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The best thing that Simon Morden's Down Station has going for it is that it has no shortage of ideas. The author's writing is functional at best, his characters behaviour is often inconsistent and unusual, their banal dialogue littered with Londoner colloquialisms and they tend to speak without thinking, but the ideas... the ideas are what makes Down Station exceptional. Undoubtedly it's this aspect of his writing that won Morden the Philip K Dick award for the first three novels comprising the Samuil Petrovich trilogy . Even though the same failings in the writing existed there, the author nonetheless managed to come up with some amazingly original and mindblowing ideas that completely rewrote and reconfigured a familiar London into something much more sinister and post-apocalyptic. I haven't read Morden since the first Simon Petrovich Metrozone novel, Equations of Life , but Down Station appears to be very much in the same mould, the author working with the same to...