disorienting background to what is now going on.

The closing part of the book is then definitely fully science-fictional and builds skilfully on the earlier narrative, with mysteries explained (apart - I think - from one - why a certain person was driving a certain car just before the story turned?).This end part is satisfying in itself, if startling, but I was a little sad that so many strands from the earlier, gentler part were left unresolved: the enigmatic Clayton, the book Alex was writing, his relationship with Wendy, the prickly, hostile Prof. Delahaye who takes against Alex. I could easily have read a book twice the length which went into these things in more detail.

All in all this is an absorbing book, great fun to read with an intriguing mystery at its heart.

Review - The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade
Kameron Hurley
Angry Robot, 2 April 2019
PB, 358pp, e

I'm grateful to Angry Robot for a free advance e-copy of The Light Brigade via NetGalley.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book.

I don't normally read military SF, and can't quite remember what prompted me to ask for The Light Brigade despite it falling in that genre. Possibly Hurley's name - I have wanted to read something by her for a while? Anyway, for the first part of the book, I was worried I'd made the wrong choice. It is very military. We get Dietz, a raw recruit from an impoverished family, joining the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps and immediately being flung into intensive, not to say gruelling, training by a merciless drill instructor. ('This is how they break you').

Then the missions - the grunts line up on the field and are broken down into beams of light, reassembled at the target and straight into heavy combat, depicted in note-perfect accounts, complete with lost comrades, tactical chaos and atrocities. It's very intense, almost hyper-real, and I wouldn't, I think, want to read a whole book like that.

But.

BUT.

The whole book isn't like that. While the military stuff doesn't go away, and it's not just backdrop, that's not all there is here, by a long, long chalk. For me, three factors lift The Light Brigade to a different plane.

Maybe I should put this differently. I hate that thing where a reviewer says "this book is genre X but it has stuff Y in it that means it transcends that genre". I don't mean that. I mean, "this book is military SF, which is great but not my cup of tea, but it's also something else, which IS my cup of tea, my afternoon scone and my bowl of strawberries, all at the same time". I'm not saying it's a better book for not just being military SF, I'm saying it is a book that overlaps better with my interests and preferences.

So, the first thing that The Light Brigade is, besides being military SF, is a portrait of a dystopian, ruined society. One where all-powerful corporates have supplanted the State, operate their own armies, dictate who is and is not entitled to citizenship and impose a fascistic ideology to underpin their rule (the phrase 'final solution' occurs several times). It's a violent, hierarchical world with graduations from the 'ghouls' at the bottom, non-persons living in labour camps and on rubbish tips  ('being a ghoul means being hungry. Living in other people's waste. Praying a cough won't turn into pneumonia...') upwards to those with residence, to citizens, to the wealthy, all the way to the CEO of the Corporation.

Of course there are aspects of our world in this, as well as hints of the path by which things got to this state ('The more fearful and out of control we feel, the more we look to some big man on a horse of a tank or a beam of light to save us'. 'America... tore itself apart... drowned in a deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalised training in critical thinking...') and it's a chilling, plausible vision on both counts.

Then there's the second thing. The, you know, SF bit. That's here not just in the dressing - futuristic plasma rifles, the concept of being at war with a terraformed Mars, the 'knu' ('a complex system of quantum-entangled data nodes...'), 'slicks', suits that recycle the soldiers' wastes and bodily fluids - or in that central conceit of soldiers turned into light, beamed across the Solar System, and reassembled - but in a deeply twisty, mind-bending plot. Very soon after that moment when I wondered if I should go on, I got my answer as strange things started to happen to Dietz. I won't say exactly what they are because although we soon understand (kind of) what is going on, it takes much longer for us (and for Dietz) to understand why - and how the separate events hang together. Indeed it's Dietz's working out of that which drives the plot, as distinct from the ongoing military narrative (one that gets darker and darker, more and more enfolded in atrocity, treachery and bad faith - even as Dietz and comrades try to hold onto a sense of loyalty to each other, the first and last thing soldiers have).

