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Scarpetta 21: Dust, Patricia Cornwell

Benton, Scarpetta’s husband, a FBI profiler, is away working on three linked murders of women in Washington DC, but his expertise is being ignored, disparaged even. And then the body of a murdered woman appears in Cambridge (Massachusetts, that is), Scarpetta’s jurisdiction, and it’s clear it’s connected to the three in Washington, even if it seems to contradict the prevailing theory held by the FBI about the crimes.

Scarpetta, Benton, Lucy and Marino find themselves trying to identify a serial killer who, it seems, is being protected by someone powerful, at least to the extent the FBI agent in charge of the investigation is ignoring evidence and focusing instead on a teenager who disappeared seventeen years before.

Once again, Scarpetta’s reputation is under attack, as are her family and relationships, but this time she sets out to methodically prove every point of her – and Benton’s – theory of the crimes, and so bring down the FBI agent deliberately misleading everyone. As in other books in the series, the murderer is more than human, almost as if the nearest the US can get to real-life superheroes are serial killers, which is pretty damn sick no matter which way you look at it. It might even be said crime novels which focus on serial killer stories – as so many of the Scarpetta series have – have much in common with fantasy or science fiction. True, one of the reasons I like the Scarpetta series is because Cornwell details the forensic science used – which does occasionally read like science fiction (much like the many CSI TV series).

Another draw is Cornwell’s focus on characterisation. Her cast are not enigmatic, phlegmatic, whimsical or just sketched-in, as is usually the case in crime fiction. She started out using first-person narratives, then switched to third-person omniscient before moving back again to first-person, except now there’s far more interiority and Scarpetta’s every thought is worked through implacably.

Dust (2013, USA) is one of the better books in the series, even though the plot centres around an implausible serial killer, and a defining event occurs off-stage and is far too easy to be credible. There’s also a fascinating article about Cornwell after the novel in the ebook edition, highlighting the many parallels between Cornwell herself and her characters, especially Scarpetta and Lucy..


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Brightness Falls from the Air, James Tiptree Jr

The second of only two novels published by Tiptree, and opinions on it are somewhat divided, chiefly I suspect because of one element of the book that has aged very badly – and was questionable to begin with.

The world of Dameim is home to an alien race who were illegally tortured and maimed in order to harvest a chemical they exude, which was then distilled into an extremely expensive drink called Star Tears. (The drink is mentioned in an earlier story by Tiptree, and the later collection The Starry Rift (1986, USA) takes place in the same universe.) Dameim is now overseen by three guardians, who live in a sort of safari lodge (which Tiptree admitted was inspired by her childhood safaris with her parents). They’re visited by a group of ten tourists, there to witness the wave-front of the Murdered Star pass over the planet. But two other men also disembark, apparently through some error, as does the supercargo who looked after the passengers while they were in cold sleep.

There are two plots – the last survivor of an alien race has tracked down the person who fired the shot which destroyed their sun, ie the Murdered Star; and three of the visitors are planning to make themselves some Star Tears – by torturing and maiming Dameii, of course. The latter plays out pretty much as you’d expect – the villains reveal themselves, and seize control. The first plot presents more of a surprise. It wasn’t the genocide everyone believed, and the alien’s “vengeance” is… complicated.

So far, so not especially a science-fictional story. There are real-world analogues to the two plots. However, the novel’s resolution depends in part on “time flurries” caused by the Murdered Star’s wave-front, and that’s pretty much sf. Tiptree also hints the cause of the genocide has, through the wave-front, altered everyone’s perceptions of Damiem and the Dameii.

Unfortunately, there’s one misstep the novel can’t recover from – among the tourists are four actors ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, and they’re porn actors. Even in 1985, readers struggled to accept this, and it’s even less acceptable now than ever before, post-Yew Tree, post Trump and Epstein and the Andrew formerly known as prince… The actors are engaging characters, but the teen pornography leaves a bad taste.

I’ve seen Brightness Falls from the Air (1985, USA) described as Tiptree best-known but least-liked novel. She only wrote two and is much better known for her short fiction, so it seems a dumb way to refer to the book. And yet, except for the under-age sex, there’s a lot to like about Brightness Fall from the Air. The main plot is perhaps not intrinsically sf, although Tiptree makes the setting entirely genre, and the many plots and subplots she handles with admirable deftness. It’s perhaps the most colourful and yet bleak novel I’ve read.

