Just Couldn’t Finish Reading: The Purple Cloud by M P Shiel (FP: 1901) [222pp] 

It was the chance of a lifetime, a chance at immortality. To be the first man to reach the North Pole would mean more than fame though, it would make him rich. An American philanthropist had offered millions to the first person to make the journey, and Adam Jeffson was determined to be that man. After much effort and not a few deaths he found the achievement to be ashes in his mouth. Almost dead himself he struggled back, alone, to base camp to find the other two explorers dead. Weeks later as his sled approached their ship, he failed to raise anyone to help him aboard. Just like at base camp he discovered the entire crew dead caught, it seemed, unaware of their predicament. Jeffson had no option but to sail the ship single-handed back to the nearest port. He knew what he would find when he got there. After seeing countless dead birds, fish and larger animals on his voyage he did not expect to find anyone alive. He did not. The world had changed in his absence. All life, it seemed, had been removed. He was, as far as he could tell, alone in a world-wide graveyard.  

To be honest I do rather like post-apocalyptic stories either in film/TV series form or as a novel. I’m particularly fond of the ‘Last Man’ idea as an individual (all too often finding someone else – an actual Eve – towards the end to start things over) explores a dead world looking for solutions and starting things over again. I was, again being honest, getting rad flags about this book almost from the beginning. Although billed as ‘Science-Fiction’ it did have a supernatural/horror feeling to it with disembodied voices and a weird experience/encounter at the Pole itself. I did kind of compartmentalise this and, essentially, ignore that part of the narrative.  

What I did like was the way Adam went about his journey of discovery, sailing from place to place, reading newspapers about how it all happened – that pesky Purple Cloud of the title – and looking at what to do next. I did manage to get to around page 90 before I gave up. Although it wasn’t too badly written overall, I did find it far too slow to really enjoy it. Descriptively it was pretty good and the picture of mass casualties lying where they fell weeks previously – in their thousands – was the stuff of nightmares. The description of the ‘event’ and subsequent speculation didn’t, however, sit well with me. The ‘Cloud’ was thought to have emerged from a volcanic eruption and encircled the Earth at approximately 4 miles an hour killing everyone and everything in its path. This, of course, completely ignores wind and much else besides. I couldn’t help but think that there would inevitably be places where the Cloud/gas wave never arrived – apart from the fact that it would take a LOT of gas to circumnavigate the entire planet. I also couldn’t help thinking of things like: just how HIGH was the Cloud? What about people in Peru or the Himalayas? Apparently, there was a few attempts to seal rooms or structures from the gas – but they ran out of oxygen before it passed... Really? What about oxygen bottles (like in The Poison Belt by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and what about respirators? Also, what about airships either hovering above it or popping over the Cloud and dropping people off in the area already passed over? SO many questions. But eventually, it all became a bit much and it became an unprecedented THIRD DNF of the year – something I really didn’t like doing. So, overall, a questionable idea, quite well done, but too long-winded for much reading pleasure.  

Just Finished Reading: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (FP: 2017) [337pp] 

The News was not good. Scientists around the world struggled to understand exactly what was going on and they were failing. From what they could discern, for unknown reasons, the process of Evolution had stopped and was, indeed, at least in some cases going into reverse. Plants and animals where no longer breeding ‘true’ and the resulting offspring was increasingly populating the world. What was worse, at least from a human perspective, was the fact that food crops were failing across the planet. The world was teetering on the edge of famine and chaos. All of this was background noise to Cedar Hawk Songmaker who had much bigger fish to fry. She was four months pregnant and had just been given the contact details of her birth mother on the Ojibwe reservation. Wanting to know her real roots before the baby is born Cedar is determined to travel to see her mother and finally know why she was given up for adoption. Meanwhile the country is falling apart and a pregnant woman, especially if they are carrying a normal baby, is a very valuable asset indeed to anyone who can hold her. 

To be honest I picked this up almost exclusively because of the title. Reading the blurb regarding a collapse of society, weird biological happenings and a strong Native American theme made me take it home... where it rested in a pile of books for EIGHT years.... [lol] 

Anyway, it’s read now... My overall reaction is quite mixed. The writing is actually very good if a little slow in places. This is the author’s 16th book so she should be pretty good by this stage! Characterisation throughout is very good and the main character is totally believable in her actions and motivations. Her personal philosophy is quite messed up – just like normal people – with a mixture of half understood Native American reading, Catholicism and her adoptive parents Western-styled Buddhism. Other characters – especially both of her families (full of other messy/realistic complications) are also very well drawn and interesting. The societal/political collapse is, as is usually the case, a little overblown but at least the adaptation to the new conditions takes months rather than moments which makes it somewhat more believable. The inevitable ‘resistance’ is also quite well done. 

Two things downgraded the book from a recommended to a reasonable. The first is the underlying ‘science’ part of the Science Fiction label. It’s complete nonsense. As Evolution doesn’t have a direction or a purpose it can’t change direction or go into ‘reverse’. That’s not how it works. So, less Science Fiction more Fantasy in that regard. The only other issue I had with the narrative was the ending which essentially fizzled out over the last 4-5 pages. I was less than impressed by that. I don’t need everything to be wrapped up into a nice, neat bow, but I do need something. Overall, this was more than saved by the quality of the writing which I enjoyed a great deal. The author has penned a great deal more – though not SF – around her own Native American heritage and history and I’ll keep my eyes open for them should I come across them in my travels. As stated before, reasonable.  

Just Finished Reading: Outlawed by Anna North (FP: 2021) [261pp] 

North America, 1894. Ada Magnusson knew her duty more than most in her small town. Afterall, her mother was the town’s best midwife and had begun training her teenage daughter the challenges and dangers of childbirth. Due to be married herself Ada was looking forward to her role in repopulating a devastated America. The Great Flu had ravaged the country (and the world?) long before she was born killing 90% of those it infected. Now it was every woman's God given role to replenish humanity. But not everyone could. That was the fear of every woman and young girl – especially those on the cusp of marriage. What if....? What if they were barren? Her husband would have every right to send her back to her family and marry again. The woman might, like Ada, have useful skills that the community could profit from but there was always the stain, the taint of ungodliness. If they refused to serve God and man by failing to produce new life were they useless or dangerous? If they did not serve God, were they in league with His enemies? So, after a year of trying and still not pregnant Ada was back with her family and when measles took four young lives it wasn’t long before suspicion fell on Ada. Was she a witch? The sheriff didn’t want to see her, as a family friend, hanging from a rope so gave her a chance – leave or die. But where to go in such an unforgiving world and how to live? Ada was about to find out that her choices were few and none of them were good... 

This was quite the genre mash-up, a Feminist, Alternate-history, Post-apocalyptic Western! So, when I picked it up in my near-by Indie bookshop it was hard not to bring home. I’m glad I did. Despite being a little slow at times (which, to be honest, was the only slight problem I had with it) this was an interesting read. It was certainly a fun twist on the Western genre with cross-dressing women pretending to be cowboys being the least of some intriguing world building. Although no specific date was mentioned for the apocalyptic Flu epidemic in the book, I do “remember” a ‘throw-away’ line hinting at a time a century previously. This sounds like the mid-18th century series of epidemics and pandemics that killed well over a million people at the time. Ramping this up to 11 would give the author the event she needed and it would also chime with the lack of medical knowledge (and of any discussion of Evolutionary or more general biological answers to explain the problems with childbirth and childlessness plus the lack of a Germ Theory to explain things). 

