Monica Byrne, The Girl in the Road (2014)

This is a really good novel. Hard to summarise, and at times hard to like, it is always written with courage, vividness and power.

It starts out more-or-less near-future SF conventional: Meena, one of our two heroines, wakes in Mumbai with snake-bite wounds fresh on her chest. Convinced she is being targeted for murder, she flees; and her slightly paranoid, cycloptropic character is very well drawn as she makes her way across India to Africa. This entails crossing the Arabian Gulf on a bridge known as “The Trail”: a pontoon made of cleverly designed blocks to harvest wave-energy (walking, and indeed living, on The Trail is supposed to be illegal; but that doesn't stop people). Meena's journey is full of colour and incident, much of it sexual; but it becomes plain early on that she is an extremely unreliable narrator, and that the mysterious trauma from which she is fleeing more complicated than we at first think. The other heroine, Mariama, is younger and a little more reliable; crossing Africa towards Ethiopia, escaping the repeated rape of her mother by the man who insists he owns them. She joins an overland caravan transporting oil and falls under the spell of a beautiful woman called Yemaya. This grown woman engages in sexual acts with child Mariama, and Byrne's handling of this element is rendered hard to read by a refusal to simply repeat the narratives structures of uncomplicated outrage that usually frames accounts of sexual activity with children. That's doubtless Byrne's point (her view of the ghastly consequences of sexual exploitation and abuse is, otherwise, clear-eyed and unsentimental). Saying so doesn't make it any easier to read. The Girl in the Road understands how sex can be oppressive, and also how it can be liberatory; understands how vast the human forces and energies are that it channels. This certainly adds nuance to the story, although it also perhaps muddles the whole. 'How beautiful and revolting sex was,' one character thinks, late in the novel. 'How its juices are both nectar and poision' [193].

More than that about the book is hard to lay down in a short review, partly because Byrne doubles down on her point-of-view characters' unreliability or partiality because much is told via a complex network of mythic and magical allusions (snakes figure a good deal) dreams and magic. The novel goes out of its way to avoid being too pat or obvious, and Byrne's energetic and sometimes over-energised writing style refuses to let the reader settle into any kind of complacent groove, reading-wise. That's a good thing, by and large. We assume that Meena and (the rather more likeable) Mariama are going to meet, or at least that their storylines are going to intercept, even though it becomes apparent that the narratives are set at different times. Byrne's future-third-world felt real to me, though I hold up my hand and confess I'd be the last person to be able to judge the accuracy of portraiture of places and cultures I have never, myself, visited. Byrne's prose is a superior instrument, and she is mostly in charge of it (she's especially good on descriptions of landscape and the natural world; and her dialogue is snappy and well flavoured). I like the bright-eyed way the novel handles its future tech; none of that Frankenstein-syndrome bollocks here. It's people who cause other people hurt, not tech, in Byrne's world. All in all this is a remarkable novel, made more remarkable by the realisation that it's a debut. The road goes ever on.

Gaie Sebold, Shanghai Sparrow (2014)

Enjoyable if slightly underwhelming steampunk adventure: I read it easily and with pleasure, but it left me feeling a bit meh. Stea-meh-punk. Our main P.O.V. character is alt-Victorian orphan thief-and-chancer Eveline Duchen, a sort of female Artful Dodger ('Martha Dodger'?), who lives with a gang of like-wise lightfingered girls presided over by Ma Pether, a sort of female Fagin ('Faye Gin'? Look, I'm coming up empty here ...). She is caught in the process of robbing a sleazy old cleric by a certain Mr Holmforth. Rather than face deportation, Evie agrees to be trained up by Holmforth and the severe Miss Cairngrim so as to be useful to the Empire in unspecified 19th-C spy-y wy-y shenanigans. Evie's backstory bogs down the middle chunk of the book rather; but we learn eventually that Holmforth thinks that Eveline may have inherited a familial ability to harness quasi-magical 'etheric power' (or something), which in turn could be put at the service of expanding the British Empire globe-wide. However much this latter eventually is (we can all agree) a consummation devoutly to be wished, Eveline doesn't actually have the etheric powers for which H. is hoping. She is, though, a pleasantly feisty, resourceful heroine, and the story moves along.