The Starmont Reader’s Guide to James Tiptree, Jr (1986, USA) by Mark Siegel, one of only two critical works on Tiptree’s fiction I’ve managed to find, suggests a common theme to much of her fiction: she believed mortality, or the acceptance of mortality, was necessary to create art; it is the shadow of death, oblivion, hanging over us that drives creativity. Brightness Falls from the Air certainly illustrates this theory.

I’ve read a lot of Tiptree this year, and the more I read the more I like it. I’ve always regarded a handful of her stories as stone cold classics of the genre. It’s also true many of her stories have not aged particularly well. I’ll happily recommend her works to people, but with the caveat they should probably stick to her short fiction.


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The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, Larry Niven

We make foolish decisions all the time, probably even several times a day. Mostly, they cause no harm, perhaps a little mild embarrassment, and often no one witnesses the embarrassment but we know about it ourselves all the same. I have no idea why I decided to complete my exploration of Larry Niven’s oeuvre. I last read books by him back in the early 1980s, and while I had fond, if incomplete, memories of some of them, I also knew they weren’t very good. But, for some reason, I decided to read the rest of his books. I don’t know; perhaps I saw a couple, with their pretty damn cool Peter Andrew Jones cover art, in my local secondhand sf bookshop, and thought, yeah, let’s give them a go, I liked them back when I was, er, fourteen or fifteen, what could possibly go wrong?

Everything, of course.

I’d remembered the ideas in Niven’s books over the decades, and I knew he was a proponent of “transparent prose”, which is what writers say when their prose is so bad it’s almost an anti-style, and yes, I’d remembered Niven’s politics were considerably to the right of mine (and not just because I’m British but because he’s a conservative loon)… but what I’d forgotten was how effortlessly offensive his fiction was. My sensibilities were still in flux back in my mid-teens, so perhaps I just skated over the worst bits and only took the good, if rare, bits on board.

The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton (1976, USA) was not a Niven book I’d read back in the day. It’s a collection of three novellas set in Niven’s Known Space universe and featuring a single protagonist, Gil Hamilton. Who is an officer in the UN police, which is called ARM, Amalgamated Regional Militias (an unconvincing backronym, which Niven himself admits). Hamilton lost an arm in an accident in the Asteroid Belt, and developed a telekinetic arm as replacement – he has ESP, it works like an arm, only not as strong, but it can reach through solid objects. Even though he had the lost arm replaced with a transplant, he still has his psionic arm. See, the “long arm” in the title, it’s a pun: Hamilton works for ARM and he has a psionic arm too. Hoho.

Hamilton chiefly investigates organleggers… and this is where I have to wonder how I didn’t immediately recoil at Niven’s politics back in the day. Earth in the Known Space series has a population of eighteen billion, which, according to Niven, means it’s massively overpopulated and covered almost entirely by cities. (Earth currently has a population of over 8 billion but there are still vast swathes of unpopulated wilderness. I can bore you with population density by country, but you can look it up on Wikipedia yourself.) For some reason, these 18 billion people have an insatiable demand for new organs. So insatiable, in fact, that pretty much breaking any law results in a death sentence so the criminal’s organs can be harvested. Having one more kid than licensed, for example. Or drunk driving. Which first supposes the death penalty is normal – it’s not, the US is an aberration (one of around 15% of nations). And second, that all medical conditions are solved by transplanting a new organ. It’s complete nonsense, complete right-wing nonsense.

The plots of the three novellas are almost incidental. Hamilton is, to be fair, a mostly engaging narrator. In the first story, Hamilton is confronted with the seeming suicide of a Belter friend by direct simulation of the pleasure centres of the brain. Except it goes against everything Hamilton knows about his friend. It’s murder, of course. And Hamilton tracks down the killer. In the second, an attempt on Hamilton’s life leads him to suspect an organlegger who retired when the world government made it legal to use cryogenically frozen bodies for organs harvesting. The third story is one Niven freely admits he had the most trouble completing – it’s a locked-room murder mystery, of a sort, but also a sf story, which, according to the essay which ends the collection, took Niven several goes to get right… and even then it’s confusing, muddled and neither a good murder-mystery nor a good sf story. 

Everything in The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, although it mentions other nations, is Americocentric. Everything operates according to US laws and sensibilities. This is hardly surprising – it’s a US sf collection written by a US sf author for the US sf market. And that was not only common, it was the actual state of the genre for much of the twentieth century. So it seems churlish to point this out, except to say it makes these books – not just Niven’s, but other sf authors of his generation – irrelevant to a twenty-first century sf audience.


