Hal Duncan’s story is also an absolute cracker as well, but then this is a writer who has a long affiliation with the group. Hal is one of the group’s golden sons, profane and eloquent in equal measure, a self-dubbed enfant terrible. Ascending manages to evoke the experimental typography of Ginsberg, play around with Moorcock’s punk aesthetic and bask in Samuel Delaney’s deviancy, while still retaining Hal’s ‘Hal-ness’. A brilliant centrepiece to the book and a nice wee vignette from his Scruffian saga too.
One common theme is the sense of prevailing optimism. Take, Elaine Gallagher’s 5AM Saint for instance. It follows a similar tack to Hal’s. Initially, we’re thrust into an inauspicious cityscape where fundamentalist hate mobs run the rule over anyone they deem to be different. Again, the writing is solid, poetic, employs experimental and linear narratives, and the core message is one of tolerance and forgiveness.
Levity is provided once again by The Glaswegian Chalk Dust Circle (or my dinner with Alan Dean Foster), the penultimate story by Michael Mooney. It’s a fantastic exercise in cheeky, dark-caped patter while discussing the validity of the argument that Robert Heinlein wrote nothing but militaristic wank fantasies. Mooney serves up a poignant story of two boys, a closeted couple, who plan to write a science fiction story together and submit it to a competition run by the Herald – which is a lovely little nod to the GSFWC’s real-life genesis. Enjoy a pint of Virus with these two acid-tongued Weegies, you won’t regret it. Again, you can’t miss that tone of optimism, that things usually do improve no matter how dire the circumstances appear.
Jim Steels’s The Crock of Shet reminds us that his talents cast a wider net than his able manning of the Interzone reviews pile alone.
The GSFWC has provided workshops, critiques and even given young writers the opportunity to meet and mingle with their professional counterparts. It deserves to be noticed, to be loved. When you consider the calibre of writer it hones and produces, its significance cannot be denied.
In my mind, the group embodies an archetypal Scottish small-town society, one of the more successful ones at least—full of characters, united in its goals, tough as a stick of Edinburgh rock and loyal to its roots. Maybe, when we band together and formulate these utopias, there’s nothing we can’t achieve. Maybe we’re pretty good at looking on the bright side after all.
Thirty Years of Rain is a fitting tribute to a writer’s circle which has transcended its limitations and continues to exceed expectations to this day. It’s rare for an anthology to offer no misfires, but after reading this book, you’ll find it impossible to be a cynic.
Heart of Granite
James Barclay
Gollancz, 416 pages
Review: Ian Hunter
Apart from being the President of the British Fantasy Society, following Ramsey Campbell who held that position for decades, James Barclay is better known as the author of several fantasy series starting way back in 1999 with the Chronicles of the Raven trilogy, followed by other series rooted in fantasy, culminating in the recent Elves books. Now we have Heart of Granite—the first in his Blood and Fire series. It is touted as science fiction, but is probably more science fantasy, set centuries in the future where war is being waged in a ravaged world using weapons culled from alien DNA.
Barclay has come up with the brilliant, but slightly bonkers idea of a world using DNA to create reptilian or insect-like pieces of military software—living creatures which soldiers can ride on based on creatures like geckos, iguanas or fast-moving basilisks. The Heart of Granite (or the HoG) is a leviathan creature, a behemoth and is like a living, breathing, moving aircraft carrier which houses thousands of people. People live, eat, and sleep there, and leave to fight their part of a never-ending war, and sometimes never come back again. Rather than planes flying out on missions to engage in dogfights with enemy forces, pilots fly inside drakes, or dragons.
The greatest of these pilots are those which make up the Inferno-X squadron and the best of them is Max Halloran, loved by some and hated by others, but still the pin-up boy for his side. He lives for the moment, like the rest of his crew. They might die tomorrow, or even worse, give in to the Fall, when they succumb to the mental strain of being linked to their drakes, for drake minds are too powerful and eventually human minds sink into madness.
