By Light Alone
Adam Roberts
Gollancz, 2011
Hb, pp416, £18.99
ISBN 9780575083646

By Light Alone is one of those books in which the author has concerns about modern society and extrapolates from these to create a world in which all his worst fears have come to pass: a warning to us all to change our ways.
On Roberts’s future Earth, a bug has been invented which allows people to feed by absorbing the energy of sunlight through their hair. Unfortunately, rather than saving mankind from the conflict between a growing population and dwindling resources, it has exaggerated the class divide: the rich wear their hair short and eat food to show off; the poor loll in the sun all day. As the book opens, our narrator is George, a rich but disaffected man whose daughter is kidnapped; the story is then taken up by a girl who seems to be George’s rescued daughter, then by his ex-wife, and finally by his real daughter, who has been swept up in the longhair revolution.

Neither Roberts’s worries nor his expression of those worries could be considered sophisticated. He offers up simplistic takes on racism, class antagonism, and the alienating effects of techno-logy; his notion of sexual politics is more interesting, if ultimately unconvincing. The crudeness of his moralising is not helped by the fact that the characters he uses as vehicles are, for the most part, unpleasant: George’s numbness is tedious; the ex-wife is a neurotic loon. By Light Alone only really takes off in its final third. When George’s daughter assumes the narration, the action gathers place and, clearly more sympathetic to this character, Roberts’s style relaxes and finds a new fluidity, a beauty of phrase and metaphor. Finally, the story takes over and the ideas come alive.
Jen Ogilvie

Songs of the Earth: 
The Wild Hunt Book One
Elspeth Cooper
Gollancz, 2011
Hb, pp480, £18.99
ISBN 9780575096141

Gair is under sentence of death, banished from the Holy City because of his ability to tap into ‘the song’, a magical inner sound world capable of awesome power. Out on his musical ear, with Church Knights and a witchfinder on his tail, Gair discovers allies for his dangerous ability among the Guardians of the Veil. Guided by the wise old head of Aldaran, he makes his incident-packed way to the Western Isles and the Guardians’ stronghold of Chapterhouse. Here, danger laps ever closer in the form of the sinister Savin; while the Hidden Kingdom, for centuries kept at bay by the Veil, gnaws threateningly at the edges of the world.

By the time the book gets to Chapterhouse, I was afraid Songs of the Earth was going to go all Harry Potter on us. Mercifully, it doesn’t. This is assured writing, containing undoubtedly familiar fantasy tropes, but palpably adult and without lazy recourse to heroic fantasy’s predominant trend of one-upmanship in grit, expletives and relentless graphic violence. The novel possesses a compelling, action-packed narrative sweep all its own, an emotional catharsis at once shocking and convincing, and one of the most unsentimental, yet tender, erotic romances to grace the genre. Aptly for a debut novel entitled Songs of the Earth, Elspeth Cooper demonstrates a refined ear, crafting her tale to its explosive climax with a fluency and flair that goes beyond seeing words as mere cogs in a story machine. Some writers inspire a real sense of faith in their readers from the start, and this is just what Elspeth Cooper achieves with this impressive first effort. Roll on Book Two!
Nick Čirkovič


The Map of Time
Félix J Palma
HarperCollins, 2011
Pb, 514pp, £12.99
ISBN 9780007344123

Time travel novels have been at the heart of science fiction since HG Wells’s The Time Machine, so it’s fitting that Wells should be the connecting thread between the three parts of this astonishing novel set largely in a brilliantly realised 1896 London.

Andrew Harrington, rich, upper-class and spoilt, is still heart-broken eight years after his lover Marie Kelly, a Whitechapel prostitute, was killed by Jack the Ripper. About to commit suicide, he is persuaded instead to go to Murray’s Time Travel to try to change the past and save her. But their Cronotilus can only go forward, specifically to one date in the year 2000, when the brave Captain Shackleton finally defeats the evil automata who had taken over the world. Murray suggests that he visit HG Wells, who must surely have the machine he wrote about in his recent novel – and so he has, enabling Harrington to travel back to the night the Ripper killed his lover.
In part two, Claire Haggerty, out of step with the constrictions of late-Victorian society, is determined to escape to the future; she meets Shackleton, the dashing man of her dreams, first in 2000 then in 1896, and again Wells is drawn in to help them send their love letters across time.

Of course all is not as it seems, but to reveal more would spoil the reading of this wonderfully imagined, beautifully written (and translated from the Spanish) and delightfully complex tale. Suffice to say that in the third part HG Wells is the central character and finds himself, along with Bram Stoker and Henry James, caught up in time paradoxes to kill for…
David V Barrett