Kim Miller

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.

This is a novel of quiet sanity compared to much of PKD's work. Ragle Gumm spends his day working on a daily puzzle in the local newspaper called, Guess Where the Little Green Man Will Appear Next. He lives with his sister and her husband and son. Next door lives the nuisance couple who are always visiting at inopportune times. But there are times when Ragle 'sees through to the other side of the world' and it's not like his normal reality. He worries that those moments are signs of mental illness.

The story is rather benign until the 25% mark, at which point a conversation happens between two characters who should not know each other. Their conversation points to not only a link between them but a common purpose, and that purpose concerns Ragle Gumm. From there the story darkens and the reader is slowly fed grains of the truth behind these various characters.

'Ragle' is the reverse of Elgar, the composer of the work The Enigma Variations, a musical work depicting several of his friends, but he never told anyone which variation portrayed which friend. And this is the theme that Dick follows through the novel. We slowly realise that the characters are not who they say they are, and not who Ragle believes they are. Just as The Truman Show portrayed a town set up solely to be the backdrop to one man's story, so Ragle and his daily competition is the centre of a military project that is keeping the world safe.

PKD's oft repeated exploration of human consciousness often takes us into the weird and crazy. Here the theme is explored but with a quiet subtlety as Ragle Gumm awakens to his own reality. And once awake he faces an old decision.

This novella takes us into a surealist noir-like detective story where unexplained strangeness is the order of the day.

A famous architect builds a house that runs on an artificial intelligence. In this way the house continues as the repository of all his major work after his death. Think of HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey, but less murdery. The house remains locked except for one person the AI will allow in as an archivist, but only for seven days each year.

One day the house calls the local police station to say there is a dead body inside. How did that guy get inside? Who killed him and how? How will the police investigate when they can't get inside to examine the scene?

The story is part locked room mystery, part gothic horror, part police procedural, part sardonic poke at one of the detectives who keeps wondering if he's in some noir detective story at last.

Overall it's a rather brittle story, as if reality is being bent almost to snapping point. Martine doesn't give anything away and the reader is left to work out their own take-away from it all. Nothing is really explained, the tension builds and falls away in unexpected moments, and the ending doesn't resolve the questions that the book presents.

This is one of PKD's most coherent novels. Two characters vie for the role as main protagonist. There is Jack, an electrical repair man and there is Manfred, a boy locked up in an institution for being 'anomolous'. For that we can read non neurotypical. Dick refers to autism on some occasions but the boy is not seen as that by those around him. And for a book written in the early 60s we should not expect a modern understanding.

Jack is called to a repair and gets involved with a powerful local union boss, Arnie, who is impressed with his work. Running parallel is the discovery that Jack's neighbours have a son, the boy in the institution whose father has just died. Jack's family gets involved with Manfred and through that Arnie makes a claim on the boy as he believes people with such brain function can see the future. Arnie recruits Jack to build a facility/machine that will allow them to communicate with Manfred so Arnie can interrogate the future.

Through a web of family relationships and power games, Dick explores the themes of isolation, shared hardship, mental illness and psychosis, and the human need to have mastery over our environment and community.

As the story develops we find that Manfred can communicate almost telepathically with the indigenous martian people. In a last ditch attempt to gain control over a situation that has escaped him, Arnie and Manfred set off on a pilgrimage inspired by the indigenous culture. Once again, Arnie can't quite keep control of things as we approach the climax of the story.

And then at the closing pages PKD hits us with a brick between the eyes. "I bet you didn't see that coming," he says as the book come to a close.

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."

Deadbeat Chuck is being divorced by his more successful marriage counselor wife. He's a programmer for simulacrum robots for the CIA but it seems he's better at writing lifelike code for robots than he is at living his own life. Chuck sees two possibilities, suicide or murder his ex wife.

His wife decides to go off to one of the moons in the Alphane star system to work with the communities that have formed since the psychiatric hospital closed down. The patients have gathered into villages according to their shared psychoses and suddenly Earth has decided they need 'help' - ie. We'd like to take their moon.

