This was a book that didn’t read as advertised. I’d been expecting something similar to Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016, UK), which I hadn’t much liked (although I did like the TV adaptation). Instead, The Change (2022, USA) proved to be a murder-mystery with a somewhat offbeat team of protagonists, and a serious, if not entirely original, point to make. More urban fantasy vs Epstein than the feminist empowerment fantasy the marketing had suggested.
To be fair, its three protagonists are all in their forties and post-menopausal, and the menopause has, if not gifted them their abilities, at least given them the freedom to use them. Harriet is an ex-ad executive who was shafted by the boys club once too often and develops an affinity for flora. Jo was the manager of a prestigious hotel but was fired after attacking a VIP guest who attempted to rape a member of her staff. She is extremely strong, can generate heat, and is an excellent fighter. Nessa was a nurse, and since her teens has been able to see ghosts.
When the three of them stumble across the body of a murdered young woman, they soon discover she is only one of many disappeared young women with links to a close-by millionaires’ gated community. Using their powers and their contacts – the local police are not interested – they identify the killer, but he dies in a helicopter crash. The disappearances, however, do not stop…
The truth behind the gated community, and the identity of the actual villain, were not hard to figure out, but I did like the central trio. A fun and very feminist urban fantasy/mystery.
Sullivan has long been a writer I wanted to read. I tried one of her novels, Maul (2003, UK), which was shortlisted for the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree Awards, several years ago, but I remember finding it hard-going. In fact, I’d chosen it as one of twelve books for a reading challenge that year. I reviewed ten of the books, failed to review Maul, and never even read the final book, Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979, USA). (For the record, the other books in the challenge were: Winterstrike (2008, UK), Liz Williams; Zoo City (2010, South Africa), Lauren Beukes; Dark Space (2007, Australia), Marianne de Pierres; City of Pearl (2004, UK), Karen Traviss; The Year of Our War (2004, UK), Steph Swainston; Spin State (2003, USA), Chris Moriarty; Shadow Man (1996, USA), Melissa Scott; China Mountain Zhang (1992, USA), Maureen F McHugh; The Steerswoman (1989, USA), Rosemary Kirstein; and Winterlong (1988, USA), Elizabeth Hand.)
Which brings me to Occupy Me (2016, UK), which was nominated for both the Clarke and BSFA Awards. In it, Sullivan pulls no punches. For the first third of the novel, you’re struggling to figure out what’s going on. The narrator is called Pearl, she is not entirely human, if human at all. She arrived on Earth in an abandoned fridge in a junkyard in New York. She is sort of an angel – at least, she has wings, but they are usually kept hidden in Higher Dimensions (HD). There are other things hidden in HD, including parts of Pearl’s organism? metabolism?, her powers, and her origin.
She is tricked into flying past a helicopter carrying a billionaire called Austen Stevens, who was responsible for a series of atrocities in an invented African nation while controlling an oil company. He then left the oil company, having embezzled millions, and set up an investment company. Now, he is dying. He has hired a native of that invented nation, the sole survivor of a family who died in the atrocities, who was then educated in the US and qualified as a doctor, to manage his palliative care in his last few months. Because Stevens believes the doctor has a briefcase which contains a spaceship or time-machine or some other science-fictional device which can make the billionaire immortal.
In fact, the briefcase is part of Pearl’s body, stolen from HD. And she wants it back.
To be honest, that plot summary doesn’t do Occupy Me much justice. There are three narratives: Pearl’s, told in the first person; the doctor’s, told in the second person; and one told in the third person, which describes the events leading up to all the main characters meeting on an oil platform in the North Sea, where certain truths about Pearl, the briefcase, the billionaire and the doctor are revealed. The novel is relentless – the narrative’s sheer momentum carries you through passages that you simply don’t have enough information to parse (but those explanations do come later), and sentences that tip from sense to a sort of nonsense that seems entirely in keeping with the narrative voice.
I didn’t think I’d like Occupy Me when I started reading it – to paraphrase a remark I made to a friend a few months ago, I may have a catholic taste in fiction, but I have a protestant ethic to reading. I will finish a book, even if I think I don’t like it or think it’s shit (and yes, that probably explains a lot of the reviews on this blog). But the further I got into Occupy Me, the more fascinating I found it, the more the shape of it became apparent, and the more its arguments began to make a strange kind of sense.
