Every time I started a new story in Children of the New World, I kept thinking: surely at least one of these is going to be something less than absoluEvery time I started a new story in Children of the New World, I kept thinking: surely at least one of these is going to be something less than absolutely brilliant, surely this is the one that's going to let me down. Spoiler: it doesn't happen.
The stories here are soft sci-fi, sitting in the near-future genre alongside Black Mirror, Her and Luke Kennard's excellent The Transition. A few of the stories hint at a shared universe, different points in could-be future, giving the collection a David Mitchell vibe. Virtual existences loom large. Memories are bought and sold, jobs performed remotely, social media accessed through implants rather than devices. Real-life parenthood is an anachronism: instead, couples raise clones of themselves or adopt, and buy robot siblings for their kids. Real-life relationships are replaced by artificial memories and real-life sex supplanted by impossible erotic experiences in virtual reality. Meanwhile, the real world is ravaged, depleted. The background details are just as effective in setting the scene. In one story, a baby gnaws on a discarded iPhone; in another, hybrids have been superseded by solar cars – to the point that the next-door neighbour who still insists on driving the former is depicted as the equivalent of a climate change denier.
Several of the stories come with commentary (but not preaching) built in, taking aim at the tendency for technology to create as many problems as it solves – or solve problems that never really existed in the first place. This is most obviously satirised in 'Moksha', in which spiritual enlightenment is achieved by way of an obscenely expensive, underground electrical procedure, with seekers of this high ignoring and avoiding anything that might actually make them happy; and in a section of 'Excerpts from The New World Authorized Dictionary', in which we learn that addiction to 'continual wireless therapy' leads to the creation of a social network for chronic users to provide each other with virtual support, and so on, ouroboros-like. Weinstein also works in a number of nods to climate change and what the 'new world' might mean for nature. In 'Heartland', soil has become such a valuable commodity that everyone's sold it off, turning land into clay fields; on the news, 'it's day nine hundred of the oil spill'. 'Fall Line' is set in a rapidly melting ski resort, post-'Big Thaw'. The characters in 'Migration' rarely leave their homes – they log in to school and work, order their food online – and when one of them ventures outdoors, they encounter a positively post-apocalyptic landscape of overgrown gardens and abandoned malls.
It's hard to pick favourites, but for what it's worth... 'Saying Goodbye to Yang' opens the book with a bang (rhyme not intended) and perfectly sets the tone, combining a futuristic scenario with direct, matter-of-fact narration. 'The Cartographers' is an ingenious tale, a kind of cyber-noir which feels too complete for you to have any sense of the devastating twist until the last minute. 'Children of the New World' perhaps realises the potential of the collection most successfully: I loved the humorous details (spam emails and viruses embodied as sinister or pathetic figures appearing unexpectedly in your home), but this is also the most emotionally affecting story. 'Fall Line' is one of the simplest, in that its portrait of an ex-skiier whose career comes to a halt after a terrible accident could be set against almost any backdrop – it just happens to take place in a world where people stream video through their eyes and snow is the stuff of legend. 'Migration' balances reality and fantasy as immaculately as anything I have ever read (which is something you could also say about the entire book).
What makes the stories work so wonderfully is not their vision of the future, but their human elements. It's the way in which Weinstein draws a line through the past, present and potential future to show what remains constant. There are all types of relationships here, families and couples and friendships, and almost everything about the interaction is familiar, full of sentiment and empathy and ordinary mistakes. As one character says, 'human contact is all there really is'. There are a couple of little weaknesses here and there, but nothing with the power to dull the transcendental glow of Children of the New World as a whole. A fantastic collection.
I received an advance review copy of Children of the New World from the publisher through NetGalley.
Every time I started a new story in Children of the New World, I kept thinking: surely at least one of these is going to be something less than absolutely brilliant, surely this is the one that's going to let me down. Spoiler: it doesn't happen.
The stories here are soft sci-fi, sitting in the near-future genre alongside Black Mirror, Her and Luke Kennard's excellent The Transition. A few of the stories hint at a shared universe, different points in could-be future, giving the collection a David Mitchell vibe. Virtual existences loom large. Memories are bought and sold, jobs performed remotely, social media accessed through implants rather than devices. Real-life parenthood is an anachronism: instead, couples raise clones of themselves or adopt, and buy robot siblings for their kids. Real-life relationships are replaced by artificial memories and real-life sex supplanted by impossible erotic experiences in virtual reality. Meanwhile, the real world is ravaged, depleted. The background details are just as effective in setting the scene. In one story, a baby gnaws on a discarded iPhone; in another, hybrids have been superseded by solar cars – to the point that the next-door neighbour who still insists on driving the former is depicted as the equivalent of a climate change denier.
Several of the stories come with commentary (but not preaching) built in, taking aim at the tendency for technology to create as many problems as it solves – or solve problems that never really existed in the first place. This is most obviously satirised in 'Moksha', in which spiritual enlightenment is achieved by way of an obscenely expensive, underground electrical procedure, with seekers of this high ignoring and avoiding anything that might actually make them happy; and in a section of 'Excerpts from The New World Authorized Dictionary', in which we learn that addiction to 'continual wireless therapy' leads to the creation of a social network for chronic users to provide each other with virtual support, and so on, ouroboros-like. Weinstein also works in a number of nods to climate change and what the 'new world' might mean for nature. In 'Heartland', soil has become such a valuable commodity that everyone's sold it off, turning land into clay fields; on the news, 'it's day nine hundred of the oil spill'. 'Fall Line' is set in a rapidly melting ski resort, post-'Big Thaw'. The characters in 'Migration' rarely leave their homes – they log in to school and work, order their food online – and when one of them ventures outdoors, they encounter a positively post-apocalyptic landscape of overgrown gardens and abandoned malls.
