It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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Eclipse Penumbra, John Shirley

The first book of A Song Called Youth, Eclipse (1985, USA), set up the situation, but I’m not entirely convinced the sequels were originally intended. They’ve been subsequently rewritten at least twice, so they’re certainly a thing now. There’s also a shift in tone between book one and book two. Having said that, these books have in some respects proved scarily prescient.

Europe has been invaded by the New-Soviets, but the Americans defeated them – well, that version of Nato which exists in the minds of most Americans that is 99% American and apparently also funds all of Europe’s healthcare, education, etc. The Second Alliance, a Christian far right security company, has taken over policing Europe, but they’re actually working to turn Europe into a white supremacist state under their leadership. They’re being fought by the New Resistance, now based in Malta after escaping France. There’s also a space colony, which has been taken over by SA after an internal revolt; it’s also being blockaded by the New-Soviets.

Eclipse had a 1980s cyberpunk feel. One character was a famous guitarist, and died jamming on top of the Arc de Triomphe as it was attacked by giant steampunk-ish wheel tanks. Eclipse Penumbra (1988, USA) dials all this back and goes for straight-up future war. We have a handful of viewpoint characters in the NR, and through them we see several military actions against the SA. In the space colony, the SA administration takes one step too far when it packs a maintenance shuttle with dissidents and non-whites and blows it up in an “accident”. This prompts the head of security to flip sides – although he’d already seen the writing on the wall, and it didn’t bode well for him.

Meanwhile, the NR leadership has managed to get hold of some incriminating footage of a SA bigwig and the US president. Smoke, the jaded writer with the pet crow from Eclipse (another cyberpunk-ish touch), is making a name for himself back in the US as a pundit. The NR campaign finally swings US public opinion against SA, and the president. It helps that one of the other SA bigwigs has infiltrated an assassin into the SA headquarters – and he successfully takes out the organisation’s messianic leader…

So, a hopeful ending. Of sorts. SA seems to be on its way out. The space colony is free once again. The NR has beaten the SA in southern Europe. The New-Soviets are retreating, but Europe is still in a mess – and the stateside SA are still planning on turning it into a white supremacist superstate.

In many respects, Shirley has stayed ahead of the current global situation, even given the last update of this trilogy was 26 years ago. The US in the book is just as big a bin fire as the US is today (arguably it’s been one throughout its history, it just has excellent PR), but Shirley’s version of Europe owes more to American ignorance of, and misinformation about, Europe than the reality. It’s the US that’s collapsing IRL, not the EU. I suppose it’s hardly surprising Shirley is closer with his future US.

The end of Eclipse Penumbra doesn’t give much of a clue where the third book, Eclipse Corona (1990, USA) is likely to go. The “corona” in the title, incidentally, is extremely unlikely to have anything to do with a virus. But we shall see. So far the trilogy is proving solid Shirley without really standing out. I’ve a feeling Eclipse’s time has passed and, despite updates and rewrites, it will never recapture that. Which leaves A Song Called Youth in a strange place.


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Luminous, Silvia Park

Luminous (2025, USA) was nominated for the Clarke Award this year (won by EJ Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again (2025, UK)), which is not necessarily an indicator of quality (see Chilling Effect, Sea of Rust, The Last Astronaut, etc.). But Luminous did get some good reviews – some very effusively positive reviews, in fact. So it goes without saying I was not especially impressed…

The novel is set in Seoul, some time after a war unified the two Koreas. Jun is a detective in the Robot Crimes squad (of two) and a war veteran. He is in fact half bionic as he was seriously wounded by a robot suicide bomber, called a HALO, during the war. And he’s a trans man.

Ruijie is a young disabled girl at a summer school. There’s a scrapyard next to the school, where she sneaks off to explore. She finds a damaged boy robot who calls himself Yoyo. Ruijie and her friends work together to protect Yoyo from the scrappers. He’s also clearly more sophisticated than other robots.

When Eli, a robot girl, goes missing, Jun investigates. Eli was an early model of the Sakura robot, made by Imagine Friends. Which is where Jun’s sister works. Imagine Friends specialises in robot children. These robots are mostly indistinguishable from real children.

