Gollancz, 2016, 371 p.

I seem to have progressed into reading Newman’s series of Planetfall novels backwards. Before Mars and Atlas Alone I did read in the correct order (3 before 4) but this is number 2 in the sequence and I have not yet read Planetfall, the first.

Our viewpoint character here, Carlos Moreno, is indentured as a detective with the Ministry of Justice and very good at his job. He has an unfortunate history, though, as his mother famously went off on a one-way trip into space on a ship called Atlas (he has to dodge the occasional journalist wanting to know how he feels about that) and he spent time in Texas with a religious cult known as the Circle before escaping it and enduring various degrading situations until his indentiture, which is a contract from which he is unlikely ever to secure release. He is called in to investigate the death of Alejandro Casales, the leader of the Circle, in a hotel on Dartmoor. It looks like murder but (of course) something about the circumstances does not seem right to Carlos. His endeavours are complicated by the political situation with representatives of the Americans and of the political entity known as Norope as well as the MoJ requiring to be satisfied.

For most of the book this is more or less a police procedural novel albeit with Science Fictional trappings – that spaceship and the Artificial Personal Assistant, APA, chips with access to the internet most people have in their heads being the most obvious of these. Moreno’s APA is called Tia.

During the investigation, one of the hotel guests, Travis Gabor, asks to be interviewed last. His husband Stefan Gabor, an extremely wealthy man, is as nasty a piece of work as you could imagine. This turns out to be unfortunate for Moreno as Stefan is angered by Moreno’s delays and buys out what had seemed his unbreakable contract with the MoJ to force him to go back to the Circle to where Travis has in the meantime debunked.

In the Circle, where such things as APAs are non grata and those entering who are chipped must wear a nullifying bracelet, Moreno has an unwelcome reunion with his father and discovers the link between the dead Casales’s activities and the US gov-corp’s and Stefan Gabor’s plans for an Atlas 2.

It’s all well done and readable enough – Newman can write – but, while at least in this instalment the derivation of Newman’s characters’ expletive of choice, JeeMuh, is explained, it still seems torturously awkward to me.

Pedant’s corner:- Written – or at least published – in USian, lasagna (lasagne,) meters (metres,)  “‘They were just pr0n really’” (‘just porn’ seems to be the sense.) “none of the outer doors were locked” (None … was locked.) “Either side of the drive” (Each side,) “outside of” (just ‘outside’,) “off of” (just ‘off’,) “the brain activity created by keywords relating to the case are also attended to” (the brain activity …. is also attended to,) “‘an end to that pain, you. Held. On.” (‘to that pain. You. Held. On.’) “to the the” (only one ‘the’ needed,) “have me made into someone who” (have made me into someone who,) syllabi (in English the plural of syllabus is syllabuses. Syllabi is a false plural used by people who think the word derives from Latin. It doesn’t.)

Tor, 2017, 180 p.

This is the second in Newman’s Industrial Magic series set in a Victorian era where magic, overseen by The Royal Society of the Esoteric Arts, is the major power source which made Britain pre-eminent. The first, Brother’s Ruin, I reviewed here.

Heroine Charlotte Gunn still wishes nothing more than to be an illustrator and (perhaps) to marry her fiancé, George, but her magical ability, which must be kept concealed or normal life will be lost to her forever, is a curse (as well as a boon.) To control it she is being tutored in secret by Magus Thomas Hopkins, whom she finds almost irresistibly attractive, but as a magus he is of course forbidden to marry.

The plot centres around the mill in Manchester which her apprentice magus brother Ben helps to run. Machines are being destroyed mysteriously and he suspects (shock! horror!) socialists are to blame and asks her to go undercover there to find out who is responsible since his failure may cause his rival trainee magus, Paxton, to oust him from the post or even to be prosecuted.

With some reluctance Charlotte agrees but this plan also coincides with Magus Hopkins’s hopes to expose the mill’s owner and Royal Society adept Ledbetter (the baddie from Brother’s Ruin) as a crook.

