First ever hustings

As part of the whole “General Election 2024” thing, I went to my first hustings event ever last night. It was being run out of our local library (and likely polling station) by a local church which uses this for worship on Sundays. Pleasingly, all six candidates standing in my seat were able to make it to the hustings, and they took pre-selected questions from the audience for a little more than an hour.

Not having been to a hustings before, but being very tired of the tedious shouting matches of Any Questions on Radio 4, I was expecting more heat than light, but thankfully it didn't work out that way.

Bar two brief moments, there was little anger on display. The first of those moments came when an Australian (I think) attendee, in response to a question he’d asked ostensibly around support for working people, interjected to ask our sitting MP to talk about immigration - which was tersely and efficiently put down by the MP. The second was when the Reform candidate, while bemoaning the international responses to current conflicts (emphasis on the moaning part there), was heckled by an audience member asking if he’d get rid of NATO. In both cases, these flare-ups were quickly extinguished, and the bulk of the evening was conducted without rancour.

Also unlike similar set-ups on radio and television, the candidates didn't interrupt, jeer or otherwise interact much with each other. They did take account of what other candidates said, but mostly only positively to re-emphasise points, or for humorous effect. While that made the event rather bloodless, it also made it more of an edifying spectacle than it routinely is with broadcast questions-and-answers shows.

In terms of performances of the candidates, they all cleared the low-bar of sounding confident in front of an audience of uncertain political character, which wasn't a given as two of them were only in their early twenties. Needless to say, the long-sitting MP, Caroline Nokes, was comfortably the most competent in this department, with her many years of experience in, or at the edge of, government (including fighting her own party from time to time).

The weakest performance was from a “pro-life” independent candidate, who, somewhat to my surprise, got more of a positive hearing than I'd expected … having not factored-in the ecclesiastical nature of the audience. Having only a one-issue platform - and *what* an issue - she was pretty unconvincing, and had to demure on several questions where the connection to abortion was especially thin. She also claimed never to have heard the expression “levelling-up” putting her even more clearly in the out-of-touch category.

Another weak performance was from the Reform candidate. Many of his answers were just word salads made from oft-repeated populist ramblings. On a moment-to-moment basis they were coherent, but they didn't say anything substantive and often completely failed to answer the question put. But, despite coasting on thinly-veiled xenophobia and unfocused disgruntlement, he seemed to have an appreciative segment of the audience. (For an anti-immigration candidate he made the schoolboy gaffe of referring repeatedly to his extensive working abroad, something his ideology was very keen to stop other people doing - not that the essential hypocrisy of his position was understood by his supporters.)

Our Labour candidate gave a reasonable though unsparklingly performance, clearly due to her relative inexperience. In what looks like an unwinnable situation this time around, she'll hopefully at least cut her teeth on it.

The LibDem candidate - best-placed to challenge the sitting MP - gave a very competent performance that, for me at least, clearly made tactical voting an option for voters. That said, in response to a question about life experiences to learn from, he made a massive gaffe of oversharing a tale of falling for a mail-order Russian bride. He recovered, somewhat, by emphasising what he'd learned from the whole affair (namely: listen to people who tell you you're flagrantly being scammed), but it was a very strange moment in the room. He needs to dial that sort of unnecessary honesty right down.

There was a very good performance from the young Green candidate. Not exactly convincing to me, and he would have come unstuck if other candidates had a right-to-reply, but very spirited and potentially someone going somewhere down the line. And the only candidate to clearly challenge the sacred cow of Brexit, and also to rebut the claims of “wokery” in public life from the Reform candidate.

Finally, Caroline Nokes gave, as already mentioned, a solid and assured performance. As a Tory, my overlap with her politics is limited, but she's proven herself as a principled politician, and I can't but respect the way she's stood her ground against some of the worst impulses of her party. However, she did also give a terribly fawning answer around the leadership of Sunak that overlooked flaws in his record that, at times, aren't a million miles from his predecessors that she's clashed with. Nonetheless, she's the kind of politician that the Tory Party of recent decades needs to keep hold of, but I suspect she may be on her way out.

Overall, an interesting evening. Difficult to describe as enjoyable, but a more tolerable experience than I’d feared. Whether it worked to inform undecided voters I’m far less confident of. I suspect most people there were motivated by already strong political viewpoints, ones unlikely to be altered by how the evening played out.

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Stray observations ...

• There wasn't any attempt to characterise the audience by a raising of hands, or determine whether anyone had their voting intentions changed by the event. Possibly efforts this way would have caused more trouble than they're worth, but it would still have been interesting to hear if anyone had been moved by the words of the candidates.
• I knew already from her talking about it in the media, but it was still something to see that Caroline Nokes has bodyguards attending events with her. It's a little sad that even quite good-natured public events like this one require this, but given attacks on MPs in recent years, it seems well-advised.
• In passing, as Ms. Nokes is my sitting MP, she's been in receipt of several missives from me down the years. I have to say that, while I haven't always agreed with her responses, I've always found her replies clear, thoughtful and honest (not to mention punctual). She's definitely what you want in an MP - it's just unfortunate she's representing a party that's so decisively lost its way.

Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson

Interstellar colonisation is a staple of science fiction, both on the page and screen. It's usually presented as a given, with the action unspooling against its long-established background. Robinson's novel, Aurora, instead focuses on the trials of the journey, and the consequences of finding out that your new home isn't what you hoped.

Written largely from the viewpoint of Freya, daughter of the ship's current chief engineer, Devi, the novel starts in the final deceleration phase of the multi-generational voyage to Aurora, a habitable moon of the "nearby" star, Tau Ceti. While her mother nurtures the ship's AI to deal with the ecological difficulties of the journey, Freya's early life is occupied by the traditions and culture that have risen up to cope with its parallel sociological pressures. Arriving at Aurora is an exhilarating - if alien - experience, with the first batch of colonists having to adjust to its empty beauty and challenging climate. However, Aurora is not as lifeless or as habitable as it appears, and a prion-like disease quickly kills these pioneers, forcing Freya and her remaining fellow travellers to reconsider their plans. After an acrimonious and violent dispute, quelled by the AI, they split into Remainers and Returners, with Freya choosing to return to an Earth she has never known. But the ship's ecological problems continue to mount, forcing an emergency adoption of new cryogenic technology from Earth to hibernate its crew. On the long journey back, the AI keeps a careful watch, reflects on the voyage, and plans for a complex reentry to the solar system, largely unassisted by a disinterested Earth. The novel closes with Freya, having survived the return voyage, adjusting to the rest of her life on Earth, with its boundless sky and ocean.

While not a sequel in a straightforward, continuity way, Aurora's story of interstellar colonisation aligns with KSR's Mars trilogy and Icehenge novels which, while not following this path, clearly allude to it. In these other novels, the venture appears as pioneering, future-facing endeavour, but Aurora instead explores the hubris of the idea, and the consequences faced by those caught up in it.

Overall, while I enjoyed completing and reflecting on Aurora, it's a long and occasionally frustrating read. Freya can be annoying, and I was actually quite furious with her when, after the (admittedly crushing) setback on Aurora, she decided to give up and return to Earth. At that point, which is a fair way into the novel, I wanted to know more about the new solar system, and not just head back to Earth, which, in any case, had already lost interest in the colonists. However, KSR's choice to have her return really makes the novel. It takes it from a detailed tale of the technology and challenges of travel and arrival, and adds a consideration of the motivation of the voyage's instigators, and their lack of consideration of the lives of those consigned to live out their pipe dreams. It also brings the ship's AI to the fore, as it picks up the narrative for almost all of the return journey. Easily my favourite character in the whole book, it was a joy to read its thoughts on the endeavour, and I was gutted by its heroic end ensuring that its human charges are safely delivered to Earth (its self-sacrifice softened by its knowledge of a job well done).

Anti-Dystopian Future History

The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

The standard model for climate change fiction is a narrative of calamity piling up, or of living among calamity. The fact that our system for living, one we support time and time again through our democracy, embeds us as part of the problem (some, admittedly, much more than others) seems to make divergence from a path to this calamity difficult to imagine.

But mapping out how this divergence could occur - scientifically, technologically, socioeconomically, ethically, and even spiritually - is Robinson's aim here. The central, eponymous concept is the creation, under the Paris Agreement, of a Ministry for the Future, a UN body focused on representing future generations and non-human residents of Earth. In Robinson's telling, this Ministry uses its limited budget in a precisely targeted way, finding the physical and - especially - the financial fulcrums where small changes can exact large gains.

But that's the philosophical backdrop. The novel itself opens with, appropriately for the subgenre, a calamitous near-future heatwave in continental India that, over a few days, kills tens of millions of people. This event unsettles the global order, with India's Hindu nationalist political class toppled, and solar radiation management (SRM) geoengineering unilaterally undertaken by the nation. It also motivates its characters, providing a clear view of the peril for the Ministry's head, Mary Murphy, and fuelling the rage of Frank May, an aid worker survivor of the heatwave. Their paths become entangled as the novel progresses over several decades, but much of the novel is a tapestry woven from parallel stories. These are told both by other inhabitants of the imperiled world and, fancifully, from the perspective of inanimate objects like a photon, a carbon atom and the Market.

While the overarching focus is climate change, as the novel progresses this broadens to encompass two key facets of this: refugees and biodiversity. Many of the strands, and especially those of Frank, deal with the trials, traumas and then resolutions of people forced to migrate directly by climate change, or indirectly because of its downstream societal impacts. In Robinson’s 21st century, after decades of strife, the world ultimately adopts a system explicitly modelled on the Nansen Passport scheme from the early 20th century. In parallel, he creates a Half-Earth movement that slowly but steadily drives societies to cede half of the Earth’s land area to nature, consolidating existing communities in cities, and allowing wildlife to recover in the wake of their retreat.