The third thing is the portrayal of Dietz. A soldier, missing parents (father: disappeared by Tene-Silvia's internal police. Mother: dead from cancer. Brother: vanished when that thing, the Blink, took out São Paulo). 'The enemy had eaten my family... I wanted the enemy obliterated.' In a sense, The Light Brigade is a story of Dietz's growing up, coming to terms with the world through a chaotic jumble of disconnected battles, through the discovery of dark truths, anomalies. It's a difficult process, taking place as the world goes (even more) to Hell and everything that was certain melts away. In the course of it we come to know and like Dietz well.

Fittingly, the ending of such a process is murky, and one could argue the book doesn't actually provide much closure. Readers' responses to this will vary. I did find it satisfying - at times I thought we might get a neat and today resolution but that would have been something of a cop out.

Instead we're left to connect the pieces, piecing together what has happened, and how...

So I was glad I read this book, glad I didn't give up. I will certainly read more of Hurley's books and would strongly recommend this one.

Review - The Rosewater Insurrection by Tade Thompson

Cover design by Charlotte Stroomer

The Rosewater Insurrection (The Wormwood Trilogy, 2)
Tade Thompson
Orbit, 14 March 2019
PB, 374pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of The Rosewater Insurrection.

After the successful and groundbreaking Rosewater, published in 2018, Thompson returns with that "difficult middle book" in his trilogy, The Rosewater Insurrection. It is 2067, and the Mayor of Rosewater, Jack Jacques, is centre stage, manoeuvring for the city's independence from Nigeria. But the alien presence that is the foundation of Rosewater's prosperity (indeed the foundation of Rosewater full stop) seems to be ailing - at just the wrong time for Jacques' plans.

The result is a book that seems rather more conventional than Rosewater, taking forward the two themes of the independence struggle and the alien presence with a lot more detail given about the alien's origin and purpose. I won't go into specifics about that as it would be spoilery, but I will say that this is a much easier book to understand than Rosewater and the alien is less, well, inscrutable. And while, as in Rosewater, there are some flashbacks in this book, they are more clearly signalled as the backstory of particular characters (Jacques himself, Eric who is, with Kaaro, one of only two survivors of those who could enter the xenosphere, the web of fungus-mediated alien consciousness, Anthony who is - well, spoilers).

The Rosewater Insurrection also seems faster-paced, Thompson trading some of the mystery and alien weirdness of the previous book for a slicker, thriller-y story as Jacques mobilises his forces for battle, struggling against internal dissension, possible treachery and the unexpected failing of the alien. The last is something of immediate concern to Kaaro and the remaining elements of Section 45, the secret Government agency set up to study and exploit the alien - a group whose position in Rosewater is now ambiguous.

Once this situation begins to develop, the story becomes fluid, compelling and full of jeopardy, Thompson moving his protagonists around the chaotic city in a situation which has echoes with recent examples of urban collapse in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. At times it becomes distinctly grim - the stakes are high, and some of the players set loose, on both sides, are far from noble. Indeed there's not exactly any noble cause here: Jacques seems mainly to want power, the Nigerian Government is ready to unleash mayhem to stop him, and the alien wants - well, the alien wants what aliens want. Meantime, Thompson asks "what slouches towards Rosewater?"

The characters we most synthesise with - Kaaro, Aminat, Lora - are a little outside this setup, seeking survival or the protection of loved ones. And then there's a Alyssa, a mysterious woman whose survival seems key to the whole situation and who rapidly becomes a sought-after pawn... It's a satisfying knotty, morally murky situation with plenty of peril, characters at crossed purposes and real sense that everything might go wrong.

To answer my implied question above, I think Thompson handles the "middle book" challenge here with aplomb. The Rosewater Insurrection isn't just "more Rosewater" (though it does deliver a wider and a deeper perspective on that remarkable city), rather it does slightly different things with the situation established in the first book, engaging the reader again with that world (while moving things on, without too much of a fuss, for whatever denouement awaits in Book 3). And, while you'd be daft not to read the first book too, this second one is self-contained enough that you could start here if you wanted.

