A Son of the Rock

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?)

Doubleday, 1997, 347 p.

This was Atkinson’s second novel and it exhibits many of the traits which would come to dominate her fiction. The family dynamic here is reminiscent of the one in Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and of the Todds in Life After Life and A God in Ruins. In this one our heroine Isobel finds herself slipping backwards and forwards in time and there is here the first adumbration of the thought found in the Todd books that it would be a boon if somehow we could live our lives over again in order to get them right. There is a Scottish flavour; neighbour Mrs Baxter – I was irresistibly reminded of the old soup adverts, especially since her daughter is named Audrey – lards the text with Scots aphorisms, though the prominence here of trees and forests is more of a preoccupation of English fiction. The house Isobel lives in is even called Arden.

We begin with a literary allusion, “Call me Isobel.” Implicitly to compare herself to Herman Melville is quite a statement by Atkinson of confidence in her abilities. But the book as a whole is dense with allusion or references – and also repetition, but repetition with a purpose, not merely saying the same thing over again in slightly different ways. For example, “The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.” There is also a reversal of Tolstoy’s Karenina Principle in, “I suppose all unhappy families resemble one another (but all happy families are happy in their own way of course)” along with the addition of “But then, do happy families exist, or happy endings come to that, outside of fiction?”

After a starting chapter headlined ‘Beginning’ there are several sections each of ‘Present’ and ‘Past’ narratives outlining Isobel’s story, her family’s and Arden’s, before we end with ‘Future’. ‘Beginning’ is a history of the land on which Arden stands ‘Present’ is narrated by Isobel in first person; ‘Past’ is in the third person.

In the ‘Present,’ Isobel (Fairfax) is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl mooning after the desirable Malcolm Lovat who, to Isobel’s chagrin, sees her as a friend. Her father, Gordon, vanished for seven years after mother Elizabeth was said to have absconded ‘with a fancy man’ but the circumstances are barely ever mentioned by their grandmother, the Widow, and the getting on for elderly spinster aunt, Vinny, in both of whose care they have been left. Both Isobel and her brother Charles try to make the most of things. When Gordon returns it is with a new wife.

The three primal motivations in literature, love, sex and death are well to the fore here. Gordon met Elizabeth by rescuing her from a bombed house during the Blitz, “My hero,” and was thereafter besotted by her feminine dazzle (the widow and Vinny are not so easily taken in.) There are incidents of murder and reported incest and Isobel imagines her part in Malcolm’s death over and over again but is unable to prevent it each time. A rational gloss to these experiences and her apparent time travelling is provided as symptoms of possible fly agaric poisoning.

While Human Croquet is exceedingly well written and intricately plotted – as well as diverse – a tangled web of relationships is revealed during the novel, to not all of which is Isobel privy; possibly too many connections between the characters to be fully convincing. (This is a trait I also noticed recently in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea.)

The game of Human Croquet, rules and a picture of which act as a three page appendix, is one of the pastimes Isobel has read of from an illustrated book of Home Entertainments. It involves a blindfolded person being aurally guided through hoops formed by two people making an arch between them.

In Human Croquet, the novel, Isobel has no such guide and has to make it on her own. As we all do.

Pedant’s corner:- hot-bed (does it need that hyphen? – ‘hotbed’,) Charles’ (many times Charles’s,) “help me Boab” (at least twice. This Scottish phrase is actually not an invocation to someone called Bob to provide assistance but rather an expression of disbelief or disconcertment, and is written ‘help ma boab’,) Keats’ (Keats’s,) beseeched (an apparently acceptable alternative to ‘besought’.) “‘Who understand them?’” (understands,) “CO2  + 2H 2A + light energy – (CH 2) + H2O) + H2A” (supposedly the equation for photosynthesis. It isn’t. And in any case CO₂, H₂O and H₂A, OHOHO) Zeus’ (Zeus’s,) Ysggadril (Yggdrasil,) “the cries of the baby upsets my” (upset my,) “they bid their mother one last terrible farewell” (they bade their mother,) “less discretely” (not less separately [discretely,] but rather less inconspicuously, ‘less discreetly’,) aureoles (x 2, areolas; or areolae,) “to staunch the throbbing” (stanch,) “would he chose for a consort” (would he choose,) “smoothes the sheets” (smooths,) Glebelands’ (Glebelands’s,) de’el (usually spelled ‘de’il’, or deil,) “the amoeba and bacteria” (if it’s supposed to be plural then ‘amoebae’ – or even amœbae.)

Black Swan, 1985, 362 p.  Cover art by Eduardo Paolozzi.

During the late twentieth century this was considered as a classic Science Fiction novel of the post-apocalyptic variety.  I bought it many moons ago but somehow never got round to it till now.

