The End Of The Pier Show

One of the criticisms of my book A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth was that it lacked illustrations of the many creatures mentioned therein. To fill what seems to be a yawning chasm lacuna hole I’m pleased to announce that there will be an illustrated version, aimed at younger readers (9-11 years). It’ll be called The Wonder of Life on Earth. The text is all-new, and it’s currently being illustrated by Raxenne Maniquiz. Click here to get a flavour of her wonderfully rich natural history art. It’s available for preorder, so put it in your Christmas shopping order … for 2026.

Peter F. Hamilton: The Chronicle of the Fallers (The Abyss Beyond Dreams/ Night Without Stars) Another month, another enormous bonkbuster from Peter F. Hamilton. Back in June I reviewed the Commonwealth Saga (Pandora’s Star/ Judas Unchained) in which the prosperous Commonwealth of human planets, all neatly linked together by railways and wormholes, is invaded by a hostile alien force whose sole goal is conquest and the elimination of all life apart from itself. Last month I reviewed the Void Trilogy in which the Black Hole at the centre of the Galaxy turns out to be a micro-universe, the Void, in which different physics applies — including telepathy — but whose consumption of energy threatens to swallow the rest of the Galaxy. The Chronicle of the Fallers is another two-volume whopper that’s a continuation, in a way, of all the others, creating a seven volume series. In The Abyss from Dreams, Nigel Sheldon — a major character from the Commonwealth Saga — infiltrates the Void in attempt to find Querencia, the planet on which much of the action of the Void Trilogy takes place. By mistake he lands on a different planet in the Void, also colonised by humans, called Bienvenido. The humans here face a constant threat from space — aliens called the Fallers who are a cross between the threads of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight novels, and zombies, who either take over humans, or eat them. On Bienvenido, a young soldier, Sivasta, obsessed with the Fallers, rises to power and becomes a kind of Marxist dictator. As a result of Nigel Sheldon’s trying to disarm the Fallers at source, Bienvenido is ejected from the Void and finds itself in real space — but circling a lonely star in the intergalactic void. Now we move to Night without Stars. This star system is a kind of sin bin in which transgressive civilisations congregate. After that I kind of lost the plot a bit, but [SPOILER ALERT] the Fallers eventually win, though not without the human population having been transferred back to the Commonwealth, with the aid of another of the Commonwealth’s star turns, genetically engineered super-sleuth Paula Myo. Often exhilarating, increasingly exhausting, my impression after reading these novels was one in which McGuffins tend to predominate over story. Hyperdrives, ultra drives, easy voyages between galaxies, weapons that destroy stars, wormhole generators, re-life, rejuvenation, accelerated development from infancy to adulthood in a month, telepathy, telekinesis, transcendence into post-physical status, sentient robots, aliens of every kind: if a character (and the characterisation is excellent) face a problem, some new gizmo should be able to help them out. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy these novels, because I did, very much. But one can have too much of a good thing.

Tom Lathan: Lost Wonders We hear a great deal about how the encroachment of humans is driving many species  to extinction. What we hear much less about is extinction at the sharp end, on a case-by-case basis. Here Tom Lathan presents ten case histories of species that have become extinct very recently, that is, in the 21st century, their demise known to the very day. The only one anyone is likely to have heard of is Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island giant tortoise of the Galapagos. Others include birds, bats, fish, snails, and a shrub. The time, energy of efforts expended by conservationists to keep the various species alive in the face of natural disasters and bureaucratic ineptitude add up to a poignant read, but in the end I was left waiting for the other shoe to drop. All the species lived on small islands or in remote, patchy habitat and would very likely have gone extinct anyway, and rather soon, whatever anyone did. Some were close relatives or even variants of other, known species, so their existence and extinction rather depended on one’s viewpoint as a taxonomist. Lathan didn’t broaden his outlook to, say, consider other threatened species that represent much deeper lineages: the tuatara, say, or the aye-aye. More importantly, he didn’t explore whether the extinction of a few species of which nobody had heard might be the thin end of the wedge. That once one starts to pull at the seemingly insignificant threads of an ecosystem, first one species goes, and then another, until the whole thing collapses. And he doesn’t address the perhaps unfashionable view that, by creating new and novel patches of habitat, and moving animals and plants around, human activity might actually have increased biological diversity. In which case the efforts of conservationists to save endangered endemics, while laudable in and of themselves, look increasingly like Canute trying to stem the tide on command. Nature is much bigger than humanity, against which the efforts of humans to demand that nature stays exactly as it is looks a lot like hubris. DISCLAIMER: An uncorrected proof of the book was sent to me by the publisher. The book will be published in November.

