First up is Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett. John Redlantern is one of 532 living descendants of two explorers cast away on Eden, a planet marooned beyond the edge of the Galaxy, so lonely it doesn’t even have a Sun. Six generations after the landing, the community remains confined to one, single valley, its weird ecology maintained by geothermal energy and lit by bioluminescent plants and animals. The people have long since regressed to the stone age. They are overcrowded, and, having depleted the ecology of the one small valley in which they live, starving. Inbreeding depression and the Founder Effect have also had their way (look, this is meant to be a science blog – so sue me.)

John, though, is not satisfied with his lot, and wonders what lies beyond Snowy Dark, the range of mountains that surrounds the deceptive security of the valley he and his many relations have known all their lives. Is Circle Valley the only habitable part of Eden? His discoveries will jolt Eden out of its complacency – for good or ill.

Perhaps inescapably reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, this marvellous book has some of the haunting, elegiac air of those post-apocalyptic classics Earth Abides or A Canticle for Leibowitz – of tiny communities trying to come to terms with their much greater pasts.

John Redlantern and his companions, especially feisty Tina Spiketree; the clubfooted philosopher Jeff; the tortured village elder Bella Redlantern, and all the rest, are utterly, heartbreakingly believable. It’s hard to come away from a brand-new novel and have the feeling that you’ve just put down something that’ll be a classic one day – one doesn’t have the necessary perspective – but Dark Eden has the feel of a classic in the making. The locale, the characters, their predicament, and the story as a whole, all point in that direction. If I have one quibble, it is the way the tale is told, in alternating sections from the points of view of different characters, which can be confusing at times. That aside, I’d recommend this unreservedly to anyone, whether they usually read SF or not, who likes a good page-turning read with strong, believable characters.

Alastair Reynolds will be familiar to many from space operas such as Revelation Space and Chasm City. Terminal World is very different. Although not space opera, it is otherwise very hard to define (and there’s nothing wrong with that.) At a first approximation I’d call it Far-Future steampunk. It’s set in and around Spearpoint, a gigantic atmosphere-piercing skyscraper and the very last human city, whose various districts are defined by Zones in which various kinds of technology can and can’t function. The protagonist, Quillon, is a pathologist in the Third District Morgue of Neon Heights, whose technology is mid-twentieth-century. Quillon is, however, not all he seems – even to himself. He’s the last vestige of a program by the Angels – posthumans living high up on Spearpoint – to infiltrate the lower levels. To escape likely assassination he has to leave Spearpoint and journey out into a large, scary and almost unknown world.

The premise of the book puts one in mind of Arthur C. Clarke’s The City And The Stars, likewise set in the last remaining human city, somewhen in the far future. Otherwise it could hardly be more different. The trappings are very, very steampunk. No steampunk is complete without airships, and Terminal World doesn’t disappoint. There are lots and lots of airships. There is also much good old-fashioned shoot-em-up high adventure as Quillon and his assorted companions battle a series of variously terrifying and disgusting foes.

At the risk of spoiling things, it’s not just Quillon who is more than he seems at first – it’s the entire locale. Seasoned SF readers will soon pick up the clues, whose solution sheds a wan light, if only fleetingly, on an ancient mystery within which the protagonists are constrained to work. I’m a sucker for stories like this, in which the characters toil unknowingly within the greater tides of history and landscape (Dark Eden is another if very different riff on this theme), a trope that goes back to Thomas Hardy and Tess Of The D’Urbevilles. An enjoyable departure.

And now, from two novels, to two anthologies of short stories. Like the three-minute single was to punk, short stories really are the most vital medium in SF. Stories allow an author to present a single, intriguing idea and leave you wanting more, rather than trusting you to bear with all the ramifications at novel length. I love anthologies – they are, if you will, amuse-bouches </pompous arse> that can introduce you painlessly and quickly to new authors.

After reading his stories Longing For Langalana and especially The Scent Of Their Arrival in the magazine Interzone I just had to have Mercurio D. Rivera write for the Futures series in Nature (which I then edited) and the result was Answers From The Event Horizon, the story that finishes the very nearly eponymous Across The Event Horizon, a terrific collection of fourteen tales. This anthology includes the Interzone stories just mentioned, and an array of others from various magazines, and there isn’t a clunker among them.

