Review of Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin

Title: Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse
Editors: Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin 
Publisher: Jurassic London
Published: October 2011
Genre: short stories, science fiction fantasy horror
Source: review copy from author Sam Wilson
Rating: 7/10

I debated reviewing Pandemonium. I received a review copy in November 2011, but it’s only now that I read the whole thing cover to cover. When I finished, I learned that Pandemonium was a limited edition. Very limited: it was available for just over a year and now it’s out of print in both paper and digital formats. Questioning the merits of reviewing a book that no one can buy, I figured I could perhaps help someone decide whether or not to take it off the tbr pile, borrow a copy from a library or friend, or perhaps check out some of the stories if they appear elsewhere. And of course there might be another print run. So, on with the end of the world!

The apocalypse is, of course, the theme of this anthology, but it’s also inspired by the  work of John Martin an English Romantic painter famous for grandiose apocalyptic visions based on his intimate knowledge of the Old Testament and related mythology (such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost). The cover of Pandemonium features the painting Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, which is also the title of one of the most harrowing stories in the collection. I’d seen The Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium  in the Louvre last year, and the anthology encouraged me to check out more of Martin’s work online. And I must say – it’s impressive stuff. It’s epic. And I love the idea of an sff and horror anthology based on those paintings.

Admittedly, it doesn’t encourage a great deal of variation in apocalyptic visions. With John Martin and his art in mind, many of the stories use Christian mythology, so there are plenty of angels, demons, and worlds ending in fire. But while a few stories are a bit dreary, others offer creative twists or alternative visions. Many don’t actually seem to take much inspiration from the paintings, but I guess it’s an anthology based on the apocalypse, not an anthology based on John Martin.

The collection starts out very strong. The first story, “The Architect of Hell” by David Bryher, is still one of my favourites. It’s written as a series of hilarious letters from the demon Mulciber (the architect of the demon city Pandemonium in Paradise Lost) to John Martin himself, asking John to design Pandemonium for him. Mulciber lost all his creative abilities when God threw him out of heaven and Lucifer’s going to be really angry if Mulciber can’t deliver.The story is clearly based on the golden city in The Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium and is actually a surprisingly bright start to the anthology: it’s quirky, funny and ends on a note that’s doubly apocalyptic but hopeful too. Also, the apocalypse – or rather post-apocalypse – depicted in the story is the fallen angels’, not the humans’.

There’s actually plenty of humour here; perhaps the best way to deal with the end of the world. The second story, “Chislehurst Messiah” by Lauren Beukes is a kind of black comedy horror set in an affluent English suburb. A snooty upper middle class bastard plays a Facebook game while his wife dies horribly, and he thinks about how this is an easier way of getting her money than divorcing her. The world is ending, but his thoughts remain ridiculously selfish and narrow-minded:

He needed to get to the gym; his abs were turning into jelly. Too much stale bruschetta and salty snack foods. But the one in the building’s basement stank like an abbatoir and the Stairmaster was practically alive with maggots. (25)

High on the uppers he stole from one a neighbouring apartment, he imagines that he could be the Messiah for the supposedly aimless lower-class “chavs” who are  running riot in England as society falls apart.

“OMG GTFO” by S.L. Grey is another satire, with a narrative composed of emails, interview transcripts, Twitter feeds, and so on. It describes a world descending into chaos as politicians, celebrities and other prominent figures are randomly possessed by dead people who describe visions of hell. But is it a vision of hell itself or hell on earth? The humour comes from the kind of speech you get on Twitter and in emails, the rubbish that spews from the mouths of air-headed celebrities, and the little ironies that emerge as the world degrades. It’s a great story.

There’s an amusing case of denial in “Another Abyss” by Magnus Anderson which features another snooty upper middle class English character. Leticia’s husband Geoff has just been promoted, and she’s hosting a dinner party to celebrate and gloat. She’s extremely upset that the damn apocalypse is ruining the evening with a blood-red sky (forcing her to close the curtains more than is respectable) and lava pouring down the lawn. Leticia is someone who’d be bragging about the cost her antique violin while Rome burned. The burning world-scenario is a common one in this anthology, but like the better stories that use it, Anderson makes it the background of a character-based tale rather than taking the more boring route of putting cliched apocalyptic destruction at the forefront.

“The End of the World” by Den Patrick is not as elegantly humorous as the previous four, with character names like Bumblefuck, Rigorprick, Spittleshite and Candy. But it’s tongue-in cheek, and surprisingly cute – the demon Spittleshite has fallen for a human named Candy and as a result he’s not especially keen about the apocalypse that’s about to begin. The story can be silly and crude, but it’s also hopeful (well, sort of) and quite fun.

Being an agnostic, I enjoyed the irreverent nature of all the stories that address Christian beliefs, which are typically are revealed to be useless or deceptive while the truth is rather disturbing. It helps to have a sense of humour when the apocalypse comes, but being a Christian seems pretty pointless.

Of these stories, “Evacuation” by Tom Pollock is the most beautiful and touching; instantly one of my favourites here. The evacuation in the title is the evacuation of Earth by the angels. The archangel Michael goes to find the last two humans, who have been held back by Michael’s lover, the angel Zaphkiel. The stories segues back and forth between the present story on the burning earth and the history of their relationship in heaven, bringing up issues of the war with Lucifer, and doubt in God.

“The Day or the Hour” by Jonathan Oliver sees Reverend Paul Smith questioning his faith when he finds himself among “the chosen” who have who have “been called to fight the forces of Satan” (164) in the final battle between good and evil. Commanded by cold, arrogant angels, Paul doesn’t feel divine love and inspiration. He feels like canon fodder in someone else’s war.

Like “Another Abyss”, “The Harvest” by Chrysanthy Balis is a story of denial, although in this case it’s extreme religious belief distorting the characters’ perception. Paul and Pepper are fully aware that their world is ending, but they’re delighted, believing that the Rapture is here at last, and soon they’ll be taken up to heaven. They decide that it’s best to wait for God in their expensive “neo-Italianate home” (203) full of earthly comforts, watching the drama unfold on their “75″ Panasonice LED flat screen” (204), favouring the Christian Broadasting Network where they “could get the real news”. They’re full of self-righteous, contradictory bullshit, but also some rather funny ideas about what will happen:

“Paul, what about Schultzie [the dog]? […] If we hold onto him real tight maybe he’ll get Raptured along with us?”

“Anything’s possible under the Lord honey,” (203)

“What if He doesn’t come for us?”

Paul had turned stern and taken her by the shoulders. “It’s not possible, do you hear me? We’re plugged in to Jesus. And the Bible says that it’s by His grace alone that we’re saved. Now, if that’s not true then nothing is.” (205)

Jesus is coming to conquer Satan at last, and God’s going to create a New Jerusalem for us to live in.”

“Would we be able to get a house like this one?”

“Sure! […] “But with a bigger pool!”(205)

“What if the Rapture begins but the angels can’t find us because we’re inside?”(206)

All these questions come from Paul’s wife Pepper, a rather daft ideal of femininity. Her daffy character makes sense in the context of the story, but she reminds me of one problem with this anthology: there aren’t many women in it. Of the eighteen stories, only five have female protagonists, and there are only six female authors. Most of the male-protagonist stories don’t have major female characters. The apocalypse, it seems, is considered to be a mostly male affair.