It's almost all London. There are a few interspersed sliver chapters set in the titular Shanghai, and a late flourish of story set in China (reached via super-speed airship, of course). There's a teacher figure called Liu, who was a touch too orientalised-inscrutable for my taste (generally speaking Sebold goes out of her way to be sensitive to issues of gender, race and class; I don't mean to misrepresent what is a work genuinely thoughtful about empire and its problematic). Also I'd say that 312 pages is somewhere between 111 and 112 pages too long for the story Sebold wants to tell: a short, sharp, steamnoir adventure yarn. Not bad. That's a dispiriting two-word judgment for any writer to encounter, I know; but it's better than the latter term on its own.

What's that? What d'ye say? Bof. "Spy-y wy-y" is too a real English idiom. How very dare you.

Big Hero 6 (dir. Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014)

There's a lot of love out there for this movie, so I'll sound merely grumpy when I record that I liked it, but didn't love it. The Japamerican design work is certainly cool; and there are some laugh-aloud moments (I laughed, out loud!) in the middle portion, all of them associated with the Baymax character, and the loudest laughs in my corner of the cinema provoked by a sequence where low battery power renders the medical robot, in effect, drunk. Ah, but. But: I thought the throughline story weak, the moral Bildungsfilm of 14-year-old protagonist Hiro Hamada abrupt to the point of jerkiness (in his anger he reprograms his robot to kill the villain! Then he instantly realises the ethical delinquency of this action, and changes back! That's it!) and unconvincing, and the action sequences weirdly uninvolving. But that's just me. Everyone else loves it. You will too.

And to double-down on my grumpiness by adding-in spoilers. So the 'villain' is driven to villainy by the fact that his daughter has vanished into the weird dimension between the two matter transporter portals. He's reputedly the world's smartest scientist, yet he decides to don a kabuki mask and terrorise the city rather than, let's say, look for a way to retrieve his daughter? We assume from the cues the movie provides that he's been involved in developing said portals, and he's for instance able to resurrect one and set it to destroy a university: but it doesn't occur to him to at least take a peek inside? In a related grump: are we to assume that the Baymax floating inside the mystery dimension, having gifted its green 'good' programme chip back to Hiro, is left only with its kill!-kill!-kill! karate red chip inside it? So that's a killer evil Baymax floating through the mystery dimension to ... wait, really? And here's a more personal snark: in the movie's big car chase sequence, humour is generated by the fact that the driver of the car in which our heroes are fleeing the bad guy is an obsessive-compulsive neat-oid type, who stops at the red lights despite the imminent peril behind him and so on. I, the author of this very post, put exactly that scenario into the central car chase of this novel, published some years ago. I daresay the film-makers never read that particular book. I daresay.

Not just personal grump, though, I think: too much of this movie felt second hand, in a tired way. Hiro flies Baymax through the clouds whooping with delight, and it's all a bit How To Train Your Dragon. Other bits strike too The Incredibles, or Wall-E, or Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs vibes. But, never mind what I say. The film has enjoyed the second-best opening weekend, in terms of gross, of any Disney animation, behind only the juggernaut that is Frozen. So you'll probably love it.

Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising (The Grisha: Book 3) (2014)

This book is not aimed at people like me: middle-aged men with thinning hair and bags beneath their eyes; professors of literature and old farts who have read Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nabokov and think that's how 'it' (let's say, for the sake of argument, Russia) should be done. There are people—other people than I, young people, eager people—for whom books such as this are written. People who don't experience a sinking of the heart at the dead facility with which commercially successful franchises can be mashed together (of 'Grisha' Book 1, The Stylist magazine lamented 'it's like The Hunger Games meets Potter meets Twilight meets Lord of the Rings'. Wait. Did I say 'lamented'? I meant: gushed enthusiastically). There are people for whom Bardugo's Fantasy-Russia 'Ravka' makes a refreshing change to Westeros and District 13 and wherever it is Divergent is set (Chicago, is it?). People who find the Goth intensity and doomed love story of the main character Alina dreamy and wondrous, not cloying and shallow. Bardugo's villain is called 'The Darkling', and it's nothing to do with Keats's bird. It's because he's dark; and Evil in this universe is a literal darkness ('The Shadow Fold') and Good is manifested as a hero with the skills of a 'Sun-Summoner', like the refrain from that song by the cockernay Chimney Sweep in Mary Poppins. Because some people don't find crashing literalness of imagination deadening. They think it's cool. Good luck to those people. May they enjoy this turgid, drawn-out, talky finale to the Grisha trilogy. May they likewise enjoy their lives, and the company of their fellows; may they laugh and dance and drink wine together in the sunshine.

