Artemis by Andy Weir

Tags

science fiction, scifi

I loved The Martian, Andy Weir’s debut novel, and I totally fell in love with it’s plucky protagonist, Mark Watney. When I got the opportunity to review his sophomore effort Artemis, I was beyond excited. Did it live up to me admittedly high expectations? yes and no.

Jazz Bashara is a young woman who has lived in Artemis, a city on the moon, for 20 years. Despite having a huge intellect, she lacks conventional ambition and instead works as a porter while running a small smuggling concern, supplying contraband for the Artemesian rich. Never one to refuse a good deal, Jazz accepts a very illegal contract from a Scandinavian multimillionaire to destroy a smelting company in return for a cool one million slugs (local currency). She soon gets involved with the lunar authorities and organised crime and before long the lives of everyone in Artemis are in jeopardy.

This is a light thriller which just happens to be set in space. For me, the best science fiction is character driven and the story could be transplanted from space to earth with few differences. Weir achieves this perfectly. Yes, there is a lot of science and technology in the story. Some of it I understood, most of it I just accepted. The science is never dry and the author does his best to make it accessible without patronising the reader.

One of the standout features of The Martian was the perky, indefatigable character of the protagonist and Weir pulls this off again. Jazz is likeable, a rascal rather than a rogue. However, I can’t help but feel that her voice is too similar to Mark Watney’s and that perhaps too much of the author’s own voice is leeching into his prose.

Artemis has a cracking plot and well drawn characters with a very likeable narrator, so you’d think this would be a five star read. Alas, no. There is one major problem with this book that spoiled my enjoyment. In The Martian, a first person narration, Watney speaks to the reader via his audio journal. The fourth wall stays intact. In Artemis, however, we have another first person narrator who repeatedly crashes through that fourth wall by chatting to us as if she is telling us the story over a beer. While this was at first just mildly annoying, in the setting of a thriller it rather removes the belief that Jazz is ever in real danger as she would have to survive in order for her to tell us the story in the way she does. There is an argument that the tone of the book is light enough that we could infer that main characters are ultimately safe, but people do die and, for me, there is an imbalance in tone.

Ultimately, this is a cracking read. Will I read Weir’s next book? Yes, I think I will. But I’ll be hoping that it will be written in the third person or narrated by a character who is oblivious to the reader.

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Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar

Tags

literary fiction, science fiction, scifi, speculative fiction

I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi recently, especially that written by writers who are neither American or Western European. I have found their slightly different take on the genre refreshing. In the west, the idea of travelling to distant worlds tends to tie in with the expanse of empire and world domination. Unsurprisingly, sci-fi from the east takes a slightly different viewpoint. of course, I could be forcing my own world view onto what I read, but I digress.

Jakub Prochazka is the first Czech astronaut and will be the first to encounter a band of purple dust hovering in space and behaving in ways the scientists on earth can’t explain. His eight month mission is to go and bring some samples back to earth for analysis. But his mission, as expected, does not go to plan.

As his mission progresses we see in flashback the story of his early childhood, his father’s collusion with the communist regime and eventual downfall, his life with his grandparents and the brief yet important relationship with his wife, Lenka.

It is her decision to leave him while he’s on his mission that seems to trigger his breakdown and we are left to decide whether Hanus, the spider-like alien who shares his ship, is real or a figment of his deteriorating mind.

To say too much more would be to spoil the book. Kalfar has created an interesting everyman, perhaps his father’s son, who seeks glory and meaning at the expense of those he cares for most. The book is almost contemporary which lends a layer of realism to the story. As other reviewers have said, this is literary science fiction and there is one passage I have highlighted on my copy which I will go back to and read time after time. I may have cried.

Is this an original tale? No, not really, but how many of those are there? I found myself reminded of other books and other films as I read on, but this is by no means a rip off of any other tale. Spaceman of Bohemia is a very enjoyable read and it has stayed with me since I finished it a couple of days ago. I expect that like Hanus, it may haunt me for a while yet. Excellent.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

 

The Last Mile by Tim Waggoner

Tags

horror, novella, science fiction, scifi

When aliens arrive on earth, evil and violent, things change. Vegetation withers, birds fall from the sky. The alien gods need to be fed, they need humans, and in order to get them, they need human minions to bring them.

