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

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

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

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

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

The following did not appear in the published review:-

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

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

This edition contains no less than five of my reviews.

The Last Pantheon by Tade Thompson and Nick Wood.

The Phoenix Keeper by S A MacLean.

Dark Shepherd by Fred Gambino.

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell.

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

Those reviews will appear here after a decent interval.

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

Another one for review in ParSec.

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

The cover you will notice features a spaceship.

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

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

Head of Zeus, 2023, 309 p. Reviewed for ParSec 9.

The Yorkshire Moors make an ideal setting for tales of the uncanny. A thin place. Remote, wild, desolate, atmospheric, and above all, wuthering. A world beyond the world. It is easy to imagine strange goings on, mysterious creatures, ghosts, hidden menace, inhabiting the landscape. But we don’t have to. The Brontë sisters (well, Emily) already did. And now, so too has Tim Powers in a story whose central focus is on the Brontë family and Emily’s dog, Keeper, but also incorporates the author’s usual injections of weird. In particular here we have boggarts, gytrashes, barguests, (the latter two being essentially the same thing,) werewolves, a temple on the moors to the Roman goddess Minerva, double-bladed knives called dioscuri, an ancient creature with latent potency buried inside Haworth Church under a slab with an Ogham inscription. Not to mention clandestine human organisations known as the Oblique and the Huberti.

The prologue sees Branwell Brontë inveigling Emily and Anne along to a cave where they all leave smears of blood on the rocks. This acts as a primer for the subsequent plot, a debt to be called in. (I note again the prevalence of blood in these sorts of invocation.) Later, in his time in London, Branwell is bitten by a dog and more recently pricked by a dioscuri. Emily too has been bitten, though escaped the knife. But both are marked.

Their father Patrick’s great-grandfather, Hugh Brunty, had been on a boat crossing to Ireland when a child stowaway was found whom the crew said was a devil and wanted to throw overboard. Hugh saved the boy, who received the name Welsh (his believed origin,) and adopted him. Welsh was a spirit and possessed Hugh, and later his son, but in the next generation Patrick’s father resisted possession, and with the help of his dog killed Welsh’s body but not its spirit. When Patrick (now Brontë) came to England the spirit followed him. It is to keep any such demons at bay that Patrick fires his gun at Haworth Church every morning.

Emily’s embroilment comes when, near a ruin called Ponden Kirk, she saves a man named Alcuin Curzon from a werewolf. He is one of the Huberti, working to prevent the Oblique reuniting the two halves of their biune god (one half being Welsh and the other the thing under the slab.) Emily in this tale is the strongest of the Brontë siblings, and along with Keeper, whose ghost doppelgänger manifests itself when times are needful, is instrumental in the resolution.

Powers has form with incorporating literary figures in his work. Previous books of his have featured Lord Byron, the Rossettis, and William Ashbless, a poet of his own invention (with James Blaylock.) How much this convinces may depend on the reader’s knowledge of those characters’ backgrounds but in My Brother’s Keeper there is too little of the Brontës as Brontës. It could of course be argued that in the context of the story Powers had little room for this, but while mention is made of the sisters’ initial book of poetry, the manuscript of Wuthering Heights being at a publisher and Branwell’s tendency to see himself as his fictional creation Northangerland, only once do we see the sisters sit down to write. (Branwell’s attempts to do so are depicted as futile, counterproductive and tainted by possession.) That the sisters’ work exists is, however, essential to the way Powers resolves the story and he gives us a supernatural – and also literal – explanation for the disease then called consumption, which in real life was to take both Emily and Anne.

All that aside; as a fantasy the novel is gripping and very well written, as is customary with Powers. Certainly not a chore to read.

Pedant’s corner:- “an uncharacteristic howel” (howl,) “toward he parsonage” (the parsonage,) “in that that wilderness” (only one ‘that’ required,) “none of the Oblique order were very eager” (none … was eager,) “‘has strived’” (I’m sure Emily Brontë would have said ‘has striven’,) ditto “‘a different route than the one’”  (‘a different route from the one’,) “keeper had laid down beside her” (had lain down,) “off of” (it’s just ‘off’ no ‘of’,) “the paralysis had been had been some consequence” (no need for that second ‘had been’.) “‘Where’s your crows?’” (‘Where are your crows?’,) “straps on this shoulders” (on his shoulders,) specactles (spectacles,) metioned (mentioned,) “and laid down between their boots” (lay down.)

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.)

Gollancz, 2023, 443 p, including 3 p Afterword. Reviewed for ParSec 9.