It's hard to pick favourites, but for what it's worth... 'Saying Goodbye to Yang' opens the book with a bang (rhyme not intended) and perfectly sets the tone, combining a futuristic scenario with direct, matter-of-fact narration. 'The Cartographers' is an ingenious tale, a kind of cyber-noir which feels too complete for you to have any sense of the devastating twist until the last minute. 'Children of the New World' perhaps realises the potential of the collection most successfully: I loved the humorous details (spam emails and viruses embodied as sinister or pathetic figures appearing unexpectedly in your home), but this is also the most emotionally affecting story. 'Fall Line' is one of the simplest, in that its portrait of an ex-skiier whose career comes to a halt after a terrible accident could be set against almost any backdrop – it just happens to take place in a world where people stream video through their eyes and snow is the stuff of legend. 'Migration' balances reality and fantasy as immaculately as anything I have ever read (which is something you could also say about the entire book).
What makes the stories work so wonderfully is not their vision of the future, but their human elements. It's the way in which Weinstein draws a line through the past, present and potential future to show what remains constant. There are all types of relationships here, families and couples and friendships, and almost everything about the interaction is familiar, full of sentiment and empathy and ordinary mistakes. As one character says, 'human contact is all there really is'. There are a couple of little weaknesses here and there, but nothing with the power to dull the transcendental glow of Children of the New World as a whole. A fantastic collection.
I received an advance review copy of Children of the New World from the publisher through NetGalley.
An intriguing but cold novel of ideas that reminded me of Infinite Detail and Oval. The gripping opening chapter, in which a lorry driver commits An intriguing but cold novel of ideas that reminded me of Infinite Detail and Oval. The gripping opening chapter, in which a lorry driver commits an act of terrorism for reasons unknown, turns out to be something of a red herring. As does, really, the five-minutes-into-the-future setting, with things like scavenged crypto and looted supermarkets acting as background detail to the subdued tale of a uniquely dysfunctional family. This was one of those reader/book mismatch situations: Lamb just wasn’t the story I wanted it to be, which of course isn’t actually a criticism of the book, but does mean I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. I will say, though, that one phrase from the jacket copy leaps out as particularly fitting – ‘moss-coated horror’ – there is indeed a lot of that....more
A curious little book (literally – it’s a pocket-sized paperback). Every time I picked it up and read a couple of chapters, I enjoyed it. But every tiA curious little book (literally – it’s a pocket-sized paperback). Every time I picked it up and read a couple of chapters, I enjoyed it. But every time I put it down, its details slid off my brain, as if I too was enveloped in the same chemical haze as Yoder’s characters.
Hannah lives in Lumena, a town dominated by a vast pharmaceutical factory. Is this the near future, or an alternate version of our world? It’s never entirely clear. Every aspect of life – school, work, socialising – revolves around a vast spectrum of (legal) drugs, most prominently Valedictorian or ‘V’; it’s supposed to make students perform better academically, but its awful side effects are swept under the carpet. There’s a lot of talk of ‘devices’ and ‘streaming’ etc – basically, contemporary references written about in such a way that they sound vaguely futuristic. I was also slightly thrown off by the characters’ use of slang, much of which already sounds dated just two years after the book was published (honestly, I never want to see ‘obvi’ again in my life). The overall effect of Lumena is one of distracted surrealism, retro futurism, like a film set in the 22nd century but shot on burned celluloid.
It all goes a bit ‘cli-fi’ in the final third as a disaster shakes everyone loose of Lumena’s grip. With Hannah’s friend Celia hospitalised, she’s led to wonder: ‘who was Celia without supplements? I mean who were any of us, really?’ This section pivots away from the smooth whimsy of the earlier chapters; the characters explore their relationships to one another amid post-Lumena life, a return to something more primordial (with added visions of chimps). It reminded me of some other slightly frustrating, difficult-to-pin-down novels about strange situations and ideas: Lamb by Matt Hill, Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada. I’d definitely recommend it if you loved any of those....more
A little girl goes missing, and we explore the ensuing search and investigation through the perspectives of her mother and a police officer. While it’A little girl goes missing, and we explore the ensuing search and investigation through the perspectives of her mother and a police officer. While it’s a standard premise for crime fiction, this is no ordinary family and no ordinary child: six-year-old Kimmy Diore is the daughter of a hugely popular family influencer who’s been broadcasting her kids’ lives on YouTube since they were born. Throughout, Kids Run the Show is a smart combination of social commentary and pacy, character-driven mystery – but it’s the concluding part of the book, unexpectedly jumping forward ten years, that really elevated this for me. De Vigan almost enters speculative fiction territory here, and it’s a risk that pays off, making the novel both more thought-provoking and more thrilling. De Vigan has explored themes of the tyranny of parents and helplessness of children throughout so much of her writing, but this is perhaps her most successful and exciting treatment of the theme yet. (This is despite a translation that occasionally threatens to become clunky; it’s a personal thing, but I will just never get used to European novels being translated into American English.)
I received an advance review copy of Kids Run the Show from the publisher through Edelweiss....more
Top of my ‘really should’ve read this in 2023’ list and therefore an obvious pick for my January reading plans, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a truly impresTop of my ‘really should’ve read this in 2023’ list and therefore an obvious pick for my January reading plans, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a truly impressive feat of imagination, delivering a horribly believable portrait of near-future dystopia. It switches between a dizzying number of perspectives; the narrative is technically impressive in that there are so many people in this thing – they just keep coming! – yet it’s never difficult to keep track of who’s who. I did find my investment in the outcome slipping towards the end, though I can’t quite decide if that was because the focus narrowed, or the opposite (i.e. not enough detail for me to feel I ‘knew’ the characters), and one promising subplot just seemed to peter out. Nevertheless this is an original and memorably vivid combination of serious ideas and action-movie setpieces....more
Flux is a novel as dazzling and stylish as its bright-yellow cover. It’s a time-travel mystery filtered through its central character’s obsession withFlux is a novel as dazzling and stylish as its bright-yellow cover. It’s a time-travel mystery filtered through its central character’s obsession with a 1980s neo-noir detective show, and it also involves a suspiciously inert tech company led by a wunderkind entrepreneur (yes, there are Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos vibes here) – but at is heart is a story about family, grief, identity. Once the book hit its stride, I could hardly bear to tear myself away from it. Three narratives, each as compelling as the next, entwine to fantastic effect. The writing is excellent; the plot is beautifully structured and the details frequently unexpected, with the overall result reminding me of The Gone World, Reprieve and John Darnielle’s books. Equally thrilling and thoughtful.
