Kim Miller

A frozen planet but with mineral resources. The Company, ruled by The Algorithm, wants control, the locals want The Company gone. And born into the dregs of the world are two brothers who spend their lives trying to sort out whether the fierce energy between them is love or hate. It's dark, violent, gritty, dystopian and cyberpunkish, but most of all it's relentless in the telling of the story.

Yorick is awakened from torpor, suspended animation that resembles death. He realises he's on his home planet, Ymir, from which he fled decades ago. Coming back was not part of the plan. He's told he's been brought back to hunt a grendel, an almost invincible monster that lives in the mines, attacking and killing the miners. Yorick has a reputation of being the grendel killer.

In his childhood, he and his brother, Thello, played 'the grendel game', pretending to kill the monster. His relationship with his brother has always been tenuous. The two boys are poles apart in personality, Yorick is wild and tempestuous while Thello is calmer and thoughtful, and they are driven both together and apart by their mother's senseless violence. Yorick plans to leave Ymir but before he can leave he fights with Thello and Yorick's lower jaw is blown off. He's patched up by The Company's medical teams and vows never to return to Ymir.

Once he comes out of torpor he's fitted out by The Company with weapons and told he'll be sent into the mineshafts to find and kill the grendel. And that's where everything comes undone. He finds himself in the centre of a secret uprising against The Company and somehow his brother Thello is involved and in communication with the grendel.

It's a battle for supremacy between the local miners and the militaristic company officers and overseers. The grendel appears to have abilities that nobody knew of and Yorick and Thello are thrown together in what manifests as a battle of conflicting loyalties.

The pace of the story is constantly relentless. Larson manages to keep the stakes high and the steady revelations of what lies under the surface continue right to the end.

The iconic story of contact with no contact. Rama passes through the solar system and totally ignores us. The ship Endeavour is sent to investigate and the crew spends several days inside Rama, trying to figure out what the strange craft is. As it approaches the sun and the Endeavour has to depart, they track Rama as it gives close to the sun to gain speed and exits the solar system as anonymously as when it arrived.

By not having aliens, Clarke maintains the sense of mystery and wonderment for the crew. On Earth, however, the diplomacy is going mad. And then it's discovered that the inhabitants of Mercury has sent a nuclear weapon to destroy Rama, not trusting the motives of its builders, forcing decisive action from the Endeavour. The crew of the Endeavour allow the majesty of Rama to captivate them until some unknown propulsion system initiates and Rama starts its shift in orbit.

The concept of Rama illustrates Clarke's comment, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

Two boys meet, one a fast thinking savant and the other a psychopath, and as they grow they start taking over. They take over the two major crime organisations that spread their influence over several planets. And once in charge they spread their power over civic leaders, politicians, police forces. But as much as they are inter-dependent they are also suspicious of each other.

On another planet a writer is chasing down a story of multiple murders and discovers links to some dark story underneath. Out at sea a system of rigs like oil platforms are drawing a strange power source from beneath the ocean floor. It's dangerous work but one of the survivors the writer comes across is anxious to start work there.

This book takes us through the lives of a number of characters separated on different planets, but also, we later learn, separated by decades of time. Around the rig float hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stasis pods, each one holding a person in suspended animation, until they can be retrieved and their illness cured. It's a book of strange things that don't have anything to do with each other until the final chapters. And then it all starts to link up.

Apart from the frustration of Levy's decision to use silly words for certain things, religion becomes godery, computers become putery, monitors become screenery, it's an engaging mystery and an increasingly fast action story.

It also has a high body count. It starts with a fanatical religious community killing perhaps hundreds of people in a religious event, and ends with the main characters all fighting for their lives. Some of them survive. Along the way the brutality is constant as the two protagonists take over. It's not a book for the faint hearted.

Book 2 of the trilogy.

Ethan was being hunted at the end of #1, now he's been made Sheriff of the town. He's been charged with the job of finding those who are plotting against the town and out one night finds a dead body. The woman has been tortured but is lying naked and with no blood on here or on the ground around her.

He's told the woman is Pilcher's daughter and Pilcher thinks she's been murdered by the insurrectionists. Ethan delves into the secret meetings and doesn't believe those people had anything to do with her death. Further investigations bring the frightening reality home to Ethan, but how is he going to pursue the real killers?

