"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

"Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

Earth wrecked, the last hope of the human race is to find a new planet but the one they've terraformed is dominated by enormous spiders.

The narrative alternates between an account of how the spiders develop a civilization and the experiences of classicist Holsten Mason in the intervals that he is awoken from suspended animation to assist with the operation of the ark-style spaceship Gilgamesh as it seeks a habitable planet for the last survivors of the human race. 

The world building is first class. He shows us step by step how the spiders evolve (with the help of a nanovirus designed to speed evolution though it only seems to work on invertebrates) and how they develop technological capabilities (mostly by enslaving ants). Themes include technological developments, a large dose of religion, and there is even reverse feminism as the male spiders struggle to be recognised as more than mates and fodder. The Gilgamesh becomes increasingly dilapidated as the centuries pass by and battles develop between the key officers who have different strategies for the accomplishment of the mission objectives.

But it didn't work for me. The spider narrative felt like a documentary. There was a lot of telling rather than showing, the author's voice repeatedly intruded. It was difficult to empathise with any of the spider characters because after a few chapters we jumped forward a few generations to a new set of characters and the device of giving them the same names failed to provide sufficient continuity, at least for me. The Holsten Mason narrative was better because his character and the characters of those he interacted with were continuous so I could develop some degree of rapport.

The spider narrative was written in the present tense with an omniscient point of view and the Holsten narrative, told through his eyes although in the third person, in the past tense.

It was driven by parallel and interleaved plots which connected, disconnected and them came together at the climax. There were plenty of incidents.

The characterisation may be thin but this is epic sci-fi and will appeal to those who like thrillers and intricate world-building

Selected quotes:

• “Guyen was a thin, small-framed man, with a nose and mouth that both seemed to have been salvaged from a far broader face.” (2.1)
• “You know what a good lesson of history? You're screwed if you can't pay the army.” (3.3)
• “All recorded history had been a progress over a desert of broken bones.” (4.1)
• “The spiders are a curious species, and those who are drawn to the temple are the most curious of all. It was inevitable that the hot-house flower of heresy would end up nurtured by those very guardians of the orthodox.” (4.2)
• “She hunts, she wrestles, she climbs, she mates; traditional pursuits and perhaps a little old-fashioned. She prefers to think of them as timeless.” (6.1)
• “Her face was written over in that universal language of hardship and care.” (6.5)
• “For a second Holsten was looking into the stress-fractures and botch-job repairs that made up Karst’s overstrained soul.” (7.1)
• “Alpash led him to a console, still acting as though Holsten and Karst and the rest were heroes of legend brought to life, but turning out to be somewhat disappointing in the flesh.” (7.1)

December 2024; 600 pages

Published in 2015 by Tor

My paperback edition was published in 2016 by Pan

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

"Sea of Tranquillity" by Emily St John Mandel

 Strange happenings suggest that what we perceive as reality, including ourselves, might be a simulation. So the Time Institute sends a time traveller to investigate. 

As is usual with this sort of fiction, it is more interesting when the reader is still in the dark as to what has happened: monsters are always scarier before they are seen. But there are several appealing characters and the plot has a clever twist towards the end.

Mandel is best known for Station Eleven, a novel set in a post-pandemic world, presciently written pre-Covid. (This book also involves a pandemic.) As with that book, the plot is somewhat contrived, with key questions unasked (such as, if we are in a simulation, who is writing the program? and why? and how can they cope with all that information? and are they in a simulation themselves?) but the characters are strong.

But I do wish that authors wouldn't write about authors. It seems like cheating. I know they say 'write what you know' but shouldn't you also write characters that resonate with your readers?

The first section is written in the present tense; the past tense is used in most of the other parts. A first-person narrative is used for Gaspery's sections; otherwise the narratives are third-person but written from the perspective of the principal character.

It was a pleasant and easy read but I doubt it will linger in my mind.