This is particularly noticeable in one of my two least favourite stories, [Pandemonium] by Andy Remic (the actual title is written in a script that my computer won’t copy). The story has some of the least interesting characters. There are three men – a nerd, a hulking goon, and a ferrety goon. Then there’s a hot blonde woman, whose job it is to whine, hang on the hulking goon’s arm, and look hot. But that’s not the only reason I disliked this story. It’s a rather unimaginative portrayal of the basic fires-of-hell-on-earth scenario. Several of the stories use it, but I found Remic’s to be the least engaging, with too much cheap gore. It was the first story I disliked, and marked the point where the anthology took a dip – the middle is rather middling.

“At the Sign of the Black Dove” by Lou Morgan is my other least favourite. It appears to be about a group of people drinking themselves into oblivion and waking up to find that the world is ending. Worst hangover ever? Meh.

“Closer” by Osgood Vance takes place in a world about to die, where most people have already been claimed by heaven or hell. The remainder are essentially the most average people on earth in terms of both skill and morality. I actually really liked this concept, but Vance uses it to tell a story about a baseball match – a group of Americans’ last stab at a bit of joy before they are all consumed by darkness. It makes sense – if you think about being average in terms of skill, then sport would be one of the things you’d think about – but I’ve never been interested in baseball and the story isn’t kind to non-fans, with its name-dropping and technical details about scoring.

There are three stories which weren’t bad, or even average, but just didn’t do anything for me – “The Last Man” by Jon Courtenay Grimwood (although, notably, ‘the last man’ is a female cyborg), “The Immaculate Particle” by Charlie Human and “Postapocalypse” by Sam Wilson. Each of them actually have interesting ideas – the cyborg, vanishing city blocks in “The Immaculate Particle” and apocalypse via postmodern thought in “Postapocalypse” but for reasons that are probably entirely subjective none of these stories left much of an impression.

In contrast, there are a couple of stories I wanted to single out for being more creative than others. They’re not necessarily better, but I liked the ways they differed from the norm. “The Architect of Hell” and “OMG GTFO” both use alternative narrative forms – letters in the former (not groundbreaking, I know, but it stood out) and media excerpts in the latter.

“Sadak In Search of the Waters of the Oblivion” by Archie Black disturbed me more than the visions of hell and burning. It’s set in a world ravaged by climate change where the earth hasn’t died (some landscapes are breathtakingly beautiful) but is horrifically hostile to humans. A research team heads out on an expedition, only to find themselves constantly assaulted by insects and micro-organisms, wading through a swamp and forced to sleep in it so they never get dry. Bugs nest in the flesh of the humans, horses and dogs in the team, their bodies rot while they’re still alive and the pain drives them mad. It’s heartbreaking and utterly revolting; if predictions of starvation isn’t enough to scare people into taking climate change seriously, then this would.

“Deluge” by Kim-Lakin Smith, inspired by the painting The Eve of the Deluge also features a post apocalyptic world ravaged by climate change, but in this case they’re about to experience a second apocalypse – a flood. Eve, the daughter of a pirate philosopher and a ‘weather witch’ in her own right, realises that the flood is coming, and tries to warn her society, a city built on a dried-up ocean floor. But, as with Noah, no one believes her. It’s only by turning to the pirate aspects of her heritage that she’s able to find salvation.

“A Private Viewing” by Scott K. Andrews is the only story besides “The Architect of Hell” that actually uses John Martin’s artwork in the plot. This story is not about the apocalypse itself, but suggests that the paintings themselves are apocalyptic forces inspiring unrest or madness. In the novel a man is forced to sit and stare at one of the paintings for hours every night and it gradually unhinges his mind.

After my interest had waned midway, I was hoping that the editors had saved a really great story to end the anthology. I wasn’t disappointed. “Not the End of the World” by Sarah McDougall is a poignant story set in Germany in WW2; or at least it seems to be. It follows a small group of tenants living in a house where ghosts from the war occasionally appear. It’s sad, but brave and hopeful; an elegant note on which to close the book.

Overall Pandemonium is a strong collection; I wished I’d read it earlier so I could review it while it was still in print. On the other hand, this also seems to be the year of the short story for me. seldom paid them much attention in the past but suddenly I’m reading or listening to at least one every weekday. It’s given me fresh appreciation for this form of fiction, so in that sense maybe it’s good that I waited until now to read this. It’s a pity that it’s out of print, but get a copy if you can, or see if you can find some of the stories elsewhere. They’re all quite short (except for the last) and most of them are worth the diversion.

Review of Twin-Bred by Karen A. Wyle

Title: Twin-Bred
Series: Twin-Bred
Author: Karen A. Wyle
Publisher: self-published
Published: 13 October 2011
Genre: science fiction
Source: eARC from the author
Rating: 4/10

When considering the possibility of alien contact, I worry how humanity will behave. As a species, we have frequently proven to be intolerant or hostile when confronted with difference (of race, gender, culture, nationality etc.). Sf has frequently used the alien as a metaphor for the other, exposing and critiquing modes of prejudice and oppression. Less socially conscious tales often reveal our assumptions about the other; consider the stereotype of aliens kidnapping humans for experiments or how many sf stories are about violent alien invaders, portraying other intelligent species as our enemies.

Twin-Bred by Karen A. Wyle is a case of humans behaving badly towards an alien whose motives and culture they do not understand because they can’t or won’t speak to them. It’s an almost embarrassing portrayal of close-minded people encountering a race of technologically inferior beings who might turn hostile.

In the novel, a human colony has been living on the planet Tofarn for 70 years. They share the world with the indigenous Tofa, a race of inscrutable four-armed aliens who don’t have any facial features except a blank pair of eyes. The humans do not know how to communicate with the Tofa, and after seven decades of co-habitation the two races still don’t understand each other. So far, this hasn’t been too problematic and the Tofa didn’t seem accepting of the human presence on their planet. But every now and then a conflict arises: the Tofa pack up and leave a village for reasons the humans cannot discern; they complain that humans are shaking hands in public or wearing the colour blue; they make a noise to prevent the humans sleeping at night.

Mara, an ambitious but emotionally dysfunctional young scientist, comes up with a solution: breeding human and Tofa twins. They will not have any genetic relationship; instead, a host mother (human or Tofa) will be implanted with both a human and a Tofa foetus. Mara believes that sharing a womb will forge a unique bond between the twins, finally enabling the two species to communicate. The humans will be able to learn about the Tofa, and the twins will be trained to resolve inter-species conflicts.

Mara’s idea is the result of her bond with Levi, her own twin who died in utero. Mara has secretly kept him alive in her mind as an entity who is also her only friend and confidant. Mara even names her twin project after him: the Long-Term Emissary Viviparous Initiative or L.E.V.I.

The Project gets government backing, probably because the government officials all have their own agendas, hoping to use the twins and their abilities to gain power and influence. Even the Tofa seem to be plotting something, not that any of the humans have the means of finding out what they’re up to.