Chuck wangles his way into taking charge of the CIA robot that will accompany his wife on the mission, planning for the robot to kill her. Trouble is, a new second job he's been offered writing comedy scripts for a TV personality wants him to write a script where a man programs a robot to murder his wife. This is beginning to sound very suspicious to Chuck.

This novel is a comedic look at the human personality when it splits into its many components. The various moon dwellers, Chuck's current mental state, his wife's incipient violence, a couple of other female characters, the CIA management, there's an intelligent telepathic slime mold alien life form, are all metaphors for the aspects of the inner life that PKD has been setting out in his books from the beginning. As a self-referential look at the ridiculousness of human life, this is PKD saying, "If your life is anything like mine, welcome to the crazy club."

A tale of increasing unpleasantness. I picked this up as I loved Noon's Vurt. Had I read this first I would probably have not read Vurt at all.

This starts out as a bit of a mystery story with a weird underlying theme of people being either a writer of their own life or a character in somebody else's writing. It seems to be developing into a metaphor for the Thought Police of 1984. However, half way through it turns towards being body horror and after that a strange and ancient magic works its way into the foundation of whatever has been happening. It ends with a bunch of people out in a field with all the magic stuff rising off them as if they are in medieval England on 'witching day' or something.

The prose is thick with over-described thought processes that left me wondering when I was going to feel some emotional attachment to any of the characters. In the 'show, don't tell' arena, this had many losing moments. It was as if Noon was forcing his narrative to drag me along, knowing it wasn't succeeding very often.

The detective, Nyquist, is a pretty normal noir investigator. He's dogged in his determination to follow his nose no matter the cost, and his nose never seems to get it wrong. There's a woman, there's the police, although in this setting they are The Narrative Police making sure people are writing their story properly (i.e. spying on everyone), and there are lots of dark corridors in tall buildings. If Nyquist's gonzo side had been let loose we might have had a taste of Dark City or Gilliam's Brazil.

The theme of 'everything depends on the words' that underlies the story tries to take it into an hallucinogenic direction that it just doesn't want to go.

A comedic romp as a time traveler from the not so distant future bumbles his way through the English aristocracy of the late 1880s.

Ned Henry is a time traveler whose job is to go back in time to search for collectible items from jumble sales for his boss Lady Schrapnell. This time he's sent back to find a hideous piece of ironware called The Bishop's Bird Stump that went missing from Coventry Cathedral in the bombing. Along the way he manages to divert the course of history of one of Lady Schrapnell's ancestors and frantically tries to fix his error before it derails the whole of the twentieth century history.

There's Ned and his secret accomplice, accompanied by a rich and lovesick university student, an Oxford don obsessed with history and fish, a wealthy landowner in a stately home, a bunch of aristocratic young women intent on marrying, lots of household servants, train timetables, parish fetes, jumble sales, a once drowned cat, and a dog.

It's a bit Monty Python / Hitchhiker's Guide as Ned bounces from one mistake to another, but as the story progresses we get the impression that there is something vitally important underlying his assignment. And slowly the discussions between the Oxford don and the landowner on the importance of minor events in history's major battles start to take on a new significance.

Jason considers himself fortunate. He has a beautiful wife and teenage son and life generally is good to him. One night walking home from drinks with friends a man pushes a gun into the back of his head. He's abducted, stripped, injected with something and blacks out. He wakes up strapped to a gurney with people he's never met greeting him like an old friend. This is no longer his world.

He finds himself in a lab with strange things happening. He recovers some semblance of normal and goes home but his house is empty, and there is no sign that his wife or son ever lived there. The lab people bring him back and he finds that he's a celebrated nuclear physicist who has managed to understand and control quantum superposition. And that's when the real trouble starts.

Jason goes on a wild ride through alternative parallel worlds, trying to get back to his own home. It's here that the novel threatens to break down into a travelogue of landscapes, each with its own catastrophe. Crouch pulls it back from the brink and Jason figures our how to 'drive' the system some other version of himself has created.