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Pistols for Two, Georgette Heyer

Heyer’s only collection, until a recent one was cobbled together from this and some uncollected pieces, which is not much of a surprise as her only published stories were contemporary, and the contents of Pistols for Two (1960, UK) appeared nowhere else. They are… condensed versions of Heyer’s Regency novels. Mostly.

Pretty much every story is a young woman, either nineteen or twenty, who finds herself in a situation with a man – of the Quality, of course – a dozen or so years older, and so comes to love him or realise she has always loved him, and they agree to marry. In some cases, Heyer holds back on the history of the characters in order to male the romance more, well, cuter. The two guardians who refuse to allow their wards to marry because they were once engaged and it all went wrong but they’ve carried a torch for each other ever since. The young woman who prevails on an unknown lord to prevent the duel between her brother and a known rake, only to discover the unknown lord is the rake and he’s fallen for her.

The only one that breaks the mould is the young cit gentleman who puts up at a country inn on his way home from working in Portugal, and finds himself the intended victim of murderous thieves. Fortunately, one of his fellow guests is a Bow Street Runner.

Short stories by definition allow less room for character development, and Heyer did tend to rely on a series of stock characters. So it’s a hardly a surprise the stories in Pistols for Two feature those self-same stock characters, and the plots read mostly like incidents from a novel-length work.

On the other hand, it’s Heyer and these stories are typical of her work. If you like Heyer, you’ll like these. If you like these, you’ll like Heyer’s other works.


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Not This August, Cyril M Kornbluth

Nominated for the Hugo in 1956, which was won that year by Robert Heinlein’s Double Star (1955, USA). Not This August (1955, USA) takes place in 1965 in a US that has been fighting USSR and Chinese forces for three years. The war has not been going well, and life in the US is grim, deprived and increasingly restrictive.

Billy Justin is a veteran and a small milk farmer barely scraping by. He hires a local itinerant who doesn’t appear to have all his marbles, only for the man to reveal he headed a secret project to build a crewed orbital bomb platform to end the war. The project was in danger of being discovered so he sealed the secret bunker and fatally gassed everyone inside.

The Soviets conquer the US and a political troop take over the county where Justin lives. He hooks up with a US resistance, and they restart the orbital bomb platform project, which was nearly finished anyway. Then the Soviet occupying troops are replaced with more hardline troops, but the Americans manage to stage an uprising, which serves as a successful ploy to prevent the Soviets from stopping the launch of the bomb platform.

Not This August reminded me a little of MJ Engh’s Arslan (1976, USA), a novel I didn’t like. One of the problems I had with that novel was the US at the time of writing, 1976, threw off fifty years of progress seemingly overnight, going from cars to carts and horses in a matter of days. In Not This August, the US has at least been at war for three years, and while it has taken most of the nation’s resources, it has not at the start of the novel managed to take US territory. Except the life lived by Justin is not the 1965 we remember, but closer to 1935. True, there were still farms and rural communities in the US without electricity until the mid-1960s in the real world, but even so… 

There’s a lot of American sf written and set in the early latter half of last century that feels like it’s set between the wars. Because that’s when the writers were teenagers, or young men (they’re almost always men; except for, well, Engh), and their imagination doesn’t stretch much further than that. Either that, or the US was a lot more backward, and perhaps still is, than it liked, or likes, to insist. Not This August is an entertaining if dated and not especially plausible sf novel. I remember living under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, and Kornbluth obviously was when he wrote this novel, but there’s nothing here to evoke that – or, I suspect, to remind those who lived during rationing what it was like (the US had rationing during WWII, but it was nowhere near as severe as in the UK). Nice try, but no Blue Peter badge, I’m afraid.


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Earth Made of Glass, John Barnes

A sequel to A Million Open Doors (1992, USA), which I did not like much, also set in Barnes’s Thousand Cultures universe and featuring the same characters, Girault and Margaret Leones. Earth Made of Glass (1998, USA) was shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 1999.

This second Thousand Cultures novel is, I think, a better book – at least, I liked it slightly more – but not for the right reasons. Like the novel preceding it, the story could easily take place in the present-day. It doesn’t need to be science fiction. In A Million Open Doors it was toxic masculine society versus repressed puritanical society. Here, it’s racist society versus enclosed society. In the first novel, the two cultures were invented, openly so, but invented based on a set of principles. In Earth Made of Glass, the two cultures, which share the limited habitable area of the world of Briand, are appropriated. The Tamil Mandalam are an attempt to create the culture of southern India in the first few centuries CE, specifically that which generated the Cankam, a huge body of epic poetry often considered to be the historical highlight of Tamil literary culture. The Maya of Kintulum, on the other hand, are a best-guess at how the Maya actually lived. None of those involved in setting up the two cultures had any connection, cultural, racial or geographic, to them.

