Borne

Borne is the new novel from Jeff VanderMeer, the David Lynch of literary sci fi. Don’t know what I mean? Let me give you an example by summarizing the events leading up to the action in this book. In a post-apocalyptic world devastated by climate change and other, unspecified man-made disasters, an unnamed, partially-destroyed city is dominated by a biotech company (known, of course, as the Company). It’s not clear exactly what the Company makes (drugs? weapons? designer pets?), but at some point it creates Mord, a thing which grows into a giant bear the size of a building (it’s described as being three storeys high lying down). Mord develops the power to levitate and escapes the Company, wreaking havoc and destroying what remains of civilization in the city. In this environment our protagonist, a black (yes!) woman (YES!) named Rachel (fine), pairs up with Wick, a disgraced former Company employee who now manufactures biological hallucinogens in the form of beetles you insert into your ear, in a converted swimming pool that he’s made into a kind of swamp teeming with artificial life. They live in an apartment complex camouflaged as a cliff face overlooking a toxic river, which they’ve booby-trapped with weaponised biochemistry and other deterrents against trespassers. To help Wick, Rachel works as a scavenger, searching for biotech that can go into his drug-swamp-brew. The most fruitful source of this is Mord himself, and while he sleeps, Rachel climbs around in his fur looking for anything salvageable. Then comes page one.

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The Power

What happens when an oppressed people suddenly gain a huge amount of power over their oppressors? What would a truly matriarchal global society look like? Are men and women born with certain inherent characteristics, or are they the result of social conditioning (surely we can agree that one’s stupid, right)? What if women were the physically stronger sex?

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Lock In

In the not-too-distant future, a flu-like epidemic has swept the globe. Of those who aren’t killed outright, a small but significant proportion develop a neurological complication that renders them conscious but paralysed – the Lock Ins of the title. Referred to as “Hadens” after a former (fictional) FLOTUS, an early contractor of the syndrome, they are implanted with complex nano-technology and able to interact with the outside world through the use of cybernetic prostheses. So yeah. Mind-controlled robots. A minuscule number of individuals are also left with their neurological structures affected in such a way that they can interface with Hadens, acting for short periods as their proxies (known as “integrators”).

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Bats of the Republic

What to say about this novel? I can, I suppose, outline the basic structure: it’s set partly in 1840s USA (including Texas, which was an independent republic at the time, a fact I did not previously know) and partly in what I suppose would have to be described as a post-apolalyptic totalitarian steampunk dystopia. Somehow these worlds are connected by a prophetic novel written by a past character – are we reading that, or are we reading what actually happens in the future? And does an old book discovered in the future world actually relate events that happened in the past, or is it a fictionalised account of the actions of people that apparently existed?

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The New World

Jane turns her phone on after a flight to learn that her husband Jim, hale and healthy a few hours ago, has died. When she arrives at the hospital where they both work, she finds his body is there only from the neck down: his head has been removed by a strange organisation, Polaris, and placed in cryogenic storage at Jim’s request. From there, the narrative bifurcates, alternating chapters between Jane’s grief and fight against Polaris, and Jim’s reawakening sometime in the distant future.

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American Gods

Holidays are not a good time for downer reads. I knew this in theory, but it really sank in when, during a week in a beach house surrounded by my best friends, I attempted to read a book featuring a love story between a suicidal junkie and a needle exchange volunteer. Can you even imagine? I got, to my credit, a third of the way through it, before putting a pin in it and scanning back through my Kindle for a more holiday-friendly re-read. American Gods is what I came up with.

For me, a lover of fantasy generally and of Neil Gaiman in particular, diving back into this novel was like that first gulp of Friday night wine after a long, stressful working week. The premise, simply put, is that all of the gods ever worshipped by humans really exist; belief somehow generates them, and, since every culture eventually ends up in America, their adherents have brought them all there at some point. Continue reading American Gods

To Say Nothing of the Dog

Anyone who followed the Morning News’s Tournament of Books this year (which I assume – possibly naively –  includes everyone I know) may recall Nicole Cliffe’s judging round, in which she wrote, of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, the following:

“Station Eleven turned out to be the fiction equivalent of the 121st episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Kamala, played by the luminous Famke Janssen, is an empathic metamorph designed to adapt herself to become the perfect mate for an important diplomat. She winds up adapting to Picard, instead — it’s a great episode, you should watch it. And in this metaphor I am Picard, and Station Eleven is Kamala. It would be impossible for a book to be better suited for me. It is unfair that I have been placed in a position to evaluate its merits at all.”

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The Peripheral

There is a certain mythology surrounding William Gibson. According to legend, Neuromancer, his debut novel and the one in which he popularised the word “cyberspace” (a word he had previously coined), was written entirely on a typewriter. Later, when he bought his first Apple Macintosh, rumour has it that he was so alarmed by the whirring sound of the CPU that he called technical support and reported it broken. Half a lifetime ago, when I was studying the theory of information systems in first year uni, I first heard the idea (which will be familiar to sci-fi nerds of all stripes) that his greatest weakness was also the key to his strength: because he wasn’t bound by “facts” or “knowledge” about what computers could actually do, he was free to imagine what they might one day be capable of doing. Continue reading The Peripheral