Tour of an Exovet Facility - Guest Post by Christian Schoon

Ever wanted to visit an exovet facility? Ever wished you could have a space-hound/alien-cat/amorphous-blob for a pet? (I mean, who hasn't?)

Well, you're in luck. As part of the Under Nameless Stars blog tour, I'm welcoming Christian Schoon onto the blog today. I loved space-vet-in-training Zenn Scarlett's first adventure, and now she's back again in book two! Over to Christian to tell us more about the weird and wonderful animals that an exovet may come into contact with, with a special tour of the Ciscan Cloister facilities!

(And be sure to enter the GIVEAWAY at the bottom of the post, where you can win both books as well as a Name Your Own Star Gift Package!)

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Hey and thanks to Vicky for inviting me to break into your Earther net-stream for this leg of the Under Nameless Stars blog tour extravaganza. Vicky’s stop on the tour is especially noteworthy for both Zenn and I, since the new novel is officially on sale worldwide today!

So, we’re broadcasting at your now from the com shack here at the ancient Ciscan Cloister Exoveterinarian Training Clinic on the far eastern edge of Valles Marineris, Equatorial Colonial Admin Sector. I’m sure you’ll understand if our signal drops out now and then. You know how tough it’s been to get replacement parts for radios, or pretty much anything else, here on Mars ever since the trade rift with Earth started. Hard to believe that was two decades ago. Anyway, since I’m wearing one of the Cloister’s last functioning screen-sleeve uplink units, we can head outside as we chat. That way you can get a glimpse of the clinic grounds and meet a few of the alien life forms housed here at present.

As we walk over to the main infirmary building, you’ll notice the impressive rock walls on either side of the valley. The red rock cliffs are roughly 1,500 feet high in this part of the Valles, and if you squint you can see the barometric generators mounted on the canyon walls at regular intervals. The transparent membrane of bound-ions these generators produce stretches a sort of invisible “roof” over the valley, trapping air and water vapor inside. It’s thanks to these bary-gens that the valley floors of Mars are inhabitable, and more important, farmable, for the colonists here.

As we approach the huge infirmary building, you can tell by the immense sliding doors that this building is constructed to accommodate even the largest alien animals that are cared for at the Cloister. I’ll just poke my head in and… yes… there’s Otha Scarlett, Zenn’s uncle, at work on a whalehound. The hound is a young adult male, about 80 feet long, something like an over-gown otter, but with eight legs and an elongated snout packed with very long teeth. Otha is using the infirmary’s mechanical lift to raise him high enough to bandage what looks like a bite-wound on the ‘hound’s neck. The animal likely got this while rough-housing with his pen mate, a somewhat larger female. The owners of these two magnificent animals are hoping to get a litter of whalehound pups to take back and release on their ocean-covered home planet. And while the two are a prime breeding pair, whalehounds are reluctant breeders in captivity, so their owners are upping their chances of success by bringing them here, where the Cloister exovets have the expertise needed to encourage the ‘hounds to bond and mate. Whalehounds aren’t especially aggressive, but Otha is using the sedation field dish to calm the animal down as he stitches the wound and applies a coating of derma-plast sealant. The young ‘hound should be well enough to return to his pen, and his rambunctious girlfriend, in a few days.

Leaving the infirmary, we descend a series of stone steps to the area of the grounds where various other aquatic species are housed. Here there is an assortment of pools and holding pens. At the largest pool, we peer into the early morning fog that drifts across the surface and spot Brother Hamish shoveling something into the water from a large wheelbarrow. Hamish is the Cloister’s sexton, or all-round handyman. Or, we should say, handy-bug, since he’s a Sirenian Coleopt, basically an eight-foot-tall sentient beetle. The mist on the water lifts, and a huge, serpentine head emerges, followed by the 200-foot body of a Tanduan Swamp Sloo. The great, plesiosaur-like reptile paddles over to see what Hamish is up to and, once she realizes he’s feeding her, she lowers her tubular nose to the water and begins hovering up the pellets of dried insectoid flakes that he’s dishing out. We wave a greeting to Hamish, who rattles his claws at us in reply, then move along in our tour.

Setting out across the Cloister gen-soy field, we wade through the fragrant blooms of the waist-high plants and are surprised when we suddenly feel what seems like a pair of small, clawed paws gripping one of our ankles from behind. We spin around. But there’s nothing there! Now, we feel the paws clawing at our pants pocket. A moment after that, the air before us shimmers, turns a hazy violet-and-cream color, and then resolves into the shape of what looks like a cross between an Earther raccoon and a lemur, topped by a foxish head with large, tufted lynx ears. It’s the Cloister’s resident rikkaset, Pyewhakit.

Like all rikkasets, Pyewhakit’s fur is made of refractive, crystal-impregnated keratin that allows him to bend light and become more or less invisible at will. It’s an especially effective defense mechanism. Unlike Zenn’s companion rikkaset Katie, Pyewhakit never learned to use sign language. Nonetheless, as he sits up on his haunches and trills at us, it’s clear what he wants. Fortunately, we’ve brought along a handful of dried cat food pellets, which is what he smelled in our pocket. We offer him this, and he gives us a polite lick on our hand before he takes the food in his dexterous front paws and delicately consumes the crunchy morsels.

With Pye trotting along beside us, we reach what Zenn likes to call the Cloister’s “Rogue’s Gallery” of cages, pens and fenced paddocks. Here, a wide variety of alien patients and other long-term “guests” reside. The first large cage seems to be empty, its floor covered by a dense layer of dried leaves, branches and rocks.  I rattle the heavy chain-link fencing and stand back, as the cage’s occupant explodes up out its hiding place, throwing a rain of leafy debris and dust into the air. Pyewhakit fluffs his fur and promptly vanishes from sight. He’s wise to do so. The creature we’ve disturbed is a Sirenian bloodcarn – a thirty-foot, predatory centipede with a head section resembling an immense tarantula. It rears up, hissing as it lifts its bright orange body and hundreds of short, undulating feet up toward the roof of its enclosure. The bloodcarn was purchased from an illegal animal poacher at the black market in New Zubrin. Its owner bought it when it was a barely out of the larval stage, a mere three feet long. The misguided owner thought it would make him look cool to possess such a creature. But as it grew, he  realized he wasn’t prepared to care for a creature as big and vicious as an adult bloodcarn, so he abandoned the animal in a remote canyon, where naturally it came into conflict with the local settlers. After it was re-captured by the authorities, it was brought to the Cloister, where it will now have to live out its life in captivity. It’s a sad story, but people simply seem unable to learn the lesson that some animals do not make good pets and should be left in the wild where they belong. We don’t linger at the bloodcarn’s cage, but move on. After we’ve gone a safe distance, Pye allows himself to become visible again beside us.