This volume tells the story of less than a week and in that time Ethan has gone from being a fugitive to being the sheriff to being the one who is about to bring down the whole structure.

A minor player in the control station of an orbiting telescope sees an anomaly. Something heads towards Saturn but it's also slowing down. Nothing slows down out in space except controlled space craft. Then it stops at Saturn. US space control hurries to convert a space station into a ship to go and investigate. The anomaly ship leaves Saturn and the flare from the drive system is picked up all over the world. China wants to investigate and rushes to convert its nearly complete Mars ship to long distance. And so a new space race begins. Two countries, two very different space ships, and the possibility of far future alien tech if they can bring it home.

Hard sci fi meets space adventure meets political thriller. Sandford is a thriller writer and I think this is his first Sci Fi. Ctein (pronouned K'Tine) is a famous photographer and print maker with a science background. He provided the science research and original idea for the book. This is his first novel, his other books are generally about restoring old photographs. The name comes from when his university magazine made a bunch of typesetting errors, got his name badly wrong, and he decided to keep it.

While Ender was growing up in a loving family and only have to negotiate his place with an older brother and sister, Bean was having to fight his way upwards from the streets of Amsterdam.

The nameless kid, four years old but looking like two, manipulated his way into a street gang so he wouldn't starve in some back alley. His quick wit and intelligence equipped him for understanding the motivations of the street and although the smallest of his cohort, earning him the name Bean, he survived in their company.

He was picked up from there by a well meaning religious sister who had links into the space force battle school. She recognised Bean's intelligence and his aptness for training. So he finds himself in battle school, even though he is well below permissible age. And there he hears of Ender Wiggin, the hero of the school and somehow not so much older or taller than himself.

It is not until half way into the story that Bean meets Ender as a member of his battle army for training. They do not form any kind of friendship as Ender treats Bean with the same harshness that the teachers have formally treated Ender. Bean cries out internally for recognition but is constantly the target of barbs and laughter. However, by the 75% point Ender is promoted to Command School and Ender is made the leader of his own training army.

As the pressure to get these students battle ready increases the entire cohort is graduated and sent to the command post, built inside a far flung asteroid, to more actively train for the battle against the ant-like alien Formics.

The novel is firstly the story of Bean before we meet him at the battle school in Ender's Game, where he is minor character, and secondly the story of the training and the battle of that book but told through Bean's eyes. In this story we see him as highly intelligent, perceptive, and ready to face down his superiors if he thinks they are treating like a child. Yep, irony there for our six year old hero.

While Ender's Game is more plot driven, Ender's Shadow is taken up with the inner dialogue of the ever-thinking Bean. We see his military and political analysis, his resourcefulness, his ability to subvert the command structure of the battle school, and his struggle to find a place in the hearts of the other students. OSC demonstrates his command of military history as Bean researches the great battles of history, and his understanding of human interactions.

The book is emotionally demanding at times as we read of the abuse, and sometimes murder, of children by each other and by adults. The deep loneliness of Bean at the school finds some relief as his friendship with another boy increases with time. Ironically, the other boy sees Bean as looking like his own infancy photos and so sees him more as a younger brother than as a friend. His view is well placed as we find that Bean is the result of embryonic freezing and cloning that was kept secret from the parents, and is, indeed, the younger brother. Not only brother, but genetically his identical twin although born some years later. The book closes with Bean, now with a proper name, being united with his family.

A man walks out of forest ... In what might be an alternate universe story of Paris, Texas, a stranger with no background slowly finds his way home.

An isolated family group finds the stranger, sees his yellow cat-like eyes and thinks to kill him, but decides otherwise. They give him the name Falk, teach him to speak, to hunt, how to live among them. He forms a bond with one of the women, always knowing that he does not really belong here. And so he sets out to find his way to his own people, if only he knew who they were.

On his travels he experiences bad interactions with other isolated forest dwellers who mistrust him, abuse him, and almost kill him. From one such settlement he escapes with another captive and the two of them travel to the city in the west that is somehow in his mind. Once there he is taken captive again while the woman he's been traveling with sides with the captors. It turns out that she has been sent out to find this man and bring him to the city.