Now that you have the gist of the plot, I’ll return to the start and begin unpacking all the ludicrously implausible aspects of this story. Humans lived for 70 YEARS on Tofarn without talking to the Tofa. SEVENTY YEARS. There are actually villages and towns where the two species live together, but still, nothing. Granted, the Tofa are not what you’d call sociable, but the overwhelming impression I got is that humans didn’t even try. It seemed like they took one look at the Tofa’s featureless faces, and gave up any hope of conversation. A couple of them might have tried speaking loudly in English.

But guess what: the Tofa have mouths and they can speak. A little girl named Laura learns this when she befriends a young Tofa who tells her his name. Her father tells her that Tofa mouths are just hidden by membranes. She tells her friend Veda this and introduces her to the Tofa. They play together until the Tofa’s father comes and breaks up the friendship. Laura, her father, and Veda never mention this groundbreaking information to anybody, and no one reports a similar experience.

So humanity plods along in total ignorance. Apparently they left Earth without realising they might encounter beings who aren’t exactly like humans. Many of them are outright racist and a couple behave like rednecks whose ideal social gathering would be a lynch mob. It’s been seventy years and the sight or close proximity of the Tofa still disgusts and disturbs them. The Tofa basically allowed them to set up a very comfortable colony on their planet, and all the humans can do is complain about how weird and icky the aliens are.

Enter Mara with L.E.V.I. Because when people don’t even want to look at the Tofa you can try implanting human women with their foetuses. Humanity goes from making virtually no effort at communication to setting up an extremely complex, long-term, expensive Project based on an “uncertain and speculative” hypothesis from a scientist with serious mental problems.There are so many holes in this Project it’s easier for me to put a few in point form:

• Humans know NOTHING about Tofa biology. They haven’t even realised that the Tofa have mouths. They don’t know how Tofa reproduce. How could anyone possibly conceive of a Project that involves implanting Tofa and human mothers with embryos of both species?
• Most humans seem disgusted or at least disturbed by the Tofa, so why is it so easy to get host mothers who are willing to carry an alien foetus?
• The humans can’t speak Tofa and the Tofa can’t speak English so they have to explain the Project using drawings with stick figures. WTF?
• If the humans can explain something as complex as the Project using stick figures, then why didn’t they try this before or after?
• The Tofa are technologically inferior to the humans, so how are they able to harvest and store embryos for the human scientists to use?

But whatever. The Project continues as (badly) planned, with a few hiccups like foetuses dying or human mothers freaking out when they see alien babies inside them during the ultrasounds (were they not briefed?). Nevertheless, a bunch of healthy human-Tofa twins are born.

The Tofa children are taught to speak English, which they do as easily as the human children. And to everyone’s shock, the Tofa mothers learn to speak English too, picking it up while living in the Project compound. If communicating was so simple why have none of the Tofa done it before?! Yes, they aren’t generally in favour of speaking to humans, but if the mothers are so willing to do it, I find it impossible that they were the first. The ending reveals additional reasons for the Tofa remaining aloof, but it’s unconvincing and just leaves you with another slew of questions.

It’s impossible for the humans to truly learn the Tofa language, because it has a telepathic component, so humans are conveniently exempt from having to bother. But you’d think that the human scientists would spend every waking moment learning everything they can about Tofa biology and culture. They don’t. Or at least they don’t seem to. Every revelation happens by chance, usually when the twins are playing together and one of the adults notices something unusual and asks for an explanation. It’s perhaps not surprising when you consider what some of the staff members are like – even after years spent working on the Project they still squirm at the sight of human and Tofa children sitting together, or seeing a Tofa come up to speak to them. Considering the resources that must have gone into the Project, it seems almost fruitless.

Even more so when the twin-bred are actually sent out on their first assignments. Up to this point, the Project remained top secret (highly unlikely, given their sloppy security measures). You can imagine what happens when the the results of a human/alien breeding program are introduced as surprise communication specialists to a world full of people who don’t like aliens. FAIL.

There are loads of other plot issues, but there’s not much point getting into them; you get the picture. I’ll move on to the writing, characters and worldbuilding.

The writing is fine and seems to have been properly edited, but the style or structure is very strange – Wyle tells the entire story in brief sections with more POVs than I could possibly remember. Most of these are only a few paragraphs long; the longest scenes are maybe 2 or 3 pages. The result is that the story moves very quickly because each little section is like a report on an issue or development in the plot, which covers 30-40 years. You could argue that this very perfunctory narration suits the pseudo-scientific plot, but it’s also completely… um, alienating. It struck me as a means of writing a novel if you were focussing on the plot but weren’t in the mood for things like character development or worldbuilding.

There are far too many characters, quite possibly more than I’ve encountered in any novel. Many of them make such minuscule contributions to the plot that it doesn’t matter if you instantly forget who they are. Sometimes Wyle randomly throws in a new character with a name, job title and a cup of coffee just so they can make a minor point about something. There’s almost no characterisation except to distinguish Tofa children from their human twins and to emphasise how socially inept Mara is. She’s actually the only character with a personality, but at the same time I found her thoroughly unlikeable.

The worldbuilding is equally flat. Tofarn is the most un-alien alien planet I’ve ever come across. It’s like a human society on Earth with a scattering of aliens thrown in. We hear very little or absolutely nothing about the flora, fauna, climate, geography, etc. of Tofarn. Whatever is mentioned has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. The humans are still in the process of reproducing what they had on Earth (they don’t have the resources to farm cows yet, for example), but most of the time you could forget that they were on another planet. Their society is almost identical to an affluent American town. They eat chocolate and muffins, wear leather, keeps cats as pets. The only major differences are the technological advancements like hover cars and the tablets everyone carries around in lieu of cellphones.  It makes perfect sense that they brought the necessary plant seeds, animal DNA and tech from Earth, but how is it that everything works perfectly on Tofa? Did they not have to make any adjustments? How do the humans even know that the planet is called Tofa?

Even though I didn’t like the way the humans behaved or how mysterious the Tofa are as an alien race, I can accept that as the tough situation within which the characters must struggle. One of the more interesting aspects of the plot was the way some people viewed the Project as a means of customising the Tofa, making them more acceptable to humans. Clearly the novel is meant to function as a critique of intolerance, which is good, although it ends up being quite defeatist about the issue. But I can accept that too – we can’t always have he endings we want. What I can’t ignore are all those other flaws. It’s just so deficient in the speculative part inherent in speculative fiction.

Review of Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins

Title: Wolfhound Century
Author: Peter Higgins
Published: 21 March 2013
Publisher: Gollancz
Genre: science fiction, alternative history fantasy, thriller
Source: I received a review copy from Gollancz Geeks, but had to use an eBook for reviewing purposes, hence the absence of page numbers for quotes.
Rating: 7/10

I judged this book by its cover. I took one look and assumed it was a political or military thriller within the sf genre. A perfunctory glance at the blurb -  “SF thriller… alternative Russia” – and I moved on. Only when Gollancz Geeks sent out an email about the book and possible review copies did I take a closer look and realise that Wolfhound Century is actually the kind of weird, hard-to-categorise genre fiction that I like. It’s still, in part, a political thriller but it’s far more bizarre and surprising than I’d expected. 

It’s set in an alternative Soviet Russia known as the Vlast, where for over three centuries angels have fallen from the sky, supposedly killed in a heavenly war. Their massive stone bodies have been used for buildings, machines, and biological modifications that serve the totalitarian state of the Vlast.

