Flipped Eye, 2021, 252 p.

Skyward Inn lies towards the edge of the Western Protectorate with a view over the Bristol Channel to Swansea from where the rocket ships rise from the Kissing Gate to make their way into space. The Kissing Gate was discovered fifty years before the events in the novel. The Coalition used it to travel to Qita, but the Western Protectorate disagreed with this action, and with the use of technology inside people’s heads, and so separated themselves from the rest of the world. The Coaliton’s take-over of Qita was complete but odd, as there was little resistance. “Why just move over and let us take it? No battle. No military. Not one voice raised – at least, not theirs.”

Jemima had in the past left her son, Fosse, to travel to Qita where an implant called Coach “bound us altogether in our heads” but now, in the inn, she dispenses Jarrowbrew, which her Qitan partner Isley, (with whom it is not possible for her to have a physical relationship,) prepares in the basement. Fosse has become something of a loner, who seeks solace among the buildings of an abandoned farm.

One day another Qitan, Won, turns up having travelled to Earth alone, but her suit needs a replacement device without which it will not restart. In an attempted bargain with a band of smugglers Jem and Isley lose the Jarrowbrew they had brought as payment for the device and nearly their lives. Meanwhile Fosse has been disturbed at the farm by three incomers who say they are taking it over. After an odd confrontation with the three where their flesh appears to meld together Fosse kills the man and flees to Swansea and takes the Kissing Gate to Qita.

So far, so SF, so good.

But things get stranger. Soil in the local graveyard begins to liquefy and the contagion spreads. Isley and Won get closer – literally. Fosse is taken on a cross-Qitan journey by a local during which he encounters its oddness. Through bodily contact with Isley, Jem is able to access Fosse’s mind but the Inn’s basement is soon filled with locals joining with Isley and Fosse (again literally) at which point SF ceases and we are in fantasy territory. The true nature of Jarrowbrew is revealed. It seems that Qita may not have been conquered after all but is taking revenge of sorts.

As a wordsmith and portrayer of character Whiteley is absolutely fine and presumably the way she takes her story is where she wanted it to go. But the journey, a little like Fosse’s on Qita, takes on an aspect which strays too far from the entirely believable. Sf/fantasy crossovers have a long history in the linked genre (A Voyage to Arcturus springs to mind) but in Skyward Inn I thought the two did not gel at all comfortably.

Pedant’s corner:- “neither of us move” (neither of us moves,) “they were not been welcoming to him” (‘being welcoming to him’ makes more sense,) Klaus’ (x2, Klaus’s.) “at he found he wanted the axe again” (‘and he found he wanted the axe again,) “their shoulder hunched” (shoulders, surely?) a missing full stop, Fosse (x 2, when Isley was meant.) “Every customer forces their laughs and drinks too fast and none of them want to say why” (wants,) “the questions he had been asked about it by his workmates was one of the reasons why he’d kept to himself” (questions is plural so needs were as its verb [though I can see why it would sit awkwardly with ‘one of the reasons’.) “He would not be charge after all.” (in charge?) “when Fosse looked up from the task from negotiating path” (task of negotiating a path.) “‘Let get on it.’” (‘Let’s get on it’.) “He glances at my hands at the sleeve pulled low” (sleeves,) “mowed grass” (mown grass,) “facing him with it arms raised” (its arms,) “to bomb the entire of the Protectorate” (yes it was in dialogue but ‘entire’ should still have been ‘entirety’,) miniscule (minuscule,) “and her saw her hand” (and he saw her hand.)

NewCon Press, 2021, 101 p.

This novella is set in Brown’s “Telemass” universe, of which I have read the four original novellas but not yet Telemass Coda, though it’s on my shelves

Here, former spaceship pilot Jon James is approached by shady businessman Santor Vakhodia to return to Arcturus VII (aka Pharantara,) the planet on which James’s lover Solange Delacroix had died. That expedition’s finding of sentient life on Pharantara had since led to it being interdicted but Vakhodia tells James that the Persephone, one of the pre-Telemass technology and so superseded suspended animation ships, has crashed on Arcturus VII with his great-great-great grandfather on it, a man whom Vakhodia wishes to thank for setting up the family business. Vakhodia offers James various incentives to join him but Jon’s acceptance is to prevent Vakhodia hiring anybody else for the job since there is a secret about Pharantara that he would like kept. His only condition is that he be accompanied by Octavia Carrera, one of his companions on the previous mission.

On the trip Vakhodia takes along his assistant Šarović and a Voronian bodyguard named Stent. Voronians have immense strength but unfortunate body odours. Carrera and James wonder if Vakhodia’s ostensible reason to visit Arcturus VII is true or merely a cover and if in fact he has permission to land, suspicions strengthened by their smallship landing well away from the Persephone crash site, necessitating an arduous land journey by tracked crawler to the downed ship.