The final part of the book is getting back to his wife and son and trying to escape a multitude of parallel Jasons, each one desperate to be the one 'real' husband and father.

The book is let down by the constant exposition of quantum theory, superposition, parallel worlds, parallel lives, and parallel people. There is a lot of 'Jason-splaining' going on. The characters are up to the task although some of the dialogue gets a bit cheesy. I suppose telling one version of your husband why another version of him is better or worse than the one in front of her is a bit tricky. The final resolution, their escape, opens up the possibility of a further novel but I hope Crouch does not take that bait. The would be too much what Netflix would do.

A very fitting end to the story started in Daemon. Suarez serves us up a non-stop assault on our senses and imagination of a 'three front war'. One one front is the Daemon, the AI that is disrupting end-stage capitalism. The second front is the emerging social movement as ordinary people start to join it and force a new egalitarian society. And the third front is the combined might of the oligarchs and moneyed class alongside a secretly complicit government.

The action starts on the first few pages and is relentless through the novel. It's seductive and almost magnetic in how it holds the reader's attention. My son and I have a rating system for action movies. It either gets a pass or a "Not enough exploding helicopters." This book has not only exploding helicopters but robotically controlled killer cars, riderless motorcycles swinging murderous rotating blades, avatars that can walk out of an online game and into real life, and lots of high tech stuff for those wondering how imaginative Suarez can get in one book. Very definitely a pass.

There are lots of scenes of over the top violence that leave scattered body parts, but lets face it, noone takes over the world without a trail of dismembered arms and legs. His VR headsets and the accompanying online world of the followers of the Daemon are way beyond their day when this book appeared. And there will be those who consider the political conversations and viewpoints scattered throughout are preachy, but they sit well in the overall story, especially considering that state of federal politics of the US in 2025.

All that remains is for somebody to pick up a bunch of funding and turn these two books into a top tier movie.

The 'out of controlness' of HAL meets the bloodlust of The Kingsman movies and ends up with a car chase/crash scene that rivals The Blues Brothers. This would have been SF when it was written twenty years ago but the computer development since then puts it into the techno-thriller genre with a political edge.

Billionaire computer game develop, Matthew Sobol, has spawned a distributed artificial intelligence network across the internet that is triggered on his death. The 'Daemon' sets in motion a slow burn revolution designed to undermine and take down the corporate industrial complex and in its place set up a system of equality. The daemon runs on the internet on tracks built into two of the online multi-player games that Sobol developed. Because it's not sitting on servers as identifiable code it can't be located. Recruitment happens among gamers who are disaffected young men who can be manipulated or attracted into taking part.

There is no lack of characters, sometimes too many to remember, and some of them are running assumed names and changing identities to infiltrate the govt agency that has been set up to fight the daemon. Dialogue is functional rather than relational, the pace of the action is fast and sometimes seductive, and sometimes it's confusing about who is alive and who is dead. There are some scenes of misogyny that Suarez would probably not include in 2025, or at least would modify.

Overall this action packed book is a good fast read. It is the first of a pair and it ends at a good point as long as the reader knows it's only the first half of the story. Most of it is enjoyable in the way of an action movie that we like but after it's over we go and buy pizza and life goes on. I'm happy to move straight into book 2, Freedom.

Not just a time travel book.

A man is shown a portal back into 1958 but no matter how long you stay in the past, the portal always brings you back to two minutes after left in the present. The man who shows it to him had tried to stop the assassination of JFK but became too ill and came back to find somebody else to take on the task. So Jake takes Al's comprehensive notes of the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald and goes back to stop him.

Jake does a test run, preventing a different tragedy that effected a friend of his in his distant childhood. He returns to find unexpected consequences for changing that kid's life. A twist of this portal is that each time you go back in time it resets all your changes back to the original, so he goes back to find a different way to save his friend, and to stay there from 1958 to 1963 and stop Oswald.