There are novels you’re not sure you like, but you can’t stop thinking about them. Tiptree’s Brightness Falls from the Air (1985, USA; my review here) is one such novel I read in the last twelve months. Occupy Me is another. I’ve come to the conclusion both novels are much much better than I initially thought, but I’m not sure why and I’ve not really convinced myself I’m right. But now I want to read more of Tricia Sullivan’s novels, and perhaps even revisit her Maul.
Who knows, perhaps I’ll think it’s really good on my second read…
Deep Black (2024, Canada) is the second book in the Arcana Imperii trilogy, following directly on from Artifact Space (2021, Canada; see my review here). In the first book, Marca Nbaro, orphaned daughter of a patrician family, faked her credentials to get a position as a “midder” on the Great Ship Athens. Great Ships are the main trading fleet of the DHC, Directorate of Human Corporations, which rules twenty or thirty worlds, and is instrumental in the trade for “xenoglass” with the Starfish, the only alien race so far encountered by humanity. Living alien race, that is, as there’s evidence of a long-dead alien race on some of the worlds colonised by humans. Nbaro foils an attempt to sabotage Athens, proves to be talented at pretty much everything ship-related, catches the eye of the Master of the ship, and is deemed “lucky” and so a good person to have onboard. The book ends with Athens in a space battle, defending the Starfish against a mysterious alien race in “bubble” ships. Nbaro, natch, manages to capture one of the aliens.
Deep Black opens as Athens cleans up after the battle and sets about trading gold and heavy metals for xenoglass with the Starfish. Nbaro’s boyfriend, the super-brainy dork Dorcas, tries to translate the Starfish language. Meanwhile, from the alien Nbaro captured, they learn the Bubble-ship aliens are called the Hin, are sort of furry octopuses, and are much more like humanity than the Starfish. They have also been enemies for millennia of the Starfish, who they accuse of genocide.
Meanwhile, there is a conspiracy within the DHC which needs to be dealt with. Athens’s AI, Morosini, has determined a cabal, possibly led by an AI, is determined to turn the DHC into a tyranny in order to enrich themselves. They have allied with some independent worlds, and even some Hin. Athens jumps to the next planetary system. There is a big space battle. A missing-presumed-destroyed Great Ship, Dubai, reveals itself – it had been hiding in order to team up with Athens. There’s another big space battle.
And so on…
Deep Black is basically about an aircraft carrier in space. It’s all about living on the Great Ship, launching and flying fighters and pinnaces, training to defend the ship from boarders. And because Nbaro is such an over-powered protagonist, she gets to do everything – and thanks to the handy “neural lace” installed in her head by Morosini, she gets to know everything too.
The level of invention in these two books is amazingly low for a space-based science fiction. Worlds are called New London and New Texas and New India. All the fancy futuristic tech is straight off the shelves at Tropes R Us. Nbaro is every mil sf hero rolled into one, with added extra special self-annotating humility and a mild dose of impostor syndrome. I wrote in my review of the first book that its only redeeming feature was its plotting. Not its plot, which is pretty straightforward and has been much used. Cameron keeps his story flowing by revealing new worldbuilding insights and dramatic scenes at regular intervals. The same is true of Deep Black – but where Artifact Space did some heavy lifting to outline the universe, Deep Black spends all its time on the routine and minutiae of life aboard a Great Ship. And space battles. Lots of space battles.
There’s a third book, which is odd as Deep Black seems to wrap up its story: conspiracy defeated, Nbaro married, Nbaro and husband voted onto the DHC council, friendly relations with both the Hin and the Starfish… I have Whalesong (2025, Canada), so I guess at some point I’ll find out where the story goes next. Can’t say I have especially high hopes, however.
I am not, I will happily admit, a fan of Dick’s books, and the only reason I read this one is because it’s in the SF Masterworks series (and the series has way too many books by Dick in it, as well). I find his novels slapdash, the good ideas wasted on haphazard plots and inconsistent settings.
