#Blogtour #Review - The Legacy of Arniston House by T L Huchu

The Legacy of Arniston House (Edinburgh Nights, 4) 
T L Huchu
Tor (Pan Macmillan), 7 November 2024 
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529097771

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Legacy of Arniston House to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I've been really enjoying Huchu's Edinburgh Nights series, of which The Legacy of Arniston House is book 4. The setting is a chastened Scotland, humbled in the aftermath of a "Catastrophe" and held down by a resurgent England. Its capital has complex politics, criminal networks, magic and, above all, the authentic texture of an alternate Edinburgh.

Huchu's main character, Ropa Moyo, is engaging and spiky, a marginalised figure (literally - she and her gran live squatters' lives in a caravan encampment on the edge of the city) who is trying to make her way in the world of Scottish magic whose leading lights, snooty and entitled as they are, don't want to be bothering with her. At the end of the previous book, The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, Ropa seemed to have caught a break when she was hired by the English Sorcerer Royal. While I was concerned this might take her away from Edinburgh, I need not have worried: it seems that Lord Samarasinghe has ongoing business in the North. (That can't bode well, can it...?) Ropa is therefore still hanging round her old home town, albeit cut off from magical society, something that pains her more than she expected. She's even able to revive her old gig as a ghost talker, albeit not everything seems to be well in the spirit realms... there could be trouble ahead.

Huchu definitely ramps up the tension in this book. After a deceptively calm opening (if you've read the first few chapters you may say to yourself "David's talking nonsense again" because they don't seem that calm, but JUST YOU WAIT, IT'S ALL RELATIVE) mayhem of all sorts erupts with rioting, mischief and Ropa being hunted by both magicians and Police. She's framed for a heinous crime and  the whole world she was used tseems about to be torn apart. All this leads up to a fast-moving conclusion in which we learn more both about Ropa's past and about recent Scottish history - and are then left, literally, on a cliffhanger. 

Or perhaps, over one.

Compared with the first three books, which were more self-contained, The Legacy of Arniston House represents a clear change of gear and of focus. There is, as in each of the others, a self-contained mystery and an injustice to be solved and righted (you might think, actually, several). But there is also a much more intricate and visible connection to the plot that's been glimpsable in the background, with certain puzzles finally closed from those earlier stories. At the same time, the implications of Ropa's own history and background are made plain for the first time.

A fun return to what is shaping up to be one of the most interesting and readable series of the past few years. I'll wait for the next book with a great deal of anticipation.

For more information about The Legacy of Arniston House, see the publisher's website here. 

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

#Review - Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken Macleod

Beyond the Light Horizon (Lightspeed Trilogy, 3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Review - Hopeland by Ian McDonald

Hopeland
Ian McDonald
Gollancz, 16 February 2023
Available as: HB, 656 pp, audio (narr Esther Wane), e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399605731

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Hopeland to consider for review. I also listened to parts of the book on audio.

Hopeland is a fierce storm of a book, a story on an epic scale - covering thousands of miles and centuries of time, and also satisfying chunky in the hand. Yet it still has plenty of space for the personal and the small. No, it is the personal and the small - used to tell a big story.

We begin in 2011 as riots engulf London. Amon Brightborne - aka Tweed Boy - a young Irish musician from a wealthy, old established family, is booked for a select gig but unable to find the address. Instead he find Raisa Peri Antares Hopeland - or perhaps she finds him. Raisa is engaged on a sort of parkour selection challenge against the shadowy Finn, the winner to receive a sought-after role in the extended Hopeland clan. Each is to cross London, one from the north, one from the south, not deviating more than 50 metres from an invisible line, the aim being to reach a certain rooftop first. And Raisa is losing - until she enlists Amon to help.

And there, at one level, you have it - like a system of three stars in motion, Raisa, Amon and Finn will weave complex, unpredictable paths through two decades and more, and their perturbations will ring down the centuries. That's the book. At another level of course we have only just begun. We will learn about the Hopelands - a chaotic, sprawling "family" ('Don't fall in love with my family!') which anybody can join, across time, space and cultures and which has its own centres, or 'hearths' everywhere, its own ways of doing things, even its own religion. We will also learn about the Brightbornes, a formidably eccentric clan whose house can't be found unless somebody shows you. Some magic there, surely, but it's matters of fact magic. 

When Brightbornes encounter Hopelands, what might happen?

The setting in which that encounter takes place is a world that's increasingly restive as weather, populations and trends are increasingly disrupted by climate change. The book takes us to Iceland, to Greenland, to the Pacific kingdom of Ava'u and to points in between as humanity struggles to move into its future. I might use the term "sprawling" for this book except that might imply something less disciplined and focussed than Hopeland actually is. Better perhaps to say that McDonald is happy to set things off in one direction, then jump several years and three continents to pick up the story elsewhere, trusting the reader to make the leap with him - which I always did, not least because of the gorgeous writing and command of emotion and pace that Hopeland displays. 

I'm not going to quote bits to illustrate that, I don't know where I'd even begin, you just have to read this and experience the rhythms, the lists (THE LISTS! They are nothing short of poetry!) the almost sneaky way the text comes back to the same point from different directions, the range of reference (McDonald calmly suggests that the word "Padowan" used in Star Wars lore for an apprentice may actually have been lifted from the Hopelands...) The book is like a feast and simply gives so much (my favourite section perhaps being the one where a whisky soaked and self pitying Amon, exiled in Ava'u like a figure out of Jospeh Conrad, or perhaps Graham Greene, becomes involved in political chicanery, a subplot that many writers would base a whole book around).

What else? Corporate and geopolitical shenanigans, the squabbles of gods and an element of possible fantasy or magic that is very much part of the texture of the story but kept as subsidiary theme. Again, any other author I can think of would make 'electromancers' fighting duels with Tesla coils across the rooftops, and declaring themselves the protectors of London, the centre of the story. Or else the cursed family with its own haunting spirit. Or... Instead, here those things are real and important but very far from being at the centre of things, rather they deepen and add weight to what is a glorious, complex and engaging story, one that creates an entrancing world of its own and one that it is simply a joy to visit. 

And McDonald dares not to give answers to some of the mysteries here. It's just the way things are, alongside all the other marvels of Hopeland - the water driven musical engine playing its thousand year melody, for example. In short, Hopeland is a book that simply draws one in, a wonderful book full of so much. I strongly recommend it.