In this future unified Korea, which seems pretty much like South Korea now, robots are common. Except they’re only robots because the novel tells us they are. They might as well be human from their actions and dialogue. And the fact most of them are children is, well, a bit skeevy. It’s a crime in this future Korea to assault robot children. But not robot adults. There’s a scene where a group of men get together and attack a group of robot women using baseball bats and clubs.

Imagine Friends are about to release a new boy robot. It turns out it’s based on Yoyo from the scrapyard – or rather, the original Yoyo was a prototype created by Jun’s father and brought home for his son and daughter. But that Yoyo disappeared years ago. In fact, he was used as the model for a series of HALO robots – boy robot suicide bombers. As was the Sakura girl robot. Is it just me, or is selling boy and girl robots that are the same models as ones used as suicide bombers during a war a really bad idea? And why was Jun blown up by one – North Korea didn’t have the technology to build them.

The whole robot thing in Luminous just doesn’t work. We’re asked to believe in children suicide bombers, that children identical to those suicide bombers are not triggering, that assaulting female robots who resemble real women is acceptable. And we’re supposed to believe the robots are indeed robots when they act and feel and speak like humans.

Then there’s the writing. I don’t know whether it’s just US science fiction or US literature in general, but some of the prose held up in recent years as good writing is just meaningless drivel. It seems to have no idea how to use metaphors. For example;

He had a smooth, high voice, but he had so many more he could slip into like a chest full of shoes. (p 163)

What does this even mean? Or,

Sometimes the heart can fail without war. This phrase would live in her heart until the end. (p 181)

Complete nonsense. And this is not how you use the verb cobble:

He could barely cobble sense of the title. (p 197)

This is just plain wrong:

Why isn’t there a male equivalent for the word maid? … The Brits have their skivvies… (p 204)

A skivvy is a slang term for a domestic servant. The nearest male equivalent to a maid is probably a footman. And finally,

… but children are still ships that have yet to be built, and now this boy was forced to float in his own wreckage. (p 272)

This is just garbage prose. There are sentences like these on pretty much every page.

In its defence, Luminous was not a chore to read – but an unconvincing premise, and prose that tries too hard and too often falls flat on its face, do not for me make an award-worthy novel.


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Macroscope, Piers Anthony

As a general rule, I avoid anything written by Piers Anthony. I read a couple of his books back in the 1980s and thought them either not especially good or somewhat dodgy. But Macroscope (1969, USA) was shortlisted for the Hugo Award (it lost to Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, USA), so I decided to give it a read.

The title of Macroscope refers to an orbital facility which contains a device which can use “macrons” to view any part of the visible universe, much like a space-based telescope, except to a level of detail and discrimination impossible to a telescope. It can, for example, focus on a world thousands of light-years away and show its alien inhabitants going about their daily business. But thousands of years ago, as macrons propagate at light speed. It can also view Earth, and act as an extremely powerful spy satellite.

Ivo is minding his own business in a city in Georgia (not the country, but the US state), when he is approached by a man who quotes an obscure line of poetry at him. This tells Ivo that his best friend Brad needs him. Brad, who has a genius-level IQ, works at the macroscope space station. Ivo and the man, Groton, drive south to Florida, and are launched in a rocket.

The macroscope scientists have discovered that someone somewhere in the galaxy is broadcasting a macron signal. Several of the scientists have tried to view it and it has wiped their minds. Brad wants Ivo to contact Schön, who is an actual super-genius, and whom only Ivo can contact, and ask him to help solve the “destroyer” signal. Ivo, Brad and Schön are all products of a project to breed and raise children in an environment that will result in high IQs. It was only partially successful.

Anthony drags out the revelation for more than half the book, but it’s pretty obvious from the first few pages that Schön doesn’t really exist: he is one of Ivo’s personalities. Or rather, Ivo is one of Schön’s. Apparently, Schön decided at the age of five he was bored with life, so he created Ivo and went dormant. Five seems an absurdly young age to do this.

A powerful senator visits the macroscope and falls victim to the destroyer. So Ivo, Brad, Groton and his wife, Beatryx, and Brad’s fiancée, Afra, steal the macroscope. They know there is useful scientific and technological information being broadcast using macrons, but they can’t reach it because of the destroyer signal. Brad tries and has his mind wiped. But Ivo is not affected, probably because the destroyer only affects IQs above a certain level. He manages to bypass it and begins downloading information. They use it to boost the macroscope to Neptune at 10 G, so they can escape the UN’s pursuing fleet. In order to survive the sustained high acceleration they must first convert themselves into protoplasmic liquid. Which they do. After converting themselves back into human bodies, they settle on Triton, and start using more high tech from the macron broadcasts. They decide they need to find the destroyer and, er, destroy it.

