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Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold

I’m reading this series in order of internal chronology rather than publication order, which no doubt affects my responses to the books. Although the seventh book published in the Vorkosigan series, Barryar (1991, USA) follows on directly from Bujold’s debut novel, Shards of Honor (1986, USA). I read both in the omnibus Cordelia’s Honor (1996, USA; it also includes a short story, ‘Aftermath’). I was impressed Bujold had picked up a narrative from five years previously and continued it so seamlessly… until I read the afterword in Cordelia’s Honor and learnt Shards of Honor and Barrayar were originally written as a single novel, and then split. And now I wonder why it took five years for the second part to appear…

In Shards of Honor, Cordelia Naismith, a Survey captain from Beta Colony, encounters Aral Vorkosigan, a military officer and aristocrat from the Russian-derived martial world of Barrayar. His reputation is not good but, of course, (mostly) undeserved. After various ups and downs – war, invasion, torture, that sort of thing – they marry. Barrayar opens with Cordelia trying to adjust to life on the titular planet with her new husband.

Vorkosigan retired from his military career but is asked to become regent for the five-year-old grandson of the emperor when the mortally-ill emperor dies. He accepts. He is not a popular choice. To make matters worse, Cordelia is pregnant but the foetus is damaged by an assassination attempt using a poisonous gas grenade. She persuades the Barrayans to implant the foetus into a Betan “uterine replicator” in order to better manage its development, but this causes a rift with her father-in-law.

Civil war kicks off, one faction supporting Vorkosigan, the other supposedly acting in the interests of the dead emperor’s daughter. The latter get hold of the uterine replicator, and Cordelia sets off on a rescue mission, without her husband’s knowledge. She succeeds, partly through luck, but mostly because she does not behave as Barrayarans expect women to behave – something she demonstrates throughout the novel. Which brings to mind, yes, the shopping scene…

I’m almost one hundred percent sure I’ve never read Barrayar before, but the shopping scene felt like I was rereading it. Perhaps an excerpt appeared in an anthology or magazine. All the same, it was fun.

There’s a big difference between Shards of Honor and Barrayar, even if there’s almost none in story terms. The latter is so much more polished: the backgrounds, especially Barrayar, are better grounded, and while you have to wonder why it took an additional five years for Barrayar to see print, it was clearly worth the wait. The story focus in Barrayar is also much clearer. While it’s effectively an origin story for Miles Vorkosigan, chief protagonist of much of the series, the novel is about Barrayar, about a woman who not only does not fit the mould when it comes to women on Barrayar but also breaks it wide open, and about her response to her new life and the trials it throws at her. It’s about women in Bujold’s space opera universe.

Of course, both books were originally published in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and space opera – US space opera – has changed a lot since then. At that time, New British Space Opera was still, well, British, and had not been appropriated and distorted by US science fiction. The Vorkosigan series, for much of its length, was in a mode of US science fiction that was often identified as either space opera or military sf, as the two subgenres were often indistinguishable in US science fictions. Barrayar does in fact read like military sf – much of the plot is set during a civil war, after all – but it’s only one instalment in a series containing over twenty books. And an early instalment, too. Certainly, Barrayar strengthens my resolve to read the full series, when the two books preceding it did not.


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The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov

(Another review from Facebook, posted before I unshuttered this blog.)

I read The End of Eternity (1955, USA) because it was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1956, and I’ve been trying a few of the old Hugo nominees. It’s also one of the few Asimov novels I managed to miss reading back in my very early teens.

Normally, of course, I avoid his books like the plague – I think he was a terrible writer, who managed a couple of ideas per book but everything else was just 1950s USA with a thin wash of paint. He’s the exemplar of Men in Hats sf. Asimov was 35 when The End of Eternity was published, but much of it reads like it was written by a much younger man – even though he didn’t even start it until 1953.

The invention of time travel has led to the creation of Eternity, a series of stations outside of time, with access to every year from their creation to the distant future, which are staffed by an all-male (for reasons that probably were unexceptional in the 1950s) corps who make carefully calculated changes to history in order to prevent future rough patches.