The conditions Charlotte finds in the mill are appalling. The noise is atrocious, the atmosphere hot and humid, the food dreadful, enough to turn anyone socialist. She can barely get through each day. It soon transpires, though, that the damage to the machines is not due to sabotage but to esoteric causes. Moreover, the working of the machines themselves is having a deleterious effect on the life force of the workers.

All diverting enough but no more. It is, though, a YA book.

Tor.com, 2017, 195 p.

This is a fantasy story with a steampunk vibe, as it is set in pseudo-Victorian times. Charlotte Gunn is an artist with a recent success in selling illustrations for a book. She has to keep this success secret from her family for fear of undermining her father’s breadwinning status and from her fiancé for similar reasons. Her biggest secret though is that she is an unregistered magus. (I feel that in her case it should really be spelled ‘maga’.)

The Royal Society of the Esoteric Arts is an all-powerful organisation protecting Queen and Empire through the magical powers of the magi. The earliest scene in the book sees Charlotte and brother Ben witness the tracking down of a baker’s son by the Society’s Enforcers using a magical implement known as the gauntlet which detects clandestine magical ability. Since untrained magi are said to be a danger to the Crown (and public) it is an offence to conceal such abilities. Adepts are routinely taken from their families (who are compensated for their loss on a sliding scale of talent) and trained up as servants of the Crown, though forbidden to marry. Those who conceal adepts are prosecuted. Charlotte feels her situation keenly but Ben’s faint traces of magical talent give her a possibility of masking her own from the investigators when her father calls them in to test Ben as due to a slight error on Charlotte’s part he perceives evidence of magic activity in the house.

Ben is in poor health, and it turns out their father took out a loan to allow Ben to go to University, from which his illness forced him to return. The calling in of the loan leads Charlotte to investigate the lender and thereby to knowledge of a conspiracy against the Society. Magus Thomas Hopkins, one of Ben’s testers, the most beautiful man Charlotte has ever seen, enlists her help to thwart the conspirators.

The tone of all this suggests an intended YA audience. There’s nothing to frighten the horses nor ground-breaking here but it’s entertaining enough, if a little slight.

Pedant’s corner:- span (spun,) “Archie’s hold tightened” (both before and after this no Archie is ever mentioned, but her brother is described as Archie on the book’s back cover,) “but that wouldn’t be for months and now, and Father had only days” (has one ‘and’ too many,) “she returned to Ben’s side who had lit the candle” (this phrase has its syntax severely awry,) bannister (banister,) a missing comma at end of a piece of direct speech where the sentence continued, “the most handsome man Charlotte had even seen” (‘had ever seen’, surely?) sprung (sprang,) “she hadn’t fully taken what he was doing in” (doesn’t need the second ‘in’.)

Ace, 2019, 312 p.

This is the second of this year’s BSFA Award nominees for best novel I have read. It is set on a starship called Atlas 2, heading out on a twenty-year voyage to join a colony on another planet (in the wake of someone called the Pathfinder who I assume appeared in an earlier novel in Newman’s Planetfall sequence.) Just as well; Earth has been devastated by a nuclear war.

Our narrator is named Deanna, on board Atlas 2 after her indentured debt had been paid off by her friend. Carl, who likes nothing better than to get his teeth into a real murder (or unexplained death) mystery. Or, I should say, because his indentureship trained/programmed him for that. Deanna – and I suppose everyone else in this scenario – has a link to an internal personal assistant. (This last is getting to be a fixture of SF novels these days.) There is also a system called MyPhys which monitors people’s health and bodily responses while the relaxation activity of choice is the use of mersives, highly detailed, virtual reality role-playing games.

Very early on Newman, through Deanna, puts the boot into fundamentalism of the self-styled Christian variety. In this story, what had been the USA has fractured and non-believers in Christianity kicked out. Deanna had had to fake belief in order to get onto the largely American funded ship, trading on relative ignorance of and assumptions about trans-Atlantic – here called Noropean – norms.

