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.