China Miéville returns in this month’s science fiction: The Rouse by China Miéville, The
The Rouse by China Miéville (Picador £35, 1,264pp)
ODD to describe this doorstop of a book of 1,200 pages, as stealthy but the genius that is China Miéville has pulled it off.
Horror, and there are skin-tinglingly terrifying passages, prowls just beyond the edges of its scope: glimpsed but too awful to confront head-on. Presences are granted their own physics and vocab – jargon developed by a secret army unit.
The Deep State’s interest in the paranormal is all filtered through the prism of grief, as Maur, a wonderfully grounded, grieving mother of a dead soldier, confronts the darkest mysteries to uncover horrendous truths. A landmark work.
The Passing of the Dragon is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The Passing of the Dragon by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus £20, 384pp)
SITTING down with this collection of short stories is like spending time with your cleverest, kindest, more brilliant friend. The register is unique: intimate, sharp and uninhibitedly brainy.
An artist’s imagination is fired by a dragon passing through her town. Is transcendency transformative? Absolutely, but not in any way you might predict. An oxygen miner on a distant planet ponders the possibility of other possibilities. In a world where memories cling to objects like grease, people must deal with their own and everyone else’s past in ways we cannot imagine. But Ken Liu can. Stories of awe and wonder that delight the mind and warm the heart.
MASSIF by Garth Nix (Gollancz £25, 352pp)
A LARGE portion of a Madagascan mountain floats into space to join other interstellar massifs: huge life-supporting rocks, each with its own mysterious avatar, that allow people to travel far into space. Far from investigating these extraordinary phenomena, humans being human, exploit and weaponise them.
It says everything about Garth Nix’s brilliance that this is just the backdrop for a tense, gripping space wars adventure with a bitching crew and a worried commander who has to stage a daring rescue mission on a distant massif. It’s a mind-blowing, gut-clenching journey into danger as the mystery behind the massifs and their avatars is revealed.