It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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Slow Gods, Claire North

I’ve been following the career of Claire North, a pseudonym of Catherine Webb, since her debut under that name, The Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014, UK). I thought it good-ish, but things started picking up with The Sudden Appearance of Hope (2016, UK) – which, if I remember correctly, managed an impressively accurate description of Dubai – and by The Pursuit of William Abbey (2019, UK) she was on my must-buy list.

Which brings me to her latest, Slow Gods (2025). Which is, well, a Banksian space opera. Iain M Banks’s space opera novels have been copied a lot over the past thirty five years, but Slow Gods comes closer than many. Which is not to say there’s nothing original in Slow Gods, because there’s plenty.

Interstellar travel in the universe of Slow Gods is accomplished via arcspace, but journeys through it are extremely unsettling to humans (there were definite vibes of the movie Event Horizon here). Ships require a human Pilot, who is plugged into the ship, but they can only Pilot for two or three trips before suffering a psychotic break. Or worse.

The Shine, properly the United Social Venture, is the complete antithesis of Banks’s Culture. A rich and powerful elite enjoy lives of untrammelled luxury supported by the labour of an indentured population kept permanently in debt. The Shine “Management” are cruel, sadistic and sociopathic. Any resemblance to twenty-first century USA is undoubtedly intended.

The Shine uses criminals and debtors as Pilots, and surgically destroys their higher brain functions so they last longer. It gives the Shine an advantage in interstellar travel. Mawukana na-Vdnaze was arrested during a Corpsec sweep, and promptly condemned to be a Pilot, but the surgery did not happen. Maw’s ship was then lost in arcspace, but somehow he managed to bring it home – but he was changed in the process. He is now effectively immortal, and he can Pilot through arcspace without being affected and with pinpoint accuracy.

The Slow, a huge and enigmatic AI with a very successful record of predicting the future, declares a binary star system will go nova, and the resulting wavefront will wipe out all worlds within an eighty light year radius. Which includes the Shine. But Management declares this “fake news” and does nothing to protect their worlds from the resulting wavefront.

Maw escapes the Shine, and goes to work for the Accord, a loose alliance of other interstellar polities. He runs various errands, including helping rescue historical artefacts from a world among the first to be destroyed by the wavefront. The Shine continues to refuse to evacuate its worlds, and instead seems bent on conquering other planets for Management to rule. The Accord can do nothing because the Shine has blackships, stealth warships with planet-killing weaponry, hidden in the systems of the Shine’s enemies. It’s the ultimate deterrent.

All this takes place over decades. The Shine are really horrible – although, to be honest, they’re not much worse than some of the polities in other twenty-first century sf novels, although here the novelty is they’re the villains. Maw is a curiously passive protagonist, someone who is so afraid of his abilities he rarely uses them. The Accord keeps him on a small island, since other people find him just as unsettling as arcspace. There’s even a hint of Special Circumstances to Maw’s role and the missions he undertakes. The world-building is also especially good. 

I don’t think the comparison with Banks is unfair, although Slow Gods is very much a twenty-first century take on the material, with thoroughly modern sensibilities (something many writers forget to do when aping Banks). I’ll be disappointed if Slow Gods does not appear on a few award shortlists this year.


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Metronome, Tom Watson

This was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2023, which is a science fiction literary award which generally aligns with my tastes in science fiction but does occasionally throw up baffling nominees. Metronome (2022, UK) is not as bad as some novels that have been nominated for the Clarke Award in the past, but I’m not convinced it deserved its place on the shortlist.

In a country which seems culturally and politically a mishmash of the UK and some random invented East European nation from literature, Whitney and Aina have been exiled to a croft on a windswept island for the crime of having a child without permission. No reason is given for the government licensing procreation, but it seems political. The two also have to take a pill three times a day – allegedly because of toxins released by the thawing of the permafrost.