This does though give Brown the opportunity to describe the profusion and fecundity of life on the planet and an incident which illuminates James’s sense of guilt at Solange Delacroix’s death as well as to reveal the special nature of Pharantara’s sentient inhabitants.

This is the author doing what he does best. It’s a solid tale with a good man at its heart, a baddy with hidden motives, action sequences in an exotic location and enigmatic aliens.

Pedant’s corner:- “Time interval later” (or equivalent) count; 10. Otherwise; “the full story what happened there” (story of what happened there,) “‘I’m taking the Telemass relay from here to Néos Kyrenia is here hours’” (in three hours?) “a ivory giant” (an ivory giant,) “the arrival’s lounge” (arrivals lounge,) “the planet had been a little further way from its primary” (away from.) “Was he privy the confidential report” (privy to the confidential report,) “‘the effect of hid pheromones. When a Voronian senses danger, they can instantaneously increase its production, and its potency’” (pheromones is plural; therefore ‘their production, and their potency’,) “lashing out at his erstwhile binds” (bonds; or, bindings,) “I just hope that” (the rest of the sentence is in past tense; so, ‘I just hoped that’,) “Vegetable life proliferated here” (plant life, surely,) “twice as tall as man” (as a man,) “trying to asses me” (assess,) “cagey” (usually ‘cagy’,) “observer would have put then at” (put them at,) “richochetted” (I prefer richoceted but apparently ricochetted is an acceptable alternative.)

A Lady Astronaut Novel, Solaris, 2019, 506 p, including 3 p Acknowledgements and 6 p Historical Note.

Each chapter of the book is prefaced by a cod news clipping. Kowal uses these to provide background (and commentary on the times) but takes care to make clear that this is an altered history in her first two words, President Dewey. In case you were in any doubt about the timeline, the chapter proper then starts with “Do you remember where you were when the Meteor hit?” Said meteor (actually, as Kowal points out, a meteorite) hits the sea just off Maryland on March, 3^rd, 1952, and wipes out most of the surrounding area, US government and all. Narrator Elma (Wexler) and her husband Nathaniel York were luckily up in their mountain cabin and so survived. Elma is a woman of many talents, a mathematician, a pilot and a war veteran. Due to her hothousing in maths (and proficiency relative to her male counterparts, which in turn led to her being held up as an example to them; never a good place to be) she has developed a visceral fear of speaking in public, manifesting in a vomiting reflex. She is also the first to calculate the likely results of the impact. After the initial cooling phase due to reduced sunlight hitting the ground the volume of water raised into the atmosphere will induce runaway global warming since H₂O is a potent greenhouse gas. Her husband realises that humans will have to get off Earth. After persuading the new powers that be an accelerated space programme is the result.

The scenario allows Kowal to address the inherent sexism of the times – but women are eventually allowed onto the space programme (it would be silly after all to engage in a colonisation programme without them.) The Yorks’ initial billeting on the black Major Lindholm after their survival of the impact also leads her to an awareness of racism, her own heretofore more or less unconscious attitudes, but also that of wider society. The figure of Colonel Stetson Parker (here the first man into space) provides an embodiment of sexism and sense of sexual entitlement, from which Elma was only saved during the war by being a General’s daughter.

This isn’t great literature but it is story and all passes easily. The reader can have some fun looking out for resemblances and differences to the space programme in our timeline – the Moon rocket here is an Artemis 9 instead of a Saturn V, for example. Despite an attempt to be forthright in the opening paragraph, there is a rather awkward treatment of the Yorks’ sex life.

I do have a couple of quibbles with the scenario. Given much of the US eastern seaboard has been wiped out would there have been sufficient resources left to mount a space programme? Okay it’s an international effort, but still. And in this perennially cloud bedecked post-disaster world (“Do you remember when you last saw the stars?”) would enough crops have been able to grow to sustain life as we more or less know it?

However, Elma is an engaging enough narrator to encourage me to read the next two novels in the sequence.

Pedant’s corner:- “Neither of us were squeamish” (neither of us was,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2.) “‘What.’” (it was a question, therefore ‘What?’) “export of corn and oats were blocked” *export … was blocked,) “I was looking for ejecta that wasn’t going to be there” (ejecta is plural; ‘ejecta that weren’t going to be there’,) “some involvement over was chosen” (over who was chosen,) “a small women” (woman,) O2 (O₂,) “lays over the Earth like a blanket ” (lies over,) “smoothes out” (smooths out,) Williams’ (Williams’s.)

