The Latest in Speculative Fiction

speculative fiction for those who take literature seriously

Today we start what I hope will be a fairly regular series over here, which is an overview of recent speculative fiction. This has admittedly taken me (much) longer than planned so I’m using the term ‘recent’ in a rather relaxed fashion. I was writing a version of this for The Sunday Times a little while ago but now I get to be as expansive as I like! (In fact I was so expansive that this is actually too long for email so you may want to use the app or desktop to view it fully.)

a small sample of today’s books

Why speculative specifically? Well, if you’ve been lucky enough to miss one of my rants recently, I find science fiction, fantasy and the weird to be annoyingly overlooked by those who take literature seriously, even though I’ve often felt it to be a place where some of the most exciting writing is happening. You may think this isn’t the case anymore depending on your own reading bubble, but I still encounter a fair bit of snobbery. But the thing is, imaginative stories are our oldest forms of stories. Realism is a production of the last few hundred years, and whilst I admittedly love traditional literary fiction and many realist novels, it is a genre just like anything else with its own restrictions and boundaries. It need not be the default mode for ‘serious’ literature.¹

Admittedly there’s been a bit of a speculative revival recently even in literary fiction, but I also find a lot of this more highbrow mode to be pretty disappointing (you can always tell who has read the Le Guins and the Delanys and who hasn’t) and rife with the same problems I’m finding across a large swathe of litfic (bad storytelling, poor plotting). Equally, there are copious amounts of pretty unremarkable SFF genre fiction being pumped out at all times. You know, the stuff they market by ‘tropes’. So my intention here is to separate the wheat from the chaff on both sides of the genre boundary. But always I’m looking for high quality literature; I like challenging books, unique books, books with good storytelling and good prose. 

Over the past few months I’ve reviewed a few books online that I did originally intend for this piece, so do go and have a look if you are interested. Out of these I’d most recommend Gogmagog and Witness. Otherwise, most of the others I’ve reviewed today have been kept secret from you until now, so I’m looking forward to finally sharing them. 

Gogmagog by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

The Book of Elsewhere by China Miéville and Keanu Reaves

Witness by Jamel Brinkley

I suppose we could include Orbital by Samantha Harvey as well… (spoiler: I am not a fan of this most recent Booker winner)

Onto the books!

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

I had no expectations of this book, really. The title and cover don’t differentiate it from the wealth of rather uninspiring SFF that comes through my door or into my inbox. I knew vaguely that it had been received well but had read very little about it. I often find if I’m surprised by a book that I love it that little bit extra (difficult to replicate, especially as you’re reading a review of it right now). But I really was impressed by it; this kind of book is exactly why I’m writing these. My own genre blinkers had prevented me from reading it sooner.

We open in the perspective of a boy listening to his lola² tell stories of ‘the Old Country’. She talks of an ‘Inverted Theatre’ which exists in an ‘Inverted World’ that lies suspended below our own; a place reached only in dreams. She tells us of how one day we may be called to this theatre to watch a particular tale. And we are. 

Thus follows a description of the night we watch a play in a dream, a story of the Old Country, a story of how it rid itself of a despotic imperial regime. The narrative moves fluidly between lola telling the tale of the Inverted Theatre, the experience of the Inverted Theatre itself, and a more immersive participation in the story depicted onstage. At the same time, we have a background sense of the life of our protagonist as he grows up in the war torn country of his birth, the place to which his Old Country family immigrated (which seems about WWII era). As you might imagine, this is a difficult selection of nested narratives to navigate, but Jimenez does it with the ease of an assured, mature writer.

And Jimenez doesn’t use the theatre conceit half-heartedly. It is baked deep into its style. For example, a particular quirk is that some of the dialogue is delivered as if by a chorus. In any of the scenes where we come across an incidental minor character, we might suddenly enter their inner dialogue through the voice of the chorus. It is used just enough to add more depth to the world, but broken up by more conventional dialogue once we fully enter whichever scene it is we’re watching.

