It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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Journey into Fear, Eric Ambler

My second Ambler, this one published in 1940 and set in 1939. The Second World War has begun. Graham is a munitions engineer in Turkey, heading back to the UK with important information for his company so they can improve the Turkish navy’s guns. The Germans want to stop him.

The Germans make an attempt on his life in Istanbul, and the Turkish security services persuade Graham to travel by ship to Italy instead of the train he’d planned to take. Unfortunately, he discovers soon after departure that the German intelligence chief after him is aboard the ship; and later, the assassin who failed to kill him in Istanbul joins the ship. Fortunately one of the other passengers – there are only a dozen or so – proves to be an agent of Turkish security services.

The German offers Graham a deal: pretend to be ill at a sanatorium controlled by the German, and stay there until the information Graham knows is no longer useful to the Allies. With no way to escape the ship, Graham agrees to the deal, intending to escape as soon as he can.

Ambler keeps up the tension well, but the urbane Nazi spymaster has long since become a cliché, and even if this is the trope’s first appearance that history spoils it. Graham, on the other hand, is a good mix of effectiveness and fear, neither trained nor experienced in what he needs to do to escape his trap but smart enough to figure out a way to get out. There’s a femme fatale, of course, a dancer Graham is introduced to in a club, and she too is on the ship. Graham is drawn to her–and she openly admits to accepting engagements from men–but is faithful to his wife back in England. The most interesting character is a Frenchman, who presents as a socialist simply to annoy his wife but is beginning to find his own arguments compelling.

There’s not much to Journey into Fear (1940, UK), but its brevity and tightness is chiefly why it works so well. I’d like to read more of Ambler’s novels.


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This Brutal Moon, Bethany Jacobs

This is the third and final novel in the Kindom trilogy. I liked the first book, These Burning Stars (2023, USA), and I especially liked the neat twist it pulled near the end. But its story was based on a difficult subject, one which has aged badly in the past year or two. The sequel, On Vicious Worlds (2024, USA), tried to pull a similar twist to the first book, but was less successful – the scaffolding wasn’t there to support the reveal. The second book ended with an attempt to seize power by one of the Hands–ie, the heads of the three institutions which rule the Kindom.

And that’s what This Brutal Moon (2025, USA) mostly is: a blow-by-blow account of the war between the rebels, allied Families and Jeveni against the Brutal Hand, the head of the Cloaks, the branch of government that’s assassins and secret police rolled into one (some would say they’re the same thing anyway). Chono, head of the Clerics, the religious branch of the Treble, a reluctant rebel and a reluctant figurehead, had to persuade the various factions to fight the Cloaks. Meanwhile, the Cloaks have sent a ship to Capamame, the distant world the Jeveni escaped to, demanding forty percent of their population to work the sevite trade.

A series of flashbacks set centuries before explain how the Jeveni discovered new seams of jevite, and used it to power a generation ship which was sent to settle the world which became Capamame.

There’s a battle at the gate leading to Capamame, and an invasion of Capamame by the Cloaks – and it looks like the Cloaks have the upper hand for much of the novel, but it’s pretty clear how the book is going to end. The upset, when it comes, is not much of a surprise – partly because the flashbacks have been teasing it throughout the novel, and partly because so much of the fighting occurs off-stage it’s hard to judge how it’s going. Instead, we get factional infighting, Six sidelined for most of the narrative, an unconvincing attempt to make the twist in the second book plausible, and a Guns of Navarone-style desperate mission to destroy the Cloaks’ secret headquarters.

All this is a fun space opera with more than a hint of Warhammer 40K, but there’s that elephant in the room which skews the reading experience. In an afterword, Jacobs writes the trilogy is about genocide, but not any particular genocide. Except it doesn’t read that way. The Jeveni are a racial and religious group who survived an attempted genocide, and are still being persecuted. In the Kindom’s universe, it’s because they’re the sole miners of jevite, and later, when the moon which is the only source blows up–the genocide–they’re the only makers of its synthetic replacement, sevite. 

These Burning Stars was fun. There was a little Banks in it, the world-building was interesting, and while the characters were larger than life (and, unfortunately, included a Magical Hacker™), they were memorable. Its main plot was resolved in that novel, forcing the two sequels to deal with the larger story, which unfortunately hasn’t proven as captivating. The Capamame-based murder-mystery that was On Vicious Worlds brought the trilogy’s story arc to the fore but proved unsatisfying. And in This Brutal Moon, the resolution of the story arc has become the entire story, and it’s basically just a big battle. The cast has also grown by this point to the size where it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of who’s who and references to past events have to be taken on faith.