Edited by Avram Davidson, British Edition, Atlas Publishing and Distribution by arrangement with Mercury Press, 112 p.

Note: the cover painting shown right is the one on my copy but the contents differ from those listed on the image which was for the US edition for April 1962. The British editions obviously did not match the US ones.

In those days the magazine had no Editorial column nor was the text of its stories – except the title page for Uncle Arly here – laid out in two columns as it would be in later years.

Isaac Asimov’s SCIENCE column was going strong. Here in Hot Stuff^a he considers the highest* temperature possible in the universe (the interior of a star about to go supernova.)

Saturn Rising by Arthur C Clarke.¹ A veteran of the first two trips to Saturn on a lecture tour is buttonholed by the hotel owner, an enthusiast for that planet, eager for commercial opportunity.

Brown Robert by Terry Carr² is both SF and a horror story. Arthur Leacock assists young Robert Ernsohn, brown Robert, to make the first trip through time. This is one of the few SF stories to deal with the fact that time travel must also involve space travel.

My Dear Emily by Joanna Russ is a vampire story set in 1880s San Francisco. As well as the Emily of the title another of its characters is named Charlotte; two names obviously chosen to invoke thoughts of the Brontë sisters. Yet the overall effect is far from that template.

The Man Without a Planet by Kate Wilhelm.³ The titular man carried on with a space voyage despite that meaning the death of his companions. The sympathies of the story’s narrator are somewhat like the protagonist of Robert Silverberg’s To See the Invisible Man.

Darfgarth by Vance Aandahl. The titular character is a wandering minstrel whose mandolin has a magical effect on the locals he stops to serenade. Until he goes too far.

Stanley Toothbrush by Carl Brandon.⁴ One morning, while shaving, viewpoint character Herbert thinks the word ‘shelf’ is ridiculous and all his shelves disappear. Later his girtlfriend teases him about a (non-existent) new boyfriend and he turns up on her doorstep. The have great problems with him – till she imagines him away.

In Uncle Arly by Ron Goulart⁵ the uncle of an ex-girlfriend has begun to haunt Tim Barnum’s television set, every Tuesday evening for half an hour. He also pops up on the radio.

Subcommittee by Zenna Henderson.⁶ Talks to end the war between humans and the alien Linjeni are going nowhere. Serena’s husband Thorn is on the talks committee. Their son Splinter finds a way through the fence between the two communities and makes friends with Doovie, a Linjeni child. The rest of the story more or less writes itself but 60 years on it is striking how the cultural assumptions of the time were entrenched even in SF: the Linjeni females in this story are as bound to their families as human women were in those days. Of course it may not have been possible to get anything else past a male editor.

*as known then.

Pedant’s corner:- ^awave length (now is one word, wavelength.) Centigrade (that unit of temperature is now designated Celsius,) “56 hydrogen nuclei … are converted into 1 helium nuclei” (the nuclei is plural, so the ‘1’ is wrong. Context and the subsequent text suggests ‘14 helium nuclei’.) Later we have 19 helium nuclei where again 14 makes more sense.
¹Ingalls’ (Ingalls’s,) “It took me awhile” (a while.) ²Mr Lewis’ assistant (x 2, Lewis’s.) ³zombi-like (zombie-like.) ⁴focussing (focusing,) “‘An what do you mean’” (And,) a miising full stop at the end of a sentence, a double quote mark at the beginning of a piece of direct speech when elsewhere there are only single ones. ⁵ “and pointing at the fat man on the set who was singing again. ‘And who’s this guy?’” (is missing a ‘said’ before ‘And who’s this guy?’) “before go to the bank” (before I go to the bank.) “Jean left them” (elsewhere she is Jeanne.) ⁶ “and felt of the knitting” (and felt the knitting.)

Four Square, 1967, 253 p. First published in 1953.

I remember fondly from my youth a novel by Russell titled Next of Kin, a light-hearted contact with aliens story where a human was captured and convinced his alien jailers that each human had an invisible companion called a Eustace, which had impressive powers. Not literature by any means but quite funny – a trait unusual in SF. Having now read this book I am reluctant ever to go back to that earlier one for fear of destroying those memories, because Dreadful Sanctuary is not very good.

The set-up is that each of a series of spaceships, all bound for Mars and built by various countries, has suffered a calamity. It seems as if someone – or something – is deliberately preventing a successful landing. Viewpoint character John Armstrong decides to find out who or what. (When reading his various adventures to that end I was reminded of the YA book Tom Swift and the Captive Planetoid which I also read recently.)