Selected quotes:

• "Sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin." (Remittance: 4)
• "This place is utterly neutral on whether he lives or dies." (Remittance: 7)
• "A man who works long hours can hide anything." (Mirella and Vincent: 1)
• "Mirella wore a great deal of make-up at work, and when she was tired in the afternoons, sometimes her face felt heavy." (Mirella and Vincent: 1)
• "Sometimes order can be relentless." (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "What is time travel if not a security problem?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "Doesn't everything seem obvious in retrospect?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "Won't most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of others?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "The traveller's presence itself is a disruption." (Bad Chickens: 7)
• "As a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world." (Last Book Tour on Earth: reprise)
• "His heart flapped deathlessly." (Remittance 1918, 1990, 2008)

December 2023; 255 pages

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

"The Invisible Man" by H G Wells

A strange guest arrives at an inn in Iping and takes a room. He always appears in a hat and coat; his face is hidden by heavy glasses and bandages. Glimpse by glimpse, the villagers begin to suspect that something is wrong; eventually they realise that, though his clothes can be seen, his body is invisible. He flees from the village and arrives, by chance, at the house of an old acquaintance, now a doctor. Here he seeks help and tells his back story. But his experiences, and his determined and ruthless personality, have made him angry. Now he decides (like a rather stereotypical 'mad scientist' turned megalomaniac) that he will institute a reign of terror over the surrounding countryside. All he needs is an accomplice.

The brilliance of the book is the way the story is so matter of fact. This might be science fiction but everything is utterly realistic (except the invisibility). The chapters are written as if to accumulate evidence for an inquiry. The descriptions are detailed. The setting is really real: Iping is a real village near Midhurst, in Sussex where Wells as a young man was apprenticed to a chemist. The villagers sound like real Sussexers. The 'scientific' explanation of invisibility, when it comes (and Wells knew that this should be left until quite late in the story) is a mixture of real science (refraction etc) and quasi science with the brilliant addition of a mention of Roentgen who announced his discovery of X-rays (which can see through flesh, making it, as it were, invisible) less than two years before The Invisible Man was published. The style is so utterly mundane that all these truths and facts drown out one's whispers of disbelief about invisibility itself (the fundamental problem is that if a man was invisible he couldn't absorb light on his retinas and therefore he couldn't see, he would be blind).

And there are so many little details that render it utterly matter-of-fact. He stumbles going down the stairs because he can't see his feet. He makes footprints. He can be heard, and smelt by dogs. People bump into him and jostle him because they can't see him. And he has to be naked which, in January, in the snow, is not very practicable. Nor can he eat whilst being watched because the food can be seen inside him (presumably as a squalid mush) until he assimilates it.

This is the textbook way of how to write scifi: make everything else so utterly convincing that the fantasy becomes believable.

And it's great fun to read.

Selected quotes:

• "the stranger was undoubtedly an unusually strange sort of stranger" (Ch 2)
• "So it was that on the ninth day of February, at the beginning of the thaw, this singular person fell out of infinity into Iping Village." (Ch 3)
• "His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers." (Ch 4)
• "The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action." (Ch 6)
• "it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?" (Ch 7)
• "Jaffers clutched at it, and only helped to pull it off; he was struck in the mouth out of the air, and incontinently drew his truncheon and smote Teddy Henfrey savagely upon the crown of his head." (Ch 7)
• "It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man." (Ch 8)
• "Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations." (Ch 10)
• "It was strange to see him smoking; his mouth and throat, pharynx and nares, became visible as a sort of whirling smoke cast." (Ch 17)
• "Paper, for instance, is made up of transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper, fill up the interstices between the particles with oil so that there is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton fibres, linen fibres, wool fibres, woody fibres, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue. So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water." (Ch 19)
• "the place that had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town." (Ch 20)
• "In going downstairs the first time I found an unexpected difficulty because I could not see my feet" (Ch 21)
• "Robbing! Confound it! You’ll call me a thief next! Surely, Kemp, you’re not fool enough to dance on the old strings. Can’t you see my position?" (Ch 23)
• "The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realized what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was, – in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded, civilized city." (Ch 23)
• "I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition – what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there?" (Ch 23)
• "that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes – no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways – scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend the disobedient." (Ch 24)

August 2023

H G Wells wrote many books. Reviewed in this blog are:

• The War of the Worlds
• The Time Machine
• Tono-Bungay
• Love and Mr Lewisham
• The History of Mr Polly
• Kipps
• The First Men in the Moon

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

• H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
• H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot

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

"Minority Report" by Philip K Dick

 Not a novel, as I thought it was, but a collection of short stories, named after the first. I read many more novels, and I write them, so I think I understand the form. The constraints of a short story means that they are inevitably more about the plot and less about the characters. In addition, PKD is writing science fiction, so there is considerable emphasis on the concept. Given these parameters, I am sure he is a master of his genre. But I didn't find his work particularly enthralling.