In narrating the story, Esther Wane wonderfully articulates the voices of a dizzying range of characters, form Amon's slightly gruff Irish English to Raisa's sassy Londonish to the Ava'uans to Greenlanders and Icelanders. The audio is magnificent.

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

#Review - Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Ogres
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Rebellion, 15 March 2022
Available as: HB, 144pp (17 March), e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781786185280

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of Ogres via Netgalley to consider for review.

In this standalone novella, Tchaikovsky explores a future where genetic engineering has produced a race of monsters - the "ogres" of the title - who oppress and dominate humans.

The main character is Torquell, the son of a village head, who comes across as a bit of a tearaway, reluctant to tug his forelock before the Masters. Good for him I say - the ogres in this book have adopted the role of feudal overlords, taking what they will and treating the peasants abominably. It later becomes clear that they also operate a form of robber-baron capitalism, with the worst aspects the Industrial Revolution gleefully reintroduced. So I'm all for opposition, but it seems doomed.

As an outlaw, Torquell's challenge is then first to understand how all this came to be and then to do something about it. It's a formidable task, as the ogres are not only collectively in charge but individually stronger and much bigger than any given human. But there is more going on here than that, something hinted at by the story being narrated not by Torquell, but to him, in the second person ('You were always trouble' are its opening words) so we sense other actors on the stage, perhaps.

I really enjoyed this one. The world which is seen through other eyes may seem rather alien, and be set in the future, but increasingly I began to see correspondences with our own world. It's explicitly a near future dystopia (I think it's fair to call it that) representing a world which claims to have solved certain problems - environmental and social - but at the pice of introducing others (you'll have to read it to understand which). Tchaikovsky's argument is though, I think, that those "new" problems, embodied in the society that he describes here may not really be that new at all. As with the best SF, the book holds up a mirror to our own society, both to its evident flaws and also to the damage that may be done in trying to correct them. 

In centring on a driven, if originally reluctant, leader figure it also gently satirises the hero tropes of the dystopian genre: that opening passage continues 'Inevitable, really. And you weren't to know it, but you were following a particular trajectory. The Young Prince is always trouble...' The narrator returns to this theme several times throughout the story, comparing Torquell to the protagonist in the Hero's Journey, not always to his credit. The biological determinism of the process that created the ogres therefore hangs over Torquell himself as a sort of plot determinism, asking us what he is, why, and what he might become.

And whether the template will be followed to the end...

For a short book - I read it in a day - this one packs a tremendous amount in, and truly left me thinking.

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

 

#Review - Stars and Bones by Gareth L Powell

Stars and Bones (Continuance, 1)
Gareth L Powell
Titan Books, 1 March 2022
Available as: PB, 352pp
Source: Advance copy
ISBN: 9781789094282

I'm grateful to Titan Books for a free advance copy of Stars and Bones to consider for review.

The first in a new series from Gareth Powell, Stars and Bones is an ambitious, not to say audacious, space opera that imagines a very different near-future for humanity from that depressing one we may expect - though it is not a future on Earth.

No, rather, within a handful of generations, Powell sees us cast out of our soiled Eden to become nomads, ever sailing the currents of space in a fleet of arks, searching for a place where we are allowed to drop anchor. 

With overtones of "2001" and a distinct sense of judgement, Stars and Bones follows a split timeline, showing us how this came to be through the perspectives of the world's richest man, Haruki, and a couple of scientists, Frank and Victoria, who all witnessed the start of the exile. Seventy-five years into the future, it follows Eryn, Navigator of survey ship Curious Ocelot, which, in the best Star Trek tradition, is about to discover something nasty, very nasty indeed, on a planet known as Candidate-623.

I loved the relationship between Eryn and the sentient Ocelot (represented in physical form by its avatar, a blue-skinned person). There's a level of familiarity and banter between them which hints at how close and trusting they are: bonded for life and with fates linked (elsewhere we see the horror when that bond is broken). I also liked Eryn full stop: her impulsiveness, her looking out for sulky teenage niece Madison. Most of all, the guilt-ridden relationship with sister Shay, Madison's mum, who's missing now creates some complex dynamics between the three and undercurrents which challenge Eryn in discharging her varied duties. There are moments when I just wanted to shout "do the thing!" to Eryn while understanding her hesitation or how she was torn. Life in space circa 2100CE is riddled with dilemmas, perhaps explaining if not always excusing Eryn's general affect of searching for somebody to thump.

There are to be fair plenty of candidates for that honour, from the leader of a survey team who seems determined to court as much danger as possible, to the deadly alien shape-shifters who plague Eryn throughout the book, to the... But that would be to spoil the story. Let's just say there is one entity here, of vast power and ancient origin, that is particularly aloof. And annoying.

It's an action-packed, combat-rich novel, part escape, part race to uncover a mystery dating back to the early days of the exile, and the survival of the drifting human race is (of course) in peril. We see how in the vast fleet, humans have recreated - but also reworked - the divisions imported from Earth, with vastly different takes on abundance. We see how many, life-limiting cultural mores have been overcome - but not everywhere. 

We also occupy one of my favourite situations in SF - the close-knit crew sharing space on a small, slightly rackety spacecraft through a combination of uneventful flight and unimaginable danger and the familiar locations - mess room, cramped quarters, hold and flight deck (seriously, if I could I'd build one of those just to live in). Familiar, maybe, but perfectly realised and deeply atmospheric. 

What else?

Oh yes. Did I mention that we also meet a talking cat? Sam is fitted with an implant and able to vocalise, but he's still all cat, strolling in amidst a crisis to ask when he'll be fed. There's much more as well - a pair of detectives, the universe's most annoying influencer ever, and a fantastic, awe-inspiring location which our heroes must visit to find a recluse who may, just, have the answer that will save humanity.

Exciting, entertaining, scary at times and refreshingly different, I enjoyed Stars and Bones immensely and would strongly recommend it.

For more information about Stars and Bones, see the Titan books website here.

#BlogTour #Review - Off Target by Eve Smith

Off Target
Eve Smith
Orenda Books, 17 February 2022
Available as: PB, 350pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN:9781914585029

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for an advance copy of Off Target (handed over, as all the best intel is, at a party in a foreign Embassy...) and to Anne for inviting make to take part in the blogtour.

Off Target is a meticulous dissection of a relationship - in fact, of two relationships, that between teacher Susan and her husband Steve, and between Susan and her daughter, Zurel. Opening in heartbreaking chapters about Susan's difficulties conceiving, and the impossible choices those difficulties dictate, it then switches focus to a second part that looks at Zurel, now approaching her teens, at what she wants and fears. Both parts are set against the backdrop of runaway genetic experimentation and augmentation. In the climax of the book, the two themes entwine, bringing Susan to unwanted public attention and placing Zurel in danger.

