A River Called Time by Courttia Newland

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought Of It:

A River Called Time, Courttia Newland’s latest novel, is unlike anything he has written before. It may well be unlike anything you have read before – even if you are familiar with the genre of speculative fiction.

In his Afterword to this book, Newland writes that he set out to write, “a decolonised novel, freed of any adherence to the race-fixated, identity-based reality we live every day. I would mentally free myself from the White Gaze.”

To do so, he constructed a world – in fact, a series of parallel worlds – in which “the Transatlantic Slave Trade, colonisation and the genocide known as Maafa … hadn’t ever taken plate, one in which Europeans treaded Africa as the ancient Greeks once treated Kemit, coming not to pillage, rape and murder, but to learn.”

But these worlds are no Utopias. Most of the parallels contain a version of London (Dinium) in which a large area of the centre has been destroyed by a catastrophic event and replaced by a giant monolith in which millions of inhabitants live their lives without ever emerging from its hermetic space. Within that monolith, there are lives of privilege, lives of poverty and gruelling labour,  and pretty much everything in between.

As we move between the different world, the same cast of characters is reconfigured again and again, playing different roles and standing in different relationships to one another. We even briefly find ourselves in a world that seems indistinguishable from our own. Each one is fully realised, the differences between them sometimes minute and sometimes vast.

The book has been a long time coming. Newland describes how he struggled, first to find a way to write the book he knew he wanted to write, and then to find anyone who was willing to publish it. There were those who thought he should stick with the urban stories he was previously known for. But finally, the book found its publishing home, with Canongate Books.

It is a slippery book – one that refuses to give up easy explanations. Each section is enthralling in its own right - the connections between them elusive but intriguing. Yet the author offers no moral compass. There are no clear ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys’. Like Markriss, the character we follow from world to world, we are left to work out for ourselves what constitutes the right choice.

Powerful, liberating and challenging, this book is an explosive new entry to the canon of speculative fiction.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Technologies of the Self by Haris A Durrani, Shadowshaper by Daniel J Older, An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obiama, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

Avoid If You Dislike: Books that stubbornly refuse to give up easy explanations..

Perfect Accompaniment:  Spaghetti Bolognaise (if you read the Afterword, you’ll know why!)

Genre: Speculative Fiction

Buy This Book Here

Tipping Point by Terry Tyler

 Reviewer: Liza Perrat, author of The Bone Angel trilogy (Spirit of Lost Angels, Wolfsangel, Blood Rose Angel) and new release, The Silent Kookaburra.

What we thought: I am a great fan of Terry Tyler’s books, mainly due to her great storytelling and character development. That’s the reason I tried Tipping Point even though I’m not generally a fan of post-apocalyptic/dystopian stories. And I’m so glad I did! I found this story scarily plausible and realistic, and could totally imagine it happening, especially since it’s set in 2024, not so far into our future. 

It all stems from the new and highly popular social networking site, Private Life, something most of us are readily familiar with today. Our privacy is ensured, but is that what happens? 

When a lethal and rapidly-spreading virus is discovered in Africa, and spreads through the UK, a nationwide vaccination programme is announced. However it soon becomes obvious that not everyone is being offered the vaccination, for example, the ill, old, mentally ill and unemployed are not entitled. 

In the roller-coaster ride of this thriller that follows, the author deftly explores the vast conspiracy theory and evokes a sense of real fear into the reader, about gaining data from social media and that information being used against us. It is a worrying scenario, with terrifying consequences, that I can easily imagine happening.

That’s not to say this story is simply a dystopian horror tale, far from it. It also shows us, very realistically, human behaviour: how people behave in both negative and positive ways when society as we know it breaks down.

As in all her books, the author has created some compelling characters with whom I could readily identify and care about.  

Tipping Point is the first book in what promises to be an excellent series, the Project Renova series and I’m eagerly looking forward to reading the second, Lindisfarne, which is waiting for me on my Kindle!

You’ll like this if you enjoy: Plausible and feasible dystopian tales.

