To The Last Page

There are two science-fiction ideas expanded on in Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous , or maybe just the one if you want to reduce it down further to the basics of exploring human behaviour and questioning moral responses in relation to science and technology. Let’s stick with two ideas however because Autonomous has two ways of looking at the subject; one from the perspective of a human and the other from a robot. Both of them are rather concerned in their own ways about human behaviour, and even if both have their own conflicts of conscience and allegiances, the situation that they find themselves in is one that means they are setting out to conflict with each other to resolve them. The conflict that represents the main dilemma is one that Jack has been struggling with for a long time; the use of drugs and the dominance of Big Pharma to control their use and distribution. Known as Jack, former genetic engineer undergraduate Judith Chen’s response to the control of potentially life-saving ...

One of the challenges of writing a first novel must be to find something worth writing about, and surely the most important thing to write about is life; taking a view on life that somehow manages to gather everything that is important, wonderful, tragic and bewildering about it, the grand and the small, and squeezing it down into a manageable size in a literary format that tries to make some kind of sense of it all. Well, we’d all like to that to be as easy as it sounds, but we know that it’s something of a tall order. More often, such efforts turn into sprawling epics that try too hard to take in everything, show off a wealth of knowledge and literature and become a literary experiment entangled in a some kind of complex prose or structural technique. Too often instead of being an all-encompassing view of life, such ambitious efforts are myopically reduced to being literary exercises that say more about writing than life. Lisa Halliday’s debut novel Asymmetry ambitiously sets out to...

What is the Blast? Well, you’re not going to get all the answers in this first volume of Manu Larcenet’s series, even though it runs to some 200 pages, but Larcenet’s scratchy expressionistic black-and-white artwork has many other attractions. It will take another 600 ages in three more volumes to get to the meaning of the strange life-changing event that Polza Mancini experiences, but what we do know fairly quickly is that it has led to him being held in police custody and investigated for what he did to Carol Oakley, a woman who is currently in an induced coma and on a ventilator in hospital. Polza’s story has many unusual twists, absurdities and horrors to go through before we get any closer to understanding the nature of the Blast, and Larcenet’s pacing and visual depictions of the journey make that a compellingly dark and intriguing story. The police already know what Polza did to Carol Oakley, and Polza isn’t denying it, but what the police commissioner wants to know is why. 38 y...

I’m not sure whether it would be an advantage or a disadvantage to have seen Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller The Third Man before reading Jean-Luc Fromental and Miles Hyman’s The Czech Coup , as the graphic novel is very much based around Graham Greene’s writing of the film. It’s hard to imagine any circumstance where lack of familiarity with one of the greatest films of post-WWII, pre-Cold War espionage and morality could be seen as an advantage, but familiarity with Carol Reed’s masterpiece does automatically put The Czech Coup at the disadvantage of being compared to a work that it can never match. While it might be no match as a thriller, there is nonetheless some interest in exploring or imagining what might have inspired the work and might been going on in the background to its creation. Graham Greene, as well as being one of Britain’s greatest writers known for his spy and war thrillers as well as for his more personal literary dramas, was indeed involved with British Intelligence ...

“ Recent years had seen a recalibration of political lunacy “, Mick Herron observes quite early on in London Rules and, watching our political leaders on the TV News most nights, you’d begin to worry that, like political satire elsewhere, Herron’s Jackson Lamb/Slough House series might lose something of an edge in what has up to now managed to be both uproariously funny and deadly serious. In the real world, the balance hasn’t always been quite as favourable. Mick Herron then has no option but to introduce a few more lunatics into London Rules in addition to the cognitively challenged crew in the dump heap of the Secret Service in Slough House. They however all have good reasons why they’ve ended up monitoring library records across the country for anyone reading “extremist literature” or cross-checking electoral rolls against properties as an unlikely way of listing potential terrorist safe houses; incompetence, personality failings and various addictions. While not valued in the S...

You’re not sure what you’re getting into when you start Elodie Harper’s The Binding Song , but in that respect you’re much like Janet Palmer, the new psychologist who has just taken up a position in a Norfolk prison working with sex offenders. Coming in on the back of a number of suicides in that wing of the prison, all kinds of theories present themselves that might hint at a direction the book could take – a gritty prison drama, a conspiracy thriller, a horror novel in a Silence of the Lambs -style investigation or even – considering Janet’s motives for taking the position – a personal crisis driven by a family tragedy. The Binding Song manages to skirt between each one of these not so much in a way that it isn’t sure quite what it wants to be, but rather in a way that seeks to make them all credible facets of its subject. That’s a bit of a challenge. There’s definitely a bit of gothic in the story, as Janet comes to HMP Halvergate as the new prison psychologist. The prison is a bit...