Wearing my Earth scientist hat, it’s refreshing, if ever so slightly uncomfortable, to read a climate change novel in which science doesn't play the dominant role in its resolution. It’s clearly important in framing the problem, and in monitoring its resolution, but the most successful drivers come from the economic and societal changes that the Ministry (and other bodies) engineer. Markets are tamed and repurposed via a carbon currency, financial transparency is hard-wired via a blockchain that destroys secrecy and corruption, and social media is democratised to put its power back into the hands of its users. And, as readers of his Mars trilogy of novels will attest, Robinson puts a lot of imaginative effort into how exactly these socioeconomic forces might be realised - arguably a little too much effort in some particularly dry segments.

An aspect I found intriguing, and liable to cause Robinson some trouble, is the novel's attitude to geoengineering. As mentioned already, SRM geoengineering plays an early and successful role in the novel, although it's clearly labelled as a temporary, placeholder fix in the narrative. But the novel also runs with icesheet management geoengineering, essentially pumping out the meltwater that lubricates icesheet collapse, and touches briefly on a novel (to me) mode of "staining" the waters of the Arctic Ocean to decrease its warming. These are all presented as successful needs-must approaches - a view of the potential role of geoengineering that I share myself, but a likely contentious one for environmentally-inclined fellow-travellers. For many, the moral hazard argument against geoengineering (sometimes even against just contemplating it) is simply unsurpassable. On a not-dissimilar note, Robinson doesn't shy away from issues of population, particularly where demographic transition in his imagined future brings benefits. Again, liable to upset some in the environmental movement who - with some justification - are ideologically opposed to contemplating this facet of Earth's problems.

Notwithstanding all of the foregoing positives, the novel isn't without its weaknesses. Principally in the character of Frank, whose role in the narrative is just too muddy - particularly so given he's introduced in such a pivotal way, and then precipitates a fateful run-in with Mary. But his arc quickly runs out of steam, and he becomes an ill-defined foil to Mary's more prominent narrative. More generally, the episodic nature of the novel - which has many "ecological sci-fi" precedents, including Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar and Brin's Earth - has a habit here of introducing then dropping threads that were just getting interesting. For instance, the whole "black ops" wing of the Ministry tantalisingly appears and then disappointingly evaporates, lost, seemingly, in a crush of competing threads. Plus, as already noted, Robinson's excitable fleshing out of some of his socioeconomic solutions can be tinder-dry at times.

But the ambition and scale of the novel absolves it of all of these problems. It’s easily the most realistic “climate positive” novel I’ve read. It may sound stupid out of context, but it’s quite the thing to read of atmospheric CO2 not just peaking but actually dropping, and dropping fast (5 ppm per year) by the end of the novel. I had to stop when I read that, as continual CO2 rise is just a simple, lifelong fact. But it’s not exactly a happy-clappy utopian novel, where the penny suddenly drops for everyone and we all start behaving sensibly. Instead, it's much more of an anti-dystopian tale, in which the planetary handbrake turn that’s executed is actually the result of the slow accumulation of multiple credible steps. So this feeds into a sense of realism and, for me at least, a more genuine positivity about the future.

I should conclude by noting that I finished reading it in the same week as I watched the darkly satirical Don’t Look Up. While that’s an excellent howl of a movie, one that doesn’t offer anything by way of a solution (or really intend to), this is much closer to the real deal. But the contrast between them was enjoyable to savour. I’ll be recommending it to my Earth science colleagues, but I think it’d be an enjoyable and informative read for anyone. If - characteristically for Robinson - a long one.

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Stray observations:

• I thought it was only me who was imagining something like the Half-Earth movement. Obviously not. It’s not a concept that I’ve seen written down before, but it seemed like a pretty good idea to me - and clearly to Robinson too. Of course, long-term I’d like to see a Whole-Earth movement in which we abandon the Earth to do interesting things elsewhere, leaving our cradle free for successor species … 
• Much like the Mars trilogy, Robinson has a nice section near the end where a major character takes a trip that allows the world that he’s built-up to shine. Here, more so than in the Mars triology, this feels necessary - like it shows what our efforts could achieve if we do the right thing, both by the Earth and by those living in it who are less fortunate than ourselves. In a literature dominated by abundant dystopias, giving a vision of how things could be different hit the spot for me. Ditto, as already mentioned, the novel’s late turnaround point when atmospheric pCO2 starts decreasing. 
• Another intriguing suggestion of Robinson’s is that advances in computing, AI and automation (none of which seem unreasonable) favour a kind of “Red Plenty” economics. Essentially, the market is (I think) streamlined and out-guessed by computing systems to the point that its purported efficiencies are unnecessary. It’s the portion of the novel where it feels closest to utopian thinking, but there’s still at least a veneer of realism. 
• It’s kind-of funny to contrast how David Brin’s corresponding stab at the future, Earth, treats the Swiss compared to here. For Robinson, they’re kind-of a beacon of sanity - albeit one with flaws - whereas Brin just made them the bad guys, what with their secret banking and mountains of gold. (Admittedly, he does claim that he did it for the surprise value.) 
• As an oceanographer, I can’t let the novel’s passing reference to the ocean that I’ve reproduced below go unmentioned. While it’s negative about the prospects for us doing anything to help the ocean, I can’t say that I disagree. Absorbing so much heat and CO2, it’s been extensively perturbed, and on a scale that we’d struggle to redress. So I’d agree with Robinson that probably the best we can do is stop making things worse, and allow it to just recover on its own.