By the time the springer arrives at Briand, the Tamil and the Maya hate each other, and consider each other to be less than human. A past disaster has resulted in a Maya shanty town outside the Tamil capital of Tanjavur. Ethnic violence is commonplace. The main Maya city of Yaxkintulum is completely off-limits to the Tamil. Girault and Margaret are sent in undercover to find some way to stop the ethnic violence and bring both cultures peacefully into the Council of Humanity fold.

Barnes does a good job of describing Tanjavur and its culture, but the endless racism towards the Maya gets tiresome very quickly. (As does the joke about people trying to pronounce Girault correctly.) And when the action shifts to Yaxkintulum, it proves just as fascinating a place (and, ironically, the Maya relied heavily on AI to invent the stories and myths which are carved into every available surface in the city). The Maya want to improve relations, and embark on a risky plan. They send a Mayan prophet to Tanjavur, with a message to not let their lives be defined by their literary corpus or mythology. Things began to look up, but then rapidly go downhill.

The two cultures are fascinating, but it feels like a guilty pleasure. Occitan and Caledony in A Million Open Doors were entirely invented; Tamil Mandalam and the Maya are not. They’re very deliberately skewed takes on real cultures. It feels like misuse, or perhaps even abuse, even though they make for a more interesting read than the dull Occitan and Caledon cultures. There is also a major female player in the plot – she’s not a character because Barnes’s characterisation of her is basically “slut”, but she has more impact on the story than anyone else. Every mention of her leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Even more so, when the narrative seems to expect the reader to admire the most racist of the Tamils.

There were two more novels after Earth Made of Glass, The Merchants of Souls (2001, USA) and The Armies of Memory (2006, USA). There’s mention in both A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass of an alien race whose artefacts have been discovered in numerous places, and that sort of makes me want to read the rest of the quartet, even though I may find lots in them I don’t like…


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Venus Plus X, Theodore Sturgeon

This was a reread, although I couldn’t tell you when I last read the book. The late seventies or early eighties, at a guess. I’d remembered the novel’s basic set-up, but nothing else. Venus Plus X (1960, USA) is set in the distant future, in a utopian community of hermaphroditic humans (not really an acceptable term these days, but these have the organs of both sexes and can procreate). 

A man from the mid-twentieth-century is pulled forward in time to the community of Ledom. Yes, it’s “model” backwards, but Sturgeon admits in a postscript he reversed the name of a can of his favourite tobacco. The time-traveller, Charlie Johns, is asked to give his opinion on Ledom and its society. Various guides show him around and explain things. Everything in Ledom is a consequence of the “A-field”, a sort of force-field, and the “cerebrostyle”, which can write knowledge directly onto people’s brains. There is also a chapter on biology – the Ledoms have both sex organs, and two uteruses, and always give birth to twins.

Alternating with this guidebook-style narrative is some sort of sitcom featuring two families who live next door to each other. These sections are almost entirely dialogue.

(The cover shown above, which I think is the edition I have in storage, badly misrepresents the actual story)

There are long sections on gender, which I suspect only gammons and terfs will disagree with, and religions, which manages to erase almost all of them except Christianity and misrepresents those it does mention. Sturgeon’s thesis is that both of these – the elimination of gender through the creation of hermaphroditic humans, and a charitic religion – were necessary to create the utopian Ledom. Except, while Sturgeon rightly points out gender roles are social constructs, he still defines them using biological sex; and, as others have pointed out, the gender politics Sturgeon presents were not universal even back in 1960 – and his model society only exists more because of its two magical inventions than anything else.

Charlie learns Ledom exists inside an A-field bubble on an Earth devastated by nuclear war. He also discovers – against the wishes of the Ledom senior members – that the Ledoms give birth to normal humans, which are then (surgically?) altered to be Ledoms. For some reason, this sends Charlie completely off the rails and he tells them he, and all humans, would kill them if they could. When Charlie tries to escape to the past, he discovers the truth about the time-travel machine. Meanwhile, nuclear bombs explode outside Ledom’s A-field – is this implying humans still live? Or that Ledom is actually in the present? It’s unclear.