Our protagonist Isherwood Williams is bitten by a rattlesnake when out on a hunting expedition. When he recovers he finds the human world has succumbed to a disease of some sort. Cities and roads are mostly deserted (the book was first published in 1950 when cars were much scarcer than they are now) but infrastructure – electricity, water, fuel – is still working. Overcoming his reluctance to use what wasn’t his property he takes a car and rides from his home in California across what was the US to the east coast and finds very few people have survived. Those who have, are disorientated and demoralised though three “negroes” have gone back to living off the land. Williams (in what is to modern eyes clearly a racist assumption) thinks they are more suited to this due to the way they lived before.

Back home in California he sets about life on his own but one day, when the electricity has finally failed and the street lights have faded away he notices a light at night. This leads him to a woman called Emma and the pair get together. Emma is of black ancestry so Williams’s racism is not too overt. (But then again in such a situation you could not afford to be overly choosy.) Emma is a resourceful and wise woman so it is just as well.

The pair set about surviving as best they can and even decide to have children. Along with a man called Ezra and the family he had collected around himself they form a community, which over the years grows and forms rituals of its own. Ish’s hand-held hammer becomes a totem, the long-lost Americans (of which to his community he is the last) and their accomplishments held in awe by the younger members. The difficulties of coming to terms with a new mode of life and of meeting other survivors or their communities  are explored briefly but mostly this is the story of Ish.

Some of the seeds of later post-apocalypse novels – especially the ‘cosy catastrophes’ of 1960s British SF – can be discerned in this book, so in that sense it can still be seen as a classic.

Pedant’s corner:- “extra ordinarily pleased” (extraordinarily,) “upon articles of dust” (particles of dust,) “but he heard only far off, the rasp and crackle of static” (needs a comma before ‘only’, “had take command” (had taken,) wistaria (x2, wisteria,) “whimpered her sleep” (whimpered in her sleep,) grape-fruit (grapefruit,) “what might, by generous interpretation, he called a social group” (be called a social group,) generaly (generally,) “electrical impluses” (impulses,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2.) “Near by a smooth rock surface” (Nearby,) youngesters (youngsters,) geograhy (geography,) feminity (femininity,) Mohenjadaro (Mohenjo-daro.)

Gollancz, 2004, 317 p.

This is a collection of Gentle’s stories (some of which have been collected before in Scholars and Soldiers.) Each is followed by an afterword describing the story’s genesis, and sometimes evolution.

We start with Cartomancy: An Introduction which is a framing device setting the subsequent stories as animations of maps brought to life by the blood of the elvish Pontiff Elthyriel.

The Logistics of Carthage is set in the same universe which Gentle set out in Ash: A Secret History (and later in Ilario: The Lion’s Eye) in which Burgundy is soon to disappear. It explores the relationship between Guillaume, a mercenary soldier in the Griffin and Gold company, and Yolande, a woman who joined up to protect her fifteen year-old son and of course failed in that. The Griffin and Gold are in North Africa fighting for the Turkish Bey. The plot revolves around both the death of another female mercenary whose body (against all mercenary custom) remains unburied because the local priesthood sees her as an abomination – and pigs.

Kitsune is narrated by Rowena, a “cute dyke” taking classes in the Japanese martial art of iaido. When she meets Tamiko, she falls in love with her at first sight. But Tamiko is – or claims to be – a fox spirit, capable of making anyone fall in love with her, a belief Rowena cannot get to grips with.

The Road to Jerusalem, the first story Gentle set in that universe mentioned above but this time Burgundy did not disappear in the 1500s, deals with a dilemma faced by a female soldier of the Knights Templar in the 1990s where she has to decide between obeying the Pope (here based in Avignon) or observing the rules of secrecy of her order. Incidental details include North America being known as Cabotsland and the Tokugawa Shogunate having a presence on its west coast.

The splendidly titled Orc’s Drift (written with Dean Wayland) is a throwaway tale set in the same universe as Gentle’s novel Grunts. A group of orcs at a remote outpost where the inhabitants have been cleared off the land is challenged by a small creature one of them identifies as a Sand Fairy.

The Tarot Dice is revealed in Gentle’s afterword to be her feeling her way towards ideas she fleshed out more fully in later stories and novels. A woman and a man in a society on the cusp of a revolution have a complicated relationship due to the fact that he in effect brought her up. The dice she employs are loaded, as is the metaphor they embody.

The Harvest of Wolves is a future dystopia where yet again a UK government has butchered the welfare system making receipt of relief dependent on doing something for it. This being a fascistic regime that involves spying on others.

Anukazi’s Daughter is the tale of a female soldier who realises she will never achieve the role of commander despite being better equipped for it than her male comrades. An encounter with enemies who accept same-sex relationships and gender equality changes her life. (This was apparently the first story in which Gentle played with the female soldier idea.)

What God Abandoned features as a minor character a young René Descartes as a member of an army at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. Another soldier is a Weerde, a person who can change sex but whose secret is discovered.