None of this is convincing, nor does Watson seem to care. Metronome is a detailed account of the days before the couple’s twelve-year sentence is finally up, when the warden will come to return them home. And which of course never happens – because in these sorts of novels, it never does. Then a man and his young daughter appear – and the latter does not need to take the pills, so the permafrost toxins seem to be a political lie. Things come to a head because Whitney spends the entire novel wearing the Idiot Hat, and the revelation late in the story that he shopped the pair of them lands with a dull inevitability.

Watson can write a good sentence, but it’s all so ploddingly dull and banal and predictable. The setting never quite adds up – no surprise there, it’s a feature of the sub-sub-sub-genre, or whatever it is. Nothing is resolved – yet another feature of stories like this. East Europeans have been writing this sort of fiction for decades, and from lived experience. Metronome can never be more than a pale imitation, and so it proves. It comes as no surprise to discover it’s Watson’s first novel, and that he studied for a MA in Creative Writing. The press apparently loved it – I’ve said before I’m generally in favour of non-genre authors writing genre, but it’s depressing how literary reviewers enthuse so often about such books when no such enthusiasm is deserved.


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Eclipse, John Shirley

I read Eclipse (1985, USA) some time back in the 1990s, I think, or it might have been the late 1980s. It was originally published in 1985, but the edition I read this year was the 1999 revised edition. It’s the first of a trilogy, A Song Called Youth, followed by Eclipse Penumbra (1988, USA) and Eclipse Corona (1990, USA). For some reason, I never got around to reading books two and three.

I’ve read a lot of fiction by John Shirley over the years. He was one of the authors I fastened onto during the late 1980s, for reasons I no longer remember. He’s had an… interesting career (there’s a good interview with him from February this year on Boing Boing: here). His output has been large, including quite a lot of work-for-hire novelisations, but the quality has been variable. His works are mostly science fiction or horror, with the odd fantasy. His good stuff is definitely worth reading, the rest not so much.

Fortunately, Eclipse is one of the good ones. It’s part-cyberpunk, part-WW3, and part-punk rock. It’s set some time around the middle of this century. After Putin’s death, Russia invaded Europe. Meanwhile, fascism is on the rise everywhere in the West. There’s a space habitat called the Colony in orbit, and a high-tech floating sovereign city in the Mediterranean called Freezone. A private security company called Second Alliance has been contracted to police the war-torn cities of western Europe. Second Alliance is run by a cabal of right-wing Christian fascists, and is deeply racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and anti-Islamic. There is a small resistance trying to prevent them. The novel follows a handful of characters from the resistance: in Paris, in the Colony, and infiltrated into Second Alliance’s leadership.

If parts of this sound familiar, it’s worth remembering the novel was originally published in 1985. And even the revised edition is twenty-seven years old. Of course, there’s nothing new about fascism, and the US has been a bin fire since it was founded… In the real world, the Russian invasion was limited to Ukraine, and Israel has proven to be a rogue nation rather than a settling influence on the Middle East. And, of course, there was 9/11 and the War on Terror. True, a lot of Shirley’s world-building in Eclipse is fairly typical of cyberpunk post-war fiction of the 1980s, and it’s scary how close to present-day reality some of it is. 

Of course, back then, cyberpunk was about the tech – the capitalism run wild, or World War 3, were just setting – and here Eclipse is a little wider of the mark. It’s probably the only thing in the book that dates it – well, that and the punk rock aesthetic, which didn’t last much past the 1990s. Nonetheless, it still reads pretty well.


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The Green Man’s Holiday, Juliet E McKenna

This is the eighth book in the series, which is pretty impressive given, I believe, the first one wasn’t actually intended to be published, and certainly wasn’t planned as the first book of a series. But the premise lends itself to multiple stories, and the novels so far have been very good… so why not?

 

Daniel Mackmain is the son of a human man and a dryad. As a result, he can speak to, and interact with, creatures from English folklore. He is also occasionally given tasks by the Green Man. Over the course of the preceding seven books, Mackmain has given up his work as a jobbing carpenter, and settled down as estate manager at a stately home, and has a girlfriend who is a hydrology consultant and a Swan Maiden. Mackmain has also built up a network of people like himself, half-human half-folkoric creature, across the UK.

