Another book to review for ParSec.

This time it’s the latest by Alastair Reynolds, titled Halcyon Years.

Judging by the front cover blurb it’s a Space Opera.

Why not? Reynolds is rather good at them.

Tor, 2024, 396 p. £10.99. Reviewed for ParSec 13.

Arton Daghdev was once a professor of ecology. (No-one can pronounce his surname. Don’t worry about it: he doesn’t.) We first meet him when he’s emerging from suspended animation and plunging from a disintegrating spaceship to the surface of Imno 27g, one of the eleven exoplanets humans have so far set foot on. It is known as Kiln and is thirty years from Earth. That’s how long the voyage took and how long it would take to get back. Arton is not going back. That ship was a fragmentation barge: deliberately designed to break up on arrival. He is a convict at the end of a one-way voyage and hopes to avoid being Acceptable Wastage either during the drop or once (if) he survives it.

Back on Earth he had taken part in a plot against the Mandate which rules there, an autocracy which brooks no opposition and wants black and white answers to complex questions, everything sorted into predetermined boxes. He had managed to escape capture for a year before being betrayed.

On arrival on Kiln he can’t help noticing the strange ruins, obviously built artefacts, which dominate the landing site’s surroundings. Brought to Commandant Terolan, his first question is, ‘Who built them?’ Prisoners with scientific expertise are prime candidates for trying to find its answer. But this is still a prison camp. That interview plus his year’s delay in arrival compared to his fellow conspirators means he will be subject to extreme suspicion by his fellow inmates. They can’t know if he betrayed them; or he if they betrayed him. Transportation to Kiln is above all a punishment. (It can’t be hell without fellow sinners to suffer amongst.)

Only Staff on Kiln have the best of what is on offer. The prisoners are divided up into Dig Support, General Labour, Excursions and Maintenance and supplied with only the products of shoddy printers, and recyclers processing just about everything, to sustain and protect them.

Excursions have the short straw, three-day sojourns into Kiln’s interior to investigate other ruins sites before being extensively and painfully decontaminated on return. Kiln’s biology is invasive and possibly deadly, a riot of parasitism and symbiosis run rampant, evolution on show in real time, adept at picking the locks of human biology and prising a way in. The howls of Ylse Rasmussen, infected by Kiln and kept in a cage like the mad woman in the attic, are warning enough to take care. Though with superficial resemblances to Earthly counterparts, organisms on Kiln are scarcely taxonomisable, latching on to each other as and when needed to perform any required function. “Kiln tissues spread throughout the body, with less reliance on discrete organs.”

Arton’s voice, self-deprecating, knowledgeable, humane, is a crucial part of this novel’s success. His tale is interspersed with ruminations on his situation and the Mandate’s justifications. “Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small. So we invent philosophies to tell us we were right to do what we did and we’re allowed to do what we want. Science, the science they” (the Mandate) “choose gives them their legitimacy.”

Arton will have none of that. He believes “Science, as a creed, should care about truth. It shouldn’t be bent for political aims. No group of people is naturally inferior, none has an innate ability to lead. We share the vast majority of our genetic inheritance with mushrooms.”

Arton’s fall from grace with the Commandant sees him deployed on Excursions and disaster strikes – as we knew it must sooner or later. His group is forced to trek back to the camp for days subject to whatever Kiln can throw at them. In the aliennesses here there are faint echoes of David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and Ian McDonald’s Chaga but Alien Clay is – unlike the creatures on Kiln – a thing only unto itself.

The infiltrations of Kiln biology into his group, the changes those bring about, cause Arton to reassess what he thought of evolution before he got there. It isn’t a boxing match, with the bigger and stronger prevailing: because you need everything else in order to survive. That’s how biology works. On Kiln evolution has demonstrated that.

Alien Clay is Science Fiction doing what it does best. It necessarily has overlaps with other tales set in a penal colony – or any colony – but its resolution absolutely depends on its Science Fictional element.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- intermittent sprinklings of USian among British usages; eg ‘handed my ass’ but then ‘the maths’. Otherwise; “the welcoming committee are keen,” (strictly, ‘is keen’,) “the main body of my admissions class are being shown the ropes” (strictly, ‘is being shown the ropes’,) “the hoi polloi” (x 2. Strictly, since ‘hoi’ means ‘the’, it’s just ‘hoi polloi’,) “A knot of people shove” (a knot shoves,) Parrides’ (Parrides’s,) “had showed me” (had shown me,) “regular spiders” (they did not occur at intervals, they were conventional; similarly with ‘a regular fire, cave man style’, the fire did not go on and off on its own.) “There are a handful of” (OK it’s idiom, but strictly, ‘There is a handful’,) “there are a range” (there is a range,) “the tech team are working” (is working,) “None of us are” (None of us is.) “Everyone in the camp holds their breath” (breaths.) “None of us have any solid way” (None of us has any.) “When pause to eat” (When I pause to eat.) “None of them particularly want to go” (None … wants to go.)

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.