Gollancz, 2016, 506 p.

Briddey Flannigan is a woman under pressure, in her work at Commspan, a phone app company apparently a rival to Apple, with her Irish-descended family, with her boyfriend Trent Worth. She is deluged by work and family emails and seemingly rushed off her feet. All this makes for a breathless introductory chapter showcasing the author’s signature style of scenes or dialogue interrupted by events, constantly breaking off to deal with something else.

Not that the pace slows much thereafter. In a Willis novel things do seem to cascade, with incident piling on incident, misunderstandings and crossed wires, things forever on the point of being resolved only to be diverted onto other paths.

Briddey’s sister Mary Clare is an overbearing, overprotective parent to her daughter Maeve. Her other sister Kathleen, as Briddey once was, is constantly being urged to marry a “foine Irish lad” by their Great Aunt Oona who, despite not being a first or even second generation immigrant, speaks using Irish syntax and rhythms.

Boyfriend Trent meanwhile while wants her to undergo with him a procedure to fit an EED, a device which will enhance ability to sense a partner’s feelings and thus bring them closer together. The EED “creates a neural pathway that made partners more receptive to each other.” Notwithstanding their relationship, Trent from the outset is a somewhat aloof, absent figure, whose speech does not carry any conviction of affection.

Briddey is at pains to keep any hint of getting an EED away from Commspan gossip Suki, while in the works basement C B Schwartz, nicknamed the Hunchback of Notre Dame, toils away perfecting the latest app.

An unexpected gap in the EED surgeon’s schedule bumps Briddey and Trent up the queue for operation. It is then disaster strikes. In the aftermath, Briddey finds herself telepathic. Worse, it is C B, not Trent, whom Briddey can hear in her head.

Still worse, Briddey is soon to be overwhelmed by a tsunami of unexpurgated thoughts pouring into her head from people round about. Only C B’s aid and tuition in protection from the racket, building in her head perimeters and safe rooms, helps her survive. This involves a kind of technique C B compares to Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr’s invention of a frequency-hopping device to frustrate radio jamming by the Germans of Allied torpedoes. (See here; paragraph 2.)

In one of their conversations about the desire to communicate (or lack of it) C B tells her, “If people really wanted to communicate, they’d tell the truth, but they don’t,” and the phrase “‘Of course’, is a dead giveaway that you’re lying.”

He has been able to receive and broadcast for a long time and has done a lot of research. Hearing voices in your head is not a survival trait, he tells her. It didn’t do much for Joan of Arc after all. He has been worried about her for a while since he knew that telepathy is to do with the haploidgroupgene R1b-L21, the Irish carry. He himself was adopted hence the non-Irish name.

It is clear very early on where all this is going in terms of a “normal” plot. The SF and scientific aspects are merely window dressing. This is actually a romcom.

Diverting enough, though.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma  before a piece of direct speech, “and rounded the corner and breathing in the sweet smells of grass and wet earth” (doesn’t need the second ‘and’,) “about Joan of Arc being captured by the British” (it was the English she was captured by. It long predated the formalisation of the UK,) octopi (the plural is octopuses; or octopodes if you’re Greek.)

Arcadia, 2024, 380 p. Reviewed for ParSec 13.

It is a usually unspoken assumption that it is the duty of a reviewer not to imbue a review with spoilers. Yet what to do if to give some flavour of the contents (something necessary to any review,) makes that all but impossible? Not that in this case any comments would really be much of a spoiler. The manner in which the story is told along with the structure of the book manage to do that without requiring any assistance. The main narrative is told in four Parts but its title (The Queen) is a hefty pointer to the contents, and the title page itself, plus those introducing the Prologue, each Part, the three separate sections of Part IV, plus the Epilogue, are blazoned with pale drawings of wasps. The Queen? Wasps? Some sort of vespine nightmare, pheromone driven, is surely being not merely hinted at, but promised. Moreover, the Prologue pretty much embodies the climactic scene, so anyone reading that already knows what the spoilers are. The rest of the text describes how the scenario got to that point.