Unusually for Gentle The Pits Beneath the World is pure Science Fiction, set on a planet with seventeen moons orbiting a blue giant star twinned with a white dwarf. Pel is a young teenager accompanying a human expedition who puts herself in danger by revealing to the local inhabitants she isn’t an adult.

In Cast a Long Shadow a woman estranged from the father of her child encounters the creatures of darkness with whom he has made a pact to obtain from him his exercise book containing drawings of them.

A Sun in the Attic is again pure Science Fiction, set in a world whose moon was once inhabited but whose atmosphere is now only patrolled by machines. One of narrator Roslin’s two husbands has invented a telescope but the City Council isn’t keen on change.

A Shadow Under the Sea is set in the same milieu as Anukazi’s Daughter and concerns a sea creature attacking the boats which do the necessary fishing for inhabitants of the Hundred Isles. Spurlock has to go to the far south, past the Cold Lands, to enlist the help of a female shaman to trap the beast.

Human Waste examines an unusual response to the repair of the human body by nanotech.

Cartomancy: Conclusion rounds off the framing device.

In one of the afterwords Gentle mentions her discomfort with the short story form. She is good at long – often very long – fiction but her short work, as here, is certainly better than serviceable.

Sensitivity note: contains the words “niggers.”

Pedant’s corner:- “at Marchès’ look” (Marchès’s,) “laying down on its side” (lying down,) turcopliers, (turcopoliers,) “De Payens’ warm voice” (De Payens’s,) “he takes up shoulder-slung gun” (he takes up a shoulder-slung gun”,) platignum (is a brand of writing pen. This was a colour, platinum,) “nods a greeting, speaks one in a thick … accent” (speaks to one in a thick.) “The Tarot dice lay before her” (present tense narration, ‘The Tarot dice lie before her’,) whiskey (whisky,) “Descartes’ beardless face” (Descartes’s,) halbards (halberds,) racheting (ratcheting,) occured (occurred.) “Shock and the smell of the seaside hits Suze” (hit Suze,) “men and women lay on the ground” (lie on the ground,) “Nats’ shadow” (x 3, Nats’s.)

Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, 309 p. Reviewed for ParSec 9.

In the aftermath of a nuclear war Indra was brought up in the Order, a religious sect fanatically opposed to technology, whose members are marked out by a crescent moon branded on one cheek. Despite (or because of) this indoctrination she was fascinated by computers which led her to befriend Nyx, who calls her God Girl. One night they were caught in a radioactive storm and, because of her brand, refused shelter till it was too late, unless they had radical medical intervention. Her mother refused to countenance anything so ungodly as nanite repair therapy but her father okayed it, at the cost of rejection from the sect. Nyx was fine but Indra’s rare susceptibility to acute onsite nanite rejection meant the treatment did not work. The Glindell Corporation offered her a way out through Neural Transcendence, the process of uploading a human mind to an artificial drive, a MindDrive housed in a titanium shell.

Not long after the process but before Indra’s old body has been reconstituted in a layer of FleshMesh designed to allow her to experience all the normal senses along with the enhanced ones the new body brings, she began to have dreams and flashback memories which her conscious mind could not reconcile. Dreams of being underwater, of infiltrating a building, of entering the Order’s compound.

As readers we are ahead of Indra here. In a story such dreams are rarely just dreams. So it proves. This is perhaps a trope in which author Kate Dylan ought not to have indulged but her writing is vivid and Indra’s personality engaging – though she does have a tendency to act without considering the consequences. It is Indra’s wish to untangle the dreams and also find her true self in her new existence which propel the plot. Given she literally embodies hi-tech it is a bit of a stretch that she apparently cannot shrug off the thoughts and sayings of the Order’s Leader Duval, which continue to impinge on her along with memories of her mother and father. It is her consciousness that something is wrong, though, the blanks in her post-upload memories, the flashbacks to events she feels viscerally but cannot account for, the feeling she is being used, which lead to her attempt to break free from Glindell’s clutches, taking up with Nyx and an organisation styling itself the The Analogue Army which opposes corporations such as Glindell. In this she is accompanied by Tian, the Glindell researcher who had been assigned to her, but who has now come under her spell.

The backstreet removal of both Indra’s and Tain’s physically implanted NDAs, (the requirement for its employees to accept such devices is one of the indications that Glindell is not a benign outfit, another is that Indra’s MindDrive is legally questionable) is an indicator of the level of technology available in this post-apocalypse world. Indra of course can switch her senses off. Tian can’t, but the nanites in her blood can repair her tissue damage quickly.