In The Green Man’s Holiday (2025, UK), Mackmain and his girlfriend, Fin, have taken a week off and rented a small cottage in the Mendips. First, the phones stop working, then their car, and then someone dumps a newborn on their backdoor step. They contact the police and the baby is returned to its distraught parents.

But it’s not a real baby, it’s a changeling. And Mackmain realises this. So he and Fin need to find the real baby, and then swap it for the changeling. They find the baby easily enough – through a portal at some nearby standing stones. But Fin becomes trapped on the other side of the portal while rescuing the baby, leaving Mackmain to resolve everything on his own. Without rousing the suspicions of the police.

But not, unfortunately, before attracting the attention of a hag (really nasty pieces of work, introduced in an earlier novel in the series). So Mackmain has to foil the hag, return the baby, and somehow find a way to get Fin back.

They’re a lot of fun these books – and yes, you do learn about British folklore. They deserve to be popular. I’ll happily read them as long as McKenna writes them. In this one, the odds seemed stacked higher than previously against Mackmain – of course, he’s sure to win through, but it feels like a close run thing. I admit a lot of the parts of England where these stories take place are unknown to me, and might as well be a foreign country. I mean, when I hear “Cotswolds” and “Mendips”, I think Midsummer Murders and what I call “chocolate box England”. The Green Man series may use similar locales, but there’s nothing sanitised (or even whitewashed) about them in the books, and they’re very much set in the UK of the twenty-first century.

Not my favourite of the series so far, but they’re all good so there’s only a tiny difference in it. Recommended.


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Short, Michael Blumlein

I’ve been a big fan of Blumlein’s fiction for years, ever since coming across one of his stories in an Interzone anthology back in the late 1980s – it was either his debut story, ‘Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report’, in Interzone: the 1st Anthology (1985, UK), or ‘The Brains of Rats’, his second published story, in Interzone: the 2nd Anthology (1987, UK). Whichever it was, it inspired me to track down everything else he had written.

Which was not easy at the time. I found a copy of his first collection, The Brains of Rats (1990, USA), which had been published by US small press Scream Press and was not readily available in the UK (I forget where I bought it; it might have been at a convention). His debut novel, The Movement of Mountains (1987, USA), which was science fiction, appeared in the UK in 1989. His second novel, X, Y (1993, USA), which was horror, was only available as a US massmarket paperback.

Then there was a gap – a story every year or two, a handful of novellas, but nothing at novel-length until The Healer (2005, USA). And a decade later, a handful of collections of his fiction. Of which Short (2023, USA), and its companion volume, Long (2023, USA), are the latest. Sadly, we lost Blumlein in 2019, so when these two volumes claim to be complete, they will stay that way. He was a singular talent, and almost sui generis. His stories were carefully crafted, and always thought-provoking. Some, obviously, worked better than others, and reading Short, which contains all twenty-nine of his published short stories, the differences can be stark.

Blumlein’s debut story, ‘Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report’, first published in Interzone in 1984, is remarkable. It’s also emblematic of Blumlein’s career – somewhere on the borderline between science fiction and horror, with occasional steps entirely into one genre or the other, often based around something medical, and always with very analytical prose. ‘Bestseller’, one of his more popular stories, is a case in point: a struggling writer answers a mysterious advert, and agrees to donate bone marrow for a large sum of money to an ailing billionaire. Then other parts of the billionaire’s body begin to fail, and the writer finds himself donating more and more…

Other stories read as though they were written to a specific market – ‘Snow in Dirt’, for example, was written for an anthology inspired by fairy tales. Even the stories originally published in F&SF feel like F&SF stories, and are lighter in tone than Blumlein’s other works.

Having said that, twenty-nine Blumlein stories in succession is a little overwhelming. His prose is intense and his stories are subtle. Short is a collection to be dipped into and savoured, I think. On the other hand, I now want to reread Blumlein’s novels. Fortunately, I recently purchased a copy of The Movement of Mountains (my copies of his books are in storage). 

And, of course, I have Long still to read.