We stroll on, passing by the enclosure of a pack of Procyoni yotes – buffalo-sized, hyena-like           scavengers with massive, bone-crushing jaws – then stop to listen to the nesting song of a pair of Akanthan axebill warblers, as the big, ostrich-like birds serenade each other with intricate harmonies that rise and fall as they bob their heads and shake their enormous, red-and-yellow-striped bills in time to the music.

Finally, we loop all the way around to the ruins of the old chapel building, the tiles of its collapsed roof littering the site where it once stood, the huge sandstone blocks of its fallen walls lying in disarray like great dominoes strewn by some giant hand. It was here that Zenn had a truly extraordinary encounter with a young sunkiller being treated at the Cloister. For those unfamiliar, the Greater Kiran Sunkiller is a creature that grows to have a 1,500 foot wingspan, drifting on the air currents of its homeworld like a colossal, two-headed pterodactyl. A birth defect in this particular sunkiller’s wings prevented it from regulating its altitude, and it was brought to be operated on at the Cloister. Unfortunately, just as it was about to be… oh… well, that’s actually quite a long story and we seem to be out of time, as the transmission window for this broadcast is closing. Something to do with upper atmospheric disturbances.

So, it’s time for me to say good-bye. Thanks again to Vicky for letting me give you all this brief tour of the Ciscan facility. And don’t forget to enter the blog tour contest and answer her question about Under Nameless Stars. I mean, really, what Earther wouldn’t want to win free books and a chance to Name Their Own Star?  Signing off from Mars, this is Brother Schoon and the other humans, Alien Sentients and animal guests here at the Ciscan Cloister. Cheers!

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Thanks Christian! I still really want my own rikkaset...

On to the GIVEAWAY!

To celebrate the publication of Under Nameless Stars, Strange Chemistry is running an exciting competition with a different question at every stop on the tour! You can find out who else is on the tour here.

And you can find out the answers to all the questions by reading this extract of Under Nameless Stars:

Read an Extract:

Read and Share via Issuu.com


So, here is my question:

15. In the opening scene, when Zenn comes to, she's sharing the cage-crate with what other animal (besides Katie and Liam...)?
a. A bloodcarn
b. An indra
c. A sandhog
d. A skirni

Good luck! :-D


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Sword and Laser Arrived!

My contributor copy of the Sword and Laser Anthology has arrived! This is the first time I've seen one of my short stories published in print, so I'm pretty excited! Want to take a peek?

The story is called False Lights and involves pirates lost in the mysterious Rift Space. I had a lot of fun writing it, so I hope people also have a lot of fun reading it. :-)

I've got another two short stories coming out in anthologies soon, and it's still a race to see which will be my first ever published short story. It's looking likely to be the Sword and Laser story, but there's still a chance one of the others may leap ahead in the final stages!

I've dipped into a few of the other stories in the Sword and Laser Anthology already and there's some fantastic stuff in there. I'm very proud to be part of it, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

Ancillary Justice - Book Review

Ancillary Justice
by Ann Leckie

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.
Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren--a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose--to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.

From debut author Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice is a stunning space opera that asks what it means to be human in a universe guided by artificial intelligence.

          (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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This is a book that was quickly gaining a lot of hype and some incredibly good reviews, and so it moved right up my ‘to read’ list even before both online book clubs I’m a member of decided to choose it as their November pick. There was a lot to live up to – practically every review I read mentioned that this was bound to be nominated for all kinds of awards. Was it as good as everyone was saying? Yes!

Ancillary Justice just clicked with me. I loved the universe that the author created, the planets, the stations and ships, the characters, the plot – everything interested me. This is one of those books that I found impossible to read along with the book club; I couldn’t help reading on and finishing it ahead of time.

Everyone has been talking about the gender politics in the book, so let’s touch on that first. I thought this was handled really well, and not only provided a fascinating cultural backdrop for the story, but also challenged the reader, inviting us to examine our own relationship with gender. The people of the Radch just aren’t interested in whether a person is male or female, and so the story, told from the POV of a person who has grown up in the culture of the Radch, refers to everyone as ‘she’. How much does it really matter, how much does it affect the story, if we know a character’s gender or not? In this case, it doesn’t matter at all, and yet I would still find myself at certain points trying to assign gender to characters. It was also interesting to see how a culture like this might interact and think about the world.

This approach to gender added a fascinating and unique element to the book, without being as vital to the plot as the gender politics in something like The Left Hand of Darkness turn out to be. I liked this – sometimes it’s nice to explore something like this without it also being integral to the plot.

Speaking of The Left Hand of Darkness, I think there were some clear nods to it in this book – the frozen world at the beginning, the two characters thrown together learning to understand and accept each other... and in some ways the relationship between the two main characters mirrors that of Ai and Estraven, but interestingly in terms of class and citizenship rather than gender. The style of writing also reminded me a lot of Ursula le Guin. It is strong, controlled, perhaps a little distant at points, with an almost mythical feel to it that I adore. Again, this kind of writing just clicks with me, and I’m so pleased to have found another author to add to my favourites shelf.

The Radch, then, don’t discriminate based on gender, but they do find other ways to keep certain members of society down. The class politics are incredibly important in this story, as they are behind the split and changing ethos of the Radch empire. At the centre of this is Anaander Mianaai, the ruler of the Radch and the person that the main character, Breq, is determined to assassinate. I thought the class politics, like the approach to gender, were conveyed so well, and there was a definite Roman feeling going on with the client-patron structure of Radch society – anything to do with Romans is always a bonus for me!

