SCI-FI/FANTASY
THE NEIL GAIMAN READER (Headline £30, 752 pp)
THE NEIL GAIMAN READER
(Headline £30, 752 pp)
In one story, a family drives home from a picnic at the end of the world. In another, the months of the year run a dysfunctional committee.
In Gaiman’s world, ordinary things become extraordinary, the unimaginable becomes mundane and crisp, transparent prose reveals shifting meaning and deeper mysteries.
Old stories and well-worn tropes are reworked: Snow White’s story is reclaimed by the wicked stepmother; a troll clings on to his wretched existence in the shifting landscape of post-war suburbia; a clubland yarn is transposed to a West End dive.
Along with excerpts from Gaiman’s longer works, this is both a dazzling introduction to the master of fantasy, and a record of his astonishingly wide-ranging talents.
THE EVIDENCE by Christopher Priest (Gollancz £20, 320 pp)
THE EVIDENCE
by Christopher Priest (Gollancz £20, 320 pp)
Todd Fremde, a crime writer, lives in a world of high-tech feudalism, where serfs have their bank accounts hacked, villeins fly in jets and a condition called mutability can alter reality — and then change it back again.
So when a police officer invites Todd to investigate a cold case, things get really strange.
Has a crime been committed and, if so, what? Sense slips away like a dream, meaning becomes oddly muffled and reality is imbued with danger.
That Priest can control these shifts of mood and narrative is testament to his own, unique genius. Simultaneously familiar and weird, grippy and slippy, The Evidence is a tour de force of intimate alienation.
THE SAINTS OF SALVATION by Peter F. Hamilton (Macmillan £20, 528 pp)
THE SAINTS OF SALVATION
by Peter F. Hamilton (Macmillan £20, 528 pp)
The latest in Hamilton’s Salvation sequence, this is an epic within an epic.
Now the Olyix, hive-minded, fundamentalist aliens, are harvesting humans and cocooning them so they can be laid before God at the absolute end of the universe. But earth is fighting back, infiltrating an Olyix spaceship and seeding the universe with colonies that will, owing to the vagaries of space drives, get so advanced that they can come back and beat the Olyix before we’re all converted.
This is outstanding sci-fi, monstrous in scale both physical and temporal, with knock-out thrills and spills.
Hard science comes up against softer emotions and mind-bending philosophical issues are distilled into simple choices. It delivers on every level.