March, 2025 Reading: "I love, till my heart is red as February and purple as March." Emily Dickinson

Still working on Zenith's Pessoa biography and hope to finish it soon.

I need to work on my forearm strength, this one's a brute.

The Electric State, Simon Stålenhag

I picked up a copy of this and read it because it was shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 2019 (won that year by Tade Thompson’s Rosewater). I’d seen Stålenhag’s art before, had even watched the TV adaptation of his earlier book, Tales from the Loop. I’m pretty sure he gave a talk in the city library here a year or two ago.

The Electric State is set in the invented US west coast state of Pacifica. A teenage girl and her robot companion travel north through a country fallen to ruin after almost everyone has taken to using some sort of brain interface device. The Electric State is not a story with illustrations, as the art carries the plot just as much as the words - in some places, it’s the art which advances the story. It’s an effective technique - and the artwork is really very good. The scenes it depicts seem normal enough, but for the looming bulks of unknowable machines and craft. Recommended.

Stålenhag has a new book in the making, Swedish Machines. Like his others, it was financed through Kickstarter. It’s closed now… It earned over SEK 3 million in under two weeks.

SOCRATES: A Man For Our Times by Paul Johnson.

Of the "Big Three" philosophers, Socrates is closest to my heart. I think we would've gotten along like an old pair of comfortable socks.

Johnson does an excellent job of describing the great thinker's process, but also putting him in the context of when he lived and the forces at work during that time. He had the misfortune of living in Athens when it was finally conquered by the Spartans and the brutal period that followed. Many high-ranking or well-known Athenians were killed or discredited, leaving a populace that was embittered, angry and eager for scapegoats.

Recommended.

Vixen 03, Clive Cussler

I have yet to figure out why I’m rereading these books given how bad they are and how bad I know they are. Perhaps, as is the case for most sf books and series, I’m more in love with the idea of them than I am the actual books? Perhaps. To be fair, Vixen 03 is a step up from the preceding books. It’s a solid thriller and the writing is mostly competent. A cynic - who? me? - might say it was competently edited, given we’ve all seen author’s oeuvres decrease in quality as they increase in popularity. Editors too afraid to meddle with a winning formula when it was their meddling which made it a winning formula in the first place... But without seeing Cussler’s manuscript, I can’t know that - perhaps the gods of writing smiled on Cussler for this one book, and his prose was clear and efficient, if limited, but not irredeemably clumsy or tin-eared.

Which is not to damn Cussler with faint praise, because not even the faint praise is warranted, and even at its best Vixen 03 is never more than an airport bestseller potboiler.

The title refers to an aircraft lost in 1954, supposedly over the Pacific, but actually in a lake in the Rockies. Unfortunately, it was carrying the only surviving instances of a horrible biological weapon. Dirk Pitt, Cussler’s Gary Stu, stumbles across the wreck and tries to uncover its provenance.

Meanwhile, the South African government has triggered a false flag operation to attack the US in the name of a black rebel organisation - but has inadvertently taken ownership of one of the biological weapons’ shells. These sections are a weird amalgam of Afrikaaner racism and surprisingly non-racist sensibilities. The only way to read it is that Cussler was against racism but admired the South Africans, who were profoundly racist. It’s a moral balancing act not unknown among twentieth-century westerners.

There’s an interesting villain Cussler could have made more of, but is perhaps a forerunner of later villains (fun villains became one of his USPs). Cussler’s take on global politics - about which he is, ostensibly, writing - is both simplistic and Americo-centric but entirely expected. These are, after all, thrillers aimed at a US market. Cussler’s novels always struck me as sort of ur-examples of their type. He turned Alistair Maclean up to eleven - a stated ambition by Cussler, if not perhaps in those words. But that was the point. The historical mystery. Its contemporary ramifications. NUMA and Dirk Pitt as the hero, the 007, of the hour. Undemanding thrills, with an historical mystery thrown in.

