“The invisible man is a Wellsian supervillain, but the invisible women are all around us, anxious and unseen.”
How do you find out what the ultimate Supervillain, Dr Freudstein, is up to? How do you stop him? The Laundry decides to set Mo—Dr Dominique O’Brien—the task of heading up a small department with a management team with their own variations of superpowers. This team includes Mhari the vampire who was once Bob’s girlfriend, Ramone, transitioning to a mermaid who once shared Bob’s mind, and Officer Friendly, the superhero cop whose stone jaw juts out further than the jetty at Lyme Regis. What could go wrong?
They gather field workers with superpowers, including Lollipop Bill, Captain Mahvelous and Busy Bee. After deciding half-heartedly what they should wear—no corsets nor fishnet stockings and eschewing the capes—off they go.
But Mo has plenty of her own inner demons to contend with, including her self-doubts, worrying about her relationship with her husband, and the responsibility of setting up this team. And to complicate things further Lecter, her demon killing violin, seeps into her dreams and her mind, threatening to take control.
Annihilation Score is trademark Stross, mingling the mundane intricacies of modern office life with the ever present fear of damnation and the end of the world. The book would make for an entertaining a “management team for dummies” instruction manual, and perhaps some imaginative management lecturers will offer this as a set text. Stross delights in playing with the absurdities of life acted out in millions of workplaces around the planet: the world will not end with a bang, but an e-mail.
The climax of the story is suitably grandiose to satisfy all fans of the Laundry files, where Stross’ tight plotting and fast-pace action knit together while we cheer and laugh from the safety of behind the sofa.
Annihilation Score is a thrilling journey on our way towards CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and now we look forward to following up on Bob Eater of Souls Howard's exploits in the next book.
No Harm Can Come to a Good Man
James Smyth
The Borough Press,
£7.99, paperback, 374 pp.
Review: Duncan Lunan
Well, a title like that should warn you. Laurence Walker is in line for the Democratic nomination to run for President of the United States. He is something of a war hero, having been captured in combat and withstood torture under which others have cracked. He is married with a son and two daughters, appears to have no skeletons in the cupboard, and his campaign is likely to attract major backers.
Everything looks good except that his principal opponent Homme (Everyman?) has beaten him in the race to be first with a computer prediction of success. This is a near-future world in which that counts for a great deal, because most major decisions are taken with reference to a predictive computer system called ClearVista, whose latest market version will even show you a snapshot video of a moment from your future life. Homme’s shows him on a Presidential visit to armed forces in the field; Walker’s, when produced, gives him zero chance of nomination or election, and shows him covering his family with a gun. Protests that ClearVista doesn’t predict what will happen are of no avail: the Party, the media and the public all respond on the basis that if it could happen, that’s enough for them. What follows has the inevitably of Macbeth, with the difference that Walker and his political advisor are trying to prevent the prophecy from being believed, much less coming true, rather than trying to bring about what it predicts.
My life as a reviewer is filled with strange coincidences, and this book has come my way just as my critical notes on the classic Jeff Hawke and Lance McLane comic strips, being published with reprints of the strips by the Jeff Hawke Club, have reached the point where their creator Sydney Jordan became increasingly preoccupied with destiny and foreordination. One of the major issues of philosophy is how (if at all) determinism and causality can be reconciled with free will, and as it happens, I found myself reading No Harm Can Come to a Good Man in parallel with The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose. One of the major themes of that book is how that philosophical debate relates to the practicality of artificial intelligence, and the provocative conclusion was that free will (a) is demonstrable, (b) cannot be simulated by algorithmic processes, so ruling out artifical intelligence in that form, now and for all time. The heavy emphasis in No Harm Can Come... upon the algorithmic nature of ClearVista’s predictions might suggest that Smythe has taken his inspiration from Penrose’s book, and has set out to show us just how far wrong things could go, following Penrose’s logic to its conclusions, should people put their trust in such predictions nevertheless.
This is no abstract philosophical text, though – it follows Walker’s decline and fall in entirely human terms. In that respect it has a lot in common with Susan Barker’s Incarnations, which I reviewed last year for Concatenation: both show a flawed but basically decent man being overwhelmed by predictions about his future, from an apparently all-knowing source, against which he struggles in vain. The title has the same force as that moment in a disaster movie, when someone who should know better assures the other characters that absolutely nothing can go wrong.
The Vagrant
Peter Newman
Harper Voyager
£14.99, hardback, 400pp.
