Halcyon Years is Alastair Reynolds's most recent novel. Like Eversion it is a standalone book which is not intended to fit into any of his established series. Again like Eversion, it presents itself as a mystery which has to be solved both by a character within the book and by the reader. The similarities end there! Halcyon Years is set on a generational spaceship - no spoiler there as it becomes obvious very rapidly that this is the case, at least for readers familiar with science fiction conventions and clues.

The central character here is Yuri Gagarin, or at least a revitalised version of him. So far as he is aware at the start of the book, his psyche has been preserved since his untimely death and has been fairly recently instantiated into a suitable body. He works as a private detective who enjoys modest success at solving cases, and is unexpectedly thrown in to a vastly more intricate and dangerous mystery than he has tackled before. From this point on, the mysteries multiply, and Gagarin has to reassess most of what he thinks he knows about the spaceship's history - including his own role within it. He has to expand his role from simply investigating a single suspicious incident to uncovering a much wider and more significant set of things kept secret.

It's hard to go on with the story without getting into spoiler territory, so I'll swap to my personal thoughts about it. First, it's very competently written and edited, and flows very smoothly. It's not the kind of prose one might read simply for the pleasure of it, but it works well as a vehicle for the storyline. The plot and its sundry twists were broadly compelling, though there were places where narrative choices and the necessity of keeping the story going stretched my credulity a little.

Overall it didn't grab me in the way Eversion did, and I wasn't left with any immediate sense of wanting to choose it as a book club read. For me, there wasn't enough immersion in the world / generational ship for it to become either compelling or absorbing, and to my mind the closing chapter struggled to find a satisfying closure to the scale of the problems raised. On the other hand it is well-written and moves at a decent pace, and Gagarin himself is an appealing character. So I'm glad to have read the book, even though I can't yet imagine wanting to revisit it on a regular basis. Thinking of typical readership, it would probably appeal to those who like crime or mysteries and their uncovering. It's a bit like a longer and more complex variation of Asimov's The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. However, unlike those books I'm not sure it would be a good introduction to science fiction for someone unfamiliar with the tropes and conventions.

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”
She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful.

I strongly suspect that both women are ultimately derived from the description in Song of Songs

Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners? (King James Version)

Anyway, a bit of searching online reassured me that I wasn't the first to spot this, and indeed whole books have been written about it. Tolkien greatly enjoyed H Rider Haggard's books (no great surprise, as Haggard insists on including large chunks of Latin and Greek in his prose) and said in 1966 "I suppose as a boy 'She' interested me as much as anything." and folk have run with this to adduce all kinds of parallels.
Of course ultimately in Tolkien's world Galadriel turns away from that

Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.
“I pass the test”, she said. “I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”

So arguably for Tolkien, Galadriel is a redeemed She

There are two threads to the tale. There are the adventures of a traveller, recorded on the strange manuscript and (one assumes, though it is never explicitly stated) set adrift in the copper cylinder. But alongside that we also follow the conversation of the people who find the cylinder, so are constantly being forced to assess whether or not we believe the traveller's tale

The traveller himself is separated accidentally from his ship after leaving Tasmania - presuming for the moment we accept his tale - and is swept through an underground passage into a collection of Antarctic lands, bordering a fair-sized sea in a kind of parallel to the Mediterranean. He loses his only companion to cannibals (and it should be said that there's a fair few passages about cannibalism and non-European tribal life that definitely reflect the age in which the book was written and would be frowned upon today).

He then finds himself among a people who seem at first sight to be warm and welcoming, but whose lifestyle and ethics turn out to be quite alien to his own. They espouse radical self-denial and poverty, so are generous to a fault to strangers in ways that appeal to our hero's Victorian Christianity. However, it turns out that there is a darker side to all this, in which taking things away from someone - and ultimately taking their life - is seen as a huge blessing and gift. So although our hero finds a woman of similar ideals to himself, and they embark on an intense (but Platonic) relationship, their hosts work out that the best way to be kind to them is to enforce them to live apart, be compulsorily married to other people, and soon after publicly executed and then consumed at a ritual feast.

The internal conflict between his Victorian "it's right to practice self-denial and give things up for others" and his simultaneous "it's wrong to deny happiness and to take life like this" - together with the competing "one is just the logical conclusion of the other" is, I think, particularly well handled so that one's sympathy keeps flipping between the two.

Meanwhile the outer story of the yachtsmen reading the manuscript gives opportunity to reflect on this - of the four people, two are immediately convinced of the truth of the narrative, one is immediately sceptical and sees it as pure invention, and the fourth is undecided. There's a lot of appraisal of the account in scientific or linguistic terms. So this beast is probably an icthyosaur, that one a pterodactyl, the other is related to an ostrich. The language as revealed mostly by proper names is a variant of Hebrew so the people as a whole probably were descended from Shem after the ark had landed. Conversely the account is seen by the sceptic as a satire on modern life similar in intent to Gulliver's Travels and all, and the details thrown in are just pseudo-science to add some colour to the satire. Ultimately the debate between the four yachtsmen has to be echoed by the reader - and although one's sympathy is with those who believe the account at face value, in the end most of us would plump for the satire theory.

As a tale it's another one which can be seen as a jumping-off point for other authors. The continued existence of dinosaurs reappears in The Lost World and Jurassic Park. The terrifying subterranean passage to the lost country reappears in Perelandra and elsewhere. The confrontation between Victorian Christianity and other world views is a perennial topic. And so on.

The book ends very abruptly... early events lead to expect that the inner story will end with the writing and sending off of the manuscript in its cylinder, but we never reach that point. So the motive for sending it is unclear. According to an early section it was intended primarily to reassure the protagonist's father (who apparently lived in Keswick, just up the road from me) that his son was still alive. But by the end of the book the threat of human sacrifice has been lifted, and things look good for the future. So why write the manuscript? Was there to be a further crisis? Or was it an invitation to dad to go join him at the South Pole? Since de Mille died, we shall never know the ending he originally intended... unless it was indeed to be left ambivalent so that the reader has, once again, to make up his or her mind.

In short, a fun read (albeit with the aforementioned opinions on what non-European tribal life was like) and an important one in the development of 19th century fiction, by a Canadian author I'd never heard of before.

So, I enjoyed this one rather more than the other Alan Moore he passed on to me (the short story collection Illuminations). It was definitely on the weirder side of the spectrum, and definitely a very long undertaking, but kept going with a good pace and I was never inclined to abandon it or anything like that. And I think one would classify this as more definitely fantasy rather than SF, whereas Illuminations was a bit of both.

Alan Moore is, of course, much better known as a writer of graphic novels, and The Great When felt extraordinarily visual, as though he had drafted it originally in graphic form and then converted it to text. So the descriptions of London (both the post-WW2 actual London and the parallel magical one) are extremely dense with description. Indeed, the actual plot is rather thin and could have been dealt with in a novella or such like, but I don't think anyone would read this for the plot. You'd read it because of the setting and the descriptions thereof. It reminded me in places of Where's Wally - not in the sense that you're trying to find someone, but rather in that there's a constant sense of studying the content very closely just to try and spot everything that's there.

The plot, in a nutshell, is like this. The protagonist, a rather geeky adolescent who works in a bookshop in an unprepossessing part of east London, gets accidentally caught up with an artefact from the alternative London. The two are never supposed to overlap and it's widely understood that Bad Things will happen if they get too close. That all happens quite early on; the rest of the book is devoted to undoing the damage which has been done. It's kind of hard to describe the later parts, as they're quite intricately depicted and depend successively on each other. There isn't really a grand resolution of the problem - more an acceptance that the protagonist has seen and experienced what he has, and even if he shouldn't really have done so, what's past is past and has to be lived with. It's possible to imagine Moore writing other books based on the same concept, but I rather think he won't, and will be satisfied with what he has done in this book.

Who would like it? I don't think it would be a good introduction to fantasy for someone who has never read any before. On the other hand, if someone has read a fair bit of fantasy of different flavours, then this would be an interesting addition. Fans of Alan Moore's graphic works would, I think, find a lot more to enjoy and recognise in The Great When than Illuminations, and I'd definitely recommend it to them - provided they were willing to commit to a lengthy read!

Reading this was a complete contrast to The Horses - it's an action tale wanting to be read at fast pace, with frequent fight scenes and liberal dollops of quite explicit sex - until the end of the book this is constantly halted before consummation so there's a lot of delayed gratification! I had an irreverent thought at one stage wondering if "throbbing" was the most frequent word in the book.

The setting is a Viking society - or at least what passes as a Viking society in the popular imagination, and I did wonder from time to time what my historical fiction friends who know about the era might think. However, that sort of doesn't matter as it's not historical fiction, but rather is set in a fantasy world. In this world, the Norse gods are tangibly real, in particular with the habit of investing fragments of their power in mortals who can then, in the right situation, call upon this power to work magical acts. At first the implication is that such individuals are rare, but this seems to be a narrative convenience rather than a real constraint. Towards the end of the book the protagonist finds herself trapped on a boat with an entire shipload of them, thus rendering her own powers useless. It's a bit like a super-hero story where you never quite know just how many super-heroes there are, and where they're all blond haired blue eyed Nordic types...

There's not a lot of character development - the protagonist keeps having thoughts that maybe she's not a nice person, but this doesn't seem to substantially change her. There's an odd contrast going on - on the one hand it feels as though she's doomed to keep on treading the same tired circle, but at the same time there is an often-repeated theme that she is a person whose fate is her own to write rather than being preordained by The Norns.

Like The Horses, Fate Inked in Blood promises that the story will continue in Part 2, but in this case the break is quite abrupt with a clear sense of being unfinished. I don't think I'd be in a hurry to get the next part, as I suspect it would just be more of the same.

Who would like this book? Well, there's certainly times and places where it would fit in - a long journey or holiday book, maybe, when you're not looking for depth or the provocation of thought but rather a racy piece of action escapism. My own preference for that is old-style space opera, but I can imagine this book filling the same gap for other readers.

It is a post-apocalyptic story with a difference. Instead of being set in a densely populated area with the risk of vigilante gangs, zombies or whatever, we find ourselves in a remote coastal community with little regular contact with the outside world, and no real comprehension of what exactly had happened. All they - and we as readers - know is that radios and phones no longer pick up signal, that the sky over the mainland has turned an odd colour, and that supply vessels are no longer bringing goods into the harbour.

Although the narration for the most part follows Sarah, a young woman who had planned to leave the community for an exciting life elsewhere, we get occasional perspectives from others as well, relating their observations or speculations, especially about the specific events surrounding the disaster. This device works well to break up what might otherwise be a bit monotonous... I found Sarah's voice and character to be immature and not very engaging. I'm sure this was deliberate on the part of the author, as it gave tension between her avowed plans to leave, and her apparent unreadiness to cope with that. But I got rather weary of her emotional and attitudinal childishness. Anyway, deliberate or no, it was good to have the occasional other voices intruding.