However, my absolute favourite thing about the book was how the author managed to show Breq as both human and not-quite-human at the same time. It is so hard to write an A.I. that truly feels like an A.I. and yet is also sympathetic and relatable to. Ann Leckie pulls this off perfectly. Breq often feels cold, slightly alien, distant... and yet she is driven, opinionated, and perhaps almost a little romantic about certain things. She is a wonderful character who I really enjoyed reading about. And then there is the fact that Breq both is and is not One Esk, and they are but are not Justice of Toren, the ship and the hive mind in control of all its ancillaries. Again, this is hard to pull off, that sense of individuals within a group mind, but it comes across so well here. Finally, the point of view stretched across several bodies is a brilliant touch in the early chapters. It’s a kind of first person voice of god, not like anything I’ve read before and intriguing without being confusing.

The plot itself is compelling and exciting, with just the right amount of world building, and flashback chapters that not only add so much to our understanding of the characters, but that turn out to be very important to what is happening later in the book. The pacing was very good, perhaps just drawing things together a little too quickly at the end, however. I liked the resolution of this particular story and look forward to seeing where the characters will go next.

A fantastic story with wonderfully written characters and several unique elements that make this a truly memorable read. I have to agree with other reviewers – this will surely turn up on award nomination lists next year!

Showcase Sunday #36 - The World Fantasy Con Edition

Inspired by Celine from Nyx Book Reviews, I've decided to combine several weekly wrap-up memes into one post. Showcase Sunday is hosted by Vicky at Books, Biscuits and Tea. Stacking the Shelves is hosted at Tynga's Reviews, and Sunday Post is hosted at Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer. Letterbox Love is a special British book-haul meme hosted by Lindsey at Narratively Speaking.

WORLD FANTASY CON

Last weekend I went to World Fantasy Con in Brighton. It was a lot of fun, and great to meet new people as well as see old friends again, including meeting Ellie from Curiosity Killed the Bookworm! :-) I went to panels and readings, chatted in the bar, braved the wind tunnel that was Brighton sea-front, went to a few publisher parties and book launches, and picked up far far too many books.

Me as a pirate (right) and steampunk 20s Ruth (left) on Halloween at WFC

 
Highlights of World Fantasy Con - Some brilliant advice panels, Scott Lynch, Mary Robinette Kowal's reading (and puppet show!), Tales of Eve launch, Terry Pratchett! (another Tiffany Aching book in the works... so excited!), Titan's fun fair party, and all the wonderful people I met and chatted to).

Mary Robinette Kowal putting on a puppet show for us

Panel - Trudi Canavan, Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie, Tad Williams, Adrian Stone, Stan Nicholls

 At the end of the event we had to travel home late on Sunday, and of course the first train was delayed and we missed the connecting train. We trudged onto a later train, sat down next to a guy who looked like a magician, who turned out to actually be a magician, who then gave us a free magic show for an hour on the train home! Bizarre but amazing end to a fantastic weekend! :-)

Read a longer post about my experience of World Fantasy Con here.


New Goodies:

So... the books. Yes, there are a lot, but in my defence a lot of these were free. You just don't say no to free books, do you? Besides, I'm hoping that Ellie's Sunday post will vastly eclipse mine, and therefore make me look restrained in comparison. :-)

Close ups of covers below

Two fantasy art books - Keith Parkinson and Didier Graffet

WFC book (contains info about special guests, some stories, and interesting bits and bobs)

Giant Thief, by David Tallerman

Passages: A Sampler of French Fantasy from Bragelonne

The Garden of Stones, by Mark T. Barnes

The Forbidden Library, by Django Wexler

Farlander, by Col Buchanan

The Queen of the Tearling, by Erika Johansen

The Emperor's Blades, by Brian Staveley

God's War, by Kameron Hurley

Sixty One Nails, by Mike Shevdon

The Gospel of Loki, by Joanne M. Harris

The Demon's Lexicon, by Sarah Rees Brennan

Banished, by Liz de Jager (Squee! Can't wait to read this one!)

Tales of Eve, edited by Mhairi Simpson

The Black Heart, by Patrick O'Leary

The Apology Chapbook, by China Mieville (this was to apologise

for not being able to come to WFC, as he was supposed to be the

Master of Ceremonies at the event. The chapbook contains some of

his unpublished short stories)

An Xmen mug (won at the Titan fun fair party!)

A TOR shot glass (from the TOR party)

Titan rock.

A Gollancz Geeks pen.

The Testimony, by James Smythe (ebook)

Shadowplay, by Laura Lam (for review) (more squees!)

 Phew, that's all of them... I think. I've probably forgotten some. xD  Hope you've had a great week too!

Off To World Fantasy Con

Just a quick post to say that I'm going to World Fantasy Con in Brighton tomorrow until Sunday. I'm really excited about it! If you're going to be there too, let me know in the comments or tweet me, or just say hi if you see me around. :-)

Now I need to try to make some more room in my suitcase. There isn't nearly enough space in there for books...

Retribution Falls - Book Review

Retribution Falls
by Chris Wooding

Sky piracy is a bit out of Darian Frey’s league. Fate has not been kind to the captain of the airship Ketty Jay—or his motley crew. They are all running from something. Crake is a daemonist in hiding, traveling with an armored golem and burdened by guilt. Jez is the new navigator, desperate to keep her secret from the rest of the crew. Malvery is a disgraced doctor, drinking himself to death. So when an opportunity arises to steal a chest of gems from a vulnerable airship, Frey can’t pass it up. It’s an easy take—and the payoff will finally make him a rich man.

But when the attack goes horribly wrong, Frey suddenly finds himself the most wanted man in Vardia, trailed by bounty hunters, the elite Century Knights, and the dread queen of the skies, Trinica Dracken. Frey realizes that they’ve been set up to take a fall but doesn’t know the endgame. And the ultimate answer for captain and crew may lie in the legendary hidden pirate town of Retribution Falls. That’s if they can get there without getting blown out of the sky. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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Retribution Falls is a really fun story. Really fun. Pirates, airships, a steampunkish feel, magic, demons, adventure, conspiracy... it has all the elements that let you know you’re in for a quick, exciting read. It’s an extremely fast paced book, barely pausing at any point for filler or downtime, and yet there are a surprising amount of back stories thrown in, all of them interesting. Chris Wooding is an expert at worldbuilding, slipping in facts and fascinating details that give such a vivid feeling of the world, without ever slowing down the plot or distracting from the story.