Investigator Vissarion Lom has a sliver of angelflesh embedded in his forehead. Among other things, “it encourages loyalty. The sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the whole. It’s a way of binding you to the Vlast.” And Lom is a dedicated, loyal policeman, willing to take down his own corrupt peers even if it means that he’s despised and his career remains stagnant. It’s because of this work ethic that Krogh, Head of the Secret Police, summons Lom to the capital Mirgorod to capture a terrorist. Joseph Kantor is “a one-man war zone”, a man who spreads chaos, fear and distrust”, but who is protected by unknown allies within the Secret Police. He uses his guise as a rebel to uphold tyranny. Because Lom is unknown in Mirgorod, Krogh hopes he can track down Kantor and “stop him. By any means possible. Any at all”.

What Krogh and Lom don’t know is that Kantor is also being influenced by an angel – the last fallen angel, known as Archangel, although it has no real name. Unlike its predecessors, Archangel fell to earth alive. It is slowly poisoning the forest around it as if “shot into the forest’s belly like a bullet, bursting it open, engendering a slow, inevitable, glacial, cancerous, stone killing”. Dying, but fused deep within the earth, the Archangel reached out with its mind and found Kantor. It promised him dominion over this world and others, if only he would perform one task – destroy the Pollandore.

The Pollandore is the stuff of folklore, described once as a ‘”forest god” although that doesn’t really capture its role in the narrative. Rather, the Pollandore is potential personified – it embodies the possibility of another world, specifically a world without the influence of the angels. And this last angel – Archangel – wants to destroy all possibility of a world free from its dominion.

Most people assume the Pollandore is a myth. The Vlast captured and caged it a long time ago, but couldn’t kill it. Now the wounded forest itself sends an emissary to the city to find a way of opening the Pollandore and saving the forest – and presumably the world – from the cruelty and destruction of the Archangel. The forest’s only hope is Maroussia, Jopseph Kantor’s stepdaughter, who holds the key to opening the Pollandore. Her path collides with Lom’s, and although she fears and hates him as a policeman, he becomes her ally when she finds herself hunted by the Secret Police. Lom himself gradually begins to rethink his loyalties as he wonders, for the first time, what the sliver of angelflesh in his forehead has really done to him.

This isn’t what I expected with this novel, and it should serve to remind me to be a bit more open-minded when judging books by their covers. Well, some books anyway. Wolfhound Century frequently surprised me with its world. When I started reading I’d forgotten what was outlined in the blurb; I recalled only that it was supposed to be a genre-leaping book that was hard to categorise, and it had been praised for being dark and inventive. As far as worldbuilding is concerned, the novel certainly lives up to the hype.

At first there are only a few minor fantastical elements – giants, stone golems called mudjhiks, Archangel, the angelflesh that seems to be more than just dead stone. Then some of the characters are revealed to be more than simply human. Maroussia, who has “an open, outdoor scent. Rain on cool earth” clearly has some kind of intrinsic link to the forest; a power which terrifies Kantor. Lom reveals a weak ability to manipulate the air, which he feebly uses when suddenly attacked by sentient rain. Raku Vishnik, a mutual friend of Lom and Maroussia’s, works as the official City Photographer, and has discovered an otherworldly city existing in the same space as Mirgorod. He has photographed the moments when the otherworld breaks through into their world and the laws of physics go awry. And like the alternate reality bursting through into the current one, the novel seemed to flourish with the bizarre as I read. Even as I neared the end it continued to unveil its wonders.

It wouldn’t be nearly as spectacular if not presented in Higgins’s vivid writing, and I spent a lot of time taking down quotes. What I also love is the way Higgins uses the world to emphasis the central conflict between the cold brutality of Mirgorod and the Vlast, and the mythical world of the forest, teeming with life and uncanny beauty. Consider, for example, these descriptions of the Lodka, the colossal building housing the Secret Police HQ:

Six hundred yards long, a hundred and twenty yards high, it enclosed ten million cubic yards of air and a thousand miles of intricately interlocking offices, corridors and stairways, the cerebral cortex of a stone brain. It was said the Lodka had been built so huge and so hastily that when it was finished, many of the rooms could not be reached at all. Passageways ran from nowhere to nowhere. Stairwells without stairs. Exitless labyrinths. From high windows you could look down on entrance-less vacant courtyards, the innermost secrets of the Vlast. Amber lights burned in a thousand windows. Behind each window, minsters and civil servants, clerks and archivists, and secret policemen were working late.

The Lodka cruised on the surface of the city like an immense ship, and like a ship it had no relationship with the depths over which it sailed, except to trawl for what lived there.

It sounds frighteningly Kafkaesque (I also assumed that Joseph Kantor is a reference to Joseph K, although I’m not sure why). Compare it to the sense of life in these passages about the forest:

The tree was eating light and breathing clouds of perfume.

The perfumed tree-breath was its voice, its chemical tongue. It was speaking to the insect population in its bark and branches, warning and soothing them. It as speaking to its neighbour trees, who answered: tree spoke to tree, out across the endless forest. And it was speaking to him. Psychoactive pheromones drifted through the alveolar forests of his human lungs and the whorled synaptical pathways of his cerebral cortex.

Maroussia was walking among them. She placed her hand on the silent living bark and felt her skin, her very flesh, become transparent. She became aware of the articulation of her bones, sheathed in their muscle and tendon. Eyes, heart and lungs, liver and brain, nested like birds in a walking tree of bone. A weave of veins and arteries and streaming nerves that flickered with gentle electricity.

I think science and fantasy are beautifully entwined here, and the descriptions draw distinct parallels between the life of the forest and the functioning of the human body, bringing to light the ways in which life is connected. It’s a stark contrast to the pointlessness within the Lodka’s structure, and the impersonal nature of the work that is done there, ignoring or stamping out life rather than nourishing it. To the Vlast, people are only useful as parts of a vast machine. If it considers it individuals to be connected, it is only so that they may serve the demands of the state, which in turn serves only itself.

While the forest and other mythical beings seek to stop destruction, the Vlast only seeks more power and has been engaged in a years-long war with the vaguely defined Archipelago. No reason is given for the war, but I think it’s safe to assume that the Vlast wants to expand. Although the Novozhod (the Vlast’s version of Joseph Stalin) is set to begin negotiations, Krogh warns that

“There are those who say there should be no end to the war at all. Ever. Warfare waged for unlimited ends! A battle waged not again people like ourselves but against the contrary principles. The great enemy.”

It’s a surreal combination of science fiction, fantasy, folklore and political thriller, but surprisingly undemanding. Wolfhound Century feels like a light combination of China Mieville and 1984. It’s much quicker and easier to read, but still contains social critique and a wonderfully inventive alternate history. Sadly, it fails to be as good as 1984 or a Mieville novel.

The problem is that Wolfhound Century is the first in a series, and the author seems to be saving too much content for the sequels. The first half is brilliant; then it gradually peters out as you realise this isn’t quite the novel you were promised. At first it looked like the climax would involve opening the Pollandore. Instead, the heroes never get anywhere near the Pollandore. There’s a prolonged fight that I thought would be just be the final showdown before the climax, but as I got closer to the end I realised that this fight was the climax. It would have been ok if only the preceding events hadn’t led you to expect so much more.

