You may have noticed on my sidebar I am reading a book with the above title.

It is my latest review book for ParSec.

Written by Andrew H Murray, another writer new to me though it seems he has published four previous novels, from its blurb it may be intended to be humorous.

I assume the review will appear in ParSec 17.

I have just seen from various sources that SF writer Ian Watson has died. I’m so sad to hear about this.

I knew he had been ill recently but had been under the impression he was recovering.

I have thirty of his books on my shelves, the most recent of which was The Chinese Time Machine which I reviewed for ParSec in 2023.

The first time I met him was when I attended the signing event for my first short story publication, The Face of the Waters, in New Worlds 2 way back in 1992.

He was a gentleman and had a particularly sharp wit.

Ian Watson: 20/4/1943 – 13/4/2026. So it goes.

Another title to be reviewed for ParSec has duly arrived.

This time it’s the latest from Adrian Tchaikovsky.

It’s called Green City Wars. I’ll get on to it soon.

ParSec 15 is indeed live and I now have my copy.

I found it does contain my reviews of City of All Seasons by Oliver K Langmead and Aliya Whiteley along with The History of the World by Simon Morden but not that of Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston.

I have four other reviews there though:-

The Measurement Problem by David Whitmarsh,

Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds,

Exiles by Mason Coile,

plus Solstice by Ruth Aylett and Greg Michaelson.

Or at least it ought to be.

The publication date was yesterday.

I’ve not accessed my copy yet but this one should contain my reviews of:-

City of All Seasons by Oliver K Langmead and Aliya Whiteley

The History of the World by Simon Morden

Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston

Those reviews will appear here in due course.

Regular readers will know of my interest in the Great War.

As a result I could not resist the opportunity to request a book with the title No Man’s Land from ParSec’s latest list for review.

It is written by Richard Morgan, whose work from Altered Carbon onwards I have usually find very good.

From the ARC’s blurb it would appear that this book does indeed take the Great War as its starting point, but being a fantasy will no doubt diverge from there quite quickly.

Luna Press, 2025, 187 p. Reviewed for ParSec 14.

At the start of this novella Elif is the sole inhabitant of the apparently desert planet Maoira-I. At twelve years old she has hitherto known only the companionship of the AI, VAS-H, her Vital Auxiliary Support: H-unit, and her knowledge of other humans is derived solely from the films and shows available to her on screen.

Contact from Commander Isabel Aremu of the Interplanetary Mission, based on Polaris, who addresses Elif as Warden, comes to her out of the blue, as does the task she is assigned of growing, or attempting to grow, plants to see if Maoira-I might be a suitable future home for humanity. The Mission is on an indefinite space flight fleeing something unspecified back on Earth. VAS-H retrieves the seeds Elif will need, seeds she had not known were there, from the base’s storage freezer.

Part One centres on Elif via both a third person narrative tightly focused on her unfolding experiences and the log entries VAS-H asks her to compile. While these are not the reflections of an unreliable narrator they are those of one without knowledge of the full picture. Helping to fill in those gaps for the reader there are also two italicised sections dealing mainly with the consequences for Commander Aremu on Polaris of the Mission having to admit that Elif exists and its failures regarding her. This leads to Aremu’s replacement as contact by the much less sympathetic Lieutenant, later Commander, Julian Bishop.

In the meantime Elif uncovers a buried Transporter vehicle on the surface and learns to drive it while Maoira-I’s long-term climatic variations begin to manifest themselves.

Part Two makes a step change. Mission operative Rokeya Khan, whose grandfather Latif was on the original team to land on Maoira-I, has set off on her own to get to the planet and find out what happened. Her arrival shocks Elif but they learn to work together.

Rokeya’s presence is the catalyst for the discovery of what became of the original crew, one of whom, naturally, but against all protocol, must have been pregnant.

It also crystallises Elif’s feelings towards the rest of humanity and towards the only home she has ever known.

There are some caveats to this. The premise does stretch credibility a bit. Could an infant human really thrive under only the influence of an AI and old videos? Could she retain sanity even? Could the original expedition genuinely have been forgotten by the Mission for twelve years?

But Reza has written this well. She captures Elif’s initial ingenuousness and growing confidence. The claustrophobic atmosphere of an isolated environment comes across, as does the slightly sinister sway of an AI companion.

This is an impressive long form debut.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:-  shrunk (x3, shrank,) CO2 (several times. It’s CO₂,) “wherever the fleet of ships were” (wherever the fleet … was,) fit (fitted,) “than several millions” (than several million,) “about to reach a crescendo” (you don’t reach a crescendo, you reach its end,) sunk (sank.) “Rokeya’s opened her mouth in shock” (Rokeya opened her mouth.)

I recently sent off to Parsec magazine my review of Solstice by Ruth Aylett and Greg Michaelson, a book which I picked up* at the first Pictcon in Perth a month or so ago. A very successful first con it has to be said. Pictcon focuses on the Scottish SF and fantasy scene.

Editor Ian Whates has chosen to run it so that review will not appear here for a while.

Meanwhile he has sent me Reality Rift by Fred Gambino, a follow-up to that author’s first novel Dark Shepherd.

*By picked up I mean “blagged with the promise of a review on the blog and the chance of ParSec running it.”

Luna Press, 2025, 198 p. Reviewed for ParSec 14.

Well. They do say you should start with a bang – and this novel does begin with a sentence reminiscent of the first in Iain Banks’s The Crow Road, though what unfolds is neither a bildungsroman nor (quite) a murder mystery but a decent enough piece of Science Fiction.