• Minority Report
• The future police use three "precog idiots" to predict the future so that they can arrest and sentence those who will commit crimes. Sometimes the precogs disagree so the police use the majority verdict. Then the chief of police discovers that the precogs are predicting that he will kill a General so he goes on the run.
• Imposter
• Is Olham Olham or is he a robot booby-trapped with a bomb who has been engineered not only to resemble Olham but to think that he is Olham?
• Second Variety
• The UN are winning the post-nuclear war against the Russians because they have invented the 'claws': autonomous robots who trick their way in among soldiers and then cut them to pieces. But suppose these robots are beginning to evolve, designing themselves into new varieties?
• War Game
• The toy manufacturers of Ganymede are creating toys designed to subvert terran defences so the terrans have to test each toy before it is sold in the shops.
• What the Dead Men Say
• When millionaire businessman Louis Sarapis dies he can't be resurrected into half-life ... but then messages arrive from deep space seeking to get his protege elected President.
• Oh, to be a Blobell
• Munster is a human-blob hybrid who has children with another hybrid and has kids. According to Mendel's genetics, one is pure human, one pure blob and two hybrids. Munster's wife wants to be a human but, for tax reasons, he wants to be a blob.
• The Electric Ant
• Poole discovers he isn't a human but a robot who thinks he is a human. Discovering that his perceptions are governed by a reel of punched tape, he experiments by covering some of the holes, making new holes, and cutting the tape. These cause his perceptions to dramatically alter. Or is he actually altering reality? Solipsists beware.
• Faith of our Fathers
• In a quasi-Maoist totalitarian society, with significant echoes of 1984, humble government servant Chien is invited to meet the Absolute Benefactor. But is he being fed hallucinogenic substances by the government or by the rebels and what will the Leader be like when he encounters him?
• We can remember it for you wholesale
• Quail wants to go to Mars but he can't afford it. So he buys a memory implant so he can remember having been to Mars. But as the technicians implant it they discover that he already has memories of having been to Mars ... which have been erased ...

As you can see, many of these stories involve how we can tell what is true and what is false, whether we are awake or asleep, dreaming of being awake.

Selected quotes:

• "The late-afternoon wind carried the muffled booming of many people packed tightly together." (Minority Report)
• "It was amazing how transformed a bald man became under the stark potency of an officer's peaked and visored cap." (Minority Report)
• "He could not grasp what he was reading - or rather unable to read. ... All he found was a procession of words, randomly strung together. It was worse than Finnegan's Wake." (What the Dead Men Say)

July 2023; 290 pages

Also written by Philip K Dick and reviewed in this blog:

• The Man in the High Castle (this one is a novel!)

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

"The Armor Thieves" by Mark Budman

A thriller with a scifi/fantasy element and a delightfully amiable and likeable protagonist. When engineering genius Andrey returns to Berengaria, an East European socialist dictatorship, he discovers parts of a suit of armour that used to belong to Queen Berengaria, from whom he is descended, which have the power to render the wearer invulnerable. Despite his father's profession of secret policeman, and despite being newly married, Andrey decides to steal the armor and use it to help a group of rebel guerrillas.

I felt that the portrayal of life under a dictatorial autocracy had great verisimilitude. The security systems at the archive where Andrey works border on the incompetent; they weren't much better at the military research labs where his wife works. There was petty corruption, there was inefficency, one got a sense of the inconveniences of life, but there was never a real hint of menace.