Review: Ian Hunter
He is “The Vagrant”, that “is his name. He has no other” proclaims the cover, below a cover illustration – by whom? I don’t know as this is clearly a very advance proof copy, so there is no mention of the illustrator and there are blanks for the author’s dedication and acknowledgements, although the cover is slightly misleading as we are given a hooded figure (so hooded that his face is in shadow),who wears a tattered coat, with one hand balancing a sword across his shoulders, while his other hand holds a bundle of baby close to his chest, and all this beneath a looming cityscape, crowding in on him from both sides. I say, misleading because The Vagrant we read beyond this cover would never be so brazen to reveal the fabled sword that he carries or the baby tucked within the confines of his coat. Both are precious to him. The sword is a lost treasure, bearing great power that many covet, because of its worth or because they want to see it – and the forces of darkness christen the weapon “The Malice” – destroyed. The baby is also coveted, but it’s probably better not to dwell on why and what for in a world where body parts of the living and dead are sought after. As for the name “Vagrant”? Given that our hero cannot utter a word, and has to communicate by facial expressions and gestures, I’d be hard pressed to remember an instance when someone else, other than Newman, actually refers to our wandering hero as “The Vagrant”, although he does gather a few other names along the way.
Eight years ago, ten thousand Seraph Knights fought in the Battle of the Red Wave, fighting on the side of the Empire of the Winged Eye, fighting alongside Gamma, one of the fabled, all-mighty, Seven, but the Seven have been complacent, too remote from human affairs in their ivory towers in the Shining City. It has taken them over a year to deliberate what to do when the first demonic hordes started rising from the Breach, and when they finally decide to fight, those that have risen from the Breach have a foothold in this world and are waiting for them. Incredibly, Gamma falls, along with eight thousand knights, and soon the two thousand that remain are reduced to only a handful, and the world around the Breach starts to change, become malignant, and the demonic entity known as the Usurper is created and eight years later, travelling across this devastated world walks a stranger, a man with a mission, bearing two secrets - gamma’s sword and a baby, and he has to get them both to the Shining City.
I’m reminded of that line out of Amadeus when the King complains to Mozart that his music has “too many notes”, and if you’ve ever listened to the jazz compositions or classical music that Frank Zappa wrote, you’ll know what I mean as they are just too busy. There is a heck of a lot going on in Newman’s debut novel as we journey with the Vagrant and various “hangers on” and encounter a whole host of exotic characters and equally exotic, or decaying locations. The invention here is probably on a par with the “Arabat” novels of Clive Barker, the series of Fourth World DC comics of the late Jack Kirby, and more recently “The Relic Guild” by Edward Cox. Rather like Cox’s novel the story is told in a linear fashion, punctuated by a series of past events, that become more and more recent, thus we learn of the Breach being breached and the fall of Gamma, right up until a year ago, and these glimpses into the past reveal the story of the Vagrant, why he carries Gamma’s sword and whom the baby belongs to. Given that this is an uncorrected proof copy, some of these chapters set in the past did slip into the present when I think they should have been a brand new chapter, no doubt something that will be corrected for the final edition.
“The Vagrant” isn’t really my cup of tea, and I had problems with all the situations and scenarios and the denseness of the description in places and a lack of lead character viewpoint, in a writing style that reminded me of William Gibson and Gene Wolfe because of its tendency to distance things slightly through a present tense, observational delivery. Credibility was also stretched in for too many places where the plot could be termed as “and with one mighty leap the Vagrant was free”. Yet, despite these misgivings, I did devour whole chunks of the novel at one sitting, and I did even start to care about the minor characters, even the goat that gets dragged along behind them to provide milk for the infant. One character in particular showed interesting character development and could have spawned a few interesting plot lines, but no, Newman ruthlessly cut them down, or rather the Vagrant did, albeit reluctantly. He is the archetypal hero, the stranger, on a quest, on a mission. The man with almost no name that changes everything. He does not speak nor do we get into his head, rather we see how he reacts and interacts with others and the effect he has on the lives of those he encounters, a flickering light of hope in a land of darkness. I look forward to seeing how that effect continues in the sequel called “The Malice” due out next year.
The Fire Sermon
Francesca Haig
Harper Collins
£12.99, hardback, 419pp
Review: Noel Chidwick
The Fire Sermon is a novel that hits the ground galloping, scooping up Cass onto the back of a horse to be thrown into a dungeon lit only by the buzzing glow of a single lightbulb. Chapter one is a masterclass for fledgling writers in how to grab your readers by the eyeballs and hurl them into your story.
