Moonraker

By Ian Fleming

Between missions James Bond is asked by M to help him with a rather delicate matter.  M is a member Of Blades, a gambling club where it seems millionaire businessman Sir Hugo Drax is getting quite the reputation for winning at bridge, but M suspects he’s cheating. M doesn’t want a scandal, Drax is the driving force behind the Moonraker, Britain’s first nuclear missile, as such he’s something of a national hero. Bond agrees to watch Drax and does indeed figure out that he’s cheating. Rather than cause a scene Bond plays him at his own game and beats him. Drax is not pleased.

Bond thinks that’s the end of his dealings with Drax, but when the head of security of the Moonraker base is killed Bond is sent in to replace him. Working with another undercover agent, Gala Brand, Bond must work out if anything is amiss with the Moonraker project, but little does he know that Moonraker isn’t all it appears to be, and neither is Hugo Drax.

It seems somewhat churlish to be bothered about spoilers for a novel written almost 70 years ago, but if you’re bothered by spoilers stop reading now!

All right then. I first read Moonraker many years ago and wasn’t too impressed, perhaps the lack of lasers and space shuttles accounts for that, but reading it again I like it a lot more. I think it sags a little in the middle, but the beginning and end are both great.

Fleming’s description of the minutiae of Bond’s life is strangely fascinating, even before M asks for his help. The scenes at Blades are equally good, although I don’t really know bridge so wasn’t aways entirely sure what was happening, but I got the gist at least.

The fact that this is the only Bond novel where 007never leaves the country is intriguing, though the logic behind him being assigned stretches credulity a little.

Gala Brand is a decent enough Bond girl, and Krebs a decent henchman (clearly if this had been filmed at the time Peter Lorre might have been a shoo-in for the part) It is Hugo Drax who shines though as an opponent for Bond and he’s wonderfully conceived as an obnoxious man who nonetheless has a certain heroic nobility about him, and it’s interesting to see even Bond changing his opinion of him once he starts working on the base. Of course, Drax isn’t remotely who he appears to be, and as wonderful as Michael Lonsdale is in the film, his Drax bears little resemblance to his literary counterpart.

Drax from the book does show up in another Bond film however, because Gustav Graves from Die Another Day is clearly based on Drax, the enemy who reinvents himself as an Englishman with the intention of gaining revenge. It’s a neat twist, though it is a shame Fleming somewhat lampshades it by mentioning werewolves (Germans disguised as allied troops in the final stages of the war) so early on. Drax’s scheme is suitably diabolical, even if he does make the mistake of not just killing Bond when he has the chance.

There’s a great car chase and a fab finale in the bunker below the Moonraker as Bond and Gala race against time to save the day.

Drax’s comeuppance is at once suitably ironic, but also a little disappointing as there’s no final showdown with Bond.

All in all a great Bond novel.

Blake’s 7 Production Diary: Series A

Written by Jonathan Helm, designed by Grahame Robertson.

For those of us of a certain age, or those who were introduced to its majesty later, Blakes 7 is a hugely important tv show. It ran for only 4 seasons, but at its height over ten million people tuned in to watch, and even at it’s lowest ebb (viewers wise) it attracted over six million. Yes, there were only three channels, but even so the show was very popular.

Regular readers of this blog will know I’ve recently gone through a full rewatch of the series, which has served only to reaffirm my love for it, so when I heard this book was coming out there was little chance I wouldn’t buy it.

Helm has shared much production info on Twitter (some people call it X these days but not me) over the years, but here all that information is collated and bound together in a book that can simply be described by one word.

Sumptuous.

I could go on for some time about how gorgeous the design of this book is, there are dozens and dozens of photos in here I’ve never seen before, along with copies of documents that provide a fascinating background to the show.