Avoid if you don’t like: the idea of what might truly happen to our world in the near future.

Ideal accompaniments: just any kind of food that is available, as tomorrow it might not be.

Genre: Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian


Available on Amazon

My Bookmuse reviews of more of Terry Tyler’s books:

TheDevil You Know

Kingsand Queens

LastChild

Yesterday by Felicia Yap

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

In the crowded field of Crime Thrillers, it is not easy to find a truly original concept, but Felicia Yap might have done just that.

I first came across Yap last year, when the opening chapter of Yesterday was one of two pieces chosen for the National Academy of Writing’s Public Edit. I loved the idea behind the book and told her so. Just a few weeks later, I wasn’t a bit surprised to learn that it had been the subject of a bidding war at the 2016 London Book Fair.

I am thrilled, therefore, to have the chance to read an Advance Review Copy of Yesterday.

In Yap’s world – in other respects indistinguishable from ours – people have total vivid recall of everything that happened to them in either the previous 24 hours (Monos) or 48 hours (Duos). Beyond that, they remember only the facts they record at the end of each day in their iDiaries.

Into this mix comes a woman whose memories work like ours. Sophia remembers the hurt that was done to her twenty years earlier, and she is bent on revenge. So why is she the one who ends up dead? And how can detective Hans Richardson solve her murder when he has less than twenty-four hours before his memories are wiped?

The story unfolds from four points of view: the detective, a husband and wife whose lives are somehow entangled with Sophia’s, and Sophia herself, speaking from the pages of her iDiary. The text is also peppered with newspaper articles and other extracts that serve to flesh out this world for us.

It’s good to see publishers embrace a book that dares to cross the boundary between Crime Thriller and SciFi. Yap has worked through the ramifications of her world – from the practical aspects of life through the social mores and hierarchies that develop, to the impact on love itself. The reader can relax and go along for the ride, knowing they are in confident hands.

Like Matt Haig’s The Humans, this debut is a fun read that manages to sneak in some penetrating questions - in this case, about how memory affects both our relationships and our sense of self. In the end, the least human character among them is the one most like ourselves.

This is the first of a trilogy and I look forward to seeing where Yap takes this next.

Watch Yap discuss her writing secrets with fellow authors at the Triskele Lit Fest, Sept 2016.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Humans by Matt Haig, The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas, The Lives and Loves of a She Devil by Fay Wheldon

Avoid if You Dislike: Crossing genres

Perfect Accompaniment: Bacon sandwich and a coffee

Genre: Crime, Sci Fi

Available on Amazon

The Chimes by Anna Smaill, Sceptre (2015)

Reviewer: Rebecca Johnson Bista

What we thought: Anna Smaill is a New Zealander, a classical violinist and a poet. This, her first novel, was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize, and it certainly deserved that accolade. It will be like nothing you have ever read. Reading this book is like inhabiting the head of someone who thinks in musical idiom rather than in prose, which has a startling and disorientating effect – especially for the musically illiterate, like me. And along the way, Smaill raises questions about memory, narrative, religion, oppression, identity, language, the evil of perfection, and the pain of free will, in a consistently vivid and gripping tale.

The Chimes is – technically – science fiction, as it is set in a future where the world as we know it – the hi-tech world of computers, electronics, metro systems, planes, and written information - has been destroyed in an apocalyptic episode called the Allbreaking. What has replaced it is a harmonious, but backward, totalitarian state run by the Order, and ruled by music: music as social organizing principle; music as mytho-political orchestration; music as language; music as mind control; music as faith. It is a world where everyone plays an instrument, almost everyone converses in ‘solfege’ – the hand-signed version of the tonic Sol-Fa scale – and every trade, place, smell, object, person, direction or memory has its own idiosyncratic theme-tune or melody. It is also where, more ominously, all books have been burned and the narrative principle of individual lives, the connection with remembered past, is erased daily by Onestory and the Chimes. These are two acts of compulsory daily communal worship or ritual accompanied a massive barrage of glorious but brain-wiping sound. Smaill sustains this world not only descriptively but with its own vernacular – an English corrupted in pronunciation by the lack of written records – and with a perfectly judged use of musical terminology and imagery through which the characters describe their lives, feelings and actions.