By videophone he contacts a Professor Mandle who has a theory about layers around Mars potentially causing the problem and has an idea to invetsigate this During the call Mandle appears to suffer a heart attack and dies. This later gives Armstrong the opportunity to meet and question Mandle’s sister Clair. She is as capable a person as her brother was but apart from sharing her ideas with Armstrong has no other agency in the book, beyond Armstong’s possible romantic interest in her.

Russell’s style here draws on US demotic speech and mannish wisecracks as in film noir. Though he also manages to insert a few classical and literary allusions by and large the prose is no more than workmanlike and contains frequent – not altogether approving – references to consumer products such as Vitalax (not to mention the advertisements for them) and a popular song titled “Skiddin’ with my shiver-kid.”

Armstrong’s researches take him to the Norman Club where he is asked a strange question, “How do you know you’re sane?” Armstrong doesn’t know, of course, but his interlocutor is sure of his own sanity since the club is in possession of a device known as a psychotron which can establish sanity beyond doubt. Armstrong’s subjection to the machine

Normans or Nor-mans claim to be normal men and not only sane but originated centuries ago from Mars and do indeed, in order to guard that history, wish to prevent other humans reaching there. There have been previous instances of implicit racism in the book – at one point Armstrong thinks of a stereotypical country named Bungo Bungo, at another he says, “‘That’s mighty white of you’” – but with the Normans it becomes explicit. According to them only white-skinned people came from Mars, yellow-skinned are the only true terrestrials, brown-skinned are Venusians, and black-skinned are Mercurians. The white people on Earth are descended from those banished from Mars because of their insanity. Earth is a prison for the insane, the dreadful sanctuary of the title. So much for the psychotron.

Only the spaceships and a handheld weapon which induces arterial blood clots make this in any way Science Fiction. The plot about a group of lunatics with aspirations to incite wars need not involve any fantastical speculation at all.

We also have the inherent difficulty of portraying the future and avoiding the unexamined assumptions of the time, assumptions all too apparent seventy years down the line. In Dreadful Sanctuary, despite habitual use of videophones, newspapers are still a main information source, accessed via recorder booths, and interpersonal calls are to devices still fixed in one place. Women, even the intellectually gifted ones such as Clair Mandle, are restricted to the domestic sphere or a job as a secretary. Then again, how will SF, or indeed any literature, written today stand up to posterity’s scrutiny?

Pedant’s corner:- Plus points for manœvre. Otherwise; queezy (queasy,) Lissajous’ patterns (only if Lissajous is plural, otherwise Lissajou’s,) Mississippi, Mississipi, “hung by the neck until dead” (hanged,) Papazoglous’ (only if Papazoglous is plural, otherwise Papazoglou’s,) “‘if only one makes safe return’” (makes a safe return,) sextette (sextet.) “The fellow laid flat” (lay flat,) sunk (sank,) “cock a snoot” (cock a snook,) “prone in the morgue” (that would be supine in the morgue,) gaget (gadget,) “rarely he occupied” (he rarely occupied,) “they’d accept him as a foe” (see him as a foe.) “His voice dropped back but was till clear” (still clear,) quartettes (quartets,) “titled back his head” (tilted,) dryly (drily,) “to both side” (to both sides,) Ploughkeepsie (Poughkeepsie,) “with a earlier” (an earlier.) “‘So out next step’” (our next step,) “he headed a a cohort” (only one ‘a’ needed,) “which the President has instructed him to prepare” (which the President had instructed him,) “even that the hydrogen bomb” (than the,) “for whom the bells tolls” (either ‘bells toll’, or, ‘bell tolls’,) “the saturine agent” (saturnine,) “one way of the other” (or the other.)

Tor.com, 2018, 228 p.

When a first person narrator (here the titular Binti) dies halfway through the text it presents something of a problem for the author. How do you carry on? How can the story not finish then and there? Okorafor’s solution here is to switch to third person – at least till the end of the chapter, when Binti comes alive again, (with a bit of authorial hand-waving. Microbes, she is told by her alien companion Okwu, “blended with your genes and repaired you,” in a breathing chamber in a young spaceship called New Fish.) I would submit that this aspect of the book (though there are others too) makes it more of a Fantasy than Science Fiction. Or is that just me being purist? Still, it makes for an interesting read.

Once more (see here for my previous experience of this scenario) her ever dwindling supply of the skin-covering paste called otjize is a constant source of concern for Binti, without it she feels naked and again she makes extensive use of her edan. Her Meduse okuoko (blue tentacles on her head instead of hair) mark her out, though.