• I mentioned the strange position of Frank in the novel before, but the late and completely unnecessary introduction of a potential romantic partner for Mary is another strange misstep. It’s brief, and just a small part of the “Earth is healing” segment near the end, but it’s pretty glaringly incongruous in a novel that’s otherwise quite disinterested in its characters’ emotional lives.

Heads, Greg Bear

This is a reread of something I must have first (and last) read 30 years ago. It's novella length, but its inventiveness and audacity have kept it memorable when other titles have long since faded away. So it was interesting to see if its legacy holds up.

Entirely Moon-set, it's narrated by Micko, a junior member of a family company (or "Binding Multiple", BM) charged with managing the affairs of his brother-in-law William's low temperature laboratory, the Ice Cave, which is teetering on the brink of an Absolute Zero breakthrough. With excess cooling capacity available, Micko's sister, and William's wife, Rho, brings a pet family history project from Earth: a mixed batch of cryogenically frozen heads from the early 21st century. While effectively dead meat, scientific advances convince Rho the heads can be "read", potentially opening a link to the great-grandparents who founded their BM. But the arrival of the heads triggers unexpected friction with other BMs, including strong pushback from the Moon's president, a member of a religiously-affiliated BM. Micko and the wider BM are caught off-guard by this hostility, until he guesses - correctly - whose head accompanies those of his great-grandparents, triggering revelations but with tragic consequences.

… And it's still excellent. Its length definitely keeps it punchy, but it's really impressive just how much Bear squeezes in. I've not even mentioned the Quantum Logic (QL) thinker - the AI controlling William's experiments - above, but its cool, alien pronouncements are a real joy. And I'm even more impressed on rereading just how vicious it is in its takedown of its thinly-veiled proxies for real-world Scientology. Bear's Logologists are transparently stand-ins for L. Ron Hubbard's cult, and he’s brutal in laying bare the reality of its formation and malevolent perpetuation.

If I had to criticise it at all, the denouement is a little raced-over compared to the preceding. But, otherwise, it stands the test of time, and is easily worth the hour or two needed to read it. It works both as a hard sci-fi yarn on Absolute Zero, and as a devastating strike on a vexatious and malign cult.

All Her Father's Guns, James Warner

An inconsistent, pleased-with-its-own-cleverness, shambling mess of a novel. Full of characters too caricatured to engage with or to like, its attempt to satirise gun culture, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the early 21st century GOP basically falls flat on its face. Physically, it's actually a thin novel, but it takes far (far) longer to wade through than you'd expect. By the end of it, I already only barely remembered its twisty, desperately flailing incoherence. And the coda, which tries to reframe one half of the novel as a reconstruction by the other half, felt like a post-modern slap in the face. Embarrassingly, I bought this one as a present - which makes it all the more annoying. One to avoid.

Love Is Blind, William Boyd

While more restricted in its scale than usual, Love Is Blind sits on the fictional biography shelf of Boyd's canon, taking in much of a single character's life, rather than a more focused, eventful interlude.

This time, it's the life of professional piano tuner, Brodie Moncur, who we first encounter in late 19th century Edinburgh. Charged with helping expand a piano selling business, he's sent to Paris, setting in motion a lifetime on the move, and entwining his path with that of opera singer, Lydia Blum. But Lydia's life is already bound to that of a brilliant, flawed Irish musician, John Kilbarron, forcing Brodie into years of compromise and subterfuge.

An outline of this novel does no justice to the detail Boyd that invests into Brodie's life and times. Whether it's the careful description of how he plies his trade, efficient travelogue on the countries and cities he lives in, or observations on societal change as the pace of life accelerates into the 20th century, Boyd's writing absorbs you into Brodie's world. For one, early on I doubted how interested I could be in the art of piano tuning, but it wasn't long before it became fascinating. I was reminded in this of a similar transformation in Roth's American Pastoral, where glove manufacture is similarly compellingly described.

If it lacks at all, it's only because the focus on characters is narrower, and it's shorter in historical scope than his other biographical works, where wars and larger mass movements come into view. But, as Boyd always is, it's still a very enjoyable and easy read. That's not a criticism, it's testament to his skill at so deftly writing an inviting other world.

Summary: it's been too long Mr Boyd - write faster!

A Line Of Forgotten Blood, Malcolm MacKay

Hitherto, MacKay's books have taken place in a stripped-back, contemporary Scotland, amped-up by stylish prose and meditative criminal protagonists. So my expectations here were for something similar, but in a more Caithness-ish setting.

However, there's more to the change of scene than just a journey northward.

In outline, it's a well-told crime caper, with good-guy private investigators rubbing up against bad-uns from a centuries-old banking family and their compliant local police force. Unexpectedly, it doesn't really have the distinctive pared-back styling of MacKay's other work. Darian Ross, the PI lead, *is* somewhat in the meditative mode, but the prose is otherwise quite a break with MacKay's earlier, Glasgow-set tales.

