The biggest problem with Andrew Hunter Murray’s The Last Day is that Robert Charles Wilson already wrote Spin. A world that’s a giant ring a world where the only inhabitable zone is the top of a mountain a giant tree in a gas torus a world with multiple suns, with life forms that emerge only when one of them emits a flare. Larry Niven, to name one, has created a whole universe ( Known Space) of interesting environments for humans to inhabit. And, yes, it’s tidelocked, not “in lock step”.
Please don’t stop the earth turning as if no writer ever had a tidelocked planet orbiting its sun. Please: don’t write about artificial intelligence as if you are the first person who ever came up with the idea that there might be some, well, ethical issues. I didn’t like 84k by Claire North and hearing established literary figures expressing their wide-eyed brand-new interest in old science fiction tropes on the radio gives me the rage.įirst, ideas. Emily St John Mandell pulled it off with Station Eleven, but others have fared less well. Science-fiction-written-by-people-who-clearly-haven’t-read–much-science-fiction, on the other hand, is problematic in a number of ways. There are TV and film properties I’ve liked too, such as 70s classic The Survivors, various adaptations of the Triffids… the list is long.īut when a skilled genre writer like Wilhelm creates a world, or when a hit machine team like Niven and Pournelle get involved, the results are thoughtful, entertaining, fully realised and immersive. Footfall, by Niven and Pournelle (asteroid) Where Late the Sweet Birds Sangby Kate Wilhelm (fertility, climate) Dinner at Deviant’s Palace by Tim Powers ( Mad Max with brains) The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndam (triffids) even David Brin’s The Postman are all books I’ve read and enjoyed. Now, I was always a fan of the post-apocalyptic.
In particular, the climate-change-Brexit-Trump nexus of post-apocalyptic text is currently en vogue in the way that books-with- GIRL-in-the-title were (are still? I daren’t look). This may be deeply unfair of me the genre misfires here might be entirely the fault of his editors, because it has been clear of late that science-fiction-written-by-people-who-clearly-haven’t-read–much-science-fiction has become increasingly common. And it’s in my favourite* genre: science-fiction-written-by-people-who-clearly-haven’t-read–much-science-fiction. They might as well call them gimps.Īlthough he has clearly published before, this is Murray’s first novel. Personally I’ve always really hated the twee and reductive description of BBC researchers and fact checkers as “elves”. I know AHM these days by dint of his presenting the Private Eye podcast,, though he’ll also be familiar to listeners of There’s No Such Thing as a Fish, the podcast of the QI elving community.
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