Characterisation was good to very good throughout (Ada was a great character) and I was never in any danger at being thrown out of the narrative because of any kind of inconsistency with how people acted or reacted to their world especially as they had only limited knowledge of the time before the Great Flu (books were very few and far between, very expensive and, all too often, not worth the effort of reading). The overall narrative was well handled and made complete sense with reasonable motivations all round – again especially for Ada who was driven by her need to understand her own inability to have children. The few action scenes were handled well and were suitable dramatic. I particularly liked the fact that, apart from her natural medical abilities and logical thinking, Ada wasn’t all that good at what she was forced to adapt to being a particularly bad shot, only passable on horseback and far too trusting/open with others – in other words REAL.  

This was definitely a somewhat strange read, but a rewarding one. It’s a bit of a slow burn at times but it is a story that stays with you after you turn the last page. I’ll definitely be looking for the author’s other works next time I’m at my Indie bookshop (next planned trip in February). Recommended.  

Just Finished Reading: Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (FP: 2020) [241pp] 

It was perfect, the ideal vacation home. Only a few hours' drive from New York but off the beaten track enough to feel like another world. Plus, it had everything there, at your fingertips except for decent phone reception but that could be an advantage too – the office would only be in touch when they drove into ‘town’ a few minutes away. It was the best excuse of being uncontactable. Of course, the kids grumbled a bit being ‘offline’ from their friends, but the pool and the big screen TV helped. Anyway, it was only for a week – they could survive for a week without constant Facebook updates. Barely a day, that’s how long the idyll lasted. Late at night there was an unwelcome and unexpected knock at the door. They almost didn’t answer. Standing there was an old black couple who claimed to be the owners of the Airbnb they were vacationing in. Further they claimed that New York and, by the looks of things, the whole eastern seaboard has had a power failure. They were here to wait things out and see what the problem was. Without their phones, without the Internet and without TV there was no way to know what was happening. Did the old couple really own the expensive house miles from anywhere? Was there really a blackout that wasn’t affecting them personally? But the old couple seemed to know where everything was and even had keys to locked cabinets. Was that enough to trust them and let them stay the night? It wasn’t long before strange things began to happen – deer walking across the lawn seemingly oblivious to the human looking at them in surprised awe, strange weather for the time of year and then there was the loud bang in the sky without a hint of cloud. Was it thunder or a sonic boom? What on earth was going on? 

I’d heard good things about this novel months before I finally got around to reading it. Yet again I’d picked it up soon after it came out because it looked ‘different’ and ‘interesting’. It was certainly that! What made it somewhat more interesting was a question in the ‘hints for reading groups’ at the back suggesting that it would be getting a very different reaction after the pandemic than before, and I could certainly see that. BTW – this isn’t a spoiler. The ‘event’ or events that are in the background are never fully fleshed out or explained – which had both a good side, in that it enhanced the mystery, and a bad side, in that we never really knew what REALLY was going on. Actually, I’m still in two minds about the book in general – despite being very well written – and a technique used throughout of hinting at events that the characters didn’t know about and could never or did never discover as well as hints of events years later that grew out of the BIG event behind the whole book. On one level this was intriguing and left me wanting to know more. On another level it did feel at times that the author was throwing a kitchen sink full of post-apocalyptic ideas on the page hoping that at least some of them would stick with his readers. Again, this is not to say this was a bad or poorly executed book, it wasn’t. I certainly mulled the plot over in my minds for days after reading the last page. The style was interesting – alternatively creepy and mysterious – with more than decent characterisation throughout and believable reactions to the strangeness being experienced. But in some ways, this did feel like half a book – as if the author had a good idea (and it was a good idea) but didn’t know how to or simply didn’t want to get into what I would regard as the meat of the situation. As a character study of how people, and especially strangers thrown together, react to a mysterious event it was very good, but I would’ve liked to see more of the outside world and their reaction to that. But maybe there’s a sequel coming? Recommended with caveats. 

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Just Finished Reading: The End is Always Near – Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses by Dan Carlin (FP: 2019) [246pp] 

We seem to be being bombarded with End of the World stories at the moment – from Climate Change (or as I still like to call it Global Warming), Putin’s threats of Nuclear War or the imminent arrival of aggressive AI systems. Of course, these fears are nothing new – apart from the details – but there have been times when not only was the fear very real but the reality tried its very best to live up to it. Some of those times are covered in this unexpectedly gripping narrative. 

I say unexpected because what I *was* expecting was a history of End of the World beliefs rather than the incidents themselves. But, as I found out here, that’s not a bad thing – especially when you have an author who clearly knows his stuff and has lots of interesting ideas on the things he presents. We start with the still mysterious and hotly debated Bronze Age Collapse where early (largely unrecorded because writing was still in its early stages) European and Middle Eastern civilisation went into sudden and near total collapse for, as yet, undetermined reasons. No doubt it wasn’t from a single cause but even the proposed multiple causes still don’t fully add up. Then there’s the much-studied Fall of the Roman Empire (which prompted me to think about how you could tell if your civilisation was collapsing if you were already in the middle of it) and then one of my favourite all-encompassing disasters – The Black Death. This was responsible not only for millions of deaths across Asia, the Middle East and Europe  but radically changed the course of Western history. That’s hardly surprising considering the average death toll was somewhere between 30-50% of Europeans and in some places literally killed EVERYONE. Interesting – given the publication date – the author speculated on how well we would handle a Pandemic, even one nowhere near as devastating as the Black Death. Now of course we know the answer to that one: Badly. 

Probably the most interesting chapters for me concerned the development, use and consequences of nuclear weapons. One of the things I hadn’t heard before that the intended first target – Berlin (I may have heard this before and skimmed over it but this really got me thinking of the consequences for Europe if that’d actually happened). The reason the first (and second) bombs were in fact dropped on Japan and not Germany was that Germany capitulated a few months before the first successful nuclear test. Lucky Berlin. The author then discussed the use of the bomb and its effect on the war and, of course, on the Soviets. Again interestingly, a number of hawks in the US Administration wanted to nuke Russia immediately before they eventually got ‘The Bomb’ too. It was considered it would take them up to 20 years to do so – it didn’t - and thankfully cooler heads prevailed. It was also interesting how the very existence of nukes, even before the Soviets and other countries acquired them, changed both the power of the US Presidency and US Foreign Policy to the present day. Nukes, in effect, changed everything about the modern world. 

As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed this book and consider it one of the most interesting and thought provoking reads of the year. I was impressed by the authors breadth of knowledge as well as his ability to see through the historical haze and pluck fascinating ideas and theories out for closer examination. Being the person that I am, inevitably I immediately flicked to the bibliography and was delighted by both its length and depth. So, more disasters to come.... Highly recommended for those who don’t mind an apocalypse or two in their lives. 