There are plenty of plot twists and turns and not a little high-paced adventure still to come in Mindbreaker, yet despite Indra’s artificial body Dylan never lets us lose sight of Indra’s human origins. The novel could even be seen as an examination of whether uploading such as Indra has undergone would mean ceasing to be human.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian, so snuck for sneaked, lay for lie, etc, etc. Otherwise; “wackjobs” (usually spelled whackjobs,) “personal affects” (effects,) “from the face of the earth” (Earth,) “proof that the company’s been flaunting the laws of nature” (flouting the laws,) claxon (several times; klaxon,) “complimenting the shine of his many piercings” (complementing,) “but will only combust when exposed to extremely high heats” (extremely high heat.) “What a difference a few credits make” (what a difference “X” makes, where X = ‘a few credits’,) “that would have easily bankrupt my Order” (bankrupted.) “Her indignance rises to match mine” (indignation,) “my Orders’ deaths” (Order’s,) duffel (spelled duffle at one point,) “once and for good” (conflates two different phrases, ‘once and for all’ and ‘for good’,) “dispatched of them” (conflates two different phrases, ‘despatched them’ and ‘disposed of them’,) “a new crop of my missing memories rear up” (a new crop …. rears up,) “there are whole years’ worth of nursery rhymes, and bedtime stories, and sang mnemonics” (sung mnemonics.)

Brain in a Jar Books, 2023, 353 p. Reviewed for ParSec 9.

In the aftermath of an extremely virulent virus called the Whispers, which may or not have been man-made, optimised humans (Opts) such as Cassie White are widely held to have had something to do with it and subject to prejudice as a result. Somewhere around the same time there was also an AI war after which the Chinese People’s Republic was replaced by the New Chinese Republic (NCR.)

Cassie’s optimisation has given her an overwhelming need to be in space. Unfortunately, a side effect of her treatment was to be the sufferer of occasional blackouts. One such led to an accident on the Moon in which a coworker died. Drugs can control the symptoms but are not fully trusted – either by her or the wider world. She had been turned down for the first expedition to Jupiter’s moon Europa, on which her brother Chris was one of the crew. Its fate is shrouded in mystery and, most likely, disaster. Hence Cassie starts the book having to work underseas, the closest she can feel to the space experience. To her surprise a politician called Ketteridge, who had previously stirred up resentment against Opts, comes to her in secret with a proposition. His bait is a video of someone walking across the surface of Europa (could it be Chris?) and he wants her to join a second expedition to that moon to recover information valuable to him.

Earlier than our introduction to Cassie though, Gibson pulls off a similar sort of trick to the one Alfred Hitchcock gave us in Psycho, as a result of which the reader knows that two other operatives on the ship, Sally Braemar and Jeff Holland, are not who they claim to be.

Not that suspicion is lacking anywhere on board. Cassie’s replacement of the original crew member has flummoxed everyone, Commander Javier hates her for being responsible for that death on the Moon and fears a relapse on her part so keeps her in suspended animation throughout the trip and her subsequent involvement to a minimum, the others resent Braemar and Holland as possible spooks. Such a closely tied group containing possible traitors makes this aspect of the novel resemble an Alistair MacLean book. And unbeknown to them all, Marcus, Cassie’s last boyfriend, who when about to die of the Whispers had his brain downloaded into an AI (a group also now universally vilified and feared due to the war) has infiltrated his way on board and can observe them all through the ship’s robot repair machines. Plus a Chinese ship having on board another former lover of Cassie, a connection of which Javier is aware, is also on the way to Europa.

And the Yatagarasu, an AI controlled ship which made an unscheduled stopover at Europa, has since vanished from human ken.

All in all, plenty to keep us intrigued and turning the pages.

The remainder of the book deals with the obstacles Cassie has to overcome in getting to Europa’s sea floor in her search for Chris and with what she finds once she gets down there.

Gibson is good on the mechanics of underwater exploration and his descriptions of the extra-terrestrial life in Europa’s ocean do tickle the sense of wonder. A touch of mysticism, if not outright fantasy, tinges the fate of the first expedition, though.

Europa Deep is good solid (well a fair bit of liquid actually) stuff, ticking quite a few boxes. It will scratch the itch of the SF buff, ought to satisfy the thriller reader and even tease the horror taste buds.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “perhaps there were having a bad day” (they were having,) “she’d be damned if she’d spend one more time in this man’s presence” (I don’t see the need for that ‘one’. One more minute?) “ a few other of you” (a few others of you.) “There was a cheap hotel not from where she was” (not far from where,) Marcus’ (many times. Marcus’s, which did appear once,) Veles’ (many times, Veles’s,) “the cry of cicadas” (cicadas plural, so therefore ‘cries’,) “zero gravity” (technically there is still gravity; the more accurate term is free fall,) Karman Limit (elsewhere Kármán line.) “She pictured Braemar bursting into the lander at that moment, a wrench gripped in one hand and his eyes full of manic hatred” (the character Sally Braemar is female. The male was called Holland,) a missing colon between a message source identifier and its content. “Europa’s dark side” (I assume this meant the side of Europa permanently not facing Jupiter,) “went work in the NCR” (went to work,) N/O2 supply (strictly N₂/O₂ supply, though, whatever, the 2 ought to be a subscript,) skeptically (sceptically,) “as much to break the silence than anything” (as anything,) “none of them were Chris” (none of them was Chris.) “Rust and grime streaked its outer shell” (Would subsurface exploration suits for use on Europa really be made of iron?) span (spun,) Chris’ (Chris’s,) Necropolis’ (Necropolis’s.)