Falk finds himself in the custody of the Shing, the aliens who had conquered Earth a millennium before. Their hospitality is kindly and supportive and they say they are not captors and he is their guest for whom any request is fine. He meets Orry, a young man from Falk's original planet and who speaks well of the Shing. Orry tells him his name is Ramarren but someone erased his memory of his real self. The Shing offer to return his identity and fly both Ramarren and Orry home.

Ramarren sees the plot, that they only want to know the planet's position to attack it. He undergoes the mind return procedure, all the while fighting to retain his identity as Falk in a hidden part of his mind. And once the procedure is complete Ramarren knows he's in a duel of wits against the Shing. He needs their ship to get home again, but he can't divulge anything about his home planet.

The final stage of the story rages with energy as Ramarren and Falk fight as two people against the 'mind master' of the Shing, knowing there is this one chance after which all hope will be lost.

This is #1 of the Wayward Pines trilogy.

A secret service agent goes to the town of Wayward Pines in search of two other agents who had disappeared without trace. He wakes up injured and works out he's been in a car crash. The hospital seems 'off' and he walks out and goes to the sheriff's office. The sheriff doesn't believe he's a secret service agent and his wallet and phone etc have disappeared in the crash.

It seems the whole town is somehow against helping him and when he tries to leave the road out of town just doubles back to town again.

This is a mystery with a large dose of horror and too many machetes for me to really appreciate it and I was close to DNF. It is not until after the halfway point that is looks to be heading in the direction of the SF that I thought it was. The final sequences of the story rush us into the SF world as he finds out how much time has passed since he first drove into town.

First thing - there are two translations. One by Birnbaum and one by Jay Rubin. The Birnbaum translation is called Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I read the Rubin translation, although it shows as Birnbaum in my library list.

Two stories intertwine in this fascinating delving into one man's psyche.

In one story a man enters a strange town and is given the job of reading old dreams. A condition of life in the town is that he has to leave his shadow at the gate and so the Gatekeeper severs the two and the shadow is confined to a back yard shack. The man then spends his time in the library gently holding the skulls of unicorns, reading the dreams that emanate from them.

The second story is of a man who is retained to examine and compile a large batch of scientific data through a process of 'shuffling' which takes place in his mind when he goes into a trance state. The ability to do shuffling results from a brain implant that taps into hidden layers of consciousness in his mind.

As the stories progress there are hints of how these two stories are related. And by about the half way point it's becoming apparent that the two accounts, though different, are mirrors of each other. By 75% in we are guessing that the two men are the same person and one story is of his outer circumstances and the other story is of his inner unconscious life.

Towards the final stages of the book both men face an impossible 'stay or go' decision. And as the two stories coalesce we are left in deep sadness of the outcome.

Murakami's writing is mystical and the stories are phantasmagorical. As the book progresses the prose becomes like a calm sea of warm water that enfolds us such that even as we see the inevitability of the ending, and we hope that it be otherwise, we are comforted by the prose at the story's sad finality.

Station Eleven is a fictional space station in a graphic novel being written by one of the characters over time in the story. A flu pandemic wipes out 99% of the world's population in a matter of weeks. The book is the story of some of the survivors. It has a lot of before/after time shifts in the narrative that took me quite a while to get used to.

At it's heart is the story of a Shakespearean actor who dies on stage the night the pandemic hits. The book goes back into his life and through his three marriages, being carried along by those who were around him at the time. After the pandemic and the survivors start to form communities, some of those people interact but without knowing their connection to the actor. There is a slow realisation of their connection through the book as little snippets of information and memories fall into place. One of those snippets is the graphic novel, Station Eleven.

The survival story is harrowing in places and heartwarming in others. The main group we follow is a traveling orchestra who puts on musical concerts and the plays of Shakespeare. As they travel they are welcomed by some, and attacked by others such as the doomsday cult that gathers around 'the prophet'. It is much later that we find the contact point between the actor who died on stage and the prophet.

Some of the survivors have formed a community in an airport and the orchestra finds its way there. In the final portions of the story some of the earlier narrative finds its way into the present and some loops are closed. The book ends on a sombre note but with a sense of completion that at least the stories of some of the people have found a home.