The main action unfolds over a period of around twenty-four hours in June 2018 in the town of Saint Catharines, Ontario. Margaret June Carpenter (Cherry) has closeted herself at home since the disappearance of four students from her school, Northfield, several weeks before: three boys, Chad Dearborn, Will Stinson, Allan Teller, who are remembered fondly and worriedly, and Margaret’s best friend Charity Atwater (Plum,) who isn’t.

Margaret’s isolation is ended when a surprise package arrives containing a mobile phone. The texts on it appear to be from Charity as they mention things that only she would know. They insist Margaret follow the instructions she is given. These lead her to the school where in Margaret’s absence a mysterious girl called Serena – about whom the only thing anyone can remember is that she is ‘hot’ – has been instigating confusion. So far so High School story but there follows a very well written scene where a teacher, Mr Foster, is clearly under mental coercion while revealing to a shocked class avidly filming his confession on their phones an act of inappropriate conduct towards Serena. Here, too, Margaret is joined by Harry Cook, her boyfriend of sorts, and there is talk of a gathering remembered as Burning Van from the burnt-out vehicle where its events, the trigger for the plot, centred.

Another strand relates the back story of an Elon Musk-like billionaire called Rudyard Crate, who as a child witnessed his elder sister eaten alive by a swarm of dorylus, or siafu, ants while barely escaping himself, which has naturally haunted him ever since but given him an unhealthy fixation. He has instigated Project Athena, designed to introduce insect phenotypes (mostly of wasps, but also of other genera) into human DNA to produce a hybrid creature. The most successful of these is Subject Six, indistinguishable from a human child until triggered by a “time of dynamic bodily or neurological change like human teenage-hood.” Subject Six: a wasp in the nest of Northfield.

When she meets Crate, Margaret notes his Businessman’s laugh, a phenomenon her father warned her of. “‘It’s as fake as a three-dollar bill, Margaret. Never trust a man who’s perfected his Businessman’s laugh.’”

The June 2018 setting is, perhaps, an authorial mis-step given that in the book the climactic events are well publicised and discussed but of course readers in 2024 have never heard of them. In all, though, The Queen is a well written but curiously unconvincing tale from the area where Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror overlap – at least unconvincing to those like me who normally don’t read horror stories – until we reach Part IV, Ever After, and a section where in an article reprinted from a magazine, Chris Packer, a journalist born and brought up in St Catharines, compares and contrasts the post-happening world-wide reactions to Margaret and Charity and so the novel begins to comment on itself and take on wider concerns.

Packer remembers from a case of abduction and killing years earlier that not all missing girls were treated equally. The one from the better-off families was spoken of with adoration: the one from the wrong side of town dismissed. It was ever thus.

Two more shorter bits of Part IV provide further perspective and reflections on the story’s events – even a touch of hope.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian. Otherwise; “He had no other companions other than” (has one ‘other’ too many,) sunk (x 5, sank, which did appear once,) “hung myself” (hanged myself.)  “Plum and me had been” (Plum and I had been,) “left raw wheals on its ankles and wrists” (raw weals.) “Queens force-feed it to her drones and attendants” (force-feed it to their drones and attendants.) “The larvae hatches” (The larvae hatch – larva was used correctly as the singular a few lines later,) “Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on Bald Mountain’” (usually translated as ‘Night on the Bare Mountain’,) sprung (sprang,) “their DNA helixes” (helices?) sanitarium (sanatorium,) staunch (stanch,) “she shrunk in the swing” (shrank.) “The song rose to its glittering crescendo” (the crescendo is the rise, not the end of the rise.) “Outside of” (no ‘of’ please, just ‘outside’.)

Tandem, 1971, 187 p. Originally published in 1966.

The story starts on the annual ship carrying the latest deportees to a penal colony on Mars. They have been given false names to hide their identities and their food has been drugged to calm them. Nevertheless, there is still room for conflict on board, as exemplified when “Jacob,” (sensitivity warning) is called a nigger. The text also uses the word negro about him and later he is even addressed in dialogue as “Sambo.”