I think it’s pretty safe to say John Varley was aware of Macroscope when he began writing The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977, USA). He probably took the idea of the “hotline” from Anthony’s novel. He did, however, do something completely different with it, and The Ophiuchi Hotline is a much, much better novel than Macroscope.

Reading Macroscope, it comes as no surprise the author later wrote a novel titled The Color of Her Panties (1992, USA). Yes, really. And yet there are parts of Macroscope that display a sort of cosmological hard sf that didn’t really appear until the 1980s, and from the 1990s onwards has pretty much fuelled the careers of writers such as Stephen Baxter. For example, having decided on an objective, Ivo, Afra, Groton and Beatryx use knowledge learned from the macron broadcasts to bury their base deep in Triton, and then smash the moon into Neptune, causing the gas giant to collapse and form a black hole, which they use to transport themselves fifty light years from the Solar system. This is genuine sense of wonder stuff.

And then, like a black hole, the story slowly falls in on itself, until the only thing that’s left is the feeling you’ve just wasted however many hours reading a book that didn’t really deserve being read. Because once the four protagonists have left the galaxy, they manage to figure out the destroyer signal is being sent from a series of stations scattered about the Milky Way. They track one down, and board it. It’s empty, and seems to be some sort of museum. Which is handy, as it explains what the macron broadcasts are, what the destroyer signal is, and why it was necessary. The explanation is… not very interesting.

Then there’s everything else in the novel. Anthony tries to discuss misogyny and racism, but his racism and misogyny is so obvious the arguments have no force. In one chapter, for example, Beatryx is sent to a world where whites kill blacks on sight. Ivo spends much of the book lusting after Afra, and only occasionally considering what other qualities she might have. Then there’s this line:

“Even the subtle racism of the educated Southern white had its rules and restrictions; it was not inherently evil” (p 209)

Nope. It is. In all its forms.

And, finally, who can get forget the poetry? Ivo likes to pretend he is the reincarnation of a nineteenth-century American poet called Sidney Lanier. It serves no actual purpose in the plot, but it does allow Anthony to quote some of Lanier’s poetry. And… it’s fucking awful. Complete drivel. For example:

How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night
(p244)

Macroscope is a book, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python, for laying down and avoiding. Sadly, it is perhaps one of Anthony’s better books.


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On the Calculation of Volume III, Solvej Balle

Something struck me as I read this third book in a planned series of seven: how discursive it is. Volume 3 (see what I did there?) opens with Tara Salter, who has been stuck in 19 November, Goundhog Day-like, for two books, obsessing about Romans. She stumbled across a lecture at a university in Düsseldorf, and has been researching the subject ever since. She has the time to do so. By this point, references to Groundhog Day are just stating the obvious, but this book does seem more like the movie than the earlier two books, especially where Bill Murray’s characters spends the same day over and over again learning how to become a virtuoso piano player in order to impress Andie McDowell, the woman he fancies.

Having said that, there’s no romance in On the Calculation of Volume III (2021, Denmark). Tara is happily married, although temporally separated from her husband. Her interest in the Romans leads her to Henry, who is in the same situation as her, trapped in 19 November. They spend time together, learn about each other. Henry introduces Tara to another person in the same situation, a young woman, Olga, who is searching for a young man she knows like them. Henry has also been spending a lot of time in the US, visiting his son.

Olga and her companion, Ralf, who is currently missing, have different ideas about how to make use of the fact they’re trapped in a single day. Ralf wants to use it to prevent accidents – which again reminds of a specific incident in Groundhog Day, when Murray saves a man using the Heimlich.

After finding Ralf, the four move into a house on the outskirts of Bremen. When another nine people in the same situation suddenly arrive.

It’s like there’s a sudden shift in gear two-thirds of the way through this book. Tara considers her growing occupation with the Romans, and then the differences in philosophy between Olga and Ralf, and then suddenly they’re coming up with a plan to do something useful, and then a whole bunch of people turn up out of the blue… That initial discursiveness is one of the appeals of the series: Tara’s thoughtful consideration of her situation, her careful working out of its boundaries, is one of the reasons why the books work so well. But that isn’t very dramatic – especially for a planned seven (quite short) novels. Tara has spent two books exploring the limits of her November 19, but now the story needs to explore its limits – by introducing more characters.