Yes, it’s just the first book in a series, so no, it won’t resolve all conflicts. But even when novels are written with sequels in mind, they still have self-contained plots – one set of conflicts is set up and then resolved in a way that leaves a new set of conflicts to be tackled in sequel. You get a full story, but with the understanding that it’s part of something bigger. Wolfhound Century seems to give you half of the first story, resolving nothing except for a fight that seemed secondary until I realised it would be the last major event of the book. Despite being quite impressed with most of the novel, I somehow finished thinking “Is that it?”

There are unfortunate gaps elsewhere too. The characters of Lom and Maroussia feel quite flat even though they drive the story, and most of the secondary characters are much more interesting than them. Lom is little more than the standard dedicated cop, wandering through the standard plot where he’s forced to question what he believes in after realising that system has betrayed him. It’s hard to see Maroussia as more than a desperate, gasping victim. They’re both cardboard cutouts in a phantasmagorical world, shuffling between people who seem more real than they do. Kantor, luckily, was fleshed out a bit more. Although his history is a tad vague in parts, we learn a lot about his ruthless philosophy of life:

Kantor’s life had been shaped by the dialectic of fear and killing: if you feared something, you studied it, learned all you could from it, and then you killed it. And when you encountered a stronger thing to fear, you did it again. And again. And so you grew stronger, until the fear you caused was greater than the fear you felt. It was his secret satisfaction that he had begun to learn this great lesson even before he was born. He was an aphex twin: a shrivelled, dead little brother had flushed out after him with the placenta and spilled across his mother’s childbed sheet. Before he even saw the light of day, he had killed and consumed his rival.

I hope Kantor will be as interesting an antagonist as his philosophy promises.  He has a strong start in Wolfhound Century, but falls to the wayside in the last third or so.

There are also some issues with the world, although these are less noticeable because that aspect of the novel is generally done very well. Still, I was left wondering about the world outside the Vlast – does anyone else know about the fallen angels? Have they fallen anywhere else? We don’t know exactly where the angels came from, and that makes sense, but the general belief is that they’re aliens, so why does everyone subscribe to the angel mythos? It’s possible that it was put in place by the authorities, who claim that the Vlast’s ongoing war with the vaguely defined Archipelago is an extension of the heavenly in which the angels died. But as far as I can tell there’s no institutionalised religion in the Vlast, so why employ Christian mythology here?

I hope there are answers and a more satisfying story arc in the sequel. I would really like to read it because this was still a mostly good and pretty exciting book. It’s flaws lie not so much in quality, as in the fact that it feels so damn incomplete! So if you’re thinking about reading this, I suggest you do. But put it on hold until the sequel comes out. According to Goodreads, it’s called Truth and Fear and is due to be published in March 2014.

Review of Doughnut by Tom Holt

Title: Doughnut
Author: Tom Holt
Published: 05 March 2013
Publisher: Orbit
Genre: science fiction, fantasy, humour
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 6/10

Theo Burnstein is, to put it mildly, down on his luck.

“You blew up—”

“A mountain, yes.” He shrugged. “And the Very Very Large Hadron Collider, and very nearly Switzerland. Like I said, one mistake. I moved the decimal point one place left instead of one place right. Could’ve happened to anyone.”

Once a respected and fantastically wealthy physicist, Theo now counts himself lucky when he finds a cardboard box to make his nights on the streets a bit cosier. Following his career-ending catastrophe, Theo’s fourth wife divorced him and took everything he owned with her. He would have been fine if he hadn’t lost his $20-million inheritance when the investment company went bust, and then lost all his friends, who apparently liked his money more than they liked him. Things kept going downhill from there, and he found himself completely unemployable, not only because the world in general now hates him, but also because the accident turned his hand invisible in a quirk of quantum physics, and employers find that creepy. Eventually he finds a job carting guts in a slaughterhouse, where his boss kindly allows him to sleep until he finds a place to stay.

Theo is saved by his ludicrous downward spiral by the death of his good friend and teacher Pieter van Goyen. Pieter leaves gives him $5000, and the seemingly useless contents of a safe deposit box – a small bottle, a manila envelope, a powder compact and an apple. He also tells him where to find a job – a massive and decidedly weird hotel that always claims that they are fully booked even though there are only two people staying there. With almost nothing to do all day, Theo eventually discovers the purpose of his strange inheritance – they are the means for entering and navigating custom-made alternate realities. It’s meant to be a dream come true, but Theo loathes every moment as he tumbles into worlds he cannot control and is almost killed by aliens or cute, shotgun-toting Disney animals. The only way he can return to the real world, is to find a doughnut and look through the hole in the centre.

Why did Pieter leave all this to him? And what are the strange people at the hotel up to? Why does it seem like someone wants him to do a set of calculations that may destroy the universe? Theo puts his scientific mind to the problem, and tries not to get killed in the process.

 

Like all of the Tom Holt novels I’ve read, Doughnut is thoroughly kooky and a bit chaotic. And like all the other Tom Holt novels I’ve read, it’s not really laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s amusing with a few clever moments – a decent option if you’re looking for light or humorous speculative fiction. One of the reasons I keep reading Holt, even though his novels are never quite as exciting as I’d like them to be, is that he writes about so many different things that he’s become a bit of a go-to author when I need to finish a reading challenge about, for example, werewolves or Norse mythology. And his plots always sound like a lot of fun.

Doughnut brings together sci fi and fantasy by combining quantum physics with alternative realities that draw on genre tropes. The first world Theo finds himself in is straight out of an epic fantasy novel. Another is a western, then a western with aliens. There’s a peaceful post-apocalyptic world where everyone lives in the sky on glass platforms. There’s even a reality where Theo is the Pope.

It’s fun and it’s entwined with the mystery of why this is all happening, but it’s not as good as it could be. The middle of the novel drags a bit because Theo is trapped in the hotel with no escape except for the other worlds, which are accessed through an empty bottle. They’re enjoyable, but they don’t really help him figure out what’s going on. The other people in the hotel could certainly enlighten Theo and the reader, but they don’t want to. As a result, the plot doesn’t move much for a good portion of the book. It takes Theo a while to gather a few scraps of useful information about the conspiracy he’s caught up in. Towards the end he suddenly figures everything out in one bright moment, after which he explains it all in a few conversations and quickly wraps up the story. It’s rather clumsy.

Still, I enjoyed it as a light read. The odd little worlds Theo ends up in are amusing, and I highlighted a couple of funny or snarky lines. The lack of information about what’s really going isn’t irritating in the way that I normally find these unecessarily prolonged mysteries to be. Like many of the Holt protagonists I’ve come across, Theo is nerdy and likeable, a bit of a loser in some ways but smart enough (a genius, in his case) to figure everything out at the end and give us a satisfying conclusion. The other characters tend to be forgettable, but I liked Theo’s insane sister Janine, who keeps trying to call him despite the fact that she’s got a restraining order legally forbidding Theo to ever call her back.

So, all in all, it’s nice if not great, and I’ll continue reading Tom Holt.