Dan is one of these unfortunate people, forced to bring sacrifices to the Masters in order to protect his wife and daughter. He picks up Alice and, hands and feet bound, takes her in his car to his particular “contact.” But they have an accident not far from the rendezvous and they have to make the last mile on foot, and Alice will not go easily to her fate.

There is a lot to like about this book. It shares some similarities with Tim Curran’s Blackout, but for me, The Last Mile isn’t as good.

There isn’t a great deal of specific violence in the book but what little there is seems…pornographic. In order to make Dan do as he’s told the gods force his wife to masturbate with the contents of the cutlery drawer. And if they can force her to violate herself in this way, why do they need thralls to do their dirty work for them?

I was left feeling rather unsatisfied by the logical inconsistencies of the novella but in the spirit of full disclosure, I am suffering an upper respiratory infection and read this book during the night when I couldn’t sleep for coughing. That may have soured my mood a little.

3 poodles.

Blackout by Tim Curran

Tags

horror, novella, science fiction, scifi

One of publisher Dark Fuse’s collection of sci-fi/horror novellas, Blackout is a story about what happens when the lights go out and the normal illumination of a 21st century town is replaced by something very dark indeed.

When he awakes from a post-BBQ-with-the-neighbours sleep, Jon finds himself alone in a darkened house. The lights don’t work and his wife is missing and when he looks out the window into a night which seems almost tangible, he thinks he sees something slither away into the bushes. In the sky towards town electric blue lightening strobes at regular, repeating intervals. And when he opens his door and enters the suffocating night, he hears screams.

Blackout is a well written, tight story with believable characters and a horror we can all relate to: which one of us has never been afraid of the monsters that lurk in the dark? Curran takes this shared, almost primal fear, and infuses it with a 21st century take on War of The Worlds. The author takes our hand and leads us further and further into his nightmarish world, the horror escalating with each chapter.

We are never properly shown what the aliens look like. Instead, Curran shows us snapshots, close ups of a gaping maw, a cable-like tentacle, allowing us to fill in the rest with our own imagination. Where this book really succeeds is in not supplying a motivation for the terrors inflicted upon earth by these creatures. We are left to infer our own conclusions…and what is scarier than the unknown?

Another good title by Curran. 4 Poodles.

 

 

I also reviewed Nightcrawlers by the same author and you can read about that here.

The Humans by Matt Haig

Tags

contemporary fiction, literary fiction, science fiction, scifi

You hear a lot of people talk about an author’s ‘voice’, discussing how it is one of the most important things to get right. In The Humans, Matt Haig’s writerly voice is so good, it’s only after finishing the book that you are aware of how well he nailed it.

Professor Andrew Martin has solved the Riemann hypothesis – it has something to do with prime numbers, apparently – and is summarily exterminated by an alien race who replaces him with one of their own. This ‘alien’ Andrew has a mission: to kill anyone whom Professor Martin has told of his discovery to prevent humankind discovering interstellar travel and screwing the universe the way they have Earth.

Unfortunately for ‘Andrew’, when he becomes corporeal on terra firma, he is standing on a road, stark bollocks naked. He is discovered by the Police and temporarily locked up in a mental hospital where his indoctrination on what being human is all about begins.

At first, ‘Andrew’ finds the human form repulsive and has no problems in fulfilling his mission. But the longer he stays on earth, the more human he becomes leading him to make some dangerous decisions.

I loved this book.

Haig uses short, staccato sentences with no contractions and few adjectives for ‘Andrew’s’ voice. Remember how we learned french at school? “Where is my aunt? My aunt is in the cafe. She is drinking coffee.” This perfectly captures how you would expect someone new to the language (‘Andrew’ learned English from one copy of Cosmipolitan) to speak. As the book progresses, however, and ‘Andrew’ becomes Andrew, the voice changes subtly and becomes more natural: an external clue to the character’s internal transformation.

The book is littered with ‘one liners’ worthy of Douglas Adams. Take this one: “A cow is an Earth-dwelling animal, a domesticated and multi-purpose ungulate, which humans treat as a one-stop shop for food, liquid refreshment, fertiliser and designer footwear.” It could have been lifted straight from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Where I find Terry Pratchett’s forced, smart-arsed comments extremely annoying, Haig’s touch is gentle and carried me along, smiling.

