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Helix Wars by Eric Brown

Solaris, 2012, 384 p.

Jeff Ellis is a shuttle pilot who travels between the many worlds of the Helix. On a flight to Phandra his craft is shot down by the Sporelli who are invading from the neighbouring world on the spiral. His life is saved by a Phandran healer, Calla, but they are taken prisoner by the Sporelli. Meanwhile the Mahkan, Kranda, has set out to rescue Ellis from the Sporelli in order to fulfil the debt of honour she incurred when Ellis previously saved her life. She does so but the Sporelli have taken Calla in order to utilise her healing powers on their injured. Thereafter we are involved with the search for Calla as Ellis feels he is now in her debt. Elsewhere, on the Helix world of New Earth, Ellis’s more-or-less estranged wife, Maria, has begun an affair with her boss.

The Helix is one of those familiar SF tropes, a Big Dumb Object. In his first novel set there, Helix, Brown did not explore the structure nor its mechanics to any great degree. That omission is remedied here. The technology of its Builders, which allows its inner exploration, is – as Clarke’s Law has it – indistinguishable from magic, perhaps from the point of view of the story conveniently so. But then if you’ve got a tool kit why not use it? The novel reads like a kind of mashup of the BDO tale and a shoot-em-up.

Brown is incapable of writing a book which does not feature human dilemmas, however. In Helix Wars these seem to sit awkwardly with the more straightforward video game type elements even if the extended interplay between Kranda and Ellis on the morality of the use of force raises the tone.

Brown’s more character driven novels are much more satisfactory. Unless you’re into shoot-em-ups I’d advise you to savour his “Starship” sequence or The Kings of Eternity instead.

Aside:- Helix Wars has a cover which, had Eric not been a mate, would have made me disinclined ever to pick the book up.

Goodbye 2012

I don’t usually do end of year round-ups – mostly because most folk write theirs before Christmas and that offends my sensibilities. The year ends on 31st Dec, not before.
Whatever, I looked through all the fiction books I read this year and found twelve that stood out. In order of reading they were:-

PfITZ by Andrew Crumey
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Kings of Eternity by Eric Brown
the Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
And The Land Lay Still by James Robertson
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
New Model Army by Adam Roberts
Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
D’Alembert’s Principle by Andrew Crumey

That’s four by women and eight by men, which is a pretty high strike rate for the distaff side compared to my fiction reading as a whole, 12:45 – is that shockingly low or a reflection of publishing? Four were SF, eight not; though that ratio alters if you count the fantastical – the Lord, the Obreht, the Bulgakov, and the Crumeys which feature stories from a city made up within one of the two. Only the Robertson and the Pamuk lie wholly within the realm of the naturalistic.

I don’t propose to rank the twelve in any way.

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