One of Those Years
It has been one of those years that come along irregularly in which, wherever we look, we come upon literary treasures.
No fans of the short story, for instance, should complain about a year in which we have been gifted with new collections by Kate Atkinson and Steven Millhauser. Both writers, incidentally, who should be far better known among readers of the fantastic. Kate Atkinson’s first ...Read More
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The Big Book of Cyberpunk, Jared Shurin, ed. (Vintage 978-0-59346-723-7, $32.50, 1,136pp, tp) September 2023.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the pre-War experiment of television was reintroduced. For a time, there was unease that the abyssal screen into which we stared might also be staring into us – “Big Brother is watching you” as George Orwell put it. Events such as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth ...Read More
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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
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Part way through The Silence by Don DeLillo (Picador) I came across a passage that resonated with me more that it perhaps might have done in other circumstances. One of the characters, in one of those archetypal DeLillo conversations that have the dispiriting and disconnecting feel of overlapping monologues, asks: “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”
DeLillo’s novella was written before the pandemic that ...Read More
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Every so often you come across a book that seems to act as a nexus, drawing other recently read books into an unexpected pattern, even though they otherwise seem completely unconnected. For me, this year, that nexus was The Dollmaker by Nina Allan (riverrun). One of the two central characters is a dwarf who becomes an expert and sought-after maker of dolls, which immediately called to mind Little by Edward ...Read More
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It’s been a hard year. The rule of ignorance and selfishness in Trump’s America; the wilful destruction of economic probity at the behest of perceived (and probably illusory) political necessity in Brexit Britain; the continued rise of the far right in Hungary, Poland, Italy, France, and elsewhere. All of this is, at some point, going to feed through into a wave of fictions built around the ongoing sense of fear ...Read More
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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
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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
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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
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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
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More and more, as I look back each year on what has caught my eye, I find myself drawn to works of genre uncertainty, work that plays with what had been safely familiar tropes, and results in fiction where we cannot convincingly say: that is science fiction, or that is fantasy, or that is mainstream. It is here, it seems to me, here in these borderlands, these debatable lands, that ...Read More
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