On arrival they are treated summarily by the previous deportees. Their remaining food is confiscated supposedly to be redistributed to the colony. Even though all on Mars are criminals (whether actual or perhaps political) this is a strict system run by the Governor, assisted by his henchmen. There is too an emphasis on religious observance, with partly misremembered prayers/texts since few books are ever brought on the one way trip.

The Mars presented here is not quite as we know it these days. There is an atmosphere of sorts (but still deadly if exposed to it,) there is an indigenous wild life food source, dubbed rabbits, and a moss which they eat and which is also edible by though not really palatable to humans.

The newcomers are in effect on probation in their new environment, having to fit into the customs which have evolved in the colony with any transgressions being treated harshly.

Jacob is taken on by the “rabbit” hunting group who one day witness what could be interpreted as a miracle like the burning bush, but which one of them rationalises as an escape of natural gas.

The governor is keen to exploit this phenomenon but at one point has an odd thought about his secret lover’s “female lack of the ability to let things ride. The lack that was her greatest strength.”

The attitudes depicted here are homophobic as well as being racist. I suppose for a book published in 1966 that’s not too surprising.

Compton was reasonably well regarded in his time. This isn’t one of his best, though.

Pedant’s corner:-  “had been found inacceptable” (inacceptable is archaic; modern usage is ‘unacceptable’,) a missing full stop at the end of a sentence. “On earth” (On Earth,) ditto “‘But we aren’t on earth.’” A missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “photo-synthetiser” (nowadays this would be ‘photo-synthesiser’,) “hread-like” (thread-like,) “ a ryme of red dust”(rime,) Phobus (Phobos,) “‘Shadrak, Meshak, Abednego’” (Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego.) “‘That a euphemism’” (That’s a euphemism’,) “insistant hunger” (insistent,) Daimos (Deimos,) “‘The though. makes me’” (The thought makes me,) “illegally horded” (hoarded,) “could never have born the skin against his skin” (never have borne.) “Three of Dickens’ novels” (Dickens’s,) “‘it dosn’t mean’” (it doesn’t mean,) fidgetted (fidgeted.)

Gollancz, 2024, 252 p. Reviewed for ParSec 12.

The book is set in the near future, after a series of disasters known as the Decade of Plagues. Most people now have an ASPIS chip, a miniature mRNA factory capable of immunising against viruses as they appear. The price is your bodily chemistry, and anything that affects it, is known to the authorities. Another apparently universally used technology is a device known as Eyes, a sort of superannuated smart phone, head worn – but can also be hand held – goggles of a sort, allowing internet contact, and blink-activated. These are treated as unremarkable, everyday objects.

Our protagonist Inara has been living in The Harbour, one of a number of Darkome villages, a network of conscientious objectors to the big-tech likes of ASPIS, where people live off-grid and construct their own anti-viruses. Like all women in her extended family Inara has the rare Li-Fraumeni syndrome. Her body lacks the crucial protein named p53, which guards against damage to DNA and kills mutated cells. As a result, she is a tumour hotbed. At seventeen she has fought cancer twice and bears the scars to prove it. Her mother had been trying to find a cure but failed and died of a brain tumour. Inara is trying to carry on the work using her mother’s cells as test subjects.

This youthful not-quite idyll comes to an end when her father manoeuvres her into enrolling in an ASPIS trial called PROSPERITY-A, which can detect pre-cancerous mutations and target them, therefore nullifying her lack of p53. Inara’s decision to comply means she has to leave The Harbour, and boyfriend Jerome.

Some while later, living in rented accommodation which she can’t afford, she discovers a lump in her breast, a lump which ought not to be there if her aspis is working properly. Somewhat unseriously, both on Rajaniemi’s and her parts, this malignancy is referred to as the Heffalump. The replacement aspis she requests also quickly malfunctions and she slowly realises that the Heffalump’s cells have the ability to hypermutate, and may be able to take over the aspis. Not that she knows quite how that works. Nevertheless this is an ability Darkome has been looking for, the capability of an aspis-jailbreak.

Her discovery kicks the story into thriller mode as Inara seeks to alert Darkome and bargain with ASPIS. Stepping into the lion’s den of ASPIS headquarters she finds all sorts of skulduggery occurring and mayhem arising.