There is still a war going on between humans called the Khoush and the alien Meduse. Binti has moved on from Oomza Uni, the first of her Himba people to go there, the first to leave Earth. Now part Meduse, she has an affinity with and ability to use mathematics, calling up currents to “tree”. When stressed she repeats the word “five” to calm herself. She also has a connection to the Enyi Zinariya, twenty-foot-tall slender beings who seemed to be made of molten gold. Accompanied by Mwinyi, a zinariya, she is going back to her homeland to try to broker a peace between the Khoush and the Meduse. Her family produced astrolabes, devices which carry the full record of your entire life. Hers and her father’s were the best in the business. In times of crisis Himba turn inward. Her family did so (into the Root where they lived) when their village was threatened by the Khoush and their Root was burned so Binti thinks they are all dead.

In the run up to the peace meeting she sees once again The Night Masquerade, a spirit previously only appearing to males (but which we later find is not a spirit,) thereby confirming her unique status. During the negotiations something goes wrong (a minion on one side did not like the prospect and opened fire) and Binti gets shot. Her body is taken on board the New Fish and taken to the rings of Saturn about which she had had a premonition. She reflects, “It was so unlike Earth, where wars were fought over and because of differences and most couldn’t relate to anyone unless they were similar.”

It all makes sense in context and Binti is an engaging companion. It is also still refreshing to read SF from beyond the familiar Anglophile template.

Pedant’s corner:- “Time interval later” ~(or equivalent) count, 8. Otherwise; zinairya (elsewhere zinariya,) spit (spat,) sunk (several times; sank,) shrunk (shrank.) “Astrolabes were the only object that… (objects,) shined (several times; shone.) “None around me were beathing” (was breathing,) “the feel of the numbers … were such a relief” (the feel … was such a relief.) “I didn’t want to go with.” (I didn’t want to go with him,) accidently (accidentally,) a missing quote mark at the end of a piece of direct speech, “their skin and hair was nearly free of otjize” (were nearly free,) “presented the dress she’s sewn for” (the rest of the sentence was in past tense, ‘she’d sewn’,) “the Roots defenses” (Root’s, [defences],) “off of” (just ‘off’,) “as Mwinyi and Okwu moved went New Fish’s walkway” (I have no idea why that ‘went’ is there. The ‘moved’ is a bit iffy too,) “the far side of the doom” (dome,) two full stops at the end of one sentence.

Collins, 1969, 157 p. Illustrated by Ray Johnson.

This one is definitely of its time. A boys’ own adventure written in breathless prose full of exclamation marks and with a “Gee Whizz!” and “Jumpin’ Jets!” style of dialogue. It was part of an ongoing series – five others are listed on the back cover – and refers to Tom Swift’s many “brilliant inventions” (some of which seem to have been able to be brought to market in short order by a couple of retainers) and previous “thrilling adventures”.

His latest wheeze is a thermal wing for re-entry – which is used for bouncing on the atmosphere like a skimming stone. This is his Duratherm Wing – or Durathermor for short (though Durathermor is hardly any shorter) and Durabuoy crash shield. Other late sixties coinages the author makes are repelatrons, Tomasite, and asbestalon. (That last would surely be given a health and safety swerve these days.)

Incidents come thick and fast – we start with an attack on a US spaceport base by black clad raiders whose costumes are blazoned with a sphere and lightning bolt symbol. This is followed up by Tom accused of being involved and his plan to hollow out an asteroid for use as a space vessel as a threat to his country. A package delivered to him turns out to contain deadly flying insects. Mysterious men arrange meetings with patsies to further implicate Tom. Despite his troubles on Earth Tom still finds time to make an excursion to an asteroid which has been brought into Earth orbit by some force or other. Using it as a test bed for his plan for an asteroid ship he finds it has a sapphire core. He manages to hop into and back from space as if he’s taking aeroplane trips. On one occasion he is accompanied by a chef named Chow. Tom’s sister and her friend make a brief appearance as companions for Tom and Bud on a trip to the beach and have as little agency as you would expect from “girls” in late sixties “juvenile” SF.

In its favour the colourful cover and grey and white endpapers are wonderfully redolent of the age though the four interior black and white illustrations are more humdrum.

I note, however, that this was a time when British publishers took care to reproduce US publications using, for the most part, British spellings. Hurrah!

Pedant’s corner:- Time interval later (or equivalent) count; 21. Otherwise: dryly (drily,) “lighter-than-air buoyancy” (less dense than air buoyancy,) Petronius’ (several times; Petronius’s,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech.

Head of Zeus, 2020, 333 p.

撑起天空, variously translated from Chinese by John Chu, Carmen Yiling Yan, Joel Martinsen, and Adam Lamphier. Reviewed for Interzone 289, Nov-Dec 2020.