In this strange but familiar world we meet Simon, a boy or young man apparently from nowhere, somewhere on the road to London. With him he carries only a bag containing his ‘object memories’ – talismans he uses to recall elements of his past and his now dead parents, and the ‘body memory’ of the skill of planting bulbs. We know nothing more of him or where he is going – and nor, it seems, does he, except for a song whose words he can’t quite remember as a clue, a thread he is convinced he has to follow.

Simon falls in with a gang of young river prospectors who search ‘the Under’, formerly the London Underground and sewer systems, for ‘the Pale Lady’ – a corruption of palladium, a pure silvery metal that has the unique property that it can insulate against sound. They sell scraps of this ‘mettle’ to make a living, as it is used to build the instrument that makes the Chimes. The gang members find their way in the darkness by maps drawn with song, memorizing routes with music, and find ‘the Lady’ because of its silvery silence behind the interwoven melodies of their soundscape world.

It turns out, however, that Simon has a gift that not many in his world possess – the ability to piece together his own fragmented memories into a narrative, and the ability to ‘read’ others’ memories from the objects in which they have invested them. The novel is written in the present tense, so we are naïve readers, sharing Simon’s perpetual ‘groundhog day’ point of view, then piecing together the threads along with him and Lucien, the gang leader, as they begin to reconstruct each others’ pasts and the history of their world through recovered scraps of memory. In doing so, they discover the dystopian truth of their apparently utopian world, and the mission Simon has been sent on by his parents. This, it becomes clear, is to seek out others like him, a kind of resistance movement of memory keepers and, eventually, to overturn the beautiful serene musical order that has tried to erase the past and imposes totalitarian oppression on them all.

The concepts raised in this ambitious novel are not all quite fully realized or resolved, which perhaps is why – aside from the genre – the book did not make the Booker shortlist. What enchanted me about it, though, was the magical world of musical consciousness – a parallel to the almost magical way in which those with faith of certain kinds perceive the universe and operate within it. Reading it was like acquiring a seventh sense, in which everything is newly comprehensible in a supra-real way, or like experiencing all-five-sense synaesthesia. This beyond-normal means of perception and communication, the revelatory exploration of the capacities of memory and what it means in human society, and the extraordinary talents and feats of musicianship, are gateways to a higher, more refined world, and it is no surprise that after the demise of the Chimes the general population is not relieved but pained and bewildered by the loss of this magical repetitive certainty of existence.

Although the beauty of such a world in this novel proves fatal, it is nevertheless an extraordinary imaginative creation, and sings on in the memory long after you close the book. I will be looking forward to Anna Smaill’s next novel.

Best accompanied by: bubble and squeak, neeps and tatties, rabbit, squirrel and every kind of music from folk song to organ to plainsong.

You will like if: you can read music or play an instrument or know solfege; you like earth-based future world sci-fi; Oxford; London; the Underground; memory games.

Avoid if: You don’t like science fiction or music, or critiques of religion!

Genre: Literary fiction, science fiction

Available on Amazon

The Generation by Holly Cave

Reviewer: JW Hicks

What we thought: Reading this insightful novel confirms the belief that winds of change may flow soft, but grow exceeding strong.

Holly Cave uses a vibrant narrative, graced by often lyrical prose and dramatic descriptions to tell this sobering tale of an imminently possible and desperately troubling future.

After Europe’s bankruptcy births the Takeover, a law is passed by the new-formed totalitarian government. Every newborn citizen is to be Tagged with a Birth Diagnosis; a Background, that will define its life. From that time on the child will be what the Tag says it will be. Tagged as gay, it will never be allowed to be anything other. Tagging – Humanity imprisoned in a genetic straight jacket.

But after a suicide bombing by a member of the Anti Genetics Movement, questions are sparked and acceptance of the status quo begins to waver.

