NewCon Press, 2025, 139 p. Reviewed for ParSec 15.

Some while ago sentient ramship UNDSP-14 CORBYN had passed through a human-colonised star system but ignored all its inhabitants’ attempts at communication. However, they exerted themselves to sending after him their one and only light speed ship, the Great Honour, utilizing a D-jump mechanism Corbyn did not have, which folded space to make the distance between two points negligible. Corbyn’s ship had resilience, though, and the Great Honour hadn’t, so was falling apart when it caught up.  Corbyn rescued crew member PurLeeDah and salvaged the D-Jump. Now, at her request, he is returning PurLeeDah to her home system but they are travelling at 0.9999999999c and need to dump velocity by innumerable small collisions to below 0.8c in order then to decelerate “as God and Heinlein intended.” This means transiting the system above its ecliptic for twenty (subjective) seconds, jumping back and doing it again and again, thousands of times, each time making a spectacular light show in the planet’s sky, shedding blue Cherenkov radiation. No wonder the inhabitants, who have, in the many relativistic centuries since launching the Great Honour, regressed to pre-industrial levels, come to call Corbyn the Travelling God as he moves from what they call the Gates of Heaven to Exaltation. It also means PurLeeDah has spent most of the interim in suspended animation.

As time goes by the condition of the cold sleep system deteriorates and Corbyn offers PurLeeDah the possibility of seeking out other star systems, possibly more evolved and able to slow them down more easily, but she declines, wanting to see her own planet again. To slow down more quickly, Corbyn takes a risk.

The overall story is told in nine sections as Corbyn drops in velocity to 0.999999999c, 0.98c, 0.95c, 0.92c, 0.85c, Orbital Velocity, and Stationary (with respect to the planet,) each section beginning with what is happening on Corbyn before giving us a snapshot of the life of humans on the planet as they slowly develop civilisation again, their worship of the Travelling God evolves and the time taken for each transit gradually increases. In effect Morden has put together eight otherwise unconnected stories of the History of the World (PurLeeDah’s world) by using an inventive framing device. (If you were paying attention you may have noticed there were only eight – not nine – velocities mentioned above. The ninth is a valedictory chapter.) Each of the eight stories is peopled with believable characters in convincing scenarios.

I did idly wonder if Morden has read Brian Aldiss’s short story Heresies of the Huge God, with which this has some thematic similarities: but it is of course as possible that he has not. The resemblances are only incidental in any case. Not that it matters. Morden has written a very good novella indeed, a story to show that Science Fiction still has life in it. And we all stand on someone’s shoulders.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “And he and her had had rationalized” (he and she had rationalised.)  “The only way he knew … were the stars” (the only way … was the stars,) dove (dived,) “The chase to over too soon” (to be over too soon,) “in his own prophesy” (the noun is ‘prophecy’, prophesy is the verb,) “lay of the land” (it wasn’t a song; ‘lie of the land’,) “Berengas’ abacus beads” (several instances of Berengas’; Berengas’s,) prophesies (prophecies,) “calculations were only be done by” (‘were only done by’ or ‘were only to be done by’,) “he did recognized this” (recognise) “one of which were” (None of which was,) “Stratos’ face” (Stratos’s,) “taller than a few stories” (storeys, please,) “no sign anything resembling” (no sign of anything.) “Neither of them were in the first flush of youth” (Neither of them was in…,) “‘more advanced that I am’” (advanced than I am.) “ ‘It is semi-rigid inflatable boat’” (It is a semi-rigid inflatable boat,) “holding on edges” (holding onto edges,) “there would be hole there now” (there would be a hole there now.) In the “About the Author”; published in three months of each other” (published within three months of each other.)

47 North, 2015, 227 p, plus 3p Author’s Historical Note, 2 p Acknowledgements and 3 p Bibliography.

This, Charnock’s second novel, (after A Calculated Life, chapter one of which is appended here following the Bibliography,) has a tripartite structure. Succeeding chapters tell the stories of Toniah, a woman from a parthenogenetic family living in 2113, adolescent Toni from the book’s publication’s present in 2015, and budding female artist Antonia Uccello in 1469 Florence.