Less plausible were the characters. Andrey is not only descended from royalty but, as he tells us, at Harvard "I graduated in record time. I had a few job offers from America’s most prestigious companies, but I ignored them." (Ch 1) His friend Viktor is "a math genius, an ace code breaker, and perennially unlucky with the girls" (Ch 1). As I have said elsewhere in this blog, I find multi-talented characters unrealistic. Fortunately, however, Andrey actually seems really rather normal. He gets a job as an archivist (and even that may be due to his family pulling strings) and marries his long-time girlfriend. More of an Everyman than a Marty Stu.

Nevertheless, the most interesting characters were those baddies who were conflicted between good and evil.

The story is mostly told from Andrey's viewpoint which provides a delightfully witty commentary. Some chapters are narrated by others. The end of the book suggests the likelihood of a sequel.

It's a good yarn and a definite page-turner.

Selected Quotes:

• "I’m trapped in an underground room, which for me is low on the list of 25 Breathtaking Places to Visit Before You Die. It’s stuffy and smells rotten and evil as if a vampire or a werewolf had finally expired after being hit with too many silver bullets or wooden stakes." (Ch 1)
• "Dad dragged the biggest skeleton out of the family closet and plopped its smelly, yellow bones on the desk in front of me." (Ch 1)
• "no one likes spies except maybe their superiors, and the spy novel readers." (Ch 5)
• "As they say in my country, it’s as easy as pissing on your fingers." (Ch 12)
• "Vesna’s and Nadya’s Dad hates birthdays, especially his own. At his fiftieth, he said that every birthday reduces the chances of the next one." (Ch 20)
• "The best attack is a 50-50 mixture of randomness and predictability. It would confuse anyone, even the attacker. And life is too short for squandering it on defense." (Ch 20)
• “People say life is a jungle,” he says. “Life is not a jungle but an African savanna. The antelopes are marching on, and the lions are pulling out and devouring the random ones. People are like that, but instead of lions, we are randomly killed by diseases and the enemies of the state. Or the state itself.” Vesna feels obligated to reply. “It’s not that random,” she says. “Young and fit antelopes generally survive, and so are young and fit people. I mean they survive diseases, not the enemies of the state. It’s a 50-50 mixture of randomness and predictability.” (Ch 23)
• "How do I get rid of useless knowledge so I’d have more room in my head for something useful?" (Ch 29)

June 2023

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

"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes

Scifi, but the best sort of Scifi, the sort of Scifi that involves the tweaking of a single parameter which changes the world, like Day of the Triffids and other books by the great John Wyndham.

It is set in the USA, in the early 1960s. Charlie Gordon is a 'retard'. He narrowly escapes being sent to an asylum for retards, getting a job sweeping up in a bakery through the kindness of the bakery owner. The other workers laugh at him and tease him and he is happy, thinking they are his friends. 

Following the successful trial of a new neurosurgery technique on Algernon, a mouse who is better at navigating mazes than dumb Charlie, the surgeons operate on Charlie. Bit by bit, at first slowly but soon by leaps and bounds, Charlie's intelligence improves. The misspellings and poor punctuation disappear from his self-penned progress reports. He starts reading, and learning languages. He starts going to lectures at the university where he has had his surgery. 

But it comes at a price. He realises that his 'friends' were patronising him, teasing him, humiliating him. Now, however, they aren't friends anymore because now that he is so much cleverer than them, they feel inadequate. As he grows clever and cleverer he starts to alienate the people who are working with him at the university too. He's much brighter than they are!

But he has problems with sex. He has emotional hang-ups from his childhood, when he was a retard, and when his mum was fearful that he would hurt his little sister.

And then (exactly half way through the book) Algernon shows signs that his mental improvement may be only temporary.

It's a great read. There are explicit references to Adam and Eve in it. About one third of the way through the nook, one of the bakery workers is decorating a wedding cake and tells Charlie: "It was evil when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. It was evil when they saw they was naked, and learned about lust and shame. And they was driven out of Paradise and the gates was closed to them. If not for that none of us would have to grow old and be sick and die." (p83) which references the forbidden knowledge theme and the sex theme and foreshadows the closing of the book all in four sentences. Much later, Charlie picks up Paradise Lost: "I could only remember it was about Adam and Eve and the tree of Knowledge, but now I couldn't make sense of it." (p 222)

Less explicitly, the book echoes Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in its tale of a creature created and then rejected by its creator, a creature who is spurned by others and is lonely. 