We get a look at the horrors of life for many people in the southern US states in that era, the racism, the sexism, the poverty. And Jake meets a pretty woman and his life of tracking Oswald gets intertwined with a love story. Once again Jake imagines he can do another reset and fix a tragedy in this woman's life, but it means starting the whole thing over again.

He also discovers that 'the past does not want to be changed' as things suddenly pop up to prevent him from taking the next planned step. And he finds 'harmonies' as other things repeat. 'That car is the same as the car in another city'. That kind of coincidence. Trouble is, sometimes that car really is the car from an earlier encounter.

As the day 11.22.63 approaches things speed up. There is more disruption and the day itself becomes totally chaotic.

No spoilers here, but a few days after everything is over Jake finds his way back to the portal. It's changed after the five years he's been in the past. And when he at last gets back to the present he finds a dystopian world of nuclear war, earthquakes, social breakdown and violence.

That past the didn't want to be changed? It meant business.

In the early pages of this book I thought I was in some Kafka world. By the time I got to later parts I didn't know what to make of it. And as it ended I was getting a bit of a feel for what is really going on. I guess being weird for the sake of being weird sometimes turns out OK.

Ultimately this is a book of warfare, but we never really find out who the enemy is. What we do find out is that the enemy has the power to erase any memories the people have of their engagement with them, or it, or anything to do with the war. In this respect the enemy is an anti-meme. A meme is a thing that we remember but has a life of its own. And antimeme exists if we observe it but no sooner do we turn our back and it is gone from memory and therefore gone from existence.

The Foundation is the only surviving agency fighting the war, and its members are disappearing. The stronger antimemes have the power to overrun a person's mind to the point of death. Foundation agents take certain drugs that allow them to remember antimeme contact and therefore plot against them. We learn that there has been at least one antimeme war that obliterated the human population some time in the distant past.

Marion Wheeler is the main agent and head of The Foundation. Her husband, Adam, is not an agent but he seems to be immune from the 'forget impact' and the antimemes. Marion is the main player in the book, but Adam emerges as humanity's real hope towards the end.

The world has gone through a nuclear war and lies in ruins. 600 years later some communities of people are forming, and one of them is a monastic order dedicated to Saint Leibowitz. He was martyred for his faith in the aftermath of the war and we are introduced to a novice of the order, Brother Francis. Francis stumbles into a buried fallout shelter and finds more of the writings of Leibowitz, but revealing them to his Abbot causes a crisis. Are they authentic? What do they mean? And what do they reveal about Leibowitz?

As the novel progresses we find that the history in the minds of the monks is not as they believe. They live in naivete about the past and its consequences. Their shared holiness, however, maintains them in faith and conviction.

The undercurrents of the novel reveal that Leibowitz was an engineer and his 'writings' are engineering and electronic diagrams. He was killed in a time called The Simplification where all educated people were seen as the cause of the war and were murdered by the survivors as they burned any surviving books and libraries. The monks were secretly finding and storing books and teaching themselves to read.

Part 1 of the book is the story of Francis. He is the sweetest and most wholesome person imaginable and he maintains his faith in his precious saint and lives in obedience to his Abbot through the political wranglings of his superiors caused by what Francis has found. The gentle humour that underlies much of the book is shown when Francis finds the fallout shelter. He knows that 'fallout' killed most of the world's inhabitants but he doesn't know what it is. He sees the sign 'Fallout Shelter' on the door and thinks 'That must be where a fallout is hiding. No way am I opening that door. It might still be alive and attack me.'

Part 2 of the book takes us another 600 years into the future. The monastery has expanded in numbers and the buildings have been fortified. Other communities have risen, one of them is the 'city' where ignorant and uneducated people have control over the political life, the other is a band of savages living in the forest. They waylay travelers and are known for cannibalism. The monks continue to struggle with interpreting the works of Leibowitz, but secular intellectuals from the city are now interested as they think there might be leads towards learning the technology of the past. The Abbott of this era is occupied in preserving the monastery and their saint in the face of the warfare that is looming after the city reinvents gun powder and muskets and can now move against the savages.

