Perihelion Summer by Greg Egan

Perihelion Summer by Greg Egan is a standalone science fiction novella from Tor.com. The combination of author I like and imprint of consistently good novellas meant that I was definitely going to read this at some point. Happily I got an early copy, so I can share this review just before release.

Greg Egan's Perihelion Summer is a story of people struggling to adapt to a suddenly alien environment, and the friendships and alliances they forge as they try to find their way in a world where the old maps have lost their meaning.

Taraxippus is coming: a black hole one tenth the mass of the sun is about to enter the solar system.

Matt and his friends are taking no chances. They board a mobile aquaculture rig, the Mandjet, self-sustaining in food, power and fresh water, and decide to sit out the encounter off-shore. As Taraxippus draws nearer, new observations throw the original predictions for its trajectory into doubt, and by the time it leaves the solar system, the conditions of life across the globe will be changed forever.

The premise of this book is a fairly technical apocalypse, involving black holes. There are some maths and physics details near the start, but it’s not opaquely technical, in my opinion. Most of the story focuses on the characters dealing with the disaster and its aftermath and observing and interacting with others doing the same. There were a lot of thoughtful little bits included, which made the read more delightful. For example the headlines from various newspapers (which will be most appreciated by Australian and British readers, I think) and comments about Australian spying in Timor-Leste.

I found Matt’s relationship with his mother both interesting, in the difficulties it added to the book, and a bit incomprehensible, with regards to her attitude. I ended up thinking about her attitude a lot and I think it comes down to this: I can understand apocalypse-denial, but not once the apocalypse is actually happening. As a child of refugees, the idea of not leaving a doomed home to save yourself when you have the ability to just baffles me. I know the mother character’s feelings are reflecting real people’s attitudes but somehow it’s even worse when shown in such an extreme situation. Anyway, that part — Matt’s interactions with his family — gave me a lot of feelings, in the way that good books often do.

This was an excellent read and I couldn’t put it down, even though I had to sleep. I highly recommend it to fans of realistic (ish) apocalypse fiction and Greg Egan’s other books. It’s a brilliant combination of character dynamics and accessible science. I really must get around to reading more Greg Egan.

5 / 5 stars

First published: April 2019, Tor.com
Series: No.
Format read: Paper ARC *gasp*
Source: Won in a Twitter competition

On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis

On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis is an apocalyptic YA novel. It's about an autistic girl, set about twenty years in the future when a comet hits the Earth. Location-wise, the book is set in the general vicinity of Amsterdam. Also, don't you think the cover is gorgeous? I think I would buy this book just for the cover, even if I was unfamiliar with the author's other work.

January 29, 2035. That’s the day the comet is scheduled to hit—the big one.

Denise and her mother and sister, Iris, have been assigned to a temporary shelter outside their hometown of Amsterdam to wait out the blast, but Iris is nowhere to be found, and at the rate Denise’s drug-addicted mother is going, they’ll never reach the shelter in time.

A last-minute meeting leads them to something better than a temporary shelter: a generation ship, scheduled to leave Earth behind to colonize new worlds after the comet hits. But everyone on the ship has been chosen because of their usefulness. Denise is autistic and fears that she’ll never be allowed to stay. Can she obtain a spot before the ship takes flight? What about her mother and sister?

When the future of the human race is at stake, whose lives matter most?

This book starts in a stressful place. Denise, the main character, and her mother are running late for their assigned temporary shelter. At the opening, the shelter will take longer for them to get to than they have time left before the predicted comet strike. This sets the stage for Denise's interactions with her mother for the rest of the book. Her mother is unreliable, in large part due to her drug addiction, and this reader got the impression that Denise would be much better off without her mother around. For a while there I was crossing my fingers for the mother's death.

Just about everyone else in Denise's life (that showed up in the present of this book) was a more positive force. The narrative is tightly in the first person, which means that often the reader is left to draw conclusions, mostly about people, that Denise does not reach. On the other hand, the tight narrative really gets us into Denise's head and I found myself sympathising with her quite strongly. I also really enjoyed watching Denise make friends when given the opportunity outside of school; that was a real highlight.

Duyvis does a particularly good job of maintaining tension in the narrative of On the Edge of Gone. Although Denise survives the apocalypse and, since it's written in first person, her survival until the end of the book is a safe bet, there is a lot of other uncertainty. Will Denise be safe? What trouble is her mum going to get (her) into next? What will be the consequence of the risky choices Denise makes throughout the book? It was very well written. Ordinarily I would have expected this to be the sort of book that I could read in one sitting, but I found myself having to pause a few times and get some distance because it was so intense. The apocalypse is obviously always going to be somewhat depressing, but the extra layer of tension that Duyvis writes over the top of it, really brings it home.

I strongly recommend On the Edge of Gone to anyone who is interested in apocalyptic fiction, YA or otherwise. Apart from anything else, this is a solid science fiction book centred around a scientifically plausible response to a disastrous event. People interested in reading about autistic main characters should also be aware that the author herself is autistic and, as noted in the afterword, is partly writing from experience.