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Just Finished Reading: The End of the World and Other Catastrophes edited by Mike Ashley (FP: 2019) [328pp] 

I don’t know if it says something deep (or disturbing!) about me, but I think one of the great pleasures of reading Science-Fiction is reading about the ‘End of the World’ in all its countless variants. Of course, people have been predicting the End for as long as there have been other people around to hear the ‘prophesy’ shouted from the rooftops or held high on placards. The great thing about fictional representations of the End is that we get to see and experience it for ourselves. Obviously, I’m not the only one fascinated in seeing things fall apart or there wouldn’t be a whole sub-industry catering to lovers of the zombie apocalypse or whatever else is the disaster of choice. Of course, WHY exactly so many hold this fascination is a whole other topic and, probably, points to some deeply troubling things in Western culture. But I digress... (as always). 

This was my third outing with the British Library Science Fiction Classics short story collections (more to come!) and, I think, one of the best ones. The 13 stories run from 1889 to 1956 with the preponderance of tales being published before 1930. Being mostly British SF its interesting how many of them focused on the destruction – and sometimes the utter destruction – of London, rather than the usual target of such things: Paris. My favourite of those was ‘The Freezing of London’ (1909) by Herbert C Ridout where a scientist demonstrates his super-weapon for a disbelieving Ministry of War with disastrous consequences for the capital of the Empire he’s trying to defend.  It was also interesting just how many stories revolved around scientists, either gone mad with power or simply unaware or unconcerned about the consequences of their breakthroughs such as ‘Within an Ace of the End of the World’ (1900) by Robert Barr, where the need for more Nitrogen fertilisers to feed the worlds growing population causes the gas level to drop in the atmosphere and being replaced by oxygen with the usual disasters to follow (plus an interesting look at the effects of oxygen narcosis!). The archetypal Mad Scientist was represented in spades by ‘The Madness of Professor Pye’ (1934) by Warwick Deeping, where the eponymous Professor uses a breakthrough in atomic science to make all of the annoying stupid little people go away and leave him alone. Interestingly the heroes of the hour where a scientist from Manchester and a pioneering lady pilot. Even more interesting was a cameo from Benito Mussolini himself in a very positive role! Finally, I must mention ‘The Great Crellin Comet’ (1897) by George Griffith  where an approaching comets impact with the Earth is averted by a projectile containing 1.5 tons of explosive!! 

Overall, I enjoyed this collection quite a lot. As always there were a few weak stories but despite their general age the quality was surprisingly high. Definitely recommended for anyone interested in classic SF or the End of Everything. 

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Just Finished Reading: Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley (FP: 1948) [153pp] 

This is a bit of an odd one, so the review will be different too. I picked this up either last year or the year before in my favourite Indie bookshop. I picked it up for several reasons: it was a Huxley book I was unfamiliar with after only reading ‘Brave New World’ by him, it was a Classic and I’m trying to read more classics, it was thin and finally it looked like an interesting ‘take’ on the post-apocalypse sub-genre. 

The short novel started in a rather unexpected way with two script writers in California chatting about the state of the world and their places in it. During the conversation a truck drives past carrying rejected scripts on the way to have them pulped or incinerated. As luck with have it, one of the rejected scripts falls off the truck and lands, relatively intact, at their feet. With little else to do that day they decide to read it. Entranced by the story they track down the author only to discover that he had recently died. The rest of the novel is the recovered script... 

The year is 2108, 100 years after a devastating global nuclear war. Few places have survived unscathed, but one of them is New Zealand. With the effects of the war now diminishing, a team of scientists is re-contacting ‘lost’ countries and has landed on the Californian coast. Attacked by savages one of them – Dr Alfred Poole, a botanist and the focus of the narrative – is captured and taken to those in authority. He discovers that the new ‘civilisation’ in California is based on the worship of Satan as it could only have been Him who led the world to self-destruction and the misery they now must live with. Dr Poole spends the rest of the story discovering exactly how the new society functions (badly!) and has some interesting chats with the high priest/archbishop about the philosophical underpinnings of their way of life and religion. 

As you can probably imagine this was all rather surreal. The most obvious theme throughout – especially considering the world had only entered the Atomic Age 3 years previously – was fear of the bomb. The other two themes throughout, which presumably originated in the author himself, were sexuality and sexual repression and, of course, mother issues. Strange doesn’t really cover it. I can’t say hand on heart that I enjoyed this short work, but I did find parts of it interesting. The ‘End of the World’ was, according to the Satanic archbishop, caused by a mixture of Nationalism, Rationalism and Consumerism. I must admit that I did find myself nodding with agreement during parts of his monologue. Overall, I would probably have DNF’d this if it had been much longer. It was a strange read and, no doubt, much of its time. It did give an interesting insight into how British intellectuals handled (badly) the existence of the new Armageddon hanging over us Damocles' sword like, but apart from that? Only recommended for Huxley completists I think!  

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Just Finished Reading: Nature’s Warnings – Classic Stories of Eco-Science Fiction edited by Mike Ashley (FP: 2020) [315pp] 

Long before present concerns about Global Warming or Climate Change hit the headlines, and long before even the 60’s and 70’s Green Movement became news Science Fiction authors were looking at future ecological catastrophes and humanity’s reactions to them. This is a collection of some of those stories running from the 1920’s to the 1980’s.  

Whenever reviewing a book of short stories, I normally preface things by saying that such collections are, rather inevitably, a bit hit and miss quality wise. This is no exception to that rule. Whilst generally there are few poor stories, I was disappointed that, being classics of the genre, there were fewer impressive stories than I’d hoped for. Three in particular did impress me though. The first was ‘The Man Who Hated Flies’ by J D Beresford (1929) where a solitary scientist is determined to rid the world of that useless pest with dangerous unintended consequences, ‘The Gardener’ by Margaret St Clair (1949) where the ‘spirit’ of an alien forest hunts down those who damage the trees under its care and extracts a particularly fitting form of retribution, and ‘Hunter, Come Home’ by Richard McKenna (1963) where a planet being ‘terraformed’ learns to fight back and gains some human allies along the way. This was the best of the collection and couldn’t help but remind me of the original Avatar movie. A few more where definitely above average including ‘Drop Dead’ by Clifford D Simak (1956) where a planets ecology and especially its singular wildlife is just too good to be true, or safe and ‘A Matter of Protocol’ by Jack Sharkey (1962) where an innocent survey mission causes an ecology to go into radical imbalance merely by landing their ship on the surface. 

Overall, this was a reasonable read with a few highlights. I’m glad that I picked it, and several others, up from my fave Indie bookshop a few months ago. This is part of the British Library Science Fiction Classics series. More to come.   

Just Finished Reading: Robot Uprisings edited by Daniel H Wilson and John Joseph Adams (FP: 2014) [472pp] 

It’s been a coming idea since the very beginnings of SF – our technology turning against us. It probably first occurred to our cave dwelling ancestors the first time a stone knife ‘turned’ in his or her hand and they cut themselves. Just think, they probably wondered, if that was a nuclear grenade I’d just dropped in the cockpit of my space cruiser!  

