RULE 34
By Charles Stross
Ace, $25.95 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-441-02034-8
SOFT APOCALYPSE
By Will McIntosh
Night Shade, $14.99 (tp)
ISBN: 978-1-59780-276-5
HEX
By Allen Steele
Ace, $26.95 (hc)
ISBN: 978-0-441-02036-2
HOUNDED
By Kevin Hearne
Del Rey, $7.99 (mm)
ISBN: 978-0-345-52247-4
RULE 34
Set a few years later than Stross’s Halting State, this is another near-future police procedural set in Edinburgh. The plot follows three main characters in alternating chapters. It starts when Liz Kavanaugh, a detective inspector whose career has been short-circuited by political repercussions from a previous case, is called to respond to a particularly ugly murder; the victim was connected to a complicated and bizarre sex toy that has malfunctioned, causing a fatal heart attack. More disturbing to Liz, the victim turns out to be an ex-con she helped to send up on internet crime charges. Meanwhile, Anwar, an ex-con with a record of credit card email fraud, is visiting a pub—a no-no for the devout Muslim he purports to be. But his visit has a purpose beyond downing a pint or two (though he does that, too); he’s meeting a contact who says he can get Anwar a legitimate job. That will please both his probation officer and his family. Anwar has a young daughter and numerous relatives and in-laws who will benefit from a reliable income stream.
The third main character is a nasty sort, a small-time criminal who’s in major trouble. The Toymaker, as he’s referred to, has taken a contract to manufacture some very shady goods for an underworld client. Unfortunately, his quality control goes seriously haywire, and as the deadline nears, he finds himself without a deliverable product. He makes a couple of increasingly desperate attempts to bail himself out, but nothing works. He’s deep in hock to one of the biggest of the bad guys, and he’s going to have to pay off his debt some way. These three characters’ plotlines begin to intersect. Liz uncovers another murder that appears to have a very similar MO, and a consulting detective called in from the continent quickly identifies several more. Meanwhile, Anwar’s new job is as Scottish representative of a former-Soviet splinter republic, and the main business appears to be distributing samples of bread flour—though Anwar strongly suspects it’s something else entirely. And the Toymaker’s career takes an unexpected turn, as he becomes a sort of traveling salesman—except he also appears to have a sideline as a hitman for the mob.
Stross builds a stark near-future world around these three characters, briefly switching the viewpoint to a couple of extras who come in at key moments to let us know what’s happening elsewhere. The dialogue is mostly street-level Scots, with plentiful profanity and slang that some American readers may find tough going. Some readers may also be put off by the second person narrative voice. But the pull of the plot is likely to make most readers keep going. Hang in there! Rule 34 is an edgy, thought-provoking novel by one of our most consistently inventive authors.
SOFT APOCALYPSE
McIntosh offers a near-future post-apocalyptic novel, but instead of a sudden exchange of nukes blasting society back into the stone age, the disaster crippling society is an economic crisis that escalates out of control. Sound familiar? It should. . . . We meet the narrator, Jasper, as he travels with a group of the new underclass of the permanently unemployed, looking for odd jobs to help bring them their next meal. These new “gypsies,” as the town dwellers call them, are educated, brought up in better circumstances. The crisis evidently had an abrupt start in the recent past; many characters remember a comfortable, middle-class childhood before things fell apart. Now even the odd jobs are few and far between. Jasper’s group of “gypsies” barter with other groups of nomadic job-seekers, trying to stay out of the eyes of the local law, which sees them as undesirables to be gotten rid of by whatever means necessary.
The details of the economic collapse are never laid out, but easy enough to extrapolate from today’s headlines. McIntosh is more interested in the consequences, notably the conversion of the US into something like a third-world society with sharp distinctions between the haves (a definite minority) and the have-nots. The latter have no hope of such luxuries as houses or cars; they’re lucky to have a tent to call home. All around them, new social structures are emerging to replace the failed ones. Jasper and his tribe eventually gravitate to Augusta, Georgia, where they establish a more or less stable existence amid an increasingly chaotic society. He scrapes up a good job, as a convenience-store clerk. By pooling his inadequate salary with several friends, he has enough for shelter, food, and whatever they can get with the leftovers. The amount of violence in everyday life has escalated significantly, and in the absence of any real municipal government—realistically, nobody’s in a position to pay taxes to support it—gangs are the de facto rulers of much of the city. Jasper hooks up with a “flash singer”—the equivalent of a rock star—Dierdre, who gives voice to the decadence of the new order. But in common with her predecessors, Dierdre has strong self-destructive tendencies that eventually drive them apart.