One such staff member, a Technician, Andrew Harlan, born in the 95th Century, despite the resolutely 20th Century US name, falls in love with a young woman from the 575th Century, and jeopardises his career, and Eternity, in order to have a relationship with her. This also includes jeopardising the plan in which he is unwittingly instrumental – sending a technician back to the 24th Century to invent time travel. No time travel, no Eternity, no Andrew Harlan, no nookie.

Everything goes entirely as expected, even the plot twists. The prose is anodyne and the level of invention low – one mission involves sabotaging a clutch on a vehicle in the 223rd century because of course they would still have cars with gearboxes 20,000 years from now; although I was… bemused by “her long legs shimmered in faintly luminescent foamite”, which is a really tone-deaf neologism and likely doesn’t evoke the image Asimov intended.

The End of Eternity lost the Hugo to Heinlein’s Double Star (1955, USA), although Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955, USA) would have been a better winner.


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The Stars Undying, Emery Robin

(This is another review I posted to Facebook before I unshuttered this blog.)

The blurb and publicity for The Stars Undying (2022, USA) make a lot of the fact it’s Cleopatra in Spaaaace. Or rather, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra; followed by Mark Antony and Cleopatra. In a space opera setting. But subtly changed so it’s not obvious– No, of course it’s not subtle. The book makes a nine-course banquet of its inspiration. Which is no bad thing, and not uncommon in science fiction, from Asimov butchering Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789, UK) and calling it Foundation (1951, USA), Blish doing the same to Spengler with his Cities in Flight (1955-1962, USA; see my review here) quartet, and, more recently and more pertinently, Kate Elliott space-operaficating Alexander the Great in Unconquerable Sun (2020, USA)…

In The Stars Undying, “Alexander the Great” dies but his memories are uploaded into an AI, and that becomes Alekso Undying, a god, and advisor to the rulers, of the people of Szayet, the latest queen of which is AltaGracia (Gracia). Gracia’s sister seized power after the death of their father, but Gracia won it back. With the help of Ceirran, the commander of the Ceiao military, and de facto ruler of the Ceiao empire. The two fall in love. Gracia follows Ceirran back to Ceiao (too many goddamn vowels), where she either charms or disgusts the locals. Because Ceiao is atheist, does not like the concept of Alekso Undying, and is a bit iffy with the idea of Ceirran, Gracia’s lover, controlling everything anyway. Gracia offers Ceirran immortality in the same form as Alekso – an AI running on uploaded memories in a “pearl” (a magical supercomputer substrate type thing), but this eventually proves Ceirran’s undoing. Et tu, Brute, and all that.

Unfortunately, Robin seems to have no sense of scale, and there’s no real sense the story is set in an interstellar empire. Cities are treated as if they’re worlds. Distances are farcical – 24,000 light years to fetch some cheese, as one memorable sentence mentions. Ceirran’s campaign, to conquer a distant world, doesn’t depart until the river that runs by the capital of the Ceiao, also called Ceiao, thaws. They’re going to another planet, what does the local weather matter?

It matters because this is a story told in a limited geographic area – southern Europe and North Africa – and all events and actions are predicated on that. It’s supposed to be a space opera, set in a galaxy, with thousands of planetary systems and worlds. And yet every place mentioned reads like it’s no further away from Rome than southern Spain or northern France.

It doesn’t help that Robin’s inspirations are so thinly-disguised, so it’s ridiculously easy to guess who is who, and what will happen. Admittedly, my knowledge of the period is limited to reading Robert Harris’s excellent trilogy about Cicero (yes, he’s there in The Stars Undying), but even so I had no problem identifying the people involved. From my reading, I also thought Robin’s characterisation of Caesar was far too kind. I know nothing about Cleopatra, and am more than willing to take her, er, take on Cleopatra. But, seriously, Caesar was not a nice guy, and Robin makes him into a romantic hero.

She also gender-flips Mark Antony, which arguably makes him more interesting than his inspiration. But does make her seem a little like, well, Starbuck from BSG (the reboot, of course).