I love books with big themes, and they don't come bigger than this - the conception and development of a child, an impossible child in fact (you'll have to read the book to learn why I use that word). The future of humanity as genetic possibilities outstrip ethics, regulation and restraint. Anguished personal dilemmas constrained by money, societal attitudes and relationships.

In presenting Susan's desperate desire to be a mother, Eve Smith really brings home her distress and desperation; at the same time, she's both desperate to succeed, and weary of the trying. Her most intimate moments are regimented and driven by apps and tests, her life taken over by online support groups and marketing, by a combination of cutting edge science and old wives' tales. And overlaying everything, guilt. All that's the background to a reckless course of action which Susan justifies to herself, though the reader, however sympathetic, will see catastrophe coming.

The story is punctuated by a series of articles from near-future media, showcasing a genetics industry offering unimagined bounty (or is it?) - fertility, ability, the easy cleansing away of illness and disability all articulated in the bright upspeak of marketing at its most glossy. Creating a darker seeming future even than the typical grim dystopia, these snippets also chart the coming of an anti-technology subculture, driven by rumour and fake news, which will also play its part in the story.

What really broke my heart, though, was the second part of Off Target. There, Smith gives us the 11 year old Zurel, a very with-it young woman who's become non-verbal following some unspecified event. Zurel just wants to be normal. Actually, she's perfect: thoughtful, kind, intelligent and perfectly able to communicate but of course against a background of gene therapies suspected of going wrong, Susan's wracked with guilt that her daughter's silence was caused by her own actions of eleven years ago. But Zurel's about more than her genes, and the truly wrenching aspect of this story is Smith's calm depiction of Zurel trying to understand herself, her origin and the increasingly scary events around her. 

We also get to see quite another take on Susan who was so sympathetic a character earlier. Zurel's point of view is rather different. What's so brilliant about Off Target though is that neither is actually wrong. Susan is a complex persona in - as becomes clear - a complex relationship. The critique of Susan we see  here is all the more telling for that sympathy, which the reader still retains.

That's totally fitting for a subject which is both morally extremely complex and close to all our hearts. As in The Waiting Rooms,  Smith shows a real knack for making the complex understandable; sketching an eerily plausible near future; and creating characters who are just, well, real. Every bit as good as its predecessor, this book is what you need to be reading to understand what's coming next.

For more information about Off Target, see the other stops on the blog tour - they're listed on the poster below. And don't forget the Orenda Books website here.

You can buy Off Target from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - Dark Lullaby by Polly Ho-Yen

Dark Lullaby

Polly Ho-Yen

Titan Books, 21 March 2021

Available as: PB, 368pp, e, audio

Source: Advance copy via NetGalley and audio subscription

ISBN(PB): 9781789094251

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Dark Lullaby via NetGalley, although in fact I actually listened to the audio edition as well.

I am intrigued by how Dark Lullaby is pitched in the marketing material (see, for example, the publisher's website here) which draws comparisons with The Handmaid's Tale. There is a similarity, in that both books are about a near-future, dystopian society that prioritises control of women and their fertility in the face of collapsing birthrates. And of course The Handmaid's Tale - the novel, its sequel and the spin-off TV series - is tremendously successful, and who wouldn't want a little bit of that? 

But as I read it, Dark Lullaby is making rather different points, and it would be a shame to judge it only by the same dystopian yardstick as Margaret Atwood's book. 

In the world of Dark Lullaby, an avowedly authoritarian Government has taken control of the UK, or at least England, where the novel is set. Very little is said about wider political events, so one can't tell where we are in relation to Brexit, say, or whether the UK is intact, and it's not really clear how this government came to power or maintains its power. Surveillance seems pretty universal, although the book explores this mainly in the context of childcare and tracking parents, and opposition is minimal. It is a world slightly distinct from ours in the deployment of "spheres" - work-spheres, go-spheres and spheres in public places - as both network access, and by implication, surveillance devices. They seem to resemble the telescreens from Nineteen Eighty Four more than our mobiles, laptops and smart TVs in that they broadcast an endless spew of propaganda, perhaps partly tailored to what is is said and done around them.

Like authoritarian nations regimes the world over, the government in this future prioritises control over women's' fertility and seeks to mobilise them to address the population fall. For unknown reasons, the birthrate has been falling and natural conception is now difficult or impossible. Woman are coerced to undergo invasive and dangerous treatments described as "induction" in order to conceive. Participation in these is not (yet) mandatory, although things seem to be moving that way, with income, housing and work roles increasingly limited for the "outs" - those who decline to take part. 

Kit has been an "out" although since meeting her now-husband Thomas, she has changed her mind and they now have a baby, Mimi. However, that's only the start of the nightmare for the couple. The focus on fertility doesn't end at birth, with an entire department of the government - "OSIP", the Thought Police of this world - devoted to monitoring standards of childcare. Unfortunately, OSIP's role doesn't seem to extend to offering any practical support, advice or help for struggling parents (struggling mothers) rather it issues judgmental warnings over the slightest infraction and then, when sufficient of these have accumulated, sweeps in to take the child away ("extraction"). 

The most powerful parts of the novel focus on the feelings of parents (principally mothers, and especially Kit) in light of this situation. This is I think where Dark Lullaby really becomes a different book from its dystopian predecessors. Parenthood is always a series of muddles and mistakes (Philip Larkin's poem on the subject is well known). Twenty five years on, as a new parent, I can still remember my panic when the community midwife was due to visit for an inspection and Daughter produced an epic wet poo (in jets) while being changed, creating an awful mess which required an immediate bath. Immediate chaos and disorder, terror at how things would look. 

It already goes with the territory to feel judged, to be all at sea as to whether what one is doing is right, fearful from moment to moment that the little scrap of humanity you are suddenly responsible for will just... stop. At the same time you're sleep deprived, probably socially isolated and your life has been turned inside out. New mothers especially are under incredible stress, and of course have also gone through the physical ordeal of giving birth. 

