Solaris, 2010, 350p

In his recent Bengal Station trilogy Brown has been revisiting some of the conventions of Pulp SF. He has also treated us to a Big Dumb Object novel in Helix. In Guardians of the Phoenix, he has turned his attention to the disaster novel, or rather, to the post-Apocalypse tale. Here too, though, there are faint echoes of Pulp SF in the Phoenix of the title.

The Earth is parched, the oceans boiled away. Resource wars and plagues have reduced humanity to dreams – and fears – of the old times. In a handful of small communities sparsely spattered over Europe a few surviving humans cling on, barely scratching a living from the harsh, sun-battered environment.

To begin with there are three main viewpoint narratives. With large animals extinct and plants beyond scarce, Paul traps lizards on the girders of the Eiffel Tower to feed his dying mentor Elise. In Aubenas the locals net bats for food and their leader quietly supplements their diet with a little cannibalism. A band of renegades has kidnapped the daughter of one of the elders of the decimated community in Copenhagen.

The action kicks off when the renegades turn up in Paris to seek out the rumoured food horde in a bank vault. A group from Copenhagen has pursued them. In the resulting gunfight the chief renegade, Hans, escapes and Paul, who had fallen into his clutches, is rescued.

Since Elise has died Paul joins the Copenhagen group’€™s onward trip to drill for water below what had been the Bay of Biscay. Hans returns to his former home in Aubenas just in time to join an expedition to Bilbao to find the remains of an abandoned project designed to save humanity from extinction.

As usual with Brown the focus is mainly on the characters, who are well rounded – the relationship between Dan and Kath from Copenhagen is particularly well laid out and Hans makes a convincing psychopath – though Paul, even given his earlier relative isolation, is perhaps still a little too naïve. Given the above the book’s plot has to follow certain lines but there are twists and turns along the way. The resolution is saved from being a bit of a deus ex machine by very short premonitory chapters featuring members of the Bilbao project, which however give the Phoenix game away somewhat.

As an adventure story the novel works admirably but I found I couldn’€™t quite buy the scenario – an Earth where the water has evaporated from the oceans would admittedly have a consequent runaway Greenhouse Effect but unless all the atmosphere had gone along with them it would surely be more like Venus, constantly overcast, and hence sunburn would be no problem. (I also wondered how in a parched world as depicted would plants be able to photosynthesise and thus keep O₂ levels up? Though animals to breathe it in have of course mostly disappeared.) These quibbles aside however Guardians of the Phoenix is fine entertainment.

Solaris, 2008. 414p.

Jeff Vaughan is a telepath working on Bengal Station, a structure containing a bustling city and busy spaceport rising out of the Bay of Bengal. Vaughan’s special talent is as a necropath, a telepath who can access the thoughts of the very recently dead before they fade too far. He is sickened by the revelations his talent in general has given him about the nature of humanity and wishes for respite from it.

As the book starts he feels his boss – who wears a shield against telepathy as part of his job – is up to no good and the story seems set for the usual sort of trajectory, but his boss commits suicide (so does his wife after she kills their child) as soon as Vaughan’s police contact, Chandra, hauls him in on a small charge.

Thereafter, as part of his investigation, Vaughan finds himself drawn into the orbit of a new religious cult, the Church of the Adoration of the Chosen One, centred round a young girl from Verkerk’s World, where the cult originated; a child who closely resembles Holly, a dead girl from Vaughan’s past. There is a whiff of overkill here as there seem to be a few such resonances. Before she died of a drug overdose, Vaughan was friendly with a girl nicknamed Tiger who in pureness of mind also reminded him of Holly. There are echoes in this of Brown’s earlier New York trilogy where the protagonist also had a paternal relationship with a teenage girl.

Vaughan and Chandra take a voidship to Verkerk’s World. One of the sections set here is narrated from Chandra’s point of view – perhaps since Vaughan’s telepathic ability would mean the interrogation which takes place would otherwise have been over much too quickly. The pair eventually find the source of the religious cult is an alien species called the Vaith who are using their devotees religious impulses for their own ends. This aspect of the plot came close to being in the nature of pulp SF (see here) part 3, and does not quite suspend disbelief.

Another narrative strand involves Suraka, a prostitute in Thailand who, too, has a pure mind. Again, the sections dealing with Suraka’s relations with aliens fail to ring quite true.

While never being less than readable, throughout Necropath too much plot and sub-plot are being shoe-horned into the narrative, which in turn makes the characterisation seem rushed. Brown also withholds information about the dead girl Holly until too near the end.

Bengal Station itself is an interesting scenario, however, but Brown does not exploit it as much as he might. There are two more in the trilogy to come though.