Gollancz, 2020, 360 p

This is a collection of the late author‘s shorter work culled from throughout his career. Each story is prefaced by a ‘Before’ section saying how it came to be written and an ‘After’ section describing how the writing went and where the story was published. Priest’s writing is always controlled and well executed. In general it tends towards a feeling of unease, as if something is lurking below the surface or what has seemed to be reality morphs into something else but here I was surprised by how much of the contents leaned towards horror.

The Head and the Hand. A man who had become famous through allowing himself to be mutilated is persuaded out of retirement for a final cut.

A Dying Fall relates the thoughts that flash through a man’s mind as he is falling in front of a subway train. They are of travelling on a motorway in Belgium and of the training course in parachute jumping/sky diving he took there.

I, Haruspex is, I assume, in the mould of H P Lovecraft. (Priest’s ‘Before’word says it was solicited by a games company wanting something based on that author’s Cthulhu Mythos but he had no familiarity with that at all – similarly I have not. The company, while paying, never used the story and Priest later found a home for it elsewhere.) Effective in its own way it is told in an old-fashioned language of stilted particularity that, for a first person narration, is curiously distanced (not to mention distancing) and overladen with exclamation marks. After consuming his special meals, narrator James Owsley, descendant of a long line of haruspices, can halt or reverse time for a while. Off the Great Hall of his home, Beckon Abbey, lies a hagioscope over a pit which loathsome things are seeking to escape. In a nearby bog a German bomber plane is held in slow suspension as it crashes after being shot down, even though this is 1936. Someone, not a member of its crew, waves to him from the impending wreck and a voice speaks in his head.

Like the author’s novel The Space Machine, written as an hommage to H G Wells, Palely Loitering, a tale of time travel and thwarted love, bears the influence of Edwardian fiction. Despite including space travel (the McGuffin here – called the Flux Channel – was built to help launch a starship on its way,) the story has a resolutely antique feel to it. Its atmosphere of picnics and bandstands, its social and family dynamics were distinctly retro even in the 1979 in which it was first published. After the starship left, three bridges were built across the Flux Channel. The one leading straight across is the ‘Today’ bridge, two others, built at slight angles to the Channel, lead respectively to ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Tomorrow’. Our narrator as a boy one day leapt off the end of the ‘Tomorrow’ bridge and found himself thirty-four years in the future, where a young woman is pointed out to him by a man who says she is waiting for her sweetheart. The reader can from then fill in the gaps but Priest’s execution of the story is impressive.

An Infinite Summer again bears Edwardian hallmarks – but then part of it is set in 1903 where Thomas Lloyd is on the point of proposing to his intended, Sarah, when he is frozen by a camera-like device wielded by someone from the future. The frozen tableaux which result from these capturings can not be seen by contemporary passers-by but only by the unfrozen and the travellers from the future. The effect on Thomas wears off only in 1935 when he is free to move around again but has to wait more years for Sarah to unfreeze. In 1940 he, and Sarah’s image, are caught in the aftermath of the shooting down of a German bomber. The image of one of the bomber’s German crew held in suspension above a river after being captured by a freezer is unforgettable. I note the similarities here between this incident and the one in I Haruspex.

The Ament* is the tale of a man who was once part of a project to film two children, one male and one female, every week, to document changes during their growth and beyond, but who in his adulthood has dreams of committing murder. But are they dreams? The story is told in two alternating voices, his and a third person viewpoint.

The Invisible Men are those (not all men) who are detailed by their USian masters to spy on a British Prime Minister who feels he has to resign due to a financial scandal. (His statement that, “It’s British tradition for a public figure to resign his position if caught in the wrong,” seems altogether quaint now, 50 years after first publication.) His observations of his surroundings on a clandestine meeting on the Norfolk coast with his USian partner – a co-leader of a UK seemingly on the brink of becoming the 51^st State – imbue the tale with a sense of foreboding.

The Stooge is employed by a stage illusionist to fake amazement at his tricks on being ‘randomly’ picked from his audience. The story’s title becomes doubly apposite.

In futouristic.co.uk a man responds to an email offering to sell him a time machine. It doesn’t work. For him.

Shooting an Episode presents the ultimate in reality TV, though it’s more like reality streaming. For its subjects no holds are barred. The trouble comes when our narrator has to go in amongst the participants to clean up their mess.