The text is full of biochemical terminology which in a story like this is necessary though may be off-putting to some. But if it is, just plough through it. No harm done.

Inara is an amply engaging protagonist in a ‘it’s me against the world’ kind of way – lone hero(in)es have of course long been an SF staple. (Not so much the heroines, to be fair, at least until recently.) However, other characters can at times feel as if they are there only for her to react against. But this is in the end a thriller. The form demands that sort of thing.

Normally the presence at a book’s end of the phrase TO BE CONTINUED (in those capitals) might have felt something of a let-down. Inara’s story and situation are, though, intriguing enough to welcome the thought of being reacquainted.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “in vitro” (possibly an uncopy-edited authorial instruction to italicise. In the old days before word-processors, underlining took that function. in vitro, then, which did appear later,) “there was no way for two Aspises fail on me in a row” (for two Aspises to fail on me,) “a mRNA drug” (since the letter ‘m’ is pronounced as beginning with a vowel this would more naturally be spoken as ‘an mRNA drug’,) “‘to cover these, ,’ he said” (no need for the extra space and comma.)  “‘Aaaand there is’” (no idea why this is represented as an extended ‘ah’ sound,) “Ca2+ channels” (Ca²⁺,) zmey (elsewhere zmey,) “drivers’ licences” (driving licences, please.)

This year’s nominees are:-

Private Rites by Julia Armfield (Fourth Estate)

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre)

Extremophile by Ian Green (Ad Astra)

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer (The Borough)

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK)

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf (Angry Robot)

I’ve read none of them.

Issue no 14 of ParSec magazine is now available.

Among its other goodies this one has my reviews of:-

If the Stars are Lit by Sara K Ellis

Orphan Planet by Madeehah Reza

The Hamlet by Joanna Corrance

Dark Crescent by Lyndsey Croal

This one is called Project Hanuman and it’s by Stewart Hotston.

I’ve not read anything by Hotston but the blurb for this sounds like it’s Science Fiction. Huzzah!

It also seems like it’s inspired in part by Indian mythology.

Yes, they come thick and fast. This one will be for ParSec 15.

It’s The History of the World by Simon Morden. I can’t find a cover for it at the moment, though.

Amazingly it’s actually Science Fiction. Sometimes recently  it has seemed as if the publishing of SF had dried up.

Four Square, 1963, 157 p.

This is a collection of Simak’s stories from the 1950s, with one from 1960, and they show their age. The connecting thread of the book is that each story features aliens of one sort or another.

In Dusty Zebra things start disappearing from narrator Joe’s desk and other things appear. Joe ends up trading with the unknown entity on the other side of what it seems is an interdimensional portal. All goes well; until it doesn’t.

Honourable Opponent sees a military delegation from Earth’s Galactic Confederacy awaiting the arrival of their counterparts from a species known as the Fivers, whose weapons have been overwhelmingly devastating, to oversee a prisoner exchange. There is a twist to the meeting when it comes.

Idiot’s Crusade has a village idiot suddenly comprehending things he had not until his mind was infiltrated by an alien; but the alien finds the experience less than congenial.

Operation Stinky occurs in the aftermath of a skunk-like animal (later dubbed Stinky) befriending a farmer whose life has been disrupted by the building of a nearby air-force base. When the air-force colonel discovers Stinky has the ability to improve machinery the secret operation of the title is started up. Stinky has its own agenda, however.

A group of interstellar scavengers searches for the Jackpot of the second last story’s title and finds it in a comprehensive library with an immersive access experience. The process changes them. One of the group justifies their activities by citing historical precedent for exploitation, “They didn’t worry much about the law or ethics of it and no-one blamed them for it. They found it and they took it and that was the end of it.”

In Neighbour a newcomer arrives in a small farming area and has sustained success on the farm he and his family have taken over. His machines work by themselves and he has rain and sun when required. His benign influence gradually extends to the neighbourhood as a whole. It is eventually noticed elsewhere. The text displays that mistrust of government embedded in much of US society – especially the rural US.

