"Impress of the Seventh Surge" by Jessica Mae Stover

My sort of novel. It would be wrong to give a plot summary because a large part of the fun of the novel is working out what is going on; I got it about three-quarters of the way through and the triumph of enlightenment was more than worth the earlier puzzlement. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed the stream of consciousness style. Here's an early example:  "think of a place where you feel a sense of calm waving grass bumblebee pale breakfast sun violet bubble tent motionless focused calm calm pepper fountains focused calm breathed focused spitting fountains of pepper spray hazing horizontal smoke choking clinging red-capped waves maskless faces spreading white teeth white hands over steel barricades cheap hoodies patched body armor under pastel fresco canopy window glass under boots crunching hunting through marble halls lawn gallows hanging easy as fairground dunk tanks white dome through orange noose swaying live stream crowd crush air horn". What a wonderful paragraph! The 'sense of calm' is so swiftly replaced by threat and horror.

This makes it sound like hard work. But it is very short (it took me about an hour and a half to read the whole thing) and it gets a lot easier quite quickly. And you can feel the quality in the writing. This isn't just science fiction, this is fine literary fiction. 

Selected quotes:

• "Hey, Shan! Your inhaler came, but I’m going to keep it.⁠— —⁠What, why?⁠— —⁠Because you take my breath away.⁠—"
• "This is the way the world ends, delivery on demand."
• "Sound of chimes, descending. Abandons device on kitchen table. Black blank glass islanded by scrubbed wood. Gloves up, cuts up boxes, cardboard gaping, driveway dust puffing underfoot. Mows yard. Sun dipping. Anger sweating. Mallets one stake in ground, then another. Every hit echoing off hammered hills. Two poles, cables slant."
• "The sotto back-and-forth of birdie meeting strings, soft pings, counting score, pushing doom to margins, disappearing it into grass and blowing it away until it’s eaten by sunset."
• "You can try not to forget all the injustices, the ones we’re going to be powerless to stop, I’m sure a lot of people will try to remember, but memory’s written on the wind: it fades."
• "Lungs fused to ribs like a steak well done."

A great read: high-quality literary fiction.

November 2022

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