Kim Miller
This is Christopher Priest's first novel. It is a good story overall but suffers from a very laggy first section that stops the story from progressing. It begins with the protagonist working in a secret lab far below the surface of Antarctica, a decision that seems to have been made only for the final stages of the book to have a jumping off point.
Research chemist Wentick is taken from the lab and into the jungles of Brazil where, after a long trek through the jungle, he's incarcerated in an abandoned jail and interrogated. The jail sections takes up 30% of the book and is a long meandering sequence of almost surreal events. Almost, but not quite. The whole section is given no meaning in the story apart from the suggestion of total disorientation. Wentick's captors are quite mad at time while Wentick himself is perfectly rational through it all.
At last he's moved from the 'jail in the jungle' environment and finds himself in Sao Paulo with a sympathetic associate and a new laboratory, except that he's 200 years into the future. There has been a nuclear war that has blown up most of the world and only South America survives without too much damage. It turns out that these future people think Wentick and his research has caused a severe problem that arose in the war and he's been brought into the future to set things right. This is quite a shift from the idea that people go back to the past to correct things.
The second half of the book moves along well and the characters are much more relatable. Wentick goes through a lot of thinking about time displacement as he considers that his wife and children are now long dead and probably didn't survive the war anyway. But with a bit of time travel left to him he makes a very unexpected decision.
This is Christopher Priest's first novel. It is a good story overall but suffers from a very laggy first section that stops the story from progressing. It begins with the protagonist working in a secret lab far below the surface of Antarctica, a decision that seems to have been made only for the final stages of the book to have a jumping off point.
Research chemist Wentick is taken from the lab and into the jungles of Brazil where, after a long trek through the jungle, he's incarcerated in an abandoned jail and interrogated. The jail sections takes up 30% of the book and is a long meandering sequence of almost surreal events. Almost, but not quite. The whole section is given no meaning in the story apart from the suggestion of total disorientation. Wentick's captors are quite mad at time while Wentick himself is perfectly rational through it all.
At last he's moved from the 'jail in the jungle' environment and finds himself in Sao Paulo with a sympathetic associate and a new laboratory, except that he's 200 years into the future. There has been a nuclear war that has blown up most of the world and only South America survives without too much damage. It turns out that these future people think Wentick and his research has caused a severe problem that arose in the war and he's been brought into the future to set things right. This is quite a shift from the idea that people go back to the past to correct things.
The second half of the book moves along well and the characters are much more relatable. Wentick goes through a lot of thinking about time displacement as he considers that his wife and children are now long dead and probably didn't survive the war anyway. But with a bit of time travel left to him he makes a very unexpected decision.
Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a police officer with The Panoply, the organisation patrolling an association of inhabited asteroids called the Glitterband. Somebody has blown up one of the habitats with the loss of hundreds of lives. Dreyfus is sent to investigate.
The story soon turns into more than a murder investigation. The most obvious suspect looks to have been set up. But by who? And what reason made such loss of life worth it? And so the mysterious presence of Aurora slowly emerges. But Aurora is not the normal super-villain trying to take over the whole of civilisation. Aurora was killed decades ago, and this resurrection speaks of a darker threat.
Very soon Dreyfus finds himself pursuing a distributed AI intent on bringing down the Glitterband's governance. And with more investigation it seems there is a second AI that is looming with a totally different threat to them all.
This is a fast paced story with high stakes and an equally high body count. The attack by Aurora is ruthless, and so must be the response against her. Dreyfus sees a possible ally against Aurora but convincing him to join the war puts him in mortal danger.
The book ends at a suitable point but there is much left to be picked up by a sequel.
Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a police officer with The Panoply, the organisation patrolling an association of inhabited asteroids called the Glitterband. Somebody has blown up one of the habitats with the loss of hundreds of lives. Dreyfus is sent to investigate.
The story soon turns into more than a murder investigation. The most obvious suspect looks to have been set up. But by who? And what reason made such loss of life worth it? And so the mysterious presence of Aurora slowly emerges. But Aurora is not the normal super-villain trying to take over the whole of civilisation. Aurora was killed decades ago, and this resurrection speaks of a darker threat.
Very soon Dreyfus finds himself pursuing a distributed AI intent on bringing down the Glitterband's governance. And with more investigation it seems there is a second AI that is looming with a totally different threat to them all.
This is a fast paced story with high stakes and an equally high body count. The attack by Aurora is ruthless, and so must be the response against her. Dreyfus sees a possible ally against Aurora but convincing him to join the war puts him in mortal danger.
