Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles (Picador) Winner of the 2022 Arthur C Clarke Award, this is a remarkable feat of language and imagination: a verse novel written in Orcadian Scots, with a lively and inventive English translation of the south that runs along the bottom of the pages. If this sounds forbidding or abstruse, it shouldn’t: Deep Wheel Orcadia is a chilling read. Two characters arrive at the titular deep space station: Astrid, returning from Mars to her childhood home; and Darling, who is on the run. They join “the thraan mixter-maxter o fock”, a “mixture of tossedawkward people” who work at the station, extracting a strange substance called Light from a nearby gas giant. The Little World on Wheels is related to Giles’ native Orkney in relation to the mainland, and the book details their hard work and hard play: drinking and dancing, love and belonging. There is wonderful language on every page, and if the plot is a bit of a drag, the whole thing makes for an unforgettable absorption in community and estrangement.
BabelRF Kuang (HarperVoyager) Kuang’s best-selling alternate history is a complicated love letter to Oxford, encompassing both her beauty and her inescapable complicity with the horrors of imperialism. In the 1828 version of the novel, Britain runs on magical “silver” and has used its power to conquer much of the world. Robin Swift, a Cantonese orphan brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell, is an enthusiastic language student, eager to enroll at the titular Babel translation institute in Oxford. The novel is part fluently written narrative, part pastiche of academic writing (complete with footnotes) on linguistic and etymological topics. At the heart is a fascinating examination of the way translation works to unite different languages and cultures by inevitably ‘translating’ them. A rich, compelling fable with teeth.
Sea of TranquilityEmily St John Mandel (Picador) The author of Station Eleven weaves a cunning time travel narrative from four main axes. Young Edwin St Andrew crosses the Atlantic by steamship in 1912, leaving educated society for the desolate beauty of the Canadian wilderness; in the 23rd century, Olive Llewellyn travels from her home on the moon to do a book tour on Earth promoting her latest novel, about a global pandemic; in 2020, a teenage girl named Vincent walks into the woods of Vancouver with a video camera. And in another century, detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, hired to investigate a mystery in the American desert, begins to discover how these timelines are interconnected. The novel begins slowly, but builds an inexorable and unrelenting momentum as the different elements cohere: life and counter-life, reality and illusion, love and memory. Singular and remarkable work by one of the main voices of the genre.
Beyond the Burn Line Paul McAuley (Gollancz) A UFO novel like no other. In McAuley’s far future, sky lights and alien craft are being observed not by humans, but by the elevated animal life forms that replaced us after our extinction. McAuley’s evolved raccoons are well-written, their sane and balanced society a lens through which humanity’s shortcomings are refracted. The immersive, slow-motion story so captivates the reader that plot twists and revelations are effortlessly kept out of sight until revealed to maximum effect. McAuley is, for my money, the best SF writer in Britain today, and he’s at the top of his game here.
GoliathTochi Onyebuchi (Tor) A big, bold future story that chronicles, with expertly orchestrated scope and detail, an exodus from a ruined Earth and the fate of those left behind. It’s the 2050s and the rich are leaving the planet for more pleasant lives in high-tech space colonies. The poor struggle in collapsing infrastructure while the rich buy memories of their former lives, sending neighborhoods out of the world brick by brick. This is a structurally ambitious novel, fired with a righteous energy: Onyebuchi handles its kaleidoscopic narrative and large cast of characters with aplomb. Basically a satire on gentrification, with the “Final Frontier” of the space in the style of the new suburbs, Goliath is a giant success.
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