I’ll try again later: Empty Space by M. John Harrison

Title: Empty Space
Series: The Kefahuchi Tract #3
Author: M. John Harrison
Published: First published 1 January 2012; my edition published 5 March 2013
Publisher: First edition published by Gollancz. My edition published by Night Shade Books
Genre: science fiction, space opera, literary fiction
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley

This isn’t so much a review as an admission of defeat and a comment on difficult books. After reading Empty Space, I don’t feel able to write any kind of useful review. I couldn’t even tell you if I liked it or not. The question is irrelevant, because I simply don’t get it, and I think I would have to do more reading before I can.

Before requesting a copy of Empty Space, I tweeted Night Shade Books to ask if it was necessary to read the first two books in the series – Light and Nova Swing. I’d read the former, but not the latter. They said this was fine. I respectfully disagree. Loudly and vehemently. From what I’ve read about them, it seems that Light and Nova Swing are fairly disparate. They’re set in the same universe, but tell two very different stories. Empty Space functions as a sequel to both, sharing characters and locations, and tying up loose ends. I re-read Light just before reading Empty Space, and found them to be closely linked. In comparison, I felt alienated from the aspects of the plot related to Nova Swing.

So to better understand this novel, I think I would have to read Nova Swing first. Then I’d have to re-read Empty Space. I had a similar experience with Light – it bewildered me the first time around; after the second reading I liked it more and felt like I’d understood it.

So what can I say about Empty Space in the meantime? Well, I can give you a bit of plot. Anna Kearney, Michael’s fragile ex-wife from Light, becomes a POV character in Empty Space. After Michael’s disappearance from a beach in America, Anna “fucked the first kind of person she found” who happened to be Tim Waterman (he made a brief appearance as her lover in Light). She married him after falling pregnant with their daughter Marnie. When we see Anna, it is almost 30 years after the events of book one and she is an old woman in her 60s or 70s, no longer suffering from anorexia but most definitely deranged, to Marnie’s great concern. She avoids visiting her therapist, takes long walks to snoop around other people’s homes, and does loopy things like swimming naked down a river in the middle of the night.

She also has experiences that sound completely crazy, but given the bizarre nature of the universe in this series, what she sees is most likely real (whatever that means). She keeps turning around to find that her summerhouse is on fire, except that the flames look fake, like something she saw on a tarot card, and after a while they disappear without having damaged anything. Her cat brings in glowing organ-shaped things from the garden. She has weird dreams that are no doubt more than just her subconscious at play. Notably, Anna is still carrying around an external hard drive that Michael gave to her before he disappeared. On it is the work he and Brian Tate were doing – the groundbreaking mathematics that enabled space travel and made the future storylines possible. Anna, however, has forgotten the significance of the hard drive.

Like Light, Empty Space has two narrative strands several centuries in the future. In one, the crew of the space freighter Nova Swing pick up a creepy, illegal alien artefact. In the third narrative, an unnamed policewoman known only as the assistant is investigating two decidedly weird murders. The victims’ bodies are found floating in midair, and as the novel progresses they rise higher while fading slowly into invisibility. The assistant used to work with a detective, but he’s dead now, existing only as a ghost hovering aimlessly in her office. The assistant is heavily gene-tailored and if she was once human she can’t even remember that time. With her heightened senses and abilities, she’s practically a weapon or a machine, and most people prefer to avoid her. Nevertheless, there’s one guy who keeps coming to see her, and somehow walks through walls to do so. His interest in her is based on the fact that someone – or something – keeps asking for her.

This person or thing is ‘Pearl’, an entity common to all three storylines. It is something between a bizarre phenomenon and an ancient, inexplicable artefact. When Pearl appears she/it says “My name is Pearlent and I come from the future”. She appears as a woman in grey, in a state of falling. Her existence remains incomprehensible to me, but as a character or plot device, she connects the storylines and brings a sense of closure to the series.

Empty Space shares many of the characteristics of Light – a tendency to connect characters, stories and timelines with little details; strange people who do strange things; incomprehensible alien technology; an abundance of violence and horror wrapped up in literary sf. There’s still a strong sense of the pain and terror involved in space travel and discovery, but with less optimism. Aliens exist, but you never see them. And of course there are cats, hundreds of cats. The future world feels more like the current one than it did in Light, perhaps because of the policewoman’s plot.

But I do not know what the fucking point is.

I usually knew what was happening in Empty Space but most of the time I didn’t know what to make of it. I could not have given you a reason why a particular scene was in the book or articulated the way in which it fit into the whole. Why does Anna’s cat bring her glowing neon organ-shaped things? Why do three characters dream of a vulva appearing in the wall? Why does the crew of the Nova Swing pick up a ‘mortsafe’ containing the fused, ghostly bodies of a child, his mother, and the nanny who started a weird sexual relationship with him?

I’m not writing a proper review because I can’t offer you any coherent understanding of the book beyond a prolonged plot summary. It might be brilliant. It might be a bunch of random crap cobbled together in a way that gives the illusion of brilliance. It could be anything in between. I can’t really say.

I am not despondent though. I felt the same way about Light when I first read it, but it was way better the second time. I also did myself a huge disservice by not reading Nova Swing. I could have skipped this blog post, but I felt like making a point about difficult books and re-reading. With a few exceptions, I try not to give up on books. Sometimes it’s obvious that a book is very bad or simply something that I won’t be interested in. Otherwise, I give it the benefit of the doubt, and assume I wasn’t ready to read it or that I was in the wrong mood for it. I choose to read books because I think they have something to offer me, and I’m willing to stick it out until the end to see if they deliver.

And in cases like this one, I feel that reading a book once just isn’t enough. That’s just the way some books are, and the fact that they’re difficult doesn’t mean they can’t be rewarding or entertaining. Some things simply take more time and effort than others. I’ll shelve Empty Space for now, and give it a second chance in the future.

Review of Light by M. John Harrison

Title: Light
Series: The Kefahuchi Tract #1
Author: M. John Harrison
Published: 2002
Publisher: First edition published by Gollancz. My edition published by Bantam Spectra
Genre: science fiction, space opera, literary fiction
Source: own copy

The cover of my edition of Light is covered with flattering quotes. More can be found on the inside pages. Many come from sources I admire – Iain M. Banks, Michael Marshall Smith, China Miéville, the Guardian. They praise Harrison’s skill and vision as a writer, the complex literary nature of Light, and it’s brutal, energetic brilliance as space opera. The novel won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, was nominated for the BSFA, and shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke. I was dazzled before I even started reading, and baffled afterwards. Elegant, violent and wildly imaginative, Light is literary genre fiction, bringing together quantum physics, a strange new world, bizarre characters, and all the complex relationships that exist between them. It is a particularly challenging read, and it’s only after my second attempt that I feel I have a decent understanding of the novel.

The story is divided into three strands, one set in 1999, and two set the post-Earth future of 2400. In 1999, Michael Kearney – a visionary physicist and a serial killer – has spent decades running from the Shrander, a mysterious entity with a horse’s skull for a head. Michael kills to keep the thing at bay, but because it’s his brilliant mind that attracted it in the first place, it will never leave him in peace. It seems like it’s been a while since he’s managed to do anything productive, although he and his partner Brian Tate are currently involved in a research project that has recently produced only enigmatic results. Tate can’t get Michael to hang around long enough to do any work – he keeps running from the Shrander, with his anorexic and psychologically frail ex-wife Anna trailing after him.