Polly Yo-Hen's novel captures the wretchedness of this situation perfectly, showing the stories of not one, not two, but three families sequentially in this plight, on whom the pitiless minions of OSIP then prey.  Told in alternate sections simply entitled "Now" and "Then" it follows Kit and Thomas in some, initially unexplained, flight (but without baby Mimi) (the "Now") and in their earlier lives, meeting one another, falling in love, agonising over whether to have kids ("Then"). Those earlier sections also show us the agony of the other families featured here, with its inevitable conclusion. The format works well for the most part, although I found it a little frustrating how long we're kept waiting to have the exact situation in the "Now" part explained. The format especially allows plenty of time to establish the dilemma faced by Kit by showing how things work out - or don't - for those other families. By the time we come to the endgame, we understand the stakes for Kit, Mimi and Thomas only too well and appreciate just how impossible things really are, the book then giving us an ending that's truly heartbreaking.

As a thriller, the story works very well - perhaps it's a little too dependent on coincidence to smooth things along (but what thriller isn't?) - but as I've suggested above, it really comes into its own as an exploration of the sense of stress, guilt and inadequacy that haunts parents even if they have the best support imaginable. Many in our world have far worse than that, but in Kit's world everything seems set up to undermine and belittle. 

Every parent who's thought at one time or another "just take her, take this baby, I can't do this" (and that means every parent I think) will empathise with Kit in her troubles. That gives the story true heart, although it doesn't make it an easy read (and readers whose experiences are simply too raw may simply find it too much). 

I would recommend, but do be aware that this isn't, always, a comfortable read.

I listened to most of this book on audio. Eva Feller's crisp narration perfectly captures Kit's balance between meltdown and iron emotional control, necessary for her just to carry on, with the almost shouted section heading ("NOW!" and "THEN!") punctuating the story like gunshots. 

#Review - Day Zero by C Robert Cargill

Day Zero
C Robert Cargill
Gollancz, 20 May 2021
Available as: PB, 304pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN(PB): 9781473212817

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Day Zero via Netgalley to consider for review.

Spoiler alert - this book is a prequel and my review assumes you have read the earlier book.

Day Zero is a prequel to Cargill's Sea of Rust, published in 2017, which was set 30 years after a robot uprising - and 15 years after the death of the last human. Day Zero takes us back to the eve of the apocalypse, focussing on a suburban US family comprising mother Sylvia, father Bradley and child Ezra.  The latter is cared for by Pounce - Nanny Pounce - a robot designed to resemble a tiger.

I recognised the background to the uprising from Sea of Rust - controversy over freed robots establishing their own town, the fury of rednecks and pretend Christians, and eventual conflict. While it's set, perhaps, 100 years in our future, the topical references are here and have only sharpened since 2017: the violent hooligans are referred to as "red hats", and there is the same parallel drawn between the condition of the robots and that of enslaved people as was present in the earlier book but I think was much less immediate because that was set further in the future and the humans were done with. 

The parallel is I think particularly apposite here because we see liberal Bradley and, especially, Sylvia, in the full pomp of their hypocrisy. They are following events from the inauguration of Isaactown (the robots' city) cheering on the free robots and deprecating the red hats - while still owning and commanding Pounce and household robot Ariadne, and making no bones about what ownership means - Pounce's box is still stored away, waiting for the day when Ezra no longer needs him. I would liked to have seen this tension explored further, but Cargill cuts it short and takes a very different turn with the plot once things get violent, giving us instead almost continual action through the final two thirds of the book as Pounce seeks to defend Ezra from bloodstained, insurrectionary bots.

While that part of the book has its own philosophical angle to which the fast paced narrative occasionally returns - is Pounce doing this from real choice or because of programming? - it is more nodded to and not explored in much depth, certainly not the same depth as the question, in Sea of Rust, about the sense of responsibility and even guilt felt by the robot protagonists and their dilemma about joining a super AI collective (again, hinted at here but not central). 

Instead, we essentially get a series of combats, escapes and duels involving Pounce and his eight year old charge as they seek some kind of safety amidst a world gone to pieces. That is all very well done, and it's definitely a compelling read, even if you hold in the back of your head the fact that by the time of Sea of Rust, all the humans were dead, which seems to make whatever happens here moot. There is though  lots of tension and peril, and the immediate task of survival allows for plenty of drama.

It didn't though, for me, carry quite the ethical heft of Sea of Rust, and its nature as a prequel, leading to a known state, rather took the emotional heft out as well. Great fun to read, and I would certainly look at another book set in this world, but I think it could have been a lot more.

For more information about Day Zero see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley

Cover by Dominic Forbes

Skyward Inn
Aliya Whiteley
Solaris, 16 March 2021
Available as: HB, 311pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy provided by publisher
ISBN (HB): 9781781088821

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Skyward Inn via NetGalley, to consider for review.

Skyward Inn is proper mind-bending science fiction. I read a lot of SF which, while thrilling and fun, is basically... domesticated. People in space ships doing things. Apocalypses. Complex tactical books involving politics conspiracies and manoeuvring. Often, all of these at the same time. And they can be really great. But sometimes I miss a sense of deep weirdness, of unknowableness - a sense that Skyward Inn delivers in spades. The book won't be for everyone, but really did it for me.

In a near future, suffering (in a background way) from climate change, a gateway (the 'kissing gate') has opened in space, allowing travel to an alien world, Qita - an opportunity eagerly taken up by 'the coalition', a suppurate or alliance of states (it's never clear which - though in this future English has become a little regarded, minority language) with dream of conquest. Part of England, the 'Western Protectorate'; has seceded, either in principled opposition to this or possibly just to preserve a self-sufficient, bucolic way of life. Again, it's never clear.

Within the Protectorate, Jem and Isley run the Skyward Inn, serving Qitan 'brew' to the locals. Both are veterans of the war: Jem, a local woman who ran away to space and Isley, a Quitan. Jem is estranged from her son Fosse, who lives nearby with Jem's brother, Dom, a leader in the community.

It's a very simple setup, on the surface, but Whitely uses it to explore so much - ideas about family, about the structure of society, what it means to be human and our responsibilities to each other and to the world. I need to be careful what I say here because the book is one of those which achieves its effect slowly and incrementally. Things seem a bit odd from the start, when Fosse, slipping away to an abandoned farm to do what teenage boys do in private, encounters strangers who Arte, well, strange, but do him the great service of paying him attention, something he's not used to.