I am not of them.

Jo Walton, My Real Children (2104)

A jonbar-point family saga that construes two versions of its central character and leaves them in a kind of strange superposition. Patricia Cowan grows to maturity through World War 2, in which conflict she loses her only sibling, a brother, as well as her father. After the war she goes to Oxford, where she shows promise. She also meets an emotionally strangulated (because closeted) man called Mark who proposes marriage. She accepts, and doesn't accept, in the two parallel timelines. In the first, she sinks into a miserable life with the horrid, cruel and uncaring Mark, through a series of exhausting births and miscarriages, into a 1960s and 1970s where, late to the party, she embraces Women's Lib and starts to put together a life of her own. In the other timeline, she finds happiness with a woman called Bee, becomes an expert in Italian Renaissance art, and creates an oasis of joy, having children on her own terms via donated sperm.

Its high-concept Sliding-Doors-y premise aside, this is a thoroughly old-fashioned piece of novel writing, which fact is both good and bad for the success of the whole. Amongst the good, and bordering on the very good, is its absorbing, unfussy attention to lived experience, and the way that generates a genuinely moving emotional weight. Also good is the way Walton sets up her sad life/happy life divide—which of course runs the risk of being a little too pat, dramatically speaking—only in order to give it a good shake. In the second half of the novel, Patricia A ('Trish') discovers a strength and purpose that her decades of misery seem almost to have prepared her for: she divorces her ghastly husband and leads a socially useful, engaged life. Patricia B ('Pat') however finds that decades of happiness have not readied her terribly well for the, slightly arbitrary (that's life I suppose) trials of her later decades. But there are downsides too, though, in the way My Real Children is made. One is that the narration sometimes strays into flatness and telling-not-showing. It's not a long novel, and covering more or less the whole 20th-century not once but twice means that we rattle through major events rather too briskly; the total is a summary of life rather than a recreation of lived experience. And the ending is a misfire, which is a shame, because Walton has built up a considerable reservoir of readerly good-will by then. Still, I like that the jonbar-point is not something that has to do with wars or assassinations; I liked the SFnal touches (moon bases, voyages to Mars); and the research was, as far as I could see, impeccable. Walton gets not only the facts and dates right, but the tone of repressed English desperation, of politeness as an idiom of loathing, of the strait-jacket of class and gender. I spotted only one error and it's vanishingly trivial; early in the novel we're told of Patricia at Oxford that 'Tolkien taught her Old English'. He wouldn't have called it that. It was one of his quirks that he studied 'Anglo Saxon' not 'Old English' (J.I.M. Stewart, who was himself taught by JRRT, records this fact in his semi-autobiographical novel Young Patullo (1975), where his based-on-Tolkien don Professor Timberlake rebukes Patullo for referring to Old English: 'you wouldn't call Latin Old Italian, now, would you?') But, now, look: I've gone completely off the point of the review. This is a fine, memorable novel, for all its flaws. It doesn't rise to the force or intensity of Kate Atkinson's peerless Life After Life, but it is, in its quiet way, moving and eloquent.

Mira Grant, Symbiont (2014)

This, the second volume in Grant's "Parasitology" dyad, turns out actually to be the middle volume of an on-the-hoof refashioning of Grant's "Parasitology" series into a trilogy. Maybe vol 3 will turn into a two-part conclusion, which in turn will yield four instalments and so on. I don't know. At any rate, the premise here is that near-future humanity all have special 'SymboGen' tapeworms in their guts to enable them to combat disease, obesity and so on. The tapeworm in question is called 'The Intestinal Bodyguard', which I don't believe would get past the product development Beta Testing stage, name-wise. Personally, I'd have suggested 'Gut Lord', and licensed that Blur song for advertising purposes. Anyway, not to get distracted: the iron law of Frankensteinian Unintended Consequences means that these tapeworms malfunction, become self-aware, clamber up through their host's bodies, killing some people and turning hordes of others into zombies. The z-word is, naturally, never used: the afflicted are called 'sleepwalkers'. But don't let the terminology fool you. This is pure AFZN, an acronym which here stands for Another Fucking Zombie Novel.