One of his squadron is already showing those signs and will end in the area known as “Landfall” where all the “Fallen” are consigned as human vegetables. In order to save his friend, Max must journey to the secret parts of the HoG for an illegal drug which will mask and delay the effects of the Fall for a little while. But other drugs and upgrades are needed when Inferno-X are almost wiped out by an enemy squadron, upgrades which haven’t been approved or tested properly. Max soon realises that they are cannon fodder, especially when an enemy leviathan is within their sights and they could deliver a killer blow to the enemy—a great result in an election year. But Max has made too many enemies and doesn’t know when to shut his motor mouth or stop his fists from flying.
On trumped-up charges he ends up in Landfill and soon discovers that what he thought was the truth is far from it, but he is going to end up lost and forgotten, drugged up and tested on, unless he can do two impossible things: escape from Landfill, and then escape from the HoG, with his drake, Martha. Meanwhile, the HoG, desperately in need of some R&R, is being pushed to the limit as it pursues an equally stricken leviathan.
Heart of Granite has already been labelled “Top Gun with dragons” and likened to Battlestar Galactica—the gritty remake version, rather than the original—and perhaps even the gung-ho style of the Starship Troopers movies. Certainly, the novel is jammed packed with well-described and action-packed aerial drake-fights as well as a fair dose of political intrigue and shenanigans where no-one in authority can really be trusted. It’s great fun, and a great page-turner. The book builds up to an almost Star Wars like climax as time and chances run out to save the HoG from enemy attack. As the novel unfolds, Max develops as a more-rounded character and Barclay leaves enough cliff-hangers and dangling threads, and enough lives in the balance to make me look forward to 2018 when the next thrilling instalment of Blood and Fire will appear. It can’t come quickly enough.
The Hatching
Ezekiel Boone
Gollancz, 303 pages
Review: Henry Northmore
There’s a rich tradition of ‘when animals attack’ stories in horror and sci-fi. We’ve been besieged by insects, rats, dogs, sharks, crabs, you name it. From classy classics such as Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds to the splatter fiction of Shaun Hutson’s Slugs, if it slithers, crawls or scurries it has probably risen up in defiance and attacked the human race.
Ezekiel Boone’s animal of choice is spiders. Even the word is enough to evoke terror in some, sending shivers scuttling down their spine. Apparently over 35% of the population suffer from arachnophobia. And Boone wants to dial the fear up one more notch as an ancient species of carnivorous spiders threatens to engulf the world. A black tidal wave of voracious creepy crawlies devouring everything in their path. It spreads like a living, flesh eating disease. Starting deep in the Peruvian jungle, then China becomes infested, India is next, how long before America is consumed by this eight legged tsunami?
Beyond the initial fright factor Boone turns his arthropods into a credible danger, with an intriguing life cycle, threatening to overwhelm humanity by sheer strength of numbers. How do you fight back against a swarm of bugs? Shooting bullets at a seething mass of spiders is an almost futile act.
Of course Boone isn’t the first to use arachnids as his villains. There are too many monster spider movies to mention with Tarantula (1955), Earth vs the Spider (1958), Arachnophobia (1990) and Eight Legged Freaks (2002) among the minor classics across the years. However Steve Altan realised he could never beat the primal terror of Jaws but proved with his Meg series that you don’t need to be the best if you can write exhilarating action sequences.
The Hatching takes too long to hit high gear and certainly isn’t as engaging as some of the best in its field (James Herbert’s The Rats is probably still the benchmark in this snapping, snarling subgenre). Boone has a predilection for clichés (including the sexy female scientist who just happens to be a world expert on spiders), he juggles too many characters, with a scant few pages devoted to each, some are invariably thinly sketched. With two more volumes planned you get the impression several are being set up for the sequels (especially Aonghas on a remote Scottish Island and survivalists Gordo and Amy in the California desert). Inevitably as the first part of a trilogy - Skitter will be available in May 2017 - it ends on a cliffhanger with hints of an even bigger, nastier danger on the horizon.