In his foreword to this collection Liu says that until recently SF had been foreign to China, peripheral to the sweep of its history but the changes in the country have made the future ever more apparent and pressing, thereby creating more interest in the genre. The question he is most asked is what makes Chinese SF Chinese in nature, but he does not consider his writing to be about anything other than humanity as a whole. Which would be, of course, what makes it widely readable.

Liu’s stories here (spanning publication from 1985 to 2014) usually have echoes of Wells and Stapledon in displaying temporal or cosmological grandeur. He has no lack of ambition in his speculative ideas but sometimes that detracts from the capacity for emotional engagement with them. He has a fondness for portraying big (though not necessarily dumb) objects, but also a tendency (see *) to inelegant nomenclature – which may be a problem of translation of course – and a slight awkwardness with structure. Almost without exception, though, his stories deal with mind-expanding concepts.

Still, the leading one, The Village Teacher, (乡村教师,) appears strangely old-fashioned to Anglophone eyes and the contrast between the tale of the dying title character inculcating Newton’s three laws in his pupils and its intersection with a millenia-old galactic war between the forces of the Federation of Carbon-Based Life* and those of the Silicon-Based Empire* is fairly stark.

To alleviate environmental and population pressures The Time Migration, (时间移民,) is carried out using cryogenics. Stops at 120, 620 and 1,000 years hence proving unsuitable for various reasons, sights are set for 11,000.

In 2018-04-01, (2018年4月1日, – a future date when Liu wrote it) Gene Extension – which actually cuts out the bits that cause ageing rather than inserting anything – is possible but expensive. Our narrator is triggered by an April Fool joke involving digital nations to commit the fraud that will ensure he has the means to benefit.

Fire in the Earth, (地火,) is about the first project to gasify coal underground for use as an oil substitute and the disaster attendant on that endeavour. The story would work without its coda but arguably that’s the only thing that makes it SF.

In Contraction, ( 西洋,) Professor Ding Yi has constructed a unified field theory which predicts the imminent moment when the universe’s expansion will stop and its collapse begin, but only he truly understands the implications. The premise is far from new (Philip K Dick’s Counterclock World springs to mind) but the story ends with a neat, if obvious, typographical way to illustrate it.

Mirror, (镜子,) postulates the invention of the superstring computer – of infinite capacity. This has allowed simulations of evolutions of universes from different Big Bangs to take place, including of course our own. Liu lays out the implications of such knowledge for human relationships.

Despite its subtitle (An alternate history of the sophon,) Ode To Joy, (欢乐颂 ,) does not mention that concept, familiar from Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, at all. Instead a huge ultra-thin mirror appears in Earth’s sky on the day the UN is to be closed for good: a mirror that can turn radiation from nearby novae into music.

Full-Spectrum Barrage Jamming, (全频带阻塞干扰,) is set during a war between a Russia newly returned to Communism and NATO (a war whose cause seems relatively trifling but has to be accepted for story purposes.) NATO’s electronic warfare capability outmatches the Russians who have to resort to the full-spectrum barrage jamming of the title. Depletion of the jamming network leads to a desperate measure in response.

Sea of Dreams, (梦之海,) is almost emblematic of Liu’s style. An ice-ball dubbed the low-temperature artist* arrives on Earth professing interest only in art and proceeds to convert the planet’s oceans into ice-cubes, which it suspends in a ring surrounding the planet (the titular Sea) before leaving humans to deal with their altered world.

Cloud of Poems, (诗云,) has faint echoes of Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God in its account of a human telling what is effectively a god that its poetry will never surpass that of the human Li Bai. Its attempt to do so involves programming every possible permutation of the formal rules of Chinese poetry composition and constructing them in a 100 AU diameter model of the Milky Way.

The last story, The Thinker, (思想者,) is the most successful here at integrating the science and speculation behind it with the experiences of its characters and making the reader feel them. A male brain surgeon and a female astronomer meet by chance at an observatory where she is studying the energy fluctuations from stars. Over the years that follow they, almost by accident, make a discovery about interstellar communication.

The following did not appear in the published review.
Pedant’s corner:- “in a pinch” (at a pinch,) “smoking sulfuric acid,” (the technical term is ‘fuming’ sulphuric acid, Liu also describes the smoke as yellow; that sounds more like fuming nitric acid,) “Order of Victories are worth the most” (should be “Orders of Victory are worth the most” but that was in dialogue,) however ‘Order of Suvorovs’ wasn’t, (Orders of Suvorov,) “gunpowder smoke” (gunpowder? From modern munitions?) “lakes of mercury” (on Mercury the planet. Yet the surface temperature is stated to be 1,800 degrees Celsius. The element mercury evaporates at ⁰C at 1 atmosphere pressure. In a vacuum – or near vacuum such as exists on the planet Mercury’s surface – and specifically mentioned in the text – that would occur at a much lower temperature,) Comanches (is the helicopter’s name spelled differently to the First Nation tribe’s? Commanche,) “1.0 gees” (1.0 gee, or, better, 1.0 G. It would still be ‘gee’ even if its value was greater than 1, since a measurement’s abbreviation subsumes its plural, eg 6 A, or 20 N or 3 m,) “changing from the dark red to orange” (no need for that ‘the’.)