I have to confess that I struggled to imagine the geography. The small town is (normally) supplied by boat, rather like the Scilly Isles or Scottish islands, but is in fact at the far end of a long promontory, like Blakeney Point or Orford Ness (non-UK readers might need to look at a map for these ). There is a road along the promontory, but for reasons unknown it is in disrepair and sometimes submerged... hence not the lifeline you might imagine. I wasn't sure whether the submersion was tidal, or seasonal, or a consequence of climate change - and so far as I recall the townspeople weren't sure either. I could never really get to grips with the geography around the settlement and its small harbour either - there are cliffs, hills, beaches and dunes, but also arable fields and a rather unsuccessful vineyard all within walking distance, but I couldn't assemble them into a coherent whole in my mind.

So I found the geography haphazard, and I don't think Janina Matthewson wanted us to focus on that. The main dramas were interpersonal ones, as the community wrestled within itself how to respond. Should they try to explore the mainland and find out what has happened? How should they organise themselves to survive the next couple of winters? What if vital public infrastructure items like tidal generators break down? How will they ration or get hold of resources that they can't produce themselves? What sort of social organisation will work?  Here, I think, PN does a very good job of uncovering how a small community might struggle with, and begin to address such issues, and this really comes across as the strongest facet of the book. The original unity fissures into competing groups all too readily in the face of real problems. Hence, the details of the global calamity don't matter - it could be more or less anything, and the survival story would end up very similar.

The horses of the title do indeed put in an appearance towards the end, and are understood as a signal that the causeway can be safely traversed. As to what is found at the other end - that's left open in what is clearly an invitation to read Part 2. The story itself finishes well, but is also a lead in to another tale in the future.

In short, I enjoyed The Horses, and am glad to have read it - the features I found less compelling were considerably outweighed by the ones that worked for me, and I was always in the position of wanting to know what happened next. It's an apocalyptic tale which is not disaster-focused but very human in scale, told in a rather gentle voice.

...
This was undeniably a strange book. I haven't read much queer fiction which was so overtly queer as this, and I kept feeling that it was full of coded messages that I was just missing.

On the plus side, the writing style was engaging and fluid, and kept me going through stages where the actual content of the prose was discouraging.

However, the content was very unfocused, IMHO - and bearing in mind that I might well have simply missed a lot of sub-surface stuff. It began with a kind of nod to many-worlds quantum theory - as so many people do these days - but this only served to introduce the idea that each chapter was sort-of a different universe in which different things had happened and where people, especially the protagonist, had made different choices.

Successive chapters then dealt with broadly the same assemblage of characters, but in different permutations. In some, a major character had died young, but in others not. In some, the relative ages of characters were mixed up. In one, all mothers (and a few other women) had fissioned into swarms of creatures. In another, aliens had arrived and were using animal bodies to kill people. I could see that some were intended metaphorically rather than factual, but others seemed to ask to be taken literally.

The closing chapters form - rather unexpectedly - a kind of Jewish apologetic, with Maimonides picked out as showing a route to forgiveness, and a focus on the biblical Cities of Refuge as a haven... again perhaps a metaphor for a caring social group within the wider world, rather than specific locations. Judaism lurks in the background of the earlier sections, but I hadn't anticipated it becoming such a strong feature at the end.

Every so often the many-worlds theme resurfaces, but (I think) as a plot device to signal a change of environment, rather than in a sciency way. The main thing that struck me about this was how, once you were past the surface trappings of swarms or aliens or bears or ghosts, how alike the worlds were. The impression I was left with was that Emet North reckons that whatever quantum choices might do to the universe, then character and queerness remain as constants. And the worlds are fairly uniformly bleak - in almost all of them the protagonist has strong inclinations towards suicide, and I don't think they were happy in any of them.

About half way through the protagonist changes pronoun from "she" to "they", but it wasn't clear to me whether this represented an objective change, or an acceptance of self, or a choice, or simply the result of being in a different universe. I think the author simply wanted you to clock the change and make of it what you will - at least, I didn't see any exposition of this switch. The other striking thing (to me at least) was that the biography of the author as given at the end of the book coincides to a remarkable degree with the sequence of events and employment choices of the protagonist. Are we supposed to read the book as autobiography along with the other aspects?

In short, a very nicely written book as regards the style, but perplexing as regards the content, unless you're privy to the coded messages contained therein. It wouldn't draw me to read other books by the author, and I think you'd have to be already committed to queer fiction to pick the book up on spec.

Oddly, I found the articles more varied and far more interesting than the short stories, and IMHO the book would have benefited by making it more purely an ideas forum. The stories were too short to really go anywhere, and tended to be heavy-handed and pedantic rather than creative and provocative in the way that say Three Body Problem is. I don't think this is just a translation issue as a fair number of different people were involved in translation. So I'll ignore those.

So the interest value of the articles was partly as a window into his own thinking, and also one into broader Chinese thought and social pressure. (I don't personally agree with all his points, but they are fascinating to read and well argued). He repeats several times how during his life Chinese SF has twice come close to extinction, and only survived as a kind of undercover interest until things changed again. The second of these low points (in the late 70s and early 80s) was at a time when Chinese SF had broadened to include a lot of fantasy elements, and these in particular attracted high-profile criticism, to the extent of being called "spiritual pollution".

A couple of specific opinions
At one stage he argues that "classic literature" - by which he doesn't just mean written-some-time-ago but rather, written in the classical mode - has an entirely different aesthetic from science fiction, and one shouldn't attempt to make comparisons. Both can have a quality he calls "poeticness" but it arises from different kinds of interactions within the stories, and he considers it extremely hard to blend the two.. He also reckons that all SF is inherently transient and any particular story will cease to have relevance in only a few years, whereas classic literature has a chance of being timeless.

A direct quote: "of all the unexpected things that might interrupt Chinese science fiction's development, social unrest has to be the most worrying... science fiction is the product of leisurely and carefree minds... Only when our lives are stable and quiet can we allow the universe's catastrophes to fascinate and awe us. If we already live in an environment full of danger, then science fiction won't interest us." Again, I'm not sure I agree as regards the West, but it did (obviously) make me wonder on the impact on SF and speculative fiction in general of the current world conditions.

He describes his own trajectory as going "from paranoia to tolerance, from fanaticism to sobriety", and also being willing to enlarge his own view of what SF can offer. He personally is very committed to hard SF and the acceptance of the limitations of physical laws (so eg no faster-than-light travel) and in his early days, so far as he was concerned, that was the whole of SF. Over the years he has come to accept and appreciate the inclusion of other branches of SF, though I don't think he'll be writing that way himself. So far as I can tell, his own conviction is that SF is fundamentally about relationships between people and the universe, rather than people and people, and (I suspect) this is why fantasy has faced more rejection in China... it's easier to pass SF off as supportive of scientific and technological progress (even if in fact a particularly book challenges this) as opposed to fantasy which is much more easily seen as escapist and critical of present society.

All in all an interesting and unusual book which I'm vey glad to have read

It's a fantasy setting in the city Bezim which Davinia Evans likens to Byzantium, but which to me felt like Renaissance Italy or possibly parts of the Far East - lots of different factions, including Montague / Capulet style feuding gangs, a posh aristocracy with refined and exotic tastes, a city district known for high-class gambling and prostitution, a grindingly poor working class mainly involved with fishing... and a whole gaggle of alchemists working at different levels of sophistication and mastery. Alchemy is tolerated by the governing body, so long as it is used only for minor tricks, and "proper" magic is illegal and punished by exile (for the wealthy and powerful) or poisoning (for the rest). The dividing line between the two levels of alchemy/sorcery is unclear, and the theory of magic proposed in the book strongly suggests there's no real difference. 

Our hero, Siyon Velo, is originally a member of a poor fishing family, then a member of one of the gangs (Little Bracken), and currently a procurer of exotic ingredients for the alchemists. He has considerable native talent, but the main advantage he has at the start of the book is a huge array of contacts with people at all levels of society. To some extent he can be seen as the Hero Whose Coming is Prophesied... except that there are no prophecies! There is, however, a general realisation amongst practitioners at all levels that there's something profoundly out of balance in the world, conceived as four interlocking planes loosely related to the four elements earth, water, air and fire. And as the plot develops, apparently only Siyon can fix things, with a little help from his friends.

Davinia isn't a Tolkien as regards the language underpinning her world, and every now and again her choice of words kind of threw me out of the book - for example one of the gangs is called Haruspex, but they have nothing to do with the ancient world, nor augury, nor divination - so far as I can tell it's just a cool-sounding name. The main characters are all quite young - she describes in a postscript how she'd changed her mind a couple of times as to Siyon's age and background, and for my taste I'd have liked a few more mature individuals in key narrative roles. But I guess she chose in the end (or was advised) to pitch at a younger readership. As it stands, even the married couples come across as only barely familiar with one other (and usually finding excuses to spend time with other pursuits than each other) so again come over as basically quite immature.

Her social structure is very interesting, especially when the characters start to find unexpected relationships between card games or opera plots and alchemical practice. A major theme of the book is that of uncovering alternate paradigms for looking at the same phenomena, and that any one approach in isolation will not get very far. That was a fascinating aspect of the book. But on the social front, I never got a clear sense of how big the city was or how many people lived in it - it seemed just to expand every now and again with new groups of people when needed for the plot. For example, all of a sudden the city is swarming with hundreds of "inquisitors" - a word with religious overtones, but they have nothing to do with religion and are in fact a kind of alchemical police force. Where were all these people before, who controls them, and what do they do when not combing the streets for our hero and his friends? So the description of the city left me with more questions than answers. I'm assuming (from occasional hints in this book) that the second will focus more on the gambling district.

But where Davinia Evans really shines, I think, is in the cosmology of her world. The four planes aren't just a rehash of our four elements, but have been thought through creatively in terms of appearance, occupants, emotional weight and affinity in this plane (the Mundane), trappings that you'd use to access them, and so forth. This attention to cosmology really carries the book through the other difficulties mentioned, and came over to me as very convincing. I imagine that the second in the series will delve more into that, as each of the planes is intriguing in its own right and worth exploring some more.

So all in all a very good but not (I think) a great book. I'll happily tackle the second in the series at some point but will let the first one settle a bit before doing so. It'll also be interesting to see if she gets caught up in the world and just keeps writing books set in it, or if she'll stop after #2 and move to something else.

Who would like it? I think it is a younger person's book more than older, especially considering the characters and their (lack of) real emotional depth. It doesn't rely heavily on standard fantasy tropes so might well be accessible to folk who haven't read much fantasy before. But for someone like me who has read a lot of fantasy it still worked as a concept - I don't think it's quite so original as maybe the blurb about it suggests, but aspects of how the ideas were developed were certainly new, and it's definitely not just a rehash of older sword-and-sorcery plots. In short, I'd be happy to recommend to a range of readers of different experience and taste, who want some fantasy writing that's set in a slightly unusual context.