Toniah lives with her sister and niece in London – all born parthogenetically, as was Toniah’s mother. She has recently been employed to reassess the work of Gauguin by a firm which specialises in historical revisionism – usually from a feminist perspective. In particular she finds antecedents to Gauguin in the paintings of Émile Bernard, but which also reflect back to Italian renaissance art.

Toni and her father are still trying to recover from the death of Toni’s mother in a car crash. Her father is an artistic copyist, working legitimately. A commission from a Chinese client leads them to spend some time in Shanghai.

Antonia’s artistic talent has been recognised by her father Paolo Uccello, a pioneer of linear perspective in the Italy of the time, who is teaching her both to read paintings and to paint herself. Her mother does not keep well and is haunted by the necessity to find a husband for her daughter. Antonia’s aunt’s life in a convent bears implications for her future.

All three lives are connected by the painting Antonia executes of her ill mother.

The speculative content – cloning of females – is presented as an unremarkable aspect of life one hundred years hence. The lack of recognition of female artists through history is not laboured but rendered subtly.

Pedant’s corner:- “she wishes her father were stood by her side” (wishes her father were standing,) “her father is stood at” (her father is standing at,) “she looks through a grill (a grille.)

Titan Books, 2025, 288 p. Reviewed for ParSec 15.

Ever since something known as the weatherbomb hit it, cutting it off from its past and erasing some of its inhabitants, Jamie Pike’s Fairharbour has been a city enveloped in everlasting winter. All contact between its island and the mainland has been severed, any expeditions sent out over the frozen wastes of the sea never heard from again. Black-clad officers called Doormen patrol the streets enforcing order, sealing entrances and windows to keep heat inside buildings. Jamie spends a lot of his time tinkering in the workshop of his vanished uncle by marriage, Pawel, a mechanical whizz, and watching what remains of the work of his grandmother Carmen, a famous film-maker.

By contrast, after the weatherbomb, Esther Pike has lived in a Fairharbour bathed in perpetual summer, with sunlight a relentless presence. In her Fairharbour too, an authoritarian regime, The Fenestration, exerts power, forever cutting holes in the walls of buildings. She, too, strains against the restricted life of her city.

With this premise of a city with a doubled character, City of All Seasons has a superficial similarity to China Miéville’s The City and the City but is in the end much more interesting than his novel (which was really only a murder mystery with an unusual setting.)

Both Jamie and Esther wonder what has become of the other and of their lost family members but both have encounters with the city’s mayor, a curious apparition always dressed in a diving suit yet who seems to be able to bridge the divide between the two manifestations of the sundered city. Their two stories are told in strictly alternating first person narratives as their interconnections begin to mount.

One of those connections lies via an atypical Tarot deck, three of whose cards are involved in the exchanges between the winter and summer city. Illustrations of those, The Two of Fish, The Stage, and the Nine of Smiles, preface three of the book’s four sections.

To plot, though. Jamie catches a glimpse of greenery and begins to wonder if there is another existence just out of reach. He constructs a kaleidoscope from some glass fragments, wing mirrors and a tube, and leaves it where he hopes it might be found by Esther.

The story delves into Jamie and Esther’s past lives and of their family before the split (crucially their uncles Jan and Remi were forever unable to share) while also gradually revealing the lore and customs of the city. In this, the tale of the city’s emblem, the smiling knight, assumes significant importance. In an old interview with Carmen she told of this as her inspiration for an intended film about a man who uses his death for the benefit of the city and prophesies, “‘When I die; it will be spectacular.’”

Also prophetic are a suit worn by her, black on one side, white on the other, slashed diagonally from right collarbone to left ribcage, and a two-handed saw made by Pawel. All of this comes together in the city’s Lavender Theatre, the source of the divide.

Though there is a slight imbalance between the two strands Langmead and Whiteley let their tale unfold at just the right pace, the similarities and differences between the situations of Jamie and Esther counterpointing and emphasising each other, the influence of their extended family to the past and future gradually becoming clearer in this well-written and characterful novel elegantly resolved.