And, in what should be an even bigger break with MacKay's other work, this is actually an Alternative History novel. I'd not read its predecessor novel, so it crept up on me gradually, but the deep background is a timeline in which Scotland's failed 17th century Darien Scheme actually worked, aborting the United Kingdom. As it happens, this seismic change in history actually makes for only a slightly tilted version of the present day. This might be MacKay musing on Scottish independence, but, if so, it's very low-key musing, to the point that you wonder what he's trying to say, or why he bothered.

Still, as this is part of a series of novels, he may yet be going places with this idea. In the meantime, this is a perfectly enjoyable novel, if not up to his usual distinctive standard.

Axiom's End, Lindsay Ellis

Cora is not having a good time. Her low rent existence is already a mess of government intrusion because of her dead-beat and secrets-leaking father. But into this comes a nearby "meteorite crash" that unleashes an alien with an interest in these extraterrestrial secrets and what exactly Cora knows about them. After a rocky start involving Cora's kidnap and fitting with a tracker / mind control technology, a reversal in the fortunes of the alien, dubbed Ampersand, forces a more balanced relationship. But this new bond brings an honesty that reveals the reason for Ampersand's visit and the unwelcome implications for humanity's future.

It'd be a more than a little rude to describe this as a mash-up of a First Contact story and the Mismatched Buddy genre, but that's not entirely inaccurate. What starts as something a little like "Predator" , with Cora stalked by a powerful alien with invisibility technology, becomes more like "Leon", with Cora becoming front-of-house for Ampersand's tetchy stand-off with the US authorities. And it works through all of this, with both leads becoming more filled-out as the novel progresses, and with a solid first contact backstory slowly teased out.

Definitely recommended.

One thing that did slightly irk me is that, for reasons that never became clear, this is also a period piece set towards the end of Dubya's tenure as US President. While this does allow the author to alternative-history defenestrate him, it's never really a big thing in the book, so comes across as merely a quirky choice. Perhaps it's trying to draw a parallel between the fictional government keeping alien secrets, and the real one hiding war-on-terror ones, but, if so, it's never drawn out definitively.

Seven Devils, Elizabeth May & Laura Lam

Having had a great run of sci-fi recently (thanks entirely to C's book-picking skills), a correction was inevitable. Seven Devils, an unusually two-handed affair, delivers this in spades. Its sole distinction is a primarily female cast in what's routinely a male-led genre, but everything else is wholly unoriginal, a poor copy of a copy of a copy. A poly-galactic evil empire, a despotic ruling family, the inevitable sequence of run-ins with scions of said family, lazy archetypal characters that include the plucky one, the clever one, the tortured-by-their-past one, etc. On top of this, it's also profoundly stupid. It has zero consideration or even awareness of scale, with the protagonists hopping between galaxies in minutes, and across which the empire has a mere *hundreds* of colonies. The empire is also said to have killed many billions of people (and aliens), but a key plot device is a so-called super-weapon that kills *individual* enemies (though, via another MacGuffin, ultimately kills more). Further, despite this background of proper genocide, the lead characters somehow find time to agonise endlessly about their individual transgressions. While the authors are clearly investing their own worthy opinions into the characters, they're oblivious as to whether those views plausibly stack up against the horror of the world described. They patently don't, and the novel fails at every turn, talking about Big Issues while floundering around in a breakneck series of weightless and faux-clever episodes. Other crimes include adding "diversity" by having a character speaking with Oor Wullie-style Scottish vernacular (to indicate they come from solid working-class stock), having regular occurrences of convenient, dig-me-out-of-this-plot-hole technology to get around plot ridiculousness, and, I kid not, "auras".

While I am entirely behind the socially-aware, feminist ideas that the authors clearly started from, this is a poor vehicle for promoting them. Vapid, lazy, inconsistent, and just plain stupid. Avoid this book.

Baghdad Central, Elliott Colla

Having seen the TV series, and being a fan of the crime subgenre "crime drama in an exotic / foreign locale", this was a shoe-in.

It's set in the "wild west" of the aftermath of 2003's falsely-prosecuted and calamitous invasion of Iraq, as the invaders try to rebuild the society they shattered for the sake of its tyrannical leadership. Its moral centre is Muhsin al-Khafaji, a man that the Iraqi state has already robbed of his wife and son, and for whom the US and UK invasion threatens to take much more. After being mistaken for a culpable member of the previous regime and brutalised in prison, he is co-opted into the process of rebuilding Iraq's police service. But, with a growing insurgency, collaboration with the invading coalition is precarious for al-Khafaji and for those around him. Especially when some of them are profiteering from the chaos, while others are using it with a very different endpoint in mind for Iraq.

Overall, this is great. It got a little too complicated for me to completely follow as it approached the end. But everything else works, so this was easy to forgive. I thought that one of its best aspects were the distressing vignettes describing daily life for Iraqis after the invasion. In just a page or two, each one is a study in how lives can be made powerless and desperate by the fallout of war. Alongside the central narrative, they provide a searing commentary on the stupidity, venal arrogance and unforgivable recklessness of "Gulf War II".

