Who wants to live forever? The Book of Elsewhere (Del Rey, £22), a collaboration between Hollywood’s Keanu Reeves and Hugo Award winner China Miéville, is set in the near future and revolves around Unute, ‘a warrior who won’t die’ who has been criss-crossing the globe for 80,000 years in search of his truth. Is he a god? A weapon wielded by some unknowable force? Currently a super-soldier leading a secret US Army death-squad, and prone to devastating warp-spasms (riastrids, no less) that lay waste to friend and foe alike, Unute is the focus of ‘the impossible new science’ that seeks to kill Death itself. Adapted from Reeves’ graphic novel series BRZRKR (2021), the story is a sprawling blend of hi-octane action sequences and philosophical meditations on life, death and immortality that calls to mind Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. Occasional excursions into the near and distant past, recounted by some of Unute’s fellow travellers, are jarring in their self-consciously stylised delivery, but for the most part this is an absorbing combination of sci-fi, mythology and teleology.
Following on from Shards of Earth (2021) and Eyes of the Void (2022), Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Lords of Uncreation (Tor, £16.99) is the concluding novel in the Final Architecture trilogy. It revolves around Idris Telemmier, a first-generation modified human who possesses the mental power to challenge the Architects – planet-sized leviathans with the power to devastate entire solar systems – who seek to destroy the last remnants of a humanity that has long since lived a nomadic existence in space. Idris – along with a rag-tag band of fellow travellers that includes all manner of alien creatures – finds himself ‘fighting the resistance of physics’ as he sinks into the trackless depths of unspace to battle ‘the unimaginable entities’ that control and direct the fearsome Architects. An action-packed tale of invasions, treachery and faction-fighting on a galactic scale from a former winner of the Arthur C Clarke and Hugo awards, Lords of Uncreation is space opera at its most gripping.
A religious schism between the followers of the god Oln provides the backdrop to Gary J. Martin’s Knight of Gaelgara (Temple Dark Books, £23.99), a medieval fantasy set in the realm of Gaelgara, which braces itself for an invasion by its ancestral enemies as the novel begins. Standing in their way is Sir Roslind, daughter of the embattled Baron Feylan of Aksson and a newly minted knight, who reluctantly accepts the help of Thorn, a veteran cougari whose claws are as sharp as his wits. Teeming with spies, assassins, traitors and heroes, Knight of Gaelgara features superb world-building, a dynamic sense of a medieval world on the cusp of devastation, and a bravura heroine in the redoubtable Sir Roslind.
Originally published in 2008, and reissued in tandem with its Netflix adaptation, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (Head of Zeus, £9.99) opens during China’s Cultural Revolution with the astrophysicist Ye Wenjie reassigned to the Red Coast Project for re-education. But why should a historical weapons research installation give rise to a wave of contemporary suicides among Chinese scientists, and the extraordinary claim that physics has never existed, and will never exist? A tour-de-force that incorporates particle physics, the search for alien life and the mind-bending possibilities that exist at the furthest frontiers of speculative science, The Three-Body Problem is a hugely entertaining intellectual thriller that deservedly won the Hugo Award on its English-language translation in 2014.
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Opening in London’s King’s Cross, Joanne Harris’s The Moonlight Market (Gollancz, £22) centres on Tom Argent, an amateur photographer who accidentally captures what appear to be non-human creatures whilst indulging his passion for photographing the city’s grimier corners. Dazzled by the improbably beautiful Vanessa, Tom is soon embroiled in an age-old war between Daylight Folk and Midnight Folk, whose vampiric compulsion to feed on human energy has its roots in an ancient folktale that tells of a lost prince with the power to reunite a kingdom rent asunder by poisoned love. The author of Chocolat tips her hat to Ursula K. Le Guin as she turns to fantasy and fairy tale in her latest novel, and does so with a delightfully light touch that roots the diffident Tom Argent – ‘no believer in fairytales and miracles’ – in a prosaic modernity before setting him loose ‘in pursuit of true love and certain death’ in a realm-spanning universe where magic is commonplace and the price of a repaid debt is nothing less than a human soul. Delicately woven, brilliantly executed, The Moonlight Market shimmers with the tantalising possibility of a fairy-tale world that exists if only we had eyes to see.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