The story develops through the depiction of disparate characters, seemingly unknown to each other but in actuality linked by threads only gradually revealed. As those threads emerge we learn the importance of scientist Elin Nagayama, teenage genius Marie, and the enigmatic Angie; how they hold the keys to the unravelling of a secret held by the State and hidden from the populace. But it’s not until the final pages do we understand how those links will influence the future.

This debut novel is a fabulous read, and I’ll be keeping a lookout for the author’s future offerings.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Huxley’s Brave New World. Veronica Roth’s Divergent.

Avoid if you don’t like: Disastrous future forebodings.

Ideal accompaniments: A glass of strengthening Guinness and a plate of savoury snacks.

Genre: Dystopian sci-fi. Lit-fic

Available from Amazon

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What we thought: It is a rare thing to find a book that conjures a world completely in its opening sentences and then builds and maintains that world to the very last page. It’s even rarer for an author, having done so once, to pull off the trick again with a second, completely different world.

I was bowled over by the opening to Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. From the moment that Sugar beckoned to me from the shadowy world of London’s Victorian slums, I would have followed her anywhere. But the last thing I would have expected was that the next journey Faber would take me on would be to a far flung planet at the limits of human exploration, at some unidentified time in our not-too-distant future.

The Book of Strange New Things is the story of Peter, former drug addict and thief turned pastor, who leaves his wife behind on Earth to travel to a planet called Oasis. The indigenous population, small, roughly humanoid and seemingly benign, have a thirst for the Bible (which they call The Book of Strange New Things) and for the ‘technique of Jesus.’

Despite the strangeness of his new world, Peter, it seems, has landed the cushiest missionary job in the history of Christianity. Back on Earth, things are not going so well for his wife, Bea. Disasters, climactic and economic, are striking closer and closer to home, and it’s clear that the social order is breaking down. Their only contact is via the Shoot, a fragile electronic link that allows them to write letters to each other over billions of miles. But Peter, absorbed in his mission, is increasingly disengaged from his wife’s distress.

The book could be seen as an exploration of the different types of love – especially agape (the love of man for God and God for man), eros (sexual love) and philia (love or affection among equals). It is also an exceptional exploration of a species in some ways more essentially alien than many science fiction authors have attempted. The truth behind the Oasans’ passion for Christianity, when finally revealed, is heartbreaking in its simplicity.

If this is, indeed, as Faber has declared, his last novel, then together with The Crimson Petal and the White, The Book of Strange New Things will stand as evidence of an extraordinary, fertile imagination and a compassionate heart. But I really hope that, sometime in the future, he might be persuaded to change his mind. Because I would love to know where he might take me next.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederick Pohl, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

Avoid if you don’t like: Religion, Sci Fi, or mixing religion with your Sci Fi.

Ideal accompaniments: A loaf of fresh bread and a tall glass of water

Genre: Literary Fiction, Sci-Fi

Available from Amazon

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Reviewer: JW Hicks, author of Rats

What we thought: That this is a futuristic novel that engenders hope in the survival of human spirit.

Station Eleven, written by Emily St John Mandel, was nominated for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

This dystopian novel is set in the days of the World’s total collapse, brought about by the fast-spreading and unstoppable Georgia Flu, which kills 99.99 percent of the population.

Mandel tells the tale through an interconnected web of characters, amongst them, Arthur Leander, an actor past his prime playing King Lear, who dies of a heart attack as the flu erupts; Jeevan who gives Leander CPR in attempt to save his life; Kirsten a child actor in the same production, who acts in post-apocalypse Shakespearian performances and Miranda who creates the hand-drawn comic called Station Eleven which miraculously survives, becoming both a totem of the old world and a distorted mirror of the new.

These characters and a host of others weave a magical, totally absorbing story of individual triumph against seemingly unsurmountable odds – characters that are skeins of colour in the grey tapestry of post-apocalyptic life in the years that follow Armageddon.