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Scarpetta 23: Depraved Heart, Patricia Cornwell

Depraved Heart (2015, USA) continues on directly from Flesh and Blood (2014, USA) – which ended with a major cliffhanger: Scarpetta shot with a speargun and possibly dead… But of course she isn’t: there are at present six more books in the series. 

Depraved Heart opens some months later. Scarpetta is still recovering, and while she has no doubt she was shot by returned-from-the-dead psycho killer Carrie Grethen, the FBI is not so convinced. In fact, they seem to think Lucy is the killer. From the reader’s point of view, it’s all nonsense. And whatever is happening to defend Lucy is being kept from Scarpetta – by Benton, by Lucy, by pretty much everyone.

All of which manifests itself as a raid on Lucy’s well-defended mansion by the FBI. There’s also a young woman who seems to have fallen to her death while drunkenly adjusting a chandelier in her mother’s palatial home… but Scarpetta is not convinced it’s accidental. And there’s plenty that’s a bit weird about the murder and the victim. Not the least of which is that she knew Lucy.

All this is going on and Scarpetta is deliberately left in the dark, which means there’s lots of interiority about Grethen shooting her, and Scarpetta doubting her own memories, and suspecting some sort of conspiracy aimed at her and her loved ones…

It’s all resolved, of course, although Grethen spends the novel entirely off-stage. Given she’s the fulcrum around which the plot revolves – the title, a legal term in US justice, seemingly applies to her, although Scarpetta does worry at one point whether it could also apply to Lucy. I’m assuming everything comes to a head in the next novel in the series, Chaos (2016, USA), as Scarpetta discusses Grethen’s career of “causing chaos” several times in Depraved Heart. 

Most of the Scarpetta novels stand alone, but I’m not convinced this one does. It reads like the middle novel of a trilogy. On the other hand, Cornwell does like to make full use of her psycho killers over several novels, even if she has to bring them back from the dead a few times.


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Joy in the Morning, PG Wodehouse

Wodehouse’s first novel was published in 1902, and I had always thought his Jeeves and Wooster stories and novels were published in the decade in which they were set, the 1920s. In fact, he continued writing Jeeves and Wooster novels right up until his death in 1975, although all were set during Edwardian times. As Wodehouse himself explains, Edwardian England was one of the few periods when a character like Bertie Wooster could exist, or indeed an entire community or subculture like him, second sons living on the largesse of their families. In later decades, they would have been forced to find work to fund their lifestyles, but in the 1920s their families were still unencumbered enough to fund them.

Joy in the Morning (1946, UK) was written two decades later, just after the Second World War, while Wodehouse was in Germany after being released from internment by the Nazis. He then moved to the US and never returned to the UK. Its story, however, follows pretty much the same plot as other Jeeves and Wooster novels. Jeeves, or occasionally Wooster, is asked to help a friend in a matter, romantic or business, and somewhere involved in this is either one or two romantic couples. Who promptly split up. And Wooster ends up, against his wishes, affianced to one of the women involved.

In Joy in the Morning, Wooster is asked to help his uncle arrange a secret meeting with an American shipping magnate called J Chichester Clam (the names in these books are excellent). Meanwhile, Wooster also has to help his friend Boko Fittleworth persuade the same uncle he is a fit husband, despite being a successful writer, for Nobby Hopwood, the ward of the uncle, and against whom the uncle is set after several botched meetings. Wooster further manages to break up the engagement of Florence Craye, the uncle’s daughter, and Stilton Cheeseworth, an old schoolfriend of Wooster’s, who is both large and somewhat dim, and has chosen to join the police rather than become a MP (although, to be fair, both qualities are useful in either career). Florence, who was once affianced to Wooster, promptly re-institutes their old engagement.

The usual hijinks ensue. There’s also a young boy, the uncle’s son, whose efforts to perform good deeds generally result in hurt and chaos – such as accidentally burning down the cottage where Wooster was intending to stay.

