Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, £20)
Refugees from Earth wake from cold storage on board the ark ship Enkidu to find they have arrived at the empty planet Imir, which they hope to transform into a new home. Much of the story centres on Liff, the first child born on Imir, a witness to the colony’s struggle and decline. Life, never easy, becomes much harder when irreplaceable tech breaks down and there are crop failures. Paranoia grows as rumours about enemy spies take hold. But they are indeed being watched, and as the viewpoint shifts to that of the watchers, there are more revelations to come. Even as we get the bigger picture, mysteries increase. Has something affected the passage of time? Liff is too young to have all the memories she does. There were no birds among the few creatures imported from Earth, so where did two large, talking ravens come from? This is the third book in a sequence that began with the award-winning Children of Time, but can be read on its own as a thoroughly absorbing and enjoyable novel.
The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz, £18.99)
The latest novel set in the Hugo-nominated, Vietnamese-inspired Universe of Xuya begins with that cliche of genre romance, two people entering into a marriage of convenience. Readers know they will fall in love before the end, no matter how unlikely it seems. Here, the proposer doesn’t even have a human body, although her avatar appears as a matriarchal figure with a weathered, brown face. She is the Rice Fish, a mindship and leader of a notorious band of space pirates, and she makes the proposal to Xich Si, a young captive, who accepts for the protection her status as wife will afford. When her feelings change, she initiates sex in the normally forbidden “heartroom” of the ship with the semi-solid avatar, in an orgy of surreal perversity. Beyond the love story, there are more traditional space opera goings-on: power struggles, political manoeuvring, betrayals and discoveries, and many incidental pleasures provided by the detailed, vividly realised settings.
Celestial by MD Lachlan (Gollancz, £18.99)
It’s 1977, and Ziggy Da Luca has been recruited for Nasa’s astronaut programme. Sworn to secrecy, she learns the reason is connected to her postgraduate studies into ancient religious beliefs about gods on the moon. In her thesis, Ziggy concluded that these “gods” may have been aliens, and a cigar-shaped structure revealed in photographs of a lunar crater could be their spaceship, the “Thunderbolt Vehicle” described in Buddhist writings. It turns out that Soviet cosmonauts have discovered a hatch set into that very structure, and in a desperate attempt to beat the Russians at understanding their discovery, Ziggy is to be one of the crew sent on a mission to the moon. This combination of cold war space race with the theory of “ancient astronauts” popularised in Erich von Daniken’s bestselling Chariots of the Gods makes for a wild and fascinating story. The Soviets are in attack mode when the Americans arrive, and there are casualties, but before long members of both crews have entered the alien vehicle, where distinctions between hallucination and reality are blurred. Ziggy, taught the importance of compassion and meditation by her Tibetan mother, is an appealing main character who refuses to harm others even when her own life is at stake. This is a refreshing change from the usual macho adventure story, one more about inner than outer space.
The Dark Between the Trees by Fiona Barnett (Solaris, £15.99)
From fairytales onward, the idea of a mysterious forest in which anything can happen has deep-rooted appeal. This debut novel taps into that fascination, telling parallel stories on separate timelines in a fictional patch of English woodland. In 1643, a small group of civil war soldiers make a hasty retreat from the battlefield, hoping to find safety in the trees. The stories the survivors tell of their experiences are too fantastic to be true. In the present day, four women, determined to find the truth behind the legends, enter the fenced-off woods. Once inside, their phones and GPS units fail, and they are soon hopelessly lost, seeing the landscape change before their eyes and feeling an invisible, malevolent presence at their backs. The tension and weirdness keep ratcheting up in both narrative strands, making for a memorable, spooky tale.
Dark Arts by Eric Stener Carlson (Tartarus, £40)
This fine collection of stories is difficult to categorise – some are ghost stories, some present inexplicable occurrences in the everyday world, and although death is a recurring theme, they aim to move rather than terrify, offering hope alongside the horrors. One story is narrated by an old dog who says “a person and a dog are two parts of the same soul”. Settings range from a library in Bangkok to a rundown hotel in Berlin, from a prison to an artist’s studio, and most of the characters have connections to the arts or scholarship. A traditional structure and simple yet elegant style add to the impression that these modern tales could be timeless classics.