5 / 5 stars

First published: March 2016, Amulet Books
Series: No. But it is set in the same world as Duyvis's Defying Doomsday story.
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Disclaimer: I have worked with the author for Defying Doomsday, but I don't think that has affected the objectivity of my review

Symbiont by Mira Grant

Symbiont by Mira Grant is the sequel to Parasite, which I reviewed in late 2013, and the second book in the Parasitology trilogy (well, I assume it's a trilogy). This review (and also the blurb) contains spoilers for the first book.

The SymboGen designed tapeworms were created to relieve humanity of disease and sickness. But the implants in the majority of the world's population began attacking their hosts turning them into a ravenous horde.

Now those who do not appear to be afflicted are being gathered for quarantine as panic spreads, but Sal and her companions must discover how the tapeworms are taking over their hosts, what their eventual goal is, and how they can be stopped.

Honestly, that's not a great blurb. I've read worse, but it does skip over a lot of relevant nuance in the story. The parasite-induced zombie apocalypse was getting starting in the first book, but now it's in full swing. One thing I found both refreshing and interesting is how different this apocalypse is to Mira Grant's other series, Newsflesh.

Sal, the main character, came to the realisation at the end of Parasite that she was not entirely the human person she thought she was. In Symbiont, she starts off still coming to terms with what that means. The book is told mainly in first person and to show us what's going on outside of Dr Cale's lab, Sal gets into a lot of trouble that takes her to a variety of places. It's more plausible in context than I may have just made it sound, and does get around the need to provide the same background information solely in quotes and journal entries.

Symbiont introduces some new characters, two of whom particularly caught my attention. There was Ronnie, a human-tapeworm chimaera that Sal encounters at one point. The tapeworm part of Ronnie has been transplanted several times and is now residing in an adolescent black girl. But Ronnie started life as an implant for a male trucker and the worm part of him remembers this and feels entirely not at home in the girl's body. Basically, it's an interesting representation of a trans chimaera. Since the tapeworms themselves are hermaphroditic, chimaera gender comes from the interplay between the tapeworm and human elements of the person. Which I found interesting.

The other new character that caught my attention was Fishy, a lab tech recruited by Dr Cale. His backstory is that when the apocalypse struck, his wife went zombie and tried to kill him. Since then he's suffered a break from reality and thinks he's dreaming a very realistic video game. On the one hand, it's a plausible coping mechanism, and on the other hand, he provides sort of "fourth wall" commentary on events. (What's the book equivalent of breaking the fourth wall?) My favourite line was about the zombies having been "conceived by a creative team with an obsession for body horror". And the bits where he was talking about boss fights.

So, if you enjoyed Parasite, I definitely recommend reading Symbiont. It does suffer a little bit from middle book syndrome, but if you're invested in the story already, it's a nice volume that pushes the plot along. I am looking forward to book three coming out late this year (and I just saw the awesome cover for it; I really like the design aesthetic they've gone with for this series). I don't recommend starting with Symbiont, but I do recommend the series to fans of medical, apocalyptic and mild horror science fiction.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: November 2014, Orbit
Series: Parasitology book 2 of 3
Format read: ePub
Source: Purchased from Google Play

The Ark by Annabel Smith

The Ark by Annabel Smith is the author's third novel but the first book of hers I've read. It's an epistolary novel (or, as I've seen someone call this style, the novel version of a found-footage movie), told in emails, transcripts, a few news clippings and related materials.

The year is 2041. As rapidly dwindling oil supplies wreak havoc worldwide a team of scientists and their families abandon their homes and retreat into a bunker known as The Ark, alongside five billion plant seeds that hold the key to the future of life on Earth. But The Ark’s sanctuary comes at a price.

When their charismatic leader’s hidden agenda is revealed it becomes impossible to know who to trust. Those locked out of The Ark become increasingly desperate to enter, while those within begin to yearn for escape.

I'm always a bit trepidatious, picking up a science fictional book by an author whose previous books have been non-genre. Sometimes those books can seem like genre tourists, not quite understanding the trope they're using (or not using). But I need not have worried in this case. The Ark is a solid science fiction book, with well thought through worldbuilding, a convincing premise and reasonable technological developments.

The Ark tells the story of the community living in a sealed seed vault. The why and how their community became sealed is most central to the story, while other personal relationships and the story of the unrest outside the vault are part of the background tapestry. I quite liked the way in which the external unrest was conveyed. Most of it came across in a series of emails between a couple in the vault and the wife's sister on the outside. We got glimpses but never a full picture, which gave us enough information to draw our own conclusions and make assumptions about the conditions outside.

