Echogenesis by Gary Gibson
(Brain in a Jar Book, 2021)
Reviewed by Phil Nicholls
Echogenesis is a fascinating science fiction mystery featuring fifteen people who awake inside small stasis pods. They are puzzled to find themselves in a strange jungle beside a crashed spaceship. The unfamiliar plants suggest they are on an unknown planet, as does the wreckage of the planetary landing craft. Robots work on repairing the crashed landing craft but will not interact with the stranded.
The opening chapters deal with the initial debates between the stranded about their location and the reason why they all have holes in their memories. These gaps are more challenging for the elder members of the team who recall being old, yet now find themselves in bodies with a physical age of about twenty.
Continue reading…
Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.
A Visit to Venus by George E. Hobbs
(Hobnob Press, 2021)
Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
It would probably be fair to say George E. Hobbs is unknown to sf fans. He is certainly not featured in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, nor Brian Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. Hobnob Press have masterminded a revival of this Swindon based author, a railway engineer most of whose works were produced for the local newspaper. A prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction (often on religious topics), Hobbs turned to sf on a number of occasions. This, the third book of his work published by Hobnob, is a long short story in which three young men journey to Venus and find a spiritually advanced race there. It was serialised in the Swindon Advertiser in 1927 and seems to have remained unknown since.
Emerald to Ice by Matt Colborn
(Independently published, 2021)
Emerald to Ice revolves around an anthropology mission to the planet Nyuki. The novel’s binary star setting is one of its best features. Nyuki orbits the smaller star Biloko, which in turn orbits the much larger Asali. This combination produces dramatic climate shifts on Nyuki, from verdant emerald to thick ice. Nyuki's climate is similar to Bran Aldiss’ Helliconia, although on a shorter timeframe.
The planets Xue and Leng orbit within the system’s Exo Kuiper belt. Six Abode space stations orbit Leng, home to the resident human population. Colborn thankfully includes a helpful diagram of this system.
Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders
(Titan Books, 2021)
Reviewed by John Dodd
When reviewing anthologies, the problem is that it’s impossible to write something concise that manages to encompass all the stories in the book, and you don’t want to miss anyone out. When the anthology is all one person’s work, it becomes easier.
Or so you’d think…
These are nineteen different stories that run the gamut of styles and subjects from time travellers who might not be time travellers, to mystical fights between mythical creatures, and cities that now lay underwater where once they were high and dry.
The British Science Fiction Association is very sad to hear that Maureen Kincaid Speller has passed away.
Maureen was a BSFA member and an integral part of the association. She served as editor of Matrix and Vector, but contributed much more than that. Her diligence, wisdom and vision were instrumental in the BSFA's continuance for several years.
A special newsletter will be sent to members later this week with a tribute to Maureen.
Voices from the Radium Age edited by Joshua Glenn
(MIT, 2022)
Reviewed by Duncan Lawie
I am deeply grateful to this volume for presenting me with ‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster. Yes, the author of those Edwardian classics adapted in the late twentieth century into gorgeous films. I have been hearing, ever since those movies were released, that he had also written a prescient piece of science fiction. It seems even more prescient now. The story describes an atomised society, each person interacting through virtual connections, isolated from every other in their own space and awkward when forced into physical interaction. How of the moment can a setting get? The story centres on a mother who is totally at home in this world and her son, living far away, who wants to break free. Their interactions and the increasing strictures of “the Machine” are used to build a detailed picture of an all too believable future.
The Art of Space Travel by Nina Allan
Reviewed by Paul Graham Raven
Some day in the not-too-distant future, a scholarly monologue will pick up the gauntlet which Nina Allan offers in her introduction to The Art of Space Travel, where she mentions the unreliability of memory as a thematic of her work, and a sort of counter-motivation for her being a writer at all. I have neither the word-count nor the talent to do so here, which is one reason that I’m going to talk about these short stories in terms of estrangement.