I’m using a lot of experiential words because that is truly how this novel feels. It feels like an experience. The prose is lush and poetic, but with actual heft and bite that prevent it from falling into a wishy washy nothingness. At times it feels cinematic, as Jimenez resets each scene on a grander or more intimate scale. It is intensely vivid and atmospheric, and at times very violent, so do be warned. I’m usually quite wary of overt gory violence in a book, but here it is balanced well and mostly necessary to the novel’s themes. It’s a little bit like reading a very literary version of Mad Max Fury Road.³ 

This novel won’t be for everyone, because it does require work from you as the reader to keep it all straight. The use of second-person “you” to put us into the theatre will undoubtedly irritate some readers. But oh, you are richly rewarded for it. Most of my notes on the book are me just saying… yes! This is what I want from a novel! I was marking it up as consistently avoiding many of the pitfalls of contemporary literature, either in literary or more standard SFF fiction. 

For example, even though it is at times a brutal, difficult novel, there is real warmth and charisma emanating from its main characters. There are quiet moments, intimate moments, and strong dialogue that help balance out the more dramatic scenes. There is light and shade. At all times I felt like Jimenez had a very clear picture of everything that was happening in all narratives, despite some of the on-the-page trickery. Sometimes the plot or dialogue moved in completely unexpected ways, and it was genuinely unpredictable at times (too many SFF novels these days I can practically predict word for word what the character will say or do next). It was logical, i.e. if you say a character is practically all powerful then they have to act that way. There was a real, true darkness to it which did not always show up in overt violence, but sometimes in the marginal things characters said or did. There was proper narrative tension, real stakes created by difficult and uncomfortable choices. And it utilised weirdness in a really effective way. Everyone needs a bit more weird. It doesn’t have to run through the whole piece—most of this is informed by the epic fantasy genre—but just to offset that which we are more familiar with. 

I really recommend it to everyone, particularly readers of literary fiction who are less familiar with epic fantasy; I think and hope it will surprise and delight you. I’ll absolutely be returning to this one in the future, and seeking out Jimenez’ first novel The Vanished Birds.

Jonathan Abernathy You are Kind by Molly McGhee

Sometimes I do this horrible thing where I read a novel over the course of several months in the interstices of life when I have only my phone but think to myself I shouldn’t spend another moment scrolling. So I read one of my many e-ARCs hanging out on there. I recommend this to nobody as a way to read a book, and funnily enough, I rarely like these books that much.

Jonathan Abernathy You are Kind is that rare exception. I began it and then was pretty busy over the following months, but when I finally got a semblance of routine back I started to read it more substantially over my lunch break. I finally ended up dedicating proper actual reading time to it when I got into the latter half. This may not sound like much of an endorsement, but I promise it is. 

Jonathan Abernathy is in serious entrenched debt from which he will never recover. He’s in his twenties, his parents are dead, and he is working minimum wage jobs to (barely) survive. This is a novel of late stage capitalism, and it’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the head. But who said good novels had to be subtle? He lands what he thinks could be a dream job (this is a pun) working on clearing up the subconscious of the American people while they sleep. He’ll remove ‘irritants’ that could interfere with worker efficiency, and he’s promised forgiveness of his debt as a reward. You’ll not be surprised when I tell you this is a trap, or a slippery slope into “government sponsored indentured servitude” as one character puts it.  

It’s a cliche to say it’s a cliche to describe something as Kafkaesque, but this is pretty modern-day Kafkaesque. It’s narrated in the sunny prose style of a 1950s infomercial, with the language of bureaucracy and the self-help books Jonathan Abernathy has internalised as tonal support. This is where the title comes from; Abernathy repeatedly assures himself that he is kind, that he is good, that he can do it, that everything will get better from here. Of course, in this world no amount of self-improvement can help when you’re facing a market that is “inhospitable to human functions”.  

We follow Abernathy in his interactions with his equally downtrodden neighbours (including a rather sweet burgeoning relationship with a single mom divorcée) and the dreamscapes of his countrymen. Naturally at times it verges into the surreal in the latter, and the logic begins to fall away to good, destabilising effect. Perhaps it gets a little repetitive in parts of the second half, but there is a solid overall narrative thrust as we begin to work towards the conclusion, and discover the reality of the company is even worse than we imagined. McGhee is talented at creating characters you care about (as long as you can get over how ‘pathetic’ Abernathy is, which I find a bit cruel from some of my fellow reviewers; this man has been psychically tortured basically by the bizarre and anti-human nature of this particular brand of capitalism). 

