Orbit, 448 pages
Review: Ian Hunter
“In Space: Every. Second. Counts.” Or, so proclaims a sticker-like blurb on the low-tech cover of Rob Boffard’s novel Tracer, the first of his “Outer Earth” trilogy. Author of the award-winning novel The Three, Sarah Lutz, also pitches in by proclaiming that we are in for a ride that is “fast, exhilarating and unforgettable”. Well, one out of three isn’t bad, I suppose.
I can’t remember the last time I was truly exhilarated by a novel, and I wouldn’t say that Tracer is particularly memorable, but it certainly is fast. After an intriguing prologue set on a doomed spacecraft which is breaking up, we are following the very fast footsteps of Riley Hale, a courier, or Tracer, and member of the Devil Dancers, as she races through the sectors of Outer Earth with a package to deliver. As usual, some of these packages aren’t always legal, and also as usual, other people want to take them away from her. Even worse for Riley, the package she carries is intended for Oran Darnell, the very imposing, nay, ruthless figure, who heads up the station’s biotech lab. Riley has to get the package to him, no matter what. If rule one is always deliver, then rule two is never look inside the package. The messenger never gets to hear the message—but when the package intended for Darnell gets damaged, Riley has no choice but to look inside and make a gruesome discovery as she tries to repair the parcel and make the drop.
The earth is dead, but humanity continues to exist on Outer Earth, a vast space station that orbits the wasted planet some three hundred miles above the battered surface. The station is miles long and contains a million people, but everything isn’t shiny and new. It’s old, making life a struggle to survive whilst trying to make the best use of the resources that are still available, like air and water and food. It’s an intense, compact, claustrophobic world where the rule of law still exists in some sectors, and is imposed by the appropriately named ‘Stompers’, while in other areas gangs have taken over the poorly maintained parts and have started to control the vital water points, and the routes through which Riley has to navigate.
Like Dystopian fiction of recent times with strong female protagonists, and the new Star Wars movie with Daisy Ridley’s character Rey, the best thing about Tracer is the character of Riley. She’s a well-rounded, lonely, suspicious, almost borderline-paranoid character. One that fights every day just to survive; but her knowledge of what’s inside Darnell’s package throws her head-long into a conspiracy that will determine the fate of everyone living on Outer Earth.
Tracer was better than average, with an interesting, if undeveloped, setting reminiscent of classic movies like Silent Running and the original Total Recall. Tracer is more action-thriller than science fiction—and there is a lot of action, a lot of the time. Apart from Riley, the characters were slightly two-dimensional, and we really only get to see the inner workings of Riley, Darnell and Riley’s friend Prakesh who works in a lab. Given this is book one there were some teasers, and dangling plot set-ups, with the inevitable cliff-hanger ending to lure the reader into the next book in the trilogy, Zero-G (which is out now). It is soon to be followed by Impact which will be released in the summer, so there is plenty to look forward to if this is to your liking. As for me? Well, I’m off to the nearest escape pod to take my chances on the scarred Earth below.
Winter
Dan Grace
Unsung Signals, 69 pages
Review: Iain Maloney
The publication of Winter marks the arrival of both a strong, new voice in Dan Grace and an important new outlet for writers in the Unsung imprint.
Writers and editors have long lived by the mantra that a story is as long as it needs to be (and I’ve never met a reader who tallies words as they go) but large parts of the industry are still ruled by the tyranny of the word count. In the era of digital publishing, this makes no sense. Long short stories, short novels and the much maligned novella all fall foul of this hangover from days of print to categorise words by number. At the low end of things, Twitter fiction and flash fiction are reshaping the landscape while writers like David Mitchell have embraced the novella, albeit by stitching five or six together to make a longer book. But the long short story, so beloved of science fiction and fantasy writers, has yet to make elbow room in the publishing world. Short Publishing in Australia and Unsung Stories in Britain are leading a welcome revolution.
Dan Grace’s Winter is a perfect example of why publishers should be minding this gap. If edited down to traditional short story length, this thrilling symphony of snow and suffocation would lose its cinematic atmosphere and widescreen beauty. Stretched out to novel-length it would be robbed of tension, claustrophobia and pace. This is a story that is exactly the length is should be and top marks to Unsung for adapting their format to the tale rather than the other way around.
Winter is set in a dystopian future where Scotland has won independence and England is under attack from ‘Green Man’ terrorists, a group who arose from environmental and anti-capitalist movements and turned paramilitary. Adam, Leila and May are on the run for their part in the uprising, fleeing London for Adam’s childhood home, a solitary cottage in the Scottish borders. After a battle at a checkpoint they are forced to hike through the forest, braving intense weather. When they arrive at the cottage they find Mikhail and Ingold, immigrants of dubious legality, squatting there.
In some ways it is a classic ‘cabin fever’ thriller, as horrors from the past and the pressures of the present turn allies into enemies. Grace complicates and renews the trope by endowing Mikhail with spiritual pagan powers, an ability to commune with nature and summon its spirits at will.
Their world is smothered by blizzards and thick forests. Dan Grace evokes the snowstorm brilliantly, allowing space and silence to suffocate the characters and the prose. The writing is sparse but evocative; information, for them and for us, is kept to a minimum, allowing Grace to echo their confusion with our own. We get only enough details to understand the moment, deftly avoiding the trap many science fiction world-builders trip of over-explaining.
This book is as much an experience as a story, one that reaches inside the reader, as unsettling and chilling as that epic Scottish winter. It is a wonderful debut on a fine new imprint and I, for one, will be following both.
We don’t have room to publish all our reviews in the magazine. More book reviews are published on our website at www.shorelineofinfinity.com
Multiverse
Russell Jones
MultiVerse has now opened its wormholes to public submissions, and we’ve two stellar (don’t excuse the pun) poets to set us sailing into the unknown: Shelly Bryant and Benjamin Dodds.
This issue leads with a distinctly extraterrestrial montage, with talking comets, deathly landings and household beasties transforming into nightmarish creatures.
Bryant’s “Travels through the Kuiper Belt” sequence examines a comet in “irregular orbit” as an intelligent species, its core thawed (much like the Romantic notion of the human heart) by intimacy. In “Saturn, and His Heir”, Bryant uses a scientific factoid on the solar system’s “greedy giants” (Jupiter and Saturn) to explore human self-indulgence, and our aptitude for persistence in the face of inequality.
Benjamin Dodds’ “Memento Mori” focuses on a cow’s skull as a reminder of our impending doom. References to “vapour trail”, “vaulted hemisphere” and “afterburn” combine to infer that our final voyage is not all that dissimilar to an alien abduction. Meanwhile, “Ridley Scott’s Alien with Moth” turns the classic sci-fi horror on its noggin, making a monster of a familiar domestic invader.
These poems may not reveal themselves immediately, and that’s part of their joy and intrigue. They’re worth reading and rereading, each time taking away something new. Both poets experiment with empty space on the page, adjusting normal sentence structures and expectations of poetic form to draw the eye and mind in new directions. These poems unsettle, they’re not afraid to shake the closet door and peer inside—so go on, take a peek...
Travels through the Kuiper Belt
I
comet
in irregular orbit
when seen from its star
and the inner planets