This book is definitely a challenge. The text is not difficult (in fact I fairly breezed through it) but conceptually there's a lot going on, and it's not all that straight forward. I could best describe it as a puzzle about our relationship with the past. It's about what memory, stories, histories, national myths, and nostalgia all mean to us. And to complicate matters further, we have an unreliable narrator, who might in fact be the author himself, or just a character. And the only other real character in the book is either an old friend, or a character the author invented, or the person who invented the narrator (who might be the author). I know that sounds confusing, but I'm not really sure it matters whether you know what's what - because I don't think there's supposed to be one right answer.

Plot-wise, well, this is not really a plot driven book. There is sequence of events that unfolds, a kind of future history, if you will, but this isn't a book about things that happen to characters and how they react to those things. Not really. So I don't think I'm spoiling anything sharing the outline here.

In Part 1, the narrator's sidekick develops a treatment for Alzheimer's that involves bringing the patients into carefully curated rooms of the past - for example, a quintessential living from the the '50s - and allowing that person to re-experience their own past for a little while.
In Part 2, the idea catches on more broadly, and soon people who aren't suffering from Alzheimer's are also seeking out these rooms for reason of nostalgia. This become so popular that nations all across Europe adopt the idea of re-imaging their nation as existing in a certain year or decade from their (not always) golden age.
Part 3 looks at the specific experience of Bulgaria.
Part 4 reveals what the rest of Europe did when each nation held a referendum on what decade they would like to live in.
Part 5 returns us to the narrator (who might be the author) and he gives us his reflections on the meaning of it all - as well as revealing some new truths/not-truths about himself.

So that's it. Highly conceptual. Super interesting. I'm still mulling it over.

Here's a Kirkus Review of the book: https://d1ldy8a769gy68.cloudfront.net/300/978/132/409/095/3/9781324090953.jpg

The writing style is quirky, and I think is supposed to reflect the thought patterns of a person who is both a pre-teen and a very old alien. It might work for some people, but to me it just came over as jerky and chaotic. There's no attempt at elegance or richness of prose. I really disliked it and found it just gimmicky: perhaps some people would find it more accessible.

Oddly (for a third book in a series) there seems little or no reference back to prior events. I'm assuming that the previous two books shed some light on what appears to be a age-old conflict between two alien races (or maybe factions within a single race?). But the mostly first person disjointed narrative disconnected me from any bigger picture. I presume, from occasional short sections, that there's an early series of events in the ancient near east, around the transition between the Late Bronze and Iron ages. This is a time period I'm very fond of, but I don't think the author was especially interested in writing about that period in a historical sense. These fragments felt like they were only a convenient placeholder for some preliminary events which - presumably - at some point would get joined up with the contemporary ones.

Who would like it? Well, I think that hypothetical person would have to be someone who had read the previous two books and still wanted more. It's not a book to start with. Nor, I think, is it a book for adult readers who are enthusiastic about SFF. Perhaps more YA in outlook? Or perhaps someone into console gaming, with its quickfire and rather superficial way of telling the story? I don't think it would appeal to anyone who reads or games in a more narrative style.

PS I just had another thought overnight... maybe it's trying to be a kind of superhero story? Certain of the characters have abilities and survive things far beyond normal human talents. Maybe Sylvain is trying to fuse multiple story types or genres into one? Or maybe isn't quite sure what kind of novel he's writing? Clearly this mashup of techniques works for some people but as mentioned yesterday, I just found it confusing and chaotic.

PPS I just looked him up and found Sylvain to be a Canadian man, whereas I'd been assuming a European woman! Not that that changes my feelings about the book, but it was fun to find that particular presupposition so far off base...

This was an interesting one! I'm not entirely sure I can say that I liked it, as the topic and near future described in it is very dark, and the story itself ends in a way which is kind of existentially hopeless for the main character. But it's undoubtedly well written and original - it's a book where I didn't find myself frequently thinking of other older books along the same line.

The story follows two timelines, one spanning a few months around 2030, and the other a few years in the 1970s and 80s. The protagonist is the same in both, but appears as a young woman in the earlier timeline, and (obviously) a much older one in the later. Her young life was spent initially as a rebel in communist Czechoslovakia, and subsequently as a refugee and illegal immigrant in the southern US. She spends part of this time obsessively making a cheap (and ultimately unsuccessful) film based on Karel Capek's War with the Newts (Capek is better known for another novel in which he coined the term robot). She flees America in the end in order to return to Europe - no longer under communist rule but sliding into right-wing nationalism.

Her old self decides to visit her daughter (given up for adoption to a Danish family but now living in America) to bid a final farewell. America by this time has slid into an inward-looking ultra-right-wing state in which outsiders are treated with extreme suspicion. Mother and daughter have one happy afternoon together, but the mother dies alone on returning to her hotel. However, despite being clinically dead, she still has awareness and an ability to move around as a kind of virtual entity. Now, the daughter happens to be working for a large corporation working on several fronts towards longevity, and we eventually learn that the mother's continued awareness is caught up with an ongoing bio/technological experiment run by the corporation.

We follow the daughter's journey back to Czechoslovakia, her reunion with a half-brother, and her attempt to get the mother's body relocated to her home for proper burial. But, perhaps inevitably, the longevity corporation has a different agenda, and the book closes with the daughter being persuaded that her mother's virtual continuation of life is a Good Thing... a sentiment that the mother, able to witness events but not take part in them, radically disagrees with.

So it's not an easy or fun book, with a gloomy view of future politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The continued analogy with War with the Newts is fascinating - in that book, the newts are exploited by humans but ultimately gain the ascendancy and systematically enslave humans and flood large portions of coastal nations to increase the oceans. In A Brief History of Living Forever, climate change is eroding the coast - so that the remains of Florida are not all that different between the two pictures - and most of humanity is being reduced to a kind of slave status. Kalfar clearly feels some kinship with Capek.

It's a little hard to see what message Kalfar wants the reader to take away from the book, other than the clear belief that right wing nationalism is in the ascendant. There are frequent situations where people "read" each other in quite erroneous ways, and correspondingly one infers how easy it is for one person to make false assumptions about another. There's another thread which treats life extension and longevity as probably cruel and problematic studies rather than areas of opportunity. But there's not a lot of positive takeaway from the book, and there's something of a sense of "now we're screwed and there's nothing we can do about it".

Who would like it? I don't think it's a book for newcomers to speculative or dystopian fiction. Unlilke some other dystopian works, it is not dealing with life in the aftermath of some calamity, but rather in the days leading up to the catastrophe, which makes it all the more challenging as a read. The reader has to be willing to tackle difficult stuff set only a very small number of years in the future. But it's certainly compelling, and a challenging and original story line, and I would happily recommend it to anyone who likes that kind of exploration.

The basic plot looks like it's going to be about a bloke who confesses to a crime he didn't commit. As punishment he gets sent back using a prototype time machine to the late Triassic era, which has rapidly become the method of choice around the world to get rid of dangerous criminals. (The Triassic is presented as a bit tricky to survive in but ultimately not very different to now, which is rather simplistic but serves as a plot device). The machine is called Absolom for no very clear reason, though I assume Riddle is alluding to the David and Absolom story in the Hebrew Bible. The man's scientist and engineer buddies, convinced of his innocence, labour night and day to invent a way to retrieve him. But then the plot switches to his daughter, who becomes the real protagonist while the bloke is kind of sidelined. The daughter has her own complicated angst and temporal history, and she converts the whole Absalom project into a way of rescuing and saving the lives of random specific people through recent (American) history.

The science bit is rather woeful and is better ignored and understood simply as a plot device - we're in the territory of "if we don't do exactly the right thing then there'll be a causality violation and our entire time line will be annihilated". So to avoid this grim fate our heroes decide that if they get any hint that they've been anywhere in the past, they'll ensure that they prepare for and enact said event, whatever it requires. This kind of plot goes back a long way - James Blish wrote a short story called Beep in 1954 (expanded into the short novel The Quincunx of Time in 1973) which did exactly this for future events. But here there is a series of quasi-magical inventions appearing at just the right point in the plot, which become increasingly hard to believe - as mentioned, better not to think in science terms at all and just accept them as ad hoc solutions to the current obstacle.

In the end it turns out that what the daughter is really aiming for is a new society, based on a conveniently uninhabited Pacific island, where she can invite exactly who she wants to share with her. This is done through a bit of technical wizardry and pot-loads of money earned through, for example, prior knowledge of how the financial markets would crash in 2007-8 (the admonition about not changing events in the slightest apparently doesn't apply to this lady earning obscene amounts of money). The climax of this thread reads to a British reader as an extraordinary piece of naivety (or self deception) - "Absalom Island was like the United States of America. A new version... Absalom - the machine itself - was a physical manifestation of the march of humanity. It was a device that removed the worst members of human society and rescued the innocent." The island has no code of laws, no constitution, nothing except for the whim of the founder and her immediate dependants to decide on what behaviours and lifestyles are acceptable. Maybe this resonates with US readers - certainly Riddle apparently sees this as uncritically Utopian - but elsewhere it has a rather chilling resonance.

So on the whole, for me, it fails not only as a piece of science fiction (which I don't think it was ever meant to be), but also as a serious consideration of human society and its development. I would doubt that the story will travel well outside the US - the few examples of who would get rescued by the new Absalom variant are all derived from American events and tropes, except for the Korean inventor of a handy subsidiary gizmo who gets rewarded with the rescue of a family member. Personally I find it hard to believe that a couple of kids in a pioneer wagon on its way west across the emerging US are more deserving than a whole bunch of non-Americans across the world in other circumstances. But in the end it all comes down to the whim of the Absalom team, and the kind of situations that they think of looking for.

The book could, I feel, have been "rescued" in several ways. First, the distraction of the original protagonist being sent back to the Triassic could have been replaced with something much simpler, seeing as how all the later trips were within the last century or so (within the age of photography, basically). But I guess that gives you the lure of dinosaurs as monsters. Secondly (and more importantly) the whole "Utopian social vision" bit was crying out for some critical reflection and recognition of the problems inherent in it. Finally, there was an implicit assumption that if people in difficult situations - which included drug and gambling addictions, loss of close family members, etc - were plucked out of their context and given a new chance, that alone would be enough to "cure" them. There's no real recognition of an internal discourse or world that might be driving behaviour regardless of being moved to a Pacific island. It all feels very superficial.

It's difficult to say who might like it. I guess one could just drift over the surface, enjoy the pacy writing, and not ask questions of the book or feel disturbed by its unexamined assumptions. To that extent it might serve as a holiday or journey book. It's certainly a quick read, and has quite a few different settings and locations that you jump about between. And I strongly suspect that it's written with an American rather than international audience in mind.