The style is sure to annoy some readers. At the beginning I wondered if it would start to feel gimmicky. But for me at least, it never did. In fact I feel like it heightened the emotion in sometimes surprising ways, not least because of its more comical aspect. Again, there is light and shade, there is balance. It doesn’t take itself entirely seriously, and yet it feels deadly serious. A very promising debut novel indeed. 

The Secret Life of Insects by Bernardo Esquinca trans. by James D. Jenkins

Something I liked about this collection is how clearly Esquinca is a student of speculative. The man knows his stuff, he clearly reads and watches widely in the genre, and it benefits his stories greatly. Naturally with any collection of stories—especially ones intended to frighten—there were some that were more effective than others. I particularly liked the title story about a forensic entomologist investigating his wife’s death; ‘Where I’m Going It’s Always Night’ about a mysterious spelunker hitchhiker which had a really classic scary story feel; ‘Demoness’ about a high school reunion where a group of friends dance around a traumatic event from their youth, and ‘Pan’s Noontide’ which was one of the better uses of an ancient God in contemporary fiction that I’ve seen. 

I’ve talked a little recently about how difficult I find it to be frightened by books, and therefore generally find it difficult to love horror. I’m usually too busy breaking a story down into its constituent parts to fully hold together that horror feel. So I liked it, but I don’t think I’ll be reflecting on this volume for a long time. I think the short story form exacerbates this for me; it is admittedly a good medium for bitesize creepy tales, but I don’t find they tend to stick. However! If you do like creepy stories—or, for instance, like Mariana Enriquez’ work as below—I think you would like this. 

Finally, illustration! Yes! Can we have more illustrated books for grown-ups please. Thank you to Valancourt and/or Dead Ink for hiring Luis Perez Ochando to add some extra flair to these. 

A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez trans. by Megan McDowell

This was my first collection by increasingly beloved Argentine author, Mariana Enriquez, who also writes primarily short stories in the literary horror/speculative space. I did try her novel Our Share of Night a couple of years ago but perhaps quite controversially softly DNF’d it pretty early on. It’s one I might like to return to at some point when I have more time for it. But anyway. I hear this collection might not be as strong as some of her earlier ones (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Things We Lost in the Fire)? Having read this, I’d like to explore those earlier collections and see how they compare. 

Whilst I think some Esquinca’s stories do this too, Enriquez’ feel more overtly political, particularly when she focuses on women’s issues. I also think she captures a character’s voice a little more strongly, to good effect (or a better translation? I do wonder how much more affecting I would have found both authors’ collections if I’d read them in Spanish). I liked the opening story ‘My Sad Dead’ which is narrated by a woman who can see ghosts and is repulsed by the encroaching fascism and deadening of empathy amongst her neighbours in a city where death lives close by. The title story tells a version of the real-life murder of Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel, in doing so making a comment on true crime whilst also touching on issues of homelessness and addiction in downtown LA. ‘Metamorphosis’ was also interesting, a short piece that explores body modification in an older woman. In conclusion, I liked them, but I don’t know that I’ll be thinking about them much beyond this review. Perhaps one day I’ll read the Spanish. 

Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald

One night an American diner appears in a field in the British countryside. Mr. Rao is pulled out of prison to investigate; his special talent is that he can correctly identify anything as true or false, or as he puts it “judge the veracity of propositional statements about the world”. This applies to speech, but also to things, things a bit like this mysterious diner. After identifying it as somehow not true, he is assigned his old pre-prison handler, Adam, to help him investigate the matter on behalf of various intelligence agencies. 

Lots of potential here. An atmospheric opening, with a splash of the weird. This novel and its authors clearly know the genres they’re working in. Even though Helen Macdonald has previously written things like nature memoir H is for Hawk, it’s clear from interviews that they have a real appreciation for it. And Sin Blaché has been writing in it for much longer. The writing is good and of a higher quality than you might find in other similar works; there are some nice turns of phrase, and decent dialogue and characterisation. One of the major themes is nostalgia, and I think that worked well and was fairly unique. 

But I can’t seem to rave about this book. Something feels… off. Whether that’s because it was authored by two minds or not, I’m not sure. First of all, an obvious critique is that this novel is way, way too long. It’s a slow burn romance but it really is much too slow. Also, I feel like sometimes authors have such a great germ of an idea, but then get lost in the corridors of boring institutions? I find this to be the case in a not-insubstantial amount of speculative fiction. Like, why is the story taking place here when it could be literally anywhere else. I get it, this is a techno-thriller that involves speaking to higher-ups in offices but I don’t know… I’d like to see somewhere other than the inside of a roadside motel ten times. Let’s go weirder! Always a little bit weirder, please! And I have a bit of an allergy to a lot of military stuff, which I thought was an odd choice. We do get a climactic and visually impressive ending, but it takes a long time to get there. 