Most collections of short stories, as you might expect, are often hit and miss affairs. Afterall even the most generous of us can’t like the output of every author (even in a favourite genre) on every subject. This is however a pretty good collection with few poor shows. One of the poorest (yet still not terrible) was The Omnibot Incident by Ernest Cline where an ‘AI’ robot Christmas present impresses its naïve young recipient a little too much. But others (who more closely fit with the overall title of the work) were suitably disturbing if not actually creepy – which some definitely were! Complex God by Scott Sigler was a good example were nano-bots started building statues of their creator giving her an even bigger god-complex, Lullaby by Anna North was another good one where the teenage granddaughter of the vilified creator of the machines that challenged mankind in a recent war stops another attack in an intriguing way. One of my favourites was Epoch by Cory Doctorow where the world's first AI fights not to be turned off (to save money!) by playing on the fears and ambitions of its maintenance staff. Needless to say the AI is way smarter than the people who built it and is always 10 steps ahead of them. It’s always difficult to realistic portray something smarter than people (and still be understood by the readership and the author brings it off with style here). An interesting one was Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds by Robin Wasserman where a house robot in a global uprising is suffering from PTSD and is cured by a human enabling it to go on killing it oppressors. Definitely a strange one was Spider the Artist by Nnedi Okorafor where a poor musician becomes friends with a maintenance robot just as it and its compatriots become self-aware. 

If you’re interested in AI, robots or cyberwarfare (at least in fiction!) this is definitely the book for you. Brimming with interesting ideas it’ll give you lots of food (and pauses) for thought about what’s going on right now in the world of robotics and AI research and where some of that might end up – and how such a thing might just be the last thing we invent before shuffling off this mortal coil in a rather spectacular own goal. Definitely recommended.   

Just Finished Reading: The Fall of The Towers by Samuel R Delany (FP: 1965) [416pp]

500 years after the Great Fire fell from the skies and destroyed the world the last human city – Toron – was beginning to fail. Hemmed in by a still dangerously polluted ocean and prevented from expanding into the radioactive wastes inland they could only build up. But after centuries of restrictive growth there is nowhere left to go. As the city’s economy grinds inexorably to a halt the malcontents in the lower city riot. With civil unrest on the rise there is only one hope – War! As the army gathers to attack the Barrier between the City and the Wastes a recently sentient AI dedicates itself to stop them. Meanwhile, in deep space, a malevolent evil presence, devoid of a physical body, approaches Earth looking for a body to inhabit and new worlds to conquer. Time is running out for humanity and the last city that holds them.

This is trilogy of shorter novels in a single binding: Captives of the Flame (aka Out of the Dead City) [1963], The Towers of Toron [1964] and The City of a Thousand Suns [1965]. I’m not actually sure if I’ve ever read (or more accurately completed) a Delany novel before. I had a ‘go’ at ‘Dhalgren’ in my teens but it didn’t stick. I think I gave up on that pretty quickly. This I read because of the reference to a “berserk computer” prompted me to add it to my Man Vs Machine ‘series’ I’m working my way through presently. Unfortunately said AI didn’t really appear in the book(s) very much or have great an impact when it did. Despite the fact that I completed this I can’t say that I enjoyed it overly much. The stories haven’t dated very well and although they had some interesting plot lines and reasonable characterisation I lost interest in the story about half way through. The original idea was a good one I thought but the author managed to add in a series of (what I considered to be) irrelevant sub-plots – like the non-corporeal alien – that didn’t really move the story on that much as well as a ‘virtual’ war that quickly descended into farce. I did think that this might just be a comment on the Vietnam conflict but on second thought considered the publication date(s) to be a bit early for that sort of thing. The idea of the (potentially at least) last humans refusing to die off after surviving a nuclear war for so long could have been – indeed should have been – a great read of humanity triumphing over crushing adversity. Unfortunately this novel/novels was nothing of the sort. Definitely a missed opportunity there. Not recommended.     

Just Finished Reading: The Hunger Games – Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (FP: 2010) [455pp]

It was what she was made for, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Being a symbol of the growing resistance to the Capital was bad enough but now they were insisting that she become THE symbol of resistance – The Mockingjay. Pressure, always pressure and then before she could get used to the idea some more pressure just in case it wasn’t already too much. She wanted to help of course. She couldn’t think of anyone else who hated the Capital more or wanted to see President Snow dead more than her but…. Was she up to it? That was the question that kept her awake at nights – that and the nightmares from the previous Hunger Games she had barely survived. She had her PR Team to make her look good on the propaganda videos but still she had to perform, she had to look as if she knew what she was doing, she had to inspire others. But to tell the truth she could barely inspire herself. Everything changed when Peter, dear lost Peter, warned of the incoming attack on District 13. If a near-death experience and the chance to save the boy you loved wasn’t enough to get her ass moving she really didn’t know what was. It was time to end this. Time to smash the Capital once and for all time. But then what? What would they put in its place and who would be its new face? Katniss had no idea. The only thing she knew for sure was that she wanted no part in any future where people, children, fought each other for entertainment. If she could just stop that it would all be worth it. Time to go to work….

I read the original Hunger Games in 2013 and Catching Fire two years later in 2015. Fast forward another SIX years and I finally finish another trilogy. At this rate I doubt if I’ll ever finish my next challenge – the Maze Runner series….. [lol] But anyway, at least it’s done now. Despite not enjoying the movie versions (OK, except the risible 3^rd movie in the Divergent series) as much as its competitor I do think that, overall at least, I enjoyed the books much more. The end of the Hunger Games trilogy was vastly superior to the train wreck that was ‘Allegiant’. Not only did it have a (mostly) coherent plot and quite a bit a character development – both for Katniss and some of the other major players (those who loved anyway!) – but the ending made sense and gave the readers a sense of closure and final relief for the girl simply no longer wanted to be on fire. Satisfying I think is the word rather than anything else. I don’t think that any of the books knocked it out of the park for me. They were, as this is, competent, solid, entertaining reads. The translation from page to screen was very accomplished with the screen version being rather toned down from the dark and surprisingly bloody books. There’s definitely a lot more death, blood and tears between these pages than ever made it to the silver screen – so be warned! If you were expecting action and fighting without blood and, all too often, guts too then you might be shocked at the graphic nature of the narrative. There’s plenty of soul searching too that didn’t make it to the movies (it would’ve slowed the narrative too much) so be ready for some pretty HEAVY thoughts here. Overall surprisingly good and overall better than the movies.       

Just Finished Reading: Allegiant by Veronica Roth (FP: 2013) [526pp]

They had to leave. It wasn’t as if Evelyn was giving them much of a choice. With the city locked down and the factions being broken up what was there to stay for? Plus there was the ‘message’ that asked for their help. That couldn’t be ignored but that meant leaving the city, which meant defying Evelyn. Tobias would help, of course, at least Tris expected him to help – despite being Evelyn’s son. So they planned and they escaped – although not without more loss and more tragedy. They were now in uncharted territory – literally. No one from the city had ever been out this far. They had no idea what to expect. But what they really didn’t expect, what didn’t even get on the (very short) list of possibilities was to be met – and called by name. Within a matter of days everything they knew, everything they suspected and everything they had speculated upon had been blown sky-high. Their very existence, their very history and the history of the Factions, had not only been called into question but the very foundations of their world had been shown to be a set of fabrications to hide the fact of what was really going on. Their lives up to that point had been an experiment, a method of fixing a problem generations in the making, they were nothing more than lab rats – important lab rats, but still. It was a lot to process but they had the time to think things out – or so they thought. But bigger forces were at work here. The government, or what remained of it after the ‘Purity Wars’, had deemed their experiment a failure and was going to shut everything down – leaving behind no one who knew anything about it…..

