To The Last Page

Behind all the unfamiliar science-fiction technological terms associated with its Martian setting and a sense of being thrown into the deep end, what happens at the start of R.T. Ester's  The Ganymedan is clear enough and sets the ball rolling in a thrilling style. The short version is that Verden Dotnet, or V-Dot as he is known, has just assassinated perhaps the most important man in the system, Archer Lenox-Pileser - known to all as LP - but while trying to make his escape on a spacecraft leaving Mars, he has been identified and killed while trying to evade the authorities. The longer version of what actually happened inevitably is a little more complicated. As indeed is the nature of 'death'. For some wealthy individuals - of which LP was definitely one - the technology that LP helped develop means that you can take frequent backups that can be restored to a new body. Indeed he has been assassinated several times already and used this technology before, but this time hi...

If it were any other writer, you would consider Tom’s Version a follow up to the author's last book, The Runes Have Been Cast , but Robert Irwin is an unusual case. His books, from The Arabian Nightmare onward, are intrigued with the idea of life as a story: as the book before the last made explicit in its title, My Life is like a Fairy Tale . Seen in that light, The Runes Have Been Cast , which was by no means straightforward itself (although less convoluted than some of Irwin's work) almost becomes enfolded within Tom's Version , a story within a story. Or maybe I'm just over-thinking it. Nonetheless the clues and references are scattered throughout Tom's Version . Now in 1970, following the late 1960s' story of the two Oxford academics in The Runes Have Been Cast , at the end of chapter one here, the narrator observes that " London was so full of stories " and the encounter group that Tom joins sounds promising of new experiences “ in the City of ...

I hadn't heard the term campus novel until on the same day I started reading The Runes Have Been Cast by coincidence I also read a review that used the term in respect of RF Kuang’s latest book Katabasis - but coincidences seem to abound when you enter the mysterious worlds of Robert Irwin. The Oxford academic setting and the search to understand the workings and secrets of the world here also reminds me of Javier Marías’ Tu rostro mañana trilogy, which also has an old master with a history in the war who pulls strings, but although Le Carré is also referenced here as with Marías, it's more JRR Tolkien and runes that hint at more esoteric knowledge in The Runes Have Been Cast . It's fascinating to see the differing approaches that these two writers take, showing that there is much to be explored in this subject. There are also two ways of acquiring knowledge and absorbing it in Robert Irwin's book, leading to two different fates. Set in the late 1950s/early 60s, frie...

You've got to hand it to Michael Mackenzie; he can script a scene of high drama with a cinematic quality, as in the scene of furore and pandemonium that erupts in the prologue of Woman Who Kill during the reading of a verdict of a notorious case that convicts a woman of the brutal killing of her family. That sets the tone for a subject that interests the main character of his running series, Professor of Criminology Anna Scavolini: how society views women who kill much more harshly or to a different standard than men. The high drama doesn't end there, or course. Mackenzie is also a dab hand at plotting, pacing, has a terrific ear for dialogue and, well, you get the whole package in this one. At this stage a 'but' or 'however' might be expected and I do have one minor personal misgiving that I'll come to later. For most readers however, the only condition worth mentioning is that it would be better if you had read the earlier books in the Anna Scavolini seri...

Science-fiction is there to question the unknowable and the imponderables. What would happen if we discovered life on another planet? What would happen if the world faced an apocalypse? What would happen if technology were to become so advanced that it would eliminate the need for humans? What if the world we see around us is not the world as it truly is? Many of these question arise in Edmund Cooper's work as a science-fiction writer, and you could find quite a few of these questions raised and dealt with in a thoughtful manner in his 1971 novel, The Overman Culture . Even though he is only really a child, Michael Faraday is the person asking such questions in The Overman Culture . He is a smart child though, he knows some things are strange and don't make sense to him, but finds it difficult to get answers from parents, teachers and other adults. "Strange ideas make people unhappy" he is told. Still things refuse to add up. He is worried about one child in his class...