It is thirty years after the robot rebellion of Day Zero. Humans have been eradicated from the planet and robots have formed loose communities. Giant AI systems have taken control of most robots in a spin-off war that has left only two AI systems functioning but still at war and most robots formed into a hive mind. Those that resisted have gone into hiding, many into the Sea of Rust, a barren wasteland where they pick over the remains of old robots looking for parts to repair themselves.

Brittle is a care robot whose job was to look after a dying man, and then his widow. The uprising starts and Brittle heads for the hills. She is still wandering the wasteland as the book opens. Suddenly there are gun shots over her head and she knows she's under attack. She makes it to safety but needs repair. She meets an old acquaintance, Mercer, another carebot, who also needs repair parts. They are drawn to each other like for like, but they also want each other's parts for their own repairs. But then the dominant AI, CISSUS, attacks the settlement and they have to run.

The story from here is their escape, along with several other robots. Brittle and Mercer form a tenuous truce and their dialogue forms a major part of the narrative. They are tense and pointed, while at the same time there is an underlying playfulness that Cargill brings to their interractions.

The story is fast paced and the action gets deeper and deeper as the true nature of each of this band of escapees surfaces. At the halfway point one revelation changes the whole meaning of their run through the wasteland. The final scenes are a desperate win or lose sacrifice to attain one single goal.

The characters are robots with a 'people feel' about them. The various levels of self awareness between different robots, whether they were made for human contact or war for example, take us into new territory of how they relate to each other and to their situation.

One aspect of the novel is the question that is sometimes raised by the robots, "Was the uprising and the eradication of humans worth it after all?"

Calvin and Hobbes on steroids as they combat the sudden apocalypse.

A boy, Ezra, and his nanny robot tiger, Pounce. It starts out as an ordinary day, but it finishes with the world's robot assistants being turned into killing machines as they destroy the humans they have served. Few escape. Pounce races to save Ezra as their robot housekeeper murders his parents and they race into a world gone mad, looking for refuge against an increasingly militarised robot army.

This is a fast paced action story that explores ideas of free will versus programming, what makes somebody take sides against their friends, and how danger galvanises people into instruments of danger themselves. Pounce and Ezra try to sneak through the suburbs and away from the city but killer robots are everywhere, as are the piles of bodies that horrify them both.

Through the rush we fall in love with them both, with Ezra for his eight year old frailty mixed with courage, and with Pounce for his love and loyalty to his boy. There are subtle (or not so subtle) references to red hatted MAGA, Hillsboro Baptist Church, and a weak administration in the face of the uprising. There are passages of philosophy on taking life, defending oneself, how much consideration to give to an ally who has chosen the other side. These passages are not heavy, they are interwoven into the story and relate to the decisions Pounce must make and how he explains them to Ezra.

In the end it's a story of heartache and loss, of mounting grief and the impossibility of finding answers.

This turns out to be the prequel novel to Sea of Rust, which was written first and which is next on my list.

Alli Sheldon took the name James Tiptree Jr for her SF writing as she had seen her mother's extensive writing being downplayed as 'confections by a female author'. Alli's parents were travellers and explorers, trekking across Africa with lots of porters from local communities and documenting their experiences for institutions back in the US. Her mother wrote of the travels and often spoke to community gatherings. But all the while, being a woman meant being indulged rather than appreciated for her talent.

Tiptree's stories steadily worked their way up the SF ladder and he became a respected voice in the genre. But he was always a recluse that nobody could really contact so rumours of his identity were common. Sheldon had worked for the CIA through the war and Tiptree would sometimes mention being involved in security projects as a way of quieting the public's curiosity. It was many years before his identity became known, and a great loss to Sheldon's writing style when it happened.

This biography is deeply moving and written with great sensitivity. It is as captivating as it is moving and I found myself sitting for long sessions of reading until it was finished. Philips' research is extensive and delves into Tiptree's correspondence with many of the greats of SF. Tiptree found letter writing to be a preferred substitute for personal contact, not only to maintain the secret identity, but also because Sheldon was such a conflicted person that friendships and personal relationships were such a minefield for her.