Lavie Tidhar: Central Station I can’t remember if I ever visited the central bus station in Tel Aviv, though it’s highly likely, given that I visited Israel in 1985 and traveled extensively round the country by bus. Like all major transport hubs, I suspect that it was and is a magnet for people of every kind, and generated its own kind of life. In Central Station, Israeli author Lavie Tidhar has inflated it into a spaceport that separates Jewish Tel Aviv from Arab Jaffa in a near-future Balkanised Israel-Palestine. People go through Central Station to reach other parts of the world via sub-orbital spaceplanes, or, via space stations, to the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and the outer planets. The novel is less a narrative than accounts of the intertwined lives of the people born, raised, living in, working in, and passing through. The people are a stew of ethnicities, and include alien elements, people grown in labs and then forgotten about and left to grow up as street kids; and the ‘others’ who are more digital than human. There is a panoply of religions, including ones presided over by robots. There are knowingly playful references to other SF stories, and some rather good Jewish jokes (I was fond of the robot who, while invoking the Nine Billion Names of God, served as a mohel to the local Jewish community). The most poignant scenes involve the hard-bitten robotniks: human soldiers killed in battle but patched together with machinery and sent back to fight in wars that everyone has forgotten and whose results turn out, in the end, to have been meaningless. The robotniks are the beggars of Central Station who appeal not for cash, but for spare parts. They speak a dialect called Battle Yiddish (which is basically just Yiddish), different from the argot of many residents of the Station, which is Asteroid Pidgin (which is basically just Pidgin). There is overt racism, too — to a young woman who has been converted into a strigoi, a kind of bio-weapon with many characteristics of a vampire. Good science fiction (and this is very good) is not necessarily about the future, but a genre in which ordinary people are presented with extraordinary situations, thus providing a satirical or even allegorical commentary on the way we live now. Parallels with the ongoing chaos of the Middle East are not hard to find.