At the same time, another stranger, a visitor from Qita, appears at the Inn, needing help. There are suggestions here of prejudice and even violence: their existence must be kept secret. The arrival does, though, trigger Jem's memories of her time in Qita. They're strange, almost hallucinogenic, episodes involving her travels ostensibly involving nothing more than posting bland propaganda leaflets wherever she goes. We're primed for a significant encounter, or a misstep, perhaps the breaking of some cultural taboo, but what Jem was doing eventually turns out to be both more and less significant the that. Less, because there are no incidents, no misunderstandings, no politics or warfare. More, because, as becomes clear to another, later traveller to Qita, what Jem did was, actually, all-important.

In this book, intentions and unintended consequences bounce off one another. As the citizens of the Protectorate struggle to maintain their principled, isolated lifestyle, they're threatened from various directions: shortages of food, materials and medicines, an ominously spreading, mysterious disease which causes some areas to be quarantined, and those strangers that Fosse runs into. At the personal level things are tense between Fosse, Dom and Jem. A lot of family history is being buried as people hold to positions and talk past one another. And that stranger, Won, at the Inn also creates tensions and misunderstandings.

Just how strange all this gets, I can't say. I will say that's it's a growing, creeping weirdness. The alienness of the Qitans in this book is both less than we have been primed to accept by the run of SF - they don't excite horror by their appearance - and more, as we are eventually shown. In exploring both aspects Whiteley creates a truly compelling story, one where I simply didn't know what was going to happen (or, indeed, exactly what had happened!)

There is some gorgeous writing here, whether capturing the turbulence of adolescence ('He never thought he'd miss going to school, but being kept at home for a few days made Fosse aware that school offered a quiet, resilient shape to his day...'), the frustration of a woman torn between standing by her past decisions or attempting to remake her future or the gentleness and thoroughness of Dom checking a dog for injuries (yes, this book contains dogs!) 

In short, reading Skyward Inn was a truly unsettling experience, but an immersive, wonder-filled one. It is a remarkable book.

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

#Review - The Library of the Dead by T L Huchu

The Library of the Dead
T L Huchu
Tor/ Pan Macmillan, 4 February 2021
Available as: HB, 336pp, e, audio
Read as: ARC 
ISBN:  9781529039450

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

This book has already received a lot of attention and praise, so came bearing some expectations - but, reader, I have to say that for me, it surpassed them.

I should declare an interest. I spent eight happy years at university in Edinburgh last century, so I'm always a sucker for a book that takes me in and out the wynds of the Old Town. I slogged up and down the tenement stairs of the Southside in the '87 and '92 elections, and used to cycle out to the west to visit friends, so it was all familiar... up to a factor of being set in a near-future, economically (and environmentally?) devastated nation bedecked with camps full of homeless - where if you don't use the greeting "God save the King!" you may be assessed as a malcontent.

Oh, and a world with actual, accepted, and working magic.

A little bit different from my experience, then, but this is a world that T L Huchu makes so vividly real that by the end I was more than half convinced that Ropa, his main character, had been somewhere just round the corner all my time in Edinburgh. It's not just the attention to detail, the sketched background where we don't know everything but we can see the picture, or the plausible inhabitants of this city. No, it's something very subtle in the positioning of this world. There has been a fall of some kind. It's referred to once or twice as the "catastrophe" but we're not told exactly what it was. Clearly the country has been impoverished, and many are suffering, but we're not talking about scavengers living of the corpse of civilisation. Nor about a future world doing very well, but with magic. Things are on a knife edge, plenty of business being done, industry moving, but with many left out. It's all the more credible for the threads of continuity between our world and this one, with recognisable traces of our more cosy lives and characters who remember, for example, when healthcare was free.

Against this background, Ropa, who is 15 or 16 and who dropped out of school so she could earn money to take care of her family (grandmother, sister), acts as a go-between for the recently deceased, carrying their messages to living families. There's money to be made, but also risks in moving round the city after dark and a palpable sense that one wrong step could lead to all three losing their slender security, living in a caravan in "His Majesty's Slum". The contrast between that sense of vulnerability, and the warmth of Ropa's relationship with her gran and sister Izwe (where is everybody else?) is another compelling feature of the book, as is the contrast between Ropa's and her gran's Zimbabwe-inflected magic and the slightly dour atmosphere of Edinburgh itself. (Towards the start of the book, Ropa settles a historic haunting - strictly outside the terms of her licence as a ghsottalker, but a girl's gotta eat - and the unfortunate restless spirit insists that a proper, Presbyterian Minister attend to give him rest, definitely not a florid Episcopalian priest).

All is, kind of, in balance until Ropa is approached for help (pro bono work, but what can you do?) by the ghost of a young mother whose son has gone missing. She can't be at peace until he's found. Investigating this leads Ropa into a darker world than we have seen yet, and this is where Huchu's positioning of the near future as unpleasant, but not hellish, really pays off, because the things that Ropa discovers puts a rather different spin on that. What follows is a breakneck adventure with all manner of perils and unsuspected enemies: but also, with friends and allies and, also unsuspected, sources of knowledge and power. Ropa is discovering things about her city that she previously knew nothing of. 

Maybe some of this is revealed to her rather easily, and maybe - when you get to the end - you'll think that the ultimate root of the evil that is loose was a bit obvious. But equally, maybe you'll think (as I did) that Ropa's self-assured expedition into the shadows and her combination of moral and physical courage are ultimately much more important, and deserve much more attention. She is driven into some very tight places, and makes some bad mistakes, but never gives up and never loses sight of what is, after all, a mission of mercy. 

And the telling of that story is glorious.

I would strongly, STRONGLY recommend this one. It's urban fantasy with all the joy and wonder boosted and a series - I hope it will be a series - that I sense is really going somewhere.

For more information about The Library of the Dead, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts

Purgatory Mount
Adam Roberts
Gollancz, 4 February 2021
Available as: HB, 336pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN: 9781473230941

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Purgatory Mount via NetGalley.

The eagles are coming! 

The eagles are here!

Adam Roberts is one author I'll always, always take time to read and I'd been sp looking forward to Purgatory Mount. I thought I knew what it was going to be about, and it was that... but also it wasn't, it turned out to be something much bigger and very different and thoroughly ramified. It does, though, rather defy a neat review. I could just say, buy this, and stop at that but I really want to persuade you, so let's try that.

Opening as a city-sized interstellar exploration ship, the Forward, arrives from Earth at a distant planet, V538 Aurigae - gamma, we seem to be in hard SF territory with a description of the long voyage, the peculiar emptiness of space in the interstellar "Local Bubble", the ice-encrusted ship itself (the ice provides both a shield and fuel), the crew - who are able to alter their perception to live faster or slower, surviving the generations long (for their livestock) voyage - and the mysterious alien artefact that has drawn Earthly attention. No, not an obelisk - an immense spire so high that it soars beyond the planet's atmosphere (indeed, beyond the original, deeper atmosphere long eroded by the local star). 

