The latter approach can lead to uneven collections. Placing the author’s first forays into the form alongside more considered stories from later in their career can offer fascinating insights into how a talent has developed, but it also tends to amplify deficiencies in weaker work. Over the course of a career style shifts, voice changes, concerns and approaches morph into new avenues of exploration until a story from the author’s youth and one from middle-age can appear to be by two different writers. These books are often closer to scrap books for posterity, the work between the covers united by little more than a spine and some glue.
At first glance Hannu Rajaniemi’s first collection, Invisible Planets, bears all the hallmarks of the latter kind of collection. After a trilogy of novels comes the short story book, perhaps at the publishers insistence, keen to keep him in the public eye in lieu of a new novel, perhaps at the writer’s urging, keen to clear the decks and buy himself some time to prepare for the next novel or series. It includes his first published story, “Shibuya no Love” from 2003 and finishes with a sample of Twitter fiction. The signs were not good.
Fortunately, Rajaniemi is better than that. On the whole this is an excellent collection which captivates from the start. Rajaniemi has the kind of imagination capable of rushing off in twenty different directions—from haunted space suits through apocalyptic space battles to cities that fall in love and stalk people—while remaining firmly rooted in the one thing that makes any flight of fancy worth reading—the emotional realism at the heart of it. These stories all centre around personal relationships and regardless of whether the vehicle of exploration is an ancient horrific cult (“The Viper Blanket”) or a revenge plot executed by a cat and dog team (“His Master’s Voice”) it is love, loss and loneliness that unites this collection.
“The Jugaad Cathedral” is a particularly good example of this, exploring the widening gap between our online and offline personas through a near-future Edinburgh where social media and technology filters and controls every interaction. While Raija ‘stays away from dirty networks owned by capitalists’ and ‘digs old computers out of dumpsters and carries then around in big shoulder bags’, Kev ends their friendship in the Dwarfcraft community to ‘take real life a bit more seriously’, misunderstanding what ‘real’ means. For all the future tech and invented slang, this is a story about being yourself and following your passions regardless of some mainstream norm, that friendship isn’t found in likes and retweets but in shared interests and caring for the well-being of someone other than yourself.
Other details and tics help bring unity to this collection. Names are repeated drawing potential links between seemingly unrelated stories, many stories are set in Rajaniemi’s native Finland or in his adopted home of Edinburgh and recurring Finnish words like perkele (Devil) and Saatana (Satan) create an atmosphere of cohesion beyond the limits of theme and voice.
Two stories however let the side down. The running order is based on theme and style, like a good mixtape or playlist, rather than chronological, and reaches a natural and dramatic conclusion with the longest piece in the book, “Skywalker of Earth”. The book should end there and the reader would close the cover with satisfaction, but instead we are given “Neurofiction: Introduction to “Snow White is Dead” followed by “Snow White is Dead” and “Introduction to Unused Tomorrows and Other Stories” followed by “Unused Tomorrows and Other Stories”.
“Snow White...” was an experiment that Rajaniemi took part in, combining a Choose Your Own Adventure with brain-computer interfaces. The story is an approximation of what participants would have experienced. I can understand the author’s urge to share what must have been a fascinating process but the story, averaged out and cut from context, is flat and disjointed while the introduction itself (and if you need a few paragraphs of non-fiction to set up a piece of fiction, you’re already in a weak position) acknowledges that this is not how the story should be read or presented.
“Unused Tomorrows” is the aforementioned list of Twitter stories. While I love the idea of 140 character stories, no one has yet got round the problem of transposing them into a collection in a printed book. Here they are presented as a list, twenty-four covering three pages, encouraging you to read them from top to bottom rather than to treat each as a distinct piece. Each one blends into the next and the effect is underwhelming.
These two pieces feel like DVD extras, bonus material tagged on to the end and undermine the coherency of the whole.
That aside, Invisible Planets showcases Rajaniemi as one of the most imaginative and warm-hearted writers at work today. He never lets a neat idea get in the way of emotional truth and, as with great science fiction writers like John Wyndham, understands that fiction—all fiction, not just the science variety—is about exploring what it means to be a thinking, feeling, sentient being.
The Transition
R J Tomlin
Self-published, 386 pages
Review: Thom Day
The Transition, RJ Tomlin’s most recent Young Adult offering, centres on Rume, an “elite” upperclassman in the Nethertower a week before he turns eighteen. The Nethertower houses hundreds or thousands (the book doesn’t make it clear, and Rume isn’t a very reliable narrator) of children aged between eleven and eighteen. Upon reaching their eighteenth birthdays, the elites undergo “the Transition” and join society outside. Before this, the kids work to meet their daily energy quota on VR-augmented exercise bikes. The Nethertower operates like a capitalist training utopia: the kids are told that working hard will earn them credits for the outside world, and their work will mould them into the individuals they are destined to be. Trying to leave, communicate with the outside world, or failure to work are all strictly forbidden, and all elites must complete the Transition.
Rume is nervous in the lead-up to his Transition, and secretly keeps emails sent by his father. A final mysterious email leads to him attempting to escape the Nethertower with four of his friends on the eve of his Transition.
