To The Last Page

Claire North, as I’ve discovered in previous literary encounters, doesn’t write books to comfort or reassure you. Or at least that’s the way it seems looking at things on a superficial level. Her 84K was a disturbing and wholly realistic twist on 1984, on a world of surveillance and enslavement to corporate interests with political power behind them and most recently the legacy of the horrors of colonialism were given a supernatural twist in The Pursuit of William Abbey . You don’t have to look too far into the past or ahead into the near future to see that these ghosts of the past and the present circumstances point all too credibly towards an unpleasant and worrying future. The dangers of technology and artificial intelligence expanding beyond a level that we can control has however been thoroughly explored elsewhere in science-fiction, but Claire North has a unique take on it here in Sweet Harmony . Again, it’s not that reassuring an outlook, but perhaps there’s more here than it j...