Given Wodehouse had by this point been writing these stories and novels for three decades, it comes as no surprise the plot ticks along like well-engineered clockwork, every remark and incident falling inexorably into place to keep plot momentum at a steady pace. Unlike other Jeeves and Wooster novels I’ve read, it’s the two of them who resolve the various situations, rather than Wooster worsening matters and Jeeves resolving it all. In fact, at several points Jeeves declares himself unable to think of a solution (although on one occasion this is a deliberate ploy). Good stuff.


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The Employees, Olga Ravn

Back in 2014, Paul Park published the novel All Those Vanished Engines (2014, USA), which comprised three linked novellas. One of these, which shared the book’s title, was originally commissioned to accompany a sound installation by Stephen Vitiello at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011. The Employees (2020, Denmark) by Olga Ravn was inspired by the art of Lea Gulditte Hestelund, a Danish visual artist, after Ravn was asked to provide accompanying text for her exhibition, Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present. Knowing this in no way affects reading The Employees, although it does in part explain some parts of a novel which takes pains to obscure its story.

The novel is told in one- or two-page chapters, each of which is the testimony of a member of the crew of the Six-Thousand Ship, so called because that’s the number of people aboard it. Just like the Three Ship that went to the Moon, and indeed the One Ship that put the first human being in space. Not all of the six thousand are human, some of them are androids – the novel is vague to their exact status, only that they are human in all ways except actually being considered human. Science fiction is normally quite happy to feature chattel slavery without commentary, so why it bothered to invent a metaphor for it will forever be a mystery.

The opening testimonies describe members of the crew, or “employees”, visiting rooms containing “objects” from Hestelund’s installation. There are also visits outside the ship to a valley, although its unclear if the ship has landed on a planet or is in space. At some point, the non-human humans object to not being treated as humans, and mutiny. This is supposed to comment meaningfully on the human, or indeed non-human, condition.

The problem is, there is nothing new here. And couching everything in terms so vague, despite the manifold viewpoints, does not render the story profound or deep. I am in general in favour of science fiction written by non-genre writers. Their unfamiliarity with the tropes and conventions of science fiction can result in something interesting to say about common sf concerns – although that “common” often means their treatment is old-fashioned or adds little to the genre conversation. 

And so it is here: The Employees, while poetically written, contains no new insights into the human condition, or even human resources. Some nice prose, an interesting structure, and a link to an art installation of a real-life artist are married to a story that tries hard to hide the fact it is thuddingly obvious from start to finish.


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Wheel of Time 14: A Memory of Light, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson

And so the Wheel of Time finally rolls to a halt. After fourteen volumes in what was intended to be a ten-book series, and the literal death of the author. It has been a slog, a brain-rotting plod through some of the worst prose ever to appear between two covers. Jordan had no discipline, seemed to think a plot meant merely moving characters around on a map, or, occasionally, not moving them, and used quirks and silly habits to define each of his cast, who behaved like teenagers. Sanderson, who wrote the last three books, is little better. He may treat the characters like adults, but he doesn’t understand what a chapter is. In A Memory of Light (2013, USA), there is a chapter which describes every skirmish of the Last Battle over a single day and is nearly 200 pages long. And is then followed by three much shorter chapters, also covering the Last Battle on that same day. Sanderson’s prose is also somewhere around the same level as Dan Brown or RA Salvatore:

… a skim of ebullience over sombreness.

Simply rob anyone who was not poor. Of course, that would just make everyone poor in the end.

The beasts yelled, howled and screeched depending on the orifice they’d been given.

Cooked bodies. To them, it was like the aroma of fresh bread.

… as the trumpets sounded in the air.

The houses had the feel of mice clustered together before a cat.

The Last Battle is the centrepiece of the novel, it’s what everything has been leading up to over thirteen fat books. It takes place on the Field of Merrilor, which is actually a random piece of ground on the border between two countries. No reason is given for the name, or why a random section of countryside should deserve a name. In real history, battles are named for nearby towns or villages, such as Waterloo. The nearest town or village to the Field of Merrilor is– oh, there isn’t one.

While all this is going on, Rand is battling the Dark One in some sort of place outside of time and space. This fight seems to involve each of them showing each other what the future will be like if either of them survives, and shouting at each other IN ALL CAPS.