I’m enjoying these, and I certainly plan to continue reading them. IV is currently available, but I’m waiting for it to drop in price; V will be published later this year. And, I assumed, VI and VII next year. Worth reading.


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Brain Twister, Mark Phillips

Although by Randall Garrett and Laurence M Janifer, Brain Twister (1962, USA) was originally published under the name Mark Phillips (the two authors’ middle names), and under the title ‘That Sweet Little Old Lady’, in Analog in 1959. Despite being a novella, it managed to be nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960. Go figure. It lost to Heinlein’s Starship Trooper (1959, USA) and much as I hate that book, it was a better winner than Brain Twister would have been.

Kenneth Malone is a FBI agent, and has been tasked with discovering the identity of the telepathic spy at the secret Yucca Flats research facility, where the US is developing a new spaceship drive. The story is set in the 1970s, although everyone still wears hats, and the only piece of invented everyday tech mentioned is a videophone. JFK is also referred to as the “youngest living ex-president”, which was weird.

Malone surmises that any telepath is likely to be insane, and so scours asylums and sanatoriums across the US, eventually finding Miss Thompson, who seems perfectly lucid, other than insisting she is immortal and Queen Elizabeth I. She agrees to help the FBI identify the spy, which results in a car journey across the country, with a stopover in Las Vegas. Malone, fellow FBI agent Boyd, nurse Barbara and Miss Thompson all wear Elizabethan dress during the trip. For reasons. Malone eventually figures out who the spy is – Miss Thompson knew who it was all along, of course.

It’s hard to describe quite how bad this novel is. It’s meant to be comic but it’s not in the least bit funny. The world-building is non-existent – it might as well have been set in 1959. And the final reveal depends on two clues dropped earlier in the narrative that weren’t, well, clues at all. Avoid at all costs


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The Deviates, Raymond F Jones

(A review posted on FB back in 2024)

Back in the 1950s, Galaxy Science Fiction began a series of reprint paperback novels which they gave away with issues of the magazine. After 35 issues, the novel series was sold to Beacon Books, who were known for publishing mildly pornographic romance paperbacks. As a result, the Galaxy novels issued by Beacon were “edited” to add sexual content. I actually wrote a blog post about these back in 2009; you can find it here.

The Deviates (1959, USA) was the second of this series – what’s the opposite of bowdlerised? there needs to be a word for this; maybe we should adopt “beaconised” – and was originally published by Avalon Books as The Secret People (1956, USA). Jones was best known for his novel This Island Earth (1952, USA), adapted into a film of the same name in 1955. He was last published in 1978, and died in 1994. He’s more or less forgotten now.

In a US recovering from a nuclear war, the genetic viability of all people is tracked and only those who won’t sire mutants are certified as “breeders”. It’s an old, and discredited, trope, but it was popular in the 1950s and produced some notable works, such as The Long Tomorrow (1955, USA) by Leigh Brackett, ‘Created He Them’, Alice Eleanor Jones, and ‘That Only a Mother’, Judith Merrill. The head of the Central Genetic Institute is Robert Wellton, who is secretly a “deviate”, but he has used his position to hide that fact.

Wellton’s deviation is beneficial – he is a telepath. So he has doctored the records such that his sperm has been used to father hundreds of children, all of whom exhibit telepathy. He has helped these “Children” to escape to a hidden village in forests in the north. (Wasn’t there an actual news story about a sperm bank doctor who used his own sperm to fertilise ova? There might have even been more than one.) Wellton comes under suspicion and so flees to the Children. But they’re no longer onboard with his mission to gradually improve humanity. They’ve built an atomic-powered spaceship – from knowing only first principles! – and want to go to Mars.

I’ve read Jones before. I don’t remember him sermonising so much. I know early US sf writers had a tendency to do so – hello, RAH! – and some of the crap they spouted barely flew in the 1950s and is now thoroughly discredited or debunked, or just plain offensive in the 21st century. Jones’s plot is based on eugenics, and a poor understanding of genetics, which is bad – but his moral arguments are more misguided than offensive.

