Dan

My mum's favourite now mine. I don't know how to describe it because it is so amazingly good. Some of the English used is out of date now and some words people might not know as they are not used now.
Anne forever.

I was a big fan of The Mountain In The Sea, and rated it as one of the most interesting debuts to come along in a while. This one also deals with non-human intelligence, but one closer to today’s headlines. Yes, it’s an AI novel. But what’s most interesting here is the form. It’s told from many different viewpoints, all of whom of have different levels of access to what’s really going on, and it ends up reading like a classic twisty espionage story. More than anything, I was put in mind of Dave Hutchinson’s fantastic Fractured Europe books. And like those, be prepared to be left scratching your head at the end, as you piece together what was really going on. A reread will, I think, throw lots of new perspectives on the novel, but even after a single read through it’s clear Ray Nayler is a hugely promising talent.

The storylines here don't really gel at all, it feels like two novellas awkwardly pushed together, a feeling only intensified by the cheap and easy way one of them is resolved. There are dangling characters and motivations, hints at setups that don't go anywhere....King's afterword suggests this one was a difficult experience for him, and sadly you can see that on the page. Even in his late period he can still write a good book (I really liked Billy Summers), but this isn't one of them. I wouldn't mind at all if Holly had a rest for a couple of books now.

This is the story of two British women over the next forty years or so, taking in climate change, eco-activism, rewilding and pandemics. It takes the form of pair of separate narratives that brush up against each other and overlap here and there as each chapter hops us forward a few years. Swift does a great job of keeping us up to date with these women’s personal lives and relationships over the decades while also sketching the political and social changes happening. She never flinches from the scale of the catastrophe facing us, but crucially offers hope and solutions instead of wallowing in doom. It’s tempting to read this as a smaller scale, more intimate, version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, but that isn’t necessary - it’s a more than good enough book to stand on its own. Plus it has some excellent dogs* in it. I really liked this one.

These books are a fantasy companion to Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, in that they relatively lowkey (although the stakes do get raised in this one) and the villains are largely kept offstage in favour of spending time with likeable characters who are -shock - nice to each other. These characters are mostly all wounded one way or another and the books have a melancholy air, but they don’t dwell on this darkness. Instead they focus on the importance of consolation and the bonds of friendship (even if Thara is terrible at recognising these latter). Ultimately they speak to what we can be instead of what we so often are, which is needed more than ever these days.