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Luminous, Silvia Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this even mean? Or,

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

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

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

This is just plain wrong:

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

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

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

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

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


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Chilling Effect, Valerie Valdes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Venomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman

(A Facebook review)

This won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2023, and throughout much of the award’s history that would be reason enough to read the book. But the shortlists in recent years have been… variable. Some of the judges’ choices have been absolutely baffling. The Last Astronaut (2019, USA)? Sea of Rust (2017, USA)? Never mind. Venomous Lumpsucker (2022, UK) sounded quite good – although having now read it, the marketing around the book didn’t sell it very well.

It’s set later this century, when nations and corporations trade “extinction credits” much as nations and corporations now trade carbon credits. Now, it’s to offset climate change (it’s not working); in the novel, thousands of species are being made extinct as corporations mine further afield for necessary elements and ores. The title refers to a fish which lives in the Baltic. It’s a cleaner fish, and cleaner fish are supposed to be the most intelligent types of fish. The venomous lumpsucker is even more intelligent than other species. It is also endangered.

An Indian corporation is mining the Baltic sea-floor, and has hired Resaint to assess the intelligence of the lumpsuckers, as that affects how many extinction credits they will have to pay for destroying their habitat and wiping them out. Unfortunately, Halyard, an executive with the firm, saw a way to make a quick buck, and sold the credits on the open market, expecting their value to drop so he could short them. The opposite happens: hackers wipe out all the digitised DNA of already-extinct species, which drives the price of credits sky-high. And then it turns out the company has already accidentally obliterated the lumpsuckers.

The novel is Resaint and Halyard chasing about the Baltic, trying to find a living colony of lumpsuckers, and being given a rude awakening into how the “extinction industry” works. Meanwhile, the UK has turned into a western North Korea, an isolated island nation ruled by a kleptocracy, but a powerful billionaire has bought up Cornwall and Devon and is seeding it with extinct species for his own reasons…

The targets of Beauman’s satire are pretty clear: not just the corporations putting profits above climate change, but also Brexit and Elon Musk. The novel is surprisingly funny, and the near-future stuff is inventive. Not everything works – the billionaire’s motives don’t add up, and the super AI reads more like a deus ex machina than actual near-future technology. But a good winner of the Clarke Award, nonetheless.


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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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Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi

Very little science fiction has been translated from Arabic into English – in fact, I knew of only one other author, Emirati Noura Al Noman, and she hasn’t been published since 2014. Ahmed Khaled Tawfik wrote several sf novels, most notably Utopia (2008, Egypt), and a little hunting revealed it had been translated into English – but with his name spelt Towfik. There’s been plenty of fantasy translated from Arabic, however, from Alf Laylat wa Layla to Naguib Mahfouz, and a number of contemporary writers. Having said that, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Iraq) was not published as category sf, and likely only deserves the label because its central conceit references Mary Shelley’s novel, a proto-sf novel. (The English title, incidentally, is a direct translation of the original Arabic title.) It was nominated for both the Arthur C Clarke Award and the International Booker Prize.

The central conceit of Frankenstein in Baghdad is actually not at all rigorous as science fiction. It’s a neat twist on the original – the monster (because of course Frankenstein is the doctor) in Saadawi’s novel is made from the body parts of victims of IEDs in post-invasion Iraq, and the monster’s mission is to avenge those deaths. But Saadawi seems more interested in telling a more general story about life in present-day Baghdad, as seen through the eyes of a handful of characters. Chief among these are the junk dealer Hadi, who originally creates the monster in some sort of fever dream; Mahmud, a young journalist, who takes Hadi’s tales of a monster semi-seriously, but is more interested in becoming like his rich and powerful editor; Elishva, an old Armenian woman who mistakes the monster for her long-dead son; and General Majid, who runs a secret police bureau of astrologers and magicians who predict bomb attacks in the city.

The novel bounces around between these characters, and a handful of others, mostly centred around the area of Bataween, and occasionally focusing on the monster. Who has discovered that once it avenges the death of one of the people whose parts make up its body, that body part rots and falls off. So the monster needs new parts – and it reaches the point where, with its own small army of followers, it too begins murdering people to keep itself together (so to speak).

The monster is a great invention, and there’s so much commentary that could be attached to the concept, but Frankenstein in Baghdad doesn’t seem all that interested in it. It’s more like an introduction, or a framing narrative, to the personal stories of the book’s cast. Which is a shame. It’s a good novel, don’t get me wrong, and its descriptions of life in post-invasion Baghdad are both heart-breaking and enraging.