The rag-tag crew of the Ketty Jay will draw inevitable comparisons with the TV series Firefly. The book has a similar kind of roguish-twinkle feel to Firefly; they’re pirates, but they’re not the really bad kind of pirates, and there’s something unavoidably lovable about their underdog position and their attempts to stay ahead of everyone who’s out to get them. The characters in Retribution Falls can be a little one-note – they’re a character type and in general they stick to it – but the back stories here do add a little more depth to certain people. In particular I liked Crake, the daemonist who aids the crew with his daemon-based magic, and Jez, the new navigator and the ship’s only woman. I found these two the most human of the characters, and I really felt for Crake. The more minor characters were less explored but did add some tension and humour. I liked the doctor the best of the side-character bunch and would like to learn more about him in later books.

The captain, Darian Frey, was a hard character to like, but felt like a very honest portrayal of the kind of man that might end up in his position. He’s always running away, always trying to find someone else to blame for his problems. There were points where I became very frustrated with him, and other points where I honestly hoped Draken would capture him and the rest of the crew would get away. However, though Darian is often unlikeable, his slightly car-crash approach to life is fascinating to read about.

As the book goes on, most of the crew members begin to reveal a darker side, aspects that make the reader question whether they are really the good guys. This isn’t explored very deeply in this book; we’re still supposed to want them to come out on top, but I’m hoping this may be touched on a bit more later in the series. The book also succeeds in making the reader feel sympathy for Draken, the woman chasing down the Ketty Jay, though it perhaps succeeded a little too well with me. There were points where I honestly wanted her to win, but then, perhaps that was the point. This is a book about pirates, and I like that lines of morality were hard to draw. No-one should feel like they are entirely the good or bad guys here.

With an interesting storyline involving conspiracy, pirates and murder, memorable characters, action, plenty of humour, adventure, airships, daemon-magic, and a malevolent ship’s cat, Retribution Falls is a quick, fun read. There isn’t really anything surprising in the book, with some elements being quite predictable, but it’s done so well there is a great amount of satisfaction in how the events roll out. There is a lot about this world that I love, and I’m looking forward to exploring more of it with the Ketty Jay’s crew in later books.

I listened to this as an audiobook, so wanted to quickly mention the narrator, Rupert Degas, who does an absolutely fantastic job and really brings the book to life. Each character felt pitch-perfect to me, and his reading combined with Chris Wooding's excellent writing kept me engrossed throughout. I'll be looking for more of Rupert Degas' work too!

The Age of Miracles - Book Review

The Age of Miracles
by Karen Thompson Walker

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life--the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.

With spare, graceful prose and the emotional wisdom of a born storyteller, Karen Thompson Walker has created a singular narrator in Julia, a resilient and insightful young girl, and a moving portrait of family life set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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I read this as part of the Richard and Judy Book Club Challenge. This is one that I was really looking forward to. It’s a character focussed end-of-the-world story with a very unique and slow-moving disaster, and I was excited to see how the author would approach it.

Okay, so what’s the disaster? Well, at first glance, it doesn’t seem like the most earth-shattering of apocalypses: the world’s rotation is slowing down, and will eventually come to a complete stop. The days and nights are getting longer. What’s so brilliant about this is that the disaster creeps up on both the characters and the reader. It’s hard at first to contemplate how extreme the consequences of this might be, and so it is for the characters, who, after the initial panic, either try to ignore the disaster or simply tell themselves that someone else will fix it.

And yet, if the world were to slowly stop turning... what would happen? Days and nights would get longer, and we would find ourselves living days, then whole weeks, then longer, in constant darkness followed by constant light. Gravity would be affected – in this book birds begin to have trouble flying, and then fall from the sky. Planes begin to experience similar problems. As nights lengthen into weeks and months of total darkness, crops would die and the world would experience extreme food shortages. The long nights would be dangerously cold. The long days would be dangerously hot. Eventually, conditions would become too extreme for life over most of the Earth. This disaster starts out almost gently, unnoticed by all but a few, and yet develops relentlessly. And unlike some other, seemingly more dramatic, disaster stories, this one really does seem to be leading to the end of human life on Earth.

I love these kinds of stories, in which what seem like small changes can have devastating or incredible consequences. I also tend to prefer this kind of slow moving disaster/apocalypse story to the flashier, action-packed ones. However, there was something lacking here that meant that I never quite got the ‘wow’ feeling from this book. I thought the author wrote her characters and the human reactions to the crisis very convincingly, but there were points where the protagonist’s point of view was a little frustrating. She is a young girl (a fact that sometimes jars with the writing style), and so sometimes the typical teenage worries of her daily life concern her more than the world around her. I did like this touch, but felt that it became too much the focus of the book. The disaster itself became so background at points that it felt like an interesting setting for a coming of age story, rather than an element that should have been woven more carefully throughout all aspects of the book (for example, how something like Life As We Knew It handles a similar kind of disaster story). Because of this, there were parts where the plot felt quite lacklustre to me, and where the main character was not really interesting enough to hold up the book. Still, that’s very much down to my personal taste, and I think others may prefer that the story’s focus is always on the normal rather than the strange.

I enjoyed the way that details were introduced a little at a time. This worked very well, because it means that the reader experiences the disaster from the same position as the main character, not knowing enough, but knowing a little too much for comfort. I would have preferred the story to cover a slightly longer period of time, simply because I wanted to see what further slowing would look like in terms of human civilisation, and for similar reasons I wish we could have seen a little more of what was happening elsewhere in the world. This is a ‘what if?’ book, and so I want to actually see that question answered as much as possible. I don’t necessarily want science or explanations, but I want to see the consequences.

However, I can understand why the author did not do this, and I appreciated the unique approach to a disaster story: this is the age of miracles, not the age of disaster. It is the age when the world is moving from ‘normal’ into something new, when society is still trying to cling to absolutely everything it can from its old life, before having to face the truth. What makes this so different from almost every other story of its type is that it’s not a story about survival, not at all. It’s a story about living with ideas and routines of the past, as the world changes slowly around you; about denial and acceptance. So, although the story was not perhaps exactly what I was hoping for, it was a very interesting and unique one, and I enjoyed reading it.



   

The Lives of Tao - Book Review

The Lives of Tao
by Wesley Chu

When out-of-shape IT technician Roen woke up and started hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumed he was losing it.