The Stars Undying could have been an interesting space opera, but I think Robin made too many bad creative decisions. The sense of scale makes no sense, and actually detracts from the story. The worldbuilding is good in places, but poor in others (there’s no sense the book’s setting is interstellar). A big thing is made of Gracia lying about how she came to power, but when she reveals the truth it’s frankly hard to care.

An interesting idea, implemented in a way that undermines its source material and its purported setting. I won’t be reading the sequel.


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Time Out of Joint, Philip K Dick

I’ve never really understood why Dick’s novels are held in such high regard. He appears multiple times in the SF Masterworks series, more so than any other author. To me, his novels seem slapdash, written at speed and with very little idea of what they were supposed to be about. Some of his short fiction is excellent: ‘A Little Something for Us Tempunauts’ has been a favourite sf story for many years. But his novels – well, the only reason I’m reading them is because they’re in the SF Masterworks series, and once I’ve read those I’ll likely never go near a novel by him again.

Time Out of Joint (1959, USA) is a Wizard of Oz story, specifically the bit where Dorothy pulls away the curtain and reveals the truth about the Wizard. And, as in that situation, the truth behind the story of Time Out of Joint proves disappointing. Ragle Gumm is a WWII veteran in a small midwest town in the 1950s. Each day, he submits an answer to a newspaper competition, Where Will the Green Man Land Next. He spends the day researching, then fills in his answer on a map grid, and submits it by post. He always wins. He’s become something of a celebrity because of his winning streak.

But something weird is going on in the town. Gumm’s brother-in-law (he lives with his sister, her husband and their son) has a vivid memory of entering the bathroom and pulling a light-cord – but their bathroom has no light-cord. Gumm himself has memories of things that never happened. The son builds a crystal radio set, and they pick up weird conversations. In the Ruins, a derelict section of town, Gumm finds some magazines which feature celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe – they know she’s a film star, but on the other hand they’ve never heard of her.

Gumm’s world is beginning to unravel – a common Dickian trope. He plots an escape, but is brought back with his memory of his escape erased. So he tries a second time, this time with the help of his brother-in-law. They steal one of the trucks that delivers produce to the brother-in-law’s supermarket. And they make it out into the wider world…

It’s not the 1950s, it’s the 1990s. And Earth is at war with a small colony on the Moon. Gumm has a talent for predicting the targets of the nuclear missiles from the Moon. But he had a breakdown, so they created an artificial 1950s town, erased his memory, and use the competition as a cover for his predictions.

And, er, that’s it.

Gumm’s breakdown was triggered by a defection to the Moon’s side and a desire to emigrate. Once he uncovers the truth about himself and the competition, he contacts the “lunatics” in order to join them.

The first half of the book is the sort of stuff Dick does really well. All is not as it seems, but is it the protagonist or the world that is wrong? Dick keeps the details light, and focuses on a handful of characters and locales – which makes you wonder what’s happening in the rest of the town. His 1998 is less convincing. There is a world state called One Happy World, and people talk a particularly tin-eared creole. Time Out of Joint then jumps straight into exposition, and ends on a hopeful note.

Time Out of Joint was No 55 in the original SF Masterworks series, the tenth book of fourteen by Dick in the 73 books of the series. No other author appears as often. Personally, I’d keep No 20 A Scanner Darkly (1977, USA) and No 73 The Man in the High Castle (1962, USA), but ditch the rest. 

But then there are plenty of other books in the original SF Masterworks series I don’t think belong in it.


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A World Out of Time, Larry Niven

I’m still not entirely sure why I’m continuing to read, or reread, Niven’s novels. He was never a favourite of mine when I was reading science fiction back in the early 1980s, although Ringworld (1970, USA) does continue to hold some fascination. A World Out of Time (1976, USA), which is not part of Niven’s Known Space universe, was a reread – at least, I used to own a copy of the book (the 1982 Futura edition with the Peter Andrew Jones cover art) and I’m pretty sure I read it… But reading the book this year, none of it was familiar. And I’m usually pretty good at remembering books I’ve read, no matter how long ago.