Is it a weird thing to dislike when you feel the authors like their characters too much? Or they want me to like their characters too much? Perhaps what I’m trying to pinpoint is the too-obvious sense of the authors’ hands here. I felt manipulated as a reader. These characters are designed to tug at my heartstrings, and so like an irritable toddler I resist. They have both spoken about how they were influenced by fandom in writing this book which is fine in theory but I don’t think it worked very well for me. I don’t want you to create characters I could create a fandom over? I actually want people being people? I sort of get it, because maybe I’m just not the target audience and am looking for something else in my fiction. But I suppose it makes the book unusual in that it seems to have more intellectual aspirations when it name drops philosophers or starts in on a theory-based approach to nostalgia… and yet it has this rather commonplace characterisation/romance plot/overall plot at the same time. Either way, I felt it paled in comparison to The Spear Cuts Through Water, for example, whose romance plot line was also a slow burn. There is such a powerful narrative thrust in that book (and a lot of other stuff going on) that it never feels dawdling like this one.

Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie

Don’t go to Almanby. Everybody knows that. Only that is exactly what three young women, Heather, Antonia and Rachel find themselves doing one day. In this world, it seems like reality has become sick; the undead roam the streets, oddities in the landscape proliferate, only the young people seem to have survived. And the core of the problem seems to lie in Almanby, a place where one by one people keep going and never coming back from. I don’t read a lot of folk horror, but if you do or if you like the film Midsommar (which I’m too chicken to watch, to be honest), you might like this.

It’s the kind of hallucinatory thing you might dream up in the fitful sleep of a hot, sun-drenched day. There’s just enough story and characterisation to keep you going, with a few spooky interludes, but dream logic reigns supreme. For some readers—including myself at times—this can be frustrating, especially over about 450 pages. If I had copious amounts of time, it’d be something I think would work even better on a reread, because I do think Leslie considers his imagery quite carefully throughout. Still, I don’t think the ending made the most of the titbits he drops throughout. 

Honestly I’ve little more to add; if this sounds like your kind of thing—and you should wait until a hot summer day to read it, fully entering its fever dream atmosphere—then it probably is. The writing is certainly evocative, but be warned that it is overlong.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

This book started life as romantic fan fiction about Victorian arctic explorer Commander Graham Gore (really and truly). It obviously had a very splashy summer where everyone—even those people who say they don’t like science fiction—seemed to be reading it. I don’t think I need to say that this is not a good example of what the genre can do for literature as a whole? Indeed I’m not entirely sure how I ended up reading it (or listening to it, as I did). But you know what, I can’t help but give Bradley some props, here. I certainly had more fun reading it than I did, say, Orbital.

Graham Gore is rescued by the ‘Ministry of Time’ from the disastrous Arctic expedition in which the real historical figure died alongside tens of other men. Because he would have died anyway, it is apparently safe for him to be transplanted into our own timeline. I honestly can’t even remember the logic for why they were doing this. Anyway, he is then assigned a handler of sorts who will help him adjust to the modern day. Cue romance, cue Victorian man discovers Spotify, cue silliness.

And to be fair to Bradley, she manages some actual real comedy in some of these moments, and her depiction of Gore carries the book entirely. The time travel plot is entirely convoluted and illogical, the romance is not particularly satisfying, and some of the metaphors are laugh out loud funny. The plot drags a little through the middle and by the end I had just thrown up my hands in terms of where the story was going. But look, if you want to read Kaliane Bradley’s wish fulfilment romance about a Victorian arctic explorer, you should. It’s light, it’s readable. No one’s saying this is great literature. But you could do much worse. At least she seems aware that novels were once upon a time written to entertain. 

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

Unfortunately this novel did epitomise quite a lot of things that I dislike about current ‘literary’ speculative fiction. So whilst it is not an unreadable or explicitly bad novel, it irritates me.

