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The Cold Between, Elizabeth Bonesteel

The Cold Between (2016, USA) is the first in a four-book series, originally published between 2016 and 2025. There may be more to follow. There probably is. The series is called Central Corps, because the main characters belong to that organisation. It’s a sort of Bujold/Cherryh/Moon light space opera, of a sort that was plentiful during the 1980s and 1990s. I read a lot of it in the 1990s, and I still have fond memories of many of them.

Which makes The Cold Between feel a bit old-fashioned, although it has updated the template in some parts. One of which is an actual sex scene, which takes place in the first ten pages.

Elena Shaw is the chief of engineering aboard the Central Corps ship Galileo, which has been sent to the world of Volhynia to deliver a cargo that should have been delivered by another Central Corps ship. But that ship had been attacked by a ship of the PSI, sort of spaceship Romany who are generally on good terms with Central Corps.

On Volhynia, Shaw leaves a bar with a retired PSI captain (the aforementioned sex scene), and that ex-captain later finds the body of a murdered Galileo crew-member, who incidentally Shaw had split with only a few weeks earlier. The Volhynia authorities arrest the ex-captain, Zajec, and seem keen on pinning the murder on him, despite Shaw providing an alibi.

Back aboard Galileo, executive officer Valentis has been involved in some secret mission with Shadow Ops, with Captain Foster completely out of the loop. It’s all to do with a nearby wormhole and the mysterious loss of Central Corps ship Phoenix decades earlier, and on which Foster’s mother was serving. Shadow Ops, and some dirty dealers in Central Corps, plus a major corporation, have a secret on the other side of the wormhole. And they’re happy to start off a war with the PSI to keep it secret.

Of course, Shaw and Zajec, and Foster once he’s figured things out, manage to foil the plot, and everything ends neatly. But then these sort of sf novels are generally good on the plotting, even if never entirely convincing when it comes to the world-building. Okay yes, it’s basically the US in spaaaace, a nicer and kinder than the present-day version, it’s true, but it still continues to astonish me how US science fiction writers seem incapable of imagining any type of future human society that is not based on the US, incorporating all the things wrong with it and that other nations on Earth, of which there are nearly 200, do not have or do (and yes, I’ve been watching The Expanse; don’t get me started).

The other major element of these books is the characters, and Bonesteel has a likeable, although not particularly varied or diverse, cast list. But at least none of the good guys are sociopaths, which is unusual enough these days to be notable. Having said all that, The Cold Between feels a bit, well, meh. It’s put together well enough, but there’s nothing remarkable, no “eyeball kicks” or ideas that jump out. It’s an action-adventure set in a made-up future, and everything in it is all too recognisable. I doubt I’ll bother with the sequels.


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Eclipse Penumbra, John Shirley

The first book of A Song Called Youth, Eclipse (1985, USA), set up the situation, but I’m not entirely convinced the sequels were originally intended. They’ve been subsequently rewritten at least twice, so they’re certainly a thing now. There’s also a shift in tone between book one and book two. Having said that, these books have in some respects proved scarily prescient.

Europe has been invaded by the New-Soviets, but the Americans defeated them – well, that version of Nato which exists in the minds of most Americans that is 99% American and apparently also funds all of Europe’s healthcare, education, etc. The Second Alliance, a Christian far right security company, has taken over policing Europe, but they’re actually working to turn Europe into a white supremacist state under their leadership. They’re being fought by the New Resistance, now based in Malta after escaping France. There’s also a space colony, which has been taken over by SA after an internal revolt; it’s also being blockaded by the New-Soviets.

Eclipse had a 1980s cyberpunk feel. One character was a famous guitarist, and died jamming on top of the Arc de Triomphe as it was attacked by giant steampunk-ish wheel tanks. Eclipse Penumbra (1988, USA) dials all this back and goes for straight-up future war. We have a handful of viewpoint characters in the NR, and through them we see several military actions against the SA. In the space colony, the SA administration takes one step too far when it packs a maintenance shuttle with dissidents and non-whites and blows it up in an “accident”. This prompts the head of security to flip sides – although he’d already seen the writing on the wall, and it didn’t bode well for him.