Having now read this book and watched its (excellent) adaptation, it's interesting to compare and contrast. On screen, the powerful vignettes are lost, presumably because the faster, rolling narrative of TV doesn't favour brief tangential interludes. But the plot is nicely straightened-out, facilitated by the addition of a snarling British antagonist to stand-in for the worst aspects of the invasion. While I should perhaps be offended - especially when the leading American characters are presented as honourably making the best of their government's mess - this change feels about right: letting us carry the can for a national stain we brought on ourselves.

The Golden Scales, Parker Bilal

Another day, another crime story set in an exotic foreign locale. This time the Cairo, and surrounds, familiar to its author, Bilal, the alias of Sudan-raised Jamal Mahjoub.

It's an efficient mix of crime sparked by modern money rubbing up against much older cultures, framed around a missing child and a missing footballer. While there's a certain familiarity for the reader in working out how the two strands are entwined, this is offset by solid writing backed-up by Bilal's personal experience.

I'll definitely be following up with its sequels.

The Second Sleep, Robert Harris

Sent by his Bishop to officiate the funeral of a fellow cleric, Christopher Fairfax discovers a brewing heresy in the impoverished rural backwaters of southwest England. But, contrary to its seeming Dark Ages setting, this heresy involves the mysterious collapse of the unbelieving technological society that came before. His own interest piqued by the heresy, Fairfax quickly finds himself ensnared in an attempt to uncover forbidden knowledge from the past.

A surprising disappointment this one. Surprising because Harris has a knack of taking a high concept idea, and writing an efficient thriller around it. He's probably most famous for Fatherland, his alternative history novel in which a Nazi detective in a victorious Third Reich discovers the suppressed Holocaust. But I also rather liked his AI-infused The Fear Index, in which a hedge fund manager is out-foxed by the awakening of his algorithm.

Here, what seems like a solid gold starting point (especially now, given the pandemic) unravels as Harris fails to approach anything like a satisfying ending. Instead, the novel peters out in a rather incoherent climax that, it seemed to me, he tries to hide under the guise of Fairfax's incomprehension. The concluding revelations also fail to offer anything immediately relevant to Fairfax's world - contrary to the front cover blurb, "what if your future lies in the past?".

Overall, best just read A Canticle For Leibowitz and see how this high concept can be done properly.

Bone Silence, Alastair Reynolds

This is the third and, for now, concluding novel in Reynolds' spaceships and pirates mash-up series. What seemed (to me) an incongruous and implausible basis for even a single book has now successfully skirted the treacherous shoals for a complete trilogy.

It picks up directly from its predecessor, which concluded with the series' leads, the Ness Sisters, unwittingly triggering a financial disaster that reset the values of the solar system's mysterious currency, quoins. Now even more on the run, and with still larger prices on their heads, their voyage intersects with that of a fugative alien who promises answers in exchange for safe passage. All of which triggers a swashbuckling chain of adventures that ultimately reveals much more about the solar system and its history than the Ness Sisters had bargained on.

A very enjoyable and satisfying "end" to the series. It does tend to accelerate the revelations towards the end, probably not giving them their due, but it's nice to have some mysteries resolved. However, given the novel resolves one suite of mysteries with a "solution" that suggests many new ones (in addition to those, like the Ghosties and Skulls, that still remain), I doubt this is really the last we've seen of Adrana and Arafura. Good!

Recommended, even if you find the pirates-in-space premise absurd.

The Space Between Worlds, Micaiah Johnson

There is a multiverse. The histories of several hundred universes are close enough to our own to permit travel between them. But jumping to a world in which you exist is invariably fatal - the multiverse is unforgiving in this regard. As a result, the most valuable travellers are those already dead in other worlds. Something that's all too easy for the poor and dispossessed in our ruined post-apocalyptic world.

What an excellent debut novel! Every part of it works brilliantly - from its well-drawn (and frequently-duplicated) characters, through the slow-reveal of its setting, to the unfolding of its satisfyingly twisty plot. The author takes what's now become a familiar trope - the parallel world - and spins off their own fresh version, complete with duplicate-prohibition, a travellers mythology of how Mother Nature enforces it, and a zeitgeisty meditation on a class- and race-stratified society.

Early on, I had a feeling of overfamiliarity with its post-apocalyptic dystopian future, but it didn't take long to reveal itself as something more unique, and cleverly so to boot. In particular, its use of duplicated characters - some very familiar between worlds, some very different - is excellent. Both in illuminating the vicissitudes of life's paths, and making for a wonderfully finely-tuned plot as the narrator, Cara, leverages her growing knowledge of the multiverse to topple the tyrant that rules the one she has come to call home.

For sci-fi, it's worth remarking that the writing is well above and beyond too. It's sparing but hits the sweet spot of world building while avoiding "Basil Exposition". Ditto, its characters are far more subtly drawn than the genre typically manages, which works particularly in a plot that requires its actors multiple shades.