I received an advance review copy of Flux from the publisher through NetGalley....more
Never Let Me Go feels like a modern classic I should have read well before now. So much so, I was surprised to be reminded that it was first publishedNever Let Me Go feels like a modern classic I should have read well before now. So much so, I was surprised to be reminded that it was first published in 2005; I’d been thinking it was from the 80s or 90s. Kathy’s narration is every bit as distinctive of that of Stevens in The Remains of the Day. (With her combination of naivety and bluntness, Kathy reminded me enormously of Jenny in Barbara Vine’s The Brimstone Wedding, another novel with an unforgettable voice.) No real point in me outlining the plot – I knew the broad strokes before reading it anyway – but the book’s voice-driven nature surprised me, and it is so readable you hardly notice you’re reading it.
At the heart of Tell Me an Ending is Nepenthe, a corporation that specialises in erasing memories (as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which At the heart of Tell Me an Ending is Nepenthe, a corporation that specialises in erasing memories (as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is – inevitably? – referenced in the book). After the procedure, some clients are left with no idea they’ve even had a memory removed, until a high-profile trial forces Nepenthe to tell all of them and offer a ‘restoration’. We see the fallout from this development through the stories of six main characters. These are Noor, Nepenthe’s head of aftercare; sensitive teenager Mei; William, an ex-police officer with PTSD symptoms; smug middle-aged couple Finn and Mirande; and Oscar, a young man who remembers virtually nothing of his past and is perpetually on the run.
Tonally, Tell Me an Ending reminded me of Natasha Pulley’s writing; thematically and structurally, it has a lot in common with Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House. It took me a while to get into it, as the chapters alternate between characters, and it’s initially quite difficult to keep so many perspectives straight. But once I was hooked, I was hooked. The plot creates its own momentum – naturally, I wanted to know what each of these people had chosen to erase. (Noor is the only one without a missing memory, but her plotline involves a similarly compelling element of corporate intrigue.) For a book that focuses on ‘endings’, however, its own are probably the weakest part; actually, one of them is downright bizarre. I’d still recommend it if you enjoy near-future stories, and it’s hard not to be charmed by the story’s warmth and compassion.
Another collection of short stories about modern life and relationships with light speculative elements, to be shelved next to Cosmogony by Lucy IAnother collection of short stories about modern life and relationships with light speculative elements, to be shelved next to Cosmogony by Lucy Ives and You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South. Out There bears the hallmarks of many debut collections by young female writers (listless narration, joyless sex, life-on-the-internet stuff) and features what I described in my review of Forgotten as ‘not quite body horror, [but] certainly bodily squeamishness’ (organ fetishes, a condition that causes people’s bones to melt every night, buildings with fleshy walls). The collection is bookended by two of the best stories – ‘Out There’ and ‘Big Sur’ – both of which deal with the challenges of a dating scene infested by ‘blots’, fake people designed to harvest data from women. Also strong are ‘The Bone Ward’, in which a woman desperately tries to hold on to a relationship she’s started in hospital; ‘Shelter’, in which a dissatisfied wife chooses an unusual method of escape; ‘Moist House’, one of the few stories with a male narrator, who replaces his wife and mistress with a singularly demanding house; and especially ‘A Scale Model of Gull Point’, about the last survivor in a ravaged resort creating art amid destruction. Most of the other stories, however, bored me, and I often found myself longing for a more lively narrative, a less sterile tone. It’s not really this specific book or author’s fault that I’m being a bit harsh here; if I’d read it a few years ago my rating probably would’ve been four stars. It’s just that I’ve read so many short stories with the exact same voice, and I feel I’ve encountered better versions of some of Out There’s ideas in collections by Mariana Enríquez, Kristen Roupenian and Alexander Weinstein.
I received an advance review copy of Out There from the publisher through NetGalley.
(4.5) An incredibly intelligent, unpredictable novel that took my breath away not only with the scope of its storytelling (and the sheer complexity of(4.5) An incredibly intelligent, unpredictable novel that took my breath away not only with the scope of its storytelling (and the sheer complexity of the connections between its characters) but also the depth of its humanity. The Candy House partly revolves around the invention of the Mandala cube, a device that allows a person’s consciousness to be recorded and shared, but assuming this makes it a plot-driven sci-fi novel would be a mistake; while it ranges all over the map in terms of genre and form, its one consistency is that it is resolutely character-centric. This is a book that wants us to look closely at people’s lives, and if there is a technology it’s concerned with, it’s its own medium, fiction – fiction as an empathy machine. I found it difficult to put down: once Egan starts writing about a person, you want to stay with them; once a chapter finishes, you think, ‘just one more’... The Candy House’s sprawling web of stories is akin to other similarly wide-ranging and densely interconnected works: City on Fire, The Overstory, I Still Dream. (Also, a confession: while I have read A Visit from the Goon Squad, it was 11 years ago and I remember little about it; the links between the two books barely registered with me, and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.)
I received an advance review copy of The Candy House from the publisher through Edelweiss.
I was stunned by this book. I wasn’t able to keep this review short, so here’s the one-sentence version: this is one of the best short story collectioI was stunned by this book. I wasn’t able to keep this review short, so here’s the one-sentence version: this is one of the best short story collections I have ever read.
The review copy doesn’t include any biographical details about Izumi Suzuki; I don’t usually read introductions (at least not until I’ve finished the book), but this is a case in which I would have appreciated one. The publisher’s website says she was a model and actress in the 1970s, became a prolific writer after the death of her partner, and died by suicide in 1986. The original dates for the stories aren’t given. Information about her in English is frustratingly scarce, and most of it seems to stem from a press release about this collection; I eventually found this short bio, which gives publication years for some of her work.