He wasn’t.

He now has a passenger in his brain – an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Now split into two opposing factions – the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix – the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet, and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes.

Meanwhile, Roen is having to train to be the ultimate secret agent. Like that’s going to end up well… (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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This was one of the Fantasy Faction science fiction book club picks, and I’m glad it was chosen. I enjoyed it, and it seemed to go down well with the book club too.

Tao is an alien life form that needs to live inside a human host to survive. Its species is trying to use humans to help return them to their planet, but there are two factions that violently disagree on their methods in doing so. The aliens usually merge with humans who have military/secret-agent training and are aware of the aliens and their secret war, but circumstances force Tao to choose Roen as a host instead. Roen is an out-of-shape IT technician and a very unlikely secret agent. Tao has a lot of work to do to get him ready for his new life.

This is a really fun book. In many ways it reminded me of the TV series Chuck, but with aliens instead of the Intersect. There are some fantastic action scenes and the book is generally fast-paced, and though the plot is predictable at points, it does exactly what you want it to. There are plenty of funny moments, an easily likeable main character, and even a training montage that worked very well! Sometimes protagonists gain skills too quickly or easily in fiction; here, you can really see and feel how hard Roen has had to work for it.

What makes this book work so well is the interaction between Tao and Roen. Both characters are written so well that each maintains a distinct personality, even though Roen is effectively talking to himself inside his own head. Their conversations provide great background and comic relief, and I enjoyed finding out more about Tao’s past hosts, and about his regrets. Tao seems to care a great deal about each one of his hosts, even the ones who defied him, feeling personally responsible for all failures. He’s an astute and interesting observer of Roen’s life, helping him to see that he needs to stop dreaming and actually change things. Tao genuinely changes Roen’s life for the better, and becomes the best friend that Roen could ask for.

I think that last point is important because there is also a slightly creepy element to Tao and Roen’s relationship. Tao entered Roen’s body and mind without permission. He is using Roen, and there is no way to get around that fact. Tao needs Roen to train and to join in his cause, and at first it doesn’t seem like he’s giving Roen much choice. He sees everything Roen does and has access to his thoughts, and Roen will now never have a private moment again. He can even control Roen’s body while he sleeps. There were times when I thought Tao was not taking this into account enough and was a bit pushy with Roen. But, this is really the difference between the good guys and the bad guys here. Tao really does care about Roen, and Roen really does benefit from having Tao with him. Tao might be using Roen, but he gives back and lets Roen use him too.

Having said that, not all the good guys seem to act this way. The Prophus claim to be better than the Genjix, but both sides seem to value their alien lives over their human ones, and while the Genjix encourage an almost religious awe, this isn’t exactly discouraged amongst the good guys. Even Tao sometimes reveals this attitude a little – the Genjix can kill as many humans as they like, but the conflict does not become truly horrifying to him until the aliens themselves begin dying. I thought these issues of agency and the value of human life were explored well, particularly in one scene involving a hospitalised host, and it added a nice thoughtful note to an otherwise action-focussed plot. This is a fun book, but also one with plenty of interesting things to discuss!

There were some bits that disappointed me a little. I really loved the character of Sonja and wished that she could have featured more than she did, and I would also have liked to learn just a little more about one of Tao’s previous lives (his big regret). I also wasn’t entirely sure about certain aspects of the ending, in particular the ‘save the princesses’ element, though I did like that this was referenced as exactly that. Having said that, the ending was dramatic and moving, and I’m definitely looking forward to finding out what happens next.

The Lives of Tao is an entertaining, action-packed book, with some interesting questions beneath the surface, as well as great characters and humour.

Glitter and Mayhem - Book Review

Glitter and Mayhem
Edited by John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas, and Michael Damian Thomas

Welcome to Glitter & Mayhem, the most glamorous party in the multiverse.

Step behind the velvet rope of these fabulous Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror tales of roller rinks, nightclubs, glam aliens, party monsters, drugs, sex, glitter, and debauchery.

Dance through nightclubs, roller derby with cryptids and aliens, be seduced by otherworldly creatures, and ingest cocktails that will alter your existence forever. Your hosts are the Hugo Award-winning editors John Klima (Electric Velocipede) and Lynne M. Thomas (Apex Magazine), and the Hugo-nominated editor Michael Damian Thomas (Apex Magazine). (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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Glitter and Mayhem is a short story anthology with the theme of glamour, parties, nightclubs, drugs, sex and rollerskating, all with a science fiction or fantasy element. The stories are all odd, some more so than others, and there’s a wonderful mix of fun, tongue-in-cheek, scary, thoughtful and sad. An anthology with this kind of theme could have suffered from stories that are all too similar in style and feel, but here this is not the case at all; the editors have managed to collect a really interesting mix.

This collection is a huge amount of fun, but it’s also refreshingly diverse in the characters, lifestyles, relationships and sex it explores. The most obvious theme of the anthology might be glamour and parties, but I think its strongest themes are acceptance, identity, and loving yourself for who you are.

As always with anthologies, there were some stories that didn’t grab me as much as others, but overall it’s a really strong collection. There are funny stories and straightforward stories and some with very clever twists. There are fairytale themes, aliens, the supernatural, the fae, and plenty of rollerskating!

Some of my favourite stories were:

Sooner Than Gold, by Cory Skerry, in which a door could lead to anywhere, but you might not like what’s on the other side.

Subterraneans, by William Shunn and Laura Chavoen, an interesting take on body-swapping.

Such & Such Said to So & So, by Maria Dahvana Headley, which plays with language in a clever little story about drinking and addiction.

Bess, the Landlord’s Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl, by Sofia Samatar, a very weird and well-written story.

Blood and Sequins, by Diana Rowland, an unconventional approach to the cops-take-out-the-bad-guys story.

Inside Hides the Monster, by Damien Walters Grintalis, which explores how a siren might have difficulty adapting to modern music tastes.

Bad Dream Girl, by Seanan McGuire, a really fun story about roller derby teams with some unusual members.

A Hollow Play, by Amal El-Mohtar, which asks what people might be willing to give up for what they love, and how much they really value those things.

A really enjoyable anthology with a good variety of stories and styles!