The first book was good enough to encourage me to carry on reading, which is not something that’s true of a number of recent space opera trilogies I’ve begun. If the second book was a dip, that’s hardly unusual in trilogies. But This Brutal Moon, to my mind, failed to pull the three books back to what the first book promised. Worth reading, but ultimately disappointing.


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Crown of Stars, James Tiptree Jr

It’s probably long past time I acknowledge Tiptree as one of my favourite genre writers, given I’ve read almost everything she wrote and will happily reread many of her stories. I’d also classify some of her fiction as stone-cold genre classics.

Crown of Stars (1988, USA), a posthumous collection, is an odd book. Especially given how Tiptree died. The contents are a mixture of science fiction and fantasy and, to be honest, the fantasy ones feel more like extended jokes than actual fiction. Not that the sf stories are all entirely serious. They are all, however, pretty dark. 

Telepathic aliens visit Earth but go away disappointed there are no gods. Poor single mothers give up their babies for adoption in a future where only the super-rich can afford “meat”. Heaven has gone bankrupt so Satan offers it space in Hell. A soldier on battle-drugs is sent to detox but finds a stash of the drugs and breaks out. A young woman is convinced the Earth is male and does her best to attract his interest. The most poignant story, however, has a teenage girl swap lives with herself at seventy, only to discover her family’s wealth had been lost, the USA consists of gated communities but is otherwise lawless, and in her attempt to make her life when she swaps back better, she inadvertently makes it worse.

These are quality stories, although none are perhaps as memorable as Tiptree’s best. ‘The Earth Like a Snake Doth Renew’, which is clearly in conversation with Tiptree’s own ‘The Last Flight of Doctor Ain’, is perhaps the top story here, or at least showcases those elements in her fiction for which she was most admired. To anyone new to Tiptree, I’d suggest starting somewhere else, perhaps her first anthology, Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (1973, USA), or one of the later best of collection, such as Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990, USA), but exploring her oeuvre is certainly worth doing.


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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980, UK) is the direct sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979, UK), although reading them this time they feel more like two parts of the same novel. There is of course a third part to follow this. And then a further two novels, which were not based on the original radio series.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the galaxy, is kidnapped from the Heart of Gold and finds himself on the home world of the company responsible for publishing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Apparently, he deliberately became president for a reason but then removed the reason from his mind. When he attempts to meet a contact suggested by another part of his mind, the city is attacked by Frogstar fighters and the entire building in which Zaphod is waiting in an office is carried away to another planet. There, Zaphod meets the man who really rules the universe, and whose identity Zaphod became president to discover. He decides the universe is in good hands.

The others meanwhile find themselves at Milliways, the titular restaurant. They’re then joined by Zaphod. They steal a ship to leave Milliways, but it turns out to be the stunt ship which will dive into a sun at the climax of the next concert by Disaster Area (a very loud music group). They jury-rig the ship’s emergency teleport system, and escape…

Ford and Arthur find themselves aboard a generation starship carrying only hairdressers, middle managers, “telephone sanitisers”, and others from the service industries. It’s the second of three generation ships – the first contains the elite, and the last the professional classes. It’s not a joke that’s aged well. It’s all very well to mock “useless” professions, but they’d been better to send off the first generation ship instead. Telephone sanitisers, whatever they are, as a rule do not fuck over vast swathes of the population on a regular basis. The generation ship crashes on a habitable world, which proves to be Earth in its prehistory.

The jokes in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe have not weathered the decades as gracefully as those in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. At Milliways, the diners are introduced to the food they’re about to eat. Taking the piss out of vegetarians and vegans is not so funny these days. Disaster Area’s manager is spending a year dead “for tax purposes”. Also not a good topic for humour, when you have billionaire scumbags decamping to tax-free countries to avoid paying their contribution. Having said that, the revelation about who really rules the universe is probably more poignant now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.

Generally, more misses than hits in this volume. True, there’s a lot of nostalgia at play here – and for those of us who remember the 1970s, that even applies to the targets of Adams’s humour. The humour in the first book struck me as less tied to its time than here. Which is not to say The Restaurant at the End of the Universe isn’t a fun, quick and light read, but YMMV. You may be better off stopping after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That novel at least shows how to do science fiction humour successfully – and I admit it’s British humour, not American, which is an entirely different beast – but it’s something a few current genre authors should probably look into.


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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, UK). 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.