Some details: judging by the blurb it's the third in a series based on the investigative activities of a newspaper dedicated to the paranormal (The Stranger Times). The various staff are all, in their several ways, anywhere between mildly and seriously weird. However, they are good-hearted, and seemingly engaged in a very long war against The Enemy, who go by the name of The Founders (but are unrelated to the Star Trek Deep Space Nine shape-shifters of that name). The paper itself is based in Manchester, and all the action takes place in and around said city. In the book there is a small cluster of related paranormal problems which all end up tying together via a kind of New Age retreat centre, which (naturally) turns out to be a front for The Founders. (I guess this paragraph highlights that the book seems to borrow lots of ideas and names from other works, even if they are changed and adapted to a different purpose here).

Part of the problem I had was precisely that it was the third book, and it's kind of taken for granted that you know most of the characters and their back-stories. I don't think it's a series that lends itself to leaping in part-way through - I sort-of assumed that I was supposed to identify with and care about the newspaper staff, and that pretty much everyone else was on the Dark Side, but there's not a lot of early stuff in the book that helps you make this choice. In fact, while you are indeed supposed to root for the staff, not everyone else turns out to be wickedly motivated - but most of them are! It feels like C.K. McDonnell has kind of settled down into his series and is basically writing now for his fans.

So there was a constant sense of listening to an in-joke that you didn't quite follow and weren't sure how to respond to. The writing itself is plain but competent - you wouldn't read it for splendid prose, but it held together well and carried the plot along. The characters don't really change or develop much - like a long-running TV show they kind of repeat the same themes and tropes that one suspects they have already done for two books. I think that C.K. McDonnell is hoping to be another of the memorable writers who blend comedy with fantasy - he has been in his time an actual stand-up comic - but at least in this book I don't think he's quite got it right. It has a slightly slapstick air about it, and I think he was aiming for a kind of Only Fools and Horses feel (there's even a Reliant Robin - for non-UK readers, a classic but idiosyncratic kind of three-wheeler), but for me it didn't quite work.

Who would like it? I think probably you'd have to be already into the series to fully appreciate what's going on, and I don't think it's as accessible as an entry point as (I think) he believes.

T.J. Bass only authored two Science Fiction books, this one and Half Past Human. Both are set on a far-future earth when humans have evolved into small four-toed Nebbish and live in an expansive underground city called The Hive. Most of the world has been turned over to an extensive agro-meck system to make enough food to feed everyone. As one might expect, The Hive is a highly ordered society, though some people live outside of it. Both books tell the stories of the margins, where the people inside The Hive meet those wo live without.

The Godwhale opens with a character named Larry Dever. He lives in our distant future, but in the Hive's distant past. The book doesn't dwell long on his era of birth, because in the first few pages he suffers an accident and must undergo a hemicorporectomy. His broken bottom half is removed and he's fixed to a semi-sentient cyber mannequin which acts as his legs (and renal functions etc.

T.J. Bass was a doctor, and he loved describing bodily functions and the setting's future medi-teck. Larry's life on a mannequin bottom isn't easy. Here's what happens when he has to go to bed:

Larry turned on his refresher and grasped a ceiling rung of his horizontal ladder. The mannequin walked away slowly, pulling flexible tubing out of his various surgical stoma. Sucking sounds. Drops of urine and feces soiled the meck's breastplates with yellow and granular brown. Larry progressed across the monkey bars to the hot shower, where he emptied his visceral sacs down the drain. Hooking his arms through the trapeze rings, he pulled on a pair of goggles and activated the strong ultraviolet lights. Scented lather softened his flaking trunk. Wearing a terrycloth body stocking, he climbed into his hammock. More UVs focused on him as he slept.
The mannequin stood beside his bed for a while, then strolled down the hall to make records...

Life with a mannequin isn't easy, so soon Larry opts to be put into cryo-suspension, so he can be re-awakened at some future time when the medicine is good enough to re-attach proper parts.

Some generations later, Larry wakes up. One on his very own descendants greets him, and tells him he's scheduled for the surgery at long last.

"The graft will be done high in your thoracic cord. You'll keep your diaphragm and its phrenic nerves, but all your abdominal viscera will come from the C.C. donor - strong, young organs from a ten-year-old."
Larry felt weak. "A ten-year-old what?"
"Donor. Grown from your nuclear material. A carbon copy."
"A live human?"
Jen noticed his agitation. "I'm sorry, Larry. But I keep forgetting you're from an era before budding. Your bud child is not considered a human being - just a donor. Business ethics require that a donor live only long enough to donate. Of course, if the donor is viable after the organs are taken, that is a different problem. But there is no question of viability in your donor's case. The anastomosis will be too high."
Larry clumped into his mannequin.
"My bud child is to die?"
Jen didn't answer. She was hoping the mannequin would administer a tranquilizer. Larry's vasomotors were not too strong so soon after his re-warming; his blood pressure fluctuated wildly.

Naturally, Larry isn't keen on this either, so he elects to go back into suspension. When next he awakes, it's in his own far future, as garbage in the sewage pits of The Hive.

Chapter Two opens by introducing the titular character - a massive undersea bio-harvester, long neglected and forgotten, lying semi dormant and reeflike under accumulating flotsam.

A thundering surf drowned the forlorn screams of sand-locked Rorqual Maru. Brine-tossed grains of olivine and calcite buries her left eye, blocking her view of the sky. Uranus had marched twenty times through the constellations while the islands changing beaches had slowly engulfed her tail. Six hundred feet of her shapely hull lay hidden under a silted and rooted green hump of palm and frond.

Rorqual Maru is dying, so she decides to donate her remaining energies to her small benthic servomeck, Iron Trilobite, and set it free. But Trilobite thinks of Rorqual Maru as a god, so instead he goes on a mission to find humans to re-energize her. This brings him in contact with the people of The Hive, and with the wild benthic feral people of the isles. The novel will spend most of its time heading for a clash between these two groups of people.

Before then, however, we're introduced to a few new characters - Nebbish people from the Hive. Particularly, the recently retired Drum (who just wants to settle down and consume calories with flavor, for which he has saved for a lifetime) and his friend Ode. His retirement plans soon go awry, though.

A dry female appeared on the screen. Drum didn't like her air of efficiency. Thin lips clashed with the gaudy smock. "Re-certification time," she said with her pasted-on smile.
Drum's mouth opened and closed - wordless.
"Earth Society has run a little short of calories," she continued. "Water table dropped and the harvest reflected it. We must cut back on the warm - the consuming population - for the duration. Please vote for those citizens with whom you want to share next year. Hurry now. Your friends need your vote to avoid being put into Temporary Suspension - TS. Remember, however, that you must not vote for yourself or your clone litter-mates. No blood prejudice allowed."
Drum smiled nervously. He had done this before when he had his job vote to protect him...
"My votes go to the Tinker who keeps my refresher, the pipe caste member who services this wing of the city - and Grandmaster Ode."
A screen played a geometric dance as tallies ran up. The thin-lipped female reappeared long enough to announce: "You failed to receive the necessary three votes, so it is TS for you."
Drum stared as his Temporary Suspension order was printed out.
"But I'm retired," he objected. My CQB is paid up for life..."
"Your retirement CQB remains in your name while you are in TS. When the harvests improve, you will be rewarmed and can continue consuming where you were interrupted. Hurry. You have to report to the clinics immediately. The air you are breathing belongs to someone else."

Luckily, Drum spots an opportunity while on his way to the TS Clinic, and instead takes a job in the sewers. It's not the greatest job, but I suppose it's better than TS:

Nebbish workmen sat around their barracks watching the sewer bouillabaisse simmer. Drum picked up his bowl and decanted a pint of surface fluid with it's fat gobbets and flecks of green basil.
"Don't you want any jointed creatures?" offered Ode, digging deep with the ladle.
Drum grinned widely, exposing a bad set of teeth; less than half remained in the lower jaw, and none in the upper.
"There'll be no more chewing for me."
"Did you put in a request for a new set?"
"Along with my usual requests for a lens and a hip joint," said Drum. "But you know what my priority is."
Ode sat silently running his tongue over his own set of broken teeth. He could use a few White team requisitions himself. The Wet Crew sloshed in and dumped their tithe down the Synthe chute. They sat down and picked up bowls of hot soup.
"Your shift," they said.
Ode and Drum finished eating and pulled on their boots.

And this is how they meet Larry, and Trilobite, and a whole new world of adventure is opened up.

Bass is a colorful writer, and his setting is incredibly rich. The writing itself can sometimes be terse. At times, important turns in the plot are hidden in the middle of a paragraph, and things can change over the course of a sentence - so his books are not the kind that you can snooze through parts and easily catch up later. His vocabulary is also large, and scientific, which may invite you to read things twice to make sure you got them. For example:

Hypertonics dehydrated his tissues and he slipped into cryotherapy torpor.

and

The city's energy organ cracked in the blast - spilling sixteen hundred kilo-amperes of toroidal plasma, at fifty million degrees Kelvin. For a moment, a bit of the sun existed in the sewers as fusion fuel spilled, spreading ionic gas in a yellow glow.

But it's a four-colour setting, to be sure. The characters a very human, very flawed, and quite relatable considering how alien the setting is. Bass tends to focus on everyman characters (yes, a product of its time, few of the main characters are women, and they are relegated to certain roles, such as goddesses and breeders). There are no 'evil villains', just the uncaring dystopian system under which the hive operates. But that said, the story telling is sometimes takes second place to the setting and Bass' efforts to describe it. And the lingo can get in the way, especially toward the end.

But despite the flaws, they are remarkable works at which every SF fan should someday take a stab. 4.5 Stars.

I think a lot of the reason for this is discussed by John Scalzi himself in his concluding author's notes - he had planned an entirely different and much darker novel, but was overtaken by the covid pandemic. He himself was unwell for many months and found himself unable to write to the original plan. The Kaiju Preservation Society emerged from all this, and was written as a kind of let's-get-back-in-the-saddle book.

The basic plot is a parallel Earth in which enormous and ravenous creatures - kind of ultra-dinosaurs if you like - roam the planet. The protagonists are there to study and investigate them and their world, and there's a bunch of military and big-business bad guys who are out to exploit them in various ways. There's a bit of technobabble which establishes in reasonably consistent way how the connection between the worlds came about, its limitations, and why out of all possible parallel Earths, only this one is known. But if he wanted to write more novels in this universe it would be easy to imagine another connection to another alternate.

Who would like it? Well, as mentioned it's a journey or holiday book, and pretty much perfect for that. It's hard to imagine anyone reading it a second time as (IMHO) there isn't enough depth to draw you back in for another round. But in the right circumstances lots of people might find it fun.

You don't need to have much familiarity with SF, though there are lots of allusions to films and streamed series to establish other parallels between the world of the book and our world. But if you don't know these, it's OK as they are not plot-critical in any way, and most of them are explained just in case. Some aspects are easier for an American rather than international audience to get, for example there are increasing references to the 2020 presidential election. It's fairly clear where John Scalzi's political sympathies lie, and where he thinks unscrupulous big business might place their own bets, but for me these kind of intruded into the book too much.