This volume is (hopefully) the first of four, each focusing on a different season of the show. Here it begins with Nation making up the title Blakes 7 on the spot in some meeting in 1975, it goes into detail about how the initial set up and pre-production was handled, it details the casting of actors who would go on to play iconic character, and then it goes into detail about the production of each and every episode. There’s detail on the scripts, the effects, the direction, the acting, the costumes…everything you can think of in fact, including the fact that Nation significantly overreached himself in committing to writing all 13 episodes of Series A—thank heavens for Chris Boucher and David Maloney amongst others for polishing the sometimes scant scripts Terry delivered.

The only downsides are the cost ( though it is for charity—the recipients being chosen by Sally Knyvette who played Jenna in the first two season— and frankly it’s so jam packed with information that it’s a must have for any fan of the show) and the fact that on occasion some of the text is quite small and/or a little faint, though frankly this probably says more about my eyesight and my decision to try and read in bed by the light of a reading lamp than the design of the book itself!

I really can’t recommend this highly enough. Can’t wait for the Series B Production Diary!

Looking Glass Sound

By Catriona Ward

In a remote cottage on the windswept Maine coast, a man named Wilder Harlow begins writing a book. It is the last book he’ll ever write. It is a story of his childhood companions and the adventures they had in the New England town where they spent their summers, a town menaced by the shadowy Daggerman and, as it turned out eventually, was menaced by something worse than the Daggerman.

It’s also the story of wilder’s college friend, Sky, who stole Wilder’s memoir and turned it into a lurid bestseller called The Sound and the Dagger.

The book Wilder is writing will finally allow him to get revenge on Sky, who was recently lost at sea and is presumed drowned. Except Wilder keeps finding notes in Sky’s handwriting, written using Sky’s signature green ink. Wilder has a degenerative disorder which means he’s slowly losing his sight, it causes hallucinations, but can that really explain the notes Sky seems to be leaving from beyond the grave, and can it explain the woman he sees drowning in the cove below, the woman no one else can see?

My third novel by Ward and on the whole I enjoyed it a lot, although things threatened to go off the rails later on. The first half of the book is excellent though, the story of Wilder’s summers spent in the bay, where he meets Nat and Harper. There’s a great coming of age story here, even before anything truly horrible happens. Wilder’s time at college where he meets Sky is also interesting.

But then things got…weird. For a time I wasn’t sure what was going on, and in fact began to worry that Ward was about to reuse a trick from another book, but thankfully this wasn’t the case, although there are twists and turns, and –as I think I’ve said about her work before—this is going to be a book that warrants a re-read one day.

There are unreliable narrators a plenty, and stories within stories. But then this is a book about stories. The true kind, but also the stories we tell ourselves to process the trauma we might have undergone, the tales we use to get by, the lies we tell so we can sleep at night, and after I was wavering slightly, Ward pulled me back in towards the end. I’m still not 100% sure I know exactly what was going on at all times, but I have a pretty good idea.

And the final page, with a code to unlock, is a doozy that, yes, did see a shiver run along my spine.

Her prose, as always is a delight to read, and I was heavily engrossed in the book, even when the plot began to spiral in numerous different directions.

It isn’t quite as good as The Last House on Needless Street, but I enjoyed it more than Sundial and she continues to be an author I enjoy reading and I’m already looking forward to the next book by her. Recommended.

The Colorado Kid

By Stephen King

In a small island off the coat of Maine the three staff of the local newspaper, The Weekly Islander, have just finished lunch with a big city journalist from the mainland who’s searching for unsolved mysteries. He goes away empty handed but the youngest of the three, 22 year old intern Stephanie, presses her older colleagues, surely someone unusual has happened on the island?

The two men, 65 year old Dave Bowie and 90 year old Vince Teague, tell her that they have, and proceed to recount the curious story of a man who was found dead on the beach 25 years ago, having asphyxiated on a piece of steak. At first the man is simply a John Doe, eventually he’ll be termed the Colorado Kid and finally his real identity will become apparent, and that’s where the mystery really begins, because the man seems to have got from Colorado to the island in a short amount of time, the question is, how? And was his death accident, or was he murdered?