The reason I was so curious about this is that ‘prescient’ is too weak a word to describe the stories in Terminal Boredom: ‘prophetic’ would be more like it. Over and over again, I was mind-bogglingly thrilled by the fact that these stories featuring video calls and robot vacuum cleaners, reality TV, live streams and screen-addicted people, in which Suzuki treats gender as a progressive 21st-century writer would, must have been written in the mid-80s at the latest.
The crown jewel of the book is ‘You May Dream’, translated by David Boyd. In it, a dispassionate young woman meets her more emotional friend, whom she regards with disgust. The two have differing opinions of the government’s latest population-reducing scheme, in which citizens are selected at random to enter cryosleep, after which they’ll only be able to live on by transferring their consciousness to another person’s dreams. It’s a story about grappling with loneliness and nihilism and detachment, with being the sort of person who will say I’m a hardcore people-pleaser, even in my dreams on one page and I’ve always enjoyed making fun of other people, cornering them on the next.
Reading this story, I began to understand Suzuki’s grasp on her characters’ voices – the voices being the other remarkable thing about these stories. Suzuki has this ability to pin down a person’s worldview in just a few lines. The things they say feel so accurate somehow, as well as so modern, that it’s often unnerving.
Like most people these days, I don’t overthink things. I’ll go along with whatever. No firm beliefs, no hang-ups. Just a lack of self-confidence tangled up in fatalistic resignation. Whatever the situation, nothing ever reaches me on an emotional level. Nothing’s important. Because I won’t let it be. I operate on mood alone. No regrets, no looking back.
I know exactly who the narrator of ‘You May Dream’ is. If she was young now she’d describe herself as blackpilled in her Twitter bio and make memes that seem vaguely fascist, and she’d be delighted that nobody could figure out whether or not she was kidding, due to her horror of sincerity, which she’d believe to be the highest form of cringe. I mean, how 2021 is a line like I devote myself to the acme of emptiness... the sadistic act of self-creation? I’m obsessed with this story. It’s incredible. It’s going straight on my list of favourite short stories of all time.
The other standout is ‘Terminal Boredom’, translated by Daniel Joseph. Set in a world of mass unemployment and screen addiction, it finds a young man and woman wearily going through the motions of some kind of relationship, the real world seeming less real to them than what they see on TV. They’re indifferent to violence, hide their emotions beneath a cool veneer of disinterest, and find human interaction exhausting. Again, they feel like they could have been written yesterday.
I couldn’t tell whether I was genuinely pissed off or not. The performance had just become a part of my personality. If nothing else, I can be pretty sure I’m not happy, I thought vacantly.
Without a doubt, this is the most uncannily clairvoyant of all the stories in Terminal Boredom, with its celebrities as politicians, reality TV shows, a character who routinely films his daily life, live recordings of suicides and killings... It also gives us the clearest articulation of the mood of Suzuki’s fiction, when the narrator states that everyone lives in a happy-go-lucky-depression – they only take life half-seriously. That attitude is typical of the people we meet throughout the book. That serious half is one of profound sadness and exhausted apathy, but the detachment it fosters allows Suzuki’s characters a kind of deadened joy.
‘Women and Women’, also translated by Daniel Joseph, is a barnstorming opener which I loved: a tongue-in-cheek story about a female-dominated society in which men are relegated to the ‘Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone’. But one girl, 18-year-old Yūko, is beginning to question the order of things, especially after she actually sees a boy. It’s so funny and irreverent, but spiked with thought-provoking details, and the characters have startling depth.
Several stories take place in alien worlds. In ‘Night Picnic’, translated by Sam Bett, a family on a far-off planet try their hardest to act normal, attempting to play out traditional roles: Mom and Dad, Junior and Sis. They’re the last remaining humans... or are they? ‘Forgotten’, translated by Polly Barton, is a haunting love story about the relationship between Emma, a human, and Sol, an alien. It is the most plot-driven story in the book, culminating in interplanetary war, yet its key strength is how it shows us the inherent incompatibility of these two people, and the pain that causes.
Addiction is a recurring theme: in ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, translated by Aiko Masubuchi, a woman is hooked on drugs that make her age rapidly. ‘That Old Seaside Club’, translated by Helen O’Horan, presents a more offbeat take, following two young women who appear to be having the time of their lives in a beautiful seaside resort... though their memories of the past are oddly blurry. Emma in ‘Forgotten’ also sustains herself through drugs and drink, and of course, the characters in ‘Terminal Boredom’ are numbed by their screen addiction. Always, it is not necessarily the stories that matter, but the way Suzuki tells them. She will make you laugh out loud, then punch you in the gut with an observation so acute, so seemingly personal, that it hurts.
I don’t think I’ve read a collection like this before: stories originally written by the same author, but translated by a variety of translators. I was worried the latter would dilute the authorial voice, would be distracting – but as I discovered, there’s little chance of that. If I had to compare it to anything, I’d say it’s Anna Kavan’s short stories spliced with Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, but really, Suzuki’s vision stands alone. ‘You May Dream’ is an instant classic, ‘Terminal Boredom’ and ‘Women and Women’ are also outstanding, and the entire collection represents a striking body of work I’m thrilled to have been able to discover.
I received an advance review copy of Terminal Boredom from the publisher through Edelweiss.
The Art of Space Travel is an outstanding collection of short stories: some are speculative, some are not, some blur the lines, all are written in a rThe Art of Space Travel is an outstanding collection of short stories: some are speculative, some are not, some blur the lines, all are written in a rich and engaging style that makes each and every character feel like a fully-formed human being. That’s all anyone else really needs to know; the rest of this review is for me. There’s rarely any point in reading a book review written by someone who is obsessed with the author’s work, and like many of my Nina Allan reviews, this is going to be very long, and involve a lot of analysis based on her other books and stories, because I need to write this all down somewhere, and what else do I have a Goodreads account for?
In her introduction, Allan discusses how she selected the stories for this career-spanning collection – mostly on instinct, and because they express themes that remain important to her as a writer. Some are linked through recurring characters, others via ideas; ‘the sense of circling a central hub of meaning’. She also writes intriguingly of ‘intended inconsistencies’, differences left in place both to provoke discussion and to invite comparisons with the subjective nature of memory – cited as a key theme for the book, along with loss, time and sense of place.
Again, I can only review The Art of Space Travel from the perspective of someone who is already a fan of Allan’s work; so deeply entrenched in it, in fact, that it has become impossible to be objective. I’ve read everything of hers I’ve been able to get my hands on, and as a result I had already read every story included here with the exception of the last, which is brand new. One of the big pleasures of this collection – of seeing the stories gathered together – is being able to join the dots, to find the places where they converge and where they pull away from one another. At times, piecing together the characters, the themes, the worlds contained here made me feel like an inventor, like someone discovering truly revelatory things for the first time. It is a special thing, a real joy, to find a writer who makes you feel like that.
But what’s perhaps more interesting is that virtually none of them are stories I would personally have chosen as part of a Nina Allan canon. Looking through them, and then comparing them to my own favourites, it seems The Art of Space Travel is frequently concerned with feelings – especially those that seem inexpressible, or are impossible to capture in words – whereas the stories I would choose are more plot-driven, more often thrilling or horrifying. As collections of speculative fiction go, this one is definitely on the literary end of the spectrum, quiet and thoughtful, rarely dealing in extremes – though incredibly powerful when it does.
Stories I already liked, such as ‘The Art of Space Travel’ and ‘Neptune’s Trident’, I found I loved upon revisiting them; stories I had originally been unsure about, like ‘Microcosmos’ and ‘Marielena’, I had a chance to reassess, and in some cases change my mind about. The collection is ordered more or less chronologically; if you are a newcomer to Allan and want to dip into it, I would recommend reading ‘Four Abstracts’ or ‘The Art of Space Travel’ first. These stories are not only the best, but also highly representative of her approach as a writer, and if you like them you will find much to relish here.
--- The book opens with three stories first published in Allan’s debut collection A Thread of Truth (2007): ‘Amethyst’, which is mainly about the friendship between two teen girls in a seaside town (but also about aliens and a pop song); ‘Heroes’, in which young Finlay finds an unexpected connection with an elderly neighbour and his racing pigeons; and ‘A Thread of Truth’, which is about doomed love, and also spiders. In both ‘Amethyst’ and ‘Heroes’, the most interesting elements of the story seem to be the least clear, the least satisfactorily resolved, but the details are so good and true that the stories are still pleasurable.
It’s easy to see why ‘A Thread of Truth’ is included here: it’s irresistibly involving, and contains within it an unforgettable ghost story, but more than that it is thematically significant. It articulates so many of the things Allan’s characters grapple with: the fact of love as both an impossible thing and an essential one; fear and how it can be vanquished; choosing between a vocation and a passion; the idea of a story that has the power to echo through time, to repeat itself.
Next are two more stories I first encountered in another previously published collection, this time 2013’s Microcosmos.‘Flying in the Face of God’ is one of several Allan stories dealing with the fate of the ‘fliers’, who undertake space travel at great physical cost (a process known as ‘the Kushnev drain’). ‘Microcosmos’ is set in a world afflicted by rising temperatures and increasing drought, and follows a girl who is briefly left with a man her parents are visiting – a stranger to her – and has a disconcerting encounter. Of everything in the collection, my most dramatic turnaround in opinion happened with ‘Microcosmos’. When I first read it, I was both disturbed and confused by the character of Ballantine, and unsure what was being left unsaid. Having read it again, I’m not sure what it was that I didn’t understand, and while I still think Ballantine’s behaviour is slightly odd, I no longer find him as menacing as I clearly did at first.
‘Fairy Skulls’ (2013) is one of the lighter entries: the tale of a woman who ends up living in a house she didn’t want... and with a fairy infestation to boot. In the introduction, Allan writes about how ‘each of my short stories seems to me like an outtake from the novel it might have become’. This is often evident from the sheer amount of detail the stories seem to contain; it’s one of the things I love most about Allan’s fiction, but it can also mean there isn’t enough space to explore strands that seem potentially fascinating. In ‘Fairy Skulls’, these include Vinnie’s relationship with her eccentric aunt Jude, as well as the history of the fairies. But I really enjoyed rereading this after Allan’s most recent novel The Good Neighbours, which also features the ‘fair folk’.
The next two stories were written around the same time that Allan was writing her second novel The Rift, and explore similar ideas about mysterious disappearances/appearances and the possibility of travelling through time or between realities. In ‘The Science of Chance’ (2014), set in an alternate version of Russia, a little girl appears – seemingly from nowhere – in a train station; a woman must attempt to track down the girl’s family with only an old, apparently unrelated newspaper clipping to go on. ‘Marielena’ (2014) follows an asylum seeker, Noah, who becomes reluctant friends with an elderly homeless woman named Mary. In both stories, the protagonist is led to a bizarre yet seemingly inescapable conclusion about the origins of the person they are trying to help.
I was interested to see ‘Marielena’ included here because, before rereading it, if someone had forced me (e.g. at gunpoint) to pick a Nina Allan story I didn’t like, I’d probably have had to choose this. It’s the style that always throws me: its stark realist lyricism is at odds with the usual rich texture of her fiction. But it and ‘The Science of Chance’ are undoubtedly companion pieces to one another, and while I still think ‘Marielena’ is one of the weaker pieces in the book, reading the two together gave me a different perspective.
‘The Art of Space Travel’ (2016) is one of Allan’s better-known stories and was previously published as a Tor.com ebook. Emily is caught up in the hysteria surrounding the celebrity guests – two astronauts – staying at the London hotel where she works as head of housekeeping. At the same time, her interest in her father’s identity is reignited when her mother, who has dementia, lets slip a new detail. I liked this the first couple of times I read it; rereading it here, I loved it. It really ticks the boxes for a lot of things I love in a short story – vivid and interesting characters, a first-person narrative with a distinctive voice, a suggestion of something inexplicable (the mysterious book is a genius touch), speculative details that stay grounded in reality.
‘Neptune’s Trident’ (2017) takes place in a broken-down, near-future vision of society in which some, including the protagonist Caitlin’s partner, have become ‘flukes’, the victims of a strange new infection that is little understood. As with ‘The Art of Space Travel’, having a chance to revisit this made me enjoy it so much more. It contains a vivid moment of horror that is difficult to forget, made all the more effective by the scrupulous worldbuilding that surrounds it.
And then we have ‘Four Abstracts’ (2017). THIS STORY; this was the first Nina Allan story I ever read, and it is the story that made me fall in love with her work. It’s about an artist, Rebecca Hathaway; it’s organised around four of her most significant pieces of art, and told by her friend Isobel in the wake of Rebecca’s death. It is, to me, a practically perfect short story. It explores friendship, art, grief and guilt, all while demonstrating a quiet, brilliant, terrifying commitment to a thread of horror via Rebecca’s claim that the women in her family are part-spider. I know now that it is a sequel of sorts to ‘A Thread of Truth’, but I didn’t know that when I first read it, and it absolutely stands alone. Always a pleasure to reread, and a masterclass in how it should be done.
‘The Common Tongue, the Present Tense, the Known’ (2016) is a sequel to ‘Microcosmos’, featuring the same protagonist, Melodie. Having revised my opinion of the earlier story, I was better able to appreciate this one. It expands on the theme of climate change introduced in ‘Microcosmos’, and depicts the older Melodie’s friendship with inscrutable scavenger Noemi. It’s moody and poetic, with the aloof tone suiting its bleak setting. I already thought of this as a sister story to ‘Neptune’s Trident’, but reading them both in the same volume, I once again found similarities that I hadn’t previously identified.
‘The Gift of Angels: an introduction’ (2018) is one of the more literary stories in Allan’s oeuvre, the gently elegiac tale of a middle-aged writer taking a trip to Paris, the city in which his parents met. When I first read the story, I was not familiar with the film La Jetée, which acts as a motif within Vincent’s narrative, images from it recurring throughout. Since then, I’ve watched it; knowing now that it’s something of a classic, I’m a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t previously heard of it, but it also strikes me as significant that I had no problem believing it was Allan’s own invention. In fact, the film fits into her body of work with eerie precision, its themes (love, fate, memory, time) matching those of this collection.
‘A Princess of Mars: Svetlana Belkina and Tarkovsky’s Lost Movie Aelita’ is a new story and, as the title suggests, it (like ‘The Gift of Angels’) is heavily influenced by film. The plot is a mixture of autofiction and cinematic mystery as the narrator digs for information about an abandoned Andrei Tarkovsky adaptation of the science fiction novel Aelita. It’s fascinating and extremely readable, a kind of essay-story, and it is, at times, delightfully difficult to figure out which parts (or characters) are real and which have been fabricated.
--- I have (unsurprisingly) given considerable thought to the question of which stories I, personally, would put in a Nina Allan ‘greatest hits’ collection. ‘Four Abstracts’ would be there, of course, and some stories that would never have made it into The Art of Space Travel because they’re part of collections that are currently in print: the title story from The Silver Wind, ‘The Gateway’ and possibly ‘The Lammas Worm’ from Stardust/Ruby. From Microcosmos I would have selected ‘Orinoco’ and ‘A.H.’ (which, for what it’s worth, I think would have fit into this collection well).
Then there are the uncollected stories I love: ‘Astray’ (the basis for The Rift), ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’, ‘Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle’, ‘Bellony’, and most of all ‘Maggots’ and ‘A Change of Scene’. The last two are honest-to-god masterpieces, but I suppose I have to grudgingly admit that they are difficult to divorce from their origins: ‘Maggots’ (probably the best horror story I’ve ever read) is part of the anthology Five Stories High, wherein all the contributions take place within the same house; ‘A Change of Scene’ is, specifically and unavoidably, a sequel to Robert Aickman’s ‘Ringing the Changes’ (and, as I’ve said a few times before, is better than the original). Still, if you are at all interested in Allan’s writing, you must read them.
I received an advance review copy of The Art of Space Travel from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Patrick Hamlin is a writer whose novel I thought Alexandra Kleeman might be a genius when I read You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine; now I know she is.
Patrick Hamlin is a writer whose novel Elsinore Lane is being made into a film featuring Cassidy Carter, one-time child star of Kassi Keene: Kid Detective, now halfway to being washed up and better known as a tabloid darling. Patrick has been given a token role as production assistant, something he quickly realises gives him no say in what the studio do with the content. With his wife and daughter cut off from civilisation at a ‘nature retreat’, Patrick is marooned in the neon sprawl of LA, watching helplessly as the material of his book – a personal, elegiac story about the loss of his father – is distorted into a bizarrely plotless horror movie.
All this plays out against the backdrop of something that gradually reveals itself as a five-minutes-into-the-future setting. In California, tap water is a thing of the past. Instead there’s a privately supplied, supposedly chemically identical, completely ubiquitous, artificial substitute called WAT-R. Patrick is rattled when he sees a group of disorientated people being shepherded into a green van; later, he learns they are victims of a new phenomenon known as ‘Random-Onset Acute Dementia’. When he decides to investigate the links between WAT-R, the new disease and the movie, who better to help than the woman who played super-sleuth Kassi Keene?
Something New Under the Sun is less weird fiction than You Too, but no less weird. The dialogue is often absurd, with sentences like ‘avoiding loss is impossible in a world that struggles to conjure even the basic sense of presence’ thrown out in casual conversation. People don’t talk like this, and it works so well – it knows its own absurdity, exists on its own plane. As in her debut, Kleeman is breathtakingly adept at taking symbols of capitalism, of celebrity, of consumer culture and warping them beyond all recognition, in doing so revealing the horror that lay beneath the surface all along.
The perspective switches throughout, often without warning, from Patrick to Cassidy and away from them altogether. It’s like a filmmaking technique itself – like a drone hovering next to the characters and then, bored, wandering away to pan through the empty rooms of a house, to zoom in on the movements of animals and insects in the scrubland. The land is just as alive as the people – indeed, so is the WAT-R; so are the highways and air-con units. The setting is a triumph, simultaneously fascinating and hellish. The style is unique: trippy, dreamy, undoubtedly odd, yet somehow really humane; against all odds, it doesn’t feel detached from reality at all.
If I had to compare it to anything... I suppose the mixture of a writer isolated from his family and hints of conspiracy, partly communicated through episodes of a TV show, reminded me of Red Pill, but god, this just does everything a hundred times better than Red Pill (and I liked that book! But Something New is more successful for me precisely because it leans into the weirdness of its weirdest aspects and lets that spin out in every direction rather than trying to tie everything back to events the reader will recognise). It could also be the eccentric sibling of We Play Ourselves, with its hallucinatory LA setting, and its blurring of reality as a film is made, and all its ideas and energy. I liked to imagine Patrick and Cassidy nearly, but not quite, crossing paths with Cass and Caroline.
Only Kleeman could have written this, I’m convinced. Only she could have written something with these themes, make it as earnest as it is knowing, and not have it turn into a dreary sermon. A film industry satire/cautionary climate change novel/conspiracy thriller/near-future science fiction, a bizarre, wild, colourful odyssey through a version of reality that seems to be melting, returning the trappings of modernity to the primordial ooze... It’s the best, most ingenious book I have read this year so far, and I’ll be surprised if I find anything to match it. As it turns out, the title is wholly apt.
I received an advance review copy of Something New Under the Sun from the publisher through Edelweiss.
(3.5) This was an unusual experience: a book I enjoyed even though I never – at any point – managed to get my head around what it was actually about. (3.5) This was an unusual experience: a book I enjoyed even though I never – at any point – managed to get my head around what it was actually about. At first I thought the early chapters’ thicket of infodumps was standard procedure for a novel like this with a near-future setting: we need to understand how New India works in the late 2020s, as well as the complexities of the characters’ relationships (Joey, the protagonist, is a ‘Reality Controller’ for Indi, her influencer ex; another major character, Joey’s childhood friend Rudra, is from a wealthy family with its own complicated web of connections). By the time I was about halfway through, however, it had dawned on me that it was all going to be like this. And it really is; every chapter up to the last feels like it’s haring off in a completely different direction. For all that, I had a really good time with the story! Basu writes at a convincing level of detail without getting bogged down in technicalities, and I didn’t tire of learning how this world’s economy of fame worked. Reminded me a lot of Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland, because of the colourful setting full of imagined tech/VR/AI/streaming stars, and also because of the distinct lack of structure – but somehow I liked this a lot more.
(4.5) If you follow me on any form of social media you’ve probably, at some point, seen me going on about Elizabeth Tan’s novel-in-stories Rubik. I’m (4.5) If you follow me on any form of social media you’ve probably, at some point, seen me going on about Elizabeth Tan’s novel-in-stories Rubik. I’m perpetually amazed and frustrated that it isn’t widely adored – or at the very least a cult classic. When people ask me to recommend underrated or lesser-known books, Rubik is always part of my answer. The publication of this new collection had somehow passed me by until a few days ago; within minutes of reading about its existence (it’s just been nominated for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction), I’d snapped it up. It is published by an Australian indie, Brio, but – thank god – the ebook is available in the UK.
Smart Ovens for Lonely People did not let me down. There are 20 stories packed into this book, and they act as a wonderful showcase for the author’s boundless imagination. Her willingness to incorporate esoteric pop culture references makes the stories feel fresh and surprising, as well as very funny. Yet for every piece of surreal hilarity there is a corresponding note of poignancy. The title story in particular is heartrending... even though it centres on the protagonist being given a cat-shaped oven that talks to her. I don’t always know where Elizabeth Tan’s writing is taking me; just that I definitely want to go there.
--- I’m not a big fan of flash fiction – I often don’t feel like I’m really ‘getting’ it – but the two-page-long ‘Night of the Fish’ is one of the best very-short-stories I’ve read. Funny and chilling all at once.
In ‘Our Sleeping Lungs Opened to the Cold’ a group of mermaids, kept in a restaurant tank as ‘floating spectacles’, begin to embrace their aquatic nature and become more fishlike. Told in a poetic yet knowing tone, this story reminded me a lot of Kirsty Logan’s short fiction.
‘Pang & Co. Genuine Scribe Era Stationery Pty Ltd’ belongs to a growing category of stories that (in my head) would fit into the world of Sam Thompson’s Communion Town. When Ira Pang gives a biro to a homeless man, it sets off an unexpected chain of events. The story is laced with intriguing, yet not overt, hints that it’s taking place in the future. I found myself wishing I could stay with it for much longer.
Meanwhile, ‘Eighteen Bells Karaoke Castle (Sing Your Heart Out)’ is set explicitly in the future, some time after the Year of Unprecedented Ecological Terror and the third collapse of the Sydney Opera House. People come to the karaoke venue of the title for an authentic turn-of-the-millennium experience; the songs are accompanied by stock footage called things like ‘Attractive Caucasian Woman Laughing in Kings Park’. Oh, and the narrator is a human-sized anthropomorphic rabbit who works there. It’s a bit like an Alexander Weinstein story combined with the anime Aggretsuko. Delightfully brilliant, absurd and hilarious – one of those stories I instantly wanted to tell people about, even as I was reading it.
In ‘Smart Ovens for Lonely People’, Shu receives a smart oven after an (initially) mysterious accident. (In the world of the story, the assignation of such an oven is apparently a standard response to trauma.) I expected this to be one of the collection’s quirkier entries. It unfolds into something unexpectedly beautiful and touching, with some of the best observations on depression I’ve read anywhere.
‘Ron Swanson’s Stencilled ’Stache’ opens at an ASMR tournament. Yrma, whose particular niche is reciting whispered mantras, wins her category by repeating the title phrase, which she devises after seeing a mural of the Parks and Recreation character outside the venue. The mantra makes her world-famous, but also plunges her into a bizarre conspiracy. This is an outlandish and very funny espionage adventure that reminded me a lot of the (fantastic) final story/chapter in Rubik, ‘Kuan x 05’.