I enjoyed both the first two movies in this series as well as the first two books they closely followed. Like the rest of the world I was greatly disappointed with the third film. It bombed so badly that the second part never made it to the big screen. It was SO poorly received that even the talked about mini-TV series to round everything off also never got made. So you can imagine the level of trepidation as I picked up this book and started reading. I read ‘Divergent’ in early 2015 (and Insurgent in 2017) so it’s only taken me a mere 6 years to finish the trilogy but I’m finally here. Overall I thought the book was better than the movie – but as the movie was REALLY bad this isn’t exactly saying much. Despite its 500+ pages not exactly a lot happens. There’s much mopping and soul searching and teen angst between Tobias and Tris – in other words more of the same but MORE of the same. The larger background to the first two books is kind of explained but the whole ‘Purity War’ thing really didn’t make a lot of sense. Essentially it was supposedly about a widespread programme of genetic ‘enhancements’ that went wrong which produced the ‘genetically damaged’ GD whilst the ‘unenhanced’ still regarded themselves as ‘genetically pure’ (GP) [laughable in itself!]. Conflict ensued and the world went to rats….. There are SO many problems with this scenario I hardly know where to start. The experiment – in the city of Chicago – was an attempt to heal the GD population through the Faction system in the hope of producing GP people, AKA ‘Divergent’. I’m not sure if the author’s subconscious had a hand in writing this book but there’s a conversation between too characters where one clearly says to the other that the whole GD-GP Purity War idea makes ZERO sense….. and he was RIGHT on the money. About the best thing you can say for the third book in the trilogy was that at least the author TRIED to pull everything together at the end. If, like me a week before I started this, you have read the first two books and wondered if the series was worth finishing ‘just cuz’…. I’d save time and skip it. It won’t add anything to your enjoyment of the series and might just leave a bad taste in your mouth. Not recommended.      

Just Couldn’t Finish Reading: Naked Came the Robot by Barry B. Longyear (FP: 1988) [214pp]

The nuclear war was really the last straw. When the radioactive dust had settled the protesters shouted out their message: “No more War”. But both sides – The Americans and the Soviets – had the same problem. With only 10% of their populations dead but their economies destroyed they needed to do something to keep their side in the fight – but without actual fighting. The answer? Welfare for the people and Robots for the economy. Within a few years it was all humming along nicely. The general population were quiet and the few humans still in the economy were doing very nicely thank you. But all was not as advertised in the new Cold War economy as new young executive Henry Fleming was about to find out. Joining the Economy on the eve of an expected Soviet victory he discovers that the robot economy is a mess of strikes and civil unrest and that being caught up in a riot is only the start of his problems.

OK, I admit I was somewhat cautious about this from the get-go. I’d read a few books by this author before and, although they were rather ‘weird’ at times I enjoyed them. This, however, was pretty much dross after only a few chapters. How I managed to get around 100 pages in before abandoning it I’m not exactly sure. It was an interesting concept that could have been a fun read. Some of the plays on words and silliness did in fact make me chuckle but overall it quickly became clear that the author was literally making shit up as he went along and what might have been an entertaining surreal adventure just became a total farce. Now my second DNF of the year, but hopefully my last! Avoid.   

Just Finished Reading: The Second Sleep by Robert Harris (FP: 2019) [414pp]

It is the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468 and young priest Christopher Fairfax is both late and lost. He has been tasked to officiate at a fellow priest’s funeral and wonders if the tasking from his bishop is a test of future progress in Mother Church. Arriving at his destination late at night he is forced to go through his deceased colleagues effects to learn something about him to make any eulogy more personal. It is then that he stumbles on Heresy. Not only has the dead man been collecting banned books but he has clearly been accumulating forbidden objects long since made anathema by the Church to prevent its flock wandering away from the path into older evil ways. Most shocking of all is an object, beautiful in its own inexplicable way, with the very mark of the beast clearly visible on its back – an apple with a single bite removed, the very manifestation of Eve’s act of defiance to God in the Garden of Eden. But where did these objects come from and why did a priest keep them? Forced to stay in the village longer than expected Fairfax becomes entangled in a local search for buried treasure, the allure of a local once rich widow and the machinations of the local business magnate. As revelation after revelation about the long dead past come to light can Fairfax keep his already shaky faith in tact or will his superiors keep such revelations buried for good?

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

I was already aware that this wasn’t a straight forward ‘Medieval’ tale before I started it. This became fairly obvious when a parakeet flew over the main character within a few pages of the start. Funnily a critic in (I think) the NYT proposed that any previous civilization collapse must have been from Climate change based on this slim evidence. What she didn’t realise was that parakeets are common in the South East of England today… Anyway, the ‘reveal’ that this was in fact the future rather than the past – complete with iPhone! - comes on page 28-29 so I’m not really giving much away here. Once that is accepted the story moves on at a good pace and is intriguingly full of speculation about what happened (about 800 years previously) to cause the collapse of ‘Elizabethan’ civilisation. One of the characters – an antiquarian – we meet later speculates on several theories but seems to zero in on one of them, a sudden and catastrophic collapse of all advanced technology. There is a hint (I think) about what is called a Carrington Event which is essentially a HUGE EMP surge from the Sun which, theoretically at least, could take out satellites and lots of stuff on the surface too. 

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBxjwzKwVl0] - For more details.

If a big one happened it could be pretty nasty – at least in the short term. What made it worse, according to the narrative, was humanities total obsession with and dependence on mobile electronic devices. No iPhone, no Civilisation. QED. So, yet again, within days of the ‘Event’ people left the cities, fled into the countryside and died in droves. It looked like an 80-90% die-off. Following around 100 years of Anarchy (and not in a good way) civilisation got its act back together by coalescing around churches which allowed the Church to take back its place as top dog and subsequently stay in control of just about everything. Sounds reasonable, right?

OK. First I have to say that I have a lot of time for this author. Not only had he produced some good work that I have enjoyed greatly he honestly writes really well – including throughout this equally well written novel. But I think this is another example of a non-SF writer trying his hand at SF (soft SF though it is). I can see what probably prompted it – one encounter too many with an iPhone zombie, someone lost using GPS or yet another Internet Troll. I get it. People like that exist and would be at a loss if the ‘Net went down for more than 10 minutes. BUT even if ALL advanced technology suddenly went offline it would NOT result in the collapse of human civilisation. Even if a super-Carrington Event took out all of our satellites and all of our phone networks and much else besides we could still get back up and running, at least making do at a minimal level, within a few weeks at worst (we’d fix the satellites later. We can do without them for now). Sure by then a lot of people would’ve probably died, maybe into the hundreds of thousands, but a minimal system for command and control would be back soon enough to prevent a TOTAL collapse. Within 6 months we’d have the backbone back online and the Internet would be back too. After that maybe we’d be back fully up and running within 12-18 months. The expertise is there and the will would be there. It’s just a matter of time, resources and knowhow.