One final note. Very few fantasy novels have as a plot point the construction and subsequent playing of a glass harmonica. A pleasing touch.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:-  “the orchestral pit” (usually ‘the orchestra pit’,) “to keep him a state of permanent uncertainty” (to keep him in a state of,) “crow’s feet” (crows’ feet,) “but Fairharbour’s artist population were never meant to” (Fairharbour’s artist population was never meant to.) Descendent (Descendant,) Esther has dyslexia [“the alphabet still runs away, even now”] but she is narrating half of this story with no apparent difficulty. “Hardly a shard of its enormous windows remain” (Hardly a shard … remains,) “one less eyesore” (one fewer eyesore,) “none of the Fenestration guards … have spotted” (none … has spotted,) “with nine people stood upon it” (standing upon it; there were more instances of ‘stood’ for ‘standing’,) a single opening quote mark at the beginning of a piece of direct speech; all other such marks are double. “The fishing fleet are out already” (The fishing fleet is out.)  “The crowd of Doormen part around him” (The crowd … parts around him,) “golden candelabras” (candelabra is already plural,) a new sentence without an initial capital letter, focussed (focused – used later,) “at the far end of the lawn were a large group” (was a large group,) “I dove” (I dived,) “-together, intense,” (- together, intense,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “It lays open on the wooden bench” (It lies open.) “The rippling of all the droplets dripping from the ceiling distort it” (The rippling …. distorts it,) “at the peripheral of the city” (at the periphery.) “They put her hands to her throat” (‘They put their hands to her throat’ makes more sense,) “they sweat” (‘the sweat,) “untameable enormity” (it wasn’t a terrible thing, just a large one; so ‘untameable size’ or ‘untameable extent’,) fit (fitted.)

The latest book to arrive for review in ParSec is The Rouse by China Miéville.

This is something of a doorstop; coming in at over 1000 pages.

In fact it’s such a size that the ARC (proof copy) I have received in fact comes in two paperback volumes. The first has a pagination ending at 646, the second’s starts at 649 (minus title page and publishing information, so fair enough) and ends at 1244. Heavy lifting.

The blurb calls it The Masterpiece Twenty Years in the Making. A big claim.

Miéville is of course known to me. I have reviewed nine of his books on A Son of the Rock.

The review of The Rouse ought to appear in ParSec 17.

Issue 16 of  ParSec magazine is available.

This one contains my reviews of:-

Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston

Reality Rift by Fred Gambino

No Man’s Land by Richard Morgan

Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Choyeop

Tor, 2014, 264 p.

This is a strange concoction, part SF (with more than a touch of Altered History,) part history of the author’s family – including the mystical implications of being born in a caul – part disquisition on the art of fiction.

The first section seems to be from the viewpoint of a child living in a post US Civil War era where the North is ruled by a queen and there are Martians apparently threatening Earth. (Or is that bit an extract from the SF novel being discussed?) The second revolves around a Second World War secret endeavour. The third is less clear cut, with the narrator (or Park himself) looking into an incident in his family’s past that may, or may not, have involved aliens.

The later sections refer to and turn back on the earlier ones, with characters appearing again in different guises, or are the same but in a different situation, all mixed in with the author’s family’s convoluted history. This metafictional aspect of the book does make it slightly less than a straightforward read. And hence difficult to sum up succinctly.

At one point we read, “It’s all metafiction, all the time.” Being told this doesn’t make it any easier on the reader, who, in any case, has already worked out this is metafiction.

A recurring theme is the Battle of the Crater at the Siege of Petersburg, about which I had some previous knowledge but Park subverts that when at one point, in an Altered History twist, instead of a mine exploding, the crater is said to have been created by the explosion of a locomotive on lines dug under the entrenchments to provide swift access to the city when the projected attack is to take place. (Or is this some sort of joke about the Underground Railroad?)

Park does present some aperçus. “One of the interesting things about autistic people is the insight they provide into ourselves. We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear.”

In his capacity as a tutor of writing, our narrator – we are again perhaps intended to assume this is Park himself – says, “I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told.” Park is poking fun at himself here, I suppose, for All Those Vanished Engines is very far from a simple story, simply told.

Pedant’s corner:-  “The tiny incised pattern on the plates …. were not identical” (The tiny patterns….,) “I went upstairs and smote for a while, trying to get Captain Lukas to finally make a stand” (‘smote’ here does not seem to be the past tense of smite,) “the kaiser’s government” (the Kaiser’s,) “a font of the kind of wisdom” (the phrase is ‘a fount of wisdom’,) “Burnsides’s Corps” (the general was called Burnside; so ‘Burnside’s Corps’.) “I shined the light” (shone, please.)