In The Sorting Out Melvina comes home late one night to find her door lying open having been forced. With increasing fear she moves through all her rooms, wondering if the man she has recently dumped has something to do with it, but a phone call reveals he is an hour away. Yet various of her books have been misplaced, their dust covers placed upside down, their normal, random arrangement systematised. One has been glued to a curtain.

In its ‘After’word Priest describes the gathering of books (which is what most readers do) as a kind of quiet madness. Well, all obsessions are. At least it’s a harmless madness.

*Amentia is the condition of feeble-mindedness or other general mental deficiency.

Pedant’s corner: Méliès’ (Méliès’s – especially since the final ‘s’ of Méliès is unsounded, thus demanding the apostrophe ‘s’ for its possessive,) maws (used for ‘mouth’; a maw is of course a stomach,) interlocuter (interlocutor,) aureole (areola,) Mrs Adams’ (Adams’s,) “more yachts were parked further away” (parked? Can you park a yacht?) “the king” (x 2, the King,) “the sort of problems the bank were concerned with” (the bank was concerned with,) soccer (football.)

Hot off the presses and to be read for ParSec, come Birdwatching at the End of the World by G W Dexter – a post-apocalypse novel with a twist – and Darkome by Hannu Rajaniemi, seemingly another post-apocalypse novel this time in a world of multiple pandemics where an implantable mRNA vaccine factory will protect you from new viruses.

The twist in Birdwatching at the End of the World is that the survivors are the pupils of a girls’ school located on an island. The pitch writes itself.

Hannu Rajaniemi I know. He used to be part of the same writers’ group as I was before his day job as a microbiological researcher took him to the USA. His expertise in the field will doubtless lend authenticity to his story. I have reviewed several of his books already; here, here, here, and here.

NewCon Press, 2023, 239 p. Reviewed for ParSec 10.

This is the author’s first collection of short stories. Ten of them appeared in a variety of publications over the past five years, eight are original to this book. Each is provided with an authorial afterword. Some of these mention Cristofari’s French background and the latitude she gains as a writer from having two languages to draw on. She casts her net wide, with settings ranging from prehistory through to the present day and beyond. A common thread running through them is ecological collapse and possible recovery from it, in perhaps a sign of recent events some feature characters living in the aftermath of a pandemic.

A few are set in France, two even in Québec. Most succeed well but The Fishery, where “fishing boats” scour the universe for usable materials while avoiding inhabited worlds, has a central metaphor which is unfortunately stretched beyond breaking point. All have a firm focus on the humans at their heart and the dilemmas which they face.

The scenarios vary widely: a woman lives in a house with a window which gives onto other worlds so providing a means of escape, a couple try to evade an ongoing apocalypse on an otherwise deserted island, an intrusive cat in a care home seems to be a feline angel of death, a girl in post-Great War France talks to her never born brother to honour her non-French origins, a dangerous encounter on a mountain road ends in various ways, a witch has an uneasy pact with a hangman, another woman, with the help of the Moon, flies to Pluto in a plastic bottle to find her son who set out to search for his dead grandmother, a research scientist in a kind of steampunk fascist dictatorship secretly works against the regime, two children put a cat into a quantum bag in a glorious excuse for the author to deploy numerous cat puns (the least of which is is it alive or dead, and in which world?) An alien reports back to her planet from World’s End in Tierra Del Fuego, a museum caretaker converses with the (long dead) exhibits after hours, three travellers bearing gifts for a newborn trudge through a post-apocalyptic Québec winter, a stone-age woman finds a home outside her birth group despite the disfigurement inflicted on her to prevent it, a woman meant for sacrifice is surprised to find herself in the goddess’s world, a witch and a space-faring knight come to an accommodation after the battle they fought destroyed the world. The end can come in three ways, by wind, by flood, and by someone singing “My Bloody Valentine”, a group of archaeologists investigating the interior of the god who fell to Earth on the local mountain find an unusual treasure.

With the single exception mentioned above Cristofari handles all of them very well.

The following did not appear in the published review:-

Pedant’s corner:- “outside of” (just outside, no ‘of’,) “knowing fully well” (the phrase is ‘knowing full well’,) “that forced me to quiet” (to stillness,) “a thick handful of filaments were already drying on the windowsill” (a thick handful … was already,) “sank behind underwater buffs” (bluffs?) “Madame Darmon sit up” (sits up,) “Gaspard withdraw his paw” (withdraws,) “between oaks trees” (oak trees.) “Door and windows were open everywhere” (Doors and windows,) “the brand news dreadnoughts” (brand new,) “I will not baulk at any sacrifice” (balk.) “None of us have.” (None of us has,) a missing end quote mark, “as soon as the oil had ran out” (had run out.) “They dragged me until the edge of the woods” (dragged me to the edge of the woods,) “terrified that the he would ride away” (no need for the ‘the’,) “in disgust of our marred faces” (in disgust at our marred faces,) “the moon waxed and waned nine more time” (nine more times,) “on all four” (all fours,) fit (fitted.) “Its flower-fruit were turning” (was turning,) “precious guinea fowls” (the plural of guinea fowl is ‘guinea fowl’,) “always easier than thriving for a real solution” (striving for?)