Now, come along, no eye-rolling at the back of the room! Yes, yes, the critical cliché that is Suvinian estrangement is the move of making the strange ordinary—but there’s also a mirror-version (more common to horror and “weird” fiction, perhaps?) of making the ordinary strange. Running both algorithms simultaneously seems to be Allan’s program: hence very ordinary people living very humdrum lives in worlds that just happen to have fairies (albeit ones that Conan Doyle would have found unphotogenic) or regenerative shapeshifters who take human form (albeit as quietly clever girls with reclusive tendencies) or space travellers (albeit by way of a chemical-surgical preparatory procedure that turns them somewhat cockroach-like, mostly but not exclusively in metabolic terms). Moreover, Allan’s POV characters are very rarely themselves the magical or fantastic or technologically transformed persons (at least not at first); they’re more often someone who knows (or knew) or loves (or loved) them, or lost them, or lives down the road from them in a liminal pit-village somewhere in the East Midlands. Indeed, this book is all but devoid of heroes, as if quietly dedicated to Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory” of fiction without being at all like Le Guin in terms of style or topic: Allan’s POVs are rarely real protagonists, and they’re definitely not anthropologists, even by proxy.
Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell
(Titan Books, 2022)
Reviewed by Stuart Carter
Gareth L. Powell has, it seems, spent his pandemic rewatching some classic science fiction cinema, in particular Alien, Aliens, Battlestar Galactica, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to come up with his own unique remix. Beginning with a classic horror opener (but it is only an opener!) when a spaceship detects a strange signal and impetuous humans land to investigate, only to wake something not only unpleasant but eager to spread, using the vector of those impetuous humans.
However, Stars and Bones does a lot of heavy world-building before the unpleasantness properly kicks off. For instance, 200 years before the events of Stars and Bones, on late 21st century Earth, World War 3 had broken out. We were only rescued by the intervention of omniscient aliens, who stopped the rain of deadly nuclear missiles when, literally at the very last moment, they detected a Zefram Cochrane-style invention of warp drive. Impressed by our human smarts, they saved the planet. Despite our impressive brains (or, rather, one brain), they were deeply unhappy with the attempted global suicide, and so humanity, although saved, was banished from Earth. The entire population (along with some domestic pets) was moved into hundreds of gigantic space arks and set to travel the cosmos until such time as we might again be trusted to take proper care of a proper planet.
Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji
(Jo Fletcher Books, 2022)
Scottish author Adam Oyebanji makes a strong impression with his debut novel. Midshipman Ravi MacLeod is training to be an officer aboard the colony ship Archimedes. The voyage to Destination World, Tau Ceti, has taken five generations and Braking Day is approaching. This is the day when the Archimedes, along with her companion vessels Bohr and Chandrasekhar, will begin deceleration as a prelude to orbiting their intended colony planet.
The detailed setting aboard Ravi’s ship is fascinating. The Archimedes has eight habitation rings, rotating in opposing pairs. However, the seventh, Ghana, is showing wear from the long journey and the eighth, Hungary, is a burnt-out wreck. While both rings appear in the plot, Oyebanji does not feel the need to provide the full backstory for their history. Instead, a few snippets of detail are scattered through the book and the setting feels so much more real for Oyebanji’s light touch.
Kings of a Dead World by Jamie Mollart
(Sandstone Press, 2021)
What would happen if the governments of the world accepted that there were too many people on the planet and took measures to reduce the population by any means? They started by killing the criminals, then euthanising those with terminal diseases, then euthanising anyone older than a certain age. At this point, you’re fairly sure that you’re in a really dark world where there’s not going to be much in the way of happy endings. Then they decide that there’s still too many people, so huge buildings are made to put people to sleep for a long time, which allows the minimal resources that are available to be used as they need to be.
There’s a lot to take in from the start, it’s a cross between the Matrix and Dark City, where the sleeping pods are looked over by Janitors, who have a massive responsibility in watching over those who are in their block of pods, but literally no oversight, they can do as they wish, when they wish, how they wish.
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