Tor, 2025, 123 p.

Rose House was deceased architect Basit Deniau’s greatest creation, “curled like the petals of a gypsum crystal in the shadow of a dune” in the Mojave desert. Rose House is the house where he died – and his mausoleum, his compressed remains fashioned into a diamond displayed on a plinth. It was left in his will to Deniau’s one-time student turned critic Dr Selene Gisil. Only she can have access – and only for seven days a year.

Rose House is a haunt, embedded with artificial intelligence. Selene hates it so much she left after only three of those days and fled to Turkey to pursue her career there.

Rose House has just telephoned China Lake Police Precinct to inform its officers there is a dead body inside it, as it was legally required to do.

The novella Rose/House is a locked room mystery, whose subject matter lies at the intersection of Science Fiction, horror and crime. A locked room (or locked house) to which the police cannot gain access.

A neat premise, certainly, and a book densely, even philosophically, written.

So, how did someone gain entry to Rose House only to be killed? And how can the police solve a crime or even assess the scene in such a restricted building?

To Detective Maritza Smith – forced to identify as the inanimate China Lake Police Precinct in order to gain entry along with Selene, recalled from Turkey – the house has a pervading sense of menace. To the reader it comes across like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Martine handles all this well. But the novella’s setting in the late 22^nd century seems much too far off.

Pedant’s corner:- “which oughtn’t have surprised her” (oughtn’t to have surprised her,) “Torres’ offer” (Torres’s,) “amongst Los Angeles’ most distinguished” (Los Angeles’s,) “sat in the back seat” (seated; or sitting,) a sentence ending in ‘did they’ but without a question mark, “chile enchilada” (chili enchilada,) putrescene (putrescine – used later.)

I saw in Monday’s Guardian the obituary of writer Dan Simmons. His work ranged over, horror, SF and thrillers and even ventured into historical fiction.

It was as an SF writer that I knew of him but  I did watch the TV adaptation of his novel The Terror based on the ill-fated Franklin Expedition some years ago now.  I posted a photograph of a memorial to two members of the Expedition here.

Looking at my records I see I have read two of Simmon’s novels, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, (though the obit linked to above says they were originally intended as one novel) and I have had two others (Ilium and Olympos) on my tbr pile for many years. The reason I haven’t got round to reading them yet is that they resemble doorstops, which I find a bit off-putting.

Daniel Joseph (Dan) Simmons:- 4/4/1948 – 21/2/2026. So it goes.

A Story of Interplanetary Exploration

Hodder and Stoughton, 1954, 181 p, plus 6 p colour illustrations, 1 p Contents, 1 p List of Illustrations (by Stead) and 6 p Foreword.

The author was, of course, the creator of Biggles, Great War fighter pilot and thereafter general man of action. In the 1950s he took to writing science fiction for younger readers and it was in the children’s section housed in the basement of Dumbarton Library where, after I had consumed all their Biggles books, I started on those. It is due to Johns, then – along with the similarly aimed books written by Patrick Moore – that I developed an abiding interest in science fiction as a genre.

The foreword here sets out Johns’s purpose in writing such books, to inspire young people with the sense of adventure, while also pre-empting possible criticism of inaccuracies by emphasizing there was much not known about even the Solar System those 70 years ago. (He specifically mentions Jupiter’s eleven moons. At last count there are 115 of those.)

Now to the story.

Retired Group Captain Timothy Clinton and his son Rex have been stalking deer on a Highland mountain when the mist comes down towards the end of the day. Eventually they spot five red lights in the form of a cross and stumble across a house whose door contains an immobiliser. This is where a Professor Brane stays along with his butler (and factotum) Judkins.

The Professor is partial to coffee and caramels (which he took up since smoking represented too great a danger among the flammable materials he was surrounded by in his lab) and accepts flying saucers are real. He has also invented a spaceship he calls the Spacemaster, which is powered by cosmic rays. The red cross is a navigational aid to finding his way back home. Naturally he invites Clinton and Timothy to join him – and Judkins – on exploratory expeditions beyond Earth.

