> SCIENCE FICTION
The Passengers By John Marrs Berkley, $35, 336 pages
In 1997 a Canadian film named Cube launched what would become a popular sub-genre in horror fantasy. The set-up goes like this: a group of strangers wake up in a futuristic death trap. While being monitored by an outside agency they must find a way to escape or die. As the game progresses secrets are revealed, though these often don’t explain the bigger mystery of why all this is happening.
The Passengers is another take on this formula, which is perhaps best known to movie audiences from the Saw film franchise. In a near-future England, a Hacker has taken control of a bunch of self-driving cars, locking their passengers inside and speeding them toward a common doom. He wants to play a game, revealing a bit about each passenger to a live streaming audience that will get to vote on who lives or dies.
As with all such stories it’s a combination morality tale and game show, which makes for compelling reading. John Marrs delivers with all the twists that you’d expect and even a couple you probably won’t in a tale of accelerated unnatural selection.
The Last Astronaut By David Wellington Orbit, $20.99, 392 pages
It says a lot for the richness and durability of classic science fiction tropes that a novel such as The Last Astronaut is so thrilling.
In the year 2054 a large object that shows signs of being directed by an alien intelligence enters our solar system. An undermanned NASA has to bring Sally Jansen, whose previous mission to Mars ended in disaster twenty years earlier, out of retirement to lead the first-contact team.
They’ll need Sally’s experience when they get to 2I (the name of the alien structure) and things start to go nightmarishly wrong. As the astronauts go spelunking through the vast, cavelike interior they have to deal with a rapidly changing and threatening environment, even as the team itself starts to break apart. David Wellington presents The Last
Astronaut as a novelization of an oral history and it’s an approach that works surprisingly well. First contact stories always involve elements of mystery and suspense as the heroes try to come to grips with new forms of intelligent life that may put the entire Earth at risk, or be no threat at all. The Last Astronaut will keep you guessing, and turning pages, until the very end.
Last Ones Left Alive By Sarah Davis-Goff Flatiron, $36.50, 288 pages
The apocalypse has come again in Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left
Alive. This time we are in Ireland, where a plague has turned most of the population into bloodthirsty zombies called skrake. After the death of her mom, our hero Orpen hits the road, pushing her mother’s dying partner Maeve in a wheelbarrow. Readers of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road will see something familiar in this.
Orpen’s goal is to make it to Dublin, where she can hook up with a gang of lethal ladies known as the banshee. The odds might be long, but fortunately Orpen’s parents have provided her with a practical education in the martial arts.
The post-collapse wasteland is, of course, well-travelled ground by now. But Davis-Goff gives it a spark with her lively descriptions of hand-to-hand combat and feminist grit.
The Memory Police By Yoko Ogawa (Translated by Stephen Snyder) Pantheon, $34.95, 288 pages
The Memory Police most obviously recalls classic dystopian works such as
1984 and Fahrenheit 451. In some distant land — distance in time or space not clearly identified — the “memory police” are regularly sent around to erase some part of the world. Roses are made extinct. Then photographs. Then calendars. All instances of the offending items are rounded up and destroyed and it is forbidden to mention them again.
Almost everyone soon forgets what’s been tossed down the memory hole anyway. Unless you are the kind of person who remembers. Then you may be disappeared as well. For the main character, a novelist in a time when novels are themselves endangered, this raises some obvious problems.
Yoko Ogawa’s book is different from those by Orwell and Bradbury in being more fantastic, along the lines of something by China Miéville. One has the sense of it being an allegory for the deletion of our own material culture, consigned to the great memory hole in the digital cloud — retrievable, in theory, but forever out of mind.