Thank you to Apex Publications for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Cover Art - The Apprentice Journals and Schadenfreude

I've got a couple of covers to share today from four people I've worked with over at Polluto magazine. I'm really excited for all of them, as I've been watching as their books came together, and am looking forward to reading them both! I'm also excited for the artists who have created two such different and amazing covers, and I wanted to provide a little more focus on them too.

First up is The Apprentice Journals (synopsis below), from J. Michael Shell, with stunning cover art from Vincent Sammy. Isn't it gorgeous?

The Apprentice Journals: From the slaver land of Tara to the shores of Ginny’s Beach, ride the mag lines with Spaul and Pearl as they do their best to deal with fickle Elementals, and their growing—as well as dangerous—love for one another. Dangerous because, as they learn from the “Fierae”—the Lightening Elementals—Love is Above the Rules.

I'm so pleased for Mike, who has been a regular contributor of short stories to the magazine, and who has already been getting some great feedback on the recently released novel. J Michael Shell's fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He lives in the American South, and though he's been characterised as an 'Old Hippie', he insists the correct appellation is 'Last Hippie'.

Vincent Sammy, a celebrated South African artist, has also recently provided Polluto with a wonderful cover, as well as artwork for South African magazine Something Wicked, and covers for Pandemonium (story collections from the Pornokitsch team). He was nominated for a This Is Horror award for best artist of 2012 and was voted into the Runner Up position! See more of Vincent's artwork here.


Second cover reveal is Schadenfreude (synopsis below), with an eye-catching cover from Vikki Hastings.

Schadenfreude: Enter a mind full of transcendental drugs, doomed punks, voyeuristic puppets and omnipotent intergalactic prisons in Chris Kelso's debut short fiction collection. 

Schadenfreude is a short story collection from Chris Kelso, who has helped me as a submissions editor (and lots more) for Polluto. He's the co-creator of The Imperial Youth Review with Garrett Cook, and co-edited the Terror Scribes anthology with Adam Lowe. You can find out more about him and his writing here.

I think this is such a beautiful and unique image from Vikki Hastings. Vikki has also provided cover art for a previous issue of Polluto. With a love of fairytale and storytelling, she likes to explore the escapist side of art, and you can see more on her website, here.


Haven't both these guys been so lucky with their lovely covers?

The Apprentice Journals

(Dog Horn Publishing)
(Amazon UK)
(Amazon USA)

Schadenfreude

(Dog Horn Publishing)
(Amazon UK)
(Amazon USA)

Edge Lit 2 - Convention Report

On Saturday I hopped on the bus to Derby for Edge Lit 2, a one-day science fiction, fantasy and horror convention. This is an extremely convenient con for me, as I only live in Nottingham, about 30 minutes away on the bus (a bus, I should add, that had AIR CONDITIONING, unlike the actual convention venue)

I had such a great time. Edge Lit is easily my favourite of the conventions I’ve been to so far. It’s small and intimate, and though all cons have been very friendly to me, this is even more so. And, despite the lack of air con, which may have just unluckily not been working on that day, it really is a great venue. It’s open, has a lovely cafe and patio area, two big cinema rooms that are good for panels and talks, and plenty of restaurants around. And I have a soft spot for Derby anyway, as I used to live there.

As always, it was lovely to see so many people again, and for the first time ever, I actually introduced some people to each other! Woohoo, I’m not the newbie anymore! I also met wonderful new people, and have added even more authors and books to my neverending To Read shelf! On such a hot day, it was so nice to be able to relax with a drink with such a great group of people.

The panels I went to were all good, and I particularly enjoyed the discussion about Urban Fantasy and what makes it so popular. I also loved the raffle, which really has to be experienced! Well done to the raffle hosts, Sarah Pinborough and Conrad Williams, for making it so fun.

Congrats to Adele Wearing, K.A. Laity and Fox Spirit on the launch of Noir Carnival, and to all involved with Spacewitch, which also launched at Edge Lit. Spacewitch is a site that exists as a catalogue of several independent publishers’ books, a place to buy them and discuss them, and to discover more from the authors, editors and artists involved. There are four publishers on there so far – Fox Spirit, Jurassic London, Newcon Press, and Clarion Publishing – and more will follow. It sounds really interesting, and the website looks really good too. Check it out here.

And finally, I didn’t manage to stay for the quiz last year, so was pleased to make it this year, and had a lot of fun contributing virtually nothing while laughing at Emma and Pete Newman’s joke answers.

I’m already looking forward to the next event, and I’m definitely going to make Edge Lit one of my must-go-to cons! Thanks to the organisers, volunteers, and everyone who made it a wonderful day.

Playing Tyler - Book Review

Playing Tyler
by T. L. Costa

Angry Robot Ebook Store
Amazon (UK) (USA)

Tyler MacCandless can’t focus, even when he takes his medication. He can’t focus on school, on his future, on a book, on much of anything other than taking care of his older brother, Brandon, who’s in rehab for heroin abuse… again.

Tyler’s dad is dead and his mom has mentally checked out. The only person he can really count on is his Civilian Air Patrol Mentor, Rick. The one thing in life it seems he doesn’t suck at is playing video games and, well, that’s probably not going to get him into college.

Just when it seems like his future is on a collision course with a life sentence at McDonald’s, Rick asks him to test a video game. If his score’s high enough, it could earn him a place in flight school and win him the future he was certain that he could never have. And when he falls in love with the game’s designer, the legendary gamer Ani, Tyler thinks his life might finally be turning around.

That is, until Brandon goes MIA from rehab and Tyler and Ani discover that the game is more than it seems. Now Tyler will have to figure out what’s really going on in time to save his brother… and prevent his own future from going down in flames. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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I was excited about reading this one. I love video games, so I like stories with connections to video games, and the plot sounded so intriguing. Although I liked certain aspects of the book, however, I did find it disappointing.

The characters are written with very distinctive voices, particularly the main character, Tyler. He has ADHD, and this is reflected in the way he tells the story. When he becomes more agitated and restless, the punctuation begins to break down and his thoughts all run into each other, often with short, sharp sentences that jump to another thought without finishing. This captures his state of mind really well, and I think it was cleverly done, but unfortunately it did become quite annoying very quickly.