Vixen 03 is a good example of the formula. More so - there are several subplots triggered by the original plane crash, all carefully resolved. Unfortunately, the characters are also turned up to eleven, making them unbelievable, and their dialogue is often risible. Vixen 03 is one of the better Dirk Pitt novels, but that’s an incredibly low bar to clear - not even a cockroach could limbo beneath it. Approach the book with low expectations, be unsurprised when they’re not met… and know this is one of the better-written ones.

I'm re-reading Christopher Priest's Dream Archipelago stories and have reached The Affirmation, a book I haven't read for some forty years. I was amused to see that the Herefordshire village of Weobley is namechecked; I have driven past that village on the way to the book town of Hay-on-Wye for many years, but last year actually went and visited it. But I digress.

The Affirmation is not an easy book, especially if it's your first experience of Priest's work. And I shall have to digest it in the light of other Dream Archipelago stories. But isn't this all part of the experience?

>5 RobertDay: I admire the diversity of the man's work, though so far I've only scratched the surface.

My "Masterworks of SF" edition of THE INVERTED WORLD arrived yesterday, coincidentally enough (thank you, Blackwell's).

Hope to crack that one open some day soon.

Finally finished Richard Zenith's PESSOA: A BIOGRAPHY and, truly, it is a work of genius.

When you think that all of his primary sources are long dead, yet he has managed to construct a credible, three-dimensional portrait of a shy, enigmatic man who created a body of literature that is like no other, a legacy that will endure for as long as people read.

Highly recommended.

Read: The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré

The eighth book in the series, written more than a decade after the previous entry, Smiley’s People (which has since been declared the final book of the “Karla Trilogy”). But le Carré was nothing if not willing to play with the expectations of his readers, and if the nine Smiley novels (until son Nick Harkaway’s recent addition) don’t always feature George Smiley as the central character, he is at least in there somewhere influencing events…

Which is not strictly true here. Or rather, it is. Sort of.

The narrator of The Secret Pilgrim is an ex-agent of the Circus, active during the events recounted in the Karla novels, and now the director of the Service’s spy school, Sarratt. He has invited Smiley, long since retired, to give a talk to the graduating class. And each reminiscence and bon mot uttered by Smiley during his after-dinner speech triggers a recollection by the narrator of a past mission for the Circus…

It’s a good read, and typical le Carré, in as much as it makes an impressive number of serious points about British society and its over-reliance on the inbred scions of its over-educated and under-gifted upper echelons… but it still feels a bit like filler material from a campaign module for Smiley’s World™.

And if that sounds unfair, then it likely is, if only because The Secret Pilgrim is presented as if it were part of the Smiley story arc when it is at best a pendant to it. Again, it’s a good read, and on a par with other books in the series, but it’s only just a George Smiley novel.

Le Carré has been praised by many, but is still I think under-appreciated. He was popular, in the way popular crime novel series are popular, which leads many to underestimate just how clever, and how critical of the UK establishment, his novels were. It’s easy enough to dismiss him as a writer of spy fiction, and especially convoluted spy fiction at that (compared to, well, Fleming), if the response to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is any indication.

Like Fleming, le Carré wore his politics on his sleeve. Unlike Fleming, they weren’t the usual Tory reactionary bollocks of those sucking up to, with a complete lack of self-awareness, the aristocracy, but an educated, thoughtful and critical view of British society and the establishment. When Fleming told some dowager duchess he was writing a novel, she told him not to because “You’re not clever enough, Ian”, which tells you how the aristocracy viewed themselves and how they viewed those who sought their company and approval. But then the British have always confused education with intelligence, much as the Americans have always confused wealth with intelligence. Le Carré was intelligent - and the proof is there in his novels. Fleming wasn’t - and, again, the proof is there in his novels.

Guess which has earned the most money…

Read le Carré. You can’t go wrong with his novels. You might even learn something about being British as well (although you may not like being British afterwards).

