Paul Kincaid

Cold Water, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris 978-1-78618-722-2, £9.99, tp) November 2022. Cover by blacksheep-uk.

We’ve encountered the story many times before: the master criminal coming out of retirement for one last job; the retired doctor who finds himself the only person with medical knowledge when disaster strikes; perhaps most pertinently the aged spy called back to the service in order to unmask the mole in the Circus. So now we ...Read More

Europe at Dawn, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris 978-1781086094, £7.99, 320pp, pb) November 2018.

It may seem paradoxical, but it is the ordinari­ness that Dave Hutchinson evokes that makes his work so extraordinary. The normal run of things in science fiction is to emphasise how dif­ferent the invented world is from our normal daily experience. The world may be gritty or glitzy, utopian or dystopian, but it is decidedly not like ...Read More

An American Story, Christopher Priest (Gollancz 978-1473200579, £20.00, 320pp, hc) September 2018.

The first thing you notice is the title: An American Story. For almost 40 years, Christopher Priest has followed the same structure for the titles of practi­cally all of his novels: The X, where X is an often very oblique reference to what follows. What was affirmed in The Affirmation; what was gradual in ...Read More

Haven, Adam Roberts (Solaris 978-1781085660, $11.99, 320pp, tp) August 2018.

You can tell this novel is by Adam Roberts. It is set a hundred or so years in the future, after a global catastrophe, the collapse of civilization as we know it, and the painfully slow emergence of a way of life that is at best nasty, brutish, and short. For all that, he still manages to slip a ...Read More

Shelter, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris 978-1-78108-504-2, 304pp, £7.99, pb) June 2018. Cover by Sam Gretton.

Dave Hutchinson’s new novel Shelter is what Brian Aldiss called a cozy catastrophe, though such stories were never truly cozy and not always a catastrophe. The question is, of course, why we might need another such catastrophe story, and why now? The answer lies not in finding a new way to tell an old story ...Read More