The story looks at both the pre-flu time and Year Twenty, when the flu has abated and the survivors have settled into isolated communities – and the Travelling Symphony of musicians and actors who go from settlement to settlement performing Shakespeare plays.

Gradually the character-skeins grow in colour, illustrating their interconnectivity and underpinning this wonderful, soul-satisfying story – a story that connects the two time frames, the then and the now.

The skein which represents Arthur Leander, links characters and events in subtle, hidden ways, helping usher the story to a satisfying conclusion, a conclusion that offers the reader the prospect of a brighter and more hopeful future.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: John Wyndham’s oeuvre. John Christopher’s Death of Grass. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Avoid if you don’t like: Futuristic revelations.

Ideal accompaniments: Comfort food and a warm cat.

Genre: Dystopian. Sci-Fi.

Available on Amazon

Only Ever Yours by Louise O'Neill

Reviewer: JJ Marsh

What We Thought: O’Neill blends an unreal alternative world with an uncanny skill at describing real human interaction. In doing so, she raises some awkward questions.

frieda and all the other “eves” are nearing the end of School. None of them can read, but they are each expert in body consciousness, colour coordinated underwear, hairstyling and manipulation. Only months to go until they learn their fate: companion, concubine or chastity? Friendships are as false as nails, tears and anger are forbidden and there is always room for improvement. frieda did have a true friend once, someone she’d known all her designed life, but isabel has changed. And she got fat.

A deeply chilling novel of women as carefully bred commodities, whose initial outlandish premise grows increasingly sinister when the parallels to contemporary culture run uncomfortably close. The girls communicate via eFones, MyFace and VideoChat, they follow reality TV shows such as Charles and carrie Carmichael, they compete to be the thinnest, the prettiest, the glossiest, and they take their meds. Some more than others.

So many things about this world impressed me – the lowercase names, the wealthy ‘Inheritants’ who get to choose their females, the Huxley/Orwellian control over obsessive body image and peer judgement, the Nutrition Centre and Organised Recreation – but most disturbing of all were the cruel mind games inflicted by the girls on each other.

This book makes you think hard about a range of issues: gender, sexuality, self-awareness, religion, conditioning, the pressure on young girls and exactly how far away this alternative universe is from our own.

You’ll like this if you enjoyed: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Rats by JW Hicks.

Avoid if you dislike: Sci-fi, sexual politics, young women

Ideal accompaniments: Gazpacho, sparkling water with lime juice and vodka, and Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack to The Omen.

Genre: Literary fiction, science fiction, young adult

Available from Amazon

The Sadness of Angels by Jim Williams

Reviewer: Barbara Scott Emmett, author of The Land Beyond Goodbye, Don’t Look Down and Delirium: The Rimbaud Delusion. (http://barbarascottemmett.blogspot.co.uk/)

What We Thought: I didn’t know quite what to make of this novel at first as it’s rather different from the other books by Jim Williams I’ve read. But then all Williams’ books are different, both from each other and from just about any other book you care to mention. It’s also some time since I read any Sci Fi (Asimov half a lifetime ago) and I generally avoid fantasy altogether (despite loving the fantastical when it’s couched in reality).

As I read on I found myself entering into a dream world, a barren land of strange creatures and bold yet vulnerable characters. This is a world of long Great Years where the sun barely rises above the horizon for generations at a time and people are either old to the point of immortality or rarely live beyond thirty. It is a disorientating world with hints of myth and legend, and a sense of some greater truth hidden beneath it all.

Destructive angels mingle with self-styled gods, evil sultans, mad emperors – devils in disguise. Opposing them are our heroes (and heroines) – novice priests of a mysterious Order which violently opposes those claiming to be descended from monkeys, filthy horsewomen who keep their men veiled, an ancient Mapmaker who travels the globe like the Wandering Jew, a half mythical princess of an icy land. A Game is being played but no one quite knows what the rules are or what the outcome might be.

A battle is fought against the Slavers, a rough bunch who round up anyone they can put to work and who curse in various bastard languages. Our heroes haven’t a hope of winning – and yet...

