Sci-fi & fantasy
Annabel Gooder
ANNEX
by Rich Larson
(Orbit, $28)
When 11-year-old Bo sees his chance and escapes from a warehouse full of children with parasites implanted in their stomachs, he finds that all adults have been neutralised and a spaceship hovers ominously overhead. He meets teenage Violet, who introduces him to a small gang of children who survive by killing the biotech simulacra of their mothers that the aliens send after them. Annex brims with inventive details as Bo and Violet try to save Bo’s sister, and possibly the world, with the unlikely help of a third party who is even stranger than the aliens they are fighting. Larson manages a good balance between the high stakes battle against the unfathomable aliens and the kids navigating day to day survival and dealing with other all-too-human evils. This young adult-aimed first novel has a satisfying ending but is also the first in a trilogy, The Violet Wars.
THE GREEN MAN’S HEIR
by Juliet E. McKenna
(Wizards Tower Press, $42.50)
After a woman’s body is found in local woodland, jobbing carpenter Daniel Mackmain feels compelled to investigate; as a dryad’s son he can communicate with the local nymphs who may have seen something. But he’s used to keeping a low profile, knowing information he cannot account for has its dangers, especially once he finds out there may be a supernatural element to the deaths. With her dryads and naiads, woses and wyrms, McKenna manages a fresh take on British folklore in a story that will appeal in different ways to fans of both The Rivers of London series and The Dark is Rising. This is an engaging, readable tale, despite a sudden switch in the last third when the murder mystery is displaced by averting a potential apocalypse in the grounds of a country house.
SUICIDE CLUB
by Rachel Heng
(Hodder & Stoughton, $35)
In Lia and Anya’s future, med-tech can mean you live for several hundred years — if your genes qualify you for the treatments. Immortality is the rumoured next step but what happens if you don’t want it? Suicide Club is an incisive parody of current healthy living trends where lives are extended by removing everything that makes life worth living. Heng is less interested in the technology that makes immortality possible or its wider implications for the world, than in the philosophical and psychological effects of living forever on the disaffected lifers. As in Orwell’s 1984, it is the corporate elites who rebel, are surveilled and kept leashed by the state (though the methods used are more like Brave New World) while the shorter-lived sub-100s are merely background. It is also very much a story about dealing with the oncoming deaths of ageing parents. While some of the characterisation seems uneven, there is plenty to chew on in this first novel.