Joe Abercrombie – The Heroes

Pro: Vivid, dynamic, brutal and different fantasy story about a battle and its consequences, and a grim cast of characters with no real good guys to be found.

Contra: Occasionally slips into slight cliché with the characterization, the initial battle description feels slightly gimmicky at first, but these objections are completely irrelevant.

Justina Robson – Natural History

Pro: Beautifully written story of very alien, yet recognizably human beings, uplifted almost to the point of incomprehensibility, yet with multidimensional characters one can relate to, topped off by solid faux science.

Contra: No serious objections, but avoid the sequel like it’s rabid.

Paul McAuley – The Quiet War

Pro: Gorgeous worldbuilding, non-US-centric future global politics, surprisingly well captured atmosphere of imminent wartime.

Contra: Occasionally too wordy in large, descriptive passages, particularly regarding scientific or faux-scientific tangents with little bearing on the plot.

Jo Walton – Among Others

Pro: Beautiful, poetic tale of growing up as a bookish and generally different child, told after the main story seems to be over, in a sort of anti-hogwartian style of boarding school story. Oh, and the way the magic works – or doesn’t work – is lovely.

Contra: The constant references to classic SF titles do become somewhat tedious and slightly forced after a point.

Chris Beckett – Dark Eden

Pro: A thoughtful, layered and brutally unflinching meditation on the nature of humanity, both its positive and negative sides, from the perspective of descendants of a crashed ship on a thoroughly alien sunless planet.

Contra: Occasionally our primary hero manages to achieve certain things just a wee bit too easily.

Also Groovy:

Liam Callanan – Cloud Atlas

Pro: Beautiful love story and wartime fantasy unfolding in the arctic wastes of Alaska, revolving around an actual cloud atlas and Japanese firebombing of US mainland during WWII.

Contra: Not sure why, but the wife lost interest in the book very early on, claims “nothing happened for a long time”.

James SA Corey – Leviathan Wakes/Caliban’s War

Pro: Perfect books for relaxed reading on the beach. It has space zombies, so I’m not sure what else needs to be said.

Contra: Pulpy style, so not good if you are looking for “serious” or “intellectual” books. Also, preemptively ripped off my novel idea, so yeah.

Justin Cronin – The Passage/The Twelve

Pro: Vampiric apocalypse and post-apocalypse that is exquisitely good even when it gets a bit stupid.

Contra: Becomes serious pulpy on occasion, and becomes exquisitely stupid sometimes even though it is still rather good. The second book is slightly worse than the first.

Greg Bear – Hull Zero Three

Pro: Weird amnesiac adventure after our hero wakes up from the perfect dream into the nightmarish reality of a broken-down generation ship where almost everything is out to kill him.

Contra: Slightly derivative – the opening is almost exactly the same as Pandorum. One of the most interesting characters is underdeveloped.

Ben Winters – Bedbugs

Pro: Mix of economic and lovecraftian horror that opts to make you extremely itchy instead of extremely frightened. Spot-on Brooklyn atmosphere.

Contra: Certain details are predictable, such as the fact that some of the characters will turn out to be evil.

Adam Roberts – New Model Army

Pro: Twisted tale of a different type of warfare style set against old military structures, presenting a deep clash between hierarchical modes of thinking set against mesh-type conceptualizations.

Contra: The action moves on in a relatively linear fashion, some of the exploits of our hero are sometimes really unfeasible.

 Classic Standing Strong:

Roger Zelazny – Creatures of Light and Darkness

Pro: Seriously disturbed mythological fantasy/far future SF full of dark humour and whimsy, a gorgeous literary experiment that was never meant for publication and all the more beautiful for it.

Contra: In a few rare spots it tends to show its age, particularly in the chapters regarding the computer powered by orgasms.

The Quiet War is not a true eganesque mathematical fandango where if the reader can’t keep up with the math and/or physics, they are reduced to skimming pages and assuming things happen by “magic”. This novel is relatively easy to follow, its several points of view speaking with distinct voices and perspectives as we follow our heroes trying to halt, mitigate or initiate an interplanetary war with Earth’s colonies on and around the satellites of Saturn. However, McAuley does enjoy stopping every now and then to describe, in minute detail, the fictional biomechemistry or construction of surface domes or, even, as boring as it may sound, soil composition and layering. To me, most of these longwinded description passages were fascinating, serving as breaks between brief and frequently violent outbursts of action.