At less than 200 pages it’s possibly unfair to call this a novel so much as a fairly long novella. It was written for the Hard Case Crime imprint, which publishes pulp crime novels in the style of those popular in the 1940s and 50s. Even the foreword of the book makes it clear that King’s story doesn’t really fit in with this concept, but I guess if one of the most popular and successful authors ever offers to write a book for your budding publishing house, you’d be kinda dumb to turn them down.

The important thing to understand about The Colorado Kid is that the mystery at its heart is intriguing, it’s also a mystery without a conclusion—that’s no spoiler, the foreword makes this point and even Vince and Dave only have theories. King’s view on this seems to be that mysteries of often more fun when they don’t have a conclusion and that the solution often disappoints, as such it seems he set out with the intention of not providing a definitive conclusion. Dave and Vince don’t even provide many theories, though there’s enough information included that the reader can formulate their own thoughts, and these are likely to range from the reasonable to the downright impossible.

The fun of the book is in the telling of the tale, and the slow unravelling of what information there is, an interesting story, albeit one without an end. The characters of Dave, Vince and Stephanie are fun too. It’s also interesting to note that this slim little tome inspired the TV show Haven.

It isn’t perfect, something King does at times is lean too heavily into the New England dialect, which is great for local colour, but can make reading it a little more of a chore than it ought to be. And the central mystery is, well in some respects it’s a trifle mundane, but maybe it’s its mundanity that makes it so intriguing, and it is intriguing.

And as it’s such a quick read it doesn’t get to outstay it’s welcome. If you like King and/or like a mystery it’s worth a punt, just don’t expect any answers!

The Woman in Me

By Britney Spears

A young girl grew up in poverty in Mississippi before going on to become one of the most famous women in the world, a pop icon worth millions, yet she struggled with mental health issues, an intrusive press and, most damning of all, abuse from her own family. This is her story.

I have been a fan of Britney Spears since the first time I saw the Baby One More Time video all the way back in 1999, I own her albums and I even went to see her live in Vegas (something that now, for obvious reasons, provokes mixed feelings in me) so when it was clear she’d written her autobiography there was no way I wasn’t going to read it.

She talks about her childhood, how from an early age she loved performing, she talks about her time with the Micky Mouse Club (where she met the likes of Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Ryan Gosling) and her early successes. There’s her relationship with Timberlake, her drunken Vegas wedding that was annulled almost immediately, and her wedding to Kevin Federline, father of her two children. She goes into the breakdown of both relationships, and her own personal breakdown, which led to her father eventually filing for a conservatorship whereby he and other family members took control of every aspect of her life, and it talks about how she finally escaped that conservatorship.

What her story tells us is that she was a woman who was used by others, from an early age, and it shows the hypocrisy of the media and record labels, who wanted her to be increasingly sexualised in her music and her outfits, whilst also simultaneously being some virginal girl next door (she admits in the book she lost her virginity at 14). It was an impossible situation to find herself in. And of course, there are the double standards. When she and Timberlake broke up everyone put the blame on her, and when Timberlake sowed his wild oats (and she implies he was doing so even while they were together) it was seen as a normal, healthy thing to do. Heven forbid that a young woman do likewise. Of course, Britney wasn’t the only woman unfairly tarred in the early 2000s (see also Paris Hilton), and sadly she won’t be the last. Even now in the 2020s there are still double standards at work when it comes to men and women.

What’s interesting is that you’d imagine Britney would be angrier than she is given all that’s happened to her, and while she clearly is angry, in many ways she’s the same polite girl she was raised to be. There’s an innocence that none of the bad stuff seems to have erased,

I’m assuming there was a ghostwriter involved here, although the prose is raw enough in places to suggest maybe there wasn’t, or at the least that she had more of a hand in the book than you might think. It’s an interesting read, but it also feels thin, and I can’t help wondering if there was a rush to get it out, you feel there’s a lot more she could have said, and sometimes you want the book to dig deeper into things, too often if feels just surface.