The latest edition of ParSec magazine (no 11) is available for purchase. At £5.99. It’s a bargain.

This edition contains no less than five of my reviews.

The Last Pantheon by Tade Thompson and Nick Wood.

The Phoenix Keeper by S A MacLean.

Dark Shepherd by Fred Gambino.

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell.

And, last but not least, Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Those reviews will appear here after a decent interval.

Ace, 1993, 234 p.

On a future Earth where everyone is genetically designed to be perfect Dante McCall is a misfit. Viral treatments to cure his asthma didn’t take but instead warped his perceptions so that he was unfit for Normal interaction. He escapes a fire in the home where he lived and boards a spaceship about to launch. That ship is picked up by a rogue trader, the Mangueira. On board Mangueira, Dante, being Italian and knowing Spanish, can just about make out the language used aboard, Brazilian Portuguese due to the origin of its large crew. Its occupants are known to the rest of humanity as Malandros. Their ship-board life is dominated by samba dancing and singing. ‘Dancing changes body and brain chemistry and makes us more receptive, more reactive.’ Dante is at first as much of a misfit here as he was on Earth.

Lewitt makes no concessions to the reader at this point. Life on board is presented as it is and the reader has to decipher it along with Dante. As he does, so do we.

A feature of Mangueira is the prevalence of birds, especially hyacinth macaws, which can speak and turn out to be the repository of the Malandros’ history. “All together they form the memory and central processing unit of Mangueira.”

Further plot intrudes when Veronica, a spy from another Trader ship, boards. Her father was Malandro but she can’t remember much of what he told her. As time goes by she gradually assimilates to life on Mangueira and goes native.

There is a lot going on here. The idea of a space faring group making a virtue of singing and dancing, continuing the Brazilian tradition of Carnival, that songs are the records and contributions of a ship’s people, is beguiling. However, we also have genetic manipulation. Malandros were manufactured, like the birds. Altered with a virus so that their genetic structure included bioactive interface chips – invented and made illegal before the first emigrés left Earth. It is bred into them, to go down through the generations. A man called Jorge Almovardo had created the living machine and was later burned for it in a Charismatic Revival.

Dante too has been (illegally) manipulated, subject to perception of time-shift, with which he can change his own past, “all the reality he had ever lived.”

Songs of Chaos is a good, solid piece of Science Fiction all the better for its unusual setting and background.

Pedant’s corner:- Dante lay the cutlery across the plate” (laid the cutlery,) Guimaraes’ (Guimaraes’s.) “None of the structures were identifiable” (None … was.) “picked up the samples and lay them” (and laid them,) “to change he design” (change the design,) imposter (impostor.) “Her Night-dark skin” (why the capital ‘N’ on Night?) Plus marks for ‘autos-da-fe’ though.

White Rabbit, 2021, 363 p.   Illustrations by Mark Edward Geyer.

This tale of a hanger-on of a rock-star, general factotum of the (oddly named it has to be said) big house, Kitchenly Mill Race, whose telephone number provides the novel’s title, at times reminded me of the style of Iain Banks. Espedair Street obviously, but also Dead Air, yet is a different beast altogether from those and different, too, from David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, which also hymns the prog rock era.

Each chapter is preceded by an illustration of the house – or part of it – plus a few words, like those you might find in Victorian novels, indicating what said chapter will contain. The novel is markedly lighter in tone than Warner’s previous works. Reading those I could never have imagined myself laughing out loud while enjoying one of his books. But I did here at one particular scene.