What is the spire made of? 

What is it for? 

Where did the makers go?

Just as we might think we know what's coming - Roberts will describe the crew's exploration and tease out these mysteries - he knocks the reader sideways by adopting a different genre, the near future thriller, and location, the USA a few years from now. That country is on the edge of civil war ('The problem is - there are plenty of people real keen to shoot their guns and run around in combat gear'). Ottoline (Otty to her friends, who call themselves the Famous Five in a reference which I suspect isn't to be found in the cultural life of the typical American teenager, now or near future) is fleeing from the adults. From government law enforcement. From the gun-toting militias. From a mysterious third faction. 

The description of the rending fabric of a modern state is terribly compelling and oh so convincing, particularly in that there isn't an overnight collapse. Otty sees a bureaucracy staggering, still trying to function, but losing its coherence and purpose. Even at the level of the combat, the increasingly dislocated refugees, the writing is terrific (in both senses) and remembering the turmoil on 6 January, I couldn't help compare this vision of a USA that has begun eating itself to that coverage on CNN of the swamping of the Capitol by an army of grotesques. 

That conjunction, which couldn't have been foreseen, makes this book seem prescient in detail, seem predictive, to an extent that may distract the reader from what I think is more fundamental, and intended, a sort of moral prescience which becomes clearer towards the end. But still, the idea of incipient civil war, of rage and destruction spraying in all directions, the urgency with which Roberts captures the violence, the unholy beauty he finds - look at the description of a coach being blown up ('Boom, boom, shake the room. Crush, crush, flip the bus') - all of this makes the book absolutely, grabbingly, compulsive. 

Roberts pulls out all the cultural stops in characterising this process, from the explosion 'like a colossal door being slammed shut somewhere in Hell' (yes, we know what that would be) to the queue jumping mob ('wearing Old Glory jackets and red MAGA caps') who try to barge onto the bus to the sharp eyed lawyers and journalists who prowl through the ruins trying to make a turn from the chaos. It's a purgatorial landscape for a sixteen year old to find herself traversing and there are no more answers as to why all this is going on than there are to why Otty is being targeted. We see a limited explanation from one character, that it's all about the money (in New Model Army, Roberts posited an almost cheerful, open-source approach to urban warfare, with some idealism driving it, here the mood is a great deal darker, more despairing).

I started reading this near-future section thinking, what's this - when do we get back to the Forward? - then found myself more and more drawn by the hectic story, the scrapes, the sheer guile and courage of a young woman whose life has been upended. We don't know, for most of the story, why Otty is on the run. She's far too canny to reveal that, to us or her interrogators. But her pursuers are clearly bad, tainted in some sense by an association with the chaos and destruction raining down and slowly, surely, they push Otty to a desperate place and to an act with unforeseeable consequences.

We do return to the Forward again, eventually, for a final act in which the connection between the two timelines is made clear. Otty's experiences turn out to be foundational to the existence of the Forward and its crew, but also to the position of others on board - to the creatures known as "Pygs" who worship the Crew as gods. And they drive the actions of both in a moral sense, Roberts invoking the concepts of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory - sidestepping the hard physics question of how that incredible, planet-topping spire was built and how it stands up for the more interesting question of what it means and what that means for those who have travelled so far to see it. 

That feels like a place I could stop - Purgatory Mount an utterly compelling book, fiercely intelligent and unconventional SF rife with ideas yet completely approachable and fun to read - but I think I also have to point out a couple of further things. First, Roberts' writing is glorious, subtlely varying to fit its subject - for example look at the down to earth, dryly humorous, opening section, even amidst all that science-y exposition, or the beauty he often evokes ('the sky was starting to blush strawberry and yellow-orange, with bars of luminous cream-coloured horizontal shine layered over the top of it'). It can also be mischievous, or mischievously inventive, as with the word 'sidegoogling' which occurs a few times (I NEED that word!) or references to the Forward's 'hal', its AI. And how about 'her heart was beating in her chest like Animal from the Muppets playing the drums'?

Which reference brings me to the second thing I wanted to mention here (and then I'm done, I promise). This book is drenched with Lord of the Rings references and comparisons. Most broadly, there's the whole device of telling us, as Roberts does in several places, that names or cultural references used to describe the ship or its crew have been translated into terms we can relate to from something utterly strange that we wouldn't get. (In fact the most blatant example of this didn't, as the author tells us in an afterword, survive copyright issues - he wanted  to give the five members of the Crew the names of the five wizards from The Lord of the Rings and indeed Pan, the one we meet most, 'a figure gifted with magic (in the Clarkean sense of the word) and given responsibility over beats, birds and plants...' would make a fine Radagast). There is also lots of detail, such as tree trunks which 'shuddered and moaned like Ents' at the force of an explosion, way bread, or all those references to eagles - The eagles are coming! The eagles are here! - but also 'Somebody would come to rescue her and she would fly away on the back of a Johannine eagle'. The latter bridges the gap between Tolkienish references and the Christian ones behind Purgatory Mount, with its themes of offence, of sin, redemption and atonement.

In short, this book is a glittering achievement, Adam Roberts in full splendour giving us a novel of ideas, of fun, of beauty. Go and get it.

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

#Blogtour #Review - Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Cover by Matt Griffin

Bear Head (Dogs of War)
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Head of Zeus, 7 January 2021
Available as: HB, 389pp, e, audio
Read as: Advance HB copy
ISBN: 9781800241572 

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of Bear Head to consider for review - and for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour (my first of 2021!) which opens today.

Bear Head is a sequel, of sorts, to Dogs of War, set several decades later and picking up some of the same characters but - and I'm proof of this - you absolutely don't need to have read the earlier book to enjoy Bear Head. To begin with, the situation that we confront here is new, and of itself. Tchaikovsky also gives all of the information the reader needs, and without a lot of intrusive info-dumping. 

That said, I think readers of Dogs of War will be pleased to learn about the later career of Honey, the bioengineered bear. Honey is a sentient, intelligent bear engineered as a weapon but who has graduated into a life as an activist, international trouble-shooter and a regular on the conference circuit. (She's frustrated though that she is generally invited along to speak at sessions about "[thing] and bioengineering" rather than addressing her much wider competences and insights. The one time she goes off script, she ends up being shunned because she has stepped out of her assigned box). 

