SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
DAVID BARRETT ROUNDS UP THE LATEST TITLES FROM THE WORLD OF SPECULATIVE AND FANTASTIC FICTION
Body Tourists Jane Rogers Sceptre, 2019 Hb, 229pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781529392951
For those of us who grew up on a diet of what Brian Aldiss disparagingly called “cosy catastrophe novels” – John Wyndham, John Christopher and others – the events of the last few months have had an added layer of disquiet. And remember Terry Nation’s original 1970s Survivors? (The more recent version with Julie Graham, Paterson Joseph and Zoë Tapper was pretty powerful as well).
We’ve been half-expecting the death toll to spiral out of control and food chains to supermarkets to break down, and for armed gangs to start roaming the streets. So far, at least, it’s not happened. No cosy catastrophes this time; though it’s interesting that a lot of mainstream novelists now seem to be venturing into areas normally claimed by SF – or maybe it’s just that we’re now living in the science-fictional future.
Jane Rogers’s Body Tourists imagines a dystopic near-future Britain where most people live in massive, cheerless housing estates. For the privileged minority, it’s possible to make a digital copy of someone’s full memory, allowing their knowledge to remain available after their deaths. Now a young doctor has found a way of transferring these stored memories – the entire personality of a nowdead person – into the bodies of young people, for a couple of weeks and for a substantial fee. The novel is told from several viewpoints, including that of the unscrupulous doctor, several of the young people who rent out their bodies to help them out of poverty, and some of those brought back from the dead into fit, healthy young bodies. What could possibly go wrong?
Rockstar Ending NA Rossi Resista Pres,s 2020 Pb, 364pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781913417024 Unintended consequences also
lie at the heart of NA Rossi’s Rockstar Ending. Britain’s youth have had enough of subsidising the elderly, who have pensions and property. Euthanasia is now legal, and if the old would just die, their homes and wealth would become available for others. One by one, benefits for the old are whittled away: insurance after 70, health care after 85. Through carefully targeted advertising on TV and social media (even down to the music on playlists) the elderly are persuaded to do the right thing. Multiple viewpoints work well here, as well in several interlinked storylines: old people about to take the Rockstar Ending to their lives; their families; grassroots campaigners against the process – and a couple of young people working for the ad agency promoting it. A disturbing story, but this first novel would have benefited from professional editing and proofing.
The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart Margarita Montimore Gollancz, 2020 Hb, 336pp £14.99, ISBN 9781473227606
The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart is a polished first novel with a clever and original premise. It’s New Year’s Eve in 1982, and the eve of Oona’s 19th birthday. She’s at a party with her boyfriend and other friends, and the band that they’re in. The clock strikes midnight – and she finds herself in 2015, physically aged 51, but still 19 inside. She has a big house and a personal assistant and she’s very, very wealthy, as a result of investments and sporting bets based on prior knowledge.
Every year, on the stroke of the New Year, she wakes up to a different era in her life. After 2015, she’s in 1991; after 1991, 2004. Each shift is as confusing as hell as she goes backwards and forwards in her life story; and these transitions don’t get any easier, even though she writes a letter at the end of each year to bring herself up to date. There are some very neat plot twists, and author Margarita Montimore is particularly good on the musical and cultural differences from year to year.
Paris Adrift EJ Swift Solaris, 2020 Pb, 436pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781781087848
EJ Swift’s Paris Adrift is also about travelling around in time, but in a very different way. In a 2318 wracked by nuclear war, a group of time manipulators work out which points in the past need to be changed to save the world from annihilation. One of them goes back to the early 21st century and guides Hallie, an English girl in Paris, into taking a job at Millie’s bar in Clichy, next to the Moulin Rouge. There is a time anomaly in the basement keg room, and Hallie is attuned to it. Not really knowing what she’s doing (and certainly not why, until much later in the book) she spends time living in 1875, causing Notre Dame not to be built, and in 1942, where she helps a Jewish cello student to flee occupied Paris. By her acts the future has been saved – but at what other cost? Paris Adrift is a very enjoyable read, but it has some structural problems, with large portions of the story not advancing the plot at all.
Elemetal Tales Garry Kilworth PS Publishing, 2019 Hb, 196pp, £20, ISBN 9781786364531
Garry Kilworth has been a prolific and consistently excellent science fiction writer for decades. Elemetal Tales (and no, it’s not a misprint) is a collection of 18 stories, each connected in some way to one of the metal elements. Some are historical or mythological: “The Mask-maker” is about a craftsman who has breathed in so much gold dust over the decades that he is now a target for thieves; in “The Emperor” a tyrant wants to be made immortal within a silver statue. Some are future science fiction, like the story of a robot designed to work on low-gravity planetoids, with a heavy lead coat. There’s an intriguing numismatic time travel story about a nickel coin, and a scary one about a kiteflying festival in India, where an assassin uses titanium wire for the kite string. A superb collection.
The Last Refuge of the Knights Templar: The Ultimate Secret of the Pike Letters William F Mann Destiny Books, 2020 Pb, 268pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781620559918
Finally, a novel about Freemasons, the Knights Templar and Albert Pike – what’s not to like? In short: everything.
The original Knights Templar discovered the treasures hidden by Jewish priests in AD 70; they were “secreted away in France” and then taken to various places around the world, including North America, “where the Templar/Grail families, direct descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, strategically intermarried with the Native North Americans”. Letters by 19thcentury Freemason Albert Pike (recently discovered in reality by author William Mann, who is the supreme grand master of the Knights Templar of Canada) contain clues to where the Templar treasure is hidden – “a secret of world proportions,” he writes in his preface.
The storytelling is repetitive and the dialogue is awful; characters speak in lectures. The novel is also a love story between two young researchers into the Templars, with possibly the most cringeworthy love and sex scenes ever written, while the 95-year-old grandfather of one of them takes “white powdered gold” as a rich man’s Viagra. They’re being hunted by a sexually perverted Jesuit priest assassin, the Jesuits being “the Pope’s personal storm troopers, who will stop at nothing to regain world dominance”. Let’s just say that compared to this novel, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code looks like great literature.