Titan Books, 2019, 413 p.

It is the year of the Quincentennnial of the Hegemony, an authoritarian state set up by The Seeker after a civilisational collapse known as the Ruin, a society where everyone knows the sun (called Ras) orbits the Earth as the true cosmology of the heavens has been lost even the word ‘planet’ has been lost; but some tech is still left over from the old time.

In the wintry wilds of the north Professor Sulara Song is investigating an archaeological site that may contain an artefact from before the Ruin; at a strip mine on a frozen steppe a man called Cale receives bad news about his son, Bowden; in the city, Kelbee, sold by her father to be the wife of a defender of the Hegemony known to the reader only as the Major (but after a promotion as the Lance-Colonel,) is little but a drudge and sex-slave, allowed outside the house only to work at the lowest grade in a garment factory.

Song’s experiences are given us in the form of journal she writes – and hers is a voice that is wry and compelling – Cale’s and Kelbee’s stories are told in the third person and their personalities therefore come across less sharply. All are actual or potential foes of the Hegemony; Song since the artefact threatens to undermine its foundation myth, Cale as a former comrade of the revolutionary known as Brennev, Kelbee through her growing connection with Nebn who befriends her one day when he comes to the factory to repair a piece of equipment.

The revelation of the underground artefact’s capabilities reads, though, like an interpolation from a different book. (Then again, after regression followed by five hundred years of stagnation any sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic.) Even knowledge of its facilities represents a threat to the Hegemony’s belief systems and therefore its control of the populace. For unlike the citizens of the Hegemony, kept separate, individualised yet subject to group orthodoxy (as is the ideal for all dictatorships,) “Our ancestors had tinkered with themselves, with the brain itself, back before the Ruin. Every new-born child inherited its parents’ ability to connect with the data corpus, not limited by proximity.”

Perhaps because it was his first novel Edwards is not quite as in control of his prose as he is in his second book, the excellent Echo Cycle, which I reviewed for Interzone, nor is his focus as tight. There is a sense here – especially in the hierarchy of the Hegemony (its head Fulvia arc Borunmer, though the first woman in that post “since… well, ever” is a typical vengeful dictator,) even the existence of the ‘Free City,’ Aspedair, supposedly the only entity on the planet that is not under the Hegemony’s sway, is not an entirely original concept – that he is feeling his way into writing, exploring other people’s scenarios than his own, conforming to a template, that he has not yet found his own voice.

Ruin’s Wake is still very readable though, and Edwards’s portrayal of human relationships and interactions is convincing.

Pedant’s corner:- Time interval later/within time interval count: 17. Otherwise; maw (it’s not a mouth,) sprung (sprang,) “the situation appeared to be diffused” (the situation was not spread out, it was resolved; defused,) “the thick pile of blankets that served as a bed” (earlier on there had been a mattress in the room,) “the light coming under the jamb” (this use of ‘jamb’ appears twice; a door’s jamb is at its side, not its bottom-most part,) snuck under the door jambs (sneaked, and see previous comment,) “the volume of the whole chamber 1,985 metres cubed and the surface area 947 metres squared” (1,985 cubic metres and the surface area 947 square metres. I didn’t bother checking the figures,) “Syn grabbed length of rope” (a length of rope,) sat (x2, sitting,) “the music swelled to a crescendo” (no it didn’t; it swelled [crescendoed] to a climax.) “Which was the truth she wondered” (is a question, so needs a question mark.) “Where would those boys would be now” (remove the second ‘would’,) dove (dived,) “a deep sob wracked her body” (racked.) “None of the people … were armed” (none … was armed,) “darkened by oxidisation” (the verb is ‘oxidise’ the noun is ‘oxidation’,) “it fit snug” (it fitted snugly,) “What struck her most were the looks on the aces” (what struck her most was …..) “He was stood in the wrong place” (standing in the wrong place.) “None of the guns were trained on him” (None … was.) “He was stood in front of her” (standing.)

TTA Press, 2021.

