Physics, werewolves and the Laundry: Gwen Ansell rates new speculative fiction.
THE QUANTUM THIEF by Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz)
The noir detective tale has grown from an interesting sidestream of fantasy and science fiction into a dominant current. Now, in the wake of China Miéville’s The City and The City and Kraken, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch and Charles Stross’s Laundry series, new writer Hannu Rajaniemi has produced an exhilarating ride through cutting-edge particle physics, married to stylistic conventions drawn from the detective tales of the early 20th century.
Finnish-born string theory scientist Rajaniemi lives in Scotland and has been part of writers’ circles with Stross, but his voice is very different. He’s spoken often of his admiration for Marice Leblanc’s Arsene Lupin stories, and it’s in that mould that his hero, con artist and thief Jean le Flambeur, has been created. The book’s detractors have complained that Le Flambeur is thinly characterised. In fact, he’s merely drawn the way a writer from an earlier era would have done it. His character emerges slowly from his methods and interactions, much as that of Lupin or Sherlock Holmes or Judge Dee does. There’s elegance and wit in the way Rajaniemi achieves that unfolding.
But physics and characterisation also interact. Le Flambeur’s character exists — with nuanced differences in more than one dimension and in various possibly manipulated memories. In the string that holds this first book together (there will be two more) he’s engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with boy detective Isidore Beautrelet around the Oubliette, one of the fantastical moving cities of Mars. He’s been rescued from jail in return for one last theft there by the masters of augmented warrior Mieli and her spidership Perhonen.
None of these devices is new (the ship clearly graduated from sarcasm class in Iain M Banks’s Culture), but Rajaniemi does some startlingly fresh things as he brings them together. Oubliette and its systems are wonderfully conceived. Citizens carry very special watches; when their Time runs out, they enter a period of service as Quiet, minds embodied in machines that maintain the city, its bureaucratic processes and defences, before returning to active life. Active minds are linked and accessible, but social interactions are governed by an intricate system controlling privacy. Lurking in the shadows is the state machinery of policing and prisons.
The Quantum Thief’s first chapter is a deceptive, helter-skelter tumble through unexplained scientific terminology, not representative of the detective story that follows. But, as with Le Flambeur’s character, context eventually makes all meanings clear; bracketed explanations would just interrupt the joy of the ride. And, without didacticism, Rajaniemi provides what is probably the closest you’ll ever get to a painless understanding of string theory.
WOLFSANGEL by MD Lachlan (Gollancz)
Werewolves have had a bad press recently, thanks to the thinly disguised chastity sermons of Twilight. Growing fur at full moon just doesn’t feel like fun anymore. New writer Lachlan, however, offers a more sophisticated narrative, set in a cold, relentless Viking world where succession and power dominate, where gods become men, men become wolves and women become somebody only outside their rigid social roles.
The book offers far more than plunder, adventure and dark magic, though all those are there. Lachlan brings to vivid life characters driven to become other to survive: abandoned girl-children starved and drugged into witchery; pretty girls scarred to evade rape; Loki fleeing into mortality from his murderous divine family — and the twin boy-wolf heirs at the heart of the story. And he does it in language that without any overwrought ornamentation, offers the cadence and music of an authentic Norse epic.
THE FULLER MEMORANDUM by Charles Stross (Orbit)
Stross’s Laundry series (this is volume three) focuses on the branch of the British Secret Service that handles the cold (and fiery, and slimy) war against really alien intelligence. The books operate at several levels: as affectionate but not craven riffs on Ian Fleming; as urban fantasy; as straight-faced speculative explorations of the science and mechanics of demons — and as finely comic post-Dilbertian takes on the everyday horrors of working in an organisation.
Some critics have suggested that Stross is more adept at ideas than action or plot: for readers of speculative fiction, that’s a strength rather than a weakness. But The Fuller Memorandum has plenty of taut, convincing action and a genuinely intriguing mystery at its heart. Whichever level you read it on — and Stross clearly derives fun as a writer from subtly shifting the ground under his readers’ feet — the Laundry books remain the classiest examples of their genre around. Unmissable.