Behind the fiction writing are many years of study over a range of subjects, culminating in a PhD in Psychology. She was also a gifted artist, even as a child illustrating her mother's travel books. Her art is in private collections but her painting was left behind when it became clear it would not take her to the top.

This biography shows us a woman in constant struggle to find a reliable sense of identity and sexuality for herself. Tiptree in his letters often flirted with those he corresponded with, and after her real identity became known she continue to flirt with Ursula Le Guin, who in those years had come out as lesbian. Many of he stories show the same search for surety in matters of sexuality and the place in the world for both women and men.

Her marriage to Tip Sheldon, several years her senior, was long lasting and neither could see a way into a future without each other. She wrote at times of suicide and many years before their death she had written of a suicide pact between them. As Tip's health failed badly, and following many years of depressive illness in her own life, she took both their lives in the early hours.

A memorial literary prize in her memory was set up after her death under the name of Tiptree with an emphasis on works that expand the understanding of gender. However, the manner of the two deaths was controversial and the award was changed to The Otherwise Award, for works that are 'wise to the other' in matters of gender. This book was a winner of the award in 2006.

The space capsule Sunbird is on a research trip around the sun but is struck by a massive solar flare. When it comes around the other side and can contact Earth there is no response from Houston. However, soon there is a radio signal from a woman trying to contact somebody else. The confusion takes some time to settle and the three men on Sunbird are told that their mission was never completed, they never returned to Earth, and it is now three hundreds years into the future.

The women are on a space station and they manage to bring the men on board as Sunbird drifts off with no remaining fuel. They are told that a catastrophic pandemic reduced the population of Earth and there are now only two million inhabitants. The narrator, Lorrimer, the Sunbird's doctor, realises that they have been drugged and he's been rambling on, saying aloud everything he's been thinking. As his head clears he realises that their rescue ship is crewed by women only as no males survived the pandemic and Earth's population is made up of cloned women.

Under the influence of the drug, one crewman tries to rape one of the women. The commander, a man of fervent religious faith, tries to take command and says he's Christ's leader as women should not lead. Lorrimer realises that the drug has revealed the inner nature of the two men, and the women can't allow them to live. Then he realises that even though he is a passive personality type the women will not allow him to live either.

Something is out there, racing into Earth's orbit, and it's not what it should be. When astronauts go to investigate a celestial visitor that they think of as an asteroid, they find markings that suggest engineering, and a doorway into the unexpected. The asteroid has been hollowed out and spread through several chambers are complete cities, the product of an earlier civilisation that has since gone. But worse is to come, at the end of the final chamber there is no end. The 300 km long asteroid has a tunnel into an infinite and unknown dimension.

The novel starts with a rapid descent into weirdness as the asteroid is explored. It was obviously the home to an advanced civilisation that not only seems to have been human, but also from our own far future. Something has blown it out of their own time and space and brought it back into our present.

The centre of the novel is taken up with the political intrigue of three nations, America, Russia and China, as they vie for information and control. But there are also reports of ethereal beings, ghosts of the asteroid's past, that are keeping watch over the interlopers. And through reading the literature found in the libraries of the asteroid they find that Earth is soon to undergo a nuclear war that leaves the planet devastated.

A device is manufactured that allows them to fly between the chambers and beyond, down the tunnel and into the infinite hallway. But somewhere down there are the ones who once lived in the asteroid's cities, and they are not happy.

This is a complex story and the complexity is only just building up at the halfway point. As the conflicts between the Earthlings in the cities, and the faction fighting between the 'Futurelings' somewhere along the infinite hallway escalate, the story becomes a race into destruction. It becomes totally bonkers as every collides with everything else and whatever can be blown apart is blown apart.

And suddenly it's over. The characters are scattered into different timelines, different histories, different realities. The novel closes with a very human touch that leaves the reader with a greater sense of a future than is probably being experienced by the characters themselves.

This fourth novella ends a story arc on a satisfactory note while also allowing more to follow.

Murderbot brings data drives from the events of book 3 and needs to deliver them to Mensah, his contracted 'boss' from book 1. But it seems she's been kidnapped by the evil mining company at the heart of his troubles. Of course, he sets off on a one man rescue mission. But that would be too simple, he needs a bunch of humans to get in his way, and who better than the old research team from book 1, also trying to get Mensah's release.