Apparently the television rights have already been sold (and it would make a great TV show if someone treated the material semi-seriously rather than CBS’s cheesy, trashy adaptation of James Paterson’s similarly themed Zoo). You don’t read animal amok novels expecting high art. And in that respect The Hatching lives up to expectations, it’s no masterpiece but it’s a decent page turner with enough breathless energy to drag you though the weaker sections.
Savant
Nik Abnett
Rebellion / Solaris, 356 pages
Review: Steve Ironside
Savant is set in a College—a place where the Masters (helped by their Companions and Assistants) teach their Students, while the ever-watching Service manages the schedules of them all, minute-by-minute and day-by-day. This regimen isn’t just about teaching however; there’s a deeper agenda to the activity of the Colleges. When the erratic behaviour of one of the Masters puts the whole system gets put at risk, Service must deal with the situation before the whole house of cards they’ve created comes tumbling down, with consequences that could spark an unimaginable global calamity.
As a potted synopsis, that sounded really interesting: personal drama against a backdrop of approaching danger, set in a world of rules and authoritarian control. Just the kind of thing I was in the mood for. As always, though, the devil is in the details.
My danger sense started to tingle on page 1. I’ve never been a fan of inventing language just to make things sound more futuristic, and the immediate use of invented words such as “cotpro”, “woolpro” and “linopro” raised flags - I wanted there to be a rationale as to why these were different from cotton, wool and lino. Maybe the College did things differently from the rest of the world; perhaps there was a reason for these different things to exist, but no real explanation was forthcoming, other than a passing reference to rationing and privilege. Whether it’s Newspeak in Orwell’s 1984, or Nadsat in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, the use of language permeates the setting and should inform the reader in some way; for me, there was a missed target here that turned the world into a screen upon which things were shown to me, rather than something that engaged me and drew me in.
The plot follows Metoo—an unusual woman in that she acts as both a Companion and an Assistant - and her Master Tobe, who starts to exhibit unexpected behaviour. Tobe, like all members of the College, doesn’t think about the world outside of his research and teaching —as the title suggests, he’s an autistic savant. With an obsessive focus on his work in addition to his mental disorder, he reacts badly to changes in his routine—much like Raymond in the movie Rain Man. As his new mantra that “Nothing is the same” takes root, attempts by Service to rectify the situation only make Tobe worse. The story follows the ripples of effect as they touch Metoo’s life, and as events escalate further, the lives of other College personnel, and operators at Service as well.
As I progressed through the book, I felt the need to ask “why?” a lot—I wanted to understand how the world had come to be this way; why the rules of this society had come into being, and what possessed the authorities to, in essence, enslave a significant percentage of the population? Alas, I was disappointed—other than vague allusions to a global catastrophe that start to surface later in the book, the world outside of the College and Service remains mostly unexplored. While this can be used to good effect in a story—take the movie Cube as a terrific example—it only really works if the world outside the story is either completely irrelevant, or is a central part of the book’s mystery and is intended to force the reader to imagine. In Savant, the world lies somewhere in-between—the external environment and its pressures directly affect the decisions that Service makes. However, because I couldn’t see that bigger picture, none of these choices felt particularly urgent, or made me sympathetic to either the characters, or the pressures that they are under. The glimpses that were handed out just served to make me want to know why, as opposed to inviting me to imagine what could actually be going on.
Despite these misgivings, I did find the book to be an easy read—the story rattles along at a comfortable pace, and beyond the College environment there are a couple of characters that I did find very engaging.
It’s a readable story that I finished in a couple of sittings. However, it’s not a book that I would return to again. Savant is ultimately emotionally flat and unsatisfying. That’s a shame, because I suspect that outside of the College, there is a fascinating world waiting to be revealed.
Empire Games
Charles Stross