Knight Books, 1969, 151 p, plus 8 p Diagrams and Technical Data.

Super Nova is the name of a(n as yet unused in an emergency) rescue ship based on the Moon.

The scene is set on the Moon base, a relatively large establishment with some married couples and a few children among the otherwise unattached. Not quite in that last category (but also not far from it) are Nurse Janie O’Donnel and Assistant Signaller Steve Murray who are attracted to each other but not as yet actually an (as we would say now) item. Gender roles are pretty much what were recognised as such in the late 1960s. Most of the women are either married and stay at home or have nurturing roles. One of the more unusual characters is Norman the News – whose nickname is perhaps an indicator of the author’s Scottish background – a reporter for Earth based newspapers.

The crisis which leads to Super Nova’s launch comes when a supply ship, the Archimedes, is stopped in space near to the incoming Satellite 907 – which has, incidentally, somehow or other managed to make the round trip to Pluto and back in a matter of days – along with a failure of communications. O’Donnel was originally scheduled to be on the Super Nova but Murray volunteers since the usual signaller is incapacitated but mainly to be near O’Donnel.

There is a large amount of information dumping (the story was intended for young adults though.) More noticeably these days the societal assumptions of its time or, rather, of MacVicar’s time, he was born in 1908 after all, are littered through it.

It turns out that in its pass round Pluto Satellite 907 has been taken over by that (minor) planet’s native intelligences, intrinsically hateful. They had in the past boosted Pluto from orbit round Neptune, a manœuvre which also forced Triton into its retrograde motion round its parent.

Close encounters with Satellite 907 lead to the Super Nova’s crew beginning to develop feelings of antipathy towards each other, leading on to much worse emotions. This is of course the influence of the Plutonians. Relief from these comes when Pluto’s spin takes the relevant transmitter round its edge. (Did they not, I wondered, have a relay system to ensure continuity? Never mind, it’s for YA; let’s carry on.)

The main action involves Murray having to approach the satellite during the transmission lull to deactivate its self-destruct device. For this he needs the relevant tools and Janie offers to take them to him. There is an uncomfortable scene where after he loses consciousness and Janie performs the actual deed she later tells him (in order to protect his self-esteem) that he did it.

One of the characters ruminates that, as a historical phenomenon, “Nobody seemed to like the Jews” then that “this was partly their own fault for being so inward looking, so close and clannish, so rigid in their beliefs.” Victim blaming or what.

But all on Earth is apparently now in harmony, technical and social benefits bind everyone in fairness to contribute in work and example. The Plutonians are somehow managing to undermine these feelings of togetherness and instilling fear and distrust – even hate.

The orbital dynamics of all of the ‘stopped in space’ gubbins are of course nonsense but without them there wouldn’t be a story.

The quaintness of this vision of the future is underlined by one of the characters using a “pocket space-range calculator” (looking like a cross between a set-square and a spirit level!) which was his own invention.

It is unusual to find in a work of SF, let alone a juvenile, as these stories were called back then, references to Goethe and James Hogg.

Similarly, I doubt any other piece of SF has ever employed the Scots word ‘douce’. Kudos to Scotsman MacVicar for that.

Diagrams of Satellite 907, the Archimedes class of ship, Pluto’s escape from orbit round Neptune, the Super Nova, a Moon Bus (with a crane attachment!) a laser-armed scout ship and a lunar vacuum suit appear as an appendix.

Sensitivity note: as well as the reference to Jews above, there is a mention of a Negro mayor, and the phrase “the nigger in the spatial woodpile.”

Pedant’s corner:- collander (colander,) “[responsible] for discovering minerals, oils and other products” (oils? On the Moon?) “dog’s-bodies” (nowadays – and perhaps even in 1969 – dogsbodies,) similies (similes,) span (spun,) “on the base of pure logic” (on the basis of pure logic,) “came to a stop in her orbit” (spaceships are not cars; they cannot just stop, they keep going until something changes their direction. This, as a plot point, ought to have been elaborated on,) 9o7 (907,) I noted the abbreviation ‘mike’ (which is now often rendered as ‘mic’,) the burst of flame from an atomic explosion “would become a towering mushroom cloud” (not in space it wouldn’t. The ‘cloud’ would be approximately spherical in shape,) “a spot of rust having formed” (on a screw fixing on a spaceship. In space the chemical conditions for rusting are not present. [To be charitable I suppose the rusting could have occurred during manufacture on Earth.] But also only iron can form rust [other metals corrode, but the result is not rust] but if they are to be launched from Earth, iron is too dense a material to make spaceships from.)