Thompson also has a way with his characters, building identity convincingly. Anthony, an avatar of the alien "footholder", is endlessly recreated by the alien each time the previous instance dies or is damaged. Based on the original Anthony, a white Briton scooped up in London, he continually tinkers with his skin colour, attempting to match those around him but never succeeding. Jacques himself has had an unexpectedly traumatic past. Kaaro's freedom of action is limited by his refusal, as everything falls apart, to abandon his dog. Taken together we're presented with an ensemble of believable characters and some moments of real sadness and loss.

This is a strong sequel to Rosewater which, without losing anything of what made that book special, is perhaps more accessible as well as broadening the scope of Thompson's imagined future. I'd strongly recommend.

For more about the book, see the publisher's website here. You can buy The Rosewater insurrection from Hive books here, from Waterstone's, Blackwell's or Amazon.

Review - Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

Cover by Will Staehl

Autonomous
Annalee Newitz
Orbit, 15 March 2018
PB, 291pp

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for a copy of Autonomous to review.

In the future of 2144, things are not bright, even if the cover of this book is orange. The chained robot arm depicted here reflects the spirit of the time - corrosive property rights and free market ideology that have displaced states and tainted science, a shadowy International Property Coalition using its own armed forces to investigate and punish transgressions, patents - seemingly of indefinite duration - treated as Holy Writ and the poor sold into indentured servitude.

The insatiable lust of the market to turn everything into property is illustrated by a glitteringly casuistical argument: once it was accepted that bots, which start as property can, being intelligent, earn their autonomy, it also surely follows that humans, born free, can enter servitude (read: slavery). And the consequences follow - in a particularly grim scene, we see the "human resources" markets of Las Vegas where "The Alice Shop" sells just what the name suggests.

Yet there is hope. Free Labs attempt to generate inventions outside the proprietary system, and bio pirates reverse-engineer and clone drugs for the benefit of the poor. But they are always waiting for the moment when their labs will be raided by the IPC's goons.

Against this background, Newitz sets up a deceptively simply story, essentially a chase. The notorious "Captain" Jack Chen, is a pirate, smuggler and, to the IPC, a terrorist. She has inadvertently copied a new drug which is very dangerous indeed. The IPC will kill to protect its secrets, so as she attempts to put right the damage she's done, Jack knows there will be a pursuit.

That pursuit is led by a man - Eliasz - and an indentured robot, Paladin, enforcers for the IPC. As we watch them close in on Jack, we see how ruthless they can be, alternately wheedling their way in with activists, scientists and the counterculture generally, and using extreme force ("That was the last useful information they got out of her, though they continued to beat and drug her for the next three hours...")

Eliasz and Paladin seem like monsters. They certainly often act like monsters. Yet at the same time, they are in a delicate, evolving and even beautiful relationship, which Newitz portrays all the more powerfully for there almost being no references that we can use for what it is. Even as he murders and mains, Paladin is running queries, trying to understand what Eliasz is feeling. There are almost humorous scenes where he seeks advice from other robots.

And yet there's a power imbalance here that casts a shadow over the relationship, if we follow through the implications. Paladin is shackled to Eliasz, not physically but by little routines and programs with cynical names like "gdoggie", which manipulate and control his responses. He is not "autonomous". And ultimately Paladin is owned by IPC, not even by Eliasz himself so whatever accomodation arises between them may not survive the duration of the mission. As the two grow close we have to wonder how far Paladin would be free to say "no". Questions of freedom, of control and of destiny hang in the air.

At the same as we are learning about Eliasz and Paladin, Newitz gives us episodes from some 30 years earlier showing Jack's early life and the web of relationships that formed around her as she grew up, progressing from youthful radical to jailed activist to smuggler and pirate. These, together with her travels, and those of the IPC agents, between Canada and North Africa, the main locations in the book, sketch what society has become and establish a wealth of believable characters seeking, in various ways, to subvert or ameliorate the grip of the corporations on peoples' lives.

The plot itself may be straightforward, but with all these carefully layered and nuanced relationships Newitz deftly echoes the themes of autonomy and dependence which she explores with Paladin and Eliasz. The result is a satisfyingly complex read where nothing is ever quite what it seems and nobody - human or bot - is entirely in the right (or the wrong).

A genuinely fresh and thought provoking read and a book I stayed up late into the night to finish.

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

Review - Places in the Darkness by Chris Brookmyre

Places in the Darkness
Chris Brookmyre
Orbit, 9 November 2017
HB, 403pp

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of this book.

