An Engine for success

IT has been a good year for British science fiction and fantasy, with several of our authors nominated for the prestigious Hugo Awards. A sense of exhaustion in the American publishing scene has meant that increasing attention is being paid to the renaissance on this side of the Atlantic.

Scotland’s Ken MacLeod was nominated for the Best Novel Hugo for Cosmonaut Keep, and although he lost out to Englishman abroad Neil Gaiman, he may only have to wait his turn to win the prize, since Engine City (Orbit, 16.99), the third and final book in his Engines of Light sequence, is the best yet. As it should, this trilogy consists of fine free-standing novels that build on each other to form a sum greater than its parts.

Engine City is a fast-paced read , which sees a Machiavellian cosmonaut, the descendants of flying-saucer abductees and intelligent dinosaurs embroiled in a potential alien invasion as the god-games of virtually omnipotent intelligences come to a head. This is intelligent, political space opera with a heart and a sense of humour.

Kim Stanley Robinson plays his own god-game in The Years of Rice and Salt (Harper Collins, 16.99) by rewriting the history of our own world. China and Islam become the dominant global powers when the Great Plague of the 15th century wipes out the population of Europe. The novel follows a small group of characters through seven centuries of conflict and progress as they undergo successive reincarnations.

Robinson is a compassionate writer who never underestimates the dreadful price that humanity has to pay for progress. The Years of Rice and Salt is a dazzling work of speculation, with all the qualities of a great historical novel and beautifully measured prose.

It is worrying to see Ramsey Campbell, described by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as "Britain’s most respected living horror writer", marooned without a mainstream publisher in his own country, but the small press has stepped into the breach. The Darkest Part of the Woods (PS Publishing, 35) is one of his finest chillers.

The Anglo-American Price family are inextricably drawn to the dark and ancient force inhabiting Goodmanswood in the Severn Valley. Campbell builds suspense with precise characterisation and telling dialogue, not cheap shocks, and the supernatural threat that lurks in the woods is all the more disturbing because the characters so often deny its presence. This is a major work by an important writer.

Another up-and-coming publisher has issued Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (Big Engine, 9.99), edited by David Langford. Sladek, an American who spent most of his writing life in Britain, was the finest satirist ever to grace the SF field with his presence. His witty and incisive fiction was distinguished not only by its humour, but also by its sophisticated ideas, complex linguistic games and elegant style. The pieces in this collection show that Sladek was not an author who could easily be pinned down by genre labels, but one whose stinging wit only matures with time.

The latest issue of Scotland’s only regular paperback anthology, the impressive Spectrum SF 9 (Spectrum Publishing, 3.99), sees the publication of the last episode of Charles Stross’s serialised novel, The Atrocity Archive.

Another Hugo nominee this year, Stross has gene-spliced HP Lovecraft and Len Deighton to produce an SF thriller that is both witty and unsettling: the Many-Angled Ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set and only Britain’s occult secret service stands in their way ... Fantastic stuff in every sense of the word, The Atrocity Archive will see American hardback publication next year.