This is often a very funny book and one that conjures strange images. The animals, though having familiar names – horses, bears etc – have wheels and tentacles. They emit gases through anal vents and often sound vaguely motorised. The Monkey (the last perhaps of its kind) has green fur that glows and it witters through its anal vent. It made me think of a Furby.

The effect of all this is the disorientation of the mind (well, the mind of this reader anyway) – a disorientation that leads to a dreamlike state where anything can happen, and often does.

This is the first book in a series in which Williams intends to explore the implications for space travel by creatures with a human lifespan faced with the vast distances between planets.

I look forward to reading more of the adventures of this odd band of fellow travellers and having my mind bent further. My straining to find the meaning behind it all may just turn out to be the koan that flips me into enlightenment.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Mysterious dreamlike novels full of strangeness.

Avoid if you dislike: Anything that doesn’t strictly conform to genre standards.

Ideal accompaniments: Swirling electronic music mixed with a Bach fugue.

Genre: Sci –Fi, Fantasy, Literary

Available from Amazon

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What we thought: For the last thirty years, Terry Pratchett has imagined how the introduction of new technology will affect the quasi-medieval society of the Discworld, and used that to hold a satirical mirror up to our own world. Now, in the company of science fiction writer Stephen Baxter he imagines instead how a step change in technology could affect modern-day Earth.

The Long Earth hypothesises that not only is the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics literally true, but that humanity has found a way of ‘stepping’ between those worlds.

A small proportion of humanity are ‘natural steppers’, able to step easily between worlds, and have done so, in secret, down through the centuries. The majority are given the power on Step Day, the day when the simple, home-made technology is made available to everyone. And another small proportion are stuck on ‘Datum Earth,’ unable to step even with the help of technology.

The Long Earth is straight science fiction story. The idea for the book was originally Pratchett’s and when he decided to develop it, he thought ‘who do I know who really understands quantum?’ and decided to approach Baxter. That the book was launched at the Royal Institution is an indication of how seriously the two authors took the science behind it. But if it lacks the humour and satire of a Discworld novel, it’s missing none of Pratchett’s warmth and humanity.

Arguably, the plot is quite thin and in other hands, could have become dry and repetitive. Pratchett makes it feel more as if David Attenborough were taking us on this voyage across the many worlds of the Long Earth – far out into the ‘high meggers’, millions of steps away from Datum Earth –gently illuminating what we are seeing and helping us to understand its implications.

This is a Utopia, but one that humanity has the potential to muck up.

You’ll enjoy this if you liked: Dan Simmons’ Endymion, Frederick Pohl’s Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

Avoid if you’re expecting trademark Pratchett fantasy and absurdity

Ideal Accompaniments: Grilled fish, a light salad and a glass of Pinot Grigio.

Genre: Science Fiction

Available from Amazon

You can read my account of Terry Pratchett’s return to Beaconsfield Library in summer 2013 here:
http://www.wordswithjam.co.uk/2013/07/the-origins-of-l-space-terry-pratchett.html

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

A clever package with a nihilistic core
Reviewer: Gabrielle Mathieu

What we thought: Perhaps, as one reviewer said, dystopian fantasy and literary fiction are not that compatible. The characters, Oryx and Crake, that together transform the world from a dystopia to a post-apocalyptic disaster, remain enigmatic throughout. (We have only Oryx’s word that she wasn’t a part of Crake’s plan.) Our narrator, Jimmy/Snowman, seems too caught up in his own misery and pursuit of unfulfilling pleasure, to display much curiosity about the inscrutable Crake, and though he’s fixated on the details of Oryx’s early exploitation as a child-prostitute, other details of her remain unexplored.