Pedant’s corner:- swop (swap,) “Alf Adams’ place” (Adams’s,) “and and could find none” (only one ‘and’ needed,) “how I’d lay awake at night (how I’d lie awake,) “when one of the new ones up and moves away (ups and moves away.)

NewCon Press, 2024, 213 p. Reviewed for ParSec 12.

The pitch for this post-apocalypse novel must have written itself. “Lord of the Flies – with girls.” Job done. Don’t you want to read it now? (No matter what I say.)

Nevertheless, a reviewer must review.

The story is set in an alternative 1975 on the largest of the Near Islands, an entirely fictional small archipelago located fifteen miles from Aberdeen. The girls are survivors of a nuclear attack on that city in what becomes obvious must have been a world-wide war. Most of the school’s pupils and teachers were away on a trip when the bombs fell.

The tale is narrated in retrospect (of a few years later) by the only boy, Stephen Ballantyne, son of the headmistress who took advantage of the convention that such children attend their parent’s school. All but one of the girls plus Stephen survive but his mother dies in the second blast.

A classic children’s story arrangement, then, with the parents out of the way and no other adults at hand. But these are not youngsters. They are fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds on the cusp of adulthood forced to rely on their own resources, albeit with a well-stocked library at hand. It helps the island is well-endowed with rabbits and sea-birds – not all of them palatable though.

The writing style is more irreverent than you might expect, with stabs at levity (one running joke in particular) and occasional addresses to the reader. It is at times consciously alliterative. In Dexter’s outlining of his scenario he has narrator Stephen tell us one girl’s name evokes “the milky mystery of midnight mosques.” And he eschews describing foul-mouthed language, “This is, after all, an adventure story set on a desert island.” Stephen also claims his greatest fault is self-effacement.

Step forward Pearl Wyss, “the smallest and mousiest-looking of the girls,” who had previously shown her mettle on a trip to a farm on the mainland for a demonstration of artificial insemination and, invited to repeat the farmer’s no doubt spitefully given information, does so flawlessly. Pearl becomes the driving force behind the rump school’s efforts to ensure survival, steering their debates and swaying (most of) the girls with her arguments.

Her awareness of the treatment of women by men down the ages colours her approach: watches to be set for any encroachment from the mainland, the building of a stockade and later a wall, the reconstruction of the curriculum to be more useful in their straitened circumstances, the manufacture of bows and training in shooting arrows.

The first man to arrive – on a rowing boat – only confirms her fears when he attempts to rape one of the girls. He is thereafter caged and ostracised.

Not all the girls agree with her. Some of their worries, such as wanting to get married in due course, a future Pearl’s prescriptions would seem to deny them, exemplify attitudes of the time where it is set. But her answer to that problem of course lies in front of them all the time. She is willing to be ruthless in defending the school against incursion by men no matter how inoffensive they may appear to be or even if they’re accompanied by women. Towards the book’s climax she says, “We make war because we hate war.” Turning into her enemy? All through the book Stephen acquiesces in her designs but in the final paragraphs he lets his air of self-effacement slip.

In an enterprise such as this it does not do to become bogged down on the details, the scenario is all. But two A-bombs dropped on Aberdeen? One would surely be enough. And how likely was it that a single mother in the 1970s would have become a headmistress; particularly of a girls’ school? Plus radiation sickness would most likely have been more prevalent than is presented here.

These are nit-picking, though. This may be no Lord of the Flies but it is still a well written, solid piece of work. In its essence it is not concerned about girls or women or whether they behave better or worse in any given situation. It is really about the nature of men and whether that nature will ever change.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- H2O (H₂O,) knit (knitted,) rowboat (several times; rowing boat,) E=mc2 (E = mc²,) focussed/unfocussed (x 2 each; focused/unfocussed,) airplanes (aeroplanes,) Benn Gunn (Ben Gunn,) “a saree” (a sari,) a sentence framed as a question but lacking its question mark, row-boat (x 2; elsewhere rowboat but in any case ‘rowing boat’,) “‘any who disagree this choice’” (who disagree with this choice.)