Apart from first person narrator Crofton Clark, the house is in many ways the most prominent “character” in the book. It has an extensive set of connected buildings based on the Tudor original – mostly destroyed by a fire – with Elizabethan, Queen Anne, Georgian and Arts and Crafts extensions, different sections of which are connected by two air bridges. Here is where Marko Morrell, member of the band Fear Taker (and greatest guitarist in the world – according to Crofton,) lives with his Scandinavian wife Auralie and daughter Molly. Or at least where Marko stays when he is not touring or away seeing to his business interests. Crofton patrols the place every night, switching lights on or off depending on their location and shutting all the curtains. Through his eyes we are given an extensive depiction of the rambling pile. It is almost as if the house is taking the place of that delineation of landscape which is a feature of the Scottish novel. But that box is ticked by Crofton also extensively describing the house’s surroundings.

This attention to detail, and his obsessiveness about Fear Taker’s œuvre, indicate that Crofton may be in some way autistic. Though he believes himself to be essential to Marko and the house’s smooth running he only got the job after a stint as a roadie as he was a friend from way back. He has illusions of competence but he is not as close to Marko nor as privy to his employer’s intentions as he thinks. Then there is his belief that an intruder makes his or her way onto the property at night.

Minor mishaps begin to spin things out of Crofton’s control but his life really begins to unravel when two fifteen-year-old girls from the local village come to the gate to ask for a Fear Taker album to be signed for the brother of one of them. Crofton cannot resist showing off and invites them in for a tour of the house.

Kitchenly 434 is a portrait of a man who thinks he knows who and what he is and his station in life but who is deluded about almost everything – including Doris Boardman, the good time girl he had been seeing in his home town of Stafford before she found a better option.

(Though Warner clearly intended it as a signifier of different, less informed, times there was an unnecessary and therefore needlessly provocative aside about Jimmy Savile’s effectiveness as a presenter on Top of the Pops.)

Pedant’s corner:- “had strode” (had stridden,) “hide-and-go-seek” (USian, in the UK, Scotland certainly, it’s just ‘hide-and-seek’,) Whacky Races (this TV programme was titled Wacky Races,) Some Mother’s Do ’Ave ’Em (mothers plural, not ‘of mother’, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em,) “which would lay … on … her thighs” (which would lie on,) “prime ministers” (Prime Ministers.) “The Cream” (x 2, that band was called, merely, ‘Cream’, and in the text its chronology seems a bit askew,) Prestos (Presto’s,) “‘was if fact spent’” (was in fact spent,) sunk (x 2, sank.) “Rose looked and me and frowned” (Rose looked at me and… ,) “troop of horses had shit all down the road” (had shat,) “in any good chemists” (any good chemist’s,) imposters (I know it’s an alternative but it just doesn’t look right to me; impostors,) “turned towards to me” (‘turned towards me’ or ‘turned to me’,) “abit like” (a bit like,) “‘ hasn’t had his barbers open since’” (barber’s,) “‘I amn’t’” (nice to see this grammatical Scottish usage but it was said by an English girl so unlikely. They usually say ‘aren’t’,) “in a weave patterns” (in a weave pattern,) Herstmonceaux (that village is spelled Herstmonceux) “Quick as shot” (Quick as a shot.)

Hard on the heels of me finishing Nordic Visions for review for ParSec along comes an anthology of (supposedly*) humorous SF works for my delight – or otherwise.

This is Laughs in Space edited by Donna Scott.

To be reviewed for ParSec 12.

*I say supposedly because in my experience humour and SF can be uncomfortable bedfellows.

We’ll see.

I happened to be in my local library the other day. The good lady and myself were looking at the new books section when she said, “What is speculative fiction?”

“SF and Fantasy,” I replied, “Why?” and she pointed out to me a book called Nordic Visions and subtitled The Best in Nordic Speculative Fiction edited by Margrét Helgadóttir.

As well as the editor herself I recognised the names of the three Finns who have contributed, Hannu Rajaniemi, Johanna Sinisalo and Emmi Itäranta (here and here.)

I of course borrowed it on the instant.

Despite its publication date of 2023 and any review of it not going to be timely I offered my review to Ian Whates at ParSec magazine.

He accepted and as a consequence the review will not be appearing on here for some time.

This year’s Clarke Award winner is In Ascension by Martin Macinnes.

Macinnes’s novel deals with the ocean depths as well as outer space. Appropriate really as Arthur C Clarke was also interested in both. As well as many outer space works he also wrote The Deep Range.

Yesterday, Lake of Darkness, the latest novel from Adam Roberts, was handed over by our postman.

Another one for review in ParSec.

Judging by the blurb it’s a murder mystery involving a black hole.

The cover you will notice features a spaceship.

That ship seems to be streamlined, more like a jet fighter in fact.

I wonder what atmosphere it would need to pass through to make streamlining necessary.