Lavie Tidhar: Maror People of a certain age will remember James Michener, who wrote vast blockbusters in which historical panoramas were seen through the eyes of a multi-generational cast of characters. One such was The Source (1965), telling of the Holy Land from pre-Biblical times to foundation of Israel. Maror, by Lavie Tidhar, can be seen as its antithesis. Yes, it’s a vast epic about Israel, but it is relentlessly anti-heroic. It stems from the idea that any fully rounded nation must have more than just politicians, heroes, generals, visionaries and pioneers. It must have whores, pimps, gamblers, gangsters, crooks and villains, too, and the boundaries between good and evil are not always clear. It starts with Avi Sagi, a cop so hard-boiled that he makes Dirty Harry look squeaky-clean. Assassination is Avi’s middle name, it seems, and he doesn’t question who it is he’s popping off. Avi’s story, in the early 2000s, turns out to be just the first in a series of short stories and vignettes set in Israel (or among Israelis abroad) from just after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, through the Lebanon campaigns of the 1980s, up to 2008. The stories illustrate the history of Israel but through the eyes of cops so bent they could be drawn as pretzels; drug lords who are also devoted family men; soldiers, who, once out of the army, find jobs as ‘security consultants’ (please don’t call them ‘mercenaries’) to foreign terrorist organisations; professional drug couriers; politicians and generals who are also serial rapists and embezzlers, and who take advantage of the chaos of the Middle East to indulge in what are euphemistically called ‘import-export’ businesses. There is enough blood to satisfy even the most rabid fan of Tarantino. At the heart of it all — and the only common feature of all the tales — is the mysterious, Bible-quoting Cohen, a policeman who is also a gangster, who plays both sides because, he says, if crime can’t be stopped, it has to be ‘managed’, and this means bending the rules. It turns out that Cohen was born on the day Israel achieved independence, and he can be seen as a kind of genius loci for Israel: sleeves-rolled-up, practical, cunning, doing everything to ensure Israel’s survival by any means necessary. Several real people have walk-on parts. Some, such as Chaim Topol and Ofra Haza, will be recognisable to an international readership, but there are lots more who will, I suspect, mean nothing to anyone (such as me) not steeped in Israeli popular culture. The book is not without hope, though, even if cruelly dashed. In the mid-1990s, the young and idealistic Avi, trying to put a life of petty crime behind him, and fuelled, like all his generation, by the hope of the nascent Oslo peace accords and a peace treaty with Jordan, goes to a rock festival in Arad, in the Negev desert, and makes out with a girl. It all looks lovely… until disaster strikes. This is a portrait of a real event. The collapse of security barriers led to serious injury and death for young festival-goers. In Israel, 18 July, 1995 is as much ‘The Day the Music Died’, as Altamont, or the death of Buddy Holly, are remembered in the US. And on 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, an architect of peace, was assassinated by a Jewish ultra-nationalist hothead. Avi turns back to crime and after that the course of the book is relentlessly downhill. The story ends, as it began, with Avi, and from the foregoing you’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s not a happy conclusion. To anyone like me who admires Israel, even if they don’t always love it, this novel is deeply unsettling. But I am consoled that there is a message here, too, for progressives, who rightly deplore the fact that women and minorities have to work twice as hard to achieve as much as their white, male colleagues, but, in their hypocrisy (born of deep-seated antisemitism) question the very existence of Israel, because Israelis don’t live up to ethical standards they would not match themselves, or expect in anyone else. Postscript: in Hebrew, maror refers to the ‘bitter herbs’ that are eaten at the Jewish festival of Passover in which Jews celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt.

Richard Fortey: Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind Richard Fortey is best known as an author (Life: An Unauthorised Biography) and palaeontologist (Trilobite!) but as his sparkling memoir A Curious Boy revealed, he’s been a skilled amateur mycologist since boyhood. Now you can go on a fungus foray without ever leaving your armchair in the company of someone who really knows his Armillarias from his Amanitas. [DISCLAIMER: I have written a longer review of this forthcoming title for a magazine].

Peter F. Hamilton: The Void Trilogy (The Dreaming Void/ The Temporal Void/ The Evolutionary Void) I started to read this years ago but it didn’t seem to make much sense, and I was put off by fantasy elements that didn’t seem to sit well with the SFnal framing. Now I know the reason — the Void Trilogy follows on pretty much directly from the Commonwealth Saga (Pandoras Star, Judas Unchained) I reviewed last month, and is best read (or, in my case, listened to) straight after. The action takes place some hundreds of years after the Commonwealth Saga. It’s been found that the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy isn’t really a black hole, but an entirely separate universe whose laws are rather different. Time flows faster, for one thing. And Commonwealth technology doesn’t really work. Instead there is … psychic power. Telepathy, telekinesis and so on. Two thousand years earlier (in Void time) a ship from the Commonwealth managed to get in  to the Void — whose barrier seemingly prevents most incursions — and lands on a planet called Querencia, where the crew and their descendants revert to a kind of medieval-grade society (with telepathy). In the greater universe, dreams of the life of Edeard, a powerful psychic from Querencia, leak out and are received by a human called Inigo, who founds a religion called Living Dream whose aim is to migrate into the Void and achieve fulfilment — at the risk of making the Void expand to consume the Galaxy. The rest of humanity aims to stop this happening. But matters are made more complicated by the fact that since Commonwealth times, humanity has split into a series of factions that either embrace or reject technology. The most techno-enthusiastic are the Accelerators who want to enter the Void as a way of jacking them up to ‘post-physical’ status, again risking Void expansion.  And there’s lots more (each one of these three volumes is enormous). Needless to say I enjoyed it hugely. The larger-than-normal amount of woo was countered by characterisation of a depth not often seen in SF. Many of the key characters carry over from the Commonwealth Saga, so we really do get invested in their fates.