We know that Michael and Tate’s research will be groundbreaking though – in 2400, Tate-Kearney transformations are commonly used in space travel. In this future, humanity is scattered across planets surrounding the Kefahuchi Tract, a space-time anomaly, a “singularity without an event horizon”. For over 65 millennia, the K-tract has beguiled every race that came across it. One race even “steered whole solar systems into position” (7) just to have a closer look at the Tract. It’s a phenomenon that takes no heed of causality, and where explorers can find ancient artefacts that can’t be understood and alien tech that defies all known possibilities.

Seria Mau Genlicher zips around the Tract thanks to the alien tech of her K-ship, The White Cat – an absurdly powerful vessel bristling with weapons and capable of shooting into orbit at Mach 50. It’s run by sentient mathematics and algorithms with a life of their own. Seria Mau allowed her body to be mostly destroyed so she could be plugged into the ship, where she floats in a tank of nutrient-rich chemicals. She’s just acquired an inexplicable artefact that brings the authorities hurtling after her, but which promises opportunities humanity has been dreaming about.

Planet-side in the city of New Venusport is Ed Chianese, once a famous explorer, now a washed up ‘twink’. Like Seria Mau he spends all his time in a tank, except he’s addicted to playing out clichéd old-Earth scenarios in virtual reality. But Ed is in debt to some very bloodthirsty people and gets forced out into the real world when they come looking for him. He runs all the way into a strange new life as a visionary in a circus.

These plot strands seem disparate and in fact the three main characters will never speak to each other. It’s only at the end that you can fully understand how they’re connected. But one of the beautiful things about this book – assuming you’re like me and enjoy this sort of thing – is the way the stories are delicately connected by images and details. Some of are very fine, just a thread tacked across chapters. Ed runs from his pursuers into the confusing warrens where the alien “New Men” live; Anna’s apartment is described as a warren where you never know where you are, and Michael’s decidedly weird friend Valentine Sprake has the same pale skin and shock of ginger hair as the New Men. Anna and Michael walk past melting tarmac; in the next chapter, Seria Mau’s dreams and nightmares “leaked up inside her like warm tar” (65).

It’s much easier to notice the recurring images, details and phrases. I mentioned the Tate-Kearney transformations and the fact that both Seria Mau and Ed start out in tanks. Cats are everywhere. Seria Mau named her ship The White Cat after the white oriental cat Michael bought for the lab, and whose strange interest in their computer screens is the first sign that the two physicists have stumbled onto something otherworldly. Michael stole a strange pair of dice from the Shrander 20 years ago; in 2400 similar dice are used for a game. Michael uses the dice to plot journeys, seeing a connection between prophecy and mathematics (he is also obsessed with the Tarot. Odd, for a physicist, but that’s the kind of guy he is). In 2400, there is a brief mention of an admiral who “abandoned the Tate-Kearney transformations and simply threw dice to decide his moves”. This kind of thing can actually work because it seems that, out in space, physics doesn’t have laws so much as guidelines:

Space was big, and the boys from Earth were awed despite themselves by the things they found there: but worse, their science was in a mess. Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, but assuming anything. (136)

Beaches frequently appear as metaphors for liminal states or places. It was staring at the pebbles on a beach that child-Michael first began to understand the world as he does. The “ragged margins of the Tract” (7) are known as The Beach, and one of the characters muses, “We’ve got to leave the beach some day. All of us. Grow up. Leave the Beach, dive into the sea” (139). By which I think he means that humanity needs to move on to the next stage of discovery.

The book links Michael and Tate’s discoveries with future ones, and these are typically represented by light, specifically a tangible, flowing light that appears as tears or foaming liquid. “Sparks in everything” – this phrase is thought or uttered multiple times. It’s beautiful, but discovery isn’t romanticised in this book – it’s terrifying, painful, and dangerous. Michael can’t handle it – his knowledge attracts the Shrander and is essentially a source of pure horror that his turned him into murderer and rendered him useless. Seria Mau underwent appalling physical adjustments and risked death – as a 13-year-old child – to become a K-ship captain. Ed is the only one who offers us the classic, thrilling image of the space explorer, but he’s currently planet-bound, sticking his head into a tank to tell the future.

But it isn’t all bad. Discovery is endless. In a universe where physics is so pliable, nothing can ever be fully understood and anything is possible. Another refrain is “there was always more; there was always more after that. Discovery and exploration often take on a notably sexual tone as well, or is somehow associated with sex and sexual relationships. The climax of the novel (excuse the pun) is described in overtly sexual terms. Seria Mau is introduced as “trolling for customers” (7), suggestive of a prostitute, although what she’s offering is horrific, high-tech death rather than pleasure. We later learn that she became a K-captain partly to escape her home, where her father wanted her to “become the mother” in the wake of her mother’s death.

Michael and Anna both seems to use sex as a means of temporarily escaping their personal problems, although Michael, for some reason, never wants to penetrate women – a symbol of his fear perhaps? Ed Chianese, the explorer however, has a string of unusual sexual relationships. The first is with a character in his virtual reality. The second is with an alien. The final one is with Annie Glyph, a rickshaw girl. Rickshaw girls are essentially human carthorses, genetically tailored to massive and powerfully muscled.

With all the weird sex in the novel, the issue of bodies comes up frequently. Seria Mau initially doesn’t want one, and when she uses an avatar for face-to-face meetings she goes as a white cat. She meets with a gene tailor named Uncle Zip, who surrounds himself with clones – versions of himself who are younger, thinner, and sometimes female. Anna, an anorexic and twice-failed suicide, looks just as fragile as her mental state. Annie Glyph comes across as her parallel and her opposite – a huge, powerful woman who dwarfs the man she sleeps with. Sex and gender finds all sorts of new permutations in this novel – I can see why it won the Tiptree award.

There’s quite a bit of science, reminding me that I really need to get better acquainted with quantum physics if I want to continue reading this sort of thing. I still don’t quite understand what a singularity is, nevermind a “singularity without an event horizon”. But although I feel like a full appreciation of the novel is out of my reach, the technical details aren’t alienating. Harrison turns the science into poetry and I learned to just enjoy the words without fussing over the physics.

The tech is pretty cool either way. K-ships are just spectacular, and The White Cat is the best of them. The shadow operators were one of my favourite things about the novel – living algorithms who usually appear as “women biting their knuckles in regret” (186) and fuss over humans with personalities to match. The White Cat’s shadow operators long to craft a pretty little body for Seria Mau and dress her up in white lace. Planet-side are all sorts of genetically tailored ‘cultivars’ – gun kiddies, over-muscled punks with tusks, rickshaw girls. There’s a cultivar called Mona (also written as ‘Moaner’) – an over-sexed female body that has become popular with women.

I could continue discussing the little details. Light is just that kind of book – short but incredibly complex. I find it to be a lot like the K-tract – beguiling even when I don’t understand it. I’m glad I re-read it, and I’d like to do so again one day, after I get a copy of Nova Swing so I can experience the trilogy as a whole (I just read book 3, Empty Space; more on that in my next review). It’s certainly not for everyone, and even now I don’t want to rate because I’m not sure what to make of it. But I’m happy to be inexplicably captivated.

