"Never Laura" by Ewgeniya Lyras

An extraordinarily creative and original cyberpunk novel set in a dystopian world of artificial intelligence, human enhancement and hallucinogenic drugs.

Following the loss of both her parents during a suicide pandemic and her subsequent rape by a priest, trust-funded Laura spends her time in nightclubs drinking, taking drugs and having sex, usually with women. Then she takes a 'soul flight' and wakes up with bionic bits. This is a world in which IT implants are as common as piercings, allowing people to achieve all sorts of things, from making phone calls to controlling their surface appearance. This is a world in which many jobs are controlled by robots or by cyborgs. This is a world of hallucination and consequent epistemological and ontological fluidity, in which neuroscientists are working to free one's soul from one's body.

There were moments when I was reminded of Dhalgren, the classic of speculative fiction by Samuel R Delaney, of the work of Angela Carter and especially of the novels of William Burroughs such as The Wild Boys, Naked Lunch, and The Soft Machine. 

But it's a work of two halves. In the first seventeen chapters, leading to just past the 50% mark, the reader is immersed in a nightmarish world in which reality is hardly ever what it seems. The second half jumps back to before the beginning, using a far more conventional narrative form to provide the back story, to contextualise and explain the first part, and to lead us to a resolution. This is an interesting design, reminding me of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, an attempt to offer alternative perspectives on the same story, something I myself am attempting with my next novel. I'm not sure that it worked.

Equally, there were some wonderfully original phrases (see the selected quotes) but there were moments when these came perilously close to tipping over into rococo absurdity: “Battered strings of my dim energy floated between planets like rotten debris of algae in the ocean.” (Ch 17)

Nevertheless, this fascinating book offers the sort of experimental fiction that is all too rare today.   

Selected quotes:

• “Black night primed the canvas of the city and neon lights painted the portrait of its drunken soul.” (Ch 1)
• “Coming back to a sober brain is never a sweet experience.” (Ch 5)
• “His expression greased with satisfaction.” (Ch 9)
• “People convolved into sculptures of orgies, digging out unforeseen desires from the wrinkles of each others’ minds.” (Ch 10)
• “An awkward, bony guy, too smart to be talkative.” (Ch 14) My wife, who is far from laconic, was not impressed when I quoted this to her.
• “The drug-sodden air flogged the anxiety from Rick's bones.” (Ch 15)
• “Their three silhouettes shared every border, every curve and cavity.” (Ch 15)
• “It's OK to embrace pleasure. It's OK to have desires. Otherwise what’s the purpose of flesh?” (Ch 15)
• “My soul was a magical sucker on the tentacle of a giant cosmic octopus.” (Ch 15)
• “The white light of her supernova accompanied her final breath, and the blinding outburst swallowed the last bits of her before shooting the bullets of her energy through my celestial body, pervading me with her life.” (Ch 17)
• “My groin was moaning like a cat in spring.” (Ch 18) !!!

September 2025; 309 pages

Published by Hay Press in 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"TIME / LIFE" by Catherine Mayer

 

An exploration of love in the face of loss.

Dory Silver, a journalist whose partner Morgen, a musician, is seriously, perhaps terminally, ill, is on stage to interview tech billionaire Elo Ó hAllmhuráin (pronounced O’Halloran) when he takes her into the future in his time machine to prove to her that time travel is possible. Unfortunately things go wrong. Stuck in the future, Dory remembers her life while trying to find a way to escape back to the past. 

It's a lot more than a homage to The Time Machine by H G Wells. It has a clever plot, alternating past and future, with a number of twists. 

There are elements of autofiction. The subtitle is "A Memoir by Dory Silver" and in the afterword, 'A Note from Catherine Mayer', the author continues the pretence that the narrative was sent to her by email. There are real people thoughout the plot eg Hayflick of the Hayflick limit (a maximum number of cell divisions enforcing a maximum human life span), Kurzweil the futurologist, and David Bowie. Both fictional Dory and real-life author Mayer have worked for TIME magazine. In particular there are a number of references to Andy Gill, late musician and member of the Gang of Four and Mayer's partner in real life, perhaps a prototype for the character of Morgen. All these things add verisimilitude (which is something a time travel narrative needs). 

There are a lot of moments where Mayer subtly plays with time. For example, it is suggested that Morgen has Covid even though he developed the disease before it emerged in China: time travel or coincidence? Dory, remembering her anonymity at university, thinks  “Ignorance and curiosity are the true comfort of strangers.” (part 1: 00:00) Dory in the future recalls this statement and thinks it is a quote but can’t remember who said it. Another little hint that the time of one's life can be convoluted.

Here are some more quotes from the text referring to time (and there are many more):

• “Every hour is happy hour. A smattering of customers, seated at the bar, abstracted and solitary, belied that message.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “Every slither of Life becomes memory ... Every memory dissolves. This too shall pass.” (part 1: 01:00)
• “The butterflies had quit the tree to flit in a haze of dandelion clocks.” (part 1: 02:00)
• “Nostalgia rarely survives close inspection. Zoom in on any period and it resolves into pixels, the good, the bad, the banal, the beautiful, all mixed together, as if in varying proportions.” (part 1: 03:00)

But where the book really takes off is in its exploration of the love between hard-bitten journalist Dory and the possibly dying Morgen. Love in the face of loss. It is tender, it is tragic, it is everyday. 

