Solaris, 2022, 417 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 7.

This is set in the alternative future familiar from the author’s sequence of four previous books – each with Europe in its title – where, after the devastation of the Xian flu, the continent’s political structures have fractured into a patchwork of states and statelets. Main viewpoint character Carey Tews has been invited back from retirement by Les Coureurs des Bois, that secretive organisation which conveys packages (and sometimes people) across the multitude of borders now garlanding the continent, to look into the death, near Gliwice in Poland, of her fellow Coureur – and former lover – Maksim Petrauskas. Despite misgivings she agrees, but swiftly realises there are odd inconsistencies at the scene and among the supposed circumstances: patchy police notes, improbable timings, its sheer unlikelihood.

The book’s first few sections also contain scenes from two other viewpoints, Krista Lindmaa, a police officer in Tallinn, and Lenna, a journalist sacked for poor time-keeping and insufficient research. Both are introduced while enduring a power blackout in the city, an event which is a precursor to Lindmaa’s deceased father (an ex-cop) being implicated in police killings of ethnic Russians back in the day and its supposed cover-up. All but destitute, Lenna accepts the offer of a Mr Reinsalu to probe into the affair. While Krista has a part to play in the unfurling of the plot, Lenna’s appearances soon peter out.

The leveraging of the discontent of ethnic Russians in Estonia is elaborated on by Krista’s Uncle Stepan. “‘People are angry all the time. Not about any one thing, just this hot explosive core of anger waiting to be aimed at something. Doesn’t even matter what it is. All you have to do is point them at it and off they go,’” adding, “‘Sometimes it’s quite easy to convince even the most rational people that someone else is trying to take away something that’s theirs. Their money, their property, their rights.’” Russians, he says, know this and work on it. Disinformation is now about making people unsure what to believe. If all news is fake where does the truth lie?

Maksim was the person who was instrumental in recruiting Carey as a Coureur. About the state of Europe he opined, “‘Borders are primitive, mediaeval. They promote division and nationalism. They’re offensive frankly.’” Knowing him as she did even then, Carey replied, “‘It’s also a great business opportunity.’” Elements of Carey’s back story such as this soon lead the reader to suspect that the resourceful and slippery Maksim is not in fact dead and something deeper is going on.

Which there is – and that is over and above the additional complication in Hutchinson’s scenario of the existence of the Community, a separate pocket universe where Europe was settled in the 18^th century by the English. The Community’s borders with Carey’s world are both nebulous and porous, and its government may be responsible for all sorts of mischief. Events soon briefly drag Carey and Krista into a third such world, Arcadia, situated in what we would call North America. Hutchinson’s resolutely down to earth style ensures this Science Fictional gloss on a story, which is (the procurement and use of an electronic device known as a cloth laptop notwithstanding) only peripherally SF, is treated matter-of-factly by his characters for whom it is merely part of life. The reading experience here is firmly that of the spy thriller, a contrast with Carey’s belief that, “Real life was always disappointing and complicated and shabby and not very exciting, and it constantly amazed her that people were surprised by that.”

Hutchinson is a very good writer indeed. His books are peopled with utterly believable characters and his plotting is intricate. Here, calls on Carey’s phone asking, “Who are you?” are subtly placed, as is the importance of Maksim’s admiration of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

That Cold Water is at its heart a spy thriller does not lessen any of that. Science Fiction is uniquely placed to explore all of space and time. Make that spaces and times.

The following did not appear in the published review.

“Time interval later” count; six or so.

Pedant’s corner:- “the only real variations Carey had ever noticed was a choice of heels” (variation.) “‘What,’ she said.” (it was a question, ‘“What?” she said’,) span (spun,) mediaeval (yay!) miniscule (x 2, minuscule.) “‘So far all we’ve done is stepped on the toes’” (all we’ve done is step on the toes,) aberation (aberration.)

Doubleday, 1989, 235 p.

This is a collection of four pieces of Crowley’s shorter fiction.

The Nightingale Sings at Night is a fable outlining a creation myth garnished with a touch of Just So story. It tells how Boy and Girl (later to become Man and Woman) were the first to name things in the world made by Dame Kind in times when the Moon could talk, and did so slyly. And it tells us why the nightingale, who only ever had this one idea, came to sing only at night.

As its title might suggest, Great Work of Time is a tale of time travel, hinging on whether – or not – Cecil Rhodes was assassinated at his house Groote Schuur, in 1893. A society calling itself the Otherhood was set up after a provision in his will in order to preserve the Empire to which he was so attached. The story starts with Caspar Last in 1983 inventing a method of time travel which involves what our narrator (as in Heinlein’s “‘-All You Zombies-‘” despite superficial appearances, there is really only one) calls orthogonal logic – past and present do not lie before and behind the present but at right angles to it. Yet this story could start anywhere – or anywhen – and is mainly concerned with the life of Denys Winterset, the President pro tem of the Otherhood (all its presidents are pro tem) who is contacted in Khartoum on a journey north on the Cape to Cairo railway, enticed into the Otherhood and given the job of assassinating Rhodes. In the Otherhood’s timeline the Empire was prolonged, the Great War wasn’t so great since it ended in 1915 with the Treaty of Monaco and as a consequence the Holocaust never happened. The story roams hither and thither across the Empire’s history including to time’s end in a forest in the sea. The writing here is wonderful and Crowley’s altered worlds are enticing.

