I apologise to you both for the late arrival of this post. I have been otherwise preoccupied with promoting my latest book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way as well as contending with a great deal of business at the Submerged Log Company, after which Mrs Gee and I enjoyed a short break. And, like Jenny, I am of the age where one begins to wonder why one bothers, realising (not for the first time) that I appear to be one of the few greyhounds in the stadium to realise that the hare they are chasing is only a toy. But I’m here now, and here is what I read in April.
Adrian Tchaikovsky: Shroud In my opinion few writers can match Adrian Tchaikovsky in his evocation of alien life and its struggle towards intelligence (see his magisterial Children of Time, reviewed here). Here he has a crew of a spaceship forced to crash-land on the eponymous moon of a gas giant. The moon is optically dark but radiates vast quantities of radio chatter. The novel — mainly a two-hander between the surviving crew members of a crippled escape pod — concerns the meeting between humans and the alien life-forms on the moon that have evolved a kind of distributed intelligence based on radio chatter, during which the aliens seem to understand much more about the humans than vice-versa.
Travis Elborough: Atlas of Unexpected Places I had expected this to be as charmingly liminal as a superficially similar book, Off The Map by Alastair Bonnett (reviewed here) but it turned out to be less a meditation on the subject of topophilia (a love of place) as a compendium of more or less random find spots on the globe with interesting anecdotes about them, from an ornate but largely unused railway station in Spain to the caves of Lascaux in France. It’s the sort of book of short but amusing stories one would put in the lavatory of one’s guest wing to entertain visitors while they are on the throne..
Jess Kidd: The Hoarder This rambling mystery comes from the rich haul of authors I ran into while reading The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) and whose wonderfully gothic Things In Jars I reviewed here. Whereas that was Victoriana, The Hoarder takes us up to the present day with social care worker Maud Drennan who is sent to look after the cantankerous Cahal Flood in a decaying mansion crammed full of rubbish. Like Bridie Devine in Things in Jars, Maud is both Irish and psychic, forever accompanied by one or more saints, quick to advise her on what to do with her difficult charge. Maud is convinced that there’s a mystery in the House of Flood. Which of course there is. I love Jess Kidd’s writing. The prose is charming; the characters, beautifully realised (Maud’s landlady, a transvestite retired magician’s assistant is especially memorable); and the dialogue exceptional. I’d be surprised if this didn’t make my end-of-the-year selection, though what with other rich pickings from The Winter Spirits it will have stiff competition.
Adam Roberts: Lake of Darkness A somewhat schizoid author who when not indulging in Tolkien-related silliness writes sere, biting and award-winning SF such as the very wonderful Jack Glass, about a criminal with igneous ingenious and incarnadine ways of breaching containment. Lake of Darkness is set in a post-scarcity future in which the crew of one of two spaceships exploring a black hole is murdered by the captain, Raine, who appears to have gone rogue. A historian specialising in 21st-century serial killers who interviews the imprisoned Raine is infected with what seems to be the same contagion (echoes of Silence of the Lambs). Whatever it is has — impossibly — escaped from the black hole. But what? An alien menace? Satan himself? What starts out as an everyday SF locked-room mystery turns into a tough, uncompromising exegesis on the physics of black holes… and the nature of good and evil. Not everyone will enjoy this. I found it mindbendingly brilliant.
Andrew Michael Hurley: The Loney Yet another author from The Winter Spirits, to which the author contributed The Old Play, a story about a drama performed as a traditional community ritual whose continuity appears to depend on the commission of a kind of human sacrifice. These themes echo in The Loney, in which the devoutly Catholic Smith family goes on an Easter retreat to a remote part of the Lancashire coast, where there is a shrine to St Anne. Their story is told through the eyes of the unnamed teenage younger Smith son, protector of his older brother Andrew who is mute and has learning difficulties. The family hopes that Andrew’s exposure to holiness will cure him. And, well, he is cured (no spoiler – this is made clear in the Prologue) but what appears to be a miracle has not quite the holiness that the family imagined. The novel gets much of its power from the things that are left unsaid, the grown-up conversations that the narrator cannot quite understand, so that the horror dawns slowly on the reader who is ever eager to learn how Andrew’s miracle comes to pass. I’ll give no further clues, but there is a parallel in Ursula Guin’s 1973 short story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.
