Just Finished Reading: The Real-Town Murders by Adam Roberts (FP: 2017) [230pp] 

Near-future England. Alma is thankful for two things. First is that she’s been hired by the owners of an automated factory to clear them of any responsibility regarding the mysterious body discovered in one of their new cars, and the fact that she wouldn’t have to solve the murder itself. That, thankfully, was a job for the police. Alma’s task was essentially a PR job to show that the factories processes were safe and that their AI manager was operating properly. She enjoyed the mystery though and mulled it over with her partner. She’d watched the video feed from multiple angles. The car had been put together perfectly, as expected, without any humans anywhere near it at any time – that sort of thing ended years ago – and yet, as the car was being inspected by the only human involved there it was, a clearly dead body in the boot. But Alma’s investigation doesn’t get very far before a government official bought off her ‘non-complete’ contract and sent her on her way. But at least she got paid for a day’s work and she already had another job to work on. So, the official at her door the next day came as quite a surprise. It seemed that the original government official had turned up dead in mysterious circumstances and they wanted to talk to Alma to work out where she fit into things. The problem was that they wanted to interview her at a secure location in Berlin. The bigger problem was that Alma’s partner needed medical attention, by Alma, ever 4 hours or she’d die. Alma needed to make a choice, go quietly or not. It wasn’t a hard choice. Unfortunately for Alma the government took this as proof that she was involved. The additional problem for Alma was that she had no idea what she was supposedly ‘involved’ in. It was time to find out... 

I ‘discovered’ this book a while back so, when I say it going cheap in my favourite Indie bookshop, I snapped it up. As I’m mentioned before I like genre mashups, and this looked like an interesting ‘locked room’ SF crime mystery – which it was, kind of. The body in the car factory was, it turned out, just the start of things. Alma, who was a great character creation, had stumbled upon (or had been led into) something MUCH bigger – a political fight at a high level for power and influence over how the country was going to be run in an increasingly technological future. The stakes were nothing short of life and death. So far so good, but what took this excellent novel from the merely interesting to the highly entertaining and then beyond was the detailed world-building and the very believable characters scattered throughout the narrative. Near-future England (as presumably the rest of the world) is largely quiet, clean and above all else empty. This isn’t because of rapid population decline but the fact that 90% of the population work and increasingly live ‘online’ in an all-encompassing virtual reality simulation called ‘The Shine’. Only those who cannot ‘log in’ for medical, philosophical or religious reasons exist day-to-day in ‘The Real’. To some this is a problem, and they intend to do ‘something’ about it. 

There’s a LOT of food for thought here – about technology, freedom (of thought & action), shadowy government agencies, the seductiveness of virtual worlds, drones and much more besides. The dystopian vision portrayed by the author is chilling both in its simplicity and in its likely inevitability. If the online world is, for all intents and purposes, perfect then why exist at all in the real-world that is anything but perfect and if that kind of world becomes our reality, then how will governments and those in power (or like to use power) react to the new way of things? As an introduction to a new author (to me at least) this was excellent and I’m still thinking about all the implications contained between its covers. I’ve already bought the sequel and will be hunting down the rest of this authors works. I think I’m going to have a LOT of fun reading him. Obviously highly recommended.  

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