This isn’t helped by the fact that I found Tyler to be an extremely annoying character in general. I think the author probably did a brilliant job of portraying an authentic teenage boy’s thoughts, but on the other hand, this meant that we get a lot of repetition of how amazing this girl is who plays games, and is hot, and plays games and is really hot, and can actually beat boys at games (and is hot). Sigh. Tyler’s obsession with Ani not only made it seem like gamer girls are incredibly rare (they really aren’t), it also became stalkerish very quickly. Ani makes it clear that they can’t hang out, but about a hundred unreturned emails later, not to mention Tyler scouting out the college campus for her, she finally gives in. Tyler can get quite possessive in his thoughts too, wanting to hit people who flirt with his mother or admire his girlfriend. Later, Tyler’s reactions to major plot events seemed to be a bit all over the place, which, while it did make sense, was frustrating to read. I think he was realistically written, but there were times that I just couldn’t like him and didn’t really want to be in his head.

So Tyler himself was a bit of a miss for me, but there were some aspects of the story that I really liked. Tyler is testing a flight simulator that will be used to train pilots to fly drones. There are some really good questions raised about the war on terror, war in general, and what ‘terrorism’ even means. The story looks at the effect of war from a US point of view, exploring the effects of war on the soldiers who come home, on their families, and on the people working in a non-combative role. This works really well, as it shows how war often seems like a distant thing that people like Tyler and Ani find it hard to connect to on a personal level. In fact, they both distance themselves completely from it in their own minds, and only feel the horror of it when they see how deeply they are actually involved. I thought the author did a good job of presenting these moral issues. They were perhaps a little unsubtle in places, but right for the intended audience.

I also really liked the inclusion of Tyler’s brother Brandon’s drug addiction, and the honest look at how drugs destroy lives, both the addict’s life and their family's. Combining two themes, the war on terror with the war on drugs, is very clever, as both are wrapped up in similar rhetoric and propaganda. Tyler finds out that he is involved in both these conflicts on a much more personal level than he could have imagined.

These aspects of the story were strong, and I thought it was a shame that they weren’t the focus earlier on. I found the love story to be irritating at best, and it certainly took too long for things to get going to keep me interested. I thought the major plot point that drove the story was obvious from the start, disappointingly so, which made it even more frustrating that it took so long to get there. I did also find the premise itself a bit hard to believe, as if there’s one thing bored gamers can be guaranteed to do, it’s shoot at the NPCs, or crash on purpose to see what happens, or fly to the edges of the map to see what’s there.

So, some great ideas and themes, wrapped up with a character and romance that I found very annoying. By the end this was an interesting read, but I would have enjoyed this a lot more if it hadn’t taken so long for the story to get going.


Thank you to Strange Chemistry and NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Entanglement - Book Review

Entanglement
by Douglas Thompson

Elsewhen Press
Amazon (UK)(USA)

In 2180, travel to neighbouring star systems has been mastered thanks to quantum teleportation using the 'entanglement' of sub-atomic matter; astronauts on earth can be duplicated on a remote world once the dupliport chamber has arrived there. In this way a variety of worlds can be explored, but what humanity discovers is both surprising and disturbing, enlightening and shocking. Each alternative to mankind that the astronauts find, sheds light on human shortcomings and potential while offering fresh perspectives of life on Earth. Meanwhile, at home, the lives of the astronauts and those in charge of the missions will never be the same again.

Best described as philosophical science fiction, Entanglement explores our assumptions about such constants as death, birth, sex and conflict, as the characters in the story explore distant worlds and the intelligent life that lives there. It is simultaneously a novel and a series of short stories: multiple worlds, each explored in a separate chapter, a separate story; every one another step on mankind's journey outwards to the stars and inwards to our own psyche. Yet the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts; the synergy of the episodes results in an overarching story arc that ultimately tells us more about ourselves than about the rest of the universe. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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Douglas Thompson has written stories for past issues of a magazine that I've been editor for, including 'Dissemblance', which appears in this collection. So naturally, when he asked if I'd like to review this book, I was intrigued! Quick disclaimer: I had nothing to do with the editing or publishing of Entanglement, and was not required to write a positive review.

Entanglement is a collection of short stories that are all part of one larger story, centred around the invention of Dupliportation technology, which has finally allowed humans to walk on other planets. This means that the book is an interesting blend of short story and novel, as the stories, though many of them could stand alone, really must be read in order and are all part of the larger story. I’ve only read one other thing that’s sort of similar, Asimov’s Foundation series, but those stories were separated by long periods of time and so this book has quite a different feel. It’s very interesting, and the stories are all fairly short and quick reads. I raced through, and really enjoyed it.

Dupliportation technology is influenced by the ansible from Ursula Le Guin’s fiction (I love Le Guin’s stories, and it was nice to see her actually mentioned by the characters in this book), and, as suggested by the book’s title, by real science: quantum entanglement. A very simplified explanation: the technology is sent through space to another world, where doubles of the human explorers are created. The consciousness of the explorers is then transferred to these doubles while the original bodies sleep on Earth. This is a fascinating method of visiting other planets, which I haven’t seen done in science fiction before. Because the explorers sleep and then enter another world, it’s strongly linked to dreaming, and the theme of dreams runs throughout the whole collection. In fact, the stories themselves often have something of a dream-like quality, which really suits the book.

I found most of the stories fun and interesting, with a good mix of tense, thoughtful, dreamy, funny and absurd. A book like this couldn’t have worked if the author had taken things too seriously, but thankfully Douglas Thompson gives us changes of tone, style and pacing when needed. The technology aspects are written well and not bogged down with too much explanation, and the science and more fantastical elements mix very naturally. The characters on Earth tend to be more interesting than the actual explorers, who are really just there to observe and report. Some of the stories worked less well for me than others, with one or two that were a bit forgettable, but most have really stayed with me. I also found a lot of the linking stories to be very compelling, particularly anything involving Guy Lecoux.

Many of the stories have quite a classic sci-fi feel, something like Ray Bradbury stories, which felt a little odd at first, a kind of mix of nostalgic and new. I thought this worked in some places and not in others. There is a very exploratory feel to the collection, which science fiction doesn’t tend to do so much these days, and the humans have quite an astonishingly gung-ho attitude in some parts. Where these stories differed from classic sci-fi was in their more cynical outlook; humans walking on other worlds would be an incredible and uplifting thing, but also hugely destructive to both humans and aliens. In these stories, the humans find that they are not necessarily as intelligent or morally superior as we often like to believe that we are. Even though rules are put in place to try to prevent too much interference, the human explorers still manage to cause plenty of harm in their blundering about and their assumptions about intelligent life. I really liked this aspect of the book.