And yet, The Deviates is supposed to be the “spiced up” version of The Secret People, and I could find nothing in it which wouldn’t have seen print in a 1956 sf novel from a major imprint. A later novel in the Beacon series, The Mating Cry (1960, Canada) by AE van Vogt, was based on van Vogt’s The House That Stood Still (1950, Canada), AKA The Undercover Aliens (1950, Canada), which happens to be a favourite sf novel, and at least I spotted the content that had been added by Beacon (reader, it did not improve the book). I haven’t read The Secret People, but I couldn’t see anything in The Deviates that might have been added by Beacon.

Oh, and the cover is a complete – and unsurprising – misrepresentation. There are no ripped blouses in the novel, and Wellton’s only “power” over women is a result of his position at the Central Genetic Institute (he can legally prevent them from having babies – see?).

Maybe the cover is the spiced up bit of the story?


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City of the Sea, Anton Gill

This is the sixth and final book in Gill’s series set in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt featuring the scribe/detective Huy. As far as I know, the first three books – City of the Horizon (1991, UK), City of Dreams (1993, UK) and City of the Dead ( 1994, UK) – were published by Bloomsbury in the early 1990s, and Gill later revisited the character and setting for a further three books in 2015, perhaps initially self-published, but later picked up by an ebook-only publisher. Except someone on the Storygraph site thinks this book was published 1999, as does AI and a lot of online sites; and the book itself claims it was first published in 1993 by Boomsbury, which I think means they used the colophon from one of the original trilogy. So, a bit of a mess. Gill’s Wikipedia page is no help either.

Anyway. Huy’s son by his first marriage has vanished, and Huy has been given permission, and a few side-tasks, to visit the City of the Sea in the Nile delta. His ex-wife and her new family live there, and the son, Heby, a soldier, had disappeared while en route across the Mediterranean to the northern part of the Egyptian empire (roughly where Lebanon is, or looks increasingly like it might be was, now). But all is not as it seems. The local high priest has been murdered and the governor asks Huy to investigate.

The great and good of the City of the Sea are, it transpires, all deeply corrupt. Plus ça change, and all that. Heby has deserted in order to sort them out, because he loves the daughter of one of them, and she was raped numerous times as a five- and six-yer-old by the now-dead high priest.

Huy is not a great detective. He uncovers the facts but often seems reluctant to act on them. Fatalism is not a good driver of justice. In fact, the villains only get their come-uppance because they over-played their hand, and General Horemhep, who has returned victorious from the wars in the north, and will later head south and become the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, is in a rush to clean things up.

Even after six books, the setting remains interesting, but Huy is also a somewhat passive protagonist for a crime novel. Gill has yet to revisit them both, which is perhaps a good thing. But I did enjoy reading them.


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Cyclops, Clive Cussler

Rereading these books, I’ve been surprised which stories I’ve remembered and which ones I’ve forgotten. Raise the Titanic! (1976, USA), Vixen 03 (1978, USA) and Night Probe! (1981, USA) had stuck in memory. But not Deep Six (1984, USA), or this one, Cyclops (1986, USA). I’d completely forgotten, for example, that Cyclops is chiefly about a secret base on the Moon the US has been operating for over a decade. You’d think you’d remember something like that in a novel.

The formula for the Dirk Pitt novels was beginning to settle by Cyclops, the eighth in the series. Open with an historical mystery, typically a ship that vanished without trace. Hint at a great treasure, or a great threat. Add a present-day geopolitical threat to the US which requires the president to get involved. Pitt is dragged in by accident, or bad luck. Tie the mystery and the present-day threat together, and resolve both.

The title refers to a US Navy Auxiliary ship which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in 1912 (Cussler never mentions the Bermuda Triangle, however). In 1989, a US millionaire goes searching for the wreck from an airship. He and his crew vanish. A full-scale search fails to find him or the airship. A few weeks later, while Dirk Pitt is working in Florida, the airship reappears. Pitt manages to stop it before it crashes into a hotel and burns. Onboard are three dead bodies – strangers, not the missing three men.

Meanwhile, the US has been running a secret Moon base programme for years. It’s so secret not even the president knows about it. Also meanwhile, Castro is making secret overtures to the Americans – because the USSR wants to take over Cuba, and he’s not happy about that.