>8 iansales: I agree with your sentiments regarding: Le Carre's body of work.

THE PERFECT SPY isn't just a great spy/espionage novel, it's a great novel PERIOD.

A brilliant examination of a tortured, conflicted human being, a character whose loyalties have dramatically shifted over the course of his life.

It brings to mind that famous quote from E.M. Forster, who insisted he would rather betray his country than his friend.

ROME'S GREATEST DEFEAT: Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest by Adrian Murdoch.

I've read a number of accounts of this event--the destruction of three of Rome's legions in the German forest--and this one seems the best so far. The author paints unbiased portraits of both Varus, the Roman commander, and Arminius, his German counterpart. Both had their virtues and weaknesses.

Hope to visit the battle site later this year, a mandatory pilgrimage for a history-loving lad like me.

The People of the Wind, Poul Anderson

Anderson was not one of those authors I read much back when I was a teenager. Perhaps half a dozen of his best-known works. There were other science fiction authors whose books and stories I much preferred. But he was a popular and well-regarded author in his day and, to be honest, his Terran Empire / Ensign Flandry / Nicholas van Rijn novels always struck me as featuring the sort of world-building I sort of liked… And yet I never made any effort to explore it.

Anyway, The People of the Wind was nominated for the Hugo in 1974 (but lost out to Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama). It’s set on a world shared by humans and Ythrians, who are winged bird-like humanoid aliens, called Avalon, and which is nominally part of the Ythrian Domain. The Terran Empire decides it wants a nice and less ragged border with the Domain, which makes no sense, and so decides to launch a full-scale attack on the Domain, which makes no sense, in order to take over those Ythrian worlds it feels will make the border look neat and tidy on a map, which makes no sense. Which makes no sense.

Anyway, Avalon is happy being a mixed human/Ythrian world, and has created a culture all its own. It has no intention of being subsumed into the Terran Empire. And it has a plan to defend itself. And when that works, but not enough, it has a last-ditch plan to defeat the forces of the Terran Empire. Which also works. Oops. Spoiler.

Reading The People of the Wind at my present age I think I understand why Anderson’s novels never appealed to me. The descriptive prose is actually not bad, and its presence not all that common in sf novels of the time, but Anderson’s decision to make use of archaic, and often completely made-up English, works against him - “blent”? “fleered”? WTF? Has either been used since Chaucer’s day? It also doesn’t help that Anderson drops lumps of exposition, that reads like encyclopaedia passages, into his narrative. There are many ways to deal with exposition, assuming you even believe it’s necessary, or even simply “another form of narrative” as Kim Stanley Robinson insists…

But I think even the most cynical would agree that exposition, in whatever form, should at least advance the story. Anderson’s doesn’t. It’s thinly-disguised gazetteer information, and might be of relevance if they ever produce a RPG of the universe (which was not a consideration back in 1973).

So, The People of the Wind. The usual bullshit “underdog defeats vastly superior enemy” narrative - which is, when you think about it, somewhat ironic coming from a US author - written in a combination of clumsy infodumps and pseudo-archaic English, and which presents absolutely nothing interesting in terms of insight… was apparently considered notable enough to be shortlisted for the genre’s premier award in the US.

Not a reason, then, to start reading Poul Anderson. But perhaps a good reason not to read him.

>11 iansales: I recently read part of Trader to the Stars in an old Analog that I'd picked up at the last convention I'd gone to. I rather agree with you; I kept tripping over archaic words, and the plot seemed over-complicated with lots of stuff that happened because, well, plot. I may have read this back in the early 1970s but remembered nothing of it other than the name 'Nicholas van Rijn', though if I was expecting a Dutch character, all I got was a comedy foreigner with a funny accent.

I get the feeling that some old-time science fiction writers peppered their stories with archaic words to make them look mature and add gravitas for a less mature readership that they felt would be impressed with erudition. A few years ago I re-read some Doc Smith, to see just how bad it was (perhaps not as bad as I'd feared, but not so good that I felt the need to read any more), and found that he did this sort of thing, too.