Part 3 takes us a further 600 years. Space travel has been achieved, technology is everywhere and the Abbott has a self driving car and his order has a starship ready to take missionaries to the colony worlds of Alpha Centauri. But technology also means the increase of nuclear weapons and an old threat reemerges. Much of this part of the book is taken up with discussions of morality and responsibility as the Abbot and his order struggle to maintain the beliefs that have informed their community life for centuries against the pragmatism of the city and a looming nuclear faceoff.

It was only after reading the book that I found that the author had been a rear gunner of a bomber in WW2 and on one mission they'd bombed a monastery in Italy. It had a profound effect on him and he converted to Catholicism after the war and struggled with PTSD and depression. 1959, the publication date, was also a time of great fear in America (I'm not American) and children used to do attack drills and were taught to hide under their desks etc. For me, sixty five years later and on the other side of the world, the story still hits hard for its literary value and without the undercurrent of fear that fueled American life when it was written.

Abelard Lindsay is a shaper and his cousin Constantine is a mechanist. The shapers see the future of humanity in genetic enhancement. The mechanists see it as physical futurism with enhanced body parts. They can't both be right. And they choose not to be. This book is the story of Lindsay, a shaper diplomat, as he travels the interplanetary spread of humanity to promote the shaper ideology. And on his heels is Constantine. Each of they appear and disappear as they take different identities, trying to influence other civilisations and to defeat each other. On his travels Lindsay takes on not only different names but different body structure and abilities. At the end it seems as if the future of humanity is to return to the sea as sub-oceanic beings on the moons of Jupiter. Or something. It gets confusing at the end.

The characters start out being engaging as the conflict between them is slowly revealed. However, by the half way point it's become something of a travelogue with different planets or asteroids requiring different body forms for Lindsay. He gets into danger on one asteroid and escapes to another, rinse and repeat.

At about the 75% point the narrative descends into long conversations where the sociopolitical advantages and disadvantages of various views of post-humanism are discussed. It's like sitting in a bar with the people at the next table talking about the obscurities of their work and all the while the reader wishes he'd accepted the invitation to play darts instead.

Overall the book is reminiscent of Accelerando where the increasingly complicated language of hard SF is played out like a game of UNO.

I never saw myself falling in love with a robot but Klara won me over. Despite some awkward passages Ishiguro has written an engaging story of an artificial friend. Clara is a robot designed to be the friend of a young child. She is chosen by Rosie and the two form a real bond.

Klara sees Rosie through times of illness, of budding romance, and of the move to adulthood. Through it all Klara's innocence and insight make a beguiling coupling as her inner AI grows and develops. Ishiguro turns the "AI will destroy humanity" them on its head as Klara become the pivot point for Rosie and her family.

The ending of the story is something that we never see coming and it left me with a sense of pain and grief, but Klara remains as she always was, hopeful and satisfied that she was the best friend to Rosie that she could be.

Vurt (1993) is Noon's first novel and he started out with a bang. It got the Arthur C. Clarke prize in 1994. The book is a high speed race through the drug fueled underworld of Manchester by a street gang named the Stash Riders. Reading the novel feels like being thrown into a group hallucination where the boundaries of what is real and what is imagined are obliterated.

Scribble is the one telling the story, Beetle is their leader and driver, Brid is Beetle's girlfriend, Mandy is the new member, Twinkle is a local kid who talks herself into the gang, the Thing is a weird living blob who came out of an hallucination, and Desdemona is Scribble's lover (also sister) who has disappeared in that same hallucination in some sort of exchange.

The story takes it's lead from the myth of Orpheus in the underworld as he seeks to rescue his lost wife. Along the way there are allusions to Lewis Caroll, Shakespeare, punk culture, Gibson style cyberpunk, Clockwork Orange vibes, and a whole lot of crazy.

