August is traditionally a quiet month in publishing, and this one is no different. But there are still science-fiction gems to look forward to, including a fascist empire, courtesy of Richard Swan, and some scary Korean sea monsters from Kim Bo-young. I can also recommend M. John Harrisonā€™s The End of Everything, published earlier this year but just longlisted for the Booker prize. Itā€™s rare for sci-fi to make this prestigious literary longlist so that is a tribute to Harrisonā€™s writing ā€“ as our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson highlighted last month. And do join us at the 51¶ÆĀž Book Club, where weā€™re reading Peter Hellerā€™s post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars, set after a superflu has wiped out most of humanity (and written well before covid-19). A Ridley Scott-directed film adaptation of it is about to be released, so weā€™re ahead of the crowd.

by Richard Swan

I hear good things about this one from Emily H. Wilson, who has a review forthcoming. Itā€™s set in a fascist and galaxy-spanning empire, where Katherine Fullerā€™s husband has died, leaving her an immensely wealthy woman. Katherine is given the chance to buy a world, and create a better society ā€“ but will the empire let her make a democracy? Itā€™s pitched by its publisher as Nineteen Eighty-Four meets The Man in the High Castle, which is enough to hook me.

by Kim Bo-young, translated by Sophie Bowman

Iā€™m also really excited about this one, in which bodyguard Mu-young is heading to an isolated Korean seaside village with her niece when she learns that a huge earthquake has hit the region. She travels there regardless, but the earthquake unleashes an ancient plague, which turns those who catch it into ā€œfishy monstersā€. The village is locked down ā€“ and Mu-young is trapped. Perfect beach reading, perhaps?

by Tim Pratt

This space opera with a ā€œtouch of romanceā€ follows graduate student Glenn and his girlfriend Vivy, a spy who has been tasked with stopping a rogue comet but finds herself also trying to find a stolen jewel that can destroy universes.

by C.A. Fletcher

I always love a post-apocalyptic story in which a few hardy souls are struggling to survive. As previously noted, weā€™re reading Peter Hellerā€™s The Dog Stars in the 51¶ÆĀž Book Club this month, and itā€™s a prime example of the genre. In Fletcherā€™s intriguing-sounding take, humans have stopped being able to have children (shades of P. D. Jamesā€™s The Children of Men, perhaps?), and Mouse and Cat are our indomitable duo living in an almost-empty world, 200 years on.

by Andrea Hairston

I rather like this title ā€“ and the story sounds fun, too. Itā€™s a murder mystery set in the multiverse, in which Oona (a St Berdoodle, which Iā€™m assuming is a type of dog) and her owner Zsuzsu are investigating the death of a local celebrity. Oona, it turns out, can travel between dimensions, and she knows the identity of the killer. We are also promised ā€œconundrumsā€ and ā€œalien trickstersā€ from the publisher.

by Nicole Brooks

A ā€œonce-in-a-lifetime floodā€ hits Ravenā€™s family home, and she finds herself trapped on the roof with her children, her dog and her stepmother, struggling to survive. The novel is set over 6 hours and sounds very nail-biting ā€“ more thriller-y than sci-fi perhaps, but itā€™s an exploration of the power of a changing nature, so Iā€™m keen to read it.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

by W.H. Chizmar

Described as a post-apocalyptic horror survival novel by its publisher, and therefore ticking all my favourite boxes, this follows the fallout when a government project to transport matter across the universe brings back something alive ā€“ and dangerous. When this ā€œsomethingā€ is being transported (in a lorry ā€“ come on, people!), its lorry overturns and ā€œunleashes an otherworldly horror upon an unsuspecting New England countrysideā€. Three years on, a man is trying to stay alive on the USā€™s now-deadly East Coast.

by Jodi Taylor

This is the latest Smallhope and Pennyroyal time-travelling adventure, and sees Lady Amelia Smallhope attempting to relax after she nearly died in the last book. However, she and Pennyroyal are targeted by someone with knowledge of the latterā€™s ā€œmurky pastā€, and further adventures ensue.

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.

My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and Iā€™m not saying I did, itā€™s because the trout are gone, every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, everyone.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didnā€™t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but Iā€™m not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didnā€™t have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. Thatā€™s where weā€™re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer.