Chris Brookmyre is well known for his successful series of crime novels featuring journalist Jack Parlabane and for his Jasmine Sharp trilogy. Among these, he has also published SF (Pandemonium and Bedlam) and I was interested to see how Pandemonium in particular seems to have divided the fanbase. Look at the Amazon reviews - some baffled crime fans there wanting to know why their favourite author is suddenly writing SF.

Places may have a similar effect, because it's heavily SF influenced (A space station! In space! Mysterious advanced technologies! World governments!)

...but it may not, because it's also a murder mystery.

The hero, Nikki Freeman (aka Nikki Fixx, who can make any problem go away, for the right consideration) is a detective on futuristic Ciudad de Cielo (as Spanish is the majority language in the US, much of the nomenclature on Seedee is Spanish influenced). Nikki is a player, cynical, connected and in the sights of morality campaigners like Helen Pititjean. So having to team up with the straitlaced Alice Blake to investigate the gruesome murder of gangster Omega (the first murder ever on CdC) is not her idea of a good career move.

So far, perhaps, so stereotyped. Nikki is the partner with the street (or rather Seedee) knowledge), Alice the senior, by-the-book cop. We know it'll be Nikki's role to bring the realities home to Alice, show here how things really work. And, yes, there is a big gap on Seedee between the public version - what the four corporations of the Quadriga, who run the place, want everyone to believe - and the reality which is rather, er, seedy. Drinking dens, sex clubs and fighting holes are the least of it.

And Alice will show Nikki that rules are there for a purpose.

So, a run-of-the-mill setup, despite the location and futuristic background?

NOT AT ALL.

I don't think Brookmyre could do run-of-the-mill if his writing hand depended on it. There is so much more here.

First, the relationship between the two women is a novel in itself. Of course there is stuff in both their backgrounds which slowly emerges - and mysteries about their present (why do both keep forgetting stuff?) but that aside they're both, from the start, seriously competent (in different ways) and on top of their jobs. Brookmyre sketches enough of the political background to show how much depends on their success, and how they are invested in their different viewpoints (Alice starts with an almost puritanical zeal: Nikki has a fire of righteous fury in her about the treatment of CdC's more disposable citizens) but he does this subtly and allows us to see the multiple levels of the relationship.

Secondly, there is just enough unreliability in what we're shown that almost until the end of the book, multiple perspectives are plausible. (A quantum novel?) I liked Alice, but suspected there was more to her than she - or Brookmyre - was letting on. I liked Nikki, but I didn't trust her. A lot of the book focuses on memory technologies, ways to assist and manipulate the brain, and I felt Brookmyre was up to a fair amount of that himself. Yet when all(?) does become clear, he had, I think, played fair with the reader. The risk, and temptation, of SF-detective fiction, is that a previously unmentioned technology was responsible for everything. That would be cheating, just as it would in a classic detective story if it turns out to have been a twin who did it all. Brookmyre knows his rules, I think.

Finally, the location is gloriously realised and imagined. From the two Wheels spinning round the Core to the space elevator itself, this is a very plausible city in the sky, large enough to require its own Metro and broken enough to have its own underclass and its own dodgy neighbourhoods (and posh suburbs). There's more than a dash of the noir here though, obviously, no rainstorms. I only found one aspect a little hard to swallow - I don't think rotating cylinders create artificial gravity in the way Brookmyre describes. But that's still a good deal less absurd than the typical Star Trek episode, so let's not quibble.

But beyond that - this book simply has heart. In their different ways, Alice, Nikki and CdC - and its people, especially the forgotten ones - aren't being what they could be they need (different types of) healing. And that isn't going to happen while the four corporations, the Federation of National Governments, who oversee the who thing, tussle over control.

That's even before we factor in the others who have a role here, out in the darkness, who have their own plans - which Nikki and Alice may be part of, whether they want to or not.

Cracking the case will take the two women to the heart of this deeper mystery, to confront a threat they could never imagine.

This is a lovely book, pacy, intelligent, fun, and, as I said, with a big heart. If you read SF, you'll love this. If you don't, you should still love it.