John Long: The Secret History of Sharks John Long is an Australian palaeontologist interested in fossil fishes. Here he recounts the evolutionary history of sharks. Conventional wisdom has these iconic predators patrolling the seas pretty much unchanged for 400 million years. But a closer look shows that they have evolved in all sorts of interesting ways, morphing out of all the dangers and obstacles that the Earth has thrown at them. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me a pre-publication version for a cover quote].

Brian Clegg: Brainjacking Disinformation. Misinformation. Misdirection. Personal Truths. Alternative Facts. Influencers. Product placement. Deepfakes. Stage magic. Advertising. Marketing. From the dawn of advertising to modern social media, we risk drowning in floods of information designed to change our minds — such is ‘brainjacking’. Brian Clegg explains the long history of brainjacking and shows that some of the purported effects are exaggerated, whereas others really should worry us. A plain-speaking guide to our modern post-truth world. [DISCLAIMER: The author sent me a pre-publication version for a cover quote].

Baoshu The Redemption of Time I generally don’t have time for fan fiction, but there’s fan fiction and fan fiction, and this one is of a superior sort. Baoshu (a pen name) is a fan, specifically of the cosmically successful Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixian Liu (reviewed elsewhere in these pages). So much of a fan that he wrote an entire novel in the same universe, and received Cixian Liu’s blessing. The Redemption of Time will make no sense at all to anyone who hasn’t read the Three-Body trilogy, and not much more sense than that to anyone who’s seen the derivative televisual emission from Netflix but not read the books. To cut a very (very) long story short, The Redemption of Time starts with the experiences of Yun Tianming with the Trisolarans, after which he gets embroiled into an eternal cosmos-spanning war between two godlike powers — the Master and the Lurker — who fight one another by altering the dimensionality of spacetime. The Redemption of Time is (almost) as full of grand ideas as the Three-Body Problem although, given its scope, there is a lot more talk than action. Although the author cleverly ties up a few loose ends in the original, I was in the end more stupefied than edified. For diehard Three-Body fans only. Baoshu has since become an author of his own fiction, some of which features in …

Ken Liu (ed.) Broken Stars After reading Invisible Planets, Ken Liu’s selection of contemporary Chinese science fiction (reviewed last month), I discovered a second anthology, containing one or two of the same authors, with a few more, and more stories overall. This time Liu is slightly more adventurous, featuring stories that contain more specifically Chinese themes that western readers will need either extra-SFnal knowledge (and footnotes) to unpack. In culinary terms, we’re getting away from chow mein and crispy duck into those parts of the menu that are only usually written in Chinese. And it’s all the more enjoyable for all that. The highlight for me was ‘The Snow of Jinyang’, by Zhang Ran, which is an example of a trope called  chuanyue, which is a distinctively Chinese take on the anachronisms that happen when people from different times are thrown together, in this case a modern-day person in tenth-century China. There are two stories from Han Song, which can be read as political satire. Names familiar to SinoSFphiles such as Baoshu (see above) and Xia Jia can be found, as well as authors with new and different voices. I enjoyed this very much. With Invisible Planets, this book is a great introduction to the vibrant world of SF from China.

William Boyd: Restless I loved the LabLit of Brazzaville Beach. The faux-biography of Any Human Heart made my list of Best Reads last year. So notified, the younger Gees found me a few more from William Boyd for Christmas and my Birthday and this is one of those (I’m easy to buy for — books and liquorice allsorts will keep me happy). This one starts in the scorching summer of 1976 with Ruth Gilmartin, a twentysomething teacher of English as a Foreign Language living in Oxford, with a precocious five-year-old son from a disastrous relationship on the early seventies anarchist fringes of German academia. Ruth’s widowed mother Sal lives in a remote cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside and has been behaving very oddly of late. By way of explanation Sal gives Ruth a dossier — in easy-digest instalments — of a half-Russian woman called Eva Delectorskaya, born in Moscow, who was recruited to the British Secret Intelligence Services just before World War II, relating her escapades between 1938 and 1942. Eva is ‘run’ by the mysterious Lucas Romer. Ruth can hardly believe that Eva and her mother are the same person. Her mother has been living a lie all her life, and Ruth becomes part of it. But they have one final mission to accomplish. Hugely enjoyable.