Sturgeon writes that he wanted to write a novel about sex. The novel credited with introducing the topic of sex into science fiction is Philip José Farmer’s novella, ‘The Lovers’ (1952, USA). The earliest sf novel I can find centred around a hermaphroditic character is Katherine Burdekin’s Proud Man (1934, UK), but in that novel the hermaphrodite travels back in time from the future to 1930. Burdekin’s novel, according to Wikipedia, criticises gender roles. Venus Plus X doesn’t do that – it posits a near-utopia, which despite its arguments only survives because it hides a horrible secret, which, to be fair, is a common science fiction trope, sort of like soylent green. I wasn’t convinced.

The title, incidentally, comes from the phrase “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”, and Charlie speculates the hermaphroditic Ledoms are women with a bit extra, “x”. Ugh.


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The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin, Alison Goodman

The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin (2025, Australia) is a direct sequel to The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (2023, Australia), a Regency crime/romance novel, from a writer whose previous work was a Regency dark fantasy trilogy (plus a straight-up fantasy and a straight-up crime novel). I really enjoyed The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, so picking up what looks to be the second book in a series was a no-brainer.

Lady Augusta, Gus, and Lady Julia are in their early forties and independently wealthy. Lady Gus has never wed, Lady Julia is a widow. In The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, they were held up by a highwayman, who proved to be a lord transported twenty years earlier for killing someone in a duel. He was back to rescue his sister, who had been put in an insane asylum by their brother, the current title holder, for being a lesbian. Lady Gus and Lady Julia get involved in Lord Evan’s plan to free Lady Hester, and Lady Gus gets involved with Lord Evan.

The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin carries pretty much straight on from the end of the first book. Lady Gus and Lady Julia freed Lady Hester and are now keeping her, and her partner, hidden. Lady Julia is enjoying the company of Mr Kent, the Bow Street Runner who helped them. Lord Evan is still in hiding, but it seems he might not have killed his opponent in that duel, so he and Lady Gus are hunting for evidence to exonerate him. However, there’s a vicious thieftaker on his trail, and it’s someone in the Exalted Brethren of Rack and Ruin, a gentleman’s club not unlike the Hellfire Club, who’s pulling the strings. Lord Evan’s involvement is a mystery, but they’re a bad lot – women have been known to enter their club house and not come out. Meanwhile, Lady Hester’s brother is trying to track her down, and the brother of Lady Gus and Lady Julia has things to say about their behaviour…

People have been churning out these sorts of novels since Georgette Heyer first invented the genre back in the 1920s. There were even imprints dedicated solely to Regency romances. I called The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin a Regency romance/crime novel, but really it’s not much different to Heyer’s “adventure” novels. What has changed since the days of Harlequin and Signet and Zebra, with their garish covers, is the presence of social commentary – although I seem to remember Fiona Hill’s Regency romances from the late 1970s and early 1980s included it. But Goodman’s series not only features social commentary, but also social justice – and it’s from a present-day perspective. Which only makes the books more likeable. I mean, I do like me some Heyer, but some of the baked-in sensibilities in her books are hard-to-take: the unexamined privilege, old men marrying teenage girls, the blindness to social inequality, the demonisation of the poor… 

Heyer did have the wit, of course, and the charm, and there she reigns supreme. Goodman’s first-person narrative is not so light, but it does cover weightier topics, and in her favour she makes excellent use of a number of real historical figures. These are fun, but also a little more meaningful than most novels of their type. Recommended.


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The Far Pavilions, MM Kaye

I read The Far Pavilions (1978, UK) back in the 1980s while visiting my parents in Oman. It was hardly my usual reading fare, but the book choice was limited. (I also read Shirley Conran and Judith Krantz that holiday.) I enjoyed it so much I went on to read all of Kaye’s novels, and even tracked down copies of her Death in… series, which were hard to find at the time. Since then, I’ve watched the TV adaptation of The Far Pavilions, starring Ben Cross and Amy Irving, a couple of times, but it’s a poor adaptation.

The Far Pavilions is set during the 1860s and 1870s, when the Raj ruled much of India. The plot follows Ashton Pelham-Martyn, whose parents died when he was young, and he was brought up, believing himself to be Indian, by his nanny in the invented Himalayan kingdom of Gulkote. He learns he is British at age eleven and is shipped off to Britain, returning a decade later as an officer of the Corps of Guides. After going AWOL for a year to recover stolen rifles from Afghan tribesmen, he is suspended and charged with escorting a royal wedding party across India. One of the princesses proves to be his childhood playmate, Anjuli, and the two fall in love. She is married to the rana of Bhithor, and Ash is sent to various places in India until the Guides are ready to have him back. Then he learns the rana has died and the widows will commit suttee. So he rescues her and spirits her away. Meanwhile, there’s been trouble in Afghanistan – once labelled the “graveyard of empires” – thanks to the Great Game, with the Russians sending a mission. Ash goes undercover among the tribes. The Second Anglo-Afghan War takes place. Afterwards, the British send a mission to Kabul, which Ash tells them is ill-advised. And so it proves…

I’d forgotten how good this book was. The TV adaptation overrode some of my memories of the novel, and not for the better (it didn’t help they had a white actress in brown make-up play Anjuli). The Far Pavilions is also a thick novel, and does occasionally get bogged down.