Way colder. Still waiting. Sheā€™s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. Sheā€™s a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. Iā€™m figuring Iā€™m dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

*

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldnā€™t sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesnā€™t run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I donā€™t call him that, though, whatā€™s the point, thereā€™s only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! Thatā€™s our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are_ spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. Itā€™s dangerous, itā€™s an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so itā€™s a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess thatā€™s enough.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees arenā€™t too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. Thatā€™s all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. Itā€™s a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. Iā€™ve seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldnā€™t be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

Thatā€™s what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe sheā€™d slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he canā€™t fly, I donā€™t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. Thatā€™s how Bangley talks. Because itā€™s thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a dayā€™s walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they donā€™t bother us. Thatā€™s what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die ā€“ no If ā€“ it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said itā€™ll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. Weā€™re supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because itā€™s warm, but if itā€™s summer I mostly donā€™t. When I wear it, I feel like Iā€™m waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasnā€™t come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

This is an extract from by Peter Heller (Tinder Press), the August read for the 51¶ÆĀž Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

was my first novel. It begins nine years after a super-flu pandemic kills off most of humanity. Hig lives with his old dog Jasper at a little country airport in Erie, north of Denver, Colorado, which he shares with a gun nut named Bangley who has been waiting for the apocalypse his whole life. Hig has lost his wife, who was pregnant with their first child, and all his friends, and he and Jasper fly a patrol every day in their 1956 Cessna searching for survivors.

When I sat down to write the book, I didnā€™t want to plot or outline. I had wanted to be a fiction writer since I was 11, but when I got out of college, I had to make a living and so I wrote for magazines. With every story I wrote I knew the ending, and I knew what was going to happen next, because it happened. It was journalism. Now, I didnā€™t want to know. I grew up as a kayaker and what I loved about running rivers was that if the stream had never been descended or described, you came around a tight bend in a canyon and there might be a waterfall, or a cougar drinking, or a flight of backlit swallows. I wanted the same thrill writing the novel. I wanted to launch onto a narrative current and follow it into wild new territory.

Also, poetry was my first love. The novels I adored were the most lyrical. Conrad at the height of his power, in the grips of a typhoon. Faulkner following the cadence of the words into the mind of a smitten cow. Welty describing a slow stream. They seemed to be as much about the music of the language as any story. I knew that I would have to be enamoured first, of the sound of my own language, and follow the song into the narrative.

I went to the coffee shop in my neighborhood in Denver and I sat down and told myself, ā€œDonā€™t think, donā€™t think, just listen.ā€ I wrote, ā€œI keep the Beast running. I keep the 100 low lead on tap. I foresee attacksā€¦ā€ A few lines later, ā€œMy name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another. If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and Iā€™m not saying I did, itā€™s because the trout are gone, every one.ā€

I sat up. ā€œSpeak,ā€ I murmured. ā€œYou are a fisherman, just like me.ā€ And then it was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. Iā€™d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table and I knew the other patrons were thinking, ā€œThat poor sonofabitch is going through a bad divorce. Or his dog died.ā€ But really, I was completely transported, and more thrilled than Iā€™d ever been in my life.

Higā€™s plane, the Beast, is one of the most prominent characters in the novel. Hig and I had a few stories about it to help fill out the novel. Once on a trip to kayak a wilderness river in Montana with one of my oldest friends, we got a ride to the river on a single engine Cessna into a remote backcountry airstrip. This was before I wrote the book. The pilot flew so close to the ridges I could see the elk tracks zigzagging in the snow. I was fascinated. I said, ā€œHey, how fast could I learn to fly like this? Could I do it for an article?ā€

The pilot was a cowboy in every sense, had a handlebar moustache and a brash manner. He said, ā€œGimme five grand and three weeks of your time and weā€™ll get her done!ā€

He was fired two weeks later for drinking on the job. But the chief pilot of the little airport was one of the greatest bush pilots alive, and he gave the thumbs up. Dave Hoerner had 30,000 hours flying wildlife biologists into the mountains to track grizzly bears and wolves. The most dangerous kind of flying. I went back up to Kalispell and flew three times a day and studied aviation books at night. I got my pilotā€™s license in 20 days. I bought a 1956 Cessna 182 single engine plane. The engine was timed out, meaning it had run so many hours I was required to rebuild it, but I thought I could nurse it along. Itā€™s the same plane Hig flies, same colour, same tail number: N6333A. And I kept it in Higā€™s hangar at the Erie airport. Soon after I bought the Beast, the engine died, right over the Continental Divide, and we had just enough altitude to glide home. In The Dog Stars, Hig flies past his point of no return looking for human connection.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

