Visions of Dystopia by George Orwell Foreword by D.J. Taylor, Edited and Introduced by Professor Richard Bradford
(Flametree Press, 2021)
Reviewed by L.J. Hurst
One day when Winston Smith went to work without his black shabby briefcase he was stopped in the street and given one. Later, he discovered that it contained a ‘heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover’. That was ‘the book’. Visions of Dystopia in some ways disguises itself as well, as it has the appearance of a medieval grimoire, its impressed cover gleaming with red, black and silver ink, and a single eye staring out. It is actually a theme anthology: the publishers, Flametree, have republished four of Orwell’s other works individually, but this thick volume contains three of his books: Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the non-fiction Homage to Catalonia, all complete, along with extracts of two more of his earlier works. Following biographer D.J. Taylor’s Foreword, there is a longer Introduction by Richard Bradford, and finally extracts from two earlier dystopian works known to Orwell—Jack London’s The Iron Heel (which Orwell reviewed early in WWII as one of the ‘Prophecies of Fascism’), and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (which Orwell had also reviewed towards the end of the War).
Continue reading…
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.
The Entropy of Loss by Stewart Hotston
(NewCon Press, 2022)
Reviewed by John Dodd
It’s something humans don’t do, talking about death, because merely the discussion of it might invite it into our midst, and if we’re being honest, none of us really has a hankering to meet it. It’s not that we have a fear of death, it’s just that no one understands it, not really, and so all we can do is talk about the part leading up to it, and the feelings that that gives us.
The Entropy of Loss is the story of Sarah and Rhona. Rhona is dying and Sarah doesn’t really want to live without her, but the treacherous nature of being alive has caused her to have an affair with Akshai, a co-worker, while Rhona is still alive. This has led to Sarah questioning if she is a good person, if she’s doing what she’s doing because she’s trying to deal with her feelings over Rhona, or if she’s just messed up by everything that’s occurring.
New Brighton by Helen Trevorrow
(Red Dog Press, 2022)
The thing about unreliable narrators is that they lend a degree of uncertainty to the story that means that you can’t entirely throw yourself into the book because you don’t know if the story that’s being told is the right one, the wrong one, or not even the story. That said, stories with unreliable narrators can also take liberties with characters and increase the level of intrigue because you really don’t know who to focus on.
So it is here…
Million Eyes II: The Unraveller by C.R. Berry
(Elsewhen Press, 2021)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
The Princes in the Tower escaping and fighting dinosaurs? Jesus Christ and Guy Fox in one bundle? C.R. Berry’s Million Eyes II: The Unraveller has it all. If that can’t pique your curiosity, nothing will.
The book is a second part of the trilogy and picks up straight after the events of the first part. Just a quick recap: ex-history teacher Gregory Ferro stumbles upon evidence that a mysterious time traveller is responsible for several key events in our history. He is murdered by a sinister and omnipresent Million Eyes corporation just as he shared his finds with Jennifer Larson. The latter barely escapes death and travels into the past.
What Not by Rose Macaulay
(MIT Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Phil Nicholls
MIT Press has released What Not by Rose Macaulay as part of a series of Radium Age SF novels. The Radium Age is defined as 1903 to 1934, a period bookended by Marie Curie’s discovery of radium and her later death. Introductions from Joshua Glenn and Matthew De Abaitua put the MIT Press project into context, as well as describe the background and influence of What Not.
Originally published in 1919, What Not presents a satirical view of Britain after World War One. At its heart is the Ministry of Brains, which seeks to eradicate the stupidity which led the world into the great war. This seemingly sensible idea is portrayed satirically as the Ministry introduces increasingly draconic laws designed to prevent lower-intelligence people from having babies.
Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest
(Gollancz, 2022)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble
As reported on his blog, Christopher Priest wrote Expect Me Tomorrow, his seventeenth novel, over the course of the 2020 pandemic period, submitting the manuscript at the end of October at more-or-less the same time as his previous novel, The Evidence, was published. It has therefore taken nearly two years to come out in English, although a French edition, Rendez-vous demain, has already been published in April of this year. In the meantime, Priest has written another ‘new book’, which is due out next year. It’s not clear, but I presume this will also be a novel; at which point Priest will have published seven novels and a substantial collection of short stories since 2011. In other words, he has produced a major body of internationally respected work in the twenty-first century proper (understood as beginning after the financial crash of 2008) that deserves to be considered highly significant in terms of both artistic creation and (admittedly sometimes oblique) social commentary. In Expect Me Tomorrow, decades of writerly craft are honed to produce not the great British novel, but a deadpan, darkly comic anti-novel charting the attenuated social life of the island we live on against the backdrop of radical climate change across a period of nearly 200 years.
An Earnest Blackness by Eugen Bacon
(Anti-Oedipus Press, 2022)
An Earnest Blackness is the debut collection of 12 non-fiction essays by Eugen Bacon, published by Anti-Oedipus Press, 2022. Her previous work includes three novels, all nominated for BSFA awards. Bacon is a multi-prize-winning author and her creative work has appeared in many magazines.
The opening lines of the first essay set the tone for much of the collection: “Decades after the ground-breaking work of authors such Toni Morrison, Samuel Delaney, and Octavia Butler, black speculative fiction is more visible and thriving than ever.” The heart of this collection is an overview of black speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, AfroSF and even slipstream writing, styles where “We can contemplate different, better futures.” Bacon offers good explorations of these labels across several essays but concedes that “There are problems with definitions.”
Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.
The Rise Of The Cyberzines by Mike Ashley
(Liverpool University Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Martin Petto
The Rise Of The Cyberzines marks the culmination of a monumental project. When Mike Ashley started this project, The Time Machines: The Story of the Science Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (2001) was intended to be the first of three volumes. Transformations: 1950 to 1970 (2005) and Gateways to Forever: 1970 to 1980 (2007) duly followed. But so too—after a gap—did Science Fiction Rebels: 1981 to 1990 (2016). And now a final mammoth book covering 1991 to 2020: “This is my final volume covering English-language magazines, in a series over twenty years in the making. A companion volume, No Limits, will explore the development of non-English sf magazines. Beyond that, I pass the baton on to anyone who wishes to continue the story through future decades.”
The result is a book—simultaneously a history of the state of the industry and a review of the state of the field—that is essential yet frustrating. Covering a larger span than any of the previous volumes as well as more fundamental industry upheavals is just too large a task for a single book, particularly one with its genesis in a different task.
Men written and directed by Alex Garland
(A24, 2022)
Reviewed by Josh Pearce
Men is Alex Garland’s third film as director, following two well-regarded science fiction forays (Annihilation and Ex Machina), and he has also written several other SF gems (28 Days Later…, Sunshine, and Dredd). Men, however, is decidedly fantasy. (Garland himself calls it “folk horror.”)
It stars Jessie Buckley as Harper, a recent widow renting a large country house for a couple of weeks as a place to recover from her tragedy. The owner of the house is Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), who gives off enough creepy vibes that when he asks Harper if she plays the piano, she lies and says, “No.” Anything to avoid prolonging being in the same room as him.
Horizon Zero Dawn: Liberation by Anne Toole and Ben Maccaw Art by Elmer Damaso
(Titan Comics, 2022)
(Minor spoilers for the video game Horizon Zero Dawn.)
Novels based on video games fall into two different categories for me, the ones that give us something that we were utterly unaware of, and those that tell a story that expands on something we already knew.
I love the lore of games, particularly in video games where the temptation must surely be to paper over the cracks in the lore with more action and hope that no one notices. The more that time goes on, the more that games designers realise that many are just like me, they want the story, they want all the things that go with it, they want to know everything.
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