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“But are you never dull?”

“How could we be? Our blood is quick and light and free, our flesh is clean and unclogged, inside and out.... Before long I hope you will understand what sort of question you have asked.”

Farther on they encountered a strange phenomenon. In the heart of the desert a fountain rose perpendicularly fifty feet into the air, with a cool and pleasant hissing sound. It differed, however, from a fountain in this respect—that the water of which it was composed did not return to the ground but was absorbed by the atmosphere at the summit. It was in fact a tall, graceful column of dark green fluid, with a capital of coiling and twisting vapours.

When they came closer, Maskull perceived that this water column was the continuation and termination of a flowing brook, which came down from the direction of the mountains. The explanation of the phenomenon was evidently that the water at this spot found chemical affinities in the upper air, and consequently forsook the ground.

“Now let us drink,” said Joiwind.

She threw herself unaffectedly at full length on the sand, face downward, by the side of the brook, and Maskull was not long in following her example. She refused to quench her thirst until she had seen him drink. He found the water heavy, but bubbling with gas. He drank copiously. It affected his palate in a new way—with the purity and cleanness of water was combined the exhilaration of a sparkling wine, raising his spirits—but somehow the intoxication brought out his better nature, and not his lower.

“We call it ‘gnawl water’,” said Joiwind. “This is not quite pure, as you can see by the colour. At Poolingdred it is crystal clear. But we would be ungrateful if we complained. After this you’ll find we’ll get along much better.”

Maskull now began to realise his environment, as it were for the first time. All his sense organs started to show him beauties and wonders that he had not hitherto suspected. The uniform glaring scarlet of the sands became separated into a score of clearly distinguished shades of red. The sky was similarly split up into different blues. The radiant heat of Branchspell he found to affect every part of his body with unequal intensities. His ears awakened; the atmosphere was full of murmurs, the sands hummed, even the sun’s rays had a sound of their own—a kind of faint Aeolian harp. Subtle, puzzling perfumes assailed his nostrils. His palate lingered over the memory of the gnawl water. All the pores of his skin were tickled and soothed by hitherto unperceived currents of air. His poigns explored actively the inward nature of everything in his immediate vicinity. His magn touched Joiwind, and drew from her person a stream of love and joy. And lastly by means of his breve he exchanged thoughts with her in silence. This mighty sense symphony stirred him to the depths, and throughout the walk of that endless morning he felt no more fatigue.

When it was drawing near to Blodsombre, they approached the sedgy margin of a dark green lake, which lay underneath Poolingdred.

Panawe was sitting on a dark rock, waiting for them.

……………………………………………

We are delighted to announce we will be partnering up with the student run imprint, Merchiston Publishing, at Edinburgh Napier University, to publish the free e-book of A Voyage to Arcturus. This will be available for all our readers by May 2016. Visit our website at www.shorelineofinfinity.com for details.

Reviews

All the Birds in the Sky

Charlie Jane Anders

Titan Books, 431 pages

Review: Duncan Lunan

In recent times I’ve been avoiding reading and reviewing fantasy, partly because I got bored with what seemed to be a generic setting corresponding to mediaeval England just before the Black Death, but frozen in time, without the dynamic social and technological changes which were then in full swing, but with heavy emphasis on the squalor. As I said in one review, it would be nice to read one set somewhere like Sweden or Switzerland. I haven’t got on much better with the ones set in Tudor or Victorian times, to be honest, because they’ve seemed to be too heavy-handed, over-emphasising the period aspects till they became unconvincing. I’ve also been getting bored with recent Young Adult novels: it’s seemed as if all the teenage protagonists’ viewpoints were the same viewpoint, with relationships with the opposite sex in centre stage. Yes, they loomed large when I was that age, but not at the expense of issues like the Moon race or the Vietnam War.

I keep thinking that Heinlein did it so much better – and All the Birds in the Sky does reference Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, which is a good sign. It reminded me of an intriguing radio serial on Children’s Hour in my childhood, where the fight between good and evil was played out simultaneously in SF and fantasy settings, so that one character might be talking into an enchanted seashell and another hearing her on a walkie-talkie or a spacesuit radio. In this novel’s near-future setting, a developing environmental crisis is being tackled in different ways by two organisations, one based on science and the other on magic, with the corresponding characters initially at the same school, somewhere within a bus ride of Boston. Patricia can talk to birds and animals, Laurence builds a sentient computer and a two-second time machine, so both are sought for recruitment by the respective groups. Their dreadful parents share a blind determination to push their children into the niches they’ve selected for them, with plenty of psychobabble to justify their actions. You might think that was bad enough, but with clueless teachers and a psychotic school counsellor who is determined to destroy them both, their problems on the home front make Harry Potter’s seem relatively minor. There aren’t any paranormal entities trying to steal their souls or tear them limb from limb, but the nasty people they’re handed over to more than make up for it.