The drug use is based on feathers that users suck on where different colours designate different types of hallucinatory effects. Some are street legal, some are not. Some are cosy comfort and some are pornographic. Some are safe, some can be deadly. Scribble's goal of finding Desdemona means he's looking for the most dangerous, the Curious Yellow. Yeah, movie reference there.

I was impressed with the relentless nature of the story. Scribble's mind is like a V8 engine running in a Mini Minor and is at full throttle all the way. Noon keeps up the pace as Scribble moves in and out of hallucinatory states so that we sometimes have trouble telling the difference. Everything is a race for Scribble, and the book ends by crashing into the final scenes and leaving us a bit stunned.

There are a couple of elements that disturbed me on reading, they are the brother/sister incest and the bestiality with dogs and 'robodogs' - (both people and dogs are sometimes enhanced with mechanistic elements). It took me a while to see these as a part of Noon's references to Greek mythology, where the Gods and heroes are often in incestual relationships and taking the form of various animals to seduce desirable humans. We read the myths without moralising too much, and in Vurt, Noon is confronting us with the same dynamic in a futuristic world.

I had trouble giving stars to this novel. Do I give it more for its sheer audacity and fireworks brilliance? Do I give it less because the characters are often shallow and unlikable and with few redeeming qualities? Do I give it less because of the incest/bestiality? Do I give it more for the talent that is obvious in the consistency of the story? I decided to mark it upwards, 4.5 stars.

So there's this guy Vergil. He's nerdy, overweight and unhealthy, and he hacked his university's data system to add in credentials he never earned so he could get a job in a bio lab doing research work. Do we like him? Probably not but Greg Bear writes him in such a way that we start out on his side.

The bio lab finds that he's been doing private stuff after hours. He's experimenting with encoding bio information and DNA onto microchips, wanting to create intelligent nanobots he can inject into people to cure diseases etc. It's not the normal approach to the mad scientist with dangerous intentions that we see, but Bear sneaks him in under our radar.

His boss decides he's got to go - today. But Vergil needs more time in the lab to complete his current experiments because he's getting somewhere. He needs to get his samples past the security guys and out of the lab. He decides to inject them into himself, then find another job in another lab where he can extract them and continue his work.

Does his plan work? Partly. The cells he's manufactured start multiplying in his bloodstream and they kick his system into a more healthy state. His physical condition improves. His eyesight improves. He becomes a fantastic lover. Everything is looking great for him. But he can't get another lab job and he can't control the increase of the 'wonder cells' in his body.

As the novel progresses the cells become a contagion and spread to other people. They cause changes that are far beyond what Vergil imagined. And like everything that a mad scientist in a SF book causes, things accelerate to the unbearable and point to the destruction of humankind.

A dystopian story of Melbourne between about 2040 and 2060. Rising sea levels brought on by climate change have flooded the lower parts of the city and are creeping higher. People are separated into two social strata, the Sweet are the higher ground dwellers with employment, power, and influence, and the Swill are those living amid the flood waters. Tall towers have been built for them, and meagre food and services are provided by the government increasingly stretched by the demand.

The Conway family start out as Sweet but with the death of the father are cast down into the Fringe, not quite Swill but with no employment and rejected by their old world. They meet Jimmy Kovacs, the nearby tower boss and protection racketeer. He takes a shine to the widow and her two young sons. The bulk of the novel is the story of these four.

One son is smart and gets elevated for training by the government. The other is a numbers savant and is sought out by black marketeers. Jimmy holds together a whole tower of Swill by strength of personality and mob boss mentality, and extends his influence into the lives of the two growing boys to keep them safe. A crisis occurs soon after the half way point that threatens the whole city and because of their involvement looks as if it will drag them all down with it.

Each chapter of the novel is written first person from the POV of one or other of the characters. This means taking note of the chapter title as it can be confusing. The author gives us deep insight into the thinking of each one as sometimes the same event is covered by two or three characters and we see the variance of understanding of each person. Turner shows that he has great skill in writing interpersonal relationships as this technique could easily become a mess of head-hopping. He knows how and when to pit people against each other, and he knows how to bring them together.

