Science fiction roundup – reviews Jul 20th 2013, 07:30
Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh, Reviver by Seth Patrick, Lexicon by Max Barry, Theatre of the Gods by M Suddain, and short story collection The Lowest Heaven
Few novelists manage to create convincing future worlds extrapolated from current trends, but Will McIntosh has achieved it in his third novel, Love Minus Eighty (Orbit, £7.99), an expansion of his 2010 Hugo award-winning short story "Bridesicle". In a hi-tech future where everyone is part of the social network and lives are led in full public view, the rich can have themselves revived after death while others opt for cryogenic storage. The novel charts the lives of Mira, a "bridesicle" who is suspended in hope of resuscitation by a rich suitor in the future; Veronika, a dating coach; and Rob, who, after accidentally killing a woman at the start of the novel, is determined to resurrect her and apologise. What follows is not only a complex, affecting and surprising love story, but a perceptive critique of a society mired in addictive technology and celebrity status.
Another novel that tackles the themes of life after death and our relationship with the dead is Seth Patrick's promising debut Reviver (Macmillan, £12.99). Jonah Miller, who works for the US Forensic Revival Service, is one of only a few hundred operatives worldwide who have the ability to revive and speak to the newly dead. When Miller interviews a woman who was brutally murdered, she warns him that something terrifying is imminent, before being taken over by a persona not her own. Meanwhile, Daniel Harker, the campaigning journalist whose work led to the public acceptance of the revival process, is abducted and murdered. The initial suspects are the various opponents of the process. But when Miller and the journalist's daughter join forces to trace his killers, they find that the threat is far greater than mere worldly opposition. The novel suffers from some early longueurs of pacing, and much info-dumping, but accelerates to become a skilfully plotted and compulsively readable supernatural thriller.
Max Barry's fifth novel, Lexicon (Mulholland Books, £14.99), begins with the rather unpromising premise of a secret organisation, known as The Poets, which is in possession of a lexicon of words with the ability to kill. Amnesiac Wil Parke once knew the "bareword", a single word of such importance that the fate of the world is at stake – but he can't remember what it is. The novel opens when Parke is kidnapped by a group desperate to learn his secret in order to prevent a Poet nicknamed Virginia Woolf from wreaking havoc. Despite the hoary set-up, what makes the novel such a spellbinding, intelligent read is the combination of excellent characterisation – streetwise would-be Poet Emily Ruff is an inspired and ambiguous creation – and a freewheeling plot intermeshed with linguistic theory and some genuinely creepy horror set-pieces.
Theatre of the Gods (Jonathan Cape, £12.99) is the maddening, ambitious, baggy and over-written debut of M Suddain. It's a zany steampunk space opera that is less a conventional novel than a series of intellectual vignettes. VVS Volcannon records the adventures of M Francisco Fabrigas, "explorer, philosopher, heretical physicist, mystic, transmariner, cosmic flâneur", who is steering a ship of children on a journey through the Omnicosmos to "the next universe, aided by a handsome deaf boy and beautiful and cunning blind girl". Wholly original, and by turns annoying and exhilarating, this antidote to formula fiction reads like Douglas Adams channelling William Burroughs channelling Ionesco, spiced with the comic brio of Vonnegut.
The Lowest Heaven (Jurassic London, £9.99), edited by Anne C Perry and Jared Shurin, gathers 17 original stories about "our closest celestial neighbours". Published in partnership with the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, it comes with an array of lavish photographs and drawings from the observatory's archive. It's a strong collection; the best stories veer towards fantasy rather than, as might be expected in an anthology about the solar system, the science fictional. Sophia McDougall's "Golden Apple" is a beautifully paced, original and affecting story of the lengths to which the loving parents of an ailing girl will go to to aid her recovery. Other standouts include the idiosyncratic "Uranus" by Esther Saxey, about gay love, alienation, and astral travel; and "Magnus Lucretius" by Mark Charan Newton, a sly tale of murder and deception narrated by the robot slave of a future Roman "planetcrafter". These are complemented by entertaining stories from Alastair Reynolds, Maria Dahvana Headley and Kaaron Warren.
• Eric Brown's latest novel, The Serene Invasion, is published by Solaris.
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