The narrator of ‘Yes! Yes! Yes You Are! Yes You Are!’ is a cat named O Fortuna. Her tale depicts the activities of a deliciously melodramatic and intellectual band of cats who keep the peace in their neighbourhood, and the conflict that arises when two newcomers (named Her Majesty the Queen and Mr Fluffy Man) turn up. I’d love a crossover between these cats and the ones in Lynne Truss’s Cat out of Hell.
‘Disobeying’ has a KILLER premise: at a literary festival, a writer is approached by a stranger who’d like her to sign his copy of her book. But the book is one she has not written... yet. If you don’t want to read the story on the basis of that alone, I don’t know what to say to you. This is probably the most conventional story in the collection, and it says something about Tan’s skill that it works just as well as the totally off-the-wall ones.
‘This is Not a Treehouse’ is ostensibly about a woman’s ire towards her boyfriend over the fact that he’s building a treehouse. It spins in loads of different directions, all of which fit wonderfully together, and includes a great group therapy anecdote. It’s an incredibly good dissection of the dynamics of a failing relationship.
‘Shirt Dresses That Look a Little Too Much Like Shirts So That It Looks Like You Forgot to Put On Pants (Love Will Save the Day)’ features a company that engineers meet-cutes between incorporeal entities and a robotic pigeon programmed to speak in lyrics from 90s pop songs. It’s pretty short but nevertheless made me snort with laughter several times.
My final favourite is the last and possibly best story, ‘You Put the U in Utopia (or, The Last Neko Atsume Player in the World)’. Mika works for a company that produces bespoke terraria, though she’s pretty unhappy with her job, and in her spare time she’s a devoted player of Neko Atsume, the mobile game where you collect cats. This is a story about starting to date someone you really like, then suspecting they are a spy; speculating on the sentience of digital cats; and solemnly concluding that ‘we are all hollaback girls’. Considering that I used to regularly play Neko Atsume and, like Mika, have repeatedly had a minor crisis about the respective size of my eyes, I feel like it may very well have been written specifically for me. Which, given the eventual implication that everything is connected, feels very apt.
'Ungirls' more closely fits my expectations of what the Disorder collection would be. It's set in the near future and has a large cast of characters: 'Ungirls' more closely fits my expectations of what the Disorder collection would be. It's set in the near future and has a large cast of characters: a group of sex workers in Cape Town; an online community of men who own genetically engineered sex dolls, known as 'growjobs'; and a motivational speaker clearly modelled on Jordan Peterson. The backbone of the plot is that Nats, one of the sex workers, takes on a job as voiceover artist for the growjobs, and is then doxxed.
But 'Ungirls' feels like it wants to be more than a short story, and really, there's just too much going on. For example, a thread about Nats' teacher friend being outed as a porn actor has no connection to the main plot and doesn't go anywhere; the extra detail might work in a novel, but is unnecessary in a story. It all seems like it's trying to Say Something, and it's not clear what that is; the message is a bit garbled. Beukes knows how to make a narrative gripping and readable, so for all its flaws I didn't dislike it.
A near-future novelette in which an Iranian man must take a written test so that he and his family can retain their British citizenship. The test, howA near-future novelette in which an Iranian man must take a written test so that he and his family can retain their British citizenship. The test, however, is not what it seems. The sections told from Idir's point of view are not good; first-person present-tense narration really doesn't work in the way it's used here, with someone's observations and reactions (to increasingly dramatic events) essentially being related in real time. Other parts of the story are much more engaging, and – though rather basic in their analysis – raise some interesting points. Many other reviewers have made comparisons between The Test and Black Mirror, and I'd have to agree, not least because I have always suspected that this was originally written for the ill-fated Black Mirror short story anthology.
I had wanted to read Mary South's debut collection of stories since first hearing about the US edition, and was delighted to discover the book had fouI had wanted to read Mary South's debut collection of stories since first hearing about the US edition, and was delighted to discover the book had found a UK publisher. What I'd read about Forgotten – such as the blurb, which says the stories involve people attempting 'to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair' – had given me the impression it would be near-future soft science fiction in the vein of Alexander Weinstein. The opening story seems to have been chosen to underscore that positioning: 'Keith Prime' is narrated by a nurse who must ensure her wards, a group of clones named Keith, are safely kept sedated until their organs are harvested. However, it isn't necessarily typical of the collection, and that mention of 'technology' turns out to be a lazy way to sum it up.
I'd compare South's work to Xuan Juliana Wang, Lauren Holmes, Jen George and Kristen Roupenian. She's good at unnerving, offputting premises – if not quite body horror, then certainly bodily squeamishness, as in 'The Promised Hostel', where the narrator is one of a group of adult men who take turns breastfeeding from a woman called Maddy. Some are so up-to-the-minute that the concepts might sound a little too calculated: in the title story, a content moderator stalks her rapist online; 'To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves' uses the members of an online fan forum as a kind of Greek chorus. Both, however, are razor-sharp. The latter, especially, is a really smart way to portray the way pop culture icons are built up, torn down and dehumanised.
Another couple of standouts: my favourite, 'Architecture for Monsters', is about a 'starchitect' whose work references human anatomy. Parts of it are written as a pitch-perfect imitation of the sort of profile that might appear in a pretentious design magazine (complete with footnotes), and the style is so enjoyable it'd be a pleasure even if it didn't have the best plot in the book. In 'The Age of Love' two staff at a nursing home discover their elderly patients are addicted to phone sex lines, and start making recordings of the calls – a practice that backfires when the narrator's girlfriend falls for the voice of a particularly eloquent octogenarian. Both are pretty funny in what appears to be a dry and deadpan way, yet there's real emotion beneath that. This is a hallmark of the whole book, and particularly apparent in its strongest stories.
I received an advance review copy of You Will Never Be Forgotten from the publisher through NetGalley.
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