So, the Church taking power again. The church in England (or indeed the Church of England) is presently holding onto its very existence by its fingernails. I’ve seen projections that at its present rate of decline it will cease to exist in less than 5 generations. Mainland Europe is in a similar situation with some countries practically religion free. So the idea that the Church could take and hold power, or that large swathes of the population would turn to Mother Church to explain what just happened or to organise a New Order is frankly farcical. The idea of the Church holding on to power for 800 years in any stable form is even more farcical. What really takes the biscuit (or cookie) is the idea that the Church can control or supress knowledge or technology for that (indeed any) length of time. First the author mentioned a King of England. If there is a secular as well as a church authority there will, inevitably, be conflict between them. My bet is on the secular side. Then there was mention of two wars – the recent war with France (rather inevitably!) and the war with the ‘Northern Caliphate’ which I found borderline racist to be honest. Now, in any kind of warfare – especially if it’s potentially existential – you’re going to be looking for any advantage in its prosecution. That usually means technological advantage. If France or the ‘Caliphate’ had a less controlling church or were willing (with God’s permission naturally) to use old tech then they’d have a distinct advantage and probably win – therefore the Churches grip on knowledge/technology would inevitably weaken over time and the secular powers would increase in power. So a long term domination by the Church in any kind of competitive power environment is, at least, unlikely if not impossible. Lastly there is the economic problem. Clearly in the book the technology, knowledge and economy is generally what we’d view as Medieval or at least pre-industrial. One of the characters, Captain Hancock, is an industrialist looking, as always, for any advantage over his rivals. He is quite willing to use old tech to do this even if it means deceiving the Church to do so. Again, over the long haul, economic competition between countries or regions with ANY difference in adherence to Church directives will ensure that old techniques, old knowledge and old ways will be used to maintain or increase wealth and power. Money talks even when it is against the teachings of the Church. So, Church power? Not a chance.

OK, rant almost over. By FAR the biggest problem I had with this otherwise pretty good book (despite everything I’ve said above) was the ending – that is the absolutely ABRUPT ending. A fair part of the book revolved around the discovery and literal unearthing or buried ‘treasure’ presumed to be a cache of ‘something’ designed by those aware that everything COULD fall apart to start the process of bringing it all back. The last part of the book sidles up to this cache and then….. STOPS. The only two reasons I can think of (apart from the idea that the author merely wanted his readers to ‘speculate’ on what was through the door) is that the author didn’t KNOW what was through the door – I did, it was a LIBRARY – or simply didn’t want to enter the room (into the library) because that would’ve started the rebuilding of a society I was getting the impression he wasn’t particularly impressed with. Needless to say I was DEEPLY unimpressed by the last page. So, despite this being a (generally) well written and (mostly) interesting work I honestly can’t recommend it unless you really want to see why the whole thing frustrated me SO much. Rant over, and I didn’t even get to criticising the pointless relationship bit!  

Just Finished Reading: The Mammoth Book of The End of the World edited by Mike Ashley (FP: 2010)

 

This is the last (for now at least!) of my Pandemic/Post-Apocalypse reading. Generally these books (this one containing 24 stories of eco-disaster, asteroid impact, pandemics, nuclear war and much else) are pretty hit and miss affairs. Some of the stories will be excellent, others barely passable but the majority will be pretty solid if generally unspectacular. This was actually one of those (in my experience at least) rare instances when nearly every story in here was at worst pretty good. For example I thought the worst (not actually shabby) story was by Robert Silverberg. That alone says something. The publication dates ranged from 1951 (Fritz Leiber) to 2010 (Alastair Reynolds and others) and included well known (again to me) authors as well as those I hadn’t come across before. My favourites included ‘The Rain at the End of the World’ by Dale Bailey, ‘The Man Who Walked Home’ by Alice Sheldon, ‘The Clockwork Atom Bomb’ by Dominic Green and ‘Terraforming Terra’ by Jack Williamson. But I think my favourite of the lot (which is saying something from such a strong bunch) was ‘Moments of Inertia’ by William Barton - If for nothing else for the really inventive (and to me hilariously funny) reason for the end of everything. As the Galaxy was consumed by a powerful energy beam and the last people on Earth prepared to kiss their collective ass’s goodbye they were visited by aliens who apologised for the inconvenience but they were the clean-up crew and hadn’t realised that there was intelligent life here. You see our Universe was actually the result of an industrial accident in a higher dimension and they’d only just noticed. Being moral beings they couldn’t just wipe out intelligent life everywhere (not just on Earth!) so had created ‘reservations’ to house every creature that had ever lived – everywhere…… So please stand by and, oh, yeah, sorry about that……! [lol] I just loved the irony. Humanity thinking itself so important and trying to figure out the origins and meaning of existence and it turns out to be the result of someone else’s mistake. Brilliant!

Anyway, this is a most excellent collection of post-apocalypse stories and will no doubt get you thinking about lots of things. I think that they’re all pretty reader friendly – despite the subject matter – so no nightmares I predict. Lots of enjoyment and musing though. That I can be sure of! Enjoy!       

 Just Finished Reading: The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J Walker (FP: 2014)

 

Like most other people Edgar Hill barely noticed the news that there was ‘something wrong’ with Saturn’s rings. A year later he even missed the late night Government Warning thanks to an argument with his wife and the bottle of wine he finished off on the sofa. In the morning, complete with hangover, he knew that something was ‘off’ though. The local newsagents and shop was shut and the thinner than usual Sunday papers hadn’t even been picked up. The headline was pretty obvious though. IMPACT IMMINENT – Take Cover. The confusion lasted a few minutes until the easily recognisable air-raid sirens started going off across the city. Hastily grabbing some random supplies from the now looted shop Edgar ran home and managed to get his family into the basement just as all hell broke loose above them. Rescued a week later by units of the Army, Edgar found himself in a world unlike anything he had experienced except in bad TV movies. Hundreds of meteors had slammed into the Northern hemisphere destroying large parts of Europe and North America. The end of the world as he knew it was just something he had to start dealing with. But as a failing husband, failing father and failed office executive he really wasn’t sure he was up to the task. What made it worse was that neither his wife nor the other survivors thought he was up to it either. But when his family were rescued and flown to safety hundreds of miles away those left behind had a long way to travel and not long to get there. With roads smashed and transport at a premium there was only one way they’d make it in time. They were going to have to run across the length of the country – over 500 miles from Scotland to Cornwall. They’d better get started…..

There were many things I liked about this usual post-apocalypse novel. The main character Edgar wasn’t a hero – at all. He was just an ordinary guy, completely out of his depth just making it up as he went along. He survived the end of the world almost by accident and it looked like he wasn’t going to survive very long. All that changed when his wife and children were taken away from him and he made the decision to get them back – no matter what, including the fact that he knew that other people didn’t think him capable of making it. The running across country was very well handled even if some of the (very few) people they met along the way were clichés out of central casting. A few things did raise my eyebrows a LOT. One was the fact that there was talk (or possibly a plan) to evacuate the UK. Even if 50% of the population had been killed in the impact that’s 30 MILLION refugees. Can you imagine evacuating that many? Even with 75% dead that still 15 MILLION people left alive. You don’t evacuate those numbers. You bring in what people need in situ!! (Oh, and there was a brief one-liner about evacuating EUROPE. That made me chuckle, a LOT). Naturally Government just vanished as usual. At least there was some mention of London being heavily hit as well as region centres in Birmingham and Manchester. But even if National Government had been taken out some kind of local government somewhere would have survived. Even if taken completely by surprise – at from government TV warning and newspaper reports it looks like they had at the VERY least 12-24 hours’ notice – they would’ve had some sort of disaster plan they could have put into effect. Any local government that DID survive would have been in contact with any other government survivors to co-ordinate things and start consolidating some sort of action plan.