The book ends at a suitable point but there is much left to be picked up by a sequel.
An easy reading romp of a novel that swaps between being a tribute to Raymond Chandler's noir detectives and mildly dystopian science fiction. It was a single sitting rainy Saturday read for me that was undemanding as long as I kept track of the weird stuff.
Metcalf is a gritty and cynical private 'inquisitor', the change in his job title represents the dystopic culture of the time. He's employed by a client, the client turns up dead and another man asks him to investigate it as he's in the firing line to be charged with the murder. The 'Inquisitor Office' gets in the way of his investigation and the novel proceeds as a game of cat and mouse as the facts of the case slowly get revealed. Along the way his 'karma' card keeps being docked by the Office to scare him off. Zero karma points could see him taken out of the society.
There are the normal noir detective tropes of cynical banter, women to be ogled, people being followed into dark places, bars with cigarette butts in pools of beer on the floor, all the expected stuff. There are also 'evolved' animals, modified animals that mimic humans, walking upright, wearing clothes, talking, carrying guns. And everybody is snorting drugs variously named as Forgettol, Avoidol, Acceptol, to smooth out their experience of living.
The book won the Locus Award for best first novel in 1995 so it came with a pedigree. However, the thirty years since has pushed the misogyny into the 'no go' zone. And even for a 1995 novel to hark back fifty years was pushing it. The weirdness of the characters held my attention and I was less interested in the 'who dunit' aspect as I was in the play between the human and animal power tripping. OK, as an Australian I wanted to know more about that kangaroo on the cover.
As things came to a head between Metcalf and the Office the story took an unexpected u-turn and the whole endeavour seemed lost. The final chapters take us into a new world and Metcalf has to adapt with instant reflexes to bring the investigation to a close. This final part of the story elevated it up a notch and gave a sense of satisfaction to my day of reading.
PS. The novel took inspiration from a quote by a Chandler character, "... the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket."
An easy reading romp of a novel that swaps between being a tribute to Raymond Chandler's noir detectives and mildly dystopian science fiction. It was a single sitting rainy Saturday read for me that was undemanding as long as I kept track of the weird stuff.
Metcalf is a gritty and cynical private 'inquisitor', the change in his job title represents the dystopic culture of the time. He's employed by a client, the client turns up dead and another man asks him to investigate it as he's in the firing line to be charged with the murder. The 'Inquisitor Office' gets in the way of his investigation and the novel proceeds as a game of cat and mouse as the facts of the case slowly get revealed. Along the way his 'karma' card keeps being docked by the Office to scare him off. Zero karma points could see him taken out of the society.
There are the normal noir detective tropes of cynical banter, women to be ogled, people being followed into dark places, bars with cigarette butts in pools of beer on the floor, all the expected stuff. There are also 'evolved' animals, modified animals that mimic humans, walking upright, wearing clothes, talking, carrying guns. And everybody is snorting drugs variously named as Forgettol, Avoidol, Acceptol, to smooth out their experience of living.
The book won the Locus Award for best first novel in 1995 so it came with a pedigree. However, the thirty years since has pushed the misogyny into the 'no go' zone. And even for a 1995 novel to hark back fifty years was pushing it. The weirdness of the characters held my attention and I was less interested in the 'who dunit' aspect as I was in the play between the human and animal power tripping. OK, as an Australian I wanted to know more about that kangaroo on the cover.
As things came to a head between Metcalf and the Office the story took an unexpected u-turn and the whole endeavour seemed lost. The final chapters take us into a new world and Metcalf has to adapt with instant reflexes to bring the investigation to a close. This final part of the story elevated it up a notch and gave a sense of satisfaction to my day of reading.
PS. The novel took inspiration from a quote by a Chandler character, "... the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket."
I was attracted to this book when I heard a reviewer say. "A man buys a house and finds that it cleans itself and if he leaves the washing up on the kitchen bench overnight it's been done in the morning." And that was my entry point into this very human time travel story.
Tom is the house buyer. He's recently divorced and moved out of town. He buys a house that has been left abandoned by the previous owner who has disappeared without a trace and is ten years missing. The mysterious washing up feature is only one of the strange things he finds. At the heart of the story is time travel.
When he finds himself no longer in the Pacific North West in 1989 but walking out of an apartment building into New York city in 1963 it turns his world upside down. We meet the other characters that populate the story. The estate agent who sold him the house, the helpful young woman who finds him sitting dazed in New York, her friends who live for folk songs and poetry in smoke filled cafes and sing of justice and peace, and somewhere in the shadows is a dark force who seeks his death.