Pitt, Giordino, Gunn, and the wife of the missing millionaire re-enact the airship’s hunt for the Cyclops, to discover what happened to the missing men. The Cuban military shoots them down, but they still find the wreck, But then they’re washed ashore on an uninhabited island. Which isn’t uninhabited. There’s a secret Soviet base on it, with a hidden radio dish that allows it to eavesdrop, and interfere, with all radio traffic in the US.

All three plots collide as Pitt blunders about, somehow managing to defy the odds – and physics, and human strength and endurance – and scupper the villains. The Soviet leadership are all nasty horrible venal people, much like the present-day US leadership, and Putin, of course. The Moon base colonists are all engineers and scientists, but they manage to defeat a squad of Soviet special forces. Pitt discovers the secret of the Cyclops – a mysterious and incalculably valuable statue it was carrying, but which isn’t in the wreck.

It all comes to an explosive head when the USSR triggers its plan to oust Castro by detonating a nuclear bomb in Havana. Except it’s not an atom bomb, although just as devastating. Pitt prevents the worst of it happening, but doesn’t entirely stop it. The results drive Castro straight into the arms of the US.

And then Pitt finds the missing statue.

The writing is bad, of course; but the formula actually works quite well in this one. And Cussler has now added Cuba to the US, after adding Canada in an earlier book. And there’s a US base on the Moon too, currently unoccupied, as the astronauts have returned home– oh wait, I forgot to mention the Soviets seized remote control of the Space Shuttle bringing the astronauts back to Earth and tried to crash it, but Pitt managed to destroy the secret Soviet base with the radio dish in time…

I’ve known from the start these books follow a downward path after Raise the Titanic!, but one or two have surprised me by not actually being as bad as I’d expected. To be fair, my expectations were really low. We shall have to see how the next book in the series fares.


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A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine

(Originally posted on FB two years ago)

A Desolation Called Peace (2021, USA) is the second book of a duology and, I think, more lauded than the first, with nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA Awards; and winning the Hugo, which the first book in the duology, A Memory Called Empire (2019, USA), also did. So you would expect high-quality science fiction from the two books, and more so from the second. But, of course, awards are not about quality, and never have been, despite the use of the word “best” in their names.

A Desolation Called Peace follows on directly from A Memory Called Empire. Mahit Dzmare has returned home to Lsel Station, but is unwilling to be debriefed as she knows it will destroy what she is: herself, and two corrupted imagos, or memory imprints, both of her predecessor in the ambassador’s role. (His murder kicked off the plot of the first book.) Meanwhile, the Teixcalaani empire has encountered an alien species and their failure to communicate with it has triggered a war. This was what Lsel Station wanted, of course – the ambassador before Dzmare had traded imago-technology for Lsel Station’s independence, but his superiors had always planned to keep the Teixcalaani empire at bay by embroiling them in a war with the mysterious aliens.

Dzmare’s lover, Three Seagrass, gets herself assigned as a language specialist to the fleet fighting the aliens, dragoons Dzmare into assisting her, and the two actually manage to open communications. Meanwhile, there are factions in the war ministry who think the only solution is ending the war by bombing the shit out of the (an?) alien home world. This does not sit well with the commander of the fleet sent to resolve the alien menace.

So, lots of politics, lots of gooey eyes between Three Seasick and Dzmare, lots of interiority and info dumps, but not, sadly, much description. There’s a lot here that reminds me of Susan R Matthews’s Jurisdiction novels, although given A Desolation Called Peace reads more like a love-letter to Three Seagrass than anything else that’s perhaps less than expected, given the set-up. The big reveal behind the aliens’ inability to communicate with humans, despite communication and language being a major feature of the two novels, and even numerous mentions of an earlier alien race contacted by the Teixcalaani empire, and several embarrassingly bad passages from the aliens’ POV… Despite all that, the big reveal is something that cropped up in a recent sf trilogy – and no doubt we’ll see it again over the next few years.

I thought A Memory Called Empire had its moments – some nice world-building, an interesting plot – but A Desolation Called Peace dials back on both. While it introduces a couple of interesting new characters, they’re not enough to overcome a dawning sense of familiarity, or the way Three Seasick begins to take over the narrative. The first book was an interesting spin on space opera, at a time when interesting spins on space opera were du jour. The second… well, either the moment has passed (it has), or it reads too much like the two books were a single novel padded out to a duology and the second book got the worst of the deal. Disappointing.


