Ian Sales, Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet Book 3) (2014)

Sales is a friend of mine, or as close as any male from the south of England can be friends with a male from the north of that country (never a proximity to be measured in millimetres, that. It can't be helped. It's stipulated in Magna Carta). What this means is that you must take any praise I offer here with a pinch of salt. Then again, you don't need to take my word for it. The first volume of his Apollo Quartet (2012's Adrift on a Sea of Rains) deservedly won the BSFA award, and was shortlisted for the Sidewise to boot. If I liked the second volume, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself (2012), a smidgen less, it wasn't because it was any less well written, but rather because the central conceit seemed to me to have a flaw in it. In another writer, flaws matter less; but with Sales you notice even slightest imperfections, because his literary sensibility is so fine tuned. He writes with control and precision, taking the rocket science of his alt-historical Apollo era seriously, getting all the technical details right and not shying away from the equations. At the same time he writes with conscious and only sometimes self-conscious literary skill. It's a combo that has made for a fascinating and compelling series of novellas.

Sales isn't the only writer to meld hard-sf accuracy with a properly literary sensibility, of course. Amongst contemporary writers Paul McAuley, for instance, comes to mind. But McAuley's 'literariness' has much to do with a fine style and vividness of observation out of William Golding. Sales is a different sort of author: stylistically quite purged and plain, but structurally quite ambitious. Not for nothing is he writing a 'quartet': Apollo is Lawrence Durrell without the wild thickets of purple over-prosing. And of the three Apollo Quartet books out so far, Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above seems to me easily the best. It is divided between 'up' and 'down' chapters (with a leavening of 'strangeness' and 'charm'). In the up sections, an extended Korean war has resulted in Mercury astronauts being recruited from the ranks of female pilots. In the down we're in a different timeline: a US Navy bathyscaphe descends 20,000 feet into the Atlantic Puerto Rico Trench to recover a film packet dropped from a spy satellite. The two stories are well balanced, the absorbing pseudo-facticity of the former playing well off the genuine tension and excitement of the latter; and as in the earlier books (and as with the earlier books, on a formal level) the implications of juxtaposition are only partly spelled out. The result is a very memorable and effective piece of writing indeed. I am very much looking forward to seeing how Sales finishes the quartet off, not least because it will then become more apparent how the whole quaternion structure fits together. Excellence is here.