But if you’re a Britney fan this is a must read and I hope writing it has proven cathartic. Whatever you may think of her, she is a woman who deserves the freedom she now has.

Slow Horses

By Mick Herron

Slough House is a drab, dilapidated office block buried in the middle of London. To the outside world it might belong to a firm of accountants or down at heel solicitors, but in fact it’s the dumping ground for spies, for MI5 agents who have spectacularly failed, or had issues with drink or drugs, or worse. Men and women christened ‘slow horses’.

It’s where spies go to die, or at least be forgotten about. Slough House is run by Jackson Lamb, himself a spy deemed surplus to requirements, an overweight, scruffy failure with poor personal hygiene.

River Cartwright is one of Slough House’s newest recruits, an agent on the up before he failed an assessment. He refuses to quit and dreams of getting back to real spying, of getting back to Regent’s Park where MI5 is based (In Herron’s world anyway) but the truth is that no spy dumped at Slough House ever got back to the big time.

But when a young man is kidnapped, and his captors threaten to cut his head off live on the internet, it might be time for the Slow Horses to prove they’re not ready for the glue factory just yet.  

Full disclosure. I haven’t seen the TV series, in fact I haven’t even seen so much as a trailer, but I have seen stills, but I can only assume that Gary Oldman is spot on casting for Jackson Lamb because I couldn’t get him out of my head when I was reading this.

This is definitely one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, a real page turner with twists and turns I didn’t see coming and a partially great cast of characters. I say partially because if the book has a flaw, it’s that there are a lot of people in Slough House, and while they do get whittled down somewhat, It was a little hard to keep track and a couple of them kinda merged into one.

There’s no mistaking Jackson Lamb though, not with him farting everywhere, but the idea of a slovenly old man being a top spy, and still able to mix it up when he has to, is great. River is good too.

The temptation with a spy novel might be to go big, but Herron subverts this. It isn’t about stopping terrorists exploding a dirty bomb, or Russia from stealing an experimental jet fighter, instead it’s grungier, a down and dirty story of angry, nasty men with a plan to get revenge. Oh, and there’s a plethora of people you can’t trust as far as you can throw them.

Herron’s prose is quick and nimble and he’s a master of the cliffhanger. Yes, sometimes he is a bit sneaky with his words, tricking you into thinking the story is going one way when something else entirely is going on. Occasionally this feels like cheating, but mostly it feels like smoke and mirrors that contrive to make for a better reading experience.

If you like spy thrillers this is hugely recommended.

There is only one problem, and that’s finding out there are many more books, because I think I am gonna have to read them! (and I probably need to watch the show too!)

Project Hail Mary

By Andy Weir

A man awakes from hibernation aboard a spaceship with no memory of who he is or why he’s there. He discovers he originally had two companions but they both died during the trip. Slowly his memory returns, he remembers that his name is Ryland Grace and he was a molecular biologist who turned his back on academia and became a teacher.

He begins to recall an apocalyptic disaster facing Earth, and begins to realise that he is part of a mission to save humanity, and eventually he realises that he is very, very far away from Earth, and he’s all alone.

Soon he’ll discover he isn’t as alone as he thought he was, and he and his new companion will have to work together to save not only humanity, but another species as well.

I really loved the Martian, both the book (which I read first) and the film, but I’d heard his follow up novel Artemis wasn’t nearly as good and the female lead was poorly realised, and so, while I don’t always take note of the critics, I’ve steered clear of it so far. Project Hail Mary had much better reviews, and the premise sounded more interesting, so I decided to give it a go and I’m glad I did.