Meanwhile, the NR leadership has managed to get hold of some incriminating footage of a SA bigwig and the US president. Smoke, the jaded writer with the pet crow from Eclipse (another cyberpunk-ish touch), is making a name for himself back in the US as a pundit. The NR campaign finally swings US public opinion against SA, and the president. It helps that one of the other SA bigwigs has infiltrated an assassin into the SA headquarters – and he successfully takes out the organisation’s messianic leader…

So, a hopeful ending. Of sorts. SA seems to be on its way out. The space colony is free once again. The NR has beaten the SA in southern Europe. The New-Soviets are retreating, but Europe is still in a mess – and the stateside SA are still planning on turning it into a white supremacist superstate.

In many respects, Shirley has stayed ahead of the current global situation, even given the last update of this trilogy was 26 years ago. The US in the book is just as big a bin fire as the US is today (arguably it’s been one throughout its history, it just has excellent PR), but Shirley’s version of Europe owes more to American ignorance of, and misinformation about, Europe than the reality. It’s the US that’s collapsing IRL, not the EU. I suppose it’s hardly surprising Shirley is closer with his future US.

The end of Eclipse Penumbra doesn’t give much of a clue where the third book, Eclipse Corona (1990, USA) is likely to go. The “corona” in the title, incidentally, is extremely unlikely to have anything to do with a virus. But we shall see. So far the trilogy is proving solid Shirley without really standing out. I’ve a feeling Eclipse’s time has passed and, despite updates and rewrites, it will never recapture that. Which leaves A Song Called Youth in a strange place.


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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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Macroscope, Piers Anthony

As a general rule, I avoid anything written by Piers Anthony. I read a couple of his books back in the 1980s and thought them either not especially good or somewhat dodgy. But Macroscope (1969, USA) was shortlisted for the Hugo Award (it lost to Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, USA), so I decided to give it a read.

The title of Macroscope refers to an orbital facility which contains a device which can use “macrons” to view any part of the visible universe, much like a space-based telescope, except to a level of detail and discrimination impossible to a telescope. It can, for example, focus on a world thousands of light-years away and show its alien inhabitants going about their daily business. But thousands of years ago, as macrons propagate at light speed. It can also view Earth, and act as an extremely powerful spy satellite.

Ivo is minding his own business in a city in Georgia (not the country, but the US state), when he is approached by a man who quotes an obscure line of poetry at him. This tells Ivo that his best friend Brad needs him. Brad, who has a genius-level IQ, works at the macroscope space station. Ivo and the man, Groton, drive south to Florida, and are launched in a rocket.

The macroscope scientists have discovered that someone somewhere in the galaxy is broadcasting a macron signal. Several of the scientists have tried to view it and it has wiped their minds. Brad wants Ivo to contact Schön, who is an actual super-genius, and whom only Ivo can contact, and ask him to help solve the “destroyer” signal. Ivo, Brad and Schön are all products of a project to breed and raise children in an environment that will result in high IQs. It was only partially successful.

Anthony drags out the revelation for more than half the book, but it’s pretty obvious from the first few pages that Schön doesn’t really exist: he is one of Ivo’s personalities. Or rather, Ivo is one of Schön’s. Apparently, Schön decided at the age of five he was bored with life, so he created Ivo and went dormant. Five seems an absurdly young age to do this.

A powerful senator visits the macroscope and falls victim to the destroyer. So Ivo, Brad, Groton and his wife, Beatryx, and Brad’s fiancée, Afra, steal the macroscope. They know there is useful scientific and technological information being broadcast using macrons, but they can’t reach it because of the destroyer signal. Brad tries and has his mind wiped. But Ivo is not affected, probably because the destroyer only affects IQs above a certain level. He manages to bypass it and begins downloading information. They use it to boost the macroscope to Neptune at 10 G, so they can escape the UN’s pursuing fleet. In order to survive the sustained high acceleration they must first convert themselves into protoplasmic liquid. Which they do. After converting themselves back into human bodies, they settle on Triton, and start using more high tech from the macron broadcasts. They decide they need to find the destroyer and, er, destroy it.

I think it’s pretty safe to say John Varley was aware of Macroscope when he began writing The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977, USA). He probably took the idea of the “hotline” from Anthony’s novel. He did, however, do something completely different with it, and The Ophiuchi Hotline is a much, much better novel than Macroscope.

Reading Macroscope, it comes as no surprise the author later wrote a novel titled The Color of Her Panties (1992, USA). Yes, really. And yet there are parts of Macroscope that display a sort of cosmological hard sf that didn’t really appear until the 1980s, and from the 1990s onwards has pretty much fuelled the careers of writers such as Stephen Baxter. For example, having decided on an objective, Ivo, Afra, Groton and Beatryx use knowledge learned from the macron broadcasts to bury their base deep in Triton, and then smash the moon into Neptune, causing the gas giant to collapse and form a black hole, which they use to transport themselves fifty light years from the Solar system. This is genuine sense of wonder stuff.