In intriguing dystopian fiction, we experience the narrator’s fight vicariously, as he or she fights against the odds to survive an unjust and violent society. However, it would be difficult to know which of the three central figures could earn our sympathy here. We’re given needlessly detailed backstory about child prostitution, at a level of detail that is almost exploitative in itself, but there’s no hint of how it affected Oryx. Her character remains implausible, almost a parody of the submissive Asian woman. Does she identify with animals herself; is that why she teaches Crake’s genetically engineered humanoid creations to treasure animals. If so, it’s ironic, as most animals in this book are themselves genetically created mutations that are dangerous. (Snats-part snake and part rat.). The insipid dialogue that Snowman keeps reenacting in his head (oh, honey) is supposed to be her voice, but it’s annoying after a while.
Speaking of Jimmy/Snowman and Oryx, I’ve read that this book is referred to as a love story. How exactly does a puerile obsession with an eight-year old prostitute become love? It’s also difficult to explain the adult Oryx’s attraction to Jimmy, when Crake, his best friend, is already her lover. Is that perhaps Margaret Atwood’s point: that the future is so bleak that what passes as friendship is hours of shared web-surfing, watching executions and child pornography, and what passes as love is passionless sex with a mysterious woman who seemingly has no interior life, judging from her trite conversation.

If the relationships function to expose the nihilism of modern life, a life built on consumption and escapism, the nihilistic core does nothing to propel the dystopian novel forward. In the end, what do I really care what happens to Jimmy/Snowman, an exhausted, self-indulgent sad sack who sits around clad in various sheets. (I fail to see why the sheets survived, but no other clothing can be found.) Nor is there much to engage me with the Crakers, the green-eyed perfect race that Crake engineered. With their waving blue penises and their purring, they are too freakish for me to care about their fate much.

What I really want to know is why Crake did what he did, and how much Oryx was a part of the plan. And I really want to know why Crake would do what he does at the end.

That unfortunately, is never answered. Even in a nihilistic world, his actions make no sense.

I admire the novel’s cleverness and the world-building. I understand how that came to be too much for some people, because there was such a strong anti-science basis, but I still enjoyed it. The Jan. 6th, 2014 New Yorker issue has an interesting article about a firm in China that is researching the genetics of human intelligence. They have four thousand employees. As Ms. Atwood says, her work is not necessarily science fiction. The ability to genetically splice organisms will leave us with many complex and difficult choices. On that level, the novel succeeds for me. I just wish it had a stronger and more comprehensible set of characters and motivations.

You’ll enjoy this if you like: Speculative fiction, Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, the Sonmi section of Cloud Atlas

Avoid if: you’re squeamish about genetic-engineering or child prostitution, you’re easily depressed, you dislike multiple timelines

Ideal accompaniments: reconstituted chicken nuggets, whisky with Irn-Bru and The Plastic Ono Band



Genre: Speculative fiction, literary fiction

My Memories of a Future Life by Roz Morris

Reviewer: Catriona Troth, author of Ghost Town

What We Thought: On the surface, this is a tale of a classical pianist suffering from RSI who, when all conventional medicine fails, resorts to hypnotism in order to be able to play once more.

But hypnotism takes Carol not into a past life, but into a far distant future, when a human elite lives a pampered life in undersea domes, fuelled by power stations left on a barren surface.

Is this Carol’s subconscious finding a way to cope, or is she really channelling some spirit from the future? Everyone from her best friend through to the local spiritualists seem to have an opinion.

My Memories of a Future Life begins with some of the most sumptuous and specific descriptions of what it is like to draw music from a piano that I have ever read. As someone who has listened to classical music all my life but never played an instrument, it allowed me to slip into Carol’s shoes and empathise with what she’s lost.

The future world is lightly but deftly drawn, original and intriguing. And Carol’s problems are given no facile answers. In the end, she must dig deep within herself to find the origins of her pain.

A deeply satisfying book written by someone who understands the music of words as well as she does the music of the piano.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Like: Scarlett Thomas, Margaret Atwood’s Madaddam Trilogy,

Avoid If You Don’t Like: A blend of realism and surrealism blended; highly literate prose

Ideal Accompaniment: Chilled champagne in a tall glass; Chopin's Sonata in B Minor, Grieg's piano concerto in A minor.

Genre: Literary Fiction with a dash of Sci-Fi.