Anyway, A World Out of Time is a Larry Niven novel. Corbell is dying of cancer, so he has himself frozen. And wakes in 2190, in the body of another man. Criminals in the worldwide State of 2190 have their personalities wiped. And the personalities of people who had themselves frozen in earlier centuries are then decanted into the criminals’ bodies (the process destroys the frozen body). The State which runs the world is mostly fascist, although Niven wants to present it as near-utopian. But people such as Corbell are considered less than human, and are employed in the sort of professions that would otherwise be occupied by slaves and, well, inmates in present-day US corporate-run prisons.

Corbell seems best-suited to become the pilot of a “rammer”, which is a single-person Bussard ramjet-powered spaceship which carries “biological package probes” used to terraform planets that are almost Earth-like. He is trained in his new role by being injected with RNA (not how it works, but never mind). Eventually, he is launched in his ship on a mission planned to take some 200 years at near lightspeed, returning him to Earth 300 years later. He’d spend most of the trip in cold sleep. But Corbell rebels, and aims his spaceship at the galactic core, intending to return to Earth 70,000 years later (not how it works, but never mind).

He judges it likely the State will still exist 70,000 years in the future, because it is a “water empire” but has no external enemies to bring it down (not how it works, but never mind; in fact, the concept of water empires has long since been debunked). Unfortunately, his watchdog back on Earth manages to upload his personality into the spaceship’s computer and it sabotages Corbell’s plan. So Corbell actually returns to Earth three millions years after he left.

Unsurprisingly, a lot has changed since 2190. Not least of which is that the Sun is now a red giant (which it won’t be three million years from now), and Earth has been moved into orbit about Jupiter. The State has long since vanished – eventually brought low by its own colonies. The secret of immortality was discovered, but only a select few, the Dictator class, were privy to it. But then an alternative process arrested development at the age of eleven, resulting in warring civilisations of immortal Boys and Girls.

On landing on Earth, which is now mostly inhospitable desert, Corbell is taken prisoner by the pilot of a Bussard ramjet spaceship who left centuries after him, and returned millennia before him. She had been kept in a “zero-time prison”, but later escaped. She is now old, but repeatedly mentions how beautiful she used to be (you can probably guess where that leads). She wants the secret of immortality for herself. Corbell escapes, and flees to Antarctica, which is temperate, and where some surviving Boys live in the ruins of one of their cities.

Nothing in A World Out of Time is even remotely believable, even for a science fiction novel. The trip through the galactic core manages to make a hash of everything from cosmology to physics. The Earth of three million years hence is just far too familiar – cars might fly, but cities have subways (and matter transmission booths, huh) and hospitals and police stations. The characterisation of the female antagonist is mostly offensive; Niven struggles to show the Boys are as super-intelligent as he tells us they are. The politics are everything you would expect of a white American male author who lives a life of unearned wealth and privilege.

A World Out of Time is actually a fix-up of three earlier stories, and the State apparently makes an appearance in two later novels, The Integral Trees (1984, USA) and The Smoke Ring (1987, USA).


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This Brutal Moon, Bethany Jacobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Crown of Stars, James Tiptree Jr

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

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

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

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


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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Slow Gods, Claire North

I’ve been following the career of Claire North, a pseudonym of Catherine Webb, since her debut under that name, The Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014, UK). I thought it good-ish, but things started picking up with The Sudden Appearance of Hope (2016, UK) – which, if I remember correctly, managed an impressively accurate description of Dubai – and by The Pursuit of William Abbey (2019, UK) she was on my must-buy list.

Which brings me to her latest, Slow Gods (2025, UK). Which is, well, a Banksian space opera. Iain M Banks’s space opera novels have been copied a lot over the past thirty five years, but Slow Gods comes closer than many. Which is not to say there’s nothing original in Slow Gods, because there’s plenty.

Interstellar travel in the universe of Slow Gods is accomplished via arcspace, but journeys through it are extremely unsettling to humans (there were definite vibes of the movie Event Horizon here). Ships require a human Pilot, who is plugged into the ship, but they can only Pilot for two or three trips before suffering a psychotic break. Or worse.