In 2255 humanity has recovered from the ravages of climate change on Earth and extended into the Solar System. Earth is dominant, with a stranglehold on the Lunar Consortium’s expansionary plans and its helium-3 extraction exports via control of the supply of nitrogen needed as a buffer gas. However, schemes are in hand for Earth to mine the gas giants for helium-3 to fuel a nuclear fusion engine which will cut journey times across the Solar System from decades to years. A third group called Conservers does not wish to deplete the Solar System’s resources but has sent out the Shadow, a ship powered by solar sails, to the Oort Cloud to investigate the possibility of Planet Nine orbiting there.

Planet Nine, as found, could fall into the venerable SF category of Big Dumb Object, except it’s not big – it’s an apparent black hole, ten times Earth-mass – and it’s not dumb. Salma, a teenager born on the voyage, discovers its Hawking radiation harbours patterns. It is sending out a message. As soon as the Shadow’s crew echoes the signal back, the Hawking radiation changes form and the galaxy’s central core simultaneously turns red from a quasar emanation. As coincidences go this would be an almighty one but how could a signal sent in the here and now cause an event to have occurred thousands of years ago so many light years away? The quasar’s red light bathes the whole Solar System and starts to increase the temperatures of every orbiting body within it, slowly but inexorably. This, however, is a challenge which is nothing but background for most of the book.

Standing off some distance away, the Shadow’s crew then sends the second pattern back to the object. It expands immediately to a larger size and forms a surface with one Earth standard gravity. And on that surface lies a cylindrical container. The three crew members sent down to the surface find it has an alien inside, an alien which resembles a bird but with human resemblances. This is swiftly dubbed Feathers. Creation Node is not just a BDO novel, then, but also a first contact one. Communication with Feathers is almost impossible except by gesture so who, or what, she is, is a mystery. Both the Earth authorities and the Lunar Consortium decide it is imperative to send missions to Shadow’s location as soon as possible.

A lot of the earlier part of the book (sometimes spoiled by information dumping of the ‘she knew’ variety and intermittent references to several of the characters wearing black pendants; a decorative choice never fully explained) is taken up with Earth’s preparations of its fusion powered ship, Cronus, to launch from Saturn orbit and the Lunar Consortium’s unannounced mission to join it. This is something of a drag on the ongoing story in the Oort cloud (albeit with a set piece collision in space to be described.) We could charitably interpret this longueur as Baxter trying to convey the time scale involved. Even with the new drive the joint mission to the changed black hole takes eleven years.

The climax of the novel is almost literally (but not quite, since Baxter tips us the wink to its existence in earlier short chapters) a deus ex machina, the manifestation of a creature with god-like powers which can move both itself and our humans between universes and across space and time. Both Planet Nine and the quasar are under its control, the details of which I’ll leave to the reader to discover. It presents a dilemma to the humans at the site, though.

Baxter’s immersion in SF shines through, Creation Node contains more than a few nods to Arthur C Clarke – sunjammers, space elevators, an enigmatic object that eventually provides a path to elsewhere in the universe – to please longstanding SF buffs. Its invocations of other universes and the vastness of time tickle the sense of wonder but the humans its tale is fashioned around are not its primary focus. Ideas are the thing here. This is good old SF for the good old SF reader.

Pedant’s corner:- “to the second. Hawking set” (has no need of that full stop,) Feathers’ (several times; Feathers’s) “‘when we first found here’” (found her makes more sense,) “had managed to assemble of fair-sized heaps of the stuff” (doesn’t need the ‘of’ before fair-sized,) “desertification was increasing such places as the Sahel” (was increasing in such places,) “seemed to rise to a crescendo” (the crescendo is the rise, not its climax,) “nothing remained to be sucked out” (it wasn’t sucked out, it was pushed out into a vacuum – which Baxter implicitly acknowledges two lines later with “after the initial plume of lost air had pushed stuff out into space,) a missing open quote mark before a piece of direct speech, “‘these are all stones are deep black’” (either ‘these are all stones which are deep black’ or these stones are all deep black’,) “twenty thousand years of emitted a galaxy core heat” (doesn’t need that ‘a’.)

This time with Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi.

I’ve not read the blurb yet.

However, Bacigalupi is an author I have read before. See here and here.

But not for some time.

ParSec 10 became available for purchase yesterday.

This issue contains my reviews of the short story collection Elephants in Bloom by Cécile Cristofari and the novel Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis.

ParSec magazine, for which as you know I review SF and fantasy books, is having a promotion (see the Facebook post here) where a tour of seven blogs can be found reviewing issues 1-6 + 9 in a succesion of links each of which has a discount code for 25% off issues 1-9. Read and enjoy.

The links start at Fantasy Book Nerd here.

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.)