And then, like a black hole, the story slowly falls in on itself, until the only thing that’s left is the feeling you’ve just wasted however many hours reading a book that didn’t really deserve being read. Because once the four protagonists have left the galaxy, they manage to figure out the destroyer signal is being sent from a series of stations scattered about the Milky Way. They track one down, and board it. It’s empty, and seems to be some sort of museum. Which is handy, as it explains what the macron broadcasts are, what the destroyer signal is, and why it was necessary. The explanation is… not very interesting.

Then there’s everything else in the novel. Anthony tries to discuss misogyny and racism, but his racism and misogyny is so obvious the arguments have no force. In one chapter, for example, Beatryx is sent to a world where whites kill blacks on sight. Ivo spends much of the book lusting after Afra, and only occasionally considering what other qualities she might have. Then there’s this line:

“Even the subtle racism of the educated Southern white had its rules and restrictions; it was not inherently evil” (p 209)

Nope. It is. In all its forms.

And, finally, who can get forget the poetry? Ivo likes to pretend he is the reincarnation of a nineteenth-century American poet called Sidney Lanier. It serves no actual purpose in the plot, but it does allow Anthony to quote some of Lanier’s poetry. And… it’s fucking awful. Complete drivel. For example:

How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night
(p244)

Macroscope is a book, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python, for laying down and avoiding. Sadly, it is perhaps one of Anthony’s better books.


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Brain Twister, Mark Phillips

Although by Randall Garrett and Laurence M Janifer, Brain Twister (1962, USA) was originally published under the name Mark Phillips (the two authors’ middle names), and under the title ‘That Sweet Little Old Lady’, in Analog in 1959. Despite being a novella, it managed to be nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960. Go figure. It lost to Heinlein’s Starship Trooper (1959, USA) and much as I hate that book, it was a better winner than Brain Twister would have been.

Kenneth Malone is a FBI agent, and has been tasked with discovering the identity of the telepathic spy at the secret Yucca Flats research facility, where the US is developing a new spaceship drive. The story is set in the 1970s, although everyone still wears hats, and the only piece of invented everyday tech mentioned is a videophone. JFK is also referred to as the “youngest living ex-president”, which was weird.

Malone surmises that any telepath is likely to be insane, and so scours asylums and sanatoriums across the US, eventually finding Miss Thompson, who seems perfectly lucid, other than insisting she is immortal and Queen Elizabeth I. She agrees to help the FBI identify the spy, which results in a car journey across the country, with a stopover in Las Vegas. Malone, fellow FBI agent Boyd, nurse Barbara and Miss Thompson all wear Elizabethan dress during the trip. For reasons. Malone eventually figures out who the spy is – Miss Thompson knew who it was all along, of course.

It’s hard to describe quite how bad this novel is. It’s meant to be comic but it’s not in the least bit funny. The world-building is non-existent – it might as well have been set in 1959. And the final reveal depends on two clues dropped earlier in the narrative that weren’t, well, clues at all. Avoid at all costs


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The Deviates, Raymond F Jones

(A review posted on FB back in 2024)

Back in the 1950s, Galaxy Science Fiction began a series of reprint paperback novels which they gave away with issues of the magazine. After 35 issues, the novel series was sold to Beacon Books, who were known for publishing mildly pornographic romance paperbacks. As a result, the Galaxy novels issued by Beacon were “edited” to add sexual content. I actually wrote a blog post about these back in 2009; you can find it here.

The Deviates (1959, USA) was the second of this series – what’s the opposite of bowdlerised? there needs to be a word for this; maybe we should adopt “beaconised” – and was originally published by Avalon Books as The Secret People (1956, USA). Jones was best known for his novel This Island Earth (1952, USA), adapted into a film of the same name in 1955. He was last published in 1978, and died in 1994. He’s more or less forgotten now.

In a US recovering from a nuclear war, the genetic viability of all people is tracked and only those who won’t sire mutants are certified as “breeders”. It’s an old, and discredited, trope, but it was popular in the 1950s and produced some notable works, such as The Long Tomorrow (1955, USA) by Leigh Brackett, ‘Created He Them’, Alice Eleanor Jones, and ‘That Only a Mother’, Judith Merrill. The head of the Central Genetic Institute is Robert Wellton, who is secretly a “deviate”, but he has used his position to hide that fact.