The standout in a strong field has to be the dark fantasy Tu Sufriemento Shall Protect Us, which takes the concept in Ursula Le Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and sets it in a near-future Hispanic New York, with gory lashings of S&M. Especially S. Light relief comes with Sleeping With The Anemone, about the lucrative xeno-porn industry, and indeed Rivera’s humour is never far from the surface in any of these stories.

Collections allow one to spot any underlying themes in an author’s work. The difficulty of communication – between people, between different species – seems to be Rivera’s central preoccupation. But no matter how dark these yarns get, there always seems to be space in Rivera’s fiction for lightness, hope, and plain old-fashioned fun (remember that?) even if it’s around the corner, or a few streets away. It’s this, I think, that elevates Rivera’s fiction from the ordinary and elevates it to the level of classic SF. Which this undoubtedly is. Kudos to Ian Whates of NewCon Press for pulling together this sparkling collection from one of SF’s rising stars. If you’re a fan of classic SF, and know what’s good for you, you’ll swizzle this one into your bargonns straight away.

Mr Whates, as it happens, is a considerable writer as well as publisher. He first piqued my subether relay when he submitted a story called The Key to Futures, a tale I picked for my own anthology Futures from Nature. His latest collection, Growing Pains, illustrates his style well. Each story is brief, crisp and plainly told, without affectation. They are also very old-school – Shop Talk, for example, is pure Asimov. There are absolutely no nods to contemporary or recent bandwagons. You won’t find anything punk here, whether steam or cyber. If there is one theme, perhaps unintentional, it is the rituals of death. Judging from these tales, Whates has been to a lot of funerals.

Some of the stories are darkly funny, like Coffee Break, where a Men-In-Black-style secret agent won’t let anything, not even an alien invasion, get in the way of his morning coffee; and The Assistant, about the unusual things office cleaners have to deal with at night, when the office workers are at home in bed. Some, such as Morphs, are horrific and gory; The Outsider nods to the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name (though when I mentioned this to Whates, he denied ever having knowingly read any Lovecraft.) But where Whates scores, I think, is less with pure SF than with fantasy. The final story, The Piano Song is just that, and very affecting.

No sooner said than done – By The Sea features D. I. Persephone Sheepwool of the Met, who has fled to seek a new life on the North Norfolk Coast after losing her husband and infant son in a horrific motor accident.

But horror is never far behind, as she discovers when a body is found at a museum in a decaying clifftop mansion whose shadowy staff is dedicated to discovering the secrets of the sea. Investigating the death along with her redoubtable sidekick D. S. Elaine Fitch, Sheepwool finds that some secrets are probably best left submerged. Trouble is, even the most deeply submerged secrets have a nasty way of oozing to the surface.

I wanted to scratch several itches with this book. First, I wanted to do for Cromer what Stephen King did for Maine. The fictional town of Deringland is modelled on Cromer – but not the real Cromer, more the Cromer that would result from the distortion of dreams. Second, I wanted to write some gothic horror, but setting it in modern times. Third, I wanted to explore the classic detective-sidekick partnership. Not so much Watson and Holmes, but more explicitly Morse and Lewis. I’ve always loved Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, and even more so the TV adaptations with John Thaw in the title role.

Like Morse, Sheepwool is cerebral and cultured, though she gets her inspiration from surrealist art rather than grand opera. Like Lewis, Fitch is down-to-earth. Devotees of Morse will remember how Lewis always likes to return to his wife and family and a steaming plate of egg and chips. My Elaine Fitch is a local girl with three children and a solid husband called Jason, a builder, who is head chef in the Fitch household.

There are no crabs in By The Sea. There are, however, lobsters – in the form of a strange pub called the Barking Lobster (another surrealist in-joke). There is also a pub called the Dazed Haddock (another Crox Minor invention.) There’s quite a bit of science confronting the unknown; the machinations of Big Pharma; and – oh yes – there are mermaids. Lots of mermaids. Mermaids real, mermaids fake, and mermaids somewhere in between. I hope you’ll download the book this weekend – it costs nothing – and enjoy.

The assumption lying behind my colleagues’ aghastness was that to fly anywhere you must needs do it from Heathrow, that overstretched, crowded and expensive-to-get-to blob just to the west of London. But capacity is limited: Heathrow has just two runways, and is now surrounded by suburbia. A somewhat laughable painting-over-the-cracks solution is to rebrand other airports, such as Gatwick (in Sussex), Stansted (in north Essex), Luton (in Bedfordshire) and even Southend (Essex again) as ‘London’. But the fact is, England needs more runways. Putting runways anywhere in the existing airports will be a considerable blight on peoples’ lives.