Apart from these digressions, McAuley also occasionally stumbles in style and even, as if lacking a good editor, grammar, however, these minor issues were overshadowed by the very believable universe he created, along with the all-too-familiar atmosphere of societies gearing up for, psyching up for, and initiating a pointless, aimless, ideologically driven war, and individuals caught in the web of History breaking right across their shoulders.

Inasmuch as Pynchon novels have a coherent plot, this one concerns Oedipa Maas, named executor for the will of her former lover. As she delves into his past, she slowly uncovers a shadowy secret alternate postal service at war with the regular Post, becoming obsessed with their existence, yet unsure if it is real, or just her going slowly insane.

Despite the fact that I found it weaker than Gravity’s Rainbow, it is nevertheless still a brilliant piece of countercultural writing. The paranoid, narcotic wanderings of Oedipa as she delves ever deeper into the (possible) conspiracy are very vivid and filled with cultural references, which is, perhaps, what made it slightly less enjoyable for me – the Beatles-like quartet that accompanies her annoyed me and was so very Scooby-doo that to an extent they kept pushing my brain out of the narrative. However, the clash between Tristero and Thurn und Taxis was so engrossing, it kept pulling me back in, much like it did with Mrs. Oedipa Maas.

Exploring the generation ship trope, when I stumbled upon the synopsis it seemed like a surefire hit – interstellar Aztec colonists on a multigeneration ark. As these stories tend to go, one of them starts to discover that not all is right with the “world”, and goes off exploring, eventually stumbling onto the true nature of their enclosed little valley.

Intriguingly, much like with Aldiss’ Non-Stop, the writing seems to hold water far better during the first part of this rather short novel – so long as Harrison is describing the primitive, gods-fearing, oppressive Aztec society. As soon as our hero cracks the walls and starts exploring the high-tech environment, cracks appear in the writing as well, both stylistically and conceptually. It did not feel in the least as a 1969 novel right up to the point our hero meets the first non-Aztec. Then, suddenly, it’s like reading ancient pulp, with monocultures and dubious quasi-scientific explanations for rather clunky bio-social phenomena, dialogues that seem stilted and an almost steampunk-level clash between the level of technology described in the book and the level of technology required to construct such a starship. Repeating the Non-Stop experience, Captive Universe put me off generation ship stories for a while, and despite the cool idea, I can’t rightly recommend it to anyone not out to read it merely as a historical curiosity.

A plot summary certainly cannot spoil anything, but it will also not help you in the least, because the plot is rather byzantine and beside the point. In a far future where humanity lives across many worlds and certain humans have been uplifted to the status of gods (or, perhaps, are gods), two of those, Anubis and Osiris, maintain a harsh balance between the forces of life and death.  But ancient powers reawaken and reignite an old battle between superior divine forces and… oh, hell, forget it. It’s not that it cannot be done, there is no point. Just start reading, and see if it grabs you.

In this literary experiment that he never meant for publication, Zelazny wrote a science fiction epic in a florid, occasionally pompous and pretentious, but lovely, flowing style, interwoven with dry and dark humor, weaving a mythic story pattern that echoes, but also twists many of the established myths and legends of various peoples. Though the principal players seem at first to be mainly Egyptian, there are tinges of Greek, Norse and other flavours, peppered with a generous helping of Buddhist/Christian. This was a book that so easily could have slipped into pretentious masturbation, but much like the lead characters in both Creatures and Lord, never took itself too seriously and thus remained firmly brilliant.

The novel starts off simply, aboard an obviously multi-generation starship wherein society deteriorated to the level of primitive hunter-gatherer tribes eking out a miserable existence in the tangle of ‘ponics gone out of control, warring with each other over the few “natural” resources available, with the nature of the world lost in legends wrapped around an odd religion based on a mishmash of psychotherapy. Our hero Roy Complain joins a gang of rebels that decide to try and explore the world in search of the legendary “control room”.

What struck me most at first was how the writing did not seem too dated – it did contain an odd reference or two, but otherwise it could have been written recently, up to the point when our intrepid heroes start to discover the underlying nature of the ship (and that, in itself, is not the big discovery, so no spoilers here – Aldiss doesn’t dilly-dally with letting us and the characters know what’s up). However, as soon as technology enters the picture, and with it, a technologically more advanced band of humans on a different deck, the age of the novel suddenly bursts through the writing and starts poking the reader in the brain. Remarkably, this is not merely due to the retro-futuristic technology, or the sudden shift between describing a primitive tribal society versus a technologically more advanced one, it also shines through in some of the characters that seem to shed their third dimension and start behaving very cardboardy, degrading the book from an enjoyable adventure to a mere historical curiosity with a rather unbelievable extra twist.