Laurence and Patricia go through very different forms of higher education, out of touch, and end up in California, where there’s rather more sex and drug-taking than in other Young Adult novels I’ve covered. Laurence is drawn into a group aiming to develop a wormhole and take an elite off Earth to start again elsewhere, while Patricia is on a crusade to wipe out evil-doers, despite her tutors’ warnings against ‘aggrandizement’, whereby magicians or witches assume they’re always right and all changes they make will be for the better. That leads her group of newly qualified witches to make an unauthorised attack on the science project, justified by a certainty that otherwise it will wreck the planet. There’s a definite chance that it might do, and like the scientists on the Manhattan Project, Laurence’s group do debate the issue – but their millionaire leader seems certain to get his way, as the military did with the Bomb. The attack succeeds, though with heavy loss of life on both sides, and it brings on the environmental disaster which the young witches thought they had the right and the power to prevent.

It comes with some nice lines. I particularly liked, “My biggest fear about the apocalypse isn’t being eaten by cannibals – it’s the fact that in every other post-apocalypse movie you see someone with an acoustic guitar by the campfire,” and, “Loose ends are cool. Loose ends mean that you’re still living your life. The person who dies with the most loose ends wins.” But the rapprochement between science and magic which Laurence and Patricia achieve at the ending could only be achieved after an apocalypse, when the existing authority structures have been demolished. It wouldn’t work in the present day, and that leaves the serious question: must the world be broken in order to save it? Should it be? The book doesn’t provide easy answers, and Young Adult readers may find a lot here to discuss. I needed some persuasion to read All the Birds in the Sky, having resolved to avoid both fantasy and YA novels from now on, but I’m glad that I made this one an exception.

The Ark

Patrick S. Tomlinson

Angry Robot, 400 pages

Review: Steve Ironside

Once upon a time, ‘hard’ sci-fi meant hard to read. Sometimes it felt like you needed a science degree if you wanted to grapple with some of the concepts that an enthusiastic author was passionate about. I’ll admit; there are authors whose work I would avoid because I wanted a good romping action piece anchored in the science, rather than to be weighed down with the theory—heck, I have A Brief History of Time for that!

Enter Patrick S. Tomlinson with The Ark, his debut novel.

Humanity’s chosen few have left Earth to a somewhat grizzly fate at the hands of the Nibiru black hole aboard the titular Ark—a 16-kilometre-long generational starship en-route to Tau Ceti. Bryan Benson, the chief of police of the Avalon module, is called in to investigate what appears to be a missing person. Events quickly escalate into something which will threaten not only Benson’s career, but the future of mankind itself.

Tomlinson seems to have taken some cues from the urban fantasy genre in terms of style, which is not a bad thing. While not opting for the first-person perspective that you see in The Dresden Files (for example), Benson is as hard-nosed as any UF lead; this people’s hero has risen from poor circumstances though his skill at Zero, a sport based on American Football played in the microgravity near the spine of the Ark.

The Ark itself is an interesting place. Because the journey takes many lifetimes, the current population is not the one that left Earth behind. No-one has ever been “outside”, with most never leaving the habitation module in which they were born. Since everything is geared towards survival, the administration—the crew who are actually running the ship—are staunchly authoritarian, with invasive rules that cause consternation amongst the general population, derisively known as ‘cattle.’ With Benson caught in the middle of the two, occasionally breaking the rules himself, and secret groups and conspiracies appearing throughout the ship, there is a sense of menace in the background and dramatic social tensions which really help to bring the setting to life.

Tomlinson keeps the main narrative bubbling along nicely, deftly adding dead ends and plot twists, so things never get boring. There is also, of course, a supporting cast of colourful characters which allows Benson to indulge in the age-old detective’s tradition of banter. There are a couple of laugh-out-loud exchanges, particularly with Korolev, a young constable under his command, and with his ‘love interest with issues’ Esa.

That’s not to say that the ‘science’ part of the science fiction equation is left out; Tomlinson has thought not only about how an Ark would need to operate over the hundreds of years that the trip to Tau Ceti would take, but includes many of those elements directly in to the narrative—a show-and-tell approach that means that the pace of the story doesn’t slow down in order to explain a nifty piece of science along the way, and ‘the Flip’ (where the crew will turn the ship through 180 degrees to start the deceleration phase of the journey) provides a background clock which adds to the urgency of Benson’s investigation.

If I could level one complaint at The Ark, it’s one that is common to a lot of urban fantasy—the ending rushes up pretty abruptly, with many of the clues dropping into place at the last minute. While it does allow for a fast paced action finale, I’d have enjoyed more of a slow reveal that played on the conspiratorial element.

Overall this is a good mystery well told.

Subtitled as part of the Children of a Dead Earth series, there are moments that point to a larger story arc, with some interesting questions being asked and I would definitely look out for any other books in this series. As a debut, I think Mr Tomlinson has a lot to be happy about.

Graft