I listened to it and I think that was for the best; I may have given up sooner otherwise. Sixteen-year-old protagonist Odile is a bit of an outsider. She doesn’t have many friends, and her mother is putting pressure on her to get a place in the Conseil, an elite organisation that allows for travel outside the valley in which she lives. Why is travel so restricted? Well, because in this world moving between valleys would mean travelling through time. Go one way, and you’ll go back in time, meeting a former version of yourself. Go the other, you’ll head into the future. 

I suppose this is an interesting enough concept, though it’s pretty much a one-sentence kind of worldbuild. Here’s something I’ll say and then think of exceptions to but… I’m wary of speculative fiction where the world is different in some very specific way, like you can time travel across valleys, but everything is otherwise very Earth-like and normal. Even in a novel like I Who Have Never Known Men—which I had mixed feelings about but which has grown on me with distance—there is a sense in which the women are from Earth but have been transplanted to this strange otherworldly planet.⁴ That they are no longer on Earth but that they are of Earth.⁵ At the very least, there’s a sense of the planet as a whole. Maybe this seems silly but… how many of these valleys are there? Does it stretch to infinity? Where are the limits of the planet? Is it just a small French Canadian town absolutely everywhere? Why? How did these very human-like people get there? What’s the history? Do they have a similar history to our own or different? How can a world like this make people much the same as us (surely impossible)? In the end it feels like a thought experiment but doesn’t do what a truly great novel would do, which would give you an immersive, fleshed out world (speculative or no). 

Also, there’s nothing literary about this except maybe that… it’s a bit dull? Apparently it doesn’t use speech marks which I obviously couldn’t tell from listening so I suppose that’s a marker of literary-ness. Thwarting genre conventions by being entirely without excitement? The prose style is that very flat, direct and emotionless style that we’ve seen a lot of recently. The plot line is pretty predictable and also extremely thin on the ground for the length. The less said about the romance element, the better. It’s also inexplicably bureaucratic… I give an exception, for instance, to Jonathan Abernathy where it is absolutely key to its themes. But here, I don’t know why you would include so much bureaucracy unless you had very little else to offer in terms of story. I’m not sure if the time travel works that well or not because the whole concept just seems questionable when expanded beyond the limits of the words on the page. I could go on but I’ll spare you. Either way, I don’t think this one is worth your time, especially for existing readers of speculative fiction. It just doesn’t compare in either concept or craft.

Thus concludes my first round up of the latest in speculative fiction! Phew, it feels like it took me a long time to get here.

I will absolutely be buying my own physical copies of The Spear Cuts Through Water and Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, which of course is my highest compliment. I would recommend The Secret Life of Insects and A Sunny Place for Shady People to the right reader, and I think for more niche requirements, Lost in the Garden, Prophet and I suppose even The Ministry of Time as well (i.e. you want to have a fun, silly time). I’m sad to say The Other Valley is a skip.

These were originally intended to be paid posts, but it feels important to me that new books get reviews where people can actually see them. I want more people to read in these genres and to have a sense of which books to spend their precious time and money on! But they are truly a labour of love with countless hours of reading, synthesising and writing so if you enjoyed it, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. Or if you’re not ready for that kinda commitment, I also have a buy me a coffee page. Thanks so much!

1. Not all literary fiction is realist, but that has been the dominant mode for a few decades. Anyway I tend to use the descriptor ‘literary’ in the more expansive sense of describing a book which is aware of its own artistry and has artistic merit i.e. something which is not solely meant for entertainment alone. Where attention is paid to the craft of the novel, rather than just the story told. 

2. Popular term for grandmother in the Philippines.

3. I wrote this in my notes and then felt very vindicated when I saw Jimenez mentioned it directly in this interview! (In general this interview shows me how reflective Jimenez is when it comes to the craft of storytelling, and confirms to me the man knows what he’s doing. Particularly his understanding that something must be given to the reader in this process to make it interesting to us, to keep us reading. Sounds basic but I honestly don’t think that many authors of literary fiction are thinking about this anymore.)

Anyway I know that to me that would be a huge draw to this book because I love that film and the aesthetics and atmosphere of it, but to others it’ll make you want to run a mile. I implore you to give it a try first, you might just be surprised.

4. In many ways I think that novel is the tonal twin of this one but is much, much better.

5. Sorry this is a minor spoiler but I needed it to illustrate my point. This is actually not very explicit in the book but heavily inferred.