Up till now apparently footloose and fancy-free with all needs catered for Deanna is invited to do an analysis job on some data and discovers a previously hidden (at least to her and her acquaintances) hierarchy on the ship. Rich and with far from mean living spaces the elite also has access to a money economy Deanna had been unaware of.

Things ramp up when a mysterious person with incredible powers of access and concealment intrudes into the mersive area she calls her office space and entices her into a mersive which seems to have all sorts of information about her past life and homes. In it she finds clues to the nature of those running the show; leaders from the CSA (not the CSA I first thought of, but the Christian States of America) and that they were responsible for the destruction of all those sinners back on Earth. On meeting one of them in the mersive she takes the opportunity to kill him there, knowing he will experience the pain of it back in meatspace. On returning to real life she is startled to find that despite safeguards against crossover (not to mention MyPhys) that person has indeed died while immersed. Carl, a dog that won’t let a bone go, has been assigned to find out what happened to him. Thereafter she is forced to prevaricate with Carl while still plotting revenge on those in charge who are intent on preserving the indentured system she and all the less privileged on board thought they’d escaped from. In the course of this we come to realise that Deanna is indeed, in her own words, “A cold collection of responses, pretending to be a person.” When the identity of her mysterious helper is revealed she comes round to planning her act of retribution very quickly, almost without thought, but also without compunction.

That the major part of this novel is spent with Deanna in mersive environments is a bit off-putting. It’s too close to “it was all a dream.” Granted within them Deanna is revealed certain clues to help her unravel her circumstances but the overlap between mersive and meatspace is a step too far. The other characters in the book are little more than attributes rather than real people – unless Newman is making the point that spending too much time in game-playing is detrimental to human relationships, which the text does not really support. Then again we are seeing this from the viewpoint of a cold collection of responses pretending to be a person; perhaps not the best reader of people. Deanna is not an exemplary human (not that characters in books necessarily have to be) but Newman lets her off her actions lightly, leaving an unsavoury taste.

Newman’s invented expletive JeeMuh is still as irritating as in Before Mars, the previous book of hers I have read, but at least this time she gives it a provenance. Yet why use it at all when the ‘f’ word is liberally sprinkled across the text?

Pedant’s corner:- It was an ARC. Many of the following may have been corrected in the published edition: hangry (is this meant to be a portmanteau word – hungry/angry – or is it just a misprint for hungry? In context the misprint is far more likely.) “‘And it’s going kill you’” (‘going to kill you’,) n00b (x2, noob?) “the smell had alerted the neighbours, the body removed” (the body had been removed,) “a couple of specs on my throat” (neither speculations nor spectacles; it was blood, so, specks,) “‘you’ve got another thing coming,’” (another think,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “As long as I know what I want and know how to get, that’s all that matters” (how to get it,) hung (hanging,) “while I patched up her” (that reads very differently from ‘while I patched her up’,) “ a variety of ways … quickly float through my mind” (a variety …floats,) grills (USian? ‘grilles’,) “the same as what I can in meatspace” (the ‘what’ is superfluous,) “none of them live on deck five” (none of them lives on deck five.) None of the Circle are working” (None … is working,) “‘who were genuinely were’” (omit one ‘were’.)

I’ve now read three of the short-listed novels for this year’s BSFA Award.

I can’t say I’ve been too struck on any of them.

Gareth L Powell’s Embers of War did not appear to be anything out of the ordinary.

My thoughts on Before Mars by Emma Newman are here.

Dave Hutchinson’s Europe at Dawn was beautifully written but is the fourth in his Fractured Europe sequence and did not add substantially to the world(s) he has created.

I’ll not be reading the Yoon Ha Lee. I found his Nine Fox Gambit was not very good and put me off his fiction for life.

That leaves Tade Thompson’s Rosewater for which I probably don’t now have the time to resource or read. I gather also there is some doubt as to its eligibility as it was published on the Kindle in 2017 rather than 2018.

My reading of the short fiction has not progressed since the short list was announced (see first link in this post.) The usual BSFA booklet containing the stories has not yet arrived. I live in hope. In any case I doubt anything else will be better than Ian McDonald’s Time Was.