Without giving too much away there was a whole section in the middle where the runners are captured by what would be a local warlord in Manchester. Apparently the locals had fought with the police after the impacts and won. So they took over. They had fences, guns (rifles, shotguns and pistols) and had some engineers rigging anti-personnel mines to deter other gangs from attacking them. I was putting words into the characters mouths when I mused – ‘This is all very well, but what are you going to do when the government arrives in tanks?’ Which they would have – eventually. Any local military units would naturally look to proper civilian command and join them. With their equipment, training, organisation and abilities they’d get things up and running again pretty quickly. I’d guess that even with 75% dead and a similar amount of physical damage there would be a centralised government within a year or two at most. National government would be back up and running within 10-15 years (25 at the outside) and things would be back to ‘normal’ 25 years after that. Maybe I should write THAT kind of end of the world scenario!?!

Anyway, even with the above caveats this was a pretty decent apocalypse told from the PoV of the everyman – out of his depth and just trying to do his best despite knowing he wasn’t really up to it. Dramatic in parts, funny in others this was (generally) a pleasure to read if sometimes formulaic. It did have a good ‘tone’ to it though which helped make the whole thing seem much more realistic than most of this sort of tale. I shall be looking forward to the sequel. Recommended.       

Just Finished Reading: The Fireman by Joe Hill (FP: 2016)

No one really knew where it came from but there were enough rumours to go around. Some speculated that it was a weapon either released on purpose or by accident by the Russians or ISIS or religious fundamentalists. There was even one theory that it was released due to the melting tundra and was what really caused the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Now, it seemed, it was our turn. But at least they had a name for it: Dragonscale or simply ‘scale. It was a fungus that invaded the body somehow (no one really knew how in the early days) and set up home there eventually penetrating all of the organs including the brain. The most obvious sign was mottling on the skin in weird and unique patterns mixed with amber-like granules – hence scale. But it was the scales effects that caused the most concern – and the most damage. When the infected experienced heightened emotions the scale ‘glowed’ and heated. When the emotions were strong enough the fungus became hot enough to ignite the infected person in a burst of Spontaneous Human Combustion so hot that the infected could start fires and start them they did. Before a mass programme of isolation was in place buildings, forests and whole cities burned. The authorities learnt too late for some that the sight of a combustion nearby could cause a ripple effect among other infected and result in firestorms. With little to go on and government action failing across the country self-styled ‘clean-up’ squads thought they had the right answer – shot the infected on sight.

Into all of this school nurse Harper Grayson managed to get pregnant. If that wasn’t complicated enough her semi-psychotic boyfriend wanted them to go through with their mutual suicide pact as the world ended around them. But she had another life to think about now – even after she got the ‘scale and had maybe a few months to live if she was lucky. Determined to go to term and bring a new life into the world Harper left her home looking for a rumoured community where they said they could control the disease. With nothing left to lose and the clock ticking she had no option – unfortunately her boyfriend and his new friends had other ideas….

I’d heard lots of good things about both the author and the novel so, as I have developed quite a ‘thing’ for post-apocalyptic lit, I thought I’d give it a try. The first thing that hit me was the size of the book - at 762 pages it’s a BEAST. Unfortunately, despite it being generally well written, this is actually far longer than it needed to be. Losing 100 pages, actually losing 200 pages, wouldn’t have made much difference to the overall storyline. It’s not that the narrative was padded, it wasn’t, but that the extra pages didn’t add very much at all to the plot. Generally the characterisation was very good – the lead character Harper was well drawn as was the ‘Fireman’ (with some reservations). The ‘scale community was interesting if a little too heavily plotted at times. The evil ex-boyfriend was too much though. I mean, how many times do you have to put a bad boy down before he stays down. I think that’s the biggest ‘beef’ I had with the whole book. Just too many damned cliff-hangers! The ending, once we literally slogged there, was pretty well telegraphed about 100 pages in advance so I wasn’t overly impressed by that. Likewise (as is usual for such things) the government vanished pretty early on leaving the mopping up to street thugs and crazy people. I’ll have much more to say about this in response to my next review but I’ll just say a few words here. I know why authors tend to eliminate governments early on in these novels. Part of it is the ‘wet dream’ aspect of living free of government oversight or being a responsible citizen. I get that. Part of it is that it eliminates right away a whole lot of complications in the story most of which would be pretty boring. But it’s just so bloody unrealistic. Even in a global disaster some form of government would survive and be in your face pretty quickly – and permanently – once the shit went down. Although, if you go by novels like this (and most post-apocalyptic movies too) you’d think that governments vanish in a puff of smoke once the hammer falls. Anyway, this was (overall) a reasonably well told end of the world narrative with some interesting ideas and set pieces. As you can imagine it’s also quite brutal in places so the easily disturbed might want to give it a miss.

Just Finished Reading: Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (FP: 2014)

They called it the Georgian Flu because it seemed to appear on the world stage at the edge of Russia. At first it seemed like just another wave of seasonal flu passing over the world but it wasn’t. But at least it was far away, another countries, another continents problem. Until the plane arrived and, hours later, passengers started showing up sick at the local hospital. Within 24 hours they knew just how bad it would be. Warning calls went out to friends, families, colleagues: Get somewhere safe, get enough food, and stay away from EVERYONE. Too late, far too late. For most of those who got sick the prognosis was pretty clear – death within 48-72 hours. For the lucky few they had something else to deal with – a world without electricity, without cell phones, without Google, where a cut or a bad tooth could kill you as easily as a looters bullet. The survivors emerged into an empty world of small communities and travelling players – relaying news and bringing music and, most importantly, Shakespeare and a feeling of almost normality. Kirsten was there the night it happened, the night movie star Arthur Leander died on stage. Twenty years later she is on stage again playing different roles in a very different world. Much has been lost, much can never be replaced, but much has been retained, saved, cherished. The human story is far from over because mere survival has never been sufficient.