Grant deserves credit for the sheer boldness and oddity of writing a tapeworm/human interspecies romance. The thing is, she doesn't take proper advantage of the weirdness of this conceit. Repeating the phrase 'a tapeworm in a human suit' is as far as the novel goes by way of flagging up the David-Cronenberg-ish yuk! potential. In the telling the fact that our narrator is 'a chimera of human and tapeworm, a dead body piloted through the world by an invertebrate' [359] is handled in a clean-as-clean-can-be fashion. The reader is given great wodges of talking, exposition, padding, running about, pseudo science and hand-waving: 'the science was all gibberish delivered by people wearing white coats and serious expressions. The fact that I was actually a tapeworm in a woman-suit made no more or less sense than anything else' [63].

Bottom line: the book stands or falls on how far it convinces you of the resonant pathos of its central conceit, viz. 'I would love him until the day I died and we would never be the same species' [367]. It's an emotional swipe that completely failed to land, for me. Your wormileage may vary. 'And don't forget I'm... I'm also just a parasitic flatworm of the genus Platyhelminthes Cestodea, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.' Without that emotional piquancy, I found reading this long narrative increasingly wearing. It's a book with the texture of cotton wadding, the dialogue is flat, the scenes where the characters are in peril from the zombies sleepwalkers are unexciting, there are various holes in the plot, and I was left with no desire to read volume 3. Thog might like it, though:

His affronted expression [was] melting into guilt. [30]

There was a hand on my shoulder. I didn't want to think about it. Thinking about it would have meant admitting that I had a shoulder. [49]

As with the gurney from before, I was strapped to the surface that I was on top of. [158]

I swallowed hard, trying to convince my salivary glands to do their job. [159]

Sherman's eyes raked dispassionately over the three men. [192]

Gunshots. They came quick and efficient, one after the other, like someone running a hand along a typewriter. [273]

Her bare skin [was] humping up into goosebumps as the air-conditioning rolled over it. [364]

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head until my hair whipped against my forehead like a hundred tiny, stinging lashes. [365]

The hot/cold slush in my belly was beginning to melt, becoming a warm, solid mass of resignation. [406]

I shook off the veil of disgust that had settled over me. [434]

My favourite of these is probably the Ernie Wise-ish one from p.158. And so ends the review what I wrote.

Andy Weir, The Martian (2014)

This foresquare piece of Hard SF competent-man-in-astro-peril novel proved one of the 'event' genre titles of 2014 (Ridley Scott's movie, starring Matt Damon as the title character, is set for an Autumn 2015 release). Self-pubbed in 2012 it got the mainstream press treatment last year, but I didn't get round to reviewing it. Ian Sales wondered why this was so on Twitter. I already knew he disliked the book.

@arrroberts I thought it was pretty shit. Should have been called The Potato Man in the Very Cold Place
— Ian Sales (@ian_sales) December 31, 2014

His reaction was the more: shun. I wasn't quite so negative. As I replied:

@ian_sales I quite liked the way it stuck straightforwardly at its task, like its protagonist.
— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) December 31, 2014

Still, it's a metaphorically and in places literally pedestrian work, and the rapture with which it has been greeted in some circles is a tad puzzling. Mark Watney is the NASA astronaut marooned on the Red Planet (I've a 'Watney's Red Barrel' joke in reserve, back here, in case it's needed) who has to keep himself alive by growing potatoes, patching up his kit, and hiking from place to place to avoid dust storms. He's eventually rescued, or else he eventually dies on Mars. I mean, obviously you know without reading the book it's going to be one of those two endings. More, you can easily guess (without reading the book) which ending Weir goes with.

So why did I like this book so much more than Ian 'Chuckles' Sales? It may be because The Potato Man in the Very Cold Place strikes me as an genuinely excellent title for a SF tale (so much so that I may steal it). Contemporary SF, I'd say, could do with little less explosive pow!-pow!-pow! heat, and rather more emphasis on the potatoes side of things. I'm reminded of the Steve Baxter novel (Titan, I think it is) where the whole deep-space exploration plot hinges on the carrots one of the two astronauts grows on board. Baxter is a much better writer of Hard SF than Weir, mind you; and Ridley Scott would do better optioning one of his novels for the blockbuster treatment. But you can't have everything.