In The Simulacra (1964, USA), The US and Germany have formed the USEA, the president is a simulacrum (although only those in the know, er, know it), and the country is effectively ruled by the First Lady. There are also colonists on Mars, spaceship dealers who sell craft capable of reaching the Red Planet to those wishing to emigrate. The dealers are apparently mobile and unregulated.
The novel opens with all psychotherapists, except one, being banned from practising. And that one is needed to treat a psychokinetic pianist who is a favourite of the First Lady. Meanwhile, the current president, or the der Alte (“the” and “der” are tautologous), is about to be retired and a new one built – but this time by a small firm and not a large German cartel.
There’s also the Sons of Job, which seems to be a neo-nazi popular movement which no one finds offensive, whose leader has access to a time-travel device. As indeed do the upper echelons of the USEA. A handful of ordinary people sort of bounce around the US – well, California and Washington, DC – stumbling into various plans and conspiracies, and so bringing everything crashing down to a somewhat abrupt end.
And that’s it. A pretty fast read, and mildly amusing, but certainly not a Masterwork and not even one of Dick’s better books.
So, they sent robots to another planetary system, and some humans whose consciousnesses had been uploaded when they died, and the robots started mining an exo-moon and then accidentally developed self-awareness. Meanwhile the uploaded humans were living in a very realistic virtual reality, and fighting while piloting small humanoid robot bodies, called “frames”, against… Which is where it gets a bit complicated…
There were two political factions on Earth, the Reaction (Rax) and the Acceleration (Axe), both of whom were fighting against late-stage capitalism through various acts of terror, the former wanting a return to earlier political systems, the latter trying to power through capitalism to something better. Out of this war arose the Direction, a global government. It’s the Direction which is trying to colonise another planetary system, which features a super-habitable exoplanet. But a legal dispute has come up in the exo-system and two law firms (both subsidiaries of another firm), each controlled by an AI, are now settling their dispute. With war.
Meanwhile, the Axe uploaded humans have settled in a VR based on a popular fantasy MMRPG while they plot to prevent the Rax in the other VR (where much of the first book, Dissidence (2016, UK) was set) from actually physically settling on the exoplanet. Except the Rax are no longer in charge of that other law firm, and some of the Axe have defected to the self-aware robots, who have decided they’re neutral.
Despite the complexity of the background, and the politics which drives the plot, Insurgence (2016, UK) is a fast-paced read. The narrative focuses on a handful of characters, each representing different factions, so giving the reader a pretty good overview of what’s happening. The level of invention is light, but clever, and MacLeod manages to keep the reader guessing as to who are the actual good guys (although pretty much everyone has something really bad in their past). Like most middle books of trilogies, there’s a lot of movement, as characters move around and events are set in motion for the final volume. If you’re going to read one book about self-aware robots and uploaded humans fighting a complicated political war over an exoplanet, make it these three. If that makes sense.
I’ve mentioned before I have a second blog where I post somewhat longer reviews. It’s on Medium, and you can find it here. It occurred to me I’ve not mentioned it here for a while and I’ve added nearly a dozen reviews since my last mention. These are (in the order I posted them):
This is the first book I’ve read by EJ Swift, although her name was not unknown to me. Mostly because of her appearances on the BSFA and Clarke Award shortlists – in fact, The Coral Bones (2022, UK) was nominated for both (it lost the Clarke to Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker (2022, UK) and the BSFA to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s City of Last Chances (2022, UK)).
The Coral Bones is structured as three narratives set in three different times. The first is in the present day, or perhaps a few years hence. Hana is a marine biologist, helping map the slow death of the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. She and a colleague discovered a dead man floating in an inflatable dinghy. He has been painted white, and the words “This is what it looks like when coral dies” painted on the side of the dinghy. Later, the man is found to have drowned, so it wasn’t murder, just someone trying to make a political point with his corpse. Hana has split from her partner, after the two had decided to have a child and the partner is now pregnant. Hana also begins to obsess about the dead man, who was also helping document the reef.
Judith is a precocious seventeen-year-old in Sydney in 1839. Her father is a celebrated captain, who has been mapping the coast of Australia. She is also a naturalist. After her mother returns alone to England, Judith persuades her father to let her accompany him on his next voyage. She documents the creatures she encounters along the way, and eventually marries the naturalist on the voyage, despite initially hating him.