Wellton’s deviation is beneficial – he is a telepath. So he has doctored the records such that his sperm has been used to father hundreds of children, all of whom exhibit telepathy. He has helped these “Children” to escape to a hidden village in forests in the north. (Wasn’t there an actual news story about a sperm bank doctor who used his own sperm to fertilise ova? There might have even been more than one.) Wellton comes under suspicion and so flees to the Children. But they’re no longer onboard with his mission to gradually improve humanity. They’ve built an atomic-powered spaceship – from knowing only first principles! – and want to go to Mars.

I’ve read Jones before. I don’t remember him sermonising so much. I know early US sf writers had a tendency to do so – hello, RAH! – and some of the crap they spouted barely flew in the 1950s and is now thoroughly discredited or debunked, or just plain offensive in the 21st century. Jones’s plot is based on eugenics, and a poor understanding of genetics, which is bad – but his moral arguments are more misguided than offensive.

And yet, The Deviates is supposed to be the “spiced up” version of The Secret People, and I could find nothing in it which wouldn’t have seen print in a 1956 sf novel from a major imprint. A later novel in the Beacon series, The Mating Cry (1960, Canada) by AE van Vogt, was based on van Vogt’s The House That Stood Still (1950, Canada), AKA The Undercover Aliens (1950, Canada), which happens to be a favourite sf novel, and at least I spotted the content that had been added by Beacon (reader, it did not improve the book). I haven’t read The Secret People, but I couldn’t see anything in The Deviates that might have been added by Beacon.

Oh, and the cover is a complete – and unsurprising – misrepresentation. There are no ripped blouses in the novel, and Wellton’s only “power” over women is a result of his position at the Central Genetic Institute (he can legally prevent them from having babies – see?).

Maybe the cover is the spiced up bit of the story?


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A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine

(Originally posted on FB two years ago)

A Desolation Called Peace (2021, USA) is the second book of a duology and, I think, more lauded than the first, with nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA Awards; and winning the Hugo, which the first book in the duology, A Memory Called Empire (2019, USA), also did. So you would expect high-quality science fiction from the two books, and more so from the second. But, of course, awards are not about quality, and never have been, despite the use of the word “best” in their names.

A Desolation Called Peace follows on directly from A Memory Called Empire. Mahit Dzmare has returned home to Lsel Station, but is unwilling to be debriefed as she knows it will destroy what she is: herself, and two corrupted imagos, or memory imprints, both of her predecessor in the ambassador’s role. (His murder kicked off the plot of the first book.) Meanwhile, the Teixcalaani empire has encountered an alien species and their failure to communicate with it has triggered a war. This was what Lsel Station wanted, of course – the ambassador before Dzmare had traded imago-technology for Lsel Station’s independence, but his superiors had always planned to keep the Teixcalaani empire at bay by embroiling them in a war with the mysterious aliens.

Dzmare’s lover, Three Seagrass, gets herself assigned as a language specialist to the fleet fighting the aliens, dragoons Dzmare into assisting her, and the two actually manage to open communications. Meanwhile, there are factions in the war ministry who think the only solution is ending the war by bombing the shit out of the (an?) alien home world. This does not sit well with the commander of the fleet sent to resolve the alien menace.

So, lots of politics, lots of gooey eyes between Three Seasick and Dzmare, lots of interiority and info dumps, but not, sadly, much description. There’s a lot here that reminds me of Susan R Matthews’s Jurisdiction novels, although given A Desolation Called Peace reads more like a love-letter to Three Seagrass than anything else that’s perhaps less than expected, given the set-up. The big reveal behind the aliens’ inability to communicate with humans, despite communication and language being a major feature of the two novels, and even numerous mentions of an earlier alien race contacted by the Teixcalaani empire, and several embarrassingly bad passages from the aliens’ POV… Despite all that, the big reveal is something that cropped up in a recent sf trilogy – and no doubt we’ll see it again over the next few years.

I thought A Memory Called Empire had its moments – some nice world-building, an interesting plot – but A Desolation Called Peace dials back on both. While it introduces a couple of interesting new characters, they’re not enough to overcome a dawning sense of familiarity, or the way Three Seasick begins to take over the narrative. The first book was an interesting spin on space opera, at a time when interesting spins on space opera were du jour. The second… well, either the moment has passed (it has), or it reads too much like the two books were a single novel padded out to a duology and the second book got the worst of the deal. Disappointing.