I don’t know how I managed to miss (or possibly why I avoided) this novel for so long. I have a vague memory of picking it up when it came out and just as quickly putting it back down again. But after hearing the glowing reviews and reading some of my Blog Buddies comments I felt I had to finally take the plunge. I’m so glad I did. I’ve read some pretty good novels this year but I think I can confidently put this at the head of the pack. Not only is it a compellingly told story it is a dozen compelling told stories. I think the thing that impressed me most about this very impressive novel – and apart from just how beautifully it was written in liquid prose – was how the narrative circled back on itself shuttling between the ‘now’ of today, the ‘future’ after the pandemic has passed and the ‘past’ of characters back stories which all together weave the narrative picture. Even objects – like Kirsten’s comic books and glass globe – get this treatment as we follow them through time and space to explain how they got there and what they meant to different people along the way. I think this is one of those very rare books that you could read repeatedly and still get things from it. It is also one of those rare books that I would recommend (or even give a copy of) to almost anyone. Despite the fact that the genre if most definitely Science-Fiction this novel most definitely transcends that genre into something more universal. It is simply a great novel – period. I honestly loved it and everything about it. I don’t think that I could find a single thing I didn’t like about it. I was deeply impressed by the characterisation (always so important for me) and thought that the author really understood each and every one of them. None of their personalities seemed ‘off’ or contrived to move the narrative forward. Things just seemed real. Very highly recommended. I’ll most definitely be reading everything she has and will produce. A total gem.   

Just Finished Reading: Feed by Mira Grant (FP: 2010)

It was an Age of Miracles – the End of Cancer, the End of the Common Cold and the Age of the Zombie. Well, you can’t have everything, right? Naturally it was all with the best possible intentions. Two separate labs working on epoch changing medical advances in secret, the Internet rumour that the cold cure would only be for the rich and the eco-terrorists who released it into the atmosphere before any real testing had been done. When the first of the dead came back and started attacking people no one really believed it. That was the stuff of science-fiction and poorly made cheap horror flicks. Even the uploaded video didn’t really change much until it was almost too late. Before things got back under control almost a third of the world was lost although no one would ever know the full body count. Too much of the planet was simply too dangerous to go into and too dangerous to try to keep or take back – like Alaska. But a kind of equilibrium had been achieved. Sure there were still outbreaks – how could there not be when everyone was pre-infected with the zombie inducing virus – but they were getting really good at containing the damage now. After all, 26 years of zombie fighting experience has got to mean something. Even after that long zombies were still news though – thankfully for brother and sister Bloggers Shaun and Georgia Mason and their team of hackers and news hounds. The good news is that they’ve just scored their biggest gig ever – by being picked as the hottest new Presidential candidate’s official Blog team. The bad news, apart from all of the political BS they’re going to have to deal with, is that someone really doesn’t want the candidate to get the nomination and will do anything to stop it – including using zombies as weapons.

OK, first I have to say that zombies really aren’t my ‘thing’. I’ve never seen the attraction in either the shuffling, walking or running dead. I’m most definitely more of a vampire person. But there was just something about this book and this author that made me give it a chance. I’m definitely glad I did. This is definitely not a shuffle of the mill zombie novel For one thing it takes place 26 years AFTER the night of the living dead. The world building is really good and is one of the things that kept my turning pages. Everything has changed because of the zombie virus – from diet, to life style, to outdoor gatherings and sporting events, even to architecture – as, naturally it would. All of it is logical and, with the odd pinch of salt, makes sense in context. Most of the time the zombie apocalypse is just the background, the context, in which the narrative takes place. The focus is on the blog news team and what they discover during their time with the wannabe President and his opponents. The characters are well drawn – especially the sibling main characters – and their motivations are well grounded in the context of the world the author created for them. Everything, by and large, made sense. The only part of the narrative that I had problems with was the technology used – this is 2040 with no great or insurmountable discontinuity in technology yet the main news people were Bloggers – not even Vloggers – whose primary method of disseminating information was TEXT. They even had very sophisticated spy cameras etc everywhere and they even uploaded short video bites but primarily they uploaded blocks of TEXT. This seemed so at odds with everything else and at odds with 2020 never mind 2040 that it did break me out of the narrative more than once. However, significant though it was, this is the only real gripe I had with the book. It not exactly the first (or the last) work that dates much faster than anticipated. I did at one point, I won’t give too much away, decide that I wouldn’t be reading any more in this series when the author managed to kill off my favourite character but the satisfying (if somewhat predictable) ending made me want to know what happens next and how things play out afterwards – so you’ll definitely be hearing more from the author and from the Mason’s in future. Definitely recommended for all zombie fiction fans and even recommended for those who haven’t tried it yet. Naturally being zombie related there is a fair bit of gore involved – but not that much in the scheme of things!       

Just Finished Reading: The Last by Hanna Jameson (FP: 2019)

It was annoying, inconvenient even, but what could you do. The fire in the hotels kitchen meant that the conference had to be moved. Short notice meant that they had to take what was on offer, no matter how remote or how far from the nearest airport. At least it was quiet. At breakfast that morning it began with a scream and a crash of cutlery. Everyone looked across the room to see what the problem was. A woman was standing holding her phone, hand across her mouth. She was crying without seeming to notice she was doing so. Other phones starting beeping with Internet alerts and then they all knew – Washington was gone. Seconds later more alerts… London, Rome, San Francisco and then…. Nothing. The Internet was down. No phone service. No news. In the panic that followed some of his colleagues begged Jon to join them as they left for the airport. Jon could only think of his wife Nadia and their two daughters. He’d left them in San Francisco. But San Francisco was gone. When he came to his senses the hotel was all but empty. Around 20 people, including some of the staff, had elected to stay or had nowhere else to go. They still had electricity and the kitchen had a healthy stock of food. For the time being at least they were safe – or at least as safe as you could be in a world where nuclear weapons flew. As the new reality set in and the shock began to wear off the suicides began. First one and then two more. Then calm, waiting for rescue, watching the endless cloud cover, watching the trees die. But they had to do something. They couldn’t just wait for someone to come, wait to die. So they organised. They rationed. They even hunted for deer in the forest. Water was going to be a problem though. They’d need to arrange something with the roof tanks. It was then that they found the child’s body. She’d been there a while. From that day. From the End. But none of the guests would possibly leave a child behind, no matter what the circumstances. Which could mean only one thing – as the world fell apart there was a murderer amongst them.

I’m really only giving a hint about this book. Sure, it’s an end of the world narrative as a group of disparate people try to survive in a post nuclear war world. On the face of it this sounds like yet another killer in an isolated hotel mystery – it’s even described as a post-apocalyptic ‘And Then There Were None’ – but it’s much, much more than that. That’s just the base, the background narrative. What pushes this excellent novel way above the expected account is both the intense claustrophobic structure and the fascinating cast of characters dealing with their own personal end of the world. Jon, the main character who narrates the story via diary entries, starts out as an average deeply flawed everyman just trying to do his best and proves to be much better than that. But my favourite character by far was Tomi (Tomisen Harkaway) the only other American at the hotel who everyone hates because she voted for ‘him’ so is held accountable for the war. Not only is she far more complex and nuanced than people give her credit for she’s also a clear-headed consummate survivor who shakes Jon out of his misery and starts him on the road to recovery and, dare I say it, personal growth. This is an intense book, there’s no getting away from that fact, but it is an excellent gripping read. The character driven narrative is one of the best I’ve come across in years and I could barely put it down. Being the type of book it is there’s death, sex and a fair bit of swearing/drug taking but most of the death takes place ‘off camera’. Almost all of the perspective is from Jon’s point of view but we see other elements of what happened on Day One and later through Jon’s interviews with the rest of the hotel survivors as he investigates the child’s death (almost as something to keep his mind off the end of the world which is an interesting way of constructing things). Highly recommended. This is actually her fourth book. I’ll definitely be checking out her earlier work.