The rest of the book is an action-adventure as Rume and his friends try to discover what the Nethertower really is, who made it, and why. Along the way they fight off cannibals and zombies, meet new friends, and help the Resistance in their war against CARMA, all while Rume tries to figure out why his past seems inextricably tied to the fate of this new world.
The book is fast-paced and a real page-turner, the story ticks over with some tension. There are some genuinely enjoyable twists and surprises as well, which kept me wondering where the story would go next.
Unfortunately these weren’t enough to cover the stilted dialogue and thinness of the landscape, and there were more than a few times I felt like giving up and putting the book aside. Rume seems to be experiencing the Nethertower for the first time along with the reader, rather than having grown up there. Baddies appear “out of nowhere” and the plot moved in one direction before abruptly veering off without explanation. The overall feeling is that this is an unfinished draft or a film treatment, rather than a completed novel. The characters come from the stock Young Adult Novel section and say the stock lines and do—for the most part—the stock things. The twists are very good and are the redeeming elements of the book, but they can’t cover the plot holes, the cardboard landscapes, the unbelievable dialogue. The final reveal is inspired but ultimately disappointing, and left me with more questions than it provided satisfaction.
This is a young book by a young author; Tomlin is 21—barely older than Rume himself. He has four books under his belt already, and has just completed a one-man 100-day marketing campaign in Leeds city centre. He’s passionate about writing and has strong reviews on Amazon. His enthusiasm shines through in The Transition; and while I may not be the first to pick up The Transition 2, I do think Tomlin is one to watch.
Behind The Throne
K.B. Wagers
432 Pages
Orbit Books
Review: Benjamin Thomas
K.B. Wagers’s debut science fiction novel Behind the Throne, the first in the Indranan War series, follows Hail Bristol, a runaway princess who has followed a much more dangerous career path: a notorious gunrunner. Tracked down twenty years after her crown-ditching escapade, Hail is brought back to the center of the Indranan Empire where her volatile relationship with her mother is mirrored by Indranan’s relationship with its neighbours. With her siblings murdered and her mother ill, the rule of the Indranan Empire has been left in the hands of Hail’s egotistical, conniving cousin.
Feeling alone and in the dead-centre of a place where she does not belong, Hail relies on her bodyguards Emmory and Zin, the same pair of Trackers that located her in deep space. With constant threats on her life, Hail must diplomatically shed her gunrunner behavior in favour for characteristics more suited for the heir to an empire. But she learns that changing who you really are is next to impossible.
What Behind the Throne does (aside from give us over four-hundred pages of fast-paced, badassness) is take situations that a good deal of people can relate to and set it against the epic back drop of a future matriarchal empire on the brink of war. This is what science fiction is supposed to do. It allows us to examine our own lives and the choices we make while being entertained by people from far off worlds.
While Behind the Throne does this, I was a little confused as to who exactly us was in this case. The novel is a fast-paced action romp with extremely well-written fight scenes, heavy language at times, and suggestions towards mature themes. However Hail is well into adulthood when she returns to the Indranan Empire and, unfortunately, doesn’t always behave as such. I get what Wagers was attempting to do by making Hail have a difficult time adapting to life back home, but there was a very strong coming of age feel to every scene that involved Hail and her Empress mother. While I expected this to a degree, it was done so heavily that for a good chunk of the narrative I felt like I was reading a book geared towards a YA audience.
Muddled target audience aside, Behind the Throne was a very enjoyable read. It didn’t bring anything shockingly new to the space epic sub-genre of science fiction, but it didn’t need to. K.B. Wagers’s pacing throughout the novel is by far one of my favourite things about it. It flows together flawlessly. The next novel in the series is due out mid-December and it’s already on my Christmas list.
Nod
Adrian Barnes
Titan, 272 pages
Review: Noel Chidwick
“All the old words are waking up and rubbing their eyes!”
Adrian Barnes has a slick way with words. His turns of phrase, his sharply focussed imagery means Nod is a treat to read.
The premise of Nod is fiendishly simple: Paul is a writer living in Vancouver. One morning he wakes up to find that no-one else slept; they literally did not sleep a wink. Quickly it becomes clear this is a world wide event, and Paul is one of only a handful of people who can sleep.
On day one people continue in a facsimile of normality, but after a second night of sleeplessness, the reality ‘dawns’ and Paul’s world slowly dissolves. Two sides emerge, the ‘Awakened’ and the ‘Sleepers’, the Awakened are the majority, the living zombies. Paul’s girlfriend, Tanya, can’t sleep and she becomes jealous of Paul. It’s clear early on that Paul needs to keep his normality hidden from those, who, after only a couple of days are suffering the hell of sleeplessness.
It’s estimated that without sleep you would certainly die within around four weeks: Paul’s aim, in the end is to survive those four weeks.
Adrian Barnes forensically examines this new Vancouver and its people. The first, and last, response from the authorities is to implement the International Communication Ban, to “bring down the wall of static… and see if we could unclench our brains and snooze in the resulting stillness.” The power is cut. The city has a few days of food stored on its shelves, then there is nothing. People are desperate to sleep, but can’t. Paul and Tanya try to pick their way through this waking nightmare:
