Doc on the run

A laconic female antihero goes on the run with a genetically engineered girl soldier.

TEN LOW, by Stark Holborn (Titan, $22.99)

Speculative fiction is, thanks to the internet, livelier than it has ever been. It’s also impossible to keep track of as it becomes increasingly Balkanised into niche subgenres rigorously policed by rabid fandoms and

full of authors you will never have heard of unless by word of mouth.

In a way, it’s like a return to the era of pulp and cheap mass-market paperbacks. Many of these writers are of indifferent quality, cutting their teeth on fanfic and self-publishing. Some have actually paid enough attention to craft a well-constructed story and find a trade publisher. UK-based Stark Holborn is one of the latter. Their new novel, Ten Low, is a serviceably enjoyable piece of speculative fiction.

It’s not, it must be said, as original as Holborn’s 2014 nun-on-the-run-with-agun western pastiche, Nunslinger. On a barren desert quasi-penal moon (more Mad Max: Fury Road than Dune), the protagonist, Ten Low, is a medic and exconvict with a bounty on her head. She’s a laconic Ripley-cum-Sarah Connor-slashFuriosa character, enigmatic in a manner reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars.

To be honest, though, the more the merrier, because even now there’s still a

dearth of non-male protagonists in these kinds of stories. I’ll take what I can get and be grateful. It bodes well for progress if a hard-boiled female anti-hero (maybe?) can just do the job without being sold as groundbreaking, beautiful and brave.

Ten flees organ-harvesting cults and avoids nasty diseases, all the while protecting a young girl she has rescued from a crashed spacecraft, who also just happens to be one of the oppressive Authority of Accorded Nations’ genetically engineered super soldiers. She does this for redemption – the exact nature of which isn’t always clear in the beginning – even although her ward despises her. Mothers of teenage girls will relate. So far, so grimdark (an often dystopian, amoral, violent subgenre, if you don’t know).

Although it would be easy to dismiss this as a bunch of squeezed-dry clichés threaded on a narrative like beads on a string, Holborn gets away with it thanks to a tautly sparse writing style, dutifully (as

your English teacher always told you) showing not telling, and by crafting characters that are both compelling and engaging, even if they’re not always terribly deep.

The novel could easily fit on either the YA or speculative shelf. It does follow the trend in some genre YA fiction of narrating in the first-person present-tense, which can take some getting used to, but drags you along in its wake regardless.

There’s scant world-building in Ten Low, but that’s an asset rather than a flaw. It doesn’t need it, because it’s left to the reader’s imagination to fill in the details from hints and names. This tactic also avoids any gaping plot holes that too much detail can produce, but also means we find out very little about Ten’s background to begin with, apart from what we’re drip fed.

That, however, keeps the reader guessing and engaged within the bigger narrative playing out – something I shan’t spoil. ▮