Viewpoint character Jocelyn Carsten (Joss,) is a hostage negotiator on the way home from managing a crisis on the planet Haitch when her passenger ship Tiktaalik suffers an explosion. She is still alive, just, but is injured, and is the sole survivor. All contact with the ship’s Central Hub – and the outside world – is lost. Only Harbour, the controlling intelligence of passenger mod Petal 4, is available to aid her.

After a trip to the med bay and an EVA to survey the damage to the ship, Harbour advises her to rest. When she wakes up there is another presence in the mod, a gemel; a holographic copy of Joss’s personality, but this has the physical appearance of her ex-wife, Alice Dray.

“A gemel” (the plural is also gemel) “is a sentient being generated from an individual’s psyche,” usually, but not always, taking on the appearance of their sires, “fuzzy copies of their progenitors, interpolated from memories and neurocircuitry, and can resemble their users to a disturbing degree,” but can be “warped by narcissists with fat wallets and the desire for more intimate personal assistants,” as had been the case with Gabrielle Vecher, on-site CEO for Haxen Mining Corps, and his gemel Malachi. Narcissus and Echo in the same package, thinks Joss. Gemel were not allowed physical bodies but, with safeguards, could patch into systems and control them from the inside. They “drew force from external sources, running off the excess electricity in the machines around them.”

This Not-Alice becomes a psychological prop for Joss and a device for the author to run Joss’s backstory past the reader, in instalments. Indeed, at times our access to Joss’s thoughts shifts between the present and her past memories with little or no signalling.

Joss’s rescue from isolation – when it comes (rather abruptly it must be said) – is by a military force co-commanded by none other than Alice Dray: the real one. Its mission is to investigate both why Tiktaalik and the tunnels on Haitch were blown up and to try to obtain the release of the humans still there held by gemel, an endeavour where Joss’s negotiating skills come to the fore. But Alice Dray’s co-commander – something of a loose cannon of the gung-ho military type – threatens to undermine Joss’s steps towards a solution of the situation.

It turns out Vecher had constructed a highly dangerous device deriving from mysterious markings on the tunnels on Haitch. And time is running out. “‘That thing Vecher made tore a hole in the fabric of the universe or whatever the hell you want to call it, and it’s growing, becoming less stable by the hour,’” says Joss during the negotiations.

Given her initial circumstances, Joss is unsurprisingly prone to periods of introspection and questioning both of herself and others.

Despite some problems with structure and pacing this is an engaging read and will push enough familiar buttons for SF readers to emerge satisfied.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian but with some British spellings. The planet Ross128 H’s nickname of Haitch is an egregious mispronunciation of that letter of the alphabet, “on a round-a-bout route” (roundabout – which was used elsewhere in the text for a meander -) once there was a single quotation mark where double ones are employed elsewhere, shlock (schlock,) back-peddling (back-pedalling,) hostage takers “174 million miles away” morphs to “140 million mile silences” during the communications gap, “sliding the stack of credits Joss had won back from her back across the table” (Joss was playing her opponent for the first time, so just ‘had won from her’.) “This is ….. based on …..?” (wasn’t a question so full stop, not question mark,) C02 (It’s not C zero two as was printed in the text, and the 2 ought to be a subscript,) “wracking your brain” (racking,) “sending some part of her ex’s upper-class snobbery would revolt” (sensing some part.) “‘Tell and I send you outside to repaint the serial number.’” (No clue. Who is Tell?) “what she can offer them are options” (I read ‘what she can offer them’ as a singular subject to the following verb; so ‘what she can offer them is options’,) “is different thing” (is a different thing.) “‘Ph damage right here’” (‘pH damage’ was meant and pH always has an upper case H and a lower case p – even at the start of a sentence,) “drowns out nothing but Callen’s voice” (everything but Callen’s voice,) “‘I pretty sure’” (I was pretty sure,) “for having sunken so low” (for having sunk so low.) “She doubts its convincing” (doubts it’s convincing,) “amid glow of the launch” (amid the glow of the launch,) a missing extraneous end quotation mark, a missing comma before the quotation mark at the end of a piece of dialogue. “‘How is that that they’ve got people down there?’”  (How is it that they’ve got…,) “‘if we so much get within the distance’” (if we so much as get within…,) “it takes her moment” (it takes her a moment.) “Alice takes her seat again and switching back to their private comm.” (and switches back to,) “the metal partition the separated them” (partition that separated them.) “A name that inferred family, and what she’d always been taught to mean trust, love and guidance” (and that she’d always been taught…,) “but do they do afford” (but they do afford,) “of the Florenz’ cargo bay” (the Florenz’s,) “breathing apparatuses” (the plural of apparatus is apparatus,) “nothing but the judder of the engine and the clatter of equipment as rattles against the bulkheads” (could be rewritten more clearly,) “‘I can’t let you can’t do this’” (either, ‘I can’t let you do this’ or, ‘You can’t do this.)

The latest book I have received to review for ParSec is Exiles by Mason Coile.

This was one of only two SF books in the most recent list of upcoming publications up for review.

I have not previously read anything by the author.

However, the accompanying blurb tells me Mason Coile is a pseudonym of Andrew Pyper, award winning author of William and ten other novels. These seem to be works in the thriller or horror genres. William was published as by Mason Coile, though.

Sadly, the blurb also says Pyper died in January 2025.

Andrew Pyper: 29/3/1968 – 3/2/2025. So it goes.