Some of the setups and / or backgrounds of the stories were interesting - indeed, the situation of the first one, Hypothetical Lizard, was quite compelling, and this made a good first section to tackle. But after that things became very uneven. Also, in most cases I wasn't sure what the central point of the story was - several seemed to be kind of writer's exercises given a topic, and I never got the feeling that there was much commitment driving them. So each time I was left with the question, "what's he trying to say here?" and in almost all the cases I couldn't really answer that.

Alan Moore, judging by the bio blurb, works mostly with comics / graphic novels, and after checking out his entry in Wiki, it's clear that he is highly accomplished in that field. So maybe he's seeking to branch out into more prose forms? The novella (Thunderman) is explicitly about the world of comics and, I suppose, is based on his experience of that world. Sadly this made it (for me, at least) rather impenetrable as a tale, and I gave up after a few sections of that one as it didn't really seem to be saying anything other than some probably witty and apposite allusions to real figures in the comic book world.

Alan Moore comes over as having a very British style of writing and humour, even when the stories are not in Britain (like Thunderman) or indeed on planet Earth at all (like Hypothetical Lizard). One of the tales (Location, Location, Location) is a retelling of the biblical book of Revelation in which all the events take place in or in the sky above Bedford, with the understanding that that is also where the Garden of Eden was located, But unlike some other British humour authors in the speculative field (eg Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams) I never got the sense that there was something serious behind the wit.

Who would like it? Well, I have to confess I'm not sure! The stories are of such varied length that you couldn't imagine someone reading them through on a journey, as you'd never be sure what time to commit to it. And most of them are quite demanding in terms of getting to grips with a very alien setting in one way or another. So it would be hard to recommend the book to a newbie SFF reader. These two factors combine so that you start to wonder if it's worth engaging with the oddity of setting for (in some cases) a very short story, Probably you'd have to be someone who is already a fan of his, and wants to devour some longer prose as well as comic strips.

But by far the majority of the population still lives on Earth, which is politically divided into a few major continental units. America has had a second revolution, the Soviet Union still controls much of Asia, and other recognisable religious or political groups have territories in Africa, South America, and so on. The main character, Marianne, is a citizen of one of the Worlds, temporarily on Earth for study, when a third American revolution breaks out and triggers global war.

The great majority of the story follows Marianne on her personal journey - literal and conceptual. But behind this story of an individual life, and ultimately coming to dominate its direction and choices, is the story of the ending of a world. This ending happens with shocking abruptness, cutting suddenly across Marianne's plans and intentions. At first I thought that this way of telling the story was too sharp, too fierce: on reflection I decided that it was a carefully crafted device to emphasise just how final such an event would be to Earth's inhabitants.

Most of the above describes my reactions as reader, but the story makes interesting reading for anyone interested in near-future life. Gamers wanting to mine the ideas will find a rich variety of possible back-stories against which a player's actions can take place. Certainly there are details that betray the year of writing (1981) - for example, the prominence of the Soviet Union - but it doesn't take much imagination to map the described geopolitical units into ones which are relevant today.

Worlds is a self-contained story, but also the opening book of a trilogy. I am looking forward to rediscovering the other two books. For me, 4* rather than 5, because although the concepts worked well, I wasn't always convinced by Marianne's touring activities, and felt that the writing quality wasn't always up to Joe Haldeman's best.

So the story basically follows the protagonist as for various reasons her simplistic world view starts to unravel, leading in the end to the abandonment and destruction of the asteroid enclave, and the start of a process of reintegrating with the rest of humankind. It's firmly in the space opera camp, with vast machines, galaxy-spanning action, and the attempted destruction of billions of lives (both human and alien).

Emily's reading list credits include studies of 20th century fascism, North Korea, Scientology and the Spartans, and these influences certainly emerge in her presentation of the asteroid culture - at the same time both logical and compelling, and oppressive and revolting. In many ways it's an all-too-credible portrayal of how a society can control its own members, and seek to eliminate divergences from its own defined norm. (In passing, she's a British writer who studied classics and humanities and now teaches Latin and Greek to schoolchildren. She's won awards for some fantasy novellas before but this is her first full-length novel).

There are a couple of places where you get a reset into a couple of (kind of) parallel universes, and the contrasts between these are a big part of the personal journey of the protagonist. One of the key threads in all the sections is how it's much easier for us to empathise with the suffering of an individual, than with the suffering of vast numbers of people.

I loved it - it's perhaps a little bit long but it would be hard to decide what should be trimmed, and I was never at any risk of giving up on it. Definitely a book I'd reread, and it'll probably be a book I select later in the year for this club.

Who else would like it? You'd have to be a person who enjoys grappling with a very different culture (it's definitely not in the camp of books about the near future with minor tweaks from today), who likes being challenged by political and social thought, and wants big ideas taken to a logical extreme in a book.

It's not, I think, a good first intro to SF as the leap might be too great for people, and the (apparent) glorification of a militaristic all-controlling state in the early stages of the book might put some off. However, unlike Heinlein's Starship Troopers (where in many ways the society is similar to the one here) the cracks and flaws in the culture are systematically brought to light as the book proceeds. So you'd want to be someone who had read and enjoyed some far-future SF and likes grappling with ideas and political systems more than spaceship battles )for a book about a military society, there are surprisingly few battles other than some hand-to-hand combat).

That said, the idea of the genetic upgrade of the title, while not universal, is well-travelled. A E van Vogt wrote a number of books years ago tackling sub-species of humans, more advanced in some way (Slan and Silkie come to mind, along with his Null-A series). More recently Ted Chiang's Understand (one of the stories in Stories of Your Life and Others) likewise, but the focus in each is different. van Vogt wanted to look at social conflict between the groups, especially where the "normal" majority wanted to suppress the "superior" new group. Chiang is more similar to Crouch - he assumed a hormone treatment rather than genetics, and covered it in a short story, but the crux of it is a conflict between two recipients of the same treatment, and whether either is more entitled to run the world.

So again Upgrade is a kind of read-once and enjoy it for what it is book - personally I don't think you'd get much more out of a second reading. A bit like some of Tom Clancy's books, it's a way for people to read action/adventure with a slightly futuristic slant, with almost all of the story being recognisably from today plus a few years of fairly obvious dystopian shift. Probably the biggest bit of world-building is the idea that an attempted genetic modification of a food crop went terribly wrong thus leading to a) mass starvation and b) distrust of and heavy policing of genetic mods in general. You could cheerfully recommend it to folk who like action/adventure and know that they're going to recognise all the tropes and not be put off by Weird Stuff!

A fascinating side-effect of reading the books you kindly pass on has been a clearer understanding on my part of the conventions of genre. What one might call "proper" SF or fantasy has a clear sense of world-building that is crucial for the plot and characters, whereas lots of these cross-genre books are content to set themselves just a few years away, do a bit of hand waving, use a bit of technobabble, and rely on the fact that their readers aren't really looking for SF/F as such.

So the one I have just started (Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - of which more in a few days) is absolutely SF, and celebrates it by filling in as part of the narrative how human society has adapted itself using a kind of caste system to the loss of planet Earth and the constraints of living on an asteroid habitat. It comes over as entirely credible and well-thought through, and in particular not based on early 21st century society! I don't yet know whether the book as a whole will be successful, but the ways in which she is bringing the social and historical background to life are excellent.

Likewise Ordinary Monsters gradually filled in details of this alternate Late Victorian world in an engaging and credible way - in keeping with its central mystery approach, you didn't get to learn all about everything at the start... important facts were withheld or only alluded to at first before being steadily revealed.

Upgrade doesn't both with such niceties - there certainly are mysteries, relating to the Cunning Plan that the main character's mother had dreamed up, but the world itself is just there and immediately recognisable.

So yes, a book to recommend to particular kinds of reader in particular situations.

All of the books he passes on to me are recent hardback productions (occasionally ones coming out in a couple of months) and although they're all loosely SFF / speculative (by Will's reckoning) many of them are not nearly so much SFF as I would normally choose. You'll see what I mean.

First up is Ledge by Stacey McEwan...
I had kind of mixed feelings throughout which weren't resolved by the ending. I like books to have a clear ending for themselves even if they are part of a series, but Ledge finished on a kind of end-of-episode cliffhanger with "don't miss next week's exciting episode" written all over it (actually it's September 2023's episode but the same applies ).

Stacey's writing is basically competent and there were no proofreading issues that I spotted, so the book has been well put together. However, I confess not to really liking her writing style - it's full of short sentences.

Like this. I thought I'd explain.

Except they're separate paragraphs.

You get the drift, I'm sure. She writes in the present tense which works well for the story, and there's a decent amount of description of the geography of the world. Strictly speaking it's not a world, but rather a fairly small island which can be crossed on foot in only a few days, which has this impossibly high mountain at the southern end on which the ledge of the title is located.

But the rest of her world-building left me a bit cold. There are two quite different races, along with numerous political sub-factions of these. There doesn't seem to be any historical or biological link between the two, but somehow they can intermarry and have children. One race is human, the other is a kind of flying humanoid thing rather larger than the average person: these are imposing but, apparently, physically quite weak. Then there's bits of magic which are kind of glued into the plot without any real coherence as to what it can and cannot do, and who can or cannot exercise it. I don't think the magic added anything important to the world, but it was crucial to the plot in the sense of healing the protagonist at one point, and helping her get through some locked doors at another. It was altogether less impressive and less well thought through than one would hope.

However, I don't think that world-building was what Stacey was interested in - she basically wanted to write a sexy romance in a vaguely mysterious world where the two lovers begin completely alienated from each other but are forced together by circumstance. The sex (by the time they get around to it, about 2/3 of the way through) is surprisingly explicit, and focuses on the mechanics and sensations of their coupling rather than going more sensitively into the how and why of inter-species sex. This kind of felt like an enormous elephant in the room! Stacey talked about feelings, but they are kind of binary black-and-white feelings rather than nuanced ones, and I wasn't convinced from the writing that the couple in question actually felt anything serious for each other, other than being able to scratch an itch.

Personally I wouldn't rush to read anything else Stacey has written (I think from the blurb that this is in fact her first novel so there isn't anything else out there to try). It's interesting (to me, at least) that she or her publisher has decided that it is the first book of a trilogy, so one assumes that Stacey has books 2 and 3 mapped out to a greater or lesser degree. I guess if she's promising book 2 this September, then that one at least must be essentially finished.

So - I think the book would appeal to people who like sexy romances along the lines of vampire / werewolf / shapeshifter protagonists. It's not a book for people who want a richly imagined and coherent alternative world. Indeed, it's kind of questionable (in a strict nerdy sense) whether it should be classed with fantasy at all, as that kind of sends the wrong message as to what the book actually is about. Within those constraints, and provided you don't stop to ask yourself awkward questions of the book, it works, and carries along at a decent pace. I was never at any serious risk of giving up on it. If I was rating it on Goodreads or whatever it would be a 3* book for me.