There was an early trope that annoyed me where somebody says, "I've written a novel ..." and it looked as if the book was to be a 'novel within a novel' thing. Luckily Turner's skill as an author and commenter on human life rose above it. In the early pages I had a three star rating in mind for that initial clumsiness but that rose to 4.5 by the end.

Astronauts on the moon discover the body of a dead astronaut, but his space suit is different and none of their people are missing. Investigation shows the frozen and mummified corpse to be 50,000 years old. What follows is a cold case investigation as scientists from many fields try to unravel the story of the dead man, who they name Charlie.

Character development and plot are secondary to the investigatory process here, and much of the book is taken up with discussions and conjecture as people suggest various theories and possibilities. Over time more is revealed as they learn to understand printed manuals from Charlie's backpack. They identify a calendar, mathematical formulae, diary notes. But who he is and how he came to be on the moon remains a mystery.

Other explorations change their understanding of the moon's surface structure, and another discovery on one of the moons of Jupiter opens up a whole new area of investigation.

It becomes a bit like an Agatha Christie revelation towards the end as the lead scientist puts together all the clues. The only possibility that holds everything together blows his mind as the history of the solar system and the whole of human evolution is called into question.

Back in 1951 a strange building appears in a city street. It's a weapons shop. Two men approach, for one the door won't open, for the other it will. He enters and soon after the shop and the man disappears.

This is a story of time swinging between events that are forced increasingly apart. The reason for the swing has something to do with the disappeared man. But the narrative centers on a far future empire rife with corruption, and in which the weapon shops are the focus of resistance.

We follow the life of a young man who leaves home and hopes to become significant in the government. He doesn't realise how deep the corruption runs but as he becomes more aware he uses it to his advantage. And still the weird time swings keep happening.

van Vogt works through the question, "What would happen if a time traveler met himself in the past?" It's an interesting solution he finds, and one in which the young man gains extraordinary power and influence. In one conversation we get the sentence, "He was here with his twin brother."

The political forces battle it out until both sides are forced to admit the damage being done to the disappeared man and that the time swings need to be stopped. The book ends by giving us a look into his mind, and the final sentence, in just a few words, breaks my mind as van Vogt drops his most powerful bomb into the story.

On the planet of Indigo people are genetically designed and born through IVF. But sometimes a woman conceives naturally, and the baby can be far from the perfection expected. Ugly, that's her nickname, real name Magdala, is such a person. Misshapen and unattractive she lives a secluded life, ignored by coworkers and desperately lonely. But one day a strange man appears in her life.

Claudio effectively kidnaps her and promises to make her beautiful. He puts her through a process of consciousness swapping whereby her whole sense of self is transferred to a perfectly formed android. Her original body is kept in a stasis chamber and has to be maintained. Magdala is now beautiful but totally in the power of Claudio. And he turns out to be a psychopath.

Tanith Lee writes him with surgical precision as he keeps Magdala under micromanaged abusive control. Magdala soon realises that he is following some plan of his own, a plan of hatred and revenge upon the woman her new body is designed to mimic.

The plot expands to include that woman, named Christophine, sometimes Christa, and we come to an awkward linking of names echoing Christ and Mary Magdalene, and of the unlovely being granted a new life. It might be a metaphor Lee is working towards but the novel is better served by being about the abusive relationship under Claudio than some sort of reach towards redemption.

The central part of the book brings us to the scientific conflict between those seeking to make consciousness transfer a reality and the three central characters reach an inevitable crisis.

But then Lee shifts into reverse gear and resets the whole thing. The final ten pages is either a monumental plot twist (if so if fails in my mind) or a low effort in ending the story because it was all headed to catastrophe. I was looking forward to catastrophe.

The character Claudio is so finely written that I was captivated by Lee's skill. His treatment of Magda is constantly and relentlessly undermining, such that although he's elevated her physical beauty he's also intent on keeping her locked into her original body image. The weird ending was almost like an apology for writing Claudio in such surgical detail.