On the surface there are similarities to The Martin, the jokey, sarcastic hero stranded a long way from home struggling to survive against all odds, so far so Matt Damon, but the canvas Weir plays with here is much larger. While Grace is trying to survive, the bigger issue is the survival of mankind, the story is far more epic, and Grace is stranded a lot further away than Mark Watney was.

And of course as the blurb on the back makes clear (so it’s not a big spoiler) Grace isn’t alone for long. I won’t say too much about his companion, only this, if you don’t love Rocky to pieces by the end of this book then you have no heart!

The narrative, and Grace’s amnesia, are handled well and the story is split between the present and the past as things slowly come back to Grace and the contrast between virtual solitude in deep space and the chaos of Earth as mankind desperately tries to find a solution is nicely done.

There is a bundle of characters, some of whom make more impact than others, but there are only really three that count, Grace, Rocky and Eva Stratt the Dutch woman given absolute authority to save Earth who project manages every element of Project Hail Mary, she’s a great character, part hero, part villain, willing to do anything to save humanity.

As always Weir’s science is flawless, at least it seems that way to me!

I enjoyed the book a lot and would say it’s a real page turner, it had me hooked from the start and had me on tenterhooks multiple times. It is perhaps a trifle too long, and Weir has a habit of going into the scientific minutiae too often, it isn’t always necessary to explain in detail how Grace determines what speed the ship is travelling at using a ball of string for example, but this is a minor grumble on my part. A fun read with some big ideas about space travel and extraterrestrial life that, for the most part, remains completely accessible to the average reader and never veers into the kind of hard sci-fi you need a physics degree to understand.

If you loved The Martian, chances are you’ll love this! I certainly did.  

Let the Old Dreams Die

By John Ajvide Lindqvist

An anthology of horror stories by the Swedish writer of the novel Let the Right One In, famously made into a superb film (and a Hollywood remake because heaven forbid people read subtitles). The anthology features a follow up to the novel, and events of the novel are vaguely sprinkled in a few other stories as well, though they don’t really connect in anyway. Here’s my take on each story.

Border

A disfigured border guard has an almost supernatural gift for knowing when people passing through customs are hiding something, but when her gift flags up one man who appears to be innocent it will start a reappraisal of her life, and she’ll discover a terrible secret about her own origins. This story was a great way to start the anthology. It doesn’t remotely go where you think it will, and what starts almost as a procedural becomes something more akin to folk horror with a dash of romance. It’s a trifle too long, and the ending is a bit limp, but neither is enough to spoil it.

Village on the Hill

A man living in a tower block suddenly notices that the building is ever so slightly leaning to one side. Another one that doesn’t go where you think it will, ending up somewhere almost Lovecraftian. It’s interesting and doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

Equinox

A woman alleviates her boredom by breaking into nearby holiday homes when they’re empty, but when she finds a dead body in one, rather than call the police she decides to keep it for herself. This is a great mixture of mundanity and the fantastical.

Can’t See It! It Doesn’t Exist!

I’ve seen this one called Itsy Bitsy elsewhere which is a better title. A paparazzi spends days outside of a villa to try and get a photo of a celebrity In flagrante with her secret lover, but after he sees them cavorting in the pool, he’s amazed to discover his photos are all devoid of life. I liked this one, another Lovecraftian horror.

Substitute

More Lovecraftian horror as a young man is visited by a former schoolfriend who disappeared many years ago after “an incident”. He wants to know if the protagonist remembers the substitute teacher they had, a woman the schoolfriend insists wasn’t human. I liked this one, it was very creepy, did end a tad abruptly mind you.

Eternal/Love

We’re back in Lovecraft territory again. A couple with a deep romantic love for one another are terrified by the idea that one day they’ll die and the husband goes to desperate lengths to keep their love alive forever. I liked this one a lot, even if I did see the EC comics’ ending coming.

