Ha’penny by Jo Walton, $25.95. Jo Walton writes about a postwar Britain without the war. It’s 1949 in London. Eight years after the peace treaty with Germany. England is at peace but there are threats against the government from abroad and at home.
There is increasing oppression of minorities, particularly Jews. The stories from Germany are harsh and the threat of deporting British immigrants back to the continent is increasing.
Viola Lark is one of six sisters who have gone very different ways. Pip married Heinrich Himmler and moved to Germany. Siddy is a communist. Viola is shunned by her parents for choosing an acting career.
The recent rage in theater productions has been cross-dressing characters and Viola is offered a plum role to play Hamlet as a woman.
The day she is offered the part, one of her co-stars is killed by a bomb. One of her sisters approaches Viola to continue a plot to assassinate Hitler on opening night.
The bomb is investigated by Inspector Carmichael. He is unhappy in his job. His superiors hold the threat of revealing his homosexuality to make him bury embarrassing results he uncovers.
With the aid of a stalwart sergeant, Carmichael has to look inside the hidden life of a successful actress.
Walton evokes an exciting period thriller while brilliantly playing sympathies back and forth between conspirators and the police.
The Spiral Labyrinth by Matthew Hughes, $24.95. Hughes has been writing a delightful series of the adventures of Old Earth discriminator Henghis Hapthorn aided by his integrator (smart computer), which has taken on the form of a small fruit-loving animal, and his intuition that has become a separate personality.
One of Hapthorn’s cases leads to a spaceship with an onboard integrator that has taken to some dangerous and unhealthy habits. It’s a trend Henghis is seeing elsewhere, including in the creature that is his integrator. It’s a minor case that ends up spanning time and multiple dimensions.
Hapthorn’s intuitive inner self, Osk Rievor, is devoted to studying the magic that is reappearing in the world. Hapthorn thinks it nothing more than a pastime of expensive rare books. Investigating a confluence of lines of magic power, Osk Rievor takes over Hapthorn’s body and can’t be stopped, following a path only he can see.
Rievor disappears while Hapthorn finds himself in a strange world he believes to be Old Earth in the far future.
Rational thinking has been replaced with magic and Haphorn’s intellect doesn’t impress anyone in this new land where he is ignorant of the basics of magic known to everyone.
Five magicians rule over the city of Bambles and they all are interested in Hapthorn, even though none is quite sure why. They are willing to torture him until he can tell them what it is they should know.
Hughes’ delightful language and humorous details echo fantasy and detective traditions while becoming wholly his own.
Postsingular by Rudy Rucker, $25.95. Rucker takes on the hot topics of nanotechnology and the transformation of humanity with exuberance and irreverent wit.
As a boy, Jeff Luty has a vision of the world transformed by nanotechnology. An experiment gone wrong kills his best friend and sets Luty on course to the life of a mad scientist.
He grows to have his own company where he creates “nants” that will transform Mars into a supercomputer. There’s quite a backlash when the power is used to project political propaganda and advertising in the sky as a prelude to dismantling the Earth for more computing power.
Ond Lutter is able to reverse this with the aid of his autistic son, Chu. Ond then releases his own nano creations, which transform the world in ways that can’t be reversed, while Ond and Chu disappear into a parallel universe.
The resulting “orphidnet” is a boon for living on the street with instant information on discarded food and places to crash.
The Big Pig Posse are some bright dropout kids who entwine themselves into the hit reality show of sex and drugs that Lutter’s wife and friends have become.
The Posse takes the lead in saving the world a second time. Thuy uses her metanovel to recover a world-hopping secret while her sometime boyfriend develops the physics of teleportation.
As always, Rucker is wildly inventive, tossing out ideas on the cutting edge of science with attention to their most offbeat consequences.
