SCIENCE FICTION ALEX GOOD
“Flux” is a novel with the feel of a film by Christopher Nolan: glossy, complexly plotted, and taking a somewhat paranoid attitude toward what science is up to. The story is told from the perspective of three characters — Bo, Brandon and Blue — who are obviously connected though not just in the obvious ways. Brandon is the central figure and his story is set roughly in our own time while the others inhabit the past and near future. Jinwoo Chong has thrown a lot into his first novel. In addition to the complexities of the plot, there are also matters relating to domestic violence, grief and identity (Brandon is gay and Asian-American).
The end of the world as we know it has taken many different forms in apocalyptic fiction. Few have been as bizarre, though, as that presented by Toronto author BH Panhuyzen in “A Tidy Armageddon.”
A section of soldiers in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry enter a bunker near their base at Shilo, Man. When they come out the world has certainly changed. While they were underground everything on earth that’s ever been made by humans has been collected and stacked into walls that are each at least 90 feet high, resulting in a seemingly endless maze that the troopers now find themselves trapped within.
This makes for a weird and monitory fable about the perils of consumerism.
When the power grid cuts out in a suburban community all the parents switch off. A support group meets for people who have been banned from dating apps. Portals to another dimension begin appearing in cosy domestic settings. A tattoo changes on its own. A black market starts up in celebrity DNA.
This is the weird world of Julianna Baggott, and just when you start to feel adjusted it gets a little weirder.
Usually with weird fiction we have people facing off against a world that’s been transformed by some external force. In Baggott’s stories we are the change and it frightens us.
“Red Team Blues” is a crypto novel that also addresses the contemporary surveillance state. Our hero is Martin Hench, a 67-year-old Silicon Valley veteran who works as a forensic accountant and general troubleshooter for the tech industry. His job is finding out where money goes after it gets laundered or disappears into the digital ether.
Things kick off here with Martin, now semi-retired, getting pulled into a case involving a stolen key to a cryptocurrency fortune. The stakes are high (his fee is going to run a quarter of a billion dollars), which means that the risks are too. As Martin soon learns, there’s no line dividing financial crimes and crimes of violence. It’s all just business.
Doctorow is a techno-optimist who has yet to lose the faith.