Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years by Peter Nicholls
(Ansible Editions, 2022)
Reviewed by Steven Doran
The package I received had 7 stamps stuck onto it: two Queen’s Heads, two miniature landscapes, a strawberry, an orange and a lemon. It was as if sending a package was as important as what it contained. That’s fitting, given Peter Nicholls’ care in bringing Sci-Fi to readers over his 57-year career, at the heart of which is The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction—a book first published in 1979 which is still updated today. This collection of reviews, essays, interviews, listicles and diaries covers publications from the 1970s up to the millennium. He chose them because they were his favourite pieces and because this period was a noisy and exciting time for Genre fiction.
The Roaring Years is a history told by an insider, observed both from the ‘salaried haven’ of academia and the ‘grubby frontline’ of publishing. He’s informed, incisive and honest, making a charming guide through the years when Wolfe, Dick, Aldiss and Herbert were bright young things, with many of their best-loved works yet to be written. There’s plenty more: essays on the state of the industry and the meaning of genre, lists of his 100 favourite writers (and 88 second favourites), and his own telling of The Great Tradition of Proto Science Fiction, covering Gilgamesh, Gawain, Rasselas and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
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Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.
Warning Light Calling by Peter Graarup Westergaard
(Vræyda Literary Press, 2021)
Reviewed by Susan Peak
In reviewing a book, I consider how well it fits in its genre. And how well is it written. Judging whether a poem is well written can be considered objectively. For example, if it is a sonnet, does it actually meet a sonnet’s requirements? But it’s also subjective, very much so when it comes to free verse when the focus is more on the effect of the poetry. And where the effect relies on feelings and images, it can be harder to assess it against a specific genre. Both aspects were a challenge in this review.
Peter Graaup Westergraad’s narrative poem, Warning Light Calling, is described as an SF novella in verse. I found it to be less clear-cut than that, and perhaps more interesting.
Ledge by Stacey McEwan
(Angry Robot Books, 2022)
Reviewed by John Dodd
The world is only a Ledge, too steep are the cliffs behind it to climb out, too wide is the chasm beyond to jump to freedom, and from above, every once in a while, Glacians, a race of winged predators, come to take tribute from the steadily dwindling numbers upon this narrow precipice.
This is the story of Dawsyn, who lives upon the ledge and has nothing in her life to look forward to, those around her are dying, there are no moments of joy to be had, and as the demons come again and again, so those around her are taken, and leave her with nothing.
Till she herself is taken, and there’s a realisation that the world she knew is a prison, and that the Glacians aren’t invincible, that they can be fought, and they can be beaten. Strangest of all, it would be one of them, Ryon, a hybrid, outcast from the Glacians himself, that helps her to escape and learn more of the world beyond.
Fractured Infinity by Nathan Tavares
(Titan Books, 2022)
Reviewed by Stuart Carter
What would you do if you had an evil other-dimensional twin? Worse, what if that same twin was the genius who first discovered how to skip between parallel worlds? You’d probably do what Hayes Figueiredo does in Fractured Infinity: grab the love of your life and run as fast and as far as you could across the multiverse.
Things didn’t start that way. The first Hayes knew of his evil twin, he was picked up by a top-secret research lab that had discovered a machine that could see the past and predict the future. So, why did they need Hayes? He’s nobody; the lab’s top scientist calls him ‘nondescript’, just a small-time documentary filmmaker. Or at least, that’s all he is in this universe. However, there’s a version of Hayes in one particular universe who’s very special; so special, in fact, that he’s invented a machine called an Envisioner, and has sent hundreds, maybe thousands of them, out across the multiverse. In Hayes’ universe a space probe on the edge of the solar system has found an Envisioner and brought it back to Earth for further investigation.
The Emergent by Nadia Afifi
(Flame Tree Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Steven French
This is the follow-up to The Sentient, in which Amira Valdez escaped from the fundamentalist religious compound in which she was born and raised and became a talented ‘holomentic’ reader, able to read peoples’ memories. Hoping to work on one of the orbital space stations, she was instead assigned to the Pandora Initiative, which aimed to produce a human clone by using three women as hosts for their own cloned embryos. After two of the women died, Amira was given the job of exploring the memories of the third, Rozene, in an effort to discover what went wrong. When she discovered that Rozene’s memories had been tampered with, Amira found herself caught between the machinations of the fundamentalist Elders and those of the Cosmics, a pseudo-religious group who believe in the ‘Conscious Plane’, a kind of web of consciousness that acts as the ‘binding glue’ of the multiverse.
The Calculations of Rational Men by Daniel Godfrey
(Self published, 2022)
It’s 1962, and the whole world is breathing a sigh of relief after the Cuban Missile Crisis ends peacefully—even the 500 inmates of HMP Queen’s Bench, an isolated prison in the north of England. But their relief is to be short-lived…
One December night, a thermonuclear attack is unleashed upon the UK, and the men are herded into an underground shelter beneath the prison, along with a small military detachment. The inmates are tense, the shelter is crowded, and their keepers are terrified. No one has any idea what’s happening above ground, only that the Geiger counters show deadly radioactive fallout has covered the prison and will swiftly finish anyone unlucky enough to be out there.
Are you terrified enough yet? Because things only go downhill from here in The Calculations of Rational Men.
HellSans by Ever Dundas
Reviewed by Phil Nicholls
This is the second novel by Scottish writer Ever Dundas. HellSans features a vision of Britain as a brutal police state, reminding me of Moore’s V for Vendetta, although with a healthy mix of Orwellian propaganda.
The key feature of Dundas’ book is the font Hell Sans, a powerful tool keeping Prime Minister Caddick in control. Simply reading political slogans in Hell Sans gives loyal citizens a strong hit of bliss. However the HSAs, those unfortunates who are Hell Sans Allergic, form an impoverished underclass, scapegoated for all the ills of the dictatorship. Freedom fighters, known as Seraphs, fight back against Caddick’s rule. The Seraphs conduct terrorist attacks and add serifs to Hell Sans text, countering the bliss-inducing effects of the font.
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).
The Entropy of Loss by Stewart Hotston
(NewCon Press, 2022)
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…
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