Characters

• As a largely autobiographical narrator-protagonist, the character of Dory Silver is very well developed. 
• Given that Morgen, Dory's partner, spends most of the time ill in bed, it must have been difficult to develop their character, but they nevertheless come across as three dimensional and real. I presume this is because they are based on Andy Gill, although they exist without pronouns and there's a hint that this might not be a cis relationship given that Dory states: “Our biologies may have ruled out natural conception, but nature can be circumvented.” (Part 2: 08:00). 
• The other main character, Elo the tech billionaire, a tech billionaire who has developed phones and tablets, computer games (one is called Morlocks, presumably in homage to The Time Machine), and a social media site called Fleet which fosters extremist views, transcends the initial satire to become considerably more complex and interesting. 

Selected quotes:

•  “Expecting, people call her condition. though she has glowered rather than glowed through these last long months, she takes no comfort in their expiration.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “In the few seconds it took to remove it, decipher the inscription, intimacy kit, and drop it back in its tray, the refrigerator charged her room.” (part 1: 00:00)
• “Hunger shook Dory awake in the morning, tapped her on the shoulder before she finished breakfast and lodged petitions every few minutes for the rest of the day.” (part 1: 05:00)
• “Cities tend to offer more and better insights into civilizations than rural areas.” (part 1: 05:00)
• “You eat what you are.” (Part 2: 08:00)
• “Unstructured time is the agar jelly in which ideas grow, no matter how dangerous these might prove.” (Part 2: 09:00) aka The devil makes work for idle hands.
• “Popular culture might depict cuckolds as avenging furies, but it's their unfaithful partners who behave as if they've been wronged.” (Part 2: 10:00)
• “She had assumed Elo to be criminally reckless in the way of many tycoons, their products and services faulty, their data -gathering dangerous, their contributions to climate change oversized, their wealth obscene.” (Part 2: 10:00)
• “Hatred is a virus that leaps from one host to another.” (Part 2: 10:00)

This debut novel is more than a remarkably intelligent contribution to the genre of time travel; it is also a eloquent and moving love letter to those lost through the pandemic.

May 2025; 213 pages

My pre-publication edition was issued by Renard Press in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Martian" by Andy Weir

 During a terrible storm, astronaut Mark Watney is apparently killed and abandoned by his crewmates as they scramble to escape from Mars. When he recovers consciousness, he discovers he is all alone in a wasteland with no way to communicate with the rest of the universe. However, he has the habitat and provisions left behind after the mission was aborted. He has breathable air and drinkable water, shelter, and food for 400 days. 

Much of this novel is told through the logs of the protagonist, a modern day Robinson Crusoe. After the first quarter, some of the story is told in the third person, describing events back on Earth. The present tense prevents the reader from knowing whether the narrator survives, allowing the tension to continue untilo almost the very last page. 

Refreshingly, there is no villain. The antagonist is the planet itself, as Watney struggles to survive. The excitement is provided by marvelling at his ingenuity as he contrives solutions to the problems he faces; another reminder of Robinson Crusoe.

Typically of much American fiction, there is an incredible level of detail. Each challenge and each 'fix' is carefully explained. This adds enormous verisimilitude and the feeling that the author has done meticulous research (but it also got a bit boring, so I skim read some of these bits). The overall impression is that all of this could really happen; it is almost a science fiction documentary. 

It is a very different sort of novel but it really works.

The character of Watney is that of an irrepressible joker; this irreverence provides a necessary lighter contrast the technical details and the terror of the challenge facing him. Possibly, it is the only sort of character that could credibly survive even a few days of isolation and hopelessness.

Selective quotes:

• "If I make any mistakes, there'll be nothing left but the 'Mark Watney Memorial Crater'" (4. Sol 32)
• "If you asked every engineer at NASA what the worst scenario for the Hab was, they'd all answer 'fire'. If you asked them what the outcome would be, they'd answer 'death by fire'." (4. Sol 32)
• "No plan survives first contact with implementation" (5. Sol 40)
• "'Do you believe in God, Venkat'? Mitch asked. 'Sure, lots of 'em', Venkat said. 'I'm Hindu'." (15)
• "I started the day with some nothin' tea. Nothin' tea is easy to make. First, get some hot water, then add nothin'." (24. Sol 501)
• "Every human being has a basic instinct to help each other our. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true." (26. Mission Day 687)

Brilliantly written, page-turning stuff.

December 2021, 369 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Beneath the world, a sea" by Chris Beckett

 The Submundo Delta is  surrounded by a Zone of Forgetfulness; no-one can ever remember the things they did in here, giving people the opportunity to be their hidden selves and act out their repressed desires. Ben, a goody-goody policeman, travels through the Zone to the Delta to persuade the humans living in the delta (descendants of Victorian colonists) to stop killing the duendes, a mysterious humanoid life form who are able to telepathically enter into people's thoughts. "While the forest opened her up and made her less wary and more open to emotions in general, duende contact exposed the childish neediness which lay behind so many of them, leaving her with a sense of herself as clumsy and blundering and unformed." (14)

So the book is fundamentally about how people cope when their darkest thoughts become manifest to them.