On a distant planet the men sit making intricate carpets from the hair of their wives and daughters. Each carpet takes a lifetime to make and each man makes only one. His son follows in the same traditional art, designing and making his single carpet. The empire's space ships pick up the carpets and they are sent to decorate the palace of the Emperor.

Rumours start to circulate that the Emperor is dead and the empire is no more. But still the carpet makers continue their work. When a space ship lands on the planet the ship's crew knows nothing of the carpet makers or the carpets. People who have been to the palace say they have never seen such a carpet there.

Eschbach has given us a series of what seems like interlinked short stories, each one centering on a single character, but each one also adding to the narrative. He steadily builds his story through a sense of mystery towards the final revelation. There are so many possibilities for metaphor here, of weaving a story, of pulling together the loose threads, of only seeing a hint of the story (carpet) because we are looking at the back of it, and I will not fall into the metaphor trap.

The prose is easy to read and without the clumsiness that can sometimes happen with a translated work. Eschbach's imagination carries us through the occasional weirdness of the story, and through our times of wondering what happened to a character or two who seems to have disappeared from the story. His final revelation is one of total insanity and I was left wondering how this situation could even have been reasonable or possible. However, Eschbach made it sound very believable.

Andrew Harlan is a 'Eternal', effectively a time traveling policeman. When history takes a bad turn the Eternals work out when the best intervention would be to prevent it. Harlan was one of those who go back in time and effect a minor change to avert disaster.

He's a totally unlikable character, but the book is filled with Asimov's cardboard cutout characters who are all totally without charisma. The plot and plot development are the thing here. Couple that with some cool tech, considering the book was written in the 1950s, and an increasing element of philosophizing about time travel, and it gets its stars.

The alternate time zone of the Eternals is filled with men only. Harlan meets a woman, the only one in the whole book, they make love, he is infatuated, he moves to get her out of her time zone and into his world. Things don't go as planned. The middle of the book is taken up with 'everything that can go wrong does go wrong' and their whole existence is threatened. With his supervisor they cobble together a plan to save everything. There is a longish episodic crisis that issues in a final showdown as Harlan is forced into a drastic decision

The book has all the 1950s expectations that men run the world, women get in the way if they venture into the man's world, and their only purpose is for men to get laid. Male interactions are purely functional and the characters here spend more time being suspicious of each other than working together. The only person with character is the sole female, Noÿs.

David Queston is an anthropologist who has spent some years studying tribal communities in South America. One of those communities has gone through some catastrophe that he is trying to identify. When he has completed his studies he returns to England to write up his thoughts.

He finds England changed. A mad psychopath has taken control and is isolating the country from the world and sending everybody back to where they came from. This means local people are sent back to their family roots. i.e. families named Stewart are sent back to Scotland regardless of them never having lived there.

The Minister of Planning and then Prime Minister is named Mandrake. Two obvious parallels come to mind. First, the author would have known of the syndicated cartoon, Mandrake the Magician. He could 'gesture hypnotically' and people would be open to suggestion. Second, the mythological plant, the mandrake, screams when it is uprooted. Both these metaphors run through the book. Everybody seems under the thrall of Mandrake.

Queston spends two years in a quiet country cottage writing up his notes, unaware that the social structures around him are failing so badly. Then men from the Ministry of Planning call on him. They want his notes and they want his mind. His research is too close to revealing what is happening in England. He goes on the run.

As England dissolves into a dystopian hellscape it seems that there is a malevolent intelligence driving everything. From isolationist paranoia to earthquakes and wild snowstorms, everything is bent on the destruction of the country and dead bodies line the streets. Queston and some companions he finds along the way are torn between escaping it and facing it to destroy it.

The darkness increases as Cooper sets the scene of humans against the unknown. Is it supernatural evil? Is it aliens? Is it some new weapon system? The tension builds and the end of the book approaches. The reader asks, "Are all these threads going to get tied up by the end?"

No spoilers, folks.