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As a former employee of Hewlett Packard, Company is another of Max Barry's early books dealing satirically (ie. wholly realistically) with the absurdity of business corporate interests and trivial office politics (or perhaps trivial business interests and absurd office politics). I was going to say that he has moved on from that, but if you look deeper even into his SF adventure Providence , you can see that the office and corporate experience is still there, so it goes deep. In Company however it's completely - and I mean completely - immersed in the world of business. We get full-on corporate speak, mission statements and productivity targets for Zephyr Holdings, a company that delivers training packages. Its business objective however is not as you might expect to increase productivity and sales, but to make the business look lean and competitive in the financial market for its shareholders - or at least that's how it appears. Hence one of the four sales reps in Zephyr...

I will make exceptions, but it would take something special for me to want to read any more books with titles that are variations on The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle or The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild , but we are talking about Max Barry here. Barry, in my experience ( Jennifer Government , Lexicon , Providence ), has always been creative within the conventions of the science fiction genre, so when he comes in with a book entitled The 22 Murders of Madison May , I don’t even need to read the blurb or synopsis to know he’s going to come up with an entertaining and distinctive variation on a theme that is often difficult to work with. Those who haven’t read Barry however it might take a little more convincing, so to summarise the concept (which is admittedly is a little easier than trying to describe The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle ) it’s about a 22 year old woman, Madison May, an estate agent, an actress or whatever she happens to be in 22 different realities in which sh...

All the SF books I’ve read by Max Barry ( Jennifer Government , Lexicon ) have been very different in style and content, but at heart there always a distrust of higher authorities, particularly ones that are managed and influenced by big corporations. His latest novel Providence seems a little more of a traditional SF space adventure and his usual concerns lie mostly in the background, but they are ever-present in a variety of forms and – perhaps as reality starts to kick in – come very much to the fore as the novel progresses. It’s certainly not obvious at the beginning of Providence , which relates a first contact situation that humanity has with another intelligent alien race, creatures that they call salamander first discovered by scientists on the Coral Beach studying bacterial growth in space. Let’s just say that the salamander did not come in peace. The ship footage viewed back on Earth is quite shocking. Ever since then Earth has fighting a war in a far-off region of space wit...

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" It may be a coincidence, but Max Barry's Lexicon bears a remarkable resemblance to one of Monty Python's best comedy routines, 'The World's Deadliest Joke', collected in the feature And Now For Something Completely Different . In the Python sketch, a writer stumbles upon a joke that is so funny that the writer himself dies laughing. Recognising the potentital of the joke as a weapon, it's employed by the military, translated into German under controlled laboratory conditions (" one translator saw two words of the joke and spent several weeks in hospital "), and used to bring about an end to the war, although the casualties on the German side apparently were " appalling ". Max Barry's Lexicon however is no laughing matter. If the resemblance to the Monty Python sketch is just a coincidence, it's probably more to do with the recognition that words have much more power than we think. Barr...