Eight years after I published the novel, on a cool day in March of 2020, Denver shut down for the Covid pandemic. I went fishing that afternoon in a state park south of town. There was no ranger at the gate, I just drove in. Eerie. No other fishermen parked in the gravel lot by the river. I waded into a lovely stretch that bends through a grove of old cottonwoods and began to cast. Alone, the way Hig does in the book. And the only fish feeding were white suckers. There were no trout that night, as in the novel. The sun settled on the ridge and the evening chilled and I got goosebumps, and not just from the temperature. I drove home up a large boulevard, the only car, and every business on either side of the road was shut.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was as if Hig had transported into my world, or I into his. Again.

by Peter Heller (Tinder Press) is the August read for the 51¶ÆĀž Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

The 51¶ÆĀž Book Club has spent July reading Claire Northā€™s space opera . Set in the far future, it follows the fortunes of a civilisation that has just learned that their planet will be destroyed by a supernova ā€“ in 100 yearsā€™ time.

ā€œWhat does it mean to look into the heavens and know the exact date when a star will die and with it, your world?ā€ North wrote in a fascinating essay for book club members on why they started the book with this conceit. ā€œWhat choices do you make, and what price would you pay to save yourself ā€“ or your civilisation?ā€

Alongside this end-of-the-world tale, Slow Gods is also a love story between Northā€™s protagonist Maw, a pilot who can navigate the dangers of faster-than-light travel but who is a little prone to murdering people, and Gebre, a citizen of that planet on the brink of annihilation, Adjumir.

Our science-fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson had heartily recommended this one: ā€œIt has been a while since I have read a piece of science fiction so purely delightful.ā€ I was also enraptured. Northā€™s writing was elegant, insightful and effortlessly funny (I hate try-hard humour in my fiction). And the concept at the heart of the story, the idea of how a civilisation might deal with imminent, but not all that imminent, destruction? It was fascinating and terrifying; as North told me in our interview for book club members, this is a deliberate parallel with climate change. ā€œSubtle metaphor it is not,ā€ they said.

Slow Gods wasnā€™t only a hit with me and Emily ā€“ I think itā€™s one of our most popular books so far with members. ā€œThe writing is gorgeous, and it has the big concept space opera feel that I really like,ā€ wrote adidubey on our . ā€œOne of the more satisfying reads we have had,ā€ added Matthew. ā€œThis book club usually picks things I wouldnā€™t and some are good and some less so (none that I have not finished) but there is a lot of variety and it gets me out of my rut of only reading the familiar.ā€

I did find the opening a little stodgy and slow to get going, which is often a problem for space operas, as the writer looks to set their galactic scene. Butterfly368 was with me on this: ā€œThe beginning was a bit slow and confusing, but the deeper I got, the more invested I became. Itā€™s one of those books that gradually pulls you in rather than grabbing you from page one,ā€ they wrote. ā€œIā€™m also enjoying its commentary on the meaning we create in our lives and on society and culture more broadly. Itā€™s given me quite a bit to think about.ā€ Melissa, however, loved it from the first. ā€œ50 pages in and totally engrossed. Iā€™ve felt gut punched with recognition at some of the terrible treatment of people but also laughed into an empty room a couple of times. Whyyyyyy do I have to go to work?ā€ she wrote.