Review of The Office of Mercy by Ariel Djanikian

Title: The Office of Mercy
Author: Ariel Djanikian
Published: 21 February 2013
Publisher: Viking
Genre: science fiction, dystopian
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 6/10

Just over three centuries ago, the world writhed in chaos. Grossly overpopulated and under-resourced, societies across the globe collapsed into violence and squalor. An elite, now known as the Alphas, sought to end the suffering. Their solution was the Storm, an act of mercy that wiped out most of the world’s human population. The Alphas survived in bunkers across the world and rebuilt human society, refusing to repeat the mistakes of the past. The bunkers were transformed into high-tech self-sufficient settlements that function according to reason and science, with the values of “World Peace, Eternal Life, and All Suffering Ended”. The citizens live according to an Ethical Code that follows utilitarian principles and seeks to elevate humanity above the urges and inclinations of nature, which are destructive rather than useful in a modern society. It’s all rather cold and clinical, but in America-Five, the settlement where this story takes place, citizens never have to worry about getting food, shelter, excellent medical care or a good education. In the meantime, their scientists are constantly finding ways to extend the human lifespan, with the ultimate goal of achieving eternal life.

But every ‘utopia’ has its dystopian flaws. Not all humans live inside a settlement. A scattering survived the Storm, and now live in primitive tribes across the lush natural world that has been able to thrive in the past few centuries. Because they are subject to all the hardships, dangers and terrors of living in the wild, their very existence goes against the utilitarian principles of the Ethical Code. Their lives consist of more pain and suffering than pleasure, so the settlements seek to alleviate that suffering, by killing the tribespeople in “sweeps” – targeted missile strikes. In the three centuries since the Storm, the 158 domed settlements scattered across the North American continent have succeeded in sweeping over 8 million tribespeople and look forward to the day when the tribes have been eradicated.

Our protagonist, 24-year-old Natasha Wiley, works in the Office of Mercy where her job is to monitor tribes and find the ideal moment to sweep them. After each sweep, a small team is sent Outside to inspect the site, ensure that there are no survivors and replace the cameras. Natasha is considered too young and inexperienced for such a mission, but her beloved mentor Jeffrey recommends her for the next outing. Natasha finally realises her dream of going Outside and experiencing the natural world for the first time. But things go awry and Natasha encounters a group of tribespeople. For the first time she sees them as healthy, strong humans who want to live even though they don’t have a high-tech settlement to live in or bioreplacement to extend their lifespans. She stops seeing them as “desperate animals in want of relief” and looks for ways to reconcile the ethics of America-Five with helping the tribes. With a few like-minded allies, she sneaks out of the settlement, risking her life and her career to change the world for the better.

 

The Office of Mercy caught my eye because the blurb promised a dystopian story combined with science and philosophy. It sounded like a more thoughtful, engaging novel than this trend-genre generally seems to offer these days, especially since most dystopian fiction seems to be bland, commercial YA fodder. I’m happy to say that The Office of Mercy delivered what I’d been hoping for. It’s not as good as it could have been, and there are many things I would have refined or changed, but I like that it avoids being as simplistic as other novels I’ve read in this genre, and offers a thought-provoking ending.

The worldbuilding tends to be done in long, dense infodumps, but it’s not hard to read and it’s fairly consistent. The sweeps are one example of this. America-Five and the other settlements could easily kill the tribespeople in many ways, but their methods are designed to prevent suffering. If the tribespeople were to find out about the settlements or the sweeps, or if only some members died while others lived, they would suffer dread and grief. The settlement would be causing more pain. Thus, the Office of Mercy waits for a moment when all members of the tribe are gathered in one place, and then fires a bomb called a nova to kill them all before they even have a chance to realise what’s happening.

Another of the governing principles of the Ethical Code is the injunction to transcend nature and all its evils. Citizens strive to resist any irrational impulses like being afraid of the dark or greedy for food. These things are leftover instincts from when all humans lived in tribes like the ones Outside and had to fight wild animals while trying to avoid starving to death.

In addition, people no longer need to have sex or suffer the pains of relationships, because babies are grown in tanks, and new generations are produced only when there are sufficient resources to care for them. Relationships are tolerated but not encouraged and citizens can satisfy their sexual urges in virtual reality. This is the cause of some anguish for Natasha – she is in love with Jeffrey, but he is the kind of model citizen who would never let a sexual relationship get in the way of living a fully ethical existence. In America-Five, the happiness of the individual is less important than working toward the happiness of an entire society.

For Natasha though, the most important feeling to avoid is Misplaced Empathy – her tendency to feel sorry for the tribespeople she helps kill. The error in this is that she is imagining their deaths from her own perspective, from a comfortable life that is worth living and with the knowledge of the nova strikes. The tribespeople on the other hand, are believed to live dreadful lives that Natasha cannot even begin to empathise with, and they don’t know about the novas so they cannot fear them. Feeling sorry for them is “immoral and dangerous” because it may prevent Natasha from killing the tribes and reducing the amount of suffering in the world.

This is a clear starting point for rebellion. It’s only by building a mental “Wall” that the citizens can commit genocide so easily. Despite the contemporary disdain for religion, the Alpha’s Ethical Code functions a lot like a religion and similar doctrines in that it encourages people to do terrible things to others with the belief that their actions are important and morally good. Natasha has a history of mental ‘weakness’ in building Walls, so seeing the tribespeople in person is particularly devastating for her.

One of the things I like about this novel though, is that it’s not a simple matter of evil America-Five vs. innocent tribes. America-Five has as many pros as it does cons and the Alphas are philosophers rather than a group of dictatorial lunatics. They really have made a great deal of good social advancements – the settlements are not plagued by disease, poverty, starvation, or a lack of education. Unlike similar societies in dystopian fiction, they don’t have institutionalised inequality in terms of race, gender, beauty, religion, intelligence or physical prowess. There is hierarchy based on age, but it’s mild and reasonable. There is no ban on free speech. Such things would go against the Ethical Code. The people of America-Five are a normal, racially diverse bunch and although their lives will look rather sterile to most readers, it’s infinitely better than most societies today.

Nor is Natasha the usual glorified revolutionary. When she goes Outside she is overwhelmed by the beauty of nature (which is particularly lush now that the human race has stopped destroying it) and the thrills and dangers that the settlement has stripped from life. Her rebellion has moral grounds, but it is also profoundly naive at times, as she idealises something that is really no more than a novelty for her. She’s like a child who wants a pony but has only seen them on TV. For a while Natasha’s ideas actually make the novel sickenly sentimental and my rating was dropping steadily until the ending redeemed the book for me. It gave me a lot to think about regarding the impossibilities of utopia and what we might have to do to get close to something resembling paradise.

The Office of Mercy could have been a great book, if it wasn’t so unrefined (perhaps because this is Djanikian’s first novel). I already mentioned the frequent, clunky infodumps. The characters are all rather dull, and the first word that comes to mind when I think of Natasha is “watery”. Certain parts of the plot are intentionally weak so as to demonstrate Natasha’s naiveté, but then there are also parts that simply stupid and illogical, distracting me from my reading as I stopped to fume and fuss in Kindle annotations. Then there’s that old and utterly infuriating American bias that tells us there are over 150 domed settlements across North America, but only states once that there are “other Alpha-inhabited continents”, because who gives a fuck about any place that isn’t America?

But yeah, if you like the dystopian genre though, it’s worth checking this novel out.