A sudden flurry of words by me making their way into the world. Sadly not freely available words, but I can give you some excerpts. First up, in the August Locus, a (timely!) review of In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (full text now online here):
The novel as a whole embodies the principle that it isn’t just our personal history that locks us into spiral- ling feedback loops: our planetary history does too, and awareness of this is part of what makes daily living in the Anthropocene feel, you might say, so very strange. “It’s perhaps difficult,” one character says to Leigh at one point, “to really face this [embedded strangeness]; certainly it’s difficult to do the idea justice.” I agree with them. But the steely unity of In Ascension, as it traverses from the hadalpelagic zone to the heliopause, makes it a compelling attempt.
Also in Locus (and also now online), All The Hollow of the Sky by Kit Whitfield:
All the Hollow of the Skytells the story of one family of fairy-smiths in Gyrford, a fictional Midlands village […] The beautifully composed omniscient narration – along with two important interludes of equally well-controlled first-person – is itself an absorbing and authoritative creation. It is precise in its deployment of local dialect and archaisms, flexible enough to accommodate both digression and directness, and attentive to both light and shade without flinching. It repays trust.
Meanwhile, in the BSFA Review #21 (members only), I wrestle a bit, perhaps not entirely satisfactorily, with two books by Han Song, in particular his recently translated novel:
So what meaning can be mined from [Hospital] must come from the journey it depicts; but the journey is restless, indirect and full of switchbacks. A new chapter generally indicates not a new event or location, but a new intellectual riff. […] The sheer number of elaborations is dazzling. Many are entertaining, such as the “medical punks” who pop up in a variety of contexts, advocating for radical innovation and transformation, not just of healthcare but of humanity itself. But at times, if taken in anything more than small doses, the execution can make the novel a rebarbative read.
And also in the BSFA Review, Life Beyond Us, a promising but unsatisfying anthology:
But drawing on a broad network is only one part of the editorial arts, and in other areas the construction of Life Beyond Us feels weak. The stories are, for instance, all very similar in length, with only a couple falling outside a tight 4,000-8,000 word range. Their topics vary, but their rhythms become familiar; a couple of meaty longer stories would have helped to manage the anthology’s pacing. The sequencing also seemed a little haphazard to me. Every so often an obvious thematic pair appear back-to-back, but in most cases the progression from one story to the next seems arbitrary. Organising the stories into subsections – even ones as broad as, say, the Earth, the solar system, and beyond – would I think have helped the book to feel more purposeful.
In short: two books you should definitely look for, and two that didn’t quite work for me.
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