Boris Johnson, whom posterity will view as the greatest statesman of this or any other age, came up with the idea of an airport made from reclaimed land far out in the Thames Estuary, to the east of London. This is a good idea because, compared with West London, there is very little out there. The land is ripe for reclamation and infrastructure development, which would lead to jobs, votes and much rejoicing.

It would also be a good chance to build something totally new, from the ground up, without the usual British solution of trying to kludge something apparently new (but really rather half-hearted) onto some crumbling antecedent. Sadly, the Transport Select Committee, a group of MPs, has shied away from that glittering chance and proposed the worst possible solution – build a third and even a fourth runway at Heathrow. Such a failure of imagination – to, as our corporate colleagues say, ‘think outside the box’ – is enough to make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes in disbelief.

One reason stated by the Committee for not building Boris Island is that it would mean building a huge amount of totally new infrastructure, when a sounder alternative might be to improve what’s already there. Once again the MPs demonstrate a shocking lack of initiative, even forethought. I can think of three reasons why building a new airport from scratch is actually a good thing.

One – building from scratch means that you can build what is required to do the job, rather than compromise with what’s existing.

Two – if infrastructure already exists, you can bet that it’s already being used, full to bursting. ‘Improving’ it to take more traffic will lead to the degradation of that infrastructure for some considerable time in the interim. Everyone knows what a headache it is to drive along a stretch of road that’s being ‘improved’. Building a completely new road is easier, quicker (the builders don’t have to accommodate existing users) and needn’t be as expensive as one might think.

Three – a completely new airport attracts business, at first connected with the airport, and then more tangentially, as people move in to service it and require accommodation, schools, hospitals and so on.

Another problem with Heathrow is that it’s difficult and expensive to get to not only from eastern parts of London, but from much of the rest of the country. If building Boris Island would take a decade or so, capacity might be increased not at Heathrow but at any number of regional airports outside the southeast. For example, just as a selection: Bristol, Birmingham. Aberdeen, Cardiff, Manchester, Durham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, Humberside, Leeds-Bradford, Newcastle or Southampton. And, Heavens to Betsy, maybe even Norwich. The only thing standing in the way of such considerations is the London-centric attitudes of business and politics.

My selection of regional airports is, I confess, not random. So what do they have in common? They are all served by KLM, direct from Schiphol. So while the politicians remain unable to think big, and continue to flog the dead horse that is Heathrow, other airports in Europe are busily exploiting markets that Londonistas pretend aren’t there, or are unimportant. More fool them.

Have you noticed how existential DIY megamarts get on Bank Holiday weekends? All I wanted to do was get a new hasp for the shed door, and when I got it home I discovered the attached emblazoned on the wrapper…

Either they need to get their collective acts together and decide which number they actually WANT on the barcode, or they need to stop watching BBC4 late at night and being scared by cosmologists taking about quantum stuff…

Deep Purple has been at it, in various incarnations, more or less constantly, since 1967. Before that, the individual members were involved in various groups, back to the early 1960s, a time when Tom Lehrer remarked of his ‘disc-jockey friends’, “of whom I have none,” that they played “rock and roll and other children’s records.”

Well, rock’n'roll has matured, and. not only that, aged. The first generation of rockers is dying off  - those who did not succumb at an early age to various excesses. The recently departed include Jon Lord — a veteran of early 1960s sessions (he played piano on the Kinks’ You Really Got Me) and the original organist and founder of Deep Purple — who recently succumbed to pancreatic cancer (he was 71.)

There was no need for Deep Purple to have released a new record at all. These days, records don’t make any money. Bands like Purple earn their bread by touring – which they do, constantly. (Hence the title of the album: Now what? You want us to actually make a record? Whatever for?) Their last studio album, Rapture of the Deep, was released in 2005. By all accounts they were driven into the studio by veteran producer Bob Ezrin (64), who expressed a desire to take the shambling, rambling rockers in hand – as he had before with the likes of Pink Floyd (The Wall). As a result, the band didn’t feel constrained to follow any particular formula. Ezrin opened up the familiar serpentine, dense riffage to reveal something altogether grander. Now What?! feels new, exciting, fresh and full of ideas.