A good novel, but one that feels like it failed to capitalise on its central idea.


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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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Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta

Shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 2015 – and it’s not often a translated work makes it onto the award shortlist. In fact, the only one prior to Memory of Water (2012, Finland) was Stanisław Lem’s Fiasco (1988, Poland), although there have been four since Itäranta (Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Iraq), The Electric State (2017, Sweden), Vagabonds (2011/2012, China) and The Anomaly (2020, France)).

Memory of Water was originally published in Finnish. There’s no mention of a translator, and Itäranta lives in the UK according to the bio, so I’m guessing she translated the novel herself. That might explain a couple of word misuses, such as “the hidden core of the profession pertains that tea masters were once…”, and “woolgathering” when context suggests it should be “digressing”. Less understandable is the use of Scandinavian Union as the name of the novel’s setting, when it seems to be set in Finland, which is not a Scandinavian country, and both Sweden and Norway are described as polluted and uninhabitable.

Several centuries from now, climate crash, and war, has drastically changed the face of the Earth. Many former nations are now underwater, and the Chinese rule pretty much everywhere. Water is so scarce it is controlled by the military. Noria is the daughter of a tea master, and his apprentice. He shows her the family secret: a hidden spring.

After Noria’s father dies, she becomes tea master, and her mother moves to the capital, Xinjing. In a nearby garbage dump, Noria and her friend find a series of CD-ROMs which contain the log of an expedition to the Lost Lands (ie, Sweden and Norway) several centuries previously. The expedition was presumed lost and the Lost Lands uninhabitable. The novel never actually reveals what’s in the logs, only that it contradicts what everyone has been told. Noria, and her best friend, to whom Noria revealed the secret of the spring, decide to retrace the route of the lost expedition. Before they can set off, the military arrest Noria.

Memory of Water is not the first sf novel to feature a Chinese-controlled future. Two examples which spring (ahem) to mind are Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love quintet (2001-2006, UK) and David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series (1989-1997 and 2010-2014 and 2017-2024, UK). Nor is it the first sf novel set in a Europe mostly underwater. Despite that, Memory of Water’s setting never quite convinces. The writing is lovely, and the surroundings are described in poetic and leisurely detail (sometimes somewhat over-leisurely). But the scarcity of water doesn’t – I’m tempted to say “hold water”, but that would be cruel. Anyway, it doesn’t seem entirely credible, and if it were indeed true then I doubt the tea ceremony would still exist centuries later. The fact Sanja can fix “past-technology”, including a CD-player, is not really feasible either, but it breaks suspension of disbelief less than the water thing.

Which is a shame, as the “water thing” is what the novel is actually about.


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A Million Open Doors, John Barnes

Nominated for both the Nebula and the Clarke Awards. Barnes seemed to have a moment in the mid-to late-1990s, with a Hugo nomination, three Nebula nominations and three Clarke nominations. But no wins. And nothing since then except appearances on the Locus Award/readers’ poll pretty much every year until a decade ago (for his last published novel, in fact). A Million Open Doors (1992, USA) is only the second book by Barnes I’ve read – I read Mother of Storms (1994, USA) back in 1999.

A Million Open Doors is the first of four novels set in the Thousand Cultures. Taking place several centuries from now, Earth has colonised a number of worlds, each of which is home to one or more “cultures”, groups of people – ethnic, national, religious, some even completely invented. Like Nou Occitan, which is supposed to be some sort of Iberian Romantic culture of troubadours and duellists, but is really just massively sexist. The worlds were colonised by slower than light ships, but now “springers”, instantaneous transport, even across interstellar distances, connect them together.

When Giraut catches his paramour in flagrante delicto with a gang of “Interstellars” (youths aping what they think is an Earth culture by “beating up and degrading young girls”), he accompanies a friend to Caledony, which has just received its first springer. Caledony is a religious culture, which uses Christianity to justify some garbled economic philosophy. Giraut opens a school to teach Occitan culture – music, duelling, poetry, dancing, painting, etc – to the joyless Caledons. Unfortunately, the success of the Centre for Occitan Arts prompts a coup by hardliners, house arrest for the previous government, martial law and armed mobs on the streets.