• "It may sound like ingratitude, but that is one of the things that I resent here - the attitude that I am a guinea pig. Nemur's constant references to having made me what I am." (p 111)
• "Everyone kept talking about me as if I were some kind of newly created thing." (p 123)
• "You've boasted time and again that I was nothing before the experiment, and I know why. Because if I was nothing, then you were responsible for creating me, and that makes you my lord and master." (p 190) Not just what the monster might have said to Frankenstein ... but also what Adam might have said to God.

Selected quotes:

• "I was holding on tite to the chair like sometimes when I go to a dentist onley Burt aint no dentist neither but he kept telling me to rilax and that gets me skared because it always means its gonna hert." (p 2) The author uses a clever technique of starting off with Charlie misspelling words and using poor grammar and punctuation (although I'm not convinced in this extract with 'because').
• "Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together." (p 60) True for novels and some mediaeval theologians suggested this was also true for God and that therefore there were limitations on what God could do (eg he couldn't create logical contradictions).
• "How foolish I was even to have thought that professors were intellectual giants. They're people - and afraid the rest of the world will find out." (p 76)
• "The best of them have been smug and patronizing - suing me to make themselves feel superior and secure in their own limitations. Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron." (p 94)
• "You can't tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel." (p 96)
• "People of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes ... think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence." (p 153) There's always that excuse: I worked hard at school and I got qualifications so I assume that if you didn't get qualifications that meant you didn't work hard and therefore I am entitled to condemn you to a low-paid, low-status life.
• "Although we know the end of the maze holds death ... I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being." (p 169)
• "Ideas explode in my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem." (p 184)
• "There were lots of people sitting in conversation groups, the kind I find impossible to join." (p 186) Know the feeling.
• "Charlie doesn't want me to pierce the upper curtain of the mind. Charlies doesn't want to know what lies beyond. Does he fear seeing God? Or seeing nothing?" (p 217)
• "Why am I always looking at life through a window?" (p 228)

Not just scifi but a well written novel to provoke plenty of thought. And there are bits which are very sixties, too.

June 2023; 238 pages

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

 

"Astral fall" by Jessica Mae Stover

 In a world of space wars, a young man graduates from military training and joins an elite team of space warriors. The bulk of the book concerns his fitting into the team; the final couple of chapters is almost a trailer for the sequel.

What I like about this book is that the author doesn't waste any time inducting the reader into the fictional world. Straight away, I had to contend with "auttie yanks" and "hardhoods", "fractal trepid suits" and "orgo-panels".  This made it very hard to read but, having persevered, the story started coming through. And all the details made it utterly convincing. It was all a bit too technical for me - it made it hard to glimpse the human dilemmas - but, remarkably, this author made what might have been a simple, futuristic space yarn seem very real. This means that it undermines the trope of militaristic novels that seem to be based on shoot-em-up games in which bad things happen with few consequences. 

Hugely atmospheric. An epic. Ideal for those who like the military equivalent of police procedurals. 

Of course, that means the reading was hard work. But in the end, it made for an extraordinarily realistic and thrilling story.

Selected quotes:

• "A patch of stars shines through a cloudhole"
• "black cloud cover— Hands fly, jerk, dance—we claw at sky and air— FALLING— The battle, the ridges, the bodies, the blood, the limp and the dead—THE RED THEATER RUSHES UP TO MEET US"
• “Don’t clutter chatter during crucials. When not sure about protocol, be polite, even downchain. Maintain secrecy at all times. What happens in the loop stays in the loop. If in doubt, create the situational report, run the diagnostic, supply the information, ask the question. Don’t assume, know."
• "The day you think that shit won’t go down, it does. I promise you that. It’s the way of the universe."
• "the most famous PT genius alive invites you to let her pull your auttie yank in her quarters, see if you pass.”
• “Military. All that mech training, all of it based on science, and yet they’re superstitious."

December 2022

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

"On the Beach" by Nevil Shute

 1963. There has been a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Everyone seems to be dead. A radioactive cloud is drifting south. Melbourne is the furthest south big city. The inhabitants are waiting to die. 