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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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Brothers of Earth, CJ Cherryh

(A review first posted only on Facebook in 2024)

Brothers of Earth (1976, USA) was Cherryh’s first novel (published a few months after Gates of Ivrel (1976, USA), but actually submitted and accepted first). It’s based on a premise Cherryh has used many times throughout her career – a human man crashlands on an alien, but humanoid, world and tries to integrate, inadvertently kicking off a war between various nations/factions (cf the Compact Space books, Cuckoo’s Egg (1985, USA), Faded Sun trilogy, Foreigner series, etc). The story takes place over a thousand years after Cherryh’s Alliance/Union history, although the Alliance still exists. But it’s at war with another human polity, the Hanan.

Kurt Morgan, sole survivor of an Alliance warship, crashes and is discovered by a party of locals, the nemet. They take him aboard their sailing ship to the city of Nephane, where he meets the methi, the ruler of the city, who is Hanan, and the sole survivor of an earlier Hanan mission. She allows him to enter the household of Kta, the captain of the ship. Kta’s family is the Elas, and they’re descended from the Indras, inhabitants of a powerful theocratic state across the sea. Nephane is split between Indras-descended and the original locals, the Sufaki, with the former forming a wealthy and powerful elite. The Sufaki rebel, Morgan and Kta are caught up in it, and flee because the methi supports the Sufaki…

The world is at a roughly late Bronze Age level – Cherryh used to teach ancient history – so it’s all swords and sandals and triremes, with the theocratic Indras versus the more liberal Indras-descended of Nephane versus the pantheistic Sufaki. This is stuff Cherryh has done many times since, and better. For a first novel, in the 1970s, it’s sort of impressive, and it’s interesting seeing how much of Cherryh’s style was pretty much there from the beginning. But the story does drag in places, and while there are plenty of strong female characters, the main protagonists are male – and there’s also an instance of fridging.

One for Cherryh fans.


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Halcyon Years, Alastair Reynolds

I’ve been buying Reynolds’s books in first edition as soon as they appear since first coming across one of his stories in Interzone. He occasionally disappoints – but he’s also one of those authors whose works you tend to compare against others in his oeuvre. A novel can be good, but disappointing given what else Reynolds has published. And that’s the case with Halcyon Years (2025, UK).

Halcyon Years is set aboard a generation ship called Halcyon, en route to Vandervecken’s Star. The journey has so far taken around 350 years, but is due to arrive in perhaps a generation. Eight million people live aboard Halcyon, in a society that owes a lot to noir fiction. There is television, telephones, mobsters, corrupt cops, cars… but also a few robots, advanced medical technology… and two families in control of everything. People who die, and can afford it, are frozen, and will be awoken once the destination has been reached. None of it is in the slightest bit convincing – but there’s a reason for that, as the book’s protagonist discovers.

Yuri Gagarin – yes, that Yuri Gagarin – is a private detective. He’s also a “Jack”, a random figure thawed out from the hundreds of thousands in deep freeze. Gagarin, of course, died in 1968, when the jet he was flying crashed, but his presence aboard Halcyon is later explained. He is asked by a mysterious woman to investigate the deaths of the youngest members of the two families which control Halcyon, the DelRossos and the Urrys. One was injured in an accident in a spacesuit while outside the ship, and later died of her injuries; the other died when a “zap-gun” blew up in his face.

It’s in the nature of these types of stories – noir, or California noir – that neither death was as presented, and they are in fact just the tip of a conspiracy, which explains the set-up aboard Halcyon, the faux 1940s milieu, Gagarin’s existence, and various other “clues” which seem to jar. Unfortunately, all this information comes in a long explanation toward the end of the book, when Gagarin and his two confederates have kidnapped three senior members of the DelRosso family and are holding them hostage while they explore what’s outside Halcyon.

I can understand the appeal of wanting to write a noir story in a science-fictional setting, such as aboard a generation ship. And I’m fairly sure noir has been appropriated by science fiction before, although no titles leap to mind. Unfortunately, none of it seems plausible, and if the big reveal makes sense of it all, it’s too late, and too crudely revealed. I’m not sure if totally committing to the mis-en-scène would have made Halcyon Days a better read, but a more elegant way of delivering the big reveal certainly would have done.

Incidentally, I’ve no idea if Reynolds ever read a story called ‘Killing the Dead’, which was published in Postscripts 20/21: Edison’s Frankenstein (2009, UK), but that also featured a generation ship in which dead people were frozen with the intent of waking them once the ship had reached its destination. Yes, I wrote that story.