We see glimpses of Honey's life in flashbacks, as well as hearing her side of things from an instance of her uploaded to Mars. Specifically, uploaded into the head of Jimmy Martin, a construction worker very definitely at the bottom of the heap in the giant building site known as Hell City where a crew of thousands (also bioengineered, to tolerate the thin air and intense cold - we're told that the only seasons on Mars are 'Winter and Very Winter') is building a habitat for future colonists. Originally an enthusiast and a hard worker, Jimmy's now sustained by regular doses of the drug Stringer, and therefore in the hands of crime boss Sugar - so in no position to refuse when Sugar offers him cash for hoisting a dodgy download. 

But she doesn't know, any more than he does, what it will contain. 

Or who...

I loved Jimmy as a character. He's not dim, he's not bad, but he is isolated from most human life, has been done over so many times, and lives in such an extreme environment, that he's very focussed on himself. As the story gradually widens its, and his, perspective, he does grow ('I re-evaluate little Jimmy, because right now he is absolutely not thinking about finding a hole to hide in. He is thinking about what it's like for other people to go through what he went though only so much worse') and find other things that he cares about - surprising things in the end. 

Jimmy's counterpart on Earth - the other main viewpoint character besides Honey - is a woman called Carole Springer. She is PA to the main baddie in this story, a monster of a man called Warner S Thompson. Thompson is easy to hate. A billionaire businessman, he is one of those sociopaths-in-a-suit we've all become familiar with over the past few years - a man with no empathy, no remorse, no scruples and yet a way with words. ('"You can't cut a deal with the man." Honey again. "I honestly don't think he has it in him to keep to an agreement the moment he gains anything from breaking it. I think that his personality went right into pathological liar and out the other side."') Tchaikovsky portrays Thompson at work quite, quite chillingly: the diction, all broken sentences designed to convince without saying anything that be can he held to, the harnessing of populist grievances with no intention of addressing the real causes, the general sense of life as a grift. It's deeply chilling, and indeed the book goes further, analysing Thompson and his ilk in terms of their being practically a parasite species, beings gifted at seeming more human than humans while in reality being much less, since they are all out for themselves. (Look for Honey's "game and metagame" discussion which is simply brilliant).

But I'm getting distracted. I was telling you about Carole. If Jimmy is the originally unwitting and totally unwilling host for Honey, then Carole is, sort of, the witting and willing host for Thompson. Not that he lives in her head, he doesn't need to. Rather he commands her life. He owns her, and she can't disobey him. Like many of those around Thompson she apparently desires and fears him, but nevertheless serves him heart and soul, anticipating his needs, facilitating them and strategising for him: 'she was just the girl who couldn't ever say no'. 

That right to say "no" is an important theme in Bear Head, with the bioengineered animals threatened by the "collar", imposed mind control to keep them in line. Tchaikovsky explores various circumstances which support or underline that right - the economics of the company store, to which Jimmy owes his soul, bribery, different types of leverage, legal restrictions and, of course, the naked threat of force. All these are things that Thompson understands well and exploits as part of his ascent to power. Carole's role is to enable him, but also, perhaps, to witness. She has learned over years how to handle him but always in the cause of his ascent - there is literally nothing she can refuse, even up to his abuse of her body when he wishes and  his violence (there are a couple of painful scenes in the book that some may wish to skip).

So if the book documents the widening of Jimmy's sympathies in dialogue with Honey, it also examines Carole's inner struggle. Her situation is in many respects worse than his - both more constrained and more vulnerable. Arguably she's more culpable too and as we see what Thompson is willing to do as events escalate, that culpability only grows. Yes she suffers appalling abuse, and Tchaikovsky is damning here: 'a woman's bruises were usually invisible in the shadow of a powerful man'. Thompson is that man, the man we've all seen, able to boast about what he can get away with, knowing that for him, the music will never stop. So even if Carole's not a good person, she's not what he is (again, the book is very good on this extra level of manipulation, of calculation).

Expect moral complexity and challenge here, but also expect gut churning action and jeopardy and a story that's very much rooted in reality, driven in part by climate change (which the rich are busily seeking to buy themselves out of in part by riding the populist wave) but more deeply, driven by human nature into which Tchaikovsky shows some devastating insights. 

Overall, a compelling and very involving (indeed, often moving) story about the best and worst of humanity (and other intelligences) which I'd strongly recommend.

For more about Bear Head, see the publisher's website here and also forthcoming posts on the tour which you can see listed in the tour poster.

You can buy the book from your local shop, if they are doing click and collect - they need your support! - or online from bookshop dot org, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon. Signed copies are available from Goldsboro Books.

 

Review - Sweet Harmony by Claire North

Cover design by Bekki Guyatt 

Sweet Harmony

Claire North

Orbit, 22 September 2020

Available as: e-book

Source: advance e-copy via Netgalley

ISBN: 9780356514772

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance e-copy of Sweet Harmony.

Claire North is the master of the intriguing idea, planted into our otherwise normal world and interrogated from all angles. Also: of glorious prose, believable characters and much else, which I'll come to in a moment. In her new novella, she steps a short way into the future of medicine and hypothesises the ability too use "naneites" - programme machines at the molecular level - to protect and preserve life, affect appearance and ability, modify mood and make many many other changes. ('Dazzling Smile - no more sad mornings!', 'Voice of an Angel - 96% agree that this is the perfect voice for the perfect woman!')

All for a price.

Harmony Meads, a 29 year old London estate agent, is 'beautiful, successful and fits in perfectly'. She's an enthusiastic user of these "upgrades" as is everyone in her office. They're all choices that she's made ('This is Harmony Meads, aged nineteen, making a choice about her body, her life') but choices have consequences, whether from the effect of programming glitches ('If you experience jaundice or liver failure, please contact your healthcare provider') to debt and enforcement action ('The upgrade was £17.99 a month for the initial twelve month contract, rising to £35 a month at the end of the introductory period...')

North's portrayal of Harmony as an anxious, aspirational twentysomething, spending money she doesn't have (there are always more credit cards) to secure a future away from '****ing Bracknell', to keep up with the team at work, to have a life, is touching and sad. This isn't an SF utopia or dystopia. It's recognisably our world - the train from Waterloo to Reading, overworked hospitals, social care stretched to its limits and, especially, advertising pushed at desperate people ('...at the end of the day, she wanted to be in control. She hit "buy". That was the beginning.') Harmony's life includes work pressures from a boss who sees having pretty people as part of the "brand", an abusive boyfriend and an elderly mother who wants the best for her daughter but whose tentative sympathy when everything goes wrong is unbearable.