This is not a time travel story of a man on a quest, he's not trying to 'fix' some event of history. It's not a hard science fiction exploration as if Wilson is saying, "I've got this idea about time travel, what do you think of it?" It's a thriller built loosely around a murder, but Tom doesn't yet know about the murder that happened before he even bought the house. The characters lift off the pages as real people with all their strengths and failures and the reader is drawn into their humanity. As the story moves to its chaotic climax we are engaged in their fears and desperation and their hope that a half baked plan will succeed.
There are two twists at the end that round out the story of two of the main characters. They give comfort to the reader while at the same time leaving questions about the nature of time travel itself and what can really be achieved for the future by going back into the past.
I was attracted to this book when I heard a reviewer say. "A man buys a house and finds that it cleans itself and if he leaves the washing up on the kitchen bench overnight it's been done in the morning." And that was my entry point into this very human time travel story.
Tom is the house buyer. He's recently divorced and moved out of town. He buys a house that has been left abandoned by the previous owner who has disappeared without a trace and is ten years missing. The mysterious washing up feature is only one of the strange things he finds. At the heart of the story is time travel.
When he finds himself no longer in the Pacific North West in 1989 but walking out of an apartment building into New York city in 1963 it turns his world upside down. We meet the other characters that populate the story. The estate agent who sold him the house, the helpful young woman who finds him sitting dazed in New York, her friends who live for folk songs and poetry in smoke filled cafes and sing of justice and peace, and somewhere in the shadows is a dark force who seeks his death.
This is not a time travel story of a man on a quest, he's not trying to 'fix' some event of history. It's not a hard science fiction exploration as if Wilson is saying, "I've got this idea about time travel, what do you think of it?" It's a thriller built loosely around a murder, but Tom doesn't yet know about the murder that happened before he even bought the house. The characters lift off the pages as real people with all their strengths and failures and the reader is drawn into their humanity. As the story moves to its chaotic climax we are engaged in their fears and desperation and their hope that a half baked plan will succeed.
There are two twists at the end that round out the story of two of the main characters. They give comfort to the reader while at the same time leaving questions about the nature of time travel itself and what can really be achieved for the future by going back into the past.
Imagine you wrote a story with a twist at the end, but moved that twist to the very early part, and then added in another twist a little further on, and then another and another and another. That is this book.
At its heart it's the story of identical twin brothers who, after winning a bronze medal for rowing in the 1936 Munich Olympics, find their strongly held political differences over the coming war force them apart. One becomes a RAF pilot and the other a conscientious objector. But this is not an 'at the heart' kind of novel. It is filled with distractions, body doubles, alternate histories, hallucinations, personal insecurities, power struggles, romance and jealousies, and probably other conflicts that I have missed.
The twins are both J.L. Sawyer, Joe and Jack. Rudolph Hess presents their medals and jokes about twins playing tricks on people, but it's Hess (and Churchill) who later don't effectively separate them. Then we add in that Churchill recruits Jack as Aide de Camp on his trips through bombed out London to encourage the locals and Jack soon realises he's working for a body double. Ironically, the real Churchill sends Jack to interrogate a high ranking German prisoner, especially to determine if the man is who he said he is. The prisoner is Hess who had flown to Britain trying to broker a peace accord. Jack determines that it's not the real Hess, but another body double.
Priest uses memoirs, press reports, private papers, and release war documents to build up the story. Jack and Joe each have long sections telling of their experiences, one flying bombing missions into Germans and the other driving an ambulance after bombing raids on London. The reader notices that certain dates don't match, such as the war ending in 1941, but later the war ended in 1945. We realise that there are two histories running parallel through the novel and Priest has woven them into the story so well that we hardly notice the transition. So we start to take much more notice of the documents he's quoting, trying to see where the following narrative falls.
Both brothers are injured. Jack is shot down returning from a raid and rescued after hours in a life raft. But his navigator later says that he was the only survivor of the crash. Joe's ambulance is hit by a bomb and in one portion of the story he's killed but in another place he's knocked out and later found in a hostel in London with severe concussion which results in severe and repeated hallucinations. The movement between these different histories is sometimes subtle and sometimes jarring, but they weave in and out of the novel like strands of a rope.