In case you haven't followed the blurb, the idea is that a late 1970s continuation of the Apollo program, in which the Soviets play a much more active part and have their own moon lander, discovers the entrance to an alien vessel very close to where Apollo 17 landed (I think this was coincidence rather than a cunning choice of landing location, since it's the Soviets who discover they hatchway first). NASA have employed an oriental female linguist as her studies of numerous sacred writings (mostly from the far-eastern tradition, but with a vague nod to ancient Egypt as well) have led her to the conclusion that there is something to be found in that exact area. So off she goes on a lunar mission, and the story is about what she finds there, and how it can only really be understood by means of eastern mystical traditions and not western scientific or military ones,

So far so good - there are a lot of resonances with Arthur C Clarke's writings, especially 2001 (for the alien artefact arriving which triggers consciousness on Earth) and Rendezvous with Rama (since the artefact ends up zipping off again having had its repeated contact with earthlings). The writing is quite prosaic (like Clarke's) except when the focus is on eastern mysticism when it kind of lights up a bit. One suspects that the whole SF trapping is to provide an excuse for writing a fictional story about how mysticism is a cool thing. I don't have any problems with that as a strategy, but I would have liked the story itself to be more convincing and solid. So much of the interpersonal interaction sections seemed to be "NASA's psychologists should have weeded this or that person out of the program, but unaccountably they missed it", thus allowing the various crew members to act like total plonkers towards each other!

So it's an OK story, a quick read and would be good on a long journey from A to B - there's enough in it to hold your interest in that context, but I can't see that it is a book that many people would reread. It's just too thin on the ground once you get the idea that a) most things that the protagonists are seeing are not real, and b) meditation and mysticism will help them solve the problem. I was reminded of something [a mutual friend] said a meeting or two back, how she gets wary when the testimonial quotes are for other books that the author has written, and that's certainly true for this one.

Who would like it? I think as previously mentioned it's a good journey book or maybe holiday book where you're not expecting too much but want something a bit different to pass the time. If you're looking for something to keep on your shelves and go back to from time to time, this probably isn't it. It's slightly a mystery to me why Gollancz would publish it, when there's so much other stuff out there with more depth (it feels more like an indie book by an author who is super-keen to explore science vs mysticism and picks the space program in the 70s to do so) but maybe they felt that the oriental side of things gave enough difference to the book to propel it along. But the start is very strong, and maybe the Gollancz editors only read ch1 and made their decision on that basis

So the basic idea is that certain children ("talents") have a range of magical abilities, fairly circumscribed in the sense that although they can get better / more confident in what they do, they can't simply learn or acquire fundamentally new abilities - they're kind of set genetically. The book is set in the late Victorian era (1870s/80s) complete with slums, pea-souper fog and all, and the life of a child is kind of grim at the best of times. In the midst of this social mix there's a castle just north of Edinburgh where the owner gathers as many talents as he can locate - the question of his motives for doing this is one of the central themes of the book, and one's view of this keeps shifting as new information about the setup is provided. The castle has, among other secrets, a kind of portal to the world of the dead, which you rapidly learn has to be kept closed but which (perhaps inevitably) is rapidly losing integrity.

It couldn't be called a fun read, but it's a persuasive one, and the world-building is good. Both the people and the settings are convincing, and the whole question of what exactly the talents are doing (and what happens to those "exiles" who don't sustain their talent through puberty) builds steadily through the book.

My only mild gripe is that although it felt through most of the book as though it was a stand-alone novel, all of a sudden in the last chapter or two we are suddenly introduced to the idea "oh look there's a whole second portal that we never knew about" - it feels far too much as though the publisher suddenly said "hey you know what, we could make a trilogy out of this". But it's a long and pretty much self-contained work in itself, and this extra bit seemed needless. While I enjoyed the book, I'm not sure I would go through a second one in the series, as it's a bit difficult to see how there can be much other than more of the same!

But overall, an unexpectedly enjoyable find and worth persevering with the intimidating size.

I found Cloud Cuckoo Land a bit patchy - most of the story threads ended up making sense, though the ones set broadly in the now were very broken up at first, and only really took off in the second half of the book when longer narrative passages were given to it. Those two story arcs (Seymour and Xeno) were probably the most compelling.

The two story arcs set around the fall of Constantinople worked well most of the time (and were my favourites for the first half of the book) but became strangely rushed towards the end, and kind of lost the richness of texture that they had started with (and ended up as a fairly contrived way to get the manuscript across to Italy).

The future-based one (Konstance) was to my mind the least convincing, with huge and seemingly unrecognised problems and a weak premise. I kept wondering if whoever did Anthony Doerr's editior noticed these problems and skipped over them without flagging them up, or just didn't see them. Parts of this thread also seemed very derivative (eg of Hal in 2001). I saw one reviewer saying something like that the book is a classic example of a literary fiction author who imagines that to write SF all they have to do is toss in some technobabble and wave their arms a bit! Basically, Doerr should probably stick to historical or contemporary stuff where he is much stronger. According to Wiki, "[Doerr] noted that those sections are "not quite science fiction", but added that they were the result of extensive research into what life could be like then" - well, I agree with his first statement but calling it "extensive research" is a very long stretch!

The other thing we both felt was that we couldn't really see how the main divisions in the text, signalled by divisions in the (fictional) Diogenes tale, had been worked out. The various portions of the several stories didn't seem to have much to do with the provided fragments of Diogenes, and were uneven in timespan and content. So the overall structure of the book didn't seem to contribute to the whole (again contrast Cloud Atlas where the structure is tightly bound into the stories).

Where Doerr does undoubtedly shine is in his prose style, which is delightful to read even in the parts which are dubious on other grounds! I've just been listening to some Arthur C Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama) where the science is almost infinitely better, and the sequence of events makes good sense, but whose prose style is exceptionally ordinary. Quite a contrast. I'd be happy to read more of Doerr for that reason alone, and All the Light we Cannot See seems to be his most highly recommended book.

This is Andy Weir's third book. His first and most famous book was The Martian, which is about an All-American varsity maverick boy-scout botanist hero who gets stuck on Mars and must solve one problem after another with science to keep himself alive. That book finishes with a scene in which the main character launches himself into space in hail-mary football pass fashion.

This book is totally different. It's about a boy-scout varsity All-American xeno-biologist hero who who is underappreciated by the establishment and has become a super-duper know-it-all grade-school science teacher. He finds himself alone in the orbit of Tau-Ceti (not Mars) thanks to a hail-mary football pass to put him INTO danger (hence the name of the book), so I think you can see how this would be wildly different. Also, our hero here, Ryland Grace, is really friendly and never swears - the guy in the Martian was much more sweary, as I recall.

And one more difference - Ryland doesn't have to do all that dramatic life-savey science stuff alone this time - he gets a buddy! And a pretty good one, too.

From here on, beware of mild spoilers.

The first 150 pages is a bit of a slog, I have to say. The writing is is easy enough to get along with and at first Ryland has lost his memory, so there's an interesting puzzle to keep the reader engaged. But I found myself gagging on Ryland's cloying and saccharine outlook and self-congratulatory manner. There's a fair bit of "Oh my Gosh! This is it! First contact! I'm the guy! I'm the guy who meets aliens for the first time!" and "It proves I was right! The Goldilocks zone is bull-puckey! You don't need water for life! I should be more focused on the ... 'save all of humanity' thing, but gosh darn it, I can spend a moment to be happy about being right when everyone said I was wrong!" And then of course there's the football: "Some quick math tells me the cylinder will take over forty minutes to reach me. I have that long to get into an EVA suit, go outside, and position myself on the hull for Humanity's first touchdown-pass reception with an alien quarterback."

So yes, Ryland is always happy. He's very self-congratulatory. And he's also dang good at pretty much everything! Except the few things his bestest alien buddy is better at, 'cause otherwise we wouldn't need him in the story. So yes, even more so than in the Martian, the our viewpoint character in this novel is an insufferably keen, overachieving, wish-fulfillment character.

The other thing about the first part of the book is the mystery . Where exactly is Ryland, and why is he here? Ryland can't remember, but with some conveniently placed (and rather screenplay-like) flashbacks, all is eventually revealed. I say flashbacks, but they're not always, because sometimes they are 'memories' of scenes at which Ryland was not actually present, which is bizarre. Eventually, these start to peter out and just become 'backstory'.

Luckily, by the time we get a third of the way into the book, we meet the alien buddy, Rocky, and things start to turn around because Ryland has someone to think about other than himself. This is when things get pretty entertaining for a while. Rocky the alien is pretty cool, and the buddy relationship really works well. By the end, I found myself caring for both characters in spite of my earlier feelings for Ryland. This section had some nice twists and turns and even ends in an interesting fashion, so I was quite pleased with it.

I'm sure Weir put a massive amount of work into the science behind everything, and I think that pays off for the reader. I'm not an expert on most of the fields discussed in the book, but pretty much every time I had a 'hey, wait a minute - he forgot about this!' moment, Weir demonstrated that he had indeed thought of that a paragraph or two, later. I might quibble with his thoughts on evolution a bit, but apart from that it seemed really sound to me and effort well spent by the writer.

The problems that Ryland and Rocky have to solve are, on the whole, pretty interesting, too, though I did find the 'whoah, here's a problem we didn't see, let's science our way out of it' thing starting to get a little tired in the last third. I think 50 to 100 pages could have been knocked out of the book without losing too much. The back story wasn't nearly as interesting as the 'first contact' story.

So yes, overall an enjoyable read for me. The book offers an interesting space problem to be solved, a really interesting exploration of alien biology, and a touching buddy story. With a less cloying main character, fewer clichés, a more worldly outlook, and some tightening up in the story-telling would likely have put this into 'Touchdown!' territory for me. 3 out of 5.

I'm working through my Gollancz SF Masterworks collection, and (going chronologically at least for now) this is the next book up in terms of year published - 1953. It won the first ever Hugo, so that's quite something.

Initially, I was really wondering why. After a solid set up, things get really confusing for a time, and I had to keep back flipping to see if this new character had been introduced, yet. Eventually I got into the swing of things, and by the time we get to the end (250 pages in this edition) I found it was all tightly tied up in a bow. OK, now I can see it! It's really very much like a Phillip K Dick novel, an author I admire very much. It's a quirky murder mystery, sort of, except we know who did it (or do we?) and why (do we really?). The story is set in a vague future New York against a backdrop of social change, as Espies (you know, those people who have E.S.P.) aka Peepers are still relatively new and finding a niche in the world, while the world adapts to their presence.

Against this backdrop, rich industrialist Ben Reich decides he'd like to commit a murder. Only nobody commits murders anymore, because they'd be easily caught by the Peepers who work for the government. So he hires his own peeper to run interference against the peepers of the Man! And things get really strange, and a woman becomes a baby, and things explode, and for a time we can't decide who's winning this contest. And then it's all wrapped up, and a winner emerges - or does he?