Books read last month:

The Memoirs of William T. Sherman: Atlanta and the March to the Sea by William T. Sherman: A few interesting anecdotes here and there. I suspect some whitewashing. Then in the end Sherman downplays the importance of the whole thing. Amusing read though.

The Popol Vuh translated by Michael Bazzett: The book had some interesting moments, and some truly beautiful moments too. The audiobook production was very poor. Would love to give it another go some other time.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey: It just felt like the author was trying really hard to say something profound. Most of the time she came out empty handed. The novel does paint a very credible picture of what it is like to live in a space station.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: Went in many different directions and in the end felt unresolved. To be fair this was not the book that I wanted to read in the current political climate. Probably 3.5 stars.

Puerto Rico: A National History by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: As as a history of Puerto Rico it is too unreliable, specially when it comes to the second half of the 20th century. Definitely NOT a good introduction to the Island. Very readable but only as a highly personal meditation which is, I suspect, what the author really wanted to write.

>12 RobertDay: I have a reread of Smith's Subspace Explorers planned for sometime in the next few months. I'm both looking forward to it and dreading it...

>13 mejix: I was distinctly underwhelmed by Orbital. Felt more like a MFA thesis than a novel.

>14 iansales: Exactly how I felt! Except in my case, I chose Galactic Patrol...

(I'd attach my review, but the 'Attach review' tool seems to have gone on strike.)

FARMER by Jim Harrison.

Realized about a quarter of the way through that I'd read tis book at least 15 years ago.

Still, Harrison is always a fun read, though his male characters' obsession with seducing young, barely legal females is increasingly creepy to my 2025 sensibilities.

>14 iansales:
It did, yes. Didn't see much point to it.

Lily, Rose Tremain

I’ve been a fan of Tremain’s work since the 1990s, when she was one of the authors whose books I borrowed from the Daly Community Library in Abu Dhabi. I’m not sure why I fastened on her, given the library, from what I remember, had a good balance of female and male authors. I think perhaps I’d randomly read one of her collections earlier and so recognised her name when I visited the library. Whatever the reason, I borrowed her books… but didn’t make any effort to continue reading her when I returned to the UK, at least not until around 10 years ago.

Lily is not her most recent novel (which is Absolutely & Forever, which I’ve read and reviewed). It’s an historical novel set in Victorian England, and seems chiefly designed to showcase the horrendous treatment of orphans in Victorian England, particularly at a real-life orphanage, the Foundling Hospital. Which, like many charitable institutions of the time, was anything but charitable, and if anything exemplified the greed and corruption endemic in Victorian society. Lily is rescued as a baby, and then sent to a foster family at a Suffolk farm, where she is loved. At age six, she’s sent back to the Foundling Hospital, and treated like a drudge. She weathers her mistreatment, leaves at age sixteen, and is apprenticed to a wigmaker.

The novel cycles back and forth between Lily’s childhood and her life after leaving the Foundling Hospital. She lives alone in a small basement flat (much of London was a slum until the 1960s), and is a treasured employee at the Wig Emporium, which chiefly makes wigs for the theatre. Lily has always wanted to return to the Suffolk farm where she spent the first six years of her life, but is wary of attracting too much attention. Which becomes more acute when she’s approached by the police constable - now a murder detective - who rescued her as a baby.

Central to the plot is a murder she committed, the details of which are left unrevealed for much of the novel’s length. But are not, to be honest, all that difficult to figure out. Lily is also a somewhat passive protagonist, although clearly a product of her upbringing (or lack thereof), and essentially powerless in Victorian society. While reading the novel, I couldn’t help being reminded of steampunk and its valorisation of the Victorians; and how Lily demonstrates the lie that the Victorians were to be admired.