It is as if Priest wanted to tell a story that was at once clear and at the same time confusing. He succeeded. The book is fascinating and engaging and it's no wonder that it was awarded literary prizes on publication.
Imagine you wrote a story with a twist at the end, but moved that twist to the very early part, and then added in another twist a little further on, and then another and another and another. That is this book.
At its heart it's the story of identical twin brothers who, after winning a bronze medal for rowing in the 1936 Munich Olympics, find their strongly held political differences over the coming war force them apart. One becomes a RAF pilot and the other a conscientious objector. But this is not an 'at the heart' kind of novel. It is filled with distractions, body doubles, alternate histories, hallucinations, personal insecurities, power struggles, romance and jealousies, and probably other conflicts that I have missed.
The twins are both J.L. Sawyer, Joe and Jack. Rudolph Hess presents their medals and jokes about twins playing tricks on people, but it's Hess (and Churchill) who later don't effectively separate them. Then we add in that Churchill recruits Jack as Aide de Camp on his trips through bombed out London to encourage the locals and Jack soon realises he's working for a body double. Ironically, the real Churchill sends Jack to interrogate a high ranking German prisoner, especially to determine if the man is who he said he is. The prisoner is Hess who had flown to Britain trying to broker a peace accord. Jack determines that it's not the real Hess, but another body double.
Priest uses memoirs, press reports, private papers, and release war documents to build up the story. Jack and Joe each have long sections telling of their experiences, one flying bombing missions into Germans and the other driving an ambulance after bombing raids on London. The reader notices that certain dates don't match, such as the war ending in 1941, but later the war ended in 1945. We realise that there are two histories running parallel through the novel and Priest has woven them into the story so well that we hardly notice the transition. So we start to take much more notice of the documents he's quoting, trying to see where the following narrative falls.
Both brothers are injured. Jack is shot down returning from a raid and rescued after hours in a life raft. But his navigator later says that he was the only survivor of the crash. Joe's ambulance is hit by a bomb and in one portion of the story he's killed but in another place he's knocked out and later found in a hostel in London with severe concussion which results in severe and repeated hallucinations. The movement between these different histories is sometimes subtle and sometimes jarring, but they weave in and out of the novel like strands of a rope.
It is as if Priest wanted to tell a story that was at once clear and at the same time confusing. He succeeded. The book is fascinating and engaging and it's no wonder that it was awarded literary prizes on publication.
The Condor has not returned from a distant planet and so her sistership, The Invincible, is sent out to find answers. They land on the planet and immediately it becomes apparent that there is disharmony between the crew. The commander is distant, his second in command is wary, various crew communities such as the scientists have differing views from the technicians.
The covers of many of the various editions of the book show a space helmet with a skull inside, so it's no surprise that they find the Condor crew dead. It's the why and the how that form the rest of the novel. The book is reminiscent of Lem's Solaris in that the humans are on a strange planet thinking they can overcome anything that comes against them. But, once again, they can only guess at the reality of the alien intelligence that they find. Just as in Solaris we have a divided crew, an enemy that can take over the minds of the humans, and a crew that does not have any women but differs from Solaris in that the planet does not conjure any into existence.
Portions of the later story are taken up with longish discussions between crew members of what is really happening on the planet and Lem goes deeply into a similar philosophical position as in Solaris that just because a planet is there does not mean that humans have the right or the ability to take it. Calling the ship Invincible is part of his ironic look at such human endeavour. And the final image is one of failure and defeat.
The Condor has not returned from a distant planet and so her sistership, The Invincible, is sent out to find answers. They land on the planet and immediately it becomes apparent that there is disharmony between the crew. The commander is distant, his second in command is wary, various crew communities such as the scientists have differing views from the technicians.
The covers of many of the various editions of the book show a space helmet with a skull inside, so it's no surprise that they find the Condor crew dead. It's the why and the how that form the rest of the novel. The book is reminiscent of Lem's Solaris in that the humans are on a strange planet thinking they can overcome anything that comes against them. But, once again, they can only guess at the reality of the alien intelligence that they find. Just as in Solaris we have a divided crew, an enemy that can take over the minds of the humans, and a crew that does not have any women but differs from Solaris in that the planet does not conjure any into existence.
Portions of the later story are taken up with longish discussions between crew members of what is really happening on the planet and Lem goes deeply into a similar philosophical position as in Solaris that just because a planet is there does not mean that humans have the right or the ability to take it. Calling the ship Invincible is part of his ironic look at such human endeavour. And the final image is one of failure and defeat.