Like any good PKD novel, we don't really know what's real and what isn't until the end. And maybe not even then! We also get quirky characters, like @kins, and on some pages the text is arranged to make a pattern you might puzzle out like Einstein. So yeah - I can see why it won the Hugo.

Terrible cover on this edition, though! I mean, really.

This is not Well's most famous work by a longshot - it's quite likely you've never even heard of it. Wells wrote The War in the Air in 1907 at a time when he was veering away from the scientific romances of his past and into more mainstream fiction. Like his earlier novels, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, this book contains a fair amount of social commentary, but unlike those, this one is couched in some fairly lengthy 'editorial' sections by the unnamed narrator that will come across as rather dry and sometimes preachy. Wells was alarmed by the increase in nationalist rhetoric he was seeing around him, and this book forms part of his reaction to it.

The War in the Air postulates a near future world war, made possible by the atmosphere of fervent nationalism running wild in the various world empires, and by the sudden increase in mobility to the war departments of these nations made possible by air travel. Huge fleets or lighter-than-air ships are built - the battleships of the air - supported by rather unreliable heavier than air flying machines of variable invention that mostly get about by clumsily flapping their wings. The novel is set in the year '191-'

Please note that there are some spoilers ahead.

The story opens with two cockney brothers from Bun Hill, near the Crystal Palace in London. They're names are Bert and Tom Smallways. Tom is the more reserved of the two. He runs a shop and marvels (and laments) at the speed of change he sees in the world around him - a world of motorcycles, automobiles, and monorails and exotic fruits and vegetables from all around the world. Bert Smallways, on the other hand, is the more progressive of the two. He'll be the hero of our story. He's employed in the bicycle (here meaning motorcycle) shop of a young man named Grubb, which satisfied his progressive nature. But a motorcycle accident and a fire in the early chapters of the book sets Bert and Grubb back. For a time they take to touring the countryside and singing. Meanwhile, the news headlines offer dire predictions of war, and a certain English inventor named Butteridge is making a name for himself.

All of these threads are drawn together one day as Mr Butteridge comes floating across Bert's path in a balloon. Mistakes are made, and before you know it Bert Smallways is carried off solo in Butteridge's balloon. He drifts across the North Sea and into northern Germany, where he eventually lands with a ruckus. The Germans assume he's Mr Butteridge himself, and since this assumption seems to be the only thing saving Bert from some German anger over the extent of property damage he created in landing, he doesn't tell them who he really is. Almost before he can say 'Gaw!', Bert finds himself in Prince Karl Albert's air flagship, the Vaterland, and heading out over the sea toward America.

It turns out the Germans have plans of invasion for North America, and almost before Bert understands what he's involved in, he witnesses a naval battle between American and German ironclads in the North Atlantic. At first this all seems like something happening remotely below, but soon it becomes obvious he's part of an air fleet, which means he's part of the action. Here we get some of the best bits of description in the book:

"Bert, craning his neck through the cabin porthole, saw the whole of that incident, that first encounter of aeroplane and ironclad. He saw the queer German Drachenflieger, with their wide flat wings and square, box-shaped heads, their wheeled bodies, and their single-man riders soar down the air like a flight of birds... One to the right pitched down extravagantly, shot steeply up into the air, burst with a loud report, and flamed down into the sea; another plunged nose forward into the water and seemed to fly to pieces as it hit the waves."

Somewhere in the book, we're told that about a third of all these heavier-than-air flying machines killed their solo pilots. Clearly, the new air force isn't the place for the faint of heart. Bert feels unsafe, even in the relative safety of the airship, though he's later dismayed to learn that a young man was shot dead by a stray rifle bullet, though this whole time he never realized the Vaterland had come under fire. Meanwhile, the battle rages on:

"He saw little men on the deck of the Theodore Roosevelt below, men foreshortened in plan into mere heads and feet, running out preparing to shoot at the [other Drachenflieger]. Then the foremost flying machine was rushing between Bert and the American deck, and then bang! came the thunder of its bomb flung neatly at the forward barbette and a thin little crackling of rifle shots in reply. Whack whack whack, went the quick-firing guns of the American's battery and smash came the answering shell from the Fuerst Bismarck. Then a second and third flying-machine passed between Burt and the American ironclad, dropping bombs also, and a fourth, it's rider hit by a bullet, reeled down and dashed itself to pieces and exploded between the shot-torn funnels, blowing them apart. Bert had a momentary glimpse of a little black creature jumping from the crumpling frame of the flying machine, hitting the funnel, and falling limply, to be instantly caught and driven to nothingness by the blaze and rush of explosion."

In these sections, it reads very like a comic book, right down to the sound effects.

"Smash! came a vast explosion in the forward part of the flagship, and a huge piece of metalwork seemed to lift out of her and dump itself into the sea, dropping men and leaving a gap into which a prompt Drachenflieger planted a flaring bomb. And then for an instant Bert perceived only too clearly in the growing, pitiless light a number of minute, convulsively active animalculae scorched and struggling in the Theodore Roosevelt's foaming wake. What were they? Not men - surely not men? Those drowning, mangled little creatures tore with their clutching fingers at Bert's soul."

By now, Prince Karl Albert knows that Bert isn't the famed airship inventor, Butteridge. Bert is allowed to live on the ship for the time being, but it's made clear to him that his role on the ship is now 'als ballast'. He tries to keep a low profile, especially when the Prince is angry. After leaving the sea battle behind them, the air fleet heads toward New York. Along the way, word comes that a German airman is to be disciplined for carrying matches while onboard the airship, Adler. This is extremely dangerous and there are signs posted about warning men not to carry matches. The airman pleads forgetfulness in the height of battle, but the Prince decides to make an example of him anyway.

"Bert stood on the gallery, curious to see the execution, but uncomfortable because that terrible blond Prince was within a dozen feet of him, glaring terribly, with his arms folded and his heels together in military fashion.
They hung the man from the Adler. They gave him sixty feet of rope, so that he should hang and dangle in the sight of all evil-doers who might be hiding matches or contemplating any kindred disobedience. Bart saw the man standing, a living, reluctant man, no doubt scared and rebellious enough in his heart, but outwardly erect and obedient, on the lower gallery of the Adler about a hundred yards away. Then they thrust him overboard...
Down he fell, hands and feet extended, until with a jerk he was at the end of the rope. Then he ought to have died and swung edifyingly, but instead a more terrible thing happened; his head came right off, and down the body went spinning into the sea, feeble, grotesque, fantastic, and with the head racing it in its fall."

The Vaterland heads on to New York, where at first the city surrenders, but then the American Spirit kicks up and, when reinforcements arrive from the south, the battle of New York begins. The Vaterland sustains damage and must leave the battle behind. It flies or drifts of to Labrador, where it settles down in the serene Canadian wilderness for a time. Rescue eventually comes, and the German fleet heads down to Niagara Falls, where most of the rest of the story is spun. The Germans take both sides of the river (here, for some reason, Wells refers to 'Niagara City' even though the cities on both sides of the river were called Niagara Falls at this time). By now we've learned that the whole world it at war - Paris, London, Berlin, New York, and other cities have all been fire-bombed out of existence. The 'Asiatics' (seemingly China, Japan, and India, described as advanced and industrious people who are more numerous and advanced than everyone else) have joined the fray and taken the west part of North America. There is a three-way war on for North America.

Toward the end, Bert finds himself stranded on Goat Island, the island above Niagara Falls that separates the American Falls from the Horseshoe Falls. From this island, he witnesses another aerial battle between the German fleet and the Asiatics. A crashing airship takes out the bridge, and for him there's no immediate way off. He soon discovers he isn't alone on the island - Prince Karl Albert is here as well as a German officer. Eventually, he must confront these two and find a way off the island. Wells is clearly familiar with the Falls area, and finishes this chapter with a poignant description of the Whirlpool, which lies downstream in the Niagara Gorge. This is where all kinds of debris that falls over the falls tends to collect. Wells seems to liken this to the sweep of great events:

"...The [missing] bird-faced officer was already rubbing shoulders with certain inert matter that had once been Lieutenant Kurt and the Chinese aeronaut and a dead cow, and much other uncongenial company, in the huge circle of the Whirlpool two and a quarter miles away. Never had that great gathering place, that incessant, aimless, unprogressive hurry of waste and battered things been so crowded with strange and melancholy derelicts. Round they went and round, and every day brought it's new contributions, luckless brutes, shattered fragments of boat and flying-machine, endless citizens from the cities upon the shores of the great lakes above. Much came from Cleveland. It all gathered here, and whirled about indefinitely, and over it all gathered daily a greater abundance of birds."

We follow Bert a little longer after his escape from the island, but soon it seems that Wells tires of telling the tale from Bert's perspective, and much of the rest of it is narrated as if to move it along to its point. The book ends with and epilogue, which takes us back to Tom Smallways in Bun Hill, some 30 years on, who shares his perspective on the last 30 years and the World War (which may still be being waged in some far off land) to his nephew, Teddy - Bert's youngest son. The book concludes:

"[Tom] sucked his old gums thoughtfully, and his gaze strayed away across the valley to where the shattered glass of the Crystal Palace glittered in the sun. A dim, large sense of waste and irrevocably lost opportunities pervaded his mind. He repeated his ultimate judgment upon all these things, obstinately, slowly, and conclusively, his final saying on the matter.
'You can say whay you like,' he said. 'It didn't ought ever to 'ave begin.'
He said it simply - somebody somewhere ought to have stopped something, but who or how or why were beyond all his ken."

Now, I'm sure that sounds heavy handed, but keep in mind all of this was written shortly before the First World War. Wells, in his way, foresaw air battles and the fire bombing of cities. He saw where nationalism was going.

As a pure story, The War in the Air has a lot of problems. There's far too much exposition by the narrator, and this can cause parts of the story to drag. Many of the action scenes are quite good, but I'm not convinced by Well's use of onomatopoeic words to illustrate that action - though as I said, it does put me in mind of how it's done in graphic novels.

So yes, as a novel it's flawed - but there's so much more in here than just a story! We've got a likeable everyman who gets swept up into bigger events (long before Frodo ever did, and one cant help but wonder how much Smallways, Grubb, and Butteridge influenced The Shire), dramatic battles in the air, exotic locations, a climax on an island surrounded by deadly waterfalls, social commentary, anti-war sentiment, and some eerily accurate predictions of what was to come. As prolific SF&F author Dave Duncan says in the introduction to this edition: "Strangely, The War in the Air is not even counted among H.G. Wells's best, but coming from anyone else it would be called a masterpiece. It deserves to be better remembered."

What can I say, but that I agree!

I wasn't planning to write a review of this book, but my friend Ray noticed I was reading it and asked me to report, so here we are. Frankly, it was much better than I expected it do be. The Ginger Star was published in novel form in 1974, and based on a shorter version of the text that was serialized in Worlds of If.