The effect on Deep Purple’s sound is similar to that of having one’s ears syringed. All of a sudden you can hear everything. The effect is most marked on Don Airey’s keyboards. Airey is a journeyman musician who has played for just about everybody. He even wrote a song for Katrina (53) and the Waves to sing at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1997. (It won.) When Jon Lord left Purple in 2002 to concentrate on his classical compositions, Airey was the natural replacement, but for many years he was very much in Lord’s shadow. For the past decade Airey has played hard-rock-overdriven Hammond in the way Jon Lord pioneered, with the occasional flourish of piano or synthesizer. With Now What?! though, Airey has come into his own. There is Hammond, and lots of it – of course there is, it wouldn’t be a Deep Purple record otherwise – but there is a much broader palette of sounds and arrangements.

There’s haunted-castle organ (Airey once played with Ozzy Osbourne); prog-rock suspended chords and odd time signatures (Airey played in Jon Hiseman’s fusion combo Colosseum II); and straight classical (you guessed it: Airey played on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini, you know, the theme tune to The South Bank Show.) The first gets an Airey airing in a daft concoction called Vincent Price, which must be Deep Purple’s answer to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Steve Morse even makes his guitar sound like a Theremin, straight out of B-feature ’50s SF. The second and third collide on Above and Beyond, a song in 6/8 time, like a medieval gigue. This song is dedicated to Jon Lord, and even sounds like something Lord might have written in his last years, as he made a stab at the classical charts.

What do aged rockers write songs about? Do they sing about wind turbines, immigration and the ungrateful youth of today? In short, do they moan about the state of the world and how things were better when they were young? If Deep Purple moans, it’s not obvious. Ian Gillan, like most rock singers, composes lyrics more for the sounds of the words than their meaning, so if anything in particular shines through, it is likely to be fractured, more allusive than explicit. When you are old and wise, you see, there is no black and white, just innumerable shades of grey (A Simple Song.) This is why in Après Vous, the singer doesn’t chase the girl, but decides to sit back and quench his thirst while his companion deludes himself with thoughts of romance; and why in All The Time In The World, he wonders why anyone at all would ever want to hurry, seeing himself as ‘old Zeno’s tortoise with Achilles snapping at my heels.’ In Bodyline our ageing rock singer admires a dancer from afar – the closest that this elderly voyeur comes to sex. Still, it’s a lot more – dare I say – ‘tasteful’ – than the Eagles’ middle-aged song I Love To watch A Woman Dance (from Long Road Out of Eden), which is, frankly, icky.

So, if there is one theme, it is, as one might expect, a wry nostalgia. Hell To Pay introduces one of Gillan’s characters, ‘Two-Tone’ Eddie, who used to be a revolutionary, ‘in the good old days of way back when’: only these days nobody can remember what the revolution was supposed to have been about. Gillan is fond of his characters, all of whom are drawn from life, and inhabit a demi-monde that Toulouse-Lautrec would have recognised: from Mitzi Dupree, ‘Queen of the Ping Pong’ (the best song by far on the otherwise so-so 1987 album The House Of Blue Light) to Ted The Mechanic (first among equals on the terrific Purpendicular, 1996.)

From nostalgia, to regret. In Blood From A Stone, a world-weary Gillan remonstrates with a bailiff who has come to clean the last pickings from a threadbare home or business, a song punctuated with startling images. ‘Come on in, help yourself’, he says,

there’s nothing left that I can see;
except a string of beads and some old pot-pourri.

This could be a song very much for our time except we’ve been here before, in Fingers To The Bone (Abandon, 1998). Blood From A Stone even reprises an old Purple bass riff, from You Keep On Moving (from Come Taste The Band, 1975: though this is very likely a coincidence, as apart from drummer Ian Paice, the line-up was quite different.)

From nostalgia, through regret, to a kind of transcendance, glimpsed vaguely through Weirdistan – ‘oh yes, it’s beautiful’, he sings – but we don’t really know what’s beautiful, nor why. More starkly, though in An Uncommon Man -  in which Airey’s brash Keith-Emerson-like trumpets and twiddling high-register Hammond echo Fanfare for the Common Man, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s nod to Copland – and in which Gillan concludes ‘it’s good to be king.’