Telma works for the Restoration Committee in 22nd Century Australia. The climate is now too hot for humans during the day, and most animal species are extinct. The Restoration Committee tracks down animals thought to be extinct in order to preserve them. An informant tells the Committee he has spotted a leafy seadragon near the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef (which has long since died). Telma heads north to meet him. It takes him weeks before he finally reveals his secret, and the secret behind the seadragon’s survival.
The narrative flips between the three, which eventually prove to be connected – Hana learns about Judith’s career, and fate; and the secret Telma uncovers also links back to Judith’s career. Of the three stories, Judith’s is the most interesting, perhaps because she’s an adventurous and headstrong young woman, where the other two have so much personal baggage it almost overwhelms the role they play in the plot. The future narrative thread, however, is cleverly done. The present day one – well, the mystery behind the man’s death is pretty easy to figure out, although Swift drags it out to the end. The prose is good, the research deep but worn lightly, and I don’t recall any road-humps during my read.
On the strength of The Coral Bones, I certainly plan to read more Swift – which is fortunate, as I have her BSFA-Award-winning When There Are Wolves Again (2025, UK) on the TBR (it has also been nominated for the Clarke, and may well win it). Recommended.
Yes, that Chris Hadfield, astronaut, recorded a video of himself playing ‘Space Oddity’ on the ISS and it went viral. That Chris Hadfield. The Defector (2023, Canada) is his second work of fiction, after The Apollo Murders (2021, Canada), and also features one-eyed ex-test pilot Kaz Zemeckis in the lead role.
A Soviet pilot defects with a MiG-25, landing in Israel the day before the Yom Kippur War. He and his aircraft are shipped to the US, to Groom Lake, AKA Area 51, where USAF plans to learn as much as possible about the MiG-25. Complicating matters are the three cosmonauts assigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Project, two real historical figures and the invented female cosmonaut who was the first Russian on the Moon in The Apollo Murders. I enjoyed the first book in what is now plainly a series because of the hardware – I mean, just look at the fiction I’ve written – and this one is centred around a topic also of interest to me: Cold War supersonic military aircraft. But not, unfortunately, to the same degree.
I must admit, Zemeckis is starting to smack a little of Dirk Pitt. I was a fan of Clive Cussler’s novels when I first read them back in the early 1980s, but the writing grew too bad to be forgivable and I eventually gave up on them over 20 years ago. Sadly, recent rereads of those early Dirk Pitt novels have shown they were always bad – as is evident from the reviews I’ve posted her – and I’m somewhat surprised I ever bothered reading past the first one. (I didn’t read them in order, so I’ve no idea which of the first half-dozen or so I read first.) Hadfield is a marginally better writer than Cussler at his best, although this is not a field in which writing chops count for much – in fact, it’s possibly the reverse. But when Zemeckis dogfights in a F-15 after one leg has been shredded below the knee by a shotgun blast, some of Dirk Pitt’s more incredible physical exploits spring to mind.
If Hadfield sticks to areas that interest me, my “enthusiasms” as I call them – deep sea exploration next? – then I’ll probably continue to pick up cheap copies of his books.
I’ve read pretty much every book Kim Stanley Robinson has published, except perhaps a couple of collections, and I’ve probably read most of their contents anyway. I buy his books in hardback as soon as they are published. This probably makes him a favourite writer.
He’s a good choice to have as a favourite author – his novels cover a wide range of subjects, and they’re never less than interesting. And I mean that in a good sense. True, he clearly has an agenda in each one – people who don’t understand how fiction works would call it “message fiction”. It makes his work a damn sight more appealing than the warmed-over middle America of the 1950s plus spaceships that far too much science fiction of last century was, even if, yes, he does tend a little to US-defaultism… although, to be fair, this particular novel is about New York.
The title of New York 2140 (2017, USA) tells you where and when the novel is set, but not what it’s about. Which is two things: climate change and late-stage capitalism. Most of Manhattan is flooded – fifteen metres in the book, which most experts agree is unlikely, and by 2140 would probably be no more than a third that high – and people use boats and skybridges between buildings to get about. The novel centres on a handful of residents of the MetLife Tower, which was originally constructed in 1909. These include: the building’s maintenance engineer, a broker, a senior NYPD police officer, the head of the residents’ board, an influencer who travels about in her own airship, and a pair of orphaned homeless boys who are eventually “adopted” by the building.