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear is just such a novel. Our protagonist, known only as Teacher, apparently wakes from hibernation with no memories, splatting into a cold, harsh environment that almost instantly tries to kill him. As his memories slowly bubble back, he remembers he is on a generation ship that has obviously gone haywire, with artificial gravity fluctuating wildly and robotic maintenance devices called factors trying to clean up loose organic material, i.e. our protagonists. Fortunately, Bear does not spend too much time uncovering the basically non-existent mystery of them being on a generation/seed ship, opting instead to guide us through the mystery of how it operates and what exactly went wrong. That is, also, why I will not elaborate on the story further, though I will make note that the sometimes confusing descriptions occasionally make it very difficult to follow what’s happening.

One further point: the plot description you can read in most places (and I do suggest you avoid reading them for this book, because all too often they are full of spoilers) makes it sound as if this is a lame knock-off of Pandorum. While the very opening is almost verbatim, the similarity dissolves after a few pages and Hull Zero Three takes off like an Escheresque nightmare with, in my head at least, strong Moebius-infused imagery and characters.

Dodger is a story about a Victorian era street urchin turned tosher (a sort of sewer scavenger) street-wise enough to know he should mind his own business, but also knightly enough to be unable to stand idly by while two thugs beat up a young lady. As he wards off the two attackers, he is joined by Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, and in typical Pratchett fashion, the story then spirals away into a tale of courtly intrigue, espionage, and numerous cameos from famous personages, both historical and fictional.

The book speaks with the usual Pratchett style, and it is almost unnecessarily set outside Ankh-Morpork, a fantasy city that already has equivalents of most of the actual people from Victorian London referenced in the book (e.g. Sir Robert Peel is a dead ringer for Sir Samuel Vimes). However, that is not its downfall, at least as far as I’m concerned. What the book lacked is, in fact, a feeling of true drama, of the possibility, however improbable, that our hero will fail, but whatever Dodger sets out to do, Dodger does, and does it successfully, and by the end it was like a numbered connect-the-dots puzzle, you still do it because you want to see the finished drawing, but there is no challenge to the entire enterprise.

Dark Eden byChris Beckett

The first-level story is interesting in itself, one you could almost read to children, provided they don’t mind the occasional outburst of more or less consensual sex or brutal, graphic violence, and of course, that they are not afraid of the dark. It is a bildungsroman following John Redlantern, a young hunter with a different mindset, and the band of rebels that slowly accrue around him from a stagnant pool of the five-hundred strong tribe of inbred descendants of a pair of survivors of an intergalactic jaunt that went belly-up.

However, there are a number of subtext threads to follow as the novel unravels, such as the almost metaphoric arc of growing from childhood, through teenage rebellion and impulsive idealism, disillusionment and finally acceptance, both at the individual and the societal level. However, far more engrossing for me was the overall atmosphere, the stifling pressure of the dark, confined world and the society our protagonists are part of, echoing so many characteristics and feelings I’ve experienced growing up in a small, self-absorbed town in a small, self-absorbed country.

The novel starts out following Bull Ingram, a WWII vet who works as a tough-as-nails enforcer hired by a records company exec to find two people, a mysterious blues singer called Ramblin’ John Hastur – and the name gives off part of the game right off the bat, but the giveaway in no way lessens the taste of the story – and a record promoter who’s gone missing. That right there would have been a fascinating story to read, written with Jacobs’ surehand style that never let me even suspect it was his first book. He carried the smoky down-south atmosphere of a white man stepping into the coloured folks’ world of rhythm and magic pat down perfect, hand in hand with small details that really peppered things just right, such as perhaps the first time I can remember reading about a character punching someone and breaking their fist.

However, as the conclusion of the novel starts to draw near, Jacobs suddenly decides to turn Bull into a supporting character and pushes for a female lead uncovering the central mystery with the help of a nigh-omniscient and suspiciously fortuitously placed and extremely wordy catholic priest. This seriously kills the tempo and dampens the beat of the story that only manages to recover somewhat at the very end, preventing this from turning out to be a near-perfect book. However, if for nothing else but the extremely atmospheric first half, this is very much a must-read.