Where It Rains in Color by Denise Crittendon
(Angry Robot, 2022)
Reviewed by Steven French
Lileala is the ‘Rare Indigo’, a title given to the most beautiful woman in the galaxy who is revered for her gorgeous blue-black skin and her ability to produce ‘the Shimmer’, a kind of visible glow. As such, she is about to become a symbolic dignitary and major tourist attraction for her home planet of Swazembi, famed both for its technological superiority and, as a tourist destination, for its misty drifts of electromagnetic colours. With her betrothed, Otto, a respected member of the science-based ‘Pineal Crew’, a glorious future seems to lie at Lileala’s feet.
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Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.
Celestial by M.D. Lachlan
(Gollancz, 2022)
This is a weird and wonderful slice of ‘alternative history’ set in 1977 about a Buddhist who goes to the moon, overcomes various obstacles, both physical and mental, including her own grief over the death of her much-loved sister and discovers the true nature of consciousness and reality. If that sounds ‘deep’ or ‘heavy’, well it really isn’t, thanks to Lachlan’s deft touch and the threads of humour that he weaves through the narrative.
The Greater Game by Gene Rowe
(White Cat Publications, 2022)
Reviewed by Phil Nicholls
In The Greater Game it is 2179 and humanity has begun the process of colonising space. A scattering of planets around distant stars have been colonised, but the bulk of the action revolves around our solar system. Simmering resentments on Mars about their Earth-based colonial controllers sits at the heart of the political machinations driving the plot. Just as the original Great Game was a colonial-era dispute over Afghanistan that ran for most of the 19th Century, so too is Rowe’s book a sprawling political thriller. One faction of the Martian government is plotting with the corporations who have evolved into effective nation-states. Meanwhile a spy and a UN Peacekeeper are both quickly swept up into the intrigue. Rowe weaves a complex, multi-thread narrative in order to encompass the broad scope of his sophisticated plot. What begins as seemingly disparate threads are then steadily pulled together through the course of the book. Once these plot lines begin to unite, the novel steadily picks up speed to a thrilling climax, which changes one part of the setting for good. I admire Rowe’s ambition for the book. The Greater Game delivers a powerful finale as a reward for the slightly disjointed nature of the early sections of the book where the focus jumps from one thread to another. This is a standard SF story structure, which Rowe uses as a vehicle to deliver a strong finish.
Wayward by Chuck Wendig
(Del Rey, 2022)
This is the post-apocalyptic sequel to Wendig’s pandemic novel, The Wanderers, in which a fungal infection (‘White Mask’) rips through humanity, save for a fortunate few. These include the ‘Sleepers’, who are controlled by a nano-tech based A.I. called ‘Black Swan’ and, together with their protective ‘Shepherds’, are directed to a small town in Colorado where civilization is planned to begin anew. Wayward is the story of how that all goes horribly wrong.
Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley
Reviewed by by Nick Hubble
Beyond the Burn Line defies easy categorisation. It is simultaneously the tale of a far-future post-Anthropocene Earth and a first-contact novel. The first half is a somewhat leftfield quest adventure set in a just-about preindustrial society. The second half is a high-tech thriller, complete with unreliable AIs and action scenes in exotic locations. If this sounds potentially bewildering, have no fear because the novel is such a beautifully written, character-driven and enchanting narrative, that it is a delight to immerse oneself within. I think a key reason for the intense readerly pleasure I experienced lay precisely in the way that Beyond the Burn Line combines so many types of stories that I like and does something meaningful with them.
Nightmare: The Unfolding of a World Crisis by Liz Cowley and Donough O’Brien
(GB Publishing, 2022)
Reviewed by John Dodd
I like disaster films. I like world ending crises. I like the sort of thing where the stakes are so high that the only thing that can justify them is a resolution of equal height. From the read on the background, this wasn’t going to be a disaster along the lines of Armageddon or Resident Evil, but I liked that something that threatened the world might not come along in a large, loud package.