To build support, Giraut and his liberal Caledon friends stage a camping trip across the continent, but there’s an accident in the mountains, resulting in several fatalities. While dashing back to get into communications range, Giraut discovers the ruin of an alien city. Meanwhile, while he was away, Council of Humanity troops have overthrown the hardliners…

Reading A Million Open Doors, I had trouble working out why it was science fiction. Yes, other planets, springers, spaceships, etc, but you could set the story on Earth. Some community full of rapists, another full of nutball religious types – I’m pretty sure you could find two towns that qualify in the US. Even the alien ruins could be the ruins of some prehistoric American culture. All the rest is just bells and whistles.

And when a science fiction novel is not science fiction, then what’s the point of it? And you also have to wonder why the novel appeared on two science fiction award shortlists. In other respects, it’s all just a little too textbook. Giraut is a male chauvinist, but he comes to value and respect women – and even falls in love with one who isn’t even attractive and whose physical flaws he mentions repeatedly. Two characters are killed irretrievably – the technology exists to bring people back using personality recordings, and there’s even an example to illustrate it, the victim of a brutal sexual assault, torture and murder. (This is not just everyday sexism, this is everyday sexual assault.) The bad guys get their just desserts – except, well, not really, a friend who insulted Giraut is humiliated (with a spanking), and the villainous pastor who seized power on Caledony is imprisoned off-world.

A Million Open Doors lost the Clarke to Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993, UK), and the Nebula to Doomsday Book (1992, USA) by Connie Willis (Sarah Canary (1991, USA), Karen Joy Fowler, or China Mountain Zhang (1992, USA), Maureen McHugh, would have been better winners). Even so, it didn’t belong on those shortlists. It’s mediocre, its one idea is in service to a story that doesn’t even need to be science fiction, and it’s offensive in parts.


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More longer

I mentioned my other blog a few months ago. I post longer, less-frequent reviews there. I also promised to post links here to those reviews. I forgot. Here are the last three:

From the 2024 Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, The Ten Percent Thief by Lanya Lakshminarayan (see here).

And from this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (see here).

And, sadly, a book that didn’t make any award shortlists, The Mars House, Natasha Pully (see here).


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The Girl with All the Gifts, MR Carey

I’d heard The Girl with All the Gifts (2014, UK) was zombie fiction, and I don’t like me zombie fiction no matter how you spin it, and that includes The Passage (2010, USA), so I had no great expectations for this, even though: a) it was nominated for the Clarke Award (but lost out to Station Eleven (2014, USA), a book I admit I did not like), b) I’ve met Mike Carey and he’s a nice guy, and c) it was on offer at 99p.

There’s a “but” implicit in all that, and yes, I did think The Girl with All the Gifts was actually pretty good. It opens firmly focused on the titular girl, Melanie, who is in some sort of research facility. Clearly, she’s not an ordinary girl – she has to be locked into a wheelchair for classes, she eats once a week (a bowl of worms), and the staff of the underground bunker where she lives is scared of her and her classmates. 

Carey doles out his information slowly and carefully. The UK – the world – has collapsed following a plague of some sort, which has reduced the bulk of the population to flesh-eating zombies, or “hungries”. But Carey provides a rationale – the zombie fungus which infects ants, takes over their bodies and forces them to climb plants in order to provide a higher platform to spore (and which really exists), has crossed the species barrier and infected humans.

Melanie is infected, but she is different. As are her classmates. She may crave human flesh, when triggered by pheromones, but she’s not mindless, she can think like a normal human being – if anything, she actually has a genius-level IQ.

Junkers  – Mad Max-like survivalists – attack and overrun the military base holding Melanie and her classmates. Melanie escapes with Sergeant, the head of base security, a trooper, Dr Caldwell, the head of the research programme, and Miss Juneau, a teacher on whom Melanie has a crush. They must travel south to Beacon City, the sole bastion of uninfected humans in the UK.

As they make their way through a deserted London, populated only by “hungries”, they learn more about the fungus. Sadly, Caldwell is something of a Mengele figure, happy to sacrifice people if it leads her to a better understanding of the fungus, and her willingness to let the others die gets annoying quickly. Having said that, she does discover Melanie’s secret – although her proposed “cure” would kill Melanie, and the kids like her they’ve encountered as they travelled toward Beacon – but not necessarily save humanity.

I do not, as I said, like zombie fiction much, and The Girl with All the Gifts is pretty much a zombie novel. But the use of the real-life zombie fungus to explain it, the focus on the disease, rather than just using it as a mechanism for menace, lifts this novel above others of its ilk. I rather enjoyed it. A good Clarke nominee, I think.