This is a sword and planet tale set on the planet Skaith - an old, dying world under an old, dying, ginger-coloured star. The hero of our story is Eric John Stark, ostensibly an earth man, but raised by wolves and a loner. He's as much animal as man, by his own description. He arrives on Skaith from Pax, the administrative centre of the Galactic Union, in the first chapter because he's looking for a friend of his - a sort of father figure - named Simon Ashton. Ashton, a diplomat, has gone missing. This is an official mission for Stark, but also a personal one.

On Skaith, he finds a secretive body called The Lords Protector, some kind of immortals who rule the place from a distance. Their captains and soldiers are The Wandsmen and The Farers, basically your everyman tyrants on the ground. When Stark arrives on Skaith, his questions about Ashton immediately attract the wrong kind of attention, and in good old S&S fashion, he finds himself stumbling from one adventure to the next in his search, all the while trying (and often failing) to avoid 'the law', such as it is. Along the way, he meets various people with curious customs, including refugees, rebels, misanthropic naturists, feral fairies, and more. A theme emerges in the telling about a conflict between people's desire to remain on their endemic but dying planet, or seek a new life in the stars. Stark, being a star-man, becomes a symbol of change.

Although this is a sword-and-planet type story, Stark actually uses multiple means to solve his problems, very few of which involve a sword. There's perhaps a little too much reliance on Stark getting captured and needing to escape, but this is balanced by a pretty nice twist near the end.

The pace is brisk, but the writing is very good for this kind of literature. The setting is pretty well realized, and there are some nice bits of description. Overall, I thought there were quite a few interesting ideas in here, and there's a fair amount of good content for a 186 page pocket book. It's definitely a cut above Burrough's Mars books, in my opinion. I see bits of Vance and T.J. Bass in the world-building and events.

Here are a few of the good bits:

Setting:
"...He did not much like the look of the sea... Skaith had no moon, so there were no tides to stir it, and there was a milky, greasy sheen to the surface. Skaith's old ginger-colored sun was going down in a senile fury of crimson and molten brass, laying streaks of unhealthy brilliance across the water. The sea seemed a perfect habitat for the creatures who were said to live in it."

Quirky Culture:
"There was a fire burning inside, and the half-dozen men and women Stark had seen before with Yarrod sat by it in a close group, heads together, arms intertwined. They neither moved nor looked up as Stark and Yarrod entered."
"Pretty good, aren't they?" said Yarrod. "Or do you know?"
Stark clawed back through his mental file on Skaith. "They're pretending to be a pod. And you're supposed to be a pod-master."
A pod, according to the file, was a collection of people so thoroughly sensitized by a species of group therapy that they no longer existed as individuals but only as independent parts of a single organism. The pod-master trained them, then kept them fed and washed and combed until such time as the hour arrived for Total Fulfillment. That was when one of the components died and the whole organism went, finding escape at last.

Little Sisters of the Sun:
"A band of women forced their way to the steps and began to climb. They wore black bags over their heads, covering their faces. Otherwise they were naked, and their skin was like tree-bark from long exposure.
"Give us the Dark Man, Mordach!" they cried. "Let us take him to the mountain top and feed his strength to the Old Sun."
Mordach held up his staff to halt them. He spoke to them gently, and Stark asked, "What are they?"
"They live wild in the mountains. Once in a while, when they get hungry, they come in. They worship the sun, and any man they can manage to capture they sacrifice. They believe they alone keep the Old Sun alive."
Halk laughed. "Look at the greedy beasts! They'd like to have all of us."

A Dying World:
"And old road," said Amnir. "Once, when Old Sun was young, all this land was rich and there were great cities. This road served them. Folk didn't ride on beasts in those days, or drive clumsy wagons. They had machines, bright and shining things as swift as the wind. Or if they wanted to they could take wing and rush through the sky like shooting stars. Now, we plod, as you see, across the cold corpse of our world."
"For what purpose," asked Stark, "do we plod?"
Amnir had refused to tell them what he intended to do with them.

On Belonging to a place, however doomed:
He glared at the stars as though he hated them.
"One is born on a world. It may not be perfect, but it's the world one knows, the only world. One adjusts, one survives. Then suddenly, it appears there is no need to struggle because one has a choice of many worlds. It's confusing. It shakes the whole foundation of life. Why do we need it?"
"It isn't a question of of whether or not you need it," said Stark. "It's there. You can use it or not, as you please."
"But it makes everything so pointless! Take the Thyrans. I've heard all their ballads, The Long Wandering, The Destruction of the Red Hunters, The Coming of Strayer, ...and so on. The long dark years, the courage, the dying, and the pain, and finally the triumph. And now we see that if they had only known it, they could have run away to a better world and avoided all that." Amnir shook his head. "I don't like it. I believe in a man staying by what he knows."

I'm looking forward to the next installment!

The Second Invasion From Mars by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Massacre of Mankind by Stephen Baxter, 2017, 487pp
The London Pen by Jean-Pierre Guillet, 2018, 195pp
The Second War of the Worlds by George H. Smith, 1976, 174pp

1. The Second Invasion From Mars by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - This is a satire, set perhaps in Greece, or at least all the personal and placenames are Greek. At first, the second invasion from mars seems like little more than a hoax spread by rumour. The Martians themselves are not seen, and the stories that trickle in seem far fetched - that they have quickly taken over the world and the new currency is stomach juice. Our main character, Apollo, a retired astronomy teacher, doesn't believe the rumours and is more concerned with the state of his pension and collecting stamps. At one point, he figures that if the Martians had taken over, the first they they would do is issue new stamps, so he heads to the post office and the lack of Martian stamps seems to confirm his theory. Things get wilder when strange people (are they androids?) show up in strange cars and an insurrection forms, and someone tries to sell the local barkeep blue beer. But who are these strange androids that keep showing up in blue cars, and what's with the blue beer and all this talk about stomach juice then? I gave this one 3 stars. PROS: Funny, clever, satirical. I love the question 'what if they invaded again and nobody noticed'. CONS: Not their best text, and really doesn't bear any resemblance to the original WotW.

2. The Massacre of Mankind by Stephen Baxter - This is a serious attempt at a sequel, and by far the longest book. At over 400 pages, it's much longer than the original, and also longer than all of the other 3 sequels combined. Why so long? I honestly couldn't say! I think the bones of the story could have been conveyed much more concisely, and I don't think all that extra fluff added much. The story follows the wife of the narrator from the first book. They are now separated, but still in contact and move in similar circles. The second invasion is expected, and they are looking for signs of it at the next close approach of the planets, a few years after the first. Sure enough they invade. It goes much like the first invasion, but more, and more widespread. When all seems lost, a deus-ex-machina from outer space interferes, and sends us into a not-quite-conclusive conclusion. I also gave this one 3 stars. PROS: The only sequel authorized by the Wells estate, and Baxter is a member of the HG Wells Society, writing style somewhat resembles the original, and there are some quite good passages. CONS: Too long-winded, with too many inconsequential events, and I wasn't convinced by the resolution.

3. The London Pen, by Jean-Pierre Guillet Originally written in French and translated. Guillet is an award-winning Quebec SF writer. The book has an afterword in which he explains his choices, and they all made a lot of sense. Of all of these books, I thought this was the most convincing 'sequel'. It takes place in The London Pen, a place where humans are kept like livestock so the Martians can harvest their blood. We follow the main character Geo (short for George, who it is hinted only once might be descended from royalty) as he goes through his coming of age ritual and is officially accepted as a blood donor. There are interactions in the society of the London Pen between the people, most of whom are collaborators or acceptors. There's no real opposition. But as events unfold, and Geo meets people and even 'befriends' a Martian, and so things take a turn. Settingwise, this was the most interesting novel, and the most convincing. The story was dramatic. I gave it 4 stars. PROS: Cool setting, convincing as a sequel, dramatic, well thought-out. CONS: Sometimes the writing seemed really naive. I think this was intentionally done when it was describing events around the main characters, who themselves were naive. Other passages were quite richly described. The other con is that the book is quite dark in places, and these penned humans don't treat each other well. Nor do the Martians.

4. The Second War of the Worlds by George H. Smith - a Daw pocketbook from 1976, and one of a series set in this imaginary world of Annwn. Because, you see, the Martians don't re-invade Earth directly in this novel - instead, they invade Annwn, a parallel earth in a parallel universe. It's a parallel world that has some connection to ours, and people can pass between these worlds. In fact, a few of the characters in this novel are from Earth, and they've passed into Annwn to help. Annwn, on the other hand, is a place like earth, but not exactly like it. There's magic, for one thing. The continents and placenames are different, but it's mostly (un?)comfortably waspy. Two of the characters are the consulting detective, Dr. W (full name never given, but it's not Dr. Who!) and his very clever companion, Mr. H, who get quite involved in sleuthing things out. (Get it? Yeah.....). I gave this one 3.5 stars. PROS: Concise and pretty well-told adventure, and the writing is really quite good in places. I feel like this novel came closest to capturing Well's actual prose, and I don't think Smith was trying to do that (unlike Baxter, who was, and I think, missed the mark). CONS: A rather dissatisfying resolution, I thought. Especially after one of the characters basically hinted at a much different resolution (i.e. make it so humans don't taste so good) but instead this book went in a different direction that was less convincing.

I think it goes without saying that none of these are as good as the original. The War of the Worlds is a classic, and for good reason because it's a brilliantly written and poignant novel. To expect an homage written by a different author to be as good as the original is to miss the point. These are love letters, carefully crafted and made available for you to read. Enjoy them for what they are. Then re-read the original and enjoy it all the more!

Next of Kin is an entertaining, if dated, SF novel from the 50's. It's pace is brisk, and it's character is too clever for everyone around him.

SYNOPSIS

Dissatisfied with the numbskulls around him on earth, Scout-Officer John Leeming volunteers to fly an experimentally fast space ship across the front lines and into enemy territory - the purpose, I guess, is to see how far it can go undetected, and if it is detected it must be destroyed. Who's the numbskull?

Leeming manages to get well behind enemy lines when something goes wrong with his ship. Since he can't land it properly (you know, with the pointy end up and the fins end down) he has to crash land it on his side, and he finds himself trapped on a bureaucratic planet so far behind the lines than nobody really knows what a human is.

After exploring the wilderness a bit and stealing to survive, Leeming ends up getting captured and must clever his way out of jail and find some way of getting to the space port (where, of course, all the ships stand properly upright and must be accessed by ladders up the side).

Leeming's ultimate fate depends on how well he can out-caper the keystone cops and numbskull bureaucrats who run the prisons, which I gather was a feature of Russell's body of work.

ANALYSIS

Ultimately, I found the novel to be entertaining enough, if not entirely convincing. It shows it's age in some ways (no female characters being one) but not insufferably so. It had some amusing parts, but was probably a little to pat and predictable. And I didn't believe for a minute that anyone would have been fooled by Leeming's scheme. Chalk this down as one of those interesting 'artifact of science-fiction' novels - it's certainly not a high concept book. 3 out of 5