It is superbly well-written. The world building is convincing; the characters are three dimensional. The reader enters into this forest in which the dangers come from within your own head. The plot dances with madness and the irrationality of the solutions we impose in order to keep ourselves from going mad. It is a brilliant piece of fiction which makes you think about the fundamentals of personality.

The pacing is a perfect match for the four-part plot structure, with major turning points coming at the 25%, 50%, and 75% points.

Selected quotes:

• "Something inside of him was keeping up a constant din of meaningless babble, and bad puns that reduced words to empty sounds, and mocking challenges to every apparently genuine thought or feeling, each one of which was immediately contradicted, peeled away, rendered meaningless." (5)
• "He had met so many people like him in his police work, people who called themselves anarchists, lived in squats or housing cooperatives, claimed benefits, switched promiscuously from one sexual relationship to the next, and thought that just because they'd abdicated all responsibility for anything whatsoever that happened in the world, they were somehow morally superior to those like him who were actually trying to keep the wheels of the world turning." (6)
• "The Greeks had a word for it. Alethia. Unforgetting. Truth isn't something out there, in other words. It's something we already possess but have temporarily forgotten." (6)
• "They were bright, highly educated people ... used to being much sharper and better-informed than anyone they met from outside their circle, and no doubt frequently frustrated, as clever people are, by the stubborn ignorance and resistance to logic of most of the human race." (6)
• "It was apparently necessary to be constantly measuring oneself against others, worrying whether one was good enough or doing one's best, and at the same time ensuring at all times that the standard that one was using to make these judgements was the right one, and not in itself revealingly old-fashioned or low-brow or vulgar." (9)
• "These people tended to come from backgrounds ... where you are rewarded from an early age for retreating from the world into a book" (10)
• "In London or New York, you or I could spend whole days sharing the streets with thousands of people we don't know, so naturally we have a set of rules and principles that allow us to get by as autonomous individuals surrounded by anonymous strangers." (11)
• "To be free of all worry and guilt that came from having a past and a future!" (11)
• "Pheromones. Shiny eyes, Giggly excitement. Ugh! What a desperate business it all was. How repulsive even. Damp mucus membranes. Bags of bones and skin and guts, pressing clumsily together in search of - what? What could one sack of guts, half-filled with shit, hope to find in another, except more guts, more shit?" (11)
• "Of course life could be lonely ... but she should know by now ... that those exciting and ridiculously hopeful feelings were basically a trick played by biology, which saw an opportunity for reproduction looming, and duly turned on a tap to flood your bloodstream with a drug not unrelated to heroin to dampen down your critical faculties and accomplish the formation of a couple. As soon as you reached that longed-for peak, the descent began almost at once ... back to a place where, as before, you were essentially alone again, except that, if you'd not been careful, you were now shackled to another person." (14)
• "The same basic architecture was present in every human and group of humans, so that the differences between individuals and groups were presumably the result of different circumstances and different histories rather than of some people just stubbornly or wilfully being wrong." (14)
• "He would be such hard work, as people always were when they were too contained and bottled up to really know themselves." (14)
• "Things slowly connected together, like isolated spikes sticking up out of a lake that revealed themselves to be the branches of a single enormous tree, when the water was drained away." (18)
• "Jael watched his face intently, like a falcon in a sky watching the movements of small creatures below it with a cold, clear-sighted and entirely self-interested gaze." (18)
• "The merging of himself with the world around him was no longer soothing in the way it had been then because he knew it would soon be beyond his reach." (18)
• "A human being's future self is really another, separate person from who they are now. The only thing that's special about this other, particular person is that they're someone who one day you'll actually have to be. And that's the beginning of responsibility." (19)
• "I'll tell you something about being super-intelligent: it's a drag. I figure things out at once that other people spend a whole happy evening discussing. I know what people are going to say before they open their mouths. I watch people cheerfully mangling logic and have to bite my tongue while others applaud therm and tell them how wise they are." (22)
• "Being smart means you get to look at the fractals at a higher magnification than everyone else." (22)
• "Fuck knows what someone like you does with all the needs an d wants you've had to suppress ... but I suppose they're in there somewhere, shackled in some dark cell, screaming, and rattling the bars, and slowly going mad." (22)
• "What was Ben Ronson anyway? He imagined a kind of web which linked up objects out there in the world with memories and nodes of feeling in long branching chains. At any particular moment almost all of this web was in darkness, and if he had a self at all, it was a kind of spotlight that swept back and forth through these hundreds of millions of branching chains, searching for some kind of meaning, some kind of sense that he was connected to something he wanted." (22)
• "If I survive this ... I will do something new. Why otherwise would I need more life than I've already had?" (25)
• "I'm the Ben that always exists when no one is watching him, not even Ben himself." (28)

Utterly readable. A page-turned. Brilliant.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God