There are two major plot-threads: equity funds have decided to force ownership of the flooded buildings, currently not subject to property laws, and are trying to buy the MetLife Tower, improving their chances with some sabotage; and a huge storm hits New York, throwing everything into chaos, and forcing a new social and economic order. The novel opens when two unemployed “quants”, programmers for a brokerage, who are staying in the building go missing. Their disappearance ties into the sabotage, and the movement of capital between a number of shell companies, all of which seems to be targeting the MetroLife Tower.
Then the storm hits, destroying parts of the city and in the aftermath Central Park becomes a giant refugee camp. A move to occupy vacant buildings in a safer part of Manhattan – buildings owned by one-percenters – leads to a violent clash. Which in turn prompts a plot by the central characters to safeguard ownership of their building, which involves deliberately crashing the economy and then forcing the US government into taking over the banks, thus curtailing their power.
There’s also a hunt for some lost British gold, a bit about the life on Herman Melville, an attempt to prevent the extinction of polar bears by migrating half a dozen to Antarctica, and a new way to colonise intertidal land. Robinson once said exposition is just another form of narrative, and there’s certainly a lot of lecturing in New York 2140, either between characters or directly to the reader. It’s mostly fascinating stuff – the bits about capitalism, however, are mostly enraging. Having said, the characters are all! a bit! excitable! With liberal use of exclamation marks in dialogue! It makes most of the cast come across like those super-perky Americans they have in bad US sitcoms.
I’ve heard New York 2140 described as Robinson’s best novel to date. I’m not sure I agree, although it’s certainly one of his better ones. It feels more didactic, and less modernist, than his other works, and its perkiness does give its prose a weird flippancy that seems at odds with the seriousness of the topics it covers. Nonetheless, definitely worth reading.
For reasons I have yet to question, I started rereading Cussler’s novels, which I last read back in the 1980s and 1990s. And even then I thought they were bad. Raise the Titanic! (1976, USA) is probably his most famous novel – it’s certainly the one that made him a bestselling author. It was his third novel, the first two had sold poorly, and this one was expected to do the same. But an editor visiting from the UK saw the manuscript at Cussler’s US publisher, and took a copy back home with him. This kicked off a bidding war on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in Cussler pulling in a huge advance. The novel then went on to become a bestseller. (Soon after, Cussler bought back the rights to his earlier novels, and resold them to his then-current publisher for considerably more than he’d sold them originally.)
The plot of Raise the Titanic! sees Dirk Pitt, special operations director of the US National Underwater and Marine Agency, and all-round lady killer and Competent Man, tapped to head a US project to raise the RMS Titanic from its seabed grave, 3800 metres below the surface (where the pressure is around 400 atmospheres). Because there’s a presidential black project to build an anti-missile screen around the US and it needs a supply of “byzanium” in order to work. The only known quantity of byzanium was secretly mined under the noses of the Soviets on Novaya Zemlya by US miners in 1912, but was shipped home on the RMS Titanic. Oops. The USSR learns of this plan and decides to hijack the Titanic once she is on the surface.
Perhaps because of the amount spent to buy the novel, Raise the Titanic! seems to have been closely edited, and the prose is far better than in the earlier novels (although still not, well, good). The plot and setting is also much more science-fictional. The book was written before the wreck was found, and most people believed the ship had come to rest in one piece (she actually split in two). Pitt’s plan is to plug the many holes in the Titanic’s hull with “wetsteel” and then pump the ship full of air.
The novel was adapted for the screen in 1980 by UK TV production company ITC, but was a massive flop. ITC’s owner, Lew Grade, later said “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”, but he did like the film. Cussler didn’t. He refused to allow anyone to adapt his other books, and later sued the makers of Sahara, adapted from his 1992 Dirk Pitt novel of the same name. That film was a huge flop too.
Cussler died in 2020, but some time around the millennium he’d created an atelier, which has since produced a huge quantity of Dirk Pitt and NUMA novels by diverse hands (with Cussler’s name the most prominent on the cover, of course). His son, called Dirk, natch, now writes the Pitt novels.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 