The Shine, properly the United Social Venture, is the complete antithesis of Banks’s Culture. A rich and powerful elite enjoy lives of untrammelled luxury supported by the labour of an indentured population kept permanently in debt. The Shine “Management” are cruel, sadistic and sociopathic. Any resemblance to twenty-first century USA is undoubtedly intended.

The Shine uses criminals and debtors as Pilots, and surgically destroys their higher brain functions so they last longer. It gives the Shine an advantage in interstellar travel. Mawukana na-Vdnaze was arrested during a Corpsec sweep, and promptly condemned to be a Pilot, but the surgery did not happen. Maw’s ship was then lost in arcspace, but somehow he managed to bring it home – but he was changed in the process. He is now effectively immortal, and he can Pilot through arcspace without being affected and with pinpoint accuracy.

The Slow, a huge and enigmatic AI with a very successful record of predicting the future, declares a binary star system will go nova, and the resulting wavefront will wipe out all worlds within an eighty light year radius. Which includes the Shine. But Management declares this “fake news” and does nothing to protect their worlds from the resulting wavefront.

Maw escapes the Shine, and goes to work for the Accord, a loose alliance of other interstellar polities. He runs various errands, including helping rescue historical artefacts from a world among the first to be destroyed by the wavefront. The Shine continues to refuse to evacuate its worlds, and instead seems bent on conquering other planets for Management to rule. The Accord can do nothing because the Shine has blackships, stealth warships with planet-killing weaponry, hidden in the systems of the Shine’s enemies. It’s the ultimate deterrent.

All this takes place over decades. The Shine are really horrible – although, to be honest, they’re not much worse than some of the polities in other twenty-first century sf novels, although here the novelty is they’re the villains. Maw is a curiously passive protagonist, someone who is so afraid of his abilities he rarely uses them. The Accord keeps him on a small island, since other people find him just as unsettling as arcspace. There’s even a hint of Special Circumstances to Maw’s role and the missions he undertakes. The world-building is also especially good. 

I don’t think the comparison with Banks is unfair, although Slow Gods is very much a twenty-first century take on the material, with thoroughly modern sensibilities (something many writers forget to do when aping Banks). I’ll be disappointed if Slow Gods does not appear on a few award shortlists this year.


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Metronome, Tom Watson

This was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2023, which is a science fiction literary award which generally aligns with my tastes in science fiction but does occasionally throw up baffling nominees. Metronome (2022, UK) is not as bad as some novels that have been nominated for the Clarke Award in the past, but I’m not convinced it deserved its place on the shortlist.

In a country which seems culturally and politically a mishmash of the UK and some random invented East European nation from literature, Whitney and Aina have been exiled to a croft on a windswept island for the crime of having a child without permission. No reason is given for the government licensing procreation, but it seems political. The two also have to take a pill three times a day – allegedly because of toxins released by the thawing of the permafrost.

None of this is convincing, nor does Watson seem to care. Metronome is a detailed account of the days before the couple’s twelve-year sentence is finally up, when the warden will come to return them home. And which of course never happens – because in these sorts of novels, it never does. Then a man and his young daughter appear – and the latter does not need to take the pills, so the permafrost toxins seem to be a political lie. Things come to a head because Whitney spends the entire novel wearing the Idiot Hat, and the revelation late in the story that he shopped the pair of them lands with a dull inevitability.

Watson can write a good sentence, but it’s all so ploddingly dull and banal and predictable. The setting never quite adds up – no surprise there, it’s a feature of the sub-sub-sub-genre, or whatever it is. Nothing is resolved – yet another feature of stories like this. East Europeans have been writing this sort of fiction for decades, and from lived experience. Metronome can never be more than a pale imitation, and so it proves. It comes as no surprise to discover it’s Watson’s first novel, and that he studied for a MA in Creative Writing. The press apparently loved it – I’ve said before I’m generally in favour of non-genre authors writing genre, but it’s depressing how literary reviewers enthuse so often about such books when no such enthusiasm is deserved.