Let the Old Dreams Die

This was the story I was most interested in. I’ve never read the novel, but Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation is simply superb. I think I, like many others, got a very distinct idea about the relationship between Oskar and Eli, but it seems I was wrong. Even Lindqvist admits he made an error in not being clearer in the screenplay. Let the Old Dreams Die corrects the mistake, but this isn’t really a story about Oskar and Eli who feature only tangentially. Instead this is a melancholy, romantic story about a ticket collector who befriends a local couple, the woman is a cop who worked the Blackeberg killings, and she and her husband have a deep love that the narrator is envious of. At its heart this is really a story about love and time, and how we all have to face losing the ones we love. Except it’s also very clearly a sequel to Let the Right One In, but I shall say no more except that this was the standout story in the book for me.  

TO HOLD YOU WHILE MUSIC PLAYS

I didn’t get this one, I didn’t like this one. Plays like we’re hearing one half of a conversation, but I couldn’t work out what I was missing. I think even the author has said he’s the only person who likes this one! One to revisit perhaps.

Majken

Another story that deals with aging. An old woman caring for her invalid husband gets embroiled with a gang of pensioner shoplifters led by the enigmatic Majken, but are the group about to graduate from petty theft to terrorism? A very interesting tale.

Paper Walls

A young boy acquires a large carboard box and decides to camp out in it. Given many of the stories in this collection felt too long, this was infuriating too short. Another one that I think I need to reread to “Get”.

The Final Processing

Another sequel to a previous novel, in this instance the zombie novel ‘Handling the Undead’. I couldn’t connect with this, in part because it’s very long. Perhaps if I’d read the novel it would have made more sense.

All in all this is a decent anthology and appears well translated. I didn’t enjoy everything, and some of the stories are way too long, but as with most such collections I liked as many stories as I didn’t, and it really was worth it for the titular story alone. Lindqvist’s Nordic sensibilities are evident, and you can tell these stories were written by someone living in a country with long, dark, cold winters. That said, however mournful his stories might be at times, there’s also throughlines of hope and love throughout.

Haunted

By James Herbert

David Ash is a researcher working for the British Parapsychological Society, but unlike most people working there he firmly doesn’t believe in the supernatural and is a famous debunker of ghosts and mediums.

When he’s invited to the remote Edbrook house he thinks this will be a case like any other. The secretive Mariell family believe they are being haunted by a spectre, Ash suspects it’s a combination of environmental factors and the power of suggestion. The house is very old, and in a poor state of repair. The three Mariell children, Robert, Simon and Christina live with their aunt who they call Nanny Tess, the woman who raised them after the untimely death of their parents.

It soon becomes apparent that the Mariell children, thought adults, are childish, and Ash suspects they may be behind the haunting. Nanny Tess encourages him to leave but Ash is going to complete his investigation.

Over three nights his reason and his sanity will be tested by events that can’t be explained, and he will start to recall a trauma from his own past, and the real reason he doesn’t want to believe ghosts are real.

This was originally written as a script for the BBC, there was going to be a TV movie made but for one reason or another this fell through and, not wanting to waste his idea, Herbert turned it into a novel.

It’s incredible to believe that in 1988 Haunted became his 14^th published novel, especially when you consider that The Rats was published in 1974! It’s quite different to most of the books that came before it, more subtle and much less gory, but Herbert was evolving as a writer and this book fits neatly into that evolution.

It’s a thin book, with a relatively simple story, although Herbert still feels the need to pad things out with a few flashbacks, not that any of them feel superfluous. There’s more going on than a simple case of ghosts of course, and it would have been interesting to see this as was originally intended, there’s a reveal late on that I distinctly recall scared the bejesus out of me the first time I read this back in the day, and I imagine it would have terrified a generation on screen. Ironically Haunted was eventually made as a film, albeit one that jettisoned much of Herbert’s story and recast one villainous character as a hero, which kinda missed the point.