Salt, 2023, 183 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 8.

Alice Thompson is a veteran of seven previous novels but as far as I’m aware none of them has been Science Fiction. Concerning as it does a voyage to another planet (or, strictly, to its moon) this book could hardly be described as anything else. Yet it is not a typical exemplar of modern SF. Unlike the brashness of the average space exploration story its tonal qualities are more reminiscent of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris or David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus. Its epigraph, perhaps the most famous quotation from The Tempest, suggests the trajectory that will follow.

A prologue sets up the body of the text as a tale of lost memory. Artemis was the sole human returnee of her crew from their trip to Oneiros on the spaceship Chimera in a search for bacteria that could break down carbon dioxide to obviate global warming. Two dryads, hybrids of computing powers and cloned human DNA provided by anonymous donors, came back with her. Though she has none of Oneiros she is now setting down as a novel, Chimera, the memories she has of the trip.

This odyssey from a beleaguered world where – apart from “the IT elite, the governing body called the elITe” (who do not allow their children access to computers or smart phones) – all humans seem to be in thrall to “widespread automation and the internet of things” and “virtual reality had destroyed downtime and daydreaming” while “in many ways all human progress, except for AI, had stagnated,” is an incongruous endeavour. The crew seems mismatched and detached. Artemis tells us that in space humans are not allowed to dream; it is too unsettling for their daily work. Though she got on the trip more or less by subterfuge and has a slightly unbalanced mental history she is in charge of the medication to ensure this. “Pills suppress rapid eye movement.” Dryads record everything they see and hear. In their ever-lurking presence they come across like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey before David Bowman pulled its plugs.

Adding to the distancing effect odd things happen on board. Though it is cruising faster than the speed of light jolts affect the ship’s smooth passage. A dryad alters the temperature controls for no good reason. A bacterium appears on a microscope slide as if out of nowhere. Artemis starts to hear ringing bells. One of the crew, Ivan, disappears.

The oddnesses do not stop there. On Oneiros itself they land miles away from their destination and have to trek across a snowscape to reach the base built for them by automated fabricators. Artemis discovers there had been a previous research ship to the moon, the Siren, but Mission Control, personified in an AI named Cressida, lost contact with the crew and pilot dryads returned the ship. She begins to see shadows.

On a novelistic level the writing here is perfectly acceptable, though the book has flaws. Thompson brings attention to her use of quotations via asterisks and footnotes. That may be all very well in academic tracts but in a novel it distracts from the narrative. Oneiros is a tad too programmatically named. At times the information dumping could have been better integrated but there are also indications of a lack of familiarity with SF as a genre or with scientific processes. Stars are visible through Chimera’s windows even though it’s travelling faster than light. (I doubt light could be seen if it’s moving slower than any potential observer.) Before their trek across Oneiros, the crew take oxygen pills. (Just how are these supposed to work?)

The novel’s central concerns are the relationship between humans and dryads and the nature of consciousness – which Ivan opines may be a fundamental property of matter. The crew’s fate and that of Artemis are bound up with the absence of dreams. How does their loss affect people, how does their lack impact on the dryads?

An Epilogue describes Artemis’s novel’s fate and may be commenting on Artemis’s reliability as a narrator.

Chimera is a solid, very readable piece of work but in drawing comparison to Lem and Lindsay is setting a high bar.

Pedant’s corner:- “She turned to the dryad.’ Why?’” (She turned to the dryad. ‘Why?) “Just logarithms and data” (this was about a dryad. ‘Just algorithms and data’ makes more sense,) bacteria (used as if its singular. Occasionally the proper singular ‘bacterium’ pops up,) focussed (focused.) “our brains our designed to look for connections” (Our brains are designed to.) “There was always had a book of poetry” (no need for the ‘had’,) two sentences couched as questions but lacking their question mark. “Cressida gave him a disarming smile” (gave her,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech, “she could make out, through the blizzard, snow that covered the entire surface of the moon, with abnormally high mountains in the distance” (a blizzard tends to obscure anything more than a few metres away,) “minus 40 centigrade” (the official designation for that temperature scale is Celsius.) “‘Check for cuts. Frostbite can get in’” (Cold can get in [though it’s actually heat being lost] and then frostbite might develop.) “Their strength and stamina was formidable” (the ‘and’ makes this plural; ‘were formidable’,) “outside of it” (outside it.) “A empty wardrobe” (An empty.) “His brain was wired different” (differently.) Technicolour (I believe it was spelled Technicolor,) “like an idea struck the flat previous” (I haven’t a clue what this is supposed to mean,) “refraction of protons” (this was about light; refraction of photons, then,) “of this moon ?” (the space between moon and the ‘?’ was there to distribute the words in the line evenly but it looked odd.)