Overall, simply excellent. (And a novel that practically screams "make me into a film".)

Mr Loverman, Bernardine Evaristo

It's easy to take pot shots at prizes in the arts. Distilling the distinctive, diaphanous and diverse into a "Best Of" list is crass and hierarchical, and even risks imposing an accepted version of the world using works that are unrepresentative of the wider culture. But, at their best, prizes can work to throw light on an artist hitherto lost in art's ocean. So it is, for me anyway, with Evaristo. Winning the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other has led me, and probably many others, first to it, and then to her back-catalogue, including Mr Loverman.

This time around, the protagonist is very male, and while the novel's chorus includes his wife and daughters, it's really all about Barrington Jedidiah Walker. Originally from Antigua, Barrington - Barry - is Windrush generation, made good through the 1980s as a property developer, and now successful and semi-retired. Also, Barry is gay, and closeted, something that his long-term beau, Morris, would like them both to rectify. However, after a lifetime of hiding his true self, Barry is struggling with how to change, with the consequences it will wreak for his family, and with the searing memories of less tolerant times. And while Barry procrastinates, his wife, Carmel, reflects on her own life, and how their situation has imprisoned her aspirations and happiness. But change is coming whether Barry is ready for it or not.

What a brilliant book. Principally through the voice that Evaristo gives to Barry’s thoughts, fears and desires. He’s a great character to be in the company of, and credibly well-rounded with his missteps and failings showing. Ditto the supporting cast of Morris, Carmel, Barry’s divergent daughters, and Carmel’s church group. Evaristo sketches the latter well, first as the harridens perceived by Barry, but then more clearly as supportive friends, much put-upon by the men in their lives. But, more or less, this is Barry’s book, and it’s difficult not to warm to, and be both amused and touched by his stumbling emergence from the closet. Even (or especially) as he self-aggrandisingly reports to Morris that, “I ain’t no homosexual, I am a … Barrysexual!”

Inland, Téa Obreht

Some books you race through, enjoying the whole journey and missing it when it's done. Meanwhile, some books you read to the end because you're hoping it gets better or makes sense there. Set in 19th century America, Inland straddles the divide by alternating the narrative between a straightforward and well-told tale of frontier life, and a largely incoherent but intermittently fascinating parallel tale involving camels. In the former, a wife and mother is stuck waiting at home, slowly coming to the realisation that her husband and sons may not be returning, while steadily falling prey to ghosts from her past. In the latter, an immigrant from the Ottoman Empire falls in with the real-life United States Camel Corps in a trek across the West, largely traced out in conversations with the dromedary camel he befriends. In principle, the latter could have been great (and is, though only sporadically), but Obreht goes out of her way to make it incomprensible, with characters with multiple names, uncertainty about who's a camel and who's a human, and far (far) too much about ghosts. But while reading it, I largely overlooked this in the expectation that the two narratives would come together and make complete sense. They do, but they don't, and the novel ends on a downbeat note, where one narrative strand resolves clearly, the other rather unravels, and the whole is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. But there is great writing most of the way here, but it feels a little wasted by the author's commitment to incoherence (they might say "mystery"). I'd go as far to say that the book would work much better with the second strand entirely expurgated.

An African In Greenland, Tété-Michel Kpomassie

An unusual (for me) foray into non-fiction with this rather unique ethnographic travelogue. I caught reference to it in a brief magazine report on BBC News 24 a few months ago, but an intriguing enough one to pick up the book.

In outline, a boy in Africa discovers Greenland and its native Inuit in a book, then spends several years steadily travelling through Africa and then Europe before finally taking the final leg to Greenland by sea. It sounds like a work of magical realism, but it's actually a richly detailed description of this journey, and of the author's subsequent time in various Greenland towns on the Labrador Sea coast.

And what detail! Kpomassie has an excellent eye, and a real gift in the telling. Whether it's the range of reactions to his colour and imposing size, the unique Greenlandic living and cultural practices, the extensive friendships he forms, his adventures on the sea or on the ice, or his gruelling (for a vegetarian) descriptions of local cuisine, it's all told with engaging flair. It helps that Kpomassie makes friends easily, bringing him into contact with a range of fascinating (and occasionally alarming) characters. His ability to rock up in a new city, town or fishing village, and then find himself digs with locals at (seemingly) the drop of a hat is really quite something. And his unique heritage and winning ways with local women certainly made me wonder if he made a longer-term mark on the Greenlandic gene pool!

Where the book sags a bit is in its episodic nature and its absence of a strong narrative journey - inevitable given it's a travelogue of a real actual journey. But the tale it tells is so good, the situations, the people, and the society so unique, that the book easily carries you with it. Well worth checking out.

Finally, Kpomassie's journey having taken place in the 1960s, it's also sobering to reflect on the climatic and cultural changes that the intervening decades have wrought.

Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson

Epic in every way - in complexity, in characterisation, in actual physical weight - it's a strange feeling to finally finish KSR's exceptional future history of Martian terraforming. It's great to turn the last page on something I've been labouring under for weeks (*months* if the two preceding tomes are factored in), but it's been such an all-encompassing and absorbing book that I'm going to miss it a bit too.