Don’t get me wrong: this is not an off-world, alternate universe science fiction or fantasy. The Humans is very firmly rooted on our own planet with a cast of human beings. Whether or not this includes Andrew Martin, you’ll have to read the book for yourself to find out.

The Humans is an optimistic essay on our species, full of love, wonder, family, dogs and peanut butter sandwiches. And I’m not ashamed to say there was a tear in my eye by the end. Highly recommended.

Horror Shorts

Tags

horror, science fiction, scifi, steampunk

Fancy a short shot of horror? I have two books to recommend to you.

In Broken Sigil by William Meikle Joe Connors is a cop who is called to investigate the death of his friend, Johnny Provan. Connor’s investigations soon unearth an affair between his friend and his late wife and when he visits the rooming house where Provan was living he begins to suspect that there are darker forces at work than just betrayal.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers but if you can imagine the love child of Stephen King and Micky Spillane what you come up with might look a lot like this wonderfully dark, noir-esque horror. Meilkle offers hints of other worlds, human gatekeepers and the all important symbolism of the Maltese Falcon. A lovely, traditional horror I stayed awake to finish.

Marrow’s Pit by Keith Deininger is a very different beast. Ballard works, lives and serves the Machine – the mechanism which is his world. Like a giant steampunk creation in a future world where citizens have been told that ‘outside’ is no longer able to sustain life. In flashback we are shown Ballard’s relationship with his father and how he and his wife Laura, a cold and heartless woman, met.

There is much in this book to remind us of other stories: Logan’s Run was the first to come to mind but then ending came as a shock and was not at all what I was expecting. The ending initially struck me as quite depressing but after some thought I realised that ‘up’ depends on what direction you are facing. A great read.

Night Crawlers by Tim Curran

Tags

horror, science fiction, scifi

If you look at the cover of Nightcrawlers by Tim Curran, see the oddly manicured female hands and the kitchy font of the title, you might be forgiven for expecting the literary equivalent of the type of movie shown by the Horror Channel at 3am: exploitative, all gore and no characterisation. Well, I hate to disappoint you but this book is far, far better than the cover suggests.

More than 200 years ago something came to Clavitt Fields from the skies. Some years later the village was burned to the ground to rid the world of the evil that seemed to have infected the village’s inhabitants. But when bodies with evidence of human bite marks on them start to turn up and two local cops disappear, people quickly realise that the evil in Clavitt Fields is still alive. And hungry.

The author takes us on a gut churning journey through the underground world, ramping up the tension nicely, making us care for the men involved in the hunt for their colleagues. In the best Scooby Doo tradition, the men split up and we are flung from crisis to crisis as we spend time with them in turn.

Without giving any spoilers, the motivation for the “thing”*** is new to the genre for me and I found that a refreshing change. I genuinely liked the main characters, especially 94 year old Elena for whom I felt a lot of sympathy and respect.

All in all, if horror is your game you could do a lot worse than choose this enjoyable book. Recommended.

 

Red Cells by Jeffrey Thomas

Tags

horror, science fiction, scifi

Dark Fuse is proving to be a great publisher of horror shorts and Red Cells by Jeffrey Thomas is no exception.

Jeremy Stake is a shape-shifting PI who is doing time so his client he impersonates doesn’t have to. Stake is in no ordinary penitentiary: this future world, populated by aliens and mutants, has a unique solution to overcrowding in jail. They created a new prison in a pocket universe, held together by physics I don’t profess to understand. And when inmates start to disappear, or rather explode in a mass of red goo, Stake finds himself at the centre of an investigation where his skills aren’t really wanted. He soon begins to realise that people – and robots – are not what they seem and that they may not be alone in this man-made universe.

I thoroughly enjoyed the mix of detective fiction, sci fi and horror. My main complain about many books in the sci fi and horror genres is that the gimmick – whether that be a monster, a ghost or an alien race – takes precedence over plot and characterisation. Thomas avoids this trap by writing a novella where I wanted to read on and find out who – or what – dunnit.

Thomas’s protagonist has appeared in two other novels by the author, neither of which I have read. An oversight I aim to put right ASAP.