Lily, the novel, is an entertaining and informative read, but it wears its purpose too prominently on its sleeve. The Foundling Hospital was a real place, and its sponsors told themselves the orphans were better off being abused by them than left to fend for themselves on the streets of London. The way Victorians could spin mistreatment into “Christian” charity is astonishing (and well documented). I think the novel is perhaps a little too didactic, perhaps even too much like a sort of a negative of a Victorian moralising tale, to be entirely convincing or enjoyable. Tremain is an excellent writer, but in Lily, and Absolutely & Forever, it often feels like the scaffolding underpinning her narratives is poking through.

Read: Something Coming Through, Paul McAuley

McAuley has always struck me as a transatlantic science fiction writer, and I think that’s the main issue I have with Something Coming Through. I mean, McAuley is good, and has written many novels I respect, but… they also mostly leave me cold. And I think Something Coming Through is a good illustration of why.

It’s a neat set-up - after war and climate change has fucked up the Earth, the enigmatic Jackaroo appear and say: here are fifteen exoplanets, and a regular shuttle service through a wormhole to each of them. Make of them what you will. Complicating matters - or perhaps making them more “interesting” - is the fact the exoplanets had previously been occupied by a series of “Elder Cultures” over many thousands of years. Almost as if the Jackaroo had done it all before. Although they refuse to say what happened to those long-dead Elder Cultures.

Something Coming Through is partly a police procedural set on Mangala, the EU-settled exoplanet. Detective Gayle is investigating the murder of a recent arrival, which he thinks is linked to a gang which sells drugs based on Mangala’s alien biosphere. It is also about Chloe, who works for a company that tracks down Elder Culture artefacts on Earth, and she is now hunting for a teenager whose sister, she believes, has been infected by an Elder Culture “eidolon” (a sort of alien program). The two plot-threads are linked, of course.

In fact, the two narratives come together very satisfyingly - although some of the minor mysteries are not difficult to solve - and provide a concrete and plausible solution that explains much. Not everything, of course, because the very nature of the world McAuley has built means a lot is unexplained.

However, and perhaps my biggest stumbling block, is that the narrative set on Mangala, despite it being settled exclusively by Europeans, reads like any random thriller set in the US. Other than a handful of characters with Nordic names and attempts at Nordic accents, it might as well have been set in the US. There are gangs in the UK and EU, of course there are, and they would probably end up embedded in a European exoplanet colony. But everything felt so… American. Especially when contrasted with Chloe’s narrative, set in the UK, which felt very English.

It’s the lack of a European feel to Gayle’s narrative that spoiled Something Coming Through for me, even though everything else was done really well. Fascinating universe, well-drawn characters, well-plotted thriller story. I’ll happily recommend it, because I think it’s a good novel. But I wanted to like it more than I did.

LUCKY ALAN a collection of short stories by Jonathan Lethem.

There's half a good collection here--that is, the first half.

"The King of Sentences" is great fun: what would it be like to corner one of our reclusive literary heroes (DeLillo or Pynchon) and DEMAND to be seen? Another tale, "Procedure in Plain Air", is so strange and original it might have emerged from the pen of George Saunders.

But the latter half of the collection sags like a wet, wool suit. Narratives that go nowhere and leave no trace.

Still a fan of Lethem's, but get the feeling he's best enjoyed in longform (i.e. novels).

Read: The Thousand Earths, Stephen Baxter

I remember a friend lamenting many years ago at their choice of Stephen Baxter as an author to collect in first editions. Not because his books are expensive, but because he’s so prolific. The Thousand Earths is, I make it, his fifty-seventh book, with two more published after it and a sixtieth due in September this year. I have read a great number of them, and have been doing so since he arranged for me to receive a review copy of his debut novel Raft in 1991.

His novels have remained remarkably consistent throughout his career, although they’ve covered a wide range of science fiction modes and premises, from a sequel to Wells’s The Time Machine, and a sequel to The War of the Worlds, to far-future cosmological speculation to alternate history to near-future space exploration.