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Chilling Effect, Valerie Valdes

Chilling Effect (2019, USA) is the first book of the Captain Eva Innocente series, followed by Prime Deceptions (2020, USA) and Fault Tolerance (2022, USA). It was nominated for the Clarke Award in 2020. Which is why I read it. I will not be reading the sequels. Chilling Effect is one of several baffling choices – a less polite way of putting it would be, actually shit books – the Clarke has shortlisted in the past decade. It reads like fan fiction, cobbled together from every space opera trope used in television or movies, and given a Latinx spin for added flavour.

Innocente is the captain of an independent trader spaceship (check), with a crew of misfits (check), including a qualified medic (check), although with a crew of only five why would you waste a berth on a doctor?, an alien engineer (check), who is also a love-interest (check), a dim-witted ex-military general crewmember (check), and a pilot who plugs into the ship (check). Within the first three pages, we have slavery and indentured labour, a mysterious galactic criminal organisation, more alien races than you can count (check; very few of which are described), and an adventure on every planet the ship visits (check). The ship’s engineer later turns out to be a member of an alien elite combat unit, apparently AWOL (check). Innocente has a murky past (check), including some sort of atrocity which is mentioned frequently but never explained (check), and comes from a family that is one half criminal and one half naively innocent (check). 

The number of clichés, and they’re all TV and movie sf clichés, the book rolls out is relentless.

Nuvesta, the capital station of the BOFA (the interstellar good guy polity) is a straight rip-off of Alpha (ie, Point Central) from the movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The concert given by an alien opera singer on a cruise liner is from The Fifth Element. At one point, Innocente spends a year involuntarily “on ice”. The word “carbonite” is not used, but it’s there hovering over the text like a storm cloud. There’s also this:

“I didn’t realize I was a sweet young moisture farmer with dreams of space travel” (p 318)

It doesn’t help that the love interest, ship’s engineer Vakar, has mouth palps and claws and is basically, well, Dr Zoidberg. How can any reader take a book seriously that presents Dr Zoidberg as a romantic lead? One of the other crew-members, Sue, is accompanied by a swarm of small yellow bots. One carries a teddy bear, another wears goggles and a hat. Clearly, they’re Minions. Sue is obviously not Gru, but perhaps one of his daughters.

During the raid on the cruise liner mentioned above – and during which a pirate crew actually talk like comedy pirates – the ship “lists twenty degrees”, causing people to fall across the room (p 232). That’s straight from Attack of the Clones and made zero sense then. If the ship has gravity plates on its decks, then the actual attitude of the ship is completely fucking irrelevant to those inside.

And not to forget the short ugly alien who demands Innocente join his harem, and turns out to be a powerful alien emperor, who stalks her throughout the book with his alien armada, destroying worlds when they don’t hand her over to him. It’s not even remotely funny.

The thing with references, or Easter eggs, is that the satisfaction for the reader lies in spotting them. But when they’re so fucking obvious, there’s no thrill to be had in recognising them. It doesn’t help that Chilling Effect‘s universe is so thinly sketched-in, and so lacking in rigour, it’s hard to tell where the story is actually set. There’s a mention of the “tail-end” in Innocente’s ship, which is not a term often used in sf for spaceships. And the ship takes 47 minutes to travel from one world to another (p 323). 

The author is Cuban-American and her protagonist, Captain Eva Innocente, is Latina. So the text is littered with Spanish, none of which is translated. The use of Spanish is possibly the only thing in Chilling Effect’s favour, although it would have made sense to translate the Spanish, directly or indirectly, given the book is aimed at an English-language audience. We may not all be monoglots, but not all of us have Spanish as our second or third or fourth language.

2021 was not a good year for the Clarke Award. The award was won by The Animals in that Country (2019, Australia) by Laura Jean McKay, which I’ve not read. Also on the shortlist were Edge of Heaven, RB Kelly (2019, UK), The Infinite, Patience Agbabi (2019, UK), aimed at 9 to 11 year olds (the Clarke is not an award for children’s books), Vagabonds, Hao Jingfang (2019, China), and The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez (2019, USA), which I’ve read and thought very much over-rated. 

I find it hard to believe anyone thought Chilling Effect was one of the best half-dozen books published in the UK that year. It’s a string of sf movie tropes set in a universe which is so light on detail and rigour it might as well not exist. A book to avoid.