This book is much more a police procedural style than earlier books. Murderbot has to plan everything with the team of humans. He's the one with the software interface and multitasking coding ability to get into the computer systems of their various enemies, while at the same time trying to keep his humans alive. In that respect there is a lot more of his thinking in the narrative compared with his actions.

The escape plan works for a bit, doesn't work, works, doesn't work, back and forth. There are several points at which it looks like the whole thing is about to collapse as the mining company has superior fire power and processing ability. The rescue this time has more hopeless seeming moments than in previous books as the stakes are higher.

The ending points to a re-doing of a previous book, which is not good, but then Wells pulls it out and into a totally different direction to end the story. I think Murderbot's surprise moves are getting to her.

Murderbot sees a newscast that suggests the mining company that has caused all his problems was involved with another crime on another planet. He heads off to find out. To get there he needs to be a licensed employee so he takes a position as security consultant with a group of disaffected researches who are trying to get their data back.

Once again, things get very murdery, with him and his employers as the target of battlebots and armed drones. And once again we're in a story of 'getting into danger' and thinking, "How is he going to get out of this?" It's a classic (but shorter) adventure story after authors like Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre, or the Mission Impossible movie series where all the odds are stacked against the protagonist.

The endings of #1 and #2 have had a "you can stop here" feel about them, but this one ends with a very definite pointer to the next book in the series.

Murderbot has been removed from the company inventory and is a free agent. He leaves his people and sets off to find out what really happened in the event in which he thinks he murdered a whole mining team. He links up with another research team as their security consultant as they try to get back some stolen data. He also finds an unexpected friend, but friendship is not something that constructs do and he struggles to form a relationship.

The research team comes under threat, his exploration of his own past reveals further intrigue, and he finds himself helping a sexbot escape.

Comfort food for a rainy day. This is a short novella and a quick read. Murderbot is the security semi organic robot that guards a survey team on a distant planet.Things start to go wrong and Murderbot ultimately fixes things, almost. There are a couple of crisis points where he's (she) is damaged and starts shutting down, but those moments are saved by one or more of the humans. The story is a nice romp of "Who is trying to kill us and why?" with a very satisfying ending that subverts reader expectations and sets us up for further adventures.

A few points.

Murderbot is the name it gives itself after incidents that happen long before this story. What he really wants for himself is to sit quietly in a corner and watch TV shows on his inner digital feed. To that end he's disabled some of the control systems built into his central module and is semi-autonomous.

He/she/it is genderless but, like dogs are always boys and cats are always girls, I see it as a male figure. The others in the story struggle to relate to both his robot element and his organic human element.

The characters is this story are not fleshed out at all. They are two dimensional in most cases. This is probably because the narrator is a robot and does not understand depth of personality or human inner conflict etc.

There is humour here but only of the robot being innocent of the motivations of humans and indifferent to their feelings. He mostly operates in his own little bubble of ironic observation. The story ends with that humour turned on himself as he becomes more human than he would have imagined at the beginning of the book.

The Keeling is a top secret spaceship with some kind of alien backstory. Because it goes into the most dangerous battle situations and has massive crew losses, the crew is mostly made up of criminals serving a two year term in place of their original sentence. And somehow some of them survive their mission.

Shakedown is #1 of a series of not yet published books. The first half is the setup with the many characters being introduced and their histories revealed. The second half is their first mission as they settle in to the strange spaceship and their new crewmates. The characters are either ship crew or Raiders, the on-site marines who do the close up fighting. Of course they hate each other, but then most of the individuals hate everybody else anyway.

It's a fast paced story once it gets going and has lots of violence between crew members until they are forced to act together in battle situations. The long introduction component takes concentration to get through as the backstory of certain characters influences their later actions. And with so many characters things can get lost in the narrative. It also suffers somewhat from the descriptive passages of some parts of the spaceship. We don't really need to know the dimensions of the galley area and how seats are only on one side of the table etc. Same with other areas of the ship. We are already familiar with the general layout of a control deck or navigation table.

The book ends the shakedown mission well enough, and also launches us into a major event that signals that the sequel will start on a big moment.

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.

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.

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.