The Ark is a quick read, surprisingly so given its apparent length. The formatting of the various documents (some more than others) makes the text sparser than in most books, so I was turning pages more quickly. That said, it's still a complete story with a proper plot (but I will say it wasn't obvious where the plot would go until it did). I would be interested to read more set in the same world because I think there are a lot more areas of her world Smith could explore if she chose to.

On the other hand, I found that the story-telling format and the way sections of the book focussed closely on different characters made it harder to become attached to said characters. For example, in the first section following the correspondences of a couple with the wife's sister, I never really warmed to the wife, even though I cared about what was happening to all three of them. And the second section was about a teenage boy (whose mother was a scentist), which gave us interesting worldbuilding information, but I didn't really care about the character, even when I should probably have been cheering for him later on. I enjoyed the story, but my one main criticism is that I would have liked more focus on character.

I should also comment on the interactive portion of the book. I read the ebook version, which exists (only?) as a PDF to preserve the unusual formatting that distinguishes different forms of communication. (It was a perfectly adequate reading experience on the iPad, if you're wondering, unlike some PDFs — ARCs mostly — which seem to exist only to make me annoyed with them.) There is a companion website — also available as an app, which I was advised was designed for phones while the website was better for iPad — with background content. There are sort of mood-setting short films of the bunker and what I found most useful: a slang dictionary for the teen-speak section. There is also a space to upload and peruse fan fiction, if that's your sort of thing. The book stands alone perfectly well (even with the slang), but for those wanting more, the website is an interesting place to poke around. I did, however, find that the setting clips made more sense after I'd finished reading because not everything is obvious from the start.

I recommend The Ark to SF fans, particularly fans of apocalyptic fiction. In particular, readers interested in an Australian flavour should definitely have a look. It was an enjoyable read that I just about inhaled in one sitting. There aren't too many epistolary SFF novels around (I can think of one off the top of my head and that's not coming out until next year), so it's a novel take on the apocalypse genre. 

4 / 5 stars

First published: September 2014, self-published
Series: Don't think so.
Format read: Review copy of finished PDF ebook
Source: Courtesy of the author
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge, Australian Science Fiction Reading

And All the Stars by Andrea K Höst

And All the Stars is the first novel I've read by Andrea K Höst, self-published Australian author. I usually only read self-published books by authors previously known to me — there are so many books out there, one has to filter somehow. However, Höst caught my eye because I remembered her being the first self-published author to be shortlisted for an Aurealis Award (last year, for the 2010 award). The shortlisting is a pretty good indication that her writing doesn't suck. Add that to science fiction element and I was sold. My copy of And All the Stars was provided by the author through Netgalley.

The novel opens with an apocalyptic alien invasion. Spires, piercing the ground, appear in many large cities around the world, including Sydney where our protagonist, Madeline, lives. Madeline survives the impact of the spire piercing the train station she was just leaving only to be infected by the mysterious alien dust the spires belched out. The dust gives her, and those others who survive the infection, blue (or green) patches of skin and some super powers. Then the invasion begins in earnest.

When I first read the blurb I wondered whether it might bear some resemblance to The Orphans Trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix because of the spires, but it didn't even a little bit. If anything it was more like Tomorrow When the War Began but with aliens and Sydney instead of foreigners and a small country town. Particularly with the teenagers versus the invaders theme.

Madeline starts off coping with the invasion alone, but that doesn't last long. She soon meets Noi, an apprentice chef, and they quickly team up with some boys from a boarding school who'd had the presence of mind to get organised after people got sick and started dying from the dust.

There is a lot to like about And All the Stars. The writing is strong and tight, the characters are delightfully varied, including a diversity of cultures and sexualities representative of modern Australia. I particularly liked the part where Höst took into account that many boarding school kids would be rich international students since the rich local students don't need to board. It has a realistic (read: slightly embarrassing) first-time sex scene, something which is often avoided in YA or over-idealised if it isn't. Although the science fictional element surrounding the aliens is on the soft side (their powers might as well be magic, although fields and electricity are mentioned), the methodology of the characters in working out how all the new stuff works is rigorously scientific.

The aliens were alien. Not little green men, but something more strange and other. Their actions were mysterious at first but, by the end when their motivations were known, they weren't so baffling as to be completely incomprehensible.

The setting — modern Sydney — also reflects real modern technology. A bunch of people die when the aliens come, but the survivors tweet information to each other and use youtube to share videos of useful things. Some TV news services keep going and the electricity stays on. Just because an apocalypse is in progress, doesn't mean that society collapses immediately. It takes time for our infrastructure to run out of resources or break down. It was nice to see aliens not arbitrarily disable everything for flimsy reasons.

I was concerned while I was reading that this would be the first book in a trilogy or series but it was entirely self contained. Which was a relief not because I wanted it to be over, but because I'm sick of stories needlessly drawn out into trilogies.

And All the Stars was a solidly good YA book. I recommend it to science fiction readers as well as fans of YA. I'll definitely some of the author's other books to my mental TBR pile.

5 / 5 stars