Much of it is historically accurate – the two main characters are invented, as are the two princely states involved in the wedding party; but many of the supporting cast are real historical figures. Kaye is critical of the treatment of India by the Raj, and before it the East India Company, and of the English’s behaviour towards the Indian people. It’s clear where her sympathies lay (Kaye was born in India, and lived there a number of times throughout her life). There’s some lovely descriptive writing of the landscape, but Ash in an almost constant state of anguish gets a little wearying. The final section of the book, about the British mission in Kabul, is also drawn out somewhat. But it’s good stuff, and I’m glad I reread it. Recommended.

Incidentally, it was Kaye’s agent who persuaded her to write about India. She had previously published a series of murder-mysteries. He was Paul Scott… who later went on to write the Raj Quartet (1966-1975, UK), which I very much recommend. 


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The Paradise Mission, Phillip Man

I’ve been a fan of Mann’s science fiction for many years, but I was disappointed by his last sf novel (he died in 2022), The Disestablishment of Paradise (2013, New Zealand), which was shortlisted for the Clarke Award. He had one more novel published, Chevalier & Gawayn (2022, New Zealand), only in New Zealand. I have a copy, bought online a couple of years ago.

The Paradise Mission (2014, New Zealand) is a novella aimed at teenagers and set on the same planet as The Disestablishment of Paradise, called, er, Paradise. One of the areas where The Disestablishment of Paradise scored highly was in its world-building. And that’s what The Paradise Mission sort of is. It’s a quick run-through of the more notable lifeforms on Paradise, as encountered and experienced by a somewhat breathless narrator.

Hetty is an Explorer, an interstellar scout sent on solo missions to survey planets. Previously, she had been on two-person missions with Crispin, but now Crispin is missing. He landed on Paradise, and no one has heard from him since. Except for a puzzling message saying he has found gold.

Hetty makes her own way to Paradise to hunt for Crispin. She finds his ship and lands beside it, but there’s no sign of him. Notes in his cabin point to three locations around the planet, which she then visits in her air-sled, finding him at the third. The bulk of the story is Hetty making sense of the flora on Paradise, which includes: the Dendron, 220 metre tall three-legged ambulatory tree-like creatures; Monkey Jokers, which are a sort of plant spider; the Michelangelo, a pitcher plant with psychic abilities; and a plant that creates vast tubes in the mountains, which act like organ-pipes and leads to Crisping labelling the range the Windsong Mountains.

Hetty has adventures. She finds Crispin, who is trying to help a Dendron which is ready to reproduce but can’t without help from another Dendron. Hetty uses her earlier encounter with a Michelangelo to call for a Dendron. Afterwards, Hetty and Crispin decide Paradise should remain untouched, and so falsify their reports to the Space Council.

Given The Disestablishment of Paradise is about the closing down of a colony on Paradise, it seems Hetty and Crispin were unsuccessful in protecting the planet. Having said that, there’s no indication how much earlier to the novel The Paradise Mission takes place. As for the novella being aimed at teenagers… other than Hetty being quite, well, excitable, as a narrator, and the frequent mentions of the young age of Explorers – and their capacity for risk-taking, and curiosity, etc, which justifies this… Well, there’s not much that makes it a YA novella – although the two characters are not explicitly described as teenagers, they’re at minimum not far from it.

Mann’s oeuvre, while small, packed a punch. The Story of the Gardner – Master of Paxwax (1986, New Zealand) and The Fall of the Families (1987, New Zealand) – is a superior space opera, and very much unlike most space operas. The A Land Fit for Heroes quartet (1993-1996, New Zealand), an alternative history in which Rome did not fall, presents a fascinating portrait of an alternate Britain. His other sf novels were high-quality literary sf of a type you rarely see these days. But The Paradise Mission is one for completists, I suspect. It’s hardly a good introduction to his work… 

Although it is a good introduction to the setting of The Disestablishment of Paradise.