Barbara Howe had some interesting comparisons to make with some of her favourite reads. ā€œReminded me a bit at the start of [Ann Leckieā€™s] Ancillary Justice, mainly in how much I was struggling to understand what was going on, and how many questions were raised early on that didnā€™t get answered until much later ā€“ if at all,ā€ she wrote. ā€œAlso, whenever [Maw] talked about having trouble with social situations and understanding his feelings, I was reminded of Murderbot ā€˜having an emotionā€™.ā€

North, incidentally, had some interesting things to say in our chat about Mawā€™s struggle to fit in; he ā€œis the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your lifeā€, they told me. North and I also dug into the multiple pronouns used in this story ā€“ something Carrie noted on Discord, writing that ā€œIā€™m really enjoying the world building and while they can take a little getting used to, feel that the introduction of new pronouns really add to the story and provide insight into the cultures weā€™re being introduced toā€. ā€œPeople exist on a spectrum,ā€ said North in our chat. ā€œIn the English language, we may still only really have ā€˜heā€™ and ā€˜sheā€™ as the commonly accepted expression of gender, but that spectrum is enormous. It ranges from Arnold Schwarzenegger through to Harry Kane through to Alan Carr, then straight on keeps on going. The enormity of that spectrum feels too big for ā€˜heā€™ and ā€˜sheā€™ to actually cover.ā€

Alan_P was another big fan. ā€œI absolutely loved it. Iā€™m looking up other books by the same author in my library which is something I rarely do,ā€ he wrote. ā€œI also (unexpectedly for me ā€“ Iā€™m not a fan of romance in general) found myself really enjoying the love story at the centre of the book. For me itā€™s the very clever way that the author has woven these different themes of not quite requited love, galaxy spanning science fiction, commentary of contemporary events and a really good story that makes it one of my favourites in a good while.ā€ A bit of a success, then!

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

The 51¶ÆĀž Book Club has been reading Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods, in which a civilisation has to work out how to deal with a supernova that will kill everyone on a planet ā€“ but not for 100 years. Claire joined us to dig into the details of the book, chatting about everything from how their hero ā€œis the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your lifeā€ to the parallels between the climate crisis and the book’s world-ending supernova (ā€œsubtle metaphor it is notā€). We also get into their terrifying version of faster-than-light travel ā€“ and how even the “science-iest” science fiction can need a little magic.

ā€œYou donā€™t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you.ā€ So writes Adam Nicolson in , his paean to that indispensable pair of ancient epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Christopher Nolanā€™s of the latter makes Nicolsonā€™s book essential reading now for anyone interested in the storyā€™s greater significance.

Nicolsonā€™s work follows three trains of thought. In the first, he waxes philosophical about what Homer ā€“ always referred to in the singular, but acknowledged to have been multiple people, spanning generations ā€“ has to say about the meaning of life and the clash between civilisation and depravity. He delves into the fascination literary giants have had with Homer, including John Keats, whose poem Endymion gives the book its title, and Alexander Pope, whose translations leave much to be desired.

The other two strands are more rooted in the tangible world. Nicolson digs into the text of the Iliad and the Odyssey and parses out variations in the Greek, tracing the languageā€™s structure back to the Linear B of the Mycenaean era and beyond, and uses this linguistic examination to attempt to pin down exactly when the poems were first composed ā€“ much earlier than weā€™d previously thought, he argues. The standardised, written Homer that we know came down from a much older oral tradition, says Nicolson, as far back as even 2000-1800 BC.

Finally, he finds traces of Homerā€™s writing in archaeological treasures from around the ancient Mediterranean, from a papyrus found at the Hawara site in Egypt to a pottery shard discovered in a tomb on the island of Ischia, one of the oldest surviving examples of written Greek. The papyrus dates to about AD 150; the pottery, to the 8th century BC. Much attention is also paid to the shaft graves of Mycenae, and what they can tell us about the world before the Bronze Age collapse.

Nicolson isnā€™t interested in the historicity of the poems themselves ā€“ they are myths, after all ā€“ as much as he is in the world that produced them. He draws a compelling portrait of a complex ancient realm, and of people for whom these stories provided a link to their nomadic, warrior-centred past.

Rereading The Mighty Dead, with its focus on relics and remnants, reminded me of my honeymoon to Crete. My husband and I visited the archaeological museum in Heraklion and saw a boar-tusk helmet on display; in book 10 of the Iliad, you will find Odysseus described wearing one, too. It is a reminder, as Nicolsonā€™s book impressively contends, that the world of Homer is still very much all around us, if we know where to look.

Who were the enigmatic Sea Peoples blamed for the Bronze Age collapse?

Around 3000 years ago, several empires and kingdoms in the Mediterranean collapsed, with a group of sea-faring warriors implicated as the culprit. But new evidence shows that many of our ideas about this turbulent time need completely rethinking

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.