What worked less well for me was Earth itself, which felt a bit old-fashioned with an almost 50s feel, though I can’t quite put my finger on why this was. Perhaps the attitudes, perhaps the characters coming almost exclusively from neat, traditional family units, perhaps something else. The alien worlds also seemed a little too similar to old Earth societies sometimes, with in most cases one leader, and often some form of hierarchy. At the very end of the book, we get an answer as to why Earth may have seemed this way, and why the aliens were limited by human experience. This last story provides a twist that might be frustrating in any other novel, but actually works very well for this book and added a new element to the stories, changing everything.

This is a clever book, packed with ideas, and I loved the idea of linking short stories with the same technology. The book asks some fascinating questions about dream and reality, intelligence, and how humans view their world. As ‘philosophical science fiction’, I think it works very well. I particularly enjoyed getting to know recurring characters over the course of the collection, and found the stories to be memorable and absorbing.


Thank you to the author for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Humans - Book Review

The Humans
by Matt Haig

Amazon (UK) (USA)

The narrator of this tale is no ordinary human—in fact, he’s not human at all. Before he was sent away from the distant planet he calls home, precision and perfection governed his life. He lived in a utopian society where mathematics transformed a people, creating limitless knowledge and immortality.

But all of this is suddenly threatened when an earthly being opens the doorway to the same technology that the alien planet possesses. Cambridge University professor Andrew Martin cracks the Reimann Hypothesis and unknowingly puts himself and his family in grave danger when the narrator is sent to Earth to erase all evidence of the solution and kill anyone who has seen the proof. The only catch: the alien has no idea what he’s up against.

Disgusted by the excess of disease, violence, and family strife he encounters, the narrator struggles to pass undetected long enough to gain access to Andrew’s research. But in picking up the pieces of the professor’s shattered personal life, the narrator sees hope and redemption in the humans’ imperfections and begins to question the very mission that brought him there. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

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There’s a lot to like about this book. It’s well written, clever and funny, and the characters all feel incredibly real. The main character (and narrator) is an alien in the form of a human man, taking the identity of the professor who has solved a critical maths problem, and so must be eliminated along with his family before the other humans can become aware of his breakthrough. At first he is repulsed by everything human, then begins to change and to eventually empathise with them. This journey is subtle yet surprisingly quick, as the narrator is first won over by small things, and then by the incredible depths of human feeling. His observations about human life are often funny, and sometimes quite revealing. The people the alien comes into contact with are part of what makes this book so successful; Andrew’s wife and son (and the family dog), in particular, are wonderful characters.

The aliens themselves are extremely advanced compared to humans, and clearly feel themselves superior. They prize logic above emotion, and yet act a little irrationally when it comes to humans, insisting on extreme measures and worrying constantly about a kind of contamination, that their agent among the humans may become corrupted and begin to sympathise with them. This leads to a lot of tension as the main character does indeed begin to care for the humans. There’s an air of menace running under the surface of the whole book, even in the most mundane scenes such as sitting on a sofa and sharing peanut butter with a dog. There is also an interesting question running through. The aliens believe humans to be monsters, but in their cold methods and intervention, are the aliens any better?

Unfortunately, I did have a few issues with the book. The story and the science fictional elements are almost background to the true theme, which is exploring what it means to be human. There were some elements that were almost forgotten about because they were not useful to the theme, such as the simple matter of how the narrator intends to get his words to the aliens, or why there are not more repercussions after a certain event at the end (being vague on purpose to avoid spoilers). I also found the fact that the original Andrew has been killed to make way for alien-Andrew to be more than a little disturbing, and breezed over a bit too easily to be anywhere near realistic. Andrew may not have been a good person, but he does not deserve to have his entire personality and identity replaced with another version of himself who chooses different paths while posing as him, and who becomes what is clearly shown to be a 'better' version of him. The more you think about it, the more horrific it is, really. I think I would have liked it if this had been touched on a little more.

There were also times where the story became lost entirely in reflection, which was good at points and a little tiresome at others, and the slightly triumphal tone of how special humans are did sometimes become annoying. This may be because the ‘humans are special’ trope is vastly overdone in the kinds of science fiction stories I read and play. On the other hand, there were some genuinely beautiful parts of the novel where we are reminded of what’s really important in life, and to appreciate what we have, and overall the message was a good one.

Choosing an alien point of view to show us a new perspective on what it means to be human is obviously useful, but does also present certain problems. The first is that it has been done many times, and though this book was enjoyable and clever, I didn’t feel that it added anything really new. The second issue is that the alien has come to a very tiny, specific part of the world – the UK – and into a very particular kind of experience – British, male, white, academic, wealthy. This isn’t so much about what it means to be human as what it means to be those things, and when the narrator is constantly telling us about how humans believe or do certain things, this niggled at me a bit. The alien also knows enough about Earth to accuse humans of being cruel in their lack of care for the people on their planet who are starving and suffering, yet does not care about them at all himself or even consider them in his ponderings on what it means to be human. But then, perhaps that’s actually a very astute comment on what it means to be human after all!

The greatest strength of the novel was in the characterisation of Andrew. And by that, I mean both Andrews. There’s the original Andrew, the self-obsessed and arrogant professor who is taking his family for granted and in very real danger of losing it. And then there’s the alien Andrew, who desperately tries to fit in and then, against all his expectations, actually does begin to fit in. We see the original Andrew in the gaps he’s left, and in the ways characters react to the imposter Andrew, and we begin to see a little of the man this Andrew must have been, long ago. This is perhaps the deepest and most honest examination of a character that I have ever seen in fiction.

So, there’s a lot to like about The Humans, and also some elements that I thought let the book down a bit. It’s a reflective story without much action, and on the whole this is a very good thing. The characters are what’s important here, and these are all extremely well written. Thoughtful, clever and funny, I enjoyed the book, and despite a few issues, overall I found its message to be both moving and uplifting.


Thank you to Canongate Books and NetGalley for providing a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.