The Thousand Earths is both far-future and, initially, near-future. There are two narratives. One is set at an undetermined time in the distant future, later revealed to be one hundred trillion years from now, on a flat disc-like Earth that is one of a thousand arranged in a vast sphere. But the Earth is shrinking at an ever increasing rate, the edge dropping away in the Tide, and forcing its population to migrate inwards towards the Heartland Mountains and the sealed capital of the Empire. This is told from the point of view of Mela, the daughter of a magistrate in the Hinterlands, who becomes an immigrant heading inwards, and a leader of one such migration. And, eventually, a witness to the end of the Earth.

The other narrative tells the story of John Hackett, who, in the late twenty-second century, travels to Andromeda and back in a ship powered by a dark energy ramscoop. His journey takes five million years, but time dilation means only twelve years have passed for him. He does something similar again and again, leaping ahead millions of years and seeing how the Solar System and human society changes (although human biology, as such, changes very little). He is there when the humans of a trillion years from now come up with the plan to create a thousand Earths to see humanity through to the very very distant future, after the stars have died.

And that’s pretty much it. Two linear narratives, telling the stories of Mela and Hackett, which, obviously, meet at the end. It’s all very readable, and there are some fascinating ideas, but it does feel like the stories could have been told in a great deal fewer pages - this is a book of 580 pages. I mean, I enjoyed reading it, and though sometimes it felt like there were great big holes in the world-building somewhere just out of view, it wasn’t enough to spoil suspension of disbelief or derail the reading experience. When it comes to big idea sf, Baxter is a safe pair of hands.

Perhaps “safe” is not always a good thing. You know what to expect with Baxter’s novels, and he consistently delivers just that. Sometimes his novels have a tendency to turn a little YA toward the end, which this one doesn’t, but for all the heavy ideas they can feel surprisingly lightweight. Diet science fiction? Possibly. But it’d be churlish to complain about it given it’s what Baxter has been delivering now for at least four decades…

Thom Jones' short story collection COLD SNAP.

I worshipped a previous collection I'd read, THE PUGILIST AT REST, and though this one isn't nearly as good, it does have its moments.

A number of stories set in Africa, involving aid workers struggling to make a positive impact in a near-hopeless environment.

For lovers of short fiction I would highly recommend his NEW AND SELECTED STORIES, which was released posthumously.

A grandmaster of short tales.

Read: Scarpetta, Patricia Cornwell

The 16th book in the series, and Cornwell really doesn’t like her characters, does she? The plot is, surprisingly, a standalone, with a man whose girlfriend has been murdered voluntarily committing himself to a mental hospital and demanding Scarpetta examine him. He suffers from achondroplasia, dwarfism, as did his girlfriend. He also thinks he is being followed, and his thoughts controlled, by some third party, perhaps the government. This puts Scarpetta in a difficult position, as what she learns during the examination is privileged. But it soon becomes clear the boyfriend was not responsible for the murder.

Everyone is now in New York, either working for, or with, DA Jaime Berger, but since Marino is unwelcome after the events of the previous novel, and Lucy is even more of a wild cannon than before, and Scarpetta herself regularly appears on CNN… Then they’re all dragged into the murder. Meanwhile an online gossip blog has been publishing lies about Scarpetta, but no one knows who the owner or writer is…

All of Cornwell’s core cast go through the ringer, and the supporting characters, with the exception of Berger, seem to be treated with disdain. Which, unfortunately, means the villain of the piece is pretty easy to spot only a handful of chapters in. From that point on, it’s a matter of waiting for the characters to catch up, and then see them gather enough evidence to see justice is done. Except he pre-empts them, and it all comes to a violent end.

On the one hand, I like that Scarpetta is self-contained; on the other, the narrative seems to spend more time trying to obscure the plot than it does advancing it. Nor was I entirely convinced by some of the details - Cornwell tries for accuracy in her mentions of computing, and back in the day they were pretty close, but I’m sceptical of some of Lucy’s explanations in this book.