Unfortunately, that was as far as this got…
The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter
Reviewed by Dan Hartland
Sleepers have been waking for much of the history of science fiction. From William Morris to Philip Francis Nowlan through to generation starships and Dave Lister, the trope of a human preserved beyond their natural lifespan waking into a transformed future has proven surprisingly stubborn. Of course, it is a usefully direct means of achieving the contrast between tomorrow’s innovations and today’s challenges that gives some kinds of SF their characteristic frisson; but in that utility it is also rather blunt. The awakened sleeper can sometimes seem to lead the reader by the nose.
One of the many things Stephen Baxter attempts in The Thousand Earths is to under-cut our expectations of this hoary old staple of the genre. His John Hackett boards a ramship in a 2154 already overcoming the challenges of our own time and swapping them for others. His mission: to use his “relativity-busting” (p. 581) ramship to travel to Andromeda and back—a five-million-year-round trip from the perspective of Earth, but on his endlessly accelerating ship only a few years of subjective time.
Dice Men: The origin story of Games Workshop by Ian Livingstone with Steve Jackson
(The Book Publicist, 2022)
Reviewed by Stuart Carter
Dare you enter the terrifying world of Dice Men, our new adventure in which YOU are the hero? Follow in the footsteps of fearless knight Sir Ian Livingstone and mild-mannered wordsmith Steve Jackson, the twin creators of Games Workshop—the realm’s mightiest purveyor of pastimes!
You play as a lowly Reviewer with a fierce deadline to beat. To calculate yours, roll one six-sided dice and add 2 to the result. This is your Deadline; if it reaches 0, you have failed in your quest.
Now, take up your notebook and stride forth, noble Reviewer!
Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins
(The MIT Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Paul Graham Raven
In reviewing this addition to MIT Press’s boldly designed Radium Age Science Fiction imprint, which is dedicated to bringing back into print seminal works of proto-sf that were originally released in the first few decades of the C20th, I find myself doing something a bit unusual: I’m going to recommend that you read Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins even though, as a novel, it is not very good.
I generally avoid definitive statements regarding quality, and part of me would like to do so here. I am not an aficionado of the period—Of One Blood was originally published in 1902—so I cannot assess it against some accepted standard of quality, even were we able to agree on the metrics for such a measurement. Nonetheless, I can say objectively that the prose veers between overwrought and hackneyed, the pacing is erratic, and the plotting largely obvious with flashes of where-the-hell-did-that-come-from. (Apparently the story was originally written for serial publication, which goes some way to explaining its rather lurching progress: even with a solid outline to go by, a tale told in episodes can come out lumpy, particularly if there are wordcount restraints.)
Tyger by SF Said
(David Fickling Books, 2023)
Reviewed by Kevan Manwaring
This is the fourth collaboration between SF Said and the multi-talented artist, Dave McKean (preceded by Varjak Paw, The Outlaw Varjak Paw, and Phoenix), and the integration of text and illustration is a pleasure to experience. Along with the stunning cover, endpapers, and other paratext, it is a total aesthetic experience that restores a bibliophilic delight to the reading experience. Although ostensibly in the ‘YA’ category, Tyger, like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust, has a genuine crossover appeal that would connect with adult audiences as well as with younger readers. In a similar way to how Pullman draws upon John Milton in his series, Said here draws heavily upon William Blake—not only in the titular ‘Tyger’ of the title (an anthropomorphic and archetypal presence that looms large in the story and in the textual plane—akin to how the armoured polar bear, Iorek Byrnison does in Pullman’s universe), but in other intertextual allusions to the Lambeth-based artist and poet. The main antagonist is Urizen, Blake’s god of reason—and the Tyger is almost an embodiment of Los: his blazing deity of the imagination. Yet beneath this Manichaean conflict there are several allusions to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience: Said draws upon the poet’s iconography (the lamb; the chimneysweep; shepherds) and cosmology. For Tyger is set in a parallel contemporary London—one of many in Said’s quantum multiverse—in which the British Empire still exists, slavery has not been abolished, and the sprawl of the city has been checked by an authoritarian, xenophobic regime. This ‘other England’ evokes the alternative London of ‘The Crystal Cabinet’, a poem featured in The Pickering Manuscript:
Another England there I saw Another London with its Tower, Another Thames and other hills, And another pleasant Surrey bower.
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