Peter F. Hamilton: Pandora’s Star + Judas Unchained I was only a short way in to this audiobook when I realised I’d once read the dead-tree version. But perhaps that was all to the good — I remembered some arresting scenes from this immense SF blockbuster and was keen to revisit them. That, and the fact that I didn’t have to lift the thing, for Peter F. Hamilton tends to write at great length, and this book (with it’s sequel, Judas Unchained, basically the story’s continuation and conclusion) offered more than 70 hours of interstellar romps as I walked the dogs and did the daily round. That doesn’t mean he can’t write short stories when he wants to. I once commissioned a very short story from him, and the result, The Forever Kitten, is a delight. Reading it again now, I can see that it’s a kind of prequel to Pandora’s Star. This is a picture of humanity a few centuries hence when humans are kept forever young, and potentially immortal, by rejuvenation therapy. Those humans who can afford it, though, because society is dominated by a few ‘Grand Families’ and ‘Intersolar Dynasties’ that control what appears to be a stable plutocracy. As the story opens, humans have colonised hundreds of worlds, each linked — by railways! — through stable wormholes invented in the 21st century by two Californian techno-geeks. That’s when an astronomer on a backwater human planet spots a Dyson Sphere enclosing a faraway star. An expedition is sent to investigate, the Dyson Sphere mysteriously dematerialises, and all hell is let loose (the enclosed star is the Pandora’s box to which the title alludes). But there is a lot more to this story than that. Sure, there are enough space battles to sate the appetite of any space-opera fan, but there are also scads of sex, often taking place between impossibly beautiful people in luxurious and meticulously described interiors (Peter F. Hamilton must be the Jackie Collins of SF); lots of violent action; fabulously realised adventure sequences; suitably weird aliens; tortuous political intrigue; and a detective element that’s almost noir, featuring the genetically modified super-sleuth Paula Myo, who always gets her man, except in the one case that’s eluded her for nearly two centuries. Immersive SF fun for everyone.

Kate Atkinson: Behind The Scenes at the Museum Even if you’d never heard of Kate Atkinson (I hadn’t, until recently) you’ll have definitely come across Life after Life, her terrific and fantastical novel that featured in my best-of selection of 2021, and adapted recently as a televisual emission. Behind The Scenes at the Museum was her debut. It concerns the life of Ruby Lennox (b. 1952), born to her uncaring mother Bunty while her father George was up the pub chatting up another woman. It features flashbacks to events in Ruby’s maternal ancestry from the end of the nineteenth century when Ruby’s great-grandmother Alice runs off with a travelling French photographer, and charts the family’s ups and downs through the turbulent twentieth century. The straitened, conventional life of an ordinary Yorkshire family is presented in stark detail, especially how stifling social conventions completely drain any hope of a fulfilling life from women. Don’t think it’s dour and preachy, because it isn’t — it’s a roaring great tragicomedy, with some wonderful set-pieces, such as the family holiday in which everything that can possibly go wrong, goes wrong; and the bit-of-a-do Yorkshire wedding that happens to be held during the World Cup Final of 1966, well, goes the same way. Ruby’s narration of her mother’s life while she, Ruby, is still in the womb, reminded me of a sentence in Peter Ustinov’s autobiography Dear Me that has a similarly in utero perspective. ‘I went to visit my mother’s gynaecologist’, he wrote. ‘My mother came with me as I was too young to go on my own’. Behind The Scenes has the same humour, sparkling wit, deft phrasing, and  rewarding richness.