The Girl With Two Souls
Stephen Palmer
CSIPP, 378 pages
Review: Katie Gray
In Bedlam asylum, some time in the early twentieth century, Kora Blackmore wakes up. She eats her breakfast, chats with her nurse about her plans for the day, re-reads her only book – and receives a rare visitor, a mysterious stranger who calls himself Doctor Spellman. He leads her on a cunning escape, out of Bedlam, out of London, north to his family home in Sheffield, where he promises she’ll be safe.
But as the title of the book suggests, he’s rescued not one girl, but two. The next day, Roka Blackmore wakes in a strange bed in a strange house, confused and disoriented to find herself outside Bedlam. She, too, makes the acquaintance of Doctor Spellman—but is far less inclined than Kora to do as she’s told…
Kora and Roka are two girls in one body. Together they’re the illegitimate daughter of Sir Tantalus Blackmore, the genius behind the British automata workforce. While quiet, studious Kora investigates the mystery behind her curious condition and her father’s work, strong-willed Roka stays up all night to see Lenin speak at a Communist rally, throws bricks through windows with the suffragettes—and champions rights for automata.
This alternate twentieth century is clockpunk rather than steampunk, the strange and unsettling automata of the eighteenth and nineteenth century fusing with the mass production of the industrial revolution to create a snowballing robotic workforce, given life by the mysterious ‘soul giver’
Did Kora/Roka receive her extra soul from the soul giver? Did she suffer some form of mental break? Or is something stranger afoot?
Stephen Palmer weaves his clockpunk setting skilfully. Automata communicate with their masters through ‘the lingua’, a programming language written on a stenograph; their rise is having a devastating impact on the human workforce; already people are debating whether automata, like any other workers, deserve rights. The alternate timeline has a sense of realism; robots are woven seamlessly into real British history, looking back to the Luddites of the early nineteenth century and forward to contemporary fears of computerisation.
There are hints of larger, more fantastical things in the background. What (or who) is the soul giver? Doctor Spellman confesses that there’s a dark secret at the heart of the factory and Sir Tantalus himself is frightened by his own work. All in all, it’s an intriguing book, with plenty of questions left unanswered for future volumes.
But on the flip side, all those questions are part of the reason why The Girl With Two Souls left me a little cold. I wouldn’t expect all the answers at the end of act one, but I was expecting some kind of a resolution. Instead the book rambles to a somewhat arbitrary stopping point. It feels more like act one of a long novel than volume one of a trilogy.
I’d happily read volume two— but to find out what happens, not because I’m especially invested in the characters. Neither Kora nor Roka is fleshed out enough for my liking. Far more attention is lavished on the differences between them than who either girl actually is as a person; Kora is quiet, studious and obedient, Roka is loud, illiterate and does as she likes. The contrast wears a bit thin. Hopefully both girls will be developed more in books to come.
Palmer is on thin ice with the inclusion of Bedlam and the ambiguity over Kora and Roka’s condition. It should be self-evident, to any educated reader, that they don’t have a natural illness as the situation depicted here is, quite simply, not how mental illness works. Dissociative Identity Disorder is a controversial, poorly-understood and stigmatised disorder, and in my opinion, it’s a subject that writers of sci-fi and fantasy should stay well away from.
That said, the Bedlam scenes are brief and tasteful, Kora and Roka’s condition renders them vulnerable rather than dangerous, and both are sure of their sanity and their status as separate people. Neither, refreshingly, is there any question of one of them being the ‘real’ girl; they’re content to regard the other as an equal. As stories about multiple personalities go, this is a well-handled one, and I’d be surprised if later volumes reveal them to be one girl with a mental problem.
Overall, I had a good time reading The Girl With Two Souls. It’s a fun read if you enjoy clockpunk aesthetic, with a plot that’s rarely predictable and isn’t afraid to get political. I look forward to reading the sequels and I hope the resolution, when it comes, satisfies my curiosity.
Hold Back the Stars
By Katie Khan
Penguin Books/Doubleday Books
Review: Thom Day
Carys and Max are stuck in space. They’ve somehow managed to make it through the ring of meteors that surrounds Earth, but their spacecraft has been critically damaged in the process. Now with 90 minutes of oxygen left, they must fight to save each other and prove to the world below that the “utopian” rules governing Earth aren’t as progressive and freeing as they seem.
I generally steer clear of the romance genre, but it’s not often you get the opportunity to read romance set in a utopian post-war future, so I had to give Hold Back the Stars a go. It’s a quick, fun read, and while it hasn’t converted me to Mills & Boone, I did find it surprisingly enjoyable.
It follows the standard girl-meets-boy storyline, but there’s plenty of futuristic elements thrown in to keep non-romance readers intrigued. It’s set in the near future, and opens with Carys and Max stranded outside their dying spacecraft with only 90 minutes of breathable air and no way to contact Earth. The story is split between their last hour and a half together and flashbacks to their burgeoning relationship.
Back on their future Earth, North America and the Middle East have devastated each other with nuclear weapons, and citizens of Europia—happily still including Britain—are Rotated every three years to different Voivodes to encourage cultural appreciation and understanding, and to discourage the possibility of future wars. Europia is governed by Representatives in the Grand Central Hall who uphold the rules of the new utopia, including the rule that serious relationships cannot be formalised (i.e. marriage) until both members are over 30. Carys and Max are in their early twenties, but Max’s grandparents helped establish Europia and set up these rules, so his relationship with Carys threatens his bond with his family and challenges their entire way of life. Carys is an up-and-coming star in the space agency, so to prove the sincerity of their love to the Central Hall—and to Max’s family—they are sent on a dangerous mission to find a way through the meteor field.