Meanwhile, society is experiencing wave after wave of new designer viruses, which can kill, mutate, or just leave the victims crippled. Some of the diseases have taken on the sort of radical chic that drugs held in the sixties; one in particular, Zen, destroys any impulse toward violence. Its acolytes tout it as the step into a posthuman future, and they have begun to build a communal society in Athens, Georgia. As society continues to collapse, Jasper and his tribe are forced out of the city and into the countryside, where they begin to realize how limited their survival skills are. After more adventures, the book ends on a guardedly positive note. McIntosh’s first novel is a grim glimpse into a future that is not all that improbable, given some leeway on the details. This is the sort of thoughtful sociological SF we see too seldom today—the kind of work Pohl and Korbluth did in the 1950s, or John Brunner, in classics like Stand on Zanzibar, where the “what-if” extrapolations give us a warning look at an all-too-possible future.
Well worth a read.
HEX
Steele sets this one in the universe of his “Coyote” series, but the overall feel is more in the mode of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama or Larry Niven’s Ringworld: world-building on the grandest of scales. The story begins on Coyote, which since its separation from the political squabbles of Earth and its allies has made contact, and established trade relations with, a wide range of alien races. Now, Coyote has been offered a deal with a race it’s had no previous contact with—though it’s heard plenty about them through its other trade associates. The danui are reclusive, making contact only with those races they’re interested in. Attempts to open relations with them are met with profound lack of interest.
But now they want a Coyote ship to travel to a secret destination, and the humans can’t resist a chance to get into a possibly beneficial trade relation. To lead the expedition, they recruit Andromeda Carson, a starship captain who’s nearing retirement and looking for something more interesting than the routine trade missions she’s recently been stuck on. In addition to her regular crew, the mission will take a contingent of military personnel—which happens to include her own estranged son. The destination, they learn, is an artificial habitat created by the danui. The scale of the thing, once they get a close look at it, dwarfs anything previously imagined. Take a Dyson sphere—a globe completely surrounding a star and capturing all its energy for the use of the inhabitants. Then break it up into a series of linked tubular habitats, arranged in hexagons, each set up with conditions suitable for a particular sentient species. It turns out the danui have been collecting sentient species from all around the galaxy, giving each a colony in Hex—as the human explorers quickly name it. The members of the Coyote expedition are the most recent recruits to the venture.
Steele has worked out the details of this gigantic environment with enough rigor to satisfy the hard-science fans, while his story maintains tension not just through the family discord but by having the human explorers separated by an accident while landing on Hex. But the central attraction is the play of different cultures on one of the grandest artifacts ever assembled in a science fiction novel. Steele is enough of a fan that we can suspect homage to Niven and/or Clarke in the choice of subject, but he’s made this audacious premise all his own.
HOUNDED
This fun first novel features a druid, several thousand years old, living in modern Arizona, where he runs an occult bookshop with a sideline in various herbs and doodads for the woo-woo clientele. Atticus O’Sullivan may be ancient beyond the wildest dreams of life-extension scientists, but he’s managed to stay young in appearance, physically fit, and as a result adopts a youthful external appearance both in dress and attitude. The latter makes sense, given that most of his clients tend to be from the college-age group.
But for all the benefits of eternal youth, the negatives can’t be ignored. Perhaps the biggest downside of living forever is that you’ve built up a couple of millennia worth of enemies, some of whom happen to be immortal, too. Atticus has had run-ins with most of the Celtic and Nordic gods, and while a fair number have decided to put up with him, a few—especially those he’s bested in some of his past exploits—have a hard time forgetting insults. The plot of this novel, the first in a trilogy, takes off when Atticus’ past
starts to catch up with him.
The druid has earned the enmity of a Celtic god, Aenghus Og, by taking a magic sword in a long-ago battle of immortals. Now Aenghus has figured out where Atticus is hiding, and he’s looking to get his sword back—along with a bit of revenge. One of the other gods shows up to warn him—a love goddess, who has no compunctions about spending a little time letting Atticus pay his respects in bed. But she makes it clear that Aenghus is on his way, and that the druid needs to plan for the imminent confrontation.
Meanwhile, Atticus has to keep the shop running. A new customer turns out to be one of a coven of Slavic witches—something of a problem, since Atticus and witches generally don’t get along. However, he thinks he’s got a sufficiently rigorous contract to prevent any tricks. It turns out he’s wrong—and that his suspicions of witches are, in this case at least, more than justified. Luckily, he’s managed to accumulate some pretty good allies in Arizona, including a gang of werewolves, who like the company of the kill-your-own-grandfather one. Many of them can be explained away by a closer look at basic physical principles. He also dissects money-making schemes, most of which involve taking some valuable commodity into the past and using it to start an investment fund that, when the traveler returns to his own day, has grown large enough to finance building the time machine. That one may not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but it may display undue faith in the long-term stability of the banks and other institutions where the growing funds would be invested.
There are undoubtedly time travel twists that Clegg has overlooked—with more than a century’s worth of SF investigations, plus a growth of serious interest by some of our best scientific minds, it’s almost inevitable. But any interested reader will find plenty of good material for speculation here. And if you’re looking for raw material for a time travel story, this is as good a source as you’re going to find for the technical underpinnings.
Copyright © 2012 by Peter Heck
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