Author:Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts’ work often has a big concept upfront: Snow (what the snow just keeps falling); By Light Alone (what if people could photosynthesise through their hair); Gradisil (what would orbital habitats be like if they organised as a country). So…this opens on a generation starship. Fantastic, Roberts’ take on this trope. Then they arrive at their destination pretty damn quickly, and there’s a Big Dumb Object waiting. Great, Roberts’ take on the inscrutable alien BDO. Hold that coffee. We’re winding back from the far future to around ten years from now.

The story-within-a-story takes place in a US where the worst 2020 predictions of the death of democracy, informal warfare, and gun-nuttery have progressed ten-fold. Which is in many ways a shame as the elements of Roberts’ post-Trump apocalypse feel less original than the first far future section of this novel. Weaponised neonicotinoids, iphones plugging directly into people, artificial intelligence, shadowy and paranoid government agencies, malware, VPNs…it’s a convincing mix of horrors, but not quite on the level of On (idea: what if gravity operated at 90 degrees).

This is not to say that the central section of Purgatory Mount is not a satisfying read. It » Continue Reading.

Author:Courttia Newman

Courttia Newman has written a novel in which lots goes on. It’s an alternative future history of London and by implication the UK and Africa too. There’s family history, romance and revolution, multiverses and astral projection. At times there’s so much going on that you wonder whether Newman can keep a hold on all the strands he’s set in motion.

We start in a dystopian future London – in which the city is divided into two. Makriss is a talented student whose excellence buys him a Golden Ticket from the outer lands into the Ark, the city within a city populated by the elite. Fast forward a few years and Makriss is a journalist writing puff pieces, playing up the ferocity of protesters in the lowest ranks of the Ark and writing pieces supporting the regime. Gradually, through a combination of wanting to impress girls, and political debate, he is sucked into an underground uprising.

If this sounds so dystopia so normal Newman throws in some pretty unique themes into the mix. The first is a complete decolonisation of Britain and Africa: in this London African culture, cosmology and religion are as natural as Christianity. So complete is » Continue Reading.

Author:Jonathan Lethem

Or How We Got Along After The Wifi Went Down. The Arrest is an ambiguous utopia/dystopia in which advanced technology – from the internet to cars and guns – has all stopped working. At its simplest this is Lethem’s entry into the crowded canon of The Road, Station Eleven, Oryx and Crake and so on. As an avowed scifi reader Lethem also gives strong callbacks to post-apocalyptic classics such as Philip K. Dick’s Dr Bloodmoney and Walter M. Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz.

Unlike the irradiated hellholes, biological swamps or fascist regimes of many of these, Lethem’s post-tech life – seen through the eyes of unreliable narrator Journeyman AKA former Hollywood screenwriter Sandy – is not so bad. Shorn of distractions such as Netflix and international travel, a small community in Maine ekes out a pretty sweet existence in which piles of sausages and hearty soups round the fire are the chief joys of life. Just as he was a journeyman writer Before The Fall – a polisher and fixer-upper of scripts – so he is now the Journeyman, assisting the butcher (bank manager pre-Arrest) and delivering parcels across the peninsula. The farmers – led by Sandy’s sister Maddie, » Continue Reading.

Author:Kim Stanley Robinson

The future history novel is a very specific type of science fiction: relying on a narrative rather than a plot. It’s desperately unfashionable and since Wells and Stapledon novelists have made their histories implicit and revealed through action and plot rather than attempting to write a ‘history of the future’. Kim Stanley Robinson’s work, especially his Mars series, might be seen as tiptoing into this arena. Now with The Ministry of the Future he’s dived straight in. The ecological and political themes that have always driven his work are now front and centre as he tracks the history of the earth over the next thirty years.

The novel starts with an apocalyptic event: an extreme heat event in India that kills millions. Virtually the only survivor is Frank, an American aid worker. He is one of only two characters who have what could be called a storyline. The other is Mary, an Irish politician who is chosen to head the titular Ministry, brought into being in Switzerland to advocate for the generations not yet born in decision-making that affects the planet’s sustainability. Their paths cross when Frank, radicalised by his experience, kidnaps Mary to impress upon her » Continue Reading.

Author:James Tiptree Jnr.

James Tiptree Junior – real name Alice Sheldon, had such an extraordinary life, working for Army Intelligence and the CIA; careers in both painting and writing; that who she was and how she wrote is in danger of overshadowing what she wrote. This collection is a great reminder of her unique tone, and her pivotal place in sci-fi history, linking the fifties magazine style with the new wave of the sixties. Which is a way of saying that the stories here are quite diverse, and while some still pack an almighty punch others have dated.

The ones that work least successfully are a group of stories in which hard-bitten but whip-smart professionals deal with alien invasions, fixes on the galaxy’s gambling world, and the travails of trans galactic parcel deliveries. ‘Birth of A Salesman’ and ‘Faithful to Thee…’ projects a fifties world of club cars, trilbys, FedEx and PanAm into the far future. These aim for satire but too often descend into whimsy.

Then there’s a group of stories where she much more successfully flips the conventions: Beam Us Home takes the stranger in a strange land story and – as Michael Faber’s Under the Skin would » Continue Reading.

Author:Andreas Eschbach

The Hair Carpet Weavers starts with the story of just that: a hair-carpet weaver – a man spending his entire life, as his predecessors did, weaving one spectacular carpet from the hair of his wives, as an offering to the Emperor. In a series of short chapters, each from the perspective of a different character, we build up a collective picture of a planet-wide society bound together by the bizarre collective endeavour of the carpet makers . The carpets themselves are sent away on completion on spaceships to the Emperor’s Palace, and their purchasing is paid for by taxes collected by the Empire, in a form of circular economy. Worship of the Emperor, who though not seen as a God, does enjoy eternal life and unlimited power, is complete and heretics are dealt with severely. Society is governed by rigid castes and education is seen as a dangerous enterprise – though in a wicked aside an Imperial Tax Collector observes that cities who kill their teachers generally see taxable revenues fall over the long term.

The frame continually widens, as a spaceship bearing researchers from the Empire itself arrives. We learn that the Emperor himself, for whom weavers » Continue Reading.

Author:Jenny Hval

The list of novels written by musicians is not long, perhaps because writing one seems like quite hard work. Nick Cave, Louise Wener, Laughing Len on the credit side …and er Morrissey and even Bruce Dickinson on the definitely debit side. Jenny Hval, Norwegian avant-garde popist, has an entry in this short canon as strong as anyone. Paradise Rot was written in 2009 before her music career really got going and has recently been translated into English (Norwegian title Perlebryggeriet which translates literally as Pearl Brewery).

It clocks in at a slim 150 pages in large type and a couple of nights reading will see you through. The story is told by Norwegian student Jo who turns up at a British seaside university town (Aberystwyth? Southend?) to study biology. Struggling to get to grips with ‘Aybourne’ and her fellow students she finds lodgings and human contact in a barely-converted former brewery with flat-mate Carrel. Carrel and Jo become increasingly close in the claustrophobic flat, until the entry of neighbour Pym provokes a crisis. What Hval’s really concerned with is the physicality of desire. This is a book full of rot and decay – apples that decay into compost, » Continue Reading.