The story revolves around Australian Navy officer Peter Holmes, his wife and baby; US Submarine commander Dwight Towers, missing his presumably dead wife and children, consoled by wannabe girlfriend Moira; and scientific officer John Osborne. Each of them try to continue as if nothing is happening. Peter and his wife worry about the baby's health and make plans for their garden; Moira's father puts in fencing for his farm; Dwight buys presents for his (probably dead) wife and kids; John wants to win the very last grand prix race. Some people keep working, others get drunk.

A stunning, beautifully written study of human behaviour, and the quest for meaning in life, when faced with inevitability.

Of course, it is of its time. The women are fundamentally passive, seeking a life of housewifery and motherhood. Patriarchal attitudes are everywhere: "These bloody women, sheltered from realities, living in a sentimental dreamworld of their own. If they'd face up to things, they could help a man,help him enormously. While they clung to the dreamworld they were just a bloody millstone round his neck." (Ch 5). But the husband uses the excuse of work to leave her and go into town.

Selected quotes:

• "It's not the end of the world at all ... It's only the end of us. The world will gone on just the same, only we won't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us." (Ch 3)
• "You get scared stiff. Then directly it's over you want to go on and do it again." (Ch 7)

September 2022; 296 pages 

Shute also wrote, among many other books, A Town Like Alice

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

"Vurt" by Jeff Noon

 This is a brilliant and hugely original urban fantasy with hints of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney.

The narrator/ protagonist Scribble and his mates Beetle, new girl Mandy, shadowgirl Bridget and The Thing-from-Outer-Space are the Stash Riders; they buy and use feathers which provide shared hallucinogenic experiences akin to playing computer games. Pink feathers are pornovurts, blue feathers offer safe desires, black are bootleg vurts, "one sliver beyond the law" and yellow feathers are the most extreme, offering experiences you can't jerk out of: "if you die in a yellow dream, you die in real life." Scribble is searching for his sister Desdemona, who got left behind in the vurtual (sic) world; he needs to find the right feather and re-enter the world to bring her back. 

So the story is a classic hero's adventure in which Scribble, a superbly flawed hero, aided by his friends, must enter another realm, presided over by Game Cat, perform tasks, build up knowledge, win things of value, rescue the princess and return to the real world. Perhaps there is a bit of Orpheus going down to the underworld to rescue Eurydice. It's a story of heroism and sacrifice. There are twists. (To be honest, I got a little bit lost in the middle of the book: it;s a complicated plot.)

The world-building is gradual and brilliant. The streets of Manchester form a real backdrop to a world people by 'pure's and hybrids between humans and shadows and robots and dogs and vurts. There's a lot of action. There are cops and robocops and shadowcops, there is sex and there are drugs and there is rock'n'roll, there are car chases and shoot-outs and The Thing-from-Outer-Space. There is 'dripfeed' (state benefits) and 'droidlocks' (dreadlocks on a robocrusty) and The Haunting (a sort of deja-vu which muddles rality with vurt) and Cortex Jammers and pedheads (pedestrians) and jerkouts and Karmachanics.  It is a vivid combination of the real and the surreal, the everyday and the fantastic. It works superbly.

Selected quotes:

• "You know how a fly flies? At the top speed always, and yet dodging obstacles instantaneously? That was how The Beetle drove." (1, Stash Riders)
• "I can hardly breathe. Let me tell you: hardly is enough." (1, Sleepless)
• "My bed is warm and wide ... and life is short." (1, Jam Mode)
• "Sometimes ... life is just a wet kiss on glass." (1, Jam Mode)
• "I knew that The Beetle had the gift of seeing beauty in ugliness. It's just that I'm more used to ugliness than he is, seeing it every day in cruel mirrors, and in the mirrors of women's eyes." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "The men had that death warmed-up look so popular with the younger robogoth: all plastic bones shining proudly through tight, pale skin." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "Real life, like yellow feathers, has no jerkout facility." (1, Down the Bottle)
• "The flowers were pollen-heavy, and so was I." (2, Heavy Losses)
• "Then I slipped inside of her ... feeling the walled garden close in the caress my penis, until the sap rose to the top, and the garden was flooded. The air was heavy with pollen; the whole world was copying itself, over and over, through the act of sex. And we were enfolded in the system, sucking where the bee sucks." (2, Heavy Losses)
• "The van skidded on a wet bend and I could feel paintwork being peeled off, as the struts of a fence clawed into us." (3, Ashes to Ashes, Hair to Hair)
• "Dozens of boats were tied up along the bank; the floating families selling off stuff, just to make a small life. Some were selling food from barbecue boats. Some were selling love, the downmarket version; cheap sluts and rabid studs on deck." (3, Gun Stroke (suffering from))
• "To be pure is good, it leads to a good life. But who wants a good life? Only the lonely." (3, Game Cat)

