Author:Alicia Whiteley

There are so many original elements to this novel it’s hard to know where to start. The sci-fi trope it starts with is the ‘friendly invasion’. Earth discovers intelligent life on Qita, and its inhabitants in turn surrender completely to the human invasion of their world. However, Whiteley sets the vast majority of her novel in Devon and the title invites comparison to the Du Maurier West Country classic. After a tour of duty to Qita Jem, owner of the Skyward Inn, runs her establishment with her son Fosse, and Qitan Islay who provides the pub with its ‘brew’ – a Qitan drink with seriously hallucinogenic properties. Their part of the West country is in the Protectorate – a society that eschews high technology and contact with the rest of humanity. Outsiders – a second Qitan, and a family seeking to move into a vacant property, set in motion a chain of events that shakes the Protectorate and forces Fosse to flee.

Whiteley takes her time to create the Protectorate society and her principal characters, and the first half of the novel proceeds at a leisurely pace. Jem in particular is an exceptionally well-drawn character, both rooted in » Continue Reading.

Author:Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, made a huge stir five years ago. It followed two descending lines of a Ghananian woman over several centuries – crossing from colonial Africa to America and from slavery to the present day. Me, I felt it dominated by structure and theme, and just as we had felt familiar with one group of characters their chapter ended and we moved on another generation. I wondered what she’d do next. This, her second novel, is immensely more satisfying. It has a tight focus on Gifty – a Ghanian-American neuroscientist researcher, her mother and her brother Nana. Through two timelines we follow Gifty’s relationship with her deeply depressed mother in present day Stanford, and with her mother and brother twenty years previously in Alabama. Their father, Chin-Chin Man, initially accompanies them to America but returns to Ghana. Gifty is a completely realised character both as a 28-year old scientist and carer for her mother, and as a girl helpless to prevent tragedy enveloping her family. It is a novel that explores religious belief, opioid addiction. and above all how we try and fix the things that have happened to us that we are helpless to » Continue Reading.

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.