Various trips see them have a close encounter with a flying saucer, find life on the Moon, dinosaurs on Venus – a planet on which the Professor wants to take the opportunity to empty Spacemaster’s rubbish bins! – a Mars with no mountains but signs of humans; the last of whom are entombed on Phobos, before returning to Earth where they get the better of some foreign spies alerted to the possible existence of a spaceship by newspaper reports of strange apparitions in the Highland skies.

The whole thing is firmly of its time and ineluctably male but for what was back then called a juvenile (nowadays YA) spends very little time focusing on Rex.

Pedant’s corner:- “the stars would be overheard again long before they could reach their lodge” (overhead again,) “before a rough, overgrown track, guided them” (doesn’t need that second comma,) the word ‘professor’ appears within sentences both capitalised and uncapitalised seemingly randomly, “poor Judkins’ great anxiety” (Judkins’s,) “‘water, which is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen’” (Er, no. A mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would simply be that, a mixture of two gases. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Compounds have totally different properties from the elements needed to make them,) “the rudder, insert vertically in the exhaust thrust just below the nozzles” (inserted,) diaphram (diaphragm,) “level with he top of the gorge ” (with the top,) “everywhere there where little flecks” (everywhere there were little flecks.) “The affect of this on the human body” (The effect of this,)  “for the most part outlines were spoiled” (for the most part its outlines were spoiled,) the Professor says stray particles of hydrogen might have been caused to ignite by the ship’s velocity (for hydrogen to burn oxygen is also required,) gasses (gases – which appeared later,) the Professor says petroleum is a mixture of carbon and hydrogen (see above for water. Petroleum is a mixture, yes, but of differing compounds of carbon and hydrogen,) acclerated (accelerated,) “the same state of nuclear fission as the Sun” (nuclear fusion that would be,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech.

Headline, 2022, 287 p. First published 1987.

When originally published the trilogy of which this is the first instalment was titled Xenogenesis. It now seems to be called Lilith’s Brood.

Lilith Iyapo wakes up in what appears to be a prison cell, provided with bland food. She has memories of this happening previously and also of her life on Earth when her husband and child had died in a traffic accident. This was shortly before a nuclear war left the planet uninhabitable (to humans at least.) She soon learns that a few humans were rescued from the apocalypse by an alien race, the Oankali; a species for which genetic engineering is essential.

The first appearance to her of an Oankali shocks her: they are covered in small tentacles acting as sensory organs, and which are attracted by movement. The Oankali have three sexes; male, female and ooloi. All have the ability to sense the biochemistry of genetics but the ooloi can manipulate it and build offspring from their mates’ genes.

Lilith is told a cancer has been removed from inside her and that the spaceship she is being held on is alive. The Oankali find cancer to be an attractive trait for their genetic manipulation purposes. They want to blend their own and human genetics, in part as their biological imperative but also to eradicate hierarchical tendencies from humans. They envisage Lilith’s part in this as to Awaken other humans and prepare them for this gene trade and a return to Earth. Lilith and the subsequent Awakened find the prospect repugnant.

When a sufficient number of people have been Awakened there are problems within the group. Specifically, some are wary of Lilith not only as a black woman but of her closeness to the Oankali and of the capabilities to manipulate the structure of the ship with which the they have endowed her, abilities naturally seen as suspicious by those not so treated.

In Dawn there are early similarities to other works of SF where people have been kept in captivity. The whole, though, depends on the credibility of the aliens and their motivations. I wasn’t entirely convinced.

Pedant’s corner:- “Where had all this been, Lilith wondered” (needs a question mark,) a missing end quotation mark after a piece of direct speech, “gasses” (gases,) “had come on to the bed with her and lay down” (and lain down,) “clean shaved” (clean shaven,) “Paul Titus’ wall” (Titus’s. Titus’ appeared again later,) “their own betrayal: No trip to Earth” (colons are not usually followed by a capital letter; ‘betrayal: no trip…’) A paragraph beginning with a piece of direct speech without having an opening quotation mark (I know this is a publishing convention but to me it feels wrong,) repellant (repellent.) “She froze where she stood and had all she could to keep from turning and running away” (is expressed awkwardly.) “It said nothing more, made no sound of its own pain” (ditto,) “she recognised Ahajas, Nikanj’s female mate as the owner” (she recognised Ahajas, Nikanj’s female mate, as the owner.) “She waited almost eager for the darkness” (needs a comma after waited,) Ahajas’ (Ahajas’s.)