On the other hand, the writing has improved, Cornwell has a good handle on her cast, and she continues to present interesting mysteries. In fact, this novel scores better on the last than many of its predecessors - the puzzle presented by the opening murder, and the ones which follow, is quite clever - and very much predicated on the victim’s and suspect’s achondroplasia.

I’m not sure Scarpetta stands on its own, but it works well as part of the series. That may not be a good thing.

HURRICANE SEASON by Fernanda Melchor.

Brilliant translation from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes.

A tale of much sound, much fury, great blocks of text and long, flowing sentences describing the world of a remote Mexican village. The body of the local witch has just been found, clearly murdered, and as the book progresses we come to see the fear and disgust and stupidity that led to the tragedy.

The characters are well-delineated, the aesthetic choices flawless. What should be a difficult, challenging read isn't.

It's a breath-stealing crime story, a murder mystery where many are complicit, a literary novel with the speed and narrative drive of a getaway car.

This will be on my "Year's Best" list.

THE BURNING GLASS AND OTHER POEMS by Walter de la Mare.

A friend of mine loaned me this volume. He's fifteen years older, born and educated in the U.K.

He can recite long stanzas of de la Mare's poems, having committed them to memory in childhood.

I can see why--the meter and rhyming seem tailor-made for recitation.

My favorites included "A Recluse" (that one spoke to my heart), "Edges", "Scholars" and "Outer Darkness".

Not the type of poetry I usually read but an encounter that left me charmed and impressed.

The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler

This was nominated for both the Clarke and the Nebula Awards last year. The author was unknown to me, although he has apparently appeared a number of times in Asimov’s - to be honest, I’ve not even seen a copy of that magazine for a couple of decades. The Mountain in the Sea is set in the near-ish future, after some sort of global collapse, chiefly climate-driven, although it’s never explicitly stated. The world has split up into small nation- and city-states, of which only a handful are mentioned in the novel. Much of the story takes place in an archipelago in the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Zone. Ha Nguyen is a neuroscientist and researcher of cephalopods. She is invited to Con Dao, in the HCMAZ, to study what may well be sentient octopuses.

Meanwhile, a Tatar hacker gifted at cracking AI neural networks is recruited by a mysterious organisation and relocated to the Republic of Istanbul. He soon realises his sponsors are looking for a backdoor entry into the code of the only fully-sentient AI, Evrim, who also happens to be in Con Dao with Nguyen.

Eiko, a Japanese programmer, has been captured by slavers and forced to work on a pirate fishing vessel. The ship is controlled by an AI (not an actual sentient AI, like Evrim), but has human guards to oversee the slaves.

Unfortunately, these three narratives are only tenuously linked, and the climax of the novel, which drags the slave ship and the hacker into a fight to save Con Dao from encroachments which threaten the intelligent octopuses… It doesn’t work. Nor does it help that each of the narratives is so tightly-focused it undermines most of the world-building. The slave ship, for example, implies the only form of protein left on Earth is fish, which is nonsense. The hacker narrative reads like a cyberpunk story without a plot, and the seeming super-powerful conspiracy at its heart proves minor at best.

The only part of the novel that works well is that featuring the octopuses. True, Nguyen is a bland and uninteresting protagonist, but some of the supporting cast are interesting. And the descriptions of the HCMAZ, flora, fauna and landscape, are nicely done. But it’s not enough. The Mountain in the Sea is three stories trying to be one. And failing. And only one of those stories is actually worth reading. Disappointing.

Last book of the month, Paul Tremblay's SURVIVOR SONG.

Solid horror offering, restrained compared to a lot of the crap out there, and the writing surpasses expectations. Tremblay is one of the few scribblers on the contemporary horror/dark fantasy scene I have any respect for.

Recommended, especially on a dark and stormy night...