Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy, Reviewed at The Guardian

For the second time, I was invited to cover for Lisa Tuttle, the Guardian's recent SFF columnist. In the May column, I write about Joe Abercrombie's The Devils, a series starter about a Suicide Squad-like troupe of monsters in a sideways, fantasized medieval Europe; Emily Tesh's The Incandescent, in which the magic school story is told from the point of view of the teacher (a longer review of this book is forthcoming in Strange Horizons); Land of Hope by Cate Baum, an apocalypse survival story in the vein of The Road with a twist that shouldn't work but somehow does; and Roisin Dunnett's A Line You Have Traced, an example of what Niall Harrison has termed "overshoot" fiction, in which three people in different time periods cope with what seems like the end of the world.

Writing these sorts of reviews is always an interesting mental challenge. You have to sum up a whole book in a paragraph, and come up with a way to encapsulate the things it does well and badly, and your reaction to the whole, in the space of a paragraph. It's a particular challenge when you find yourself less than entirely laudatory about a work--what might read like a qualified, but still ultimately positive reaction at a thousand words can seem like an absolute pan at two hundred. Hopefully I've managed to strike the correct balance.

An additional challenge in the case of this column was that I ended up writing several versions of it, only for prospective books to be disqualified because they lacked a UK publisher, or were already being covered by the Guardian in another piece. In particular, I'm sorry that I wasn't able to include my review of Joe Mungo Reed's Terrestrial History, which despite taking place in Scotland (and also Mars) is a US publication. As an extra bonus for AtWQ readers, I include that book's review below:

Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed (W.W. Norton)

Journeying from a remote Scottish island to a human colony on Mars, Reed's third novel follows four generations in a single family as they try to cope in a climate ravaged world. In the late twenty-first century, politician Andrew and his daughter Kenzie clash over Kenzie's decision to develop fusion reactors for a billionaire's Mars mission, a project which Andrew regards as an abandonment of humanity. Bookending this conflict are Andrew's mother Hannah, who spent her career fruitlessly researching fusion power, and Kenzie's Martian-born son Roban, who travels back in time, hoping to give Hannah the technology when it might still be used to help everyone. The novel is strongest in its Mars-set chapters, in which Roban and his fellow "First Gen" children, born with severe disabilities, regard with bemusement their "Homer" parents' longing for a lost world, before realizing that they are considered expendable in the pursuit of an unattainable recreation of it. Another powerful chapter sees Andrew running for office on a platform of aggressive climate mitigation, in the face of a growing xenophobic, eco-fascist movement. Despite moments of connection and rebellion, this is a bleak story, about the cost of choosing individual survival over solidarity and communal solutions.