The whole thing is dragged out so much, it’s mind-numbingly boring. We know the good guys are going to win because Mat is a tactical genius – despite the fact the bad guys hugely outnumber them and have an actual superhero leading them. There are, of course, other battles going on elsewhere – three of them, in fact. But they’re soon lost and everything shifts to the Field of Merrilor. I’ll say one thing in Sanderson’s defence: he finds some novel uses for Travelling (but then everything else the Aes Sedai and Asha’man do is just your standard AD&D battle magic).

Pretty much all of the central cast survive to the end of the book, although Sanderson throws a few bait-and-switches in order to make it happen. The Forsaken… I’d completely lost track of who was who. They’ve changed names and appearances throughout the series. Nor did they seem to do much except whinge at each other. In fact, for much of the novel, if not the entire series, the biggest hurdles the good guys had to face were other good guys. The Seanchan invasion. The Children of Light. All the various factions. And, after all that, the bad guys turn up in overwhelming force, with hundreds of thousands of Trollocs, every other nasty creature that’s been named in the previous thirteen books, and an actual army, with its own wielders of the One Power, from some other part of the world that’s been mentioned perhaps twice in the entire series…

The Wheel of Time is not a good series, and A Memory of Light is not a good novel nor a good end to the series. I’m glad I finally finished the series. I’m also slightly astonished I bothered to read it all.


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There is No Antimemetics Division, qntm

Novels originally published on blogs which went on to become bestsellers when picked up by a traditional imprint are not new – The Martian (2011, USA), Wool (2011, USA), Fifty Shades of Gray (2011, UK), for example. Novels which originally appeared on AO3 have also picked up contracts from traditional publishers. To these routes we can now add the SCP Foundation, a collective writing project in which contributors post stories based within the SCP Foundation’s universe. Think X-Files meets Lovecraft meets Copypasta meets Resident Evil. Sort of.

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025, UK) is a reformatted collection of stories originally published on the SCP Foundation website by Sam Hughes, given a story arc as a loose framing narrative, and expanded to novel-length with an original novella. It works. Sort of. It’s a fix-up and the joins are not difficult to spot. The universe is a collaborative project, although I believe the “antimemetic” aspect is original to qntm.

In the universe of the SCP Foundation, the world is under constant threat by paranormal and supernatural phenomena. A secret organisation exists in order to combat these threats. It’s called the Unknown Organisation, UO. (While the UO is international, the novel is set entirely within the UK.) The idea has been around for years. There was a RPG called Delta Green based on the same premise back in the 1990s. The X-Files covered similar ground in some episodes.

Where There is No Antimemetics Division differs is that the threats the titular division combats are entirely idea-based. They’re memes. Even then, we’ve been there before – I remember similar ideas in some of the New Who series. It’s a neat central premise. It’s partly presented as case-files, which is a somewhat obvious spin on the material, but is also a quick and effective way to world-build. Unfortunately, there’s not much drama or jeopardy in, well, bad ideas. So There is No Antimemetics Division turns the various memetic “unknowns” into mechanisms to generate horror tropes. Especially in the final section of the novel, in which a much-feared Unknown has escaped from idea-space and is turning the real world into some sort of post-apocalyptic zombified wasteland.

To add verisimilitude to the narrative parts of it are redacted. But it’s often easy to figure out the redacted words and they’re… banal. “And”. “Was”. Words that would not normally be redacted because they’re not informative or revealing. If it’s a gimmick, it didn’t work for me.

There’s probably something ironic in the fact some of the ideas in There is No Antimemetic Division just bounced off me, while others were a little too familiar. I also felt some of the ideas lacked rigour, and the UO and its capabilities, and the technology behind it, appeared to change from page to page. Eventually, the whole edifice slowly collapsed under the weight of its own premise. A neat idea, perhaps, that overstayed its welcome at novel-length and probably worked best in its original incarnation, a wiki of short stories. For me, the novel never really recovered from asking me to swallow an invisible cryptozoic creature that was 1000 metres tall and able to walk on water using its wide padded feet…