The story shows us where Harmony is coming from, her hopes, desires and dreams; the insidious spiral she's got into, having to scrimp and save to make minimal payments on all the upgrades she's taken out; and the spinning of her life into chaos when things go wrong, when she loses that control. The contracts Harmony's signed allow for punitive measures, withdrawing the benefits previously offered and then going further. In a nightmare of calls to customer service, attempts to scrape together money and to keep  up appearances, we have a world that is so familiar, so close to our own - the knife-edge between keeping everything in the air and seeing those plates begin to smash on the ground. North's vision of just how this technology might be used and abused is deeply plausible because it's rooted in just how people currently suffer when they lose a grip, even for a moment on their lives.

As I've come to expect from this author, Sweet Harmony doesn't just deliver a scary and convincing near future but also glorious, on-point writing. North describes 'skin the colour of city sunset' and 'The smell after rain, when all things come back to life' or in hospital  'old men shuffling the lock-kneed two-step to their ends'. Here's Harmony's friend Shelly. 'Her brilliant autumn-blonde hair flowed and curled around her face like frozen candlelight; her skin glowed like tungsten...' which is gorgeously vivid - but is then soured when we're informed that Shelly is so beautiful that 'all the boys assumed she was a tart, that there was no other reason to be that sensational save for the benefit of men...' In a world where you can constantly be upgraded, the neediness of those men, their desire to control women, assumes ever newer and crueller forms. 

The upgrades have other insidious effects and throughout the book, North is picking away at how corrupting it all is, how as well as the financial burden, life becomes a pretence with things we might take for granted (such as getting drunk) becoming just paid for options once one's life and responses are owned by a private corporation. There's a safety net where basic functions and health are still maintained but it's an affectless, joyless world lacking vibrancy and sensuality. 

That's the world which, in some form, Harmony spends most of this book trying to escape because in the end this isn't a book primarily about nightmare tech but about one life - and the roots of her discontent and ruinous debt habit are human roots, in family, society and place. And in the poisonous relationships and work pattens she finds herself. It's all about choices, choices made in circumstances we can't control and which are therefore hardly choices at all - are they?

Strongly recommended. 

For more about Sweet Harmony, see the Orbit website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Love Bites by Ry Herman

Love Bites

Ry Herman

Jo Fletcher Books, 9 July 2020

Available as: PB, 384pp, e

Read as: e-book via NetGalley

ISBN: 9781529406306

I'm grateful to Milly at Jo Fletcher books for an advance e-copy of Love Bites via NetGalley and for inviting me to take part in the Blog Blast.

CW: Love Bites, and so this review, includes themes of physical and emotional abuse and also suicide.

My review

Love Bites is an absorbing, modern romance novel that just happens to concern a vampire. In events set in and around Boston leading up to Christmas 1999 we see Chloë and Angela struggle with their pasts, with the ways they've been hurt, to imagine a future together.

Graduate astrophysics student Angela has escaped an abusive relationship with photographer Tess. Abusive, but formative: Tess very much shaped the person that Angela is, from her taste in clothes to her lifestyle. But Tess hurt Angela badly and Angela is concerned that she may inflict the same pain on others - if she gets too close. She may not be able to help herself. So she's wary when the pattern seems to be playing itself out again.

Publisher's reader Chloë has suffered from mental health problems. She is on medication, but sometimes harbours dark thoughts ('Gun, the thought enters her mind, unbidden. You could shoot yourself in the head. It'd be quick and simple.') Coming from a strictly religious background and having entered into a disastrous marriage, her self-esteem is often low. ('Cooking is too much of an effort, anyway. She's worthless.')

When the two women meet, it's bound to get complicated...

If that wasn't enough, Love Bites also introduces a (possibly) centuries old witch, who might play the role of fairy godmother here but then again she might just be talking rubbish, and an angel who seems to be branching out and setting up his own religion. We also see a lot of Chloë's workmate Shelley and her partner Mike - together the characters form a believable group (Herman has a knack of making the weird seem credible - maybe something to do with grounding the unbelievable in the dilemmas of everyday life - work, rent, relations with an ex, cat sitting) and in fact a very sympathetic one. The paranormal element is here but the meat and drink of the story (perhaps I should say the blood...) is relationships, not doomy overcoming-supernatural-evil. I enjoyed that.

I liked the notes that one character penned in seeking to understand her, totally inexplicable, staten of being. What are the limits now being a vampire? What can you safely do and not do? How many of the myths are true? Subjected to a scientific investigation, maybe there might be answers... or maybe just more frustration.

There is also some sharp writing here, from scene setting as our protagonists go about their daily lives ('Brookline is still sleepy, not yet hurrying along in the caffeinated press of rush hour', 'She is, after all, young and over-educated') to the intoxication of a new relationship ('She's young and in love and dancing') to some very tender sex scenes (not going to quote) to the sadness of a chilly family (Chloë's parents, whose main reaction to her attempted suicide is irritation that have to pay for the ambulance). It also has a great, if chilling, exposition of the progress of an abusive relationship leading up to 'And then, once day, when she slaps you...'

There's a lot of fear here, and guilt, and a hope to be better but honest doubt whether you can be and whether it is fair, or just demanding, to seek forgiveness. And risk and trust and the potential, perhaps for new starts, not knowing all the answers but seeking honestly to find them. It's funny in places ('It gives him the vague impression that he's a member of a depressed drum-and-bugle corps. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Goth Club Band') but can turn poignant in a flash ('Sweat is already soaking the ridiculously impractical waist cinched dress Tess is having her wear today', 'She can't spend her life not trusting anybody'). 

It's a heady mix and a book I greatly enjoyed. Do try it. (It would also, I think, make a great Christmas present for just the right person...)

About the Author

Born in the US, Ry Herman is now a permanent Scottish resident, and has been writing theatrical plays for most of his life. He's worked at a variety of jobs, including submissions editor, theatre technician, and one job which could best be described as typing the number five all day long. He acts and directs and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019. He is bisexual and genderqueer. Hobbies include baking bread, playing tabletop roleplaying games, and reading as many books as humanly possible. Ry is based in Edinburgh.

You can buy Love Bites from your local bookshop or online from Hive Books, who support local bookshops, Blackwell's, Foyles, Waterstones or Amazon.

For more information about the book, 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.