Haunted will never rank as one of my favourite Herbert’s, but there is still a lot to like whether you’re a fan of his, or just a fan of good haunted house stories. Ash is an interesting hero, with his hardened sceptic predating Dana Scully by a few years, though the alcoholism feels a trifle on the nose. The Mariell children and Nanny Tess are somewhat stereotypes, but again that is the point because Herbert is using the language of the genre, and these are the characters you’d have found in haunted house tales going back to centuries past. Herbert does cast an interesting spin on familiar tropes, and that is where this book succeeds.

Is it Shirley Jackson or Susan Hill levels of good, perhaps not, the story meanders a little, and the off screen death of a character later on feels unfair on both the reader and the character, but this is still  a good book, and possibly a great entry point to the world of Herbert.   

Children of Memory

By Adrian Tchaikovsky

Earth fell long ago, leaving partially terraformed planets out in the depths of space. Eventually enough of civilisation recovered on Earth that a handful of ark ships were sent out to try and find a new life on these worlds. One such ship was the Enkidu, captained by Heorest Holt, its cargo thousands of humans in suspended animation.

The Enkidu reaches its destination, the planet Imir. The world is habitable, but its no paradise. Holt and his crew have no choice though, the Enkidu is on its last legs, they have no where else to go, and so they settle on Imir.

Generations later and a fragile colony exists on Imir, eking out a pitiful existence, terrified of Seccers, mysterious raiders who want what little they have, and Watchers in the sky who they also fear, and yet who also inspires guilt.

Strangers have come to Imir though, led by a woman named Miranda. She claims to have come from a remote farm, but in fact she’s come from the stars. She wants to help the colony, but fear and paranoia mean she must tread carefully, or else all might be lost.

And so the third book in Tchaikovsky’s “Children of…” series arrives and I have to say it’s good and a worthy successor to the first two books. It’s also a somewhat more intimate story, even though it deals with huge themes and covers a long timeframe.

There’s a handy explainer at the start, which was useful to remind me of what had gone before, but I really wouldn’t recommend reading this book until you’ve read the first two!

In the first book Tchaikovsky gave us a race of intelligent spiders who’d been inadvertently uplifted by a human designed virus intended for primates. In the second book the virus was also used, more intentionally this time, to evolve octopuses, and in the second book we were also introduced to another life form, albeit one truly alien and, initially at least, incredibly dangerous. In Children of Memory spiders, octopuses, Humans (as opposed to humans, the capital H denoting those humans who’ve been altered by the Portiids to no longer irrationally fear spiders) and the aliens are working together to explore the galaxy and they are joined by a new race who evolved from corvids, although there is some debate about whether these evolved crows are actually sentient or not, and sentience is a theme running through the book, especially when you factor in the digital consciousnesses of Dr. Avrana Kern, she exists as multiple independent computer programs. Are they all alive, are they sentient?

The book isn’t just about interesting philosophical questions however, we also get to see the struggles of a band of humans trying desperately to forge a colony on a world unsuited for colonisation, and here the book is especially heart-breaking.

The characters are interesting, though at times each of them is a little too complex, Miranda for example isn’t really a Human called Miranda, she’s an alien copy of a Human called Miranda who assumes the role of a schoolteacher on Imir. Her interactions with a girl named Liff form the emotional heart of the story.

Tchaikovsky’s prose is very good, as is his ability to explain complex ideas relatively simply, and as always, his world building is simply superb. I do have to say that I didn’t enjoy this as much as the previous two books. As the universe expands and the number of intelligent life forms increases things can become cluttered, and once you realise that all on Imir is not what it seems the story becomes even more complex and at times a trifle too complex, and there are endings within endings and whilst I realise Tchaikovsky knew exactly where he was going, at times it felt like the author had gone rogue, only for you to realise that, no he hadn’t.

I am, of course, being overly picky. This is an excellent story tackling huge themes while still giving you characters you can empathise with, that it’s subjectively the weakest of the three books doesn’t mean it’s not a great read in its own right, and I really hope he has a fourth book planned because I’m not ready to leave this universe behind. Highly recommended.