In pocket summary, it picks up as the second - and successful - Martian revolution is concluding, on a Mars newly liberated from a flash-flooded Earth. Thanks to anti-aging medical technology, much of the original cast of Red Mars is still with us, together with their first and second generation children. These assorted narrators take us through factional Red (pristine, lifeless) and Green (transformed, bountiful) fights, fumbling efforts to kick-start Martian politics, and the solar system-wide issue of humanity's abundance in the wake of this anti-aging.

However, that description can't touch just how ridiculously broad the canvas here is. As well as the geology of Mars and the science of its transformation (both global *and* local), the socio-economics of its political awakening, and the gathering pace of solar system expansion, the novel finds time to take in (among other things) life in southeast England on a drowned Earth, sex-and-hunting cults on Mars, and the impact of low Martian gravity for regular and extreme sports. KSR can't even leave his convenient narrative trick of anti-aging alone, and embarks on a fully fleshed-out subplot digging into biological senescence and memory.

Inevitably, not all of this works, and I suspect readers will find themselves skim-reading the themes that don't interest them as much. For me, I couldn't care as much about political theory as KSR clearly does. But then I just couldn't get enough of the Red vs. Green tussles of Ann and Sax, or the scientific detail of Mars' animation, from global geoengineering to gardening its microclimates. And there's a great stretch where Nirgal, a first generation child, takes part in a solitary, round-the-world marathon (Mars-athon?), which really opened my eyes to seeing Mars as a (potential) physical, living-and-breathing place.

So almost impossible not to recommend to science fiction fans, but it's a real taskmaster of a trilogy of novels. But, I think, absolutely worth it.

Daemon's Departure

The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman

Unlike the first volume, which largely tees up His Dark Materials (HDM), this second volume of The Book Of Dust picks up afterwards, and sets a now 20-something Lyra and, more significantly, her daemon Pantalaimon, on another adventure against the revitalised Magisterium.

Motivated by a murder, mysterious goings-on in a distant desert, and the now-fractious relationship between Lyra and Pantalaimon, this is another exceptionally entertaining, fast-paced and highly imaginative journey through Pullman's rich alternative universe. As well as pulling through several other characters from La Belle Sauvage, it fleshes out Lyra's already rich world by sending her and her daemon on separate (!) journeys into Europe and the Middle East. In parallel, friends and foes are hunting them as the Magisterium rallies to counter threats to its theology and control.

Much as in HDM, Pullman continues to needle authoritarian forms of organised religion, but he has a number of enemies in his sights. The troubles in the war-torn Middle East, and the disinterest of Western powers, are laid bare on Lyra's travels. And perhaps surprisingly, the book also takes some well-deserved shots across the bows of the Ultra-rationalists and New Atheists. Even Boris Johnson attracts some of Pullman's ire with a dismissive reference to second-hand water cannons.

The only real downside to the book is that I've unwisely read it when the final volume of the trilogy ("to be concluded") has no official release date in sight, leaving me now chomping at the bit for Book Three.

However, if I can conclude on two niggles, ... Considering the magnitude of the events of HDM, both Lyra and her world are surprisingly unchanged. Confined within her own universe this time, it's largely left unmentioned that she's been to others, even to the Land Of The Dead, that she's met primordial angels and the alien Mulefa, and that she even (if unwittingly) killed "God". It's very easy to forget all this and to enjoy the novel, but it does sometimes feel like an elephant in the room. There's also a slightly queasy feeling around La Belle Sauvage's Malcolm and his attraction to Lyra.

Feminist Panoply

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo

A cross between a novel and a short story collection, GWO flits between the diverse lives of an interconnected cast of girls, women and others. Tied - chapter to chapter - to the interior concerns of these dramatists, activists, teachers, students, farmers, ..., the book rounds them out when they drift into the view of other characters.

What results is a fantastic cross-section of lived-in lives, and a tapestry of the struggles and joys - mostly, sadly, the former - from across the spectrum of the black British experience. Or so says this white, cis, hetero male reader - for whom it's a *very* pleasing own-perspective-free read.

As the title implies, the novel takes in identities hitherto unrepresented or actively written-out of the culture. But it does so with a definite lightness and fleetness of foot. The chapter written from the life of its Other character gently articulates their perspective and clearly stakes out their right to exist on their terms. But the novel is also broad and realistic enough to have a later character wryly puncture some of the activist language while still giving the respect due to marginalised identities.

By way of a character-limit-imposed summary, it's a brilliant read that I'd recommend to everyone, and a very worthy winner of the 2019 Booker. Having already read the novel it shared that prize with, Atwood's excellent follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale, while both are inclusive tours de force in their respective genres, it's clearly the more encompassing, overarching and relevant read.

And, against a backdrop of BLM and Trans-activism, and a pop-culture present that includes The Handmaid's Tale, Mrs America, I May Destroy You, and more, it feels giddily zeitgeisty.