August 2022; 325 pages

Also reviewed in this blog by Jeff Noon:

• A Man of Shadows

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

"Neuromancer" by William Gibson

The novel that introduced the word 'cyberspace' and is credited with launching the cyberpunk genre.

It's science fiction and does a phenomenal job of world-building, creating a dystopian future in which the characters move between the Sprawl, a mega-city-sized red light district on Earth, and a multiple-zone orbiting space station. But the hero character, Case, also moves through cyberspace, using electrodes to log his consciousness into a variety of different computer systems (and other consciousnesses in an IT mediated form of telepathy), experiencing their information processing as sensory data and as thoughts, and holding conversations with other entities (who manifest themselves as people, some being people he knows or knew) travelling through this Matrix.

In many ways this is a thriller of the old order in which a washed-up lowlife, usually an ex-cop or a down-on-his-luck private eye but in this case a cowboy computer hacker, is recruited by a mysterious and potentially treacherous boss (in this case a rehabilitated soldier with a bad case of PTSD thast threatens to send him mad) to carry out a mission whose purpose he doesn't fully understand. On the way he picks upo companions: a female assassin whose mind he can enter and with whom he has sex (this too is described in information technology terms, considering DNA as a line of code: "Then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message."; Ch 20); a dead hacker whose consciousness exists on a ROM (a modern uptake on a spirit guide, or the voice of a ghost); a cliched Rastafarian; and an illusion-creating magician. At least one of these will betray the mission. This novel is Raymond Chandler updated for the internet generation.

The plot itself is a classic action plot, consisting mostly of a number of exciting fight sequences interspersed with moments of relaxation.  In essence, it's a heist. Predictably, the true reason why Case has been recruited doesn't emerge till later in the story.

Needless to say, there is no character development and the back stories did not make three-dimensional credible characters.

On the positive side, Gibson has a gift of original description:

• "Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button." (Ch 1)
• "Her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight." (Ch 1)
• "Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach." (Ch 2)
• "She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill." (Ch 4)
• "The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark stone. The pavement was uneven and smelled of a century's dripping gasoline, absorbed by ancient limestone." (Ch 7)

In one way, this is an unusual book in that the hero doesn't risk life and limb, others do that for him. There were moments when I needed why Case was important to the team: his role seemed to be mostly that of observer. But I'm not sure. I found some of the writing so confusing that (a) I wasn't sure what was going on and (b) I didn't really care what was going on.  I was surprised, when I read the wikipedia plot summary afterwards, that I had actually known what was happening.

I think the reason why I found some of the writing difficult was that Gibson is a purist when it comes to world-building: he doesn't stop and explain what he is talking about, he describes things using terms that the characters would use and assumes the reader will come to understand in time (a bit like the slang language invented for A Clockwork Orange). For example: "Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input." (Ch 4) These two sentences contain six words that have particular meanings within the novel (cowboys, simstim, meat, trodes, cyberspace, matrix) and their arrival so early in the book means that one hasn't yet had time to understand them. This makes for slow reading. Nevertheless, one cannot deny to incredible power of the world Gibson has built, which spawned the cyberpunk genre.

Gibson's world reminded me of the world's built by William Burroughs in his works such as Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, and The Soft Machine.

Selected Quotes:

• "the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." (Ch 1)
• "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators" (Ch 3)
• "The music that pulsed continually through the cluster ... was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalised pop." (Ch 8)
• "The multinationals that shaped the course of human history had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality." (Ch 17)

July 2022; 297 pages

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