Weird and dangerous flotsam washes up in The End of Everything
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The best science-fiction book of the year so far has only just been published. The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison, is about half the length of a regular novel, but it’s so powerful and complete that there is nothing slight about it. I consumed it in one greedy gulp before getting up one morning.
Our main characters, Phillip and his grandmother Marnie, live along the south coast of England in the wake of an alien invasion. Since the iGhetti began to appear, the European mainland seems to have disappeared, and it has become very hard indeed to work out what is real and what isn’t. Strange, dangerous artefacts wash up out of the sea. Something called “a bad patch” periodically settles over people, causing them to see things or behave out of character. Maybe. Nothing is clear.
Phillip hunts for alien artefacts, hoping to sell them, and Marnie is an artist. That sounds simple, but right from the start, our heroes don’t behave as we would expect.
There are echoes of Roadside Picnic, the 1972 work by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, in which aliens visit Earth but with no interest in humans, leaving dangerous detritus behind them. There are also reminders of John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, in which the alien invasion begins with pregnancies rather than spaceships. But then again, this is wholly original. It’s a work of genius.
Two other books out this June are worth a mention in this roundup of the year so far. First, The Traveler, by Joseph Eckert.
Every day at 7.52am, our hero, Scott Treder, leaps forward in time. The first time, he jumps forward a day. The next time, two days; it’s going to keep doubling.
Early on, Scott’s son, Lyle, does the maths. “Dad?” says Lyle. “Did you know that if it keeps doubling, the fifteenth time it happens you’ll go almost forty-five years into the future?”
Lyle becomes a theoretical physicist and spends his life trying to help his father. His devotion is moving, but after only a few forward jumps, Lyle is dust in our rearview mirror. (Sort of. I won’t say more.)
As we travel into the far future, the book jumps out of thriller territory and into science fiction proper. This isn’t high art, like The End of Everything, but I was dragged forward by the question at the core of the book: what future being is doing this to Scott, and why?
Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky is also out this month. Now, Tchaikovsky has already written one of the best books of the year so far, that being the fourth instalment in his Children of Time series. Children of Strife, set in a far future where efforts to terraform a distant planet have gone disturbingly wrong, is a brilliant achievement.
By rights, Tchaikovsky’s second book of the year should be second-rate. (I speak as a jealous writer.) However, while Green City Wars is what is these days termed as “cosy”, and may not be to everyone’s taste, the quality shines through. Our hero is an IQ-augmented racoon. He’s also a private investigator who is looking for a missing mouse in a city of the future. So far, so Zootopia, the movie.
Here though, unlike in Zootopia, the augmented animals exist only to clean up after the humans who live above them.
The green city is built on the suffering of the animals who scrabble to serve so that they can go on receiving the elixir that keeps their brains working at a higher level. So, it’s sort of political, but the vibe is comic and joyful. If you like your books extremely whimsical, this may be for you.
Casting further back into the year, a standout for me remains Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. It’s not my favourite in her Imperial Radch universe, but a fantastic addition, nonetheless.
Luminous, by Silvia Park, is uneven, but full of heart and big ideas about the future of AI, and well worth a read. And Vigil, by George Saunders, has also stayed with me. Its ghostly protagonist Jill Blaine is a delight, even if the man she is trying to help to his death, an oil tycoon, is irredeemable.
Emily H. Wilson is the author of the Sumerians series. A former editor of New Scientist, she is working on her first sci-fi novel.
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