AJ JJ Publishing, 2022, 269 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 6.

This is the third in a trilogy, a fact of which I was unaware when, drawn by the premise, I requested the book for review. (The previous two instalments, Percivious Insomnia and Percivious Origins, were not, I think, reviewed in ParSec.) Mea culpa, for not researching the authors beforehand.

Coming in only for the last part of any book sequence is problematic – especially for a reviewer. Not all the background to the text is available; though the author(s) ought to provide enough to give any new reader a fair shout. Still, a book is a book, and must be considered on its own merits.

The scenario here is that an outbreak of insomnia has hit Earth. We are told people stagger around like zombies, transport – personal and public – has all but ceased, society has broken down. A drug called Noctural has been peddled as a cure but is ineffective, a fact of which its makers are well aware. In addition, the XYZ, a group of aliens capable of instant communication with each other by a form of emotional telepathy and apparently descended from whales who lived on Earth millions of years ago but now taking the shape of outsize humans, have been on an unsuccessful interstellar odyssey to find a new home but failing to settle (and incidentally forced into making a kind of slingshot around a black hole in transit) have returned to Earth intent on helping to find a cure for the pandemic of sleeplessness and making us all kinder into the bargain.

It gives me no pleasure to write this but if this all seems like a bit much for the authors to juggle with successfully, well it is. Chapters are relatively short and each is narrated from one of at least twenty different viewpoints which tends to make the reading experience bitty. Far too much is told to us, not shown, information dumping is profuse, clumsy and intrusive, with overuse of the pluperfect tense and a frequent resort to cliché. The process of discovering an effective serum against the insomnia pandemic, Noctural 2.0, is not dramatised and it seems to have been found absurdly easily. The text is sometimes couched as journalese, the characters do not come across as rounded and their dialogue is wooden.

At the climax it all descends into Bond villainy: that the villain has been given the name Khalid Al Gamdi leaves a sour taste. In addition, after that dénouement there are no less than nine chapters clearing up loose ends (while ironically introducing a new one.)

Alarm bells about all this had been ringing from before the start – which itself has the galloping hiccups, with both an Introduction and a Prologue. On the title page there is that MD after the name of the second co-author. But why is it there? Is it to lend an air of scientific credibility? In which case it is spurious, since this is a work of fiction not an academic tract and ought to need no outside props. In any case such a claim is thoroughly undercut by multiple appearances in the text of the non-metaphorical use of the phrase “the dark side of the moon” (which is an elegant description of madness but not of reality. Both “sides” of the Moon, far and near, are bathed in fourteen continuous Earth days of sunlight – and another fourteen of darkness – per lunar cycle. If you are striving for scientific verisimilitude at least get the details right. See also the ancient whales above.)

The overall feel of the text is that of authors so enamoured with their vision that they indulged the need to put every last little aspect of it down on paper (or screen.) Unfortunately, fiction doesn’t succeed under those conditions. Certainly there has to be enough detail to convince the reader the authors have a consistent world in their heads. Too much however, tends to give the opposite impression. Moreover, it gets in the way of the story. And it is story that readers of Science Fiction primarily search for. There is story here but the authors’ avowed intention in the accompanying blurb and the ‘About the Authors’ page of reviving what they describe as forgotten altruism led them to stray into didacticism.

Pedant’s corner:- human’s vast and varied pastimes (humans’,) “the prime minister” (Prime Minister,) “‘Your safety, our safety, as well as the safety of many others depend on it’2 (depends on it,) “the dark side of the moon” (there is no such thing – see above – and it’s Moon,) “that was provided there were enough insomnia-resilient staff on duty” (provided there was enough staff.) “Fifty suicide STARLINK satellites composed the payload” (the satellites created the payload? – comprised,) “what drew his attention were her photos” (was her photos,) one ‘it’s’ that ought to have been ‘its’, “something cold crossed his gaze upon her face” (needs its syntax sorted out,) “regardless the cost” (regardless of the cost,) “risen to a crescendo” (to a climax,) “careful to cover their interaction with his torso from the cameras” (opaque syntax again,) “returning from whence he had come” (whence = ‘from where’ so this is equivalent to ‘from from where he had come’,) another “rose to a crescendo”, “the two crafts” (the plural of craft [as in conveyance] is ‘craft’,) “desperate to clear its path” (‘his’-  or ‘their’ – path,) “despite the unforeseen danger that undoubtedly lay ahead” (if it undoubtedly lay ahead then it was not unforeseen; ‘unknown’ perhaps,) “and good thing” (an interpolation that has no sense at all,) “Cooper’s gaze – abducted by a long black, illuminated gown” (how can a gaze be abducted?) many new paragraphs are unindented, “the reason his kiss had fallen on deaf lips” (a tin-eared construction, ‘unresponsive lips’,) “than he had ever felt had before” (one ‘had’ too many,) “the only options to negate it was to swallow Noctural 2.0 .. or they could go off planet” (is missing an ‘either’ before what then should be ‘were to swallow’; otherwise ‘the only option was to swallow’,) “had rode up in” (had ridden,) “the tallest thing standing on the island were the trees in Central Park” (was the trees.)