After a longish break Interzone reappears with a double edition. The editorial is by Lavie Tidhar describing his early steps into being published (in Interzone natch,) and his quest to bring World SF to wider attention. This being a double issue there are two of Aliya Whiteley’s Climbing Stories. In the first she ponders museum artefacts what they tell us about the past – and the future. In the second^a she wonders about the connections we make – as people and as readers – and their validities. Whiteley is also the subject of the first item in the book reviews, where Duncan Lawie looks at both her latest novels Greensmith (“the more astonishing end of Philip K Dick”) and the gentler on the reader Skyward Inn (the name of a pub in the Western Protectorate.) Both “explore big questions whose answers lead to further thought.” I examine the British Library’s reprints of John Brunner’s “very readable” The Society of Time (which is in control of time travel in a Western Europe dominated by a Catholic Spanish Empire) and Ian Macpherson’s Wild Harbour, a cosy catastrophe avant la lettre, and Scottish to boot. John Howard relishes M John Harrison’s “selected stories” collection Settling the World, stories in which nothing is settling, the footing is always unsure. Stephen Theaker discusses David Ebenbach’s How to Mars, (“a good story, but gimmicky, of a one-way trip to Mars for a reality show but where one of the inmates against all the rules has become pregnant,”) Premee Mohammed’s novella These Lifeless Things (set fifty years after the Setback killed 99% of humans) and Martha Wells’s Fugitive Telemetry (an Android SecUnit investigates a murder on Preservation Station,) Maureen Kincaid Speller considers The Wall by Gautam Bhatia (filled with moments of deep emotional intensity but a little too overcrowded with possibilities) yet “deeply satisfying,” and Val Nolan finds the “darkly absurdist” Line by Nial Burke well worth waiting for.

The fiction was all well worth reading.

A Hollow in the Sky by Alexander Glass.¹ Except for a few refuseniks called scatterlings humans have joined into a kind of hive mind called the Gathering. Our narrator Mateo is one of the scatterlings, looking after a vespiary in a monastery. Some years ago fellow scatterling Tomoko went off with/was taken away by extremely enigmatic aliens named the Borers. Now she has returned. This is well written but overuses the vespine metaphor.
In The Andraiad by Tim Major,² the titular andraiad is a church organist and piano tuner called Martin Helm, built to replace a man who died in a fight, and determined to be better.

Pace Car by Lyle Hopwood. Gates – matter transmitters – apparently gifted to Earth as a punishment for the creation of part animal/part human chimeras – have transformed the world, but they are gradually destroyinh their surroundings. Billions of humans have died. Our narrator is a collector of old cars who requires a mechanic to maintain them. He is part goat.

An Island for Lost Astronauts by Daniel Bennet is set in a post sea-level rising world and the appearanceof a mysterious and otherwise unexplained White Ship where convicts are left to scavenge the islands outside East City where returning astronauts have also been outcast for fear of contamination. The story has a sub-Ballardian feel and is deliberately enigmatic.

The narrator of A Stray Cat in the Mountain of the Dead by Cécile Cristofari³ is a nurse of Arabic origin working in a French care home. As the story unfolds we discover she has a weak heart but it is the stray cat that gets in no matter what the staff do that drives the story. If it lies on their laps the deaths of inmates seem inexorably to follow.

Nemesis by Matt Thompson. In a world threatened by comets thrown Earthwards by the sun’s dark companion beyond the Oort Cloud (the Nemesis of the tile) a woman’s memories are being reconstructed.

The Mischief That is Past by John Possidente⁴ is a tightly controlled exposition of justified paranoia. A journalist on Humbodt, a space station, is in hiding after a contact tells him of someone called Sacagawea who died in 1812. Except she didn’t; she’s still alive, uncovered in Greenland 1937 along with an alien spaceship, and now a state secret. Yet this story ends as its narrator’s is just beginning.

The Egg Collectors by Lavie Tidhar⁵ are two ballooners (sic) sheltering from a storm on Titan who encounter some ovoid objects on the surface.

Without Lungs or Limbs to Stay by Shauna O’Meara is set on a generation starship where the population has gone rogue, is now space adapted, and recycles the sleep-frozen members of the intended colony in order to keep their nutrient balance the right side of viable.

Pedant’s corner:- ^aTim Lees’ (Lees’s,) “to not only” (not only to.) ¹“a timpani” (timpani is plural; one of them is a timpano.) ²Louis’ (x2, Louis’s,) a mining lift cage accident is said to involve nine men on the top deck and seven below, but three lines later reference is to nine on the lower deck.) ³a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. ⁴“to lay low” (to lie low.) ⁵ballooners (balloonists,) “‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you.’” (is a question so ought to finish with a question mark.)