The science fiction is fun as long as you don’t dig too deeply—I’m not sure the idea that Earth could capture a ring of meteors would hold up under astrophysical scrutiny—but it doesn’t stand in the way of the story: it’s a romance foremost with a good sci-fi background.
Meanwhile future Earth is an interesting place: Europia is a multicultural utopia, and united blocks exist around the globe, with Rotation occurring every three years. Aid is sent to the former United States, destroyed in a nuclear war with the Middle East, and people are encouraged to travel and learn other languages to increase cultural understanding. Hybrid electric vehicles are the norm, but space exploration has been halted by the meteor cloud now caught in Earth orbit. And there are sprayable bike locks—I don’t know why I like this last detail so much, but it gives the story a great feeling of futuristic domesticity.
The romance itself is sweet, if stereotypically sappy, and Carys and Max are likeable, if stereotypically flawed, characters. Secondary characters are few and exist mainly to further the plot, but Max’s friend Liu is a notable and refreshing exception.
Overall, Hold Back the Stars is an enjoyable, if not overly stimulating, story. The sci-fi elements held my non-romantic attention throughout, and any clunky writing could be mostly smoothed over by these elements. The ending left me disappointed, but this was mainly down to the story fitting the romance, rather than sci-fi, genre. Khan has a great imagination and paints a colourful, intriguing background for her characters to interact against, and I’d be interested to read more of her work in future.
Daughter of Eden
Chris Beckett
Corvus, Atlantic, 400 pages
Review: Iain Maloney
Daughter of Eden is the concluding part of a trilogy which began with Dark Eden and continued through Mother of Eden. 400 years have passed since Angela and Tommy were marooned on the strange world of Eden, and their descendants have bred, spread and developed. Eden’s society is split into two main factions and when Daughter of Eden opens, war is literally on the horizon.
Angela Redlantern, whom we first met as the friend of Starlight in Mother of Eden, is the first to see the boats of the Johnsfolk bearing down on Mainground. She joins her family and neighbours as they flee over Snowy Dark to take refuge at the original landing ground, bringing the trilogy full circle.
I won’t touch futher on the plot, to avoid spoiling the central premise of the narrative, beyond saying that it’s a thrilling tale of cultural revolution, military conflict and something of a coming-of-age journey, though for a society rather than an individual. I have to admit to not being a fan of the middle instalment, Mother of Eden. The constantly shifting perspectives and patchwork narration were welcomingly original but the narrow focus on political machinations below ground in New Earth laboured under the weight of plot inevitability. Fortunately Daughter of Eden is a very different kind of book. The scope is much wider, drawing in the various groups from across Eden, and the two contrasted timelines Beckett shapes the novel around – the shocking present and the preparatory past where Angela is trained to become a shadowspeaker—a member of the Gela priesthood—give the story depth and dynamism lacking in Mother of Eden.
Beckett’s work has long been fascinated with anthropology and cultural history, and the Eden trilogy wears its inspirations on the dust jacket. The first book explored a Cain and Abel-like story and how evil can be brought into the world. The second looked at how real events can become scriptural ‘truths’ that define a society and how one group can use these ‘truths’ to subjugate another, here through slavery and patriarchy. Daughter of Eden asks, “What happens when reality contradicts the ‘truth’ of these stories?” Eden truly is a paradise lost, but by playing the thought experiment through move by move, Beckett shows how humans can make a complete mess of things without the need for external malevolent intervention. There are no serpents that side of the wormhole.
The bedrock of feminism on which the trilogy rests is also given a more nuanced airing in this novel. While Mother of Eden looked at the straightforward male-versus-female dynamic developing among the Johnsfolk, Daughter of Eden explores a female-versus-female dynamic in the struggle between the cynical shadowspeaker Mary and the naïve Angela. It is a truism that members of oppressed groups are often unwittingly complicit in their own oppression, but Mary’s eagerness to preach whatever suits the headmen of Eden in order to protect her own power base, and her rage at being found out by Angela, give colourful life to the concept.
Despite being so overtly political and philosophical, Daughter of Eden avoids didacticism. Although the tone of all three novels is one of disapproval of religion, and organised religion in particular, the chaos caused by the dismantling of a belief system is sensitively handled, and the inevitable push-back and Trump-esque denial of reality is all too believable. When your entire existence is predicated on a particular understanding of the universe, it takes enormous strength and objectivity to abandon it. As Beckett shows us in Daughter of Eden, and recent events in reality underline, not everyone possesses those attributes.
The books are a great feat of world building that avoids all the usual cliches and pitfalls. Apart from a short section at the beginning of Daughter of Eden, exposition and explanation are kept within the action and are tied to plot developments, proving that the pages and pages of background given by lazier science fiction and fantasy writers can be dealt with in a more sophisticated manner. The language of Eden, developed from the childish English of the original first generation Edeners (Edenites? Edenonians?) is also a lesson for other world-builders in how small shifts in register or emphasis can render a known language unfamiliar. Edenese comes to life not in lists of new nouns and verbs that require an extensive glossary, but in the metaphors and similes drawn directly from the landscape of Eden.
The trilogy is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the power of the novel form to explore what it means to be human. Beckett has created a coherent and enclosed world and there is definite scope for more stories from Eden, for this to develop into a longer series that studies human social development in a way reminiscent of Asimov’s Foundation, while eschewing galaxy-wide panorama for a crucible. The Eden trilogy, like The Holy Machine before it, is what science fiction excels at: deconstructing complex ideas through the medium of compelling characters and captivating stories. Religion is both dangerous and necessary, as Marx pointed out, and here Eden is no different from Earth.