In Blue is a story set, post Revolution, in a kind of eutopia based on coincidence magnitude calculations and the act-field theory (which predicts the occurrence, within any given parameters of the field, of coincidences of a certain magnitude.) Whatever you do, whatever comes about in the whole act field, is by definition what act-field theory predicts. All possible disproofs were themselves provable parts of act-field theory as was everything else. Our protagonist, Hare, meets a woman who thinks there is no such thing as act-field theory but that as long as everybody else believes in it, then it does work. A beautiful expression of the type of double-think which exists in authoritarian societies.

Novelty relates the struggle of a writer to come to terms with his theme, the contrary pull people feel between Novelty and Security

Pedant’s corner:- “A theatrical costumer” (costumier,) “the place where the Nile had its origin” (the text implies this origin is the Victoria Falls, which are on the Zambezi, not the Nile,) railroad (I know it was written by a USian and for a USian publication but Brits don’t use that word. It’s a railway. Similarly we had ‘drapes’ for ‘curtains’,) the American civil war” (it’s a proper noun so, American Civil War,) “the year of grace IV Elizabeth II” (I’m not sure why that ‘IV’ is there – unless it’s to denote the fourth year of the reign,) “I apologise for the hugger-mugger” (hugger-mugger is used here in the sense of secrecy, clandestine, not the usual one of close-packed, disorderly confusion,) question marks omitted from three pieces of direct speech which were questions, “the probability of any two snowflakes’ being exactly alike” (that apostrophe after snowflakes is surely not needed.)

Bloomsbury, 2020, 257 p.

Narrator Piranesi lives in a set of Halls decorated with Statues and subject to sometimes disruptive sea-tides. He describes his life to us through a series of journal entries with headings such as Entry for the First Day of the Fifth Month in the Year the Albatross came to the South-Western Halls. The Lower Halls provide food such as fish, crustaceans and vegetation. As far as he knows the Halls have only ever been home to fifteen people and thirteen of those are dead, their bones lying in various places among the Halls. One of these he has named Biscuit-Box Man since his (though we are not told so, it could actually be a her, Piranesi has no way of knowing for sure) smaller bones are contained in a red box bearing the words Huntley and Palmers and Family Circle. One of the others’ remains are wedged in a narrow space between a Plinth and a Wall, ten skeletons are in an Alcove and the one he calls the Folded-up Child, Piranesi thinks is a female. That leaves one person, The Other, a fifty to sixty year-old man who is Piranesi’s only live companion. He appears, usually to a schedule, speaks in obscurities and deflections and believes there is a Great and Secret Knowledge hidden in the World of the Halls which can give him enormous powers if it can be found. Occasionally the Other supplies Piranesi with items such as shoes.

Piranesi’s journal describes his journeys through the Halls in some detail, an otherwise deserted environment he has come to know intimately. His use of English and familiarity with notions like biscuit-boxes, though, immediately invite questions. How does he have knowledge and memories of these things, none of which are found in the Halls? What are we – and he – missing?

The obvious literary comparison of a story set in a huge building like this is with Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast but this is not truly like. Something about the writing rang a distant bell but it wasn’t till the Other’s reference to a projected ceremony to discover the Great and Secret Knowledge that I thought of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, which again isn’t an apt comparison. However, given the vastness of the Halls, Walking on Glass might be the more pertinent – or even parts of The Bridge.

Piranesi’s diary entries are full of capitalised nouns – a flavour of which dapples my paragraphs above. This long out of date practice for all but proper nouns helps to emphasise the otherness of Piranesi’s existence – and that of the Halls.

Jeopardy introduces itself when a confluence of tides is set to deluge all but the uppermost parts of the Halls but also when a mysterious (to begin with) number sixteen is mentioned by the Other who claims sixteen wants to harm Piranesi or will send him mad. One day Piranesi hears sixteen calling out (the voice is a woman’s,) leaves a message for her to keep away and tries to avoid reading the reply she chalks on a Hall’s floor. He then meets an old man whose speech confuses him by saying that the Halls exist in a Distributary world which could not exist had the other world it flowed from not existed first, causing Piranesi to look back at his journal entries, which he realises contain gaps but also references to another world and people such as Laurence Arne-Sayles and Valentine Ketterley. How this is all connected is revealed only when Piranesi finally speaks with sixteen, who is named Raphael. Reflecting on this talk and the reassessment he has to make about his life he ruminates, “Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”

Clarke conjures the sense of otherness of the Halls admirably and her approach is distinctive from other descriptions of parallel worlds but there was something underwhelming about the resolution. Clarke is an accomplished writer but for me the worlds she invents fail to convince completely.

Pedant’s corner:- enormity (used in the sense of huge rather than its true meaning of monstrous,) “I tried hard not complain” (not to complain,) “‘I thought that you were to unlikely to’” (no need for that first ‘to’,) at one point there was no new paragraph when a second person spoke, focussed (several times, focused,) “the fish that abounds in every vestibule” (the fish that abound,) “using the name the Other called her” (he had not done so in any of the conversations Piranesi had previously related to us.)