Echopraxia is a semi-sequel to Peter Watts’s 2006 novel, Blindsight. The key event that links the two books is the Firefall, an event in the year 2082 – thousands of alien objects called ‘Fireflies’ suddenly appeared in Earth’s atmosphere and burned up instantly. Several years later, a ship called the Theseus was sent to investigate a comet giving off a radio transmission, in the hopes of finding out more of whoever was behind the Firefall. Echopraxia picks up back on Earth some time afterwards, with no word from Theseus.
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Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is a terrible book. By this I don’t mean it’s bad. Far from it – it’s a visceral, intense thrill ride into a true heart of darkness. When I say it’s terrible, I mean in the sense that a storm can be terrible, or a warlord, or a god. I mean that it inspires a frenzied mix of fear and awe, the kind that makes you want to run screaming, but also roots you to the spot, unable to tear your gaze away for even a second.
Ursula le Guin is best known for her ‘soft’ science fiction novels (a term I dislike, but I use for lack of a better one). So-called ‘soft’ sci-fi focuses more on characters, relationships, societies, psychology, and sociology, as opposed to ‘hard’ sci-fi which focuses on scientific accuracy and plausible future technology. Le Guin typifies this approach in her examinations of future societies and how they might affect human psychology and behaviour, for example Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness and Annares in The Dispossessed. Always Coming Home is no exception to this, but goes one step further: it is less a novel than an anthropological document of a culture that does not yet exist.
Hannibal Lecter is probably the most famous fictional serial killer ever created. Ever since his debut in 1981’s Red Dragon, he has captured the imaginations of millions worldwide. It’s unlikely he would have been as popular, though, had Thomas Harris not followed it up with The Silence of the Lambs. In this novel, Lecter took centre stage, after his comparatively small role in Red Dragon, and met his match in FBI trainee Clarice Starling.
Marcus Sedgwick was one of my favourite writers as a teenager, so when I learned he’d written a book for adults, I was keen to check it out. A Love Like Blood retains many of the elements of his YA fiction – a Gothic feel, a historical setting, and elements of the supernatural – while delving into more adult themes such as desire, grief, and obsession. I thought it was a smart, literate, and gripping delve into a disturbing and violent underworld.
Disgrace has become something of a contemporary classic since winning the Booker Prize in 1999. J.M. Coetzee’s searing novel of a man who’s lost his way in a changing South Africa was in 2006 named ‘the greatest novel of the last 25 years’ by The Observer, and made it onto BBC News’ list of the 100 most influential novels in 2019. It’s a short book, but Coetzee makes every word count as it builds to its shattering conclusion.
The genesis of Under the Pendulum Sun came from Jeanette Ng’s MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It was there she gained an interest in missionary theology, which forms the backbone of the novel, though it’s set in the Victorian era. Other influences include the Brontës, namely Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and Paradise Lost. This is to say that it’s a heady cocktail of the Gothic, religious, and fantastical. It has a very simple premise, which she used to pitch the novel: Victorian missionaries in fairyland.
Patrick Ness is best known as a writer for children and young people, but he’s also written two novels for adults: The Crash of Hennington and The Crane Wife. The Crane Wife was published in 2013, and is a loose retelling of a Japanese folktale of the same name. Ness relocates the story to contemporary London, making the protagonist a middle-aged divorcee who works in a printing shop (also, like Ness himself, an American in Britain). It’s something of an experiment, with mixed success, but still a lot to enjoy.
For a number of years, Stephen King wrote novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. As he stated in the introduction to The Bachman Books, this was done to see if his success was due to talent or luck (and so he could publish more than one book a year). He was outed as Bachman in 1985 by a bookstore clerk named Steve Brown, who noticed similarities between King’s and Bachman’s writing styles. In 1989 King published The Dark Half, which drew on his experiences writing under a pseudonym for a story about a writer whose psychopathic pen name comes to life.
Dempow Torishima’s Sisyphean is a book of four parts, each a separate story but contributing to a larger whole. It’s described as a ‘mosaic novel’, though it was published in its native Japan as a short story collection. I think ‘mosaic novel’ fits it better, because when put together the stories gain something they would otherwise lack as individual pieces. They’re linked by theme and setting – all take place in a distant future where genetic engineering has rendered the human race unrecognisable.
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