Sceptre, 2021, 567 p.

Mitchell has form with unusual novelistic structures. In Cloud Atlas he embedded several stories physically one within another. Here, in a book about the history of a briefly flaring sixties band (the Utopia Avenue of the title,) he doesn’t go as far but has set his novel out as if its sections were tracks on their three LPs. Each of its six main sections is prefaced by an image of the supposed label of one side of an album and its chapters focus on the lives of the writers of its songs, bassist Dean Moss, ex folk singer Elf Holloway and virtuoso guitarist Jasper de Zoet. The group’s drummer, Peter ‘Griff’ Griffin, didn’t compose but gets one writing credit for devising a drum pattern for one of Elf’s songs. Occasional scenes are seen from other viewpoints but these are rare.

All three main viewpoint characters are beautifully inhabited, living, breathing creatures, each replete with flaws and doubts. Dean had a troubled upbringing and his connections with old friends from Gravesend add complications he could do without, Elf’s family background was safe and secure but she harbours questions about her sexuality (incidentally her initial boyfriend here, the Australian, Bruce – perhaps a little too programmatically named – is a perfect evocation of the selfish misogynist,) Jasper’s connection to the de Zoets comes from a wrong side of the blanket liaison during World War 2. The relatively minor characters are agreeably nuanced.

Mitchell also has a habit of incorporating in his work cross-references to previous novels. Among others here Jasper’s surname is a nod to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and indeed he turns out to be descended from that gentleman. There is a mention of The Cloud Atlas Sextet, a musical piece which featured in Mitchell’s third novel and once again we encounter the enigmatic Dr Marinus, a character whose absence from a Mitchell book would now be more noteworthy than his appearance.

It is a trifle odd to say it for someone who lived through the times depicted but since Mitchell was born in 1969 this is technically a historical novel. The text is peppered with encounters with sixties names – Sandy Denny, a pre-fame David Bowie, Steve Marriot, Syd Barrett, Joohn Lennon, Francis Bacon, Steve Winwood, Kaith Moon, Marc Bolan, Brian Jones, Rick Wakeman, Jerry Garcia, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Zappa, Cass Elliott, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, not to mention a certain peroxide-haired Top of the Pops presenter. However, the dialogues these real people engage in with the novel’s characters are sometimes not entirely convincing. The way Mitchell ties it in to his wider œuvre means the book can also be classified as a fantasy.

Jasper’s mental peculiarity (he hears knocking no-one else can and experiences another mind within his) is explicitly linked to his de Zoet history as in that previous book and provides the fantastical and speculative elements of this one – Marinus carries out psychosurgery on him – but could be read simply as psychotic episodes if fantastical speculation is not to your taste. Then again, readers of Mitchell ought to be used by now to his flights of fancy.

The band’s adventures include a brush with Italian police corruption followed by a tad unlikely UK tabloid support and eventually taking the US by storm. Their USian promoter sounds off about the violent history of the United States, “We need war like the French need cheese. If there’s no war we’ll concoct one,” and adds a warning, “Here in the land of the free, you’ll meet some of the gentlest, smartest, wisest people who ever lived. But when violence comes it’s merciless. Without warning.” All too true, then and now.

In Utopia Avenue Mitchell has worked his magic again. It is by degrees warm, tragic and affirmative: like all the best of literature, capturing the human condition.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2,) “Eric Burden’s intro on the Animals’ version” (it was Hilton Valentine who played the intro on the Animals’ recording of House of the Rising Sun,) “Sergeant Pepper’s” (no-one in Britain in the sixties – and for about fifty years afterwards – ever said Sergeant Pepper’s, that LP’s title was always abbreviated to just Sergeant Pepper.) “A producer told them that Elf’s the first woman ever to ‘play’ an instrument on Top of the Pops” (so had he – or is it perhaps Mitchell – never heard of Honey Lantree? Or do drums not count as an instrument?) “the hairdressers” (the hairdresser’s,) “the audience are clapping out the rhythm” (the audience is clapping out,) “Andy Williams’ company” (Williams’s,) “the callous on his hand” (callus,) “or he would have thrown Jasper arranged in a list the SS Arnhem on the crossing from Harwich.” (I can’t make any sense of this at all,) “the band drop away” (the band drops away,) “on his next LP.A coloured model” (needs a space between the full stop and the ‘A’ – LP. A coloured.) “The tennis players’ skin turns first albino-milky” (the tennis players’ skins turn first.)