20 Books of Summer – final review part 2 – books #23-24, Smythe & Sterling

Here are my final reviews of the extra books from my TBR piles that I managed to squeeze in for 20 Books of Summer in August. As they were extras to the 20, I don’t feel guilty at all for the reviews being later. You may have read that Cathy will step down from hosting the challenge next year – but I’ve volunteered to take it over alongside another blogger. I’m sure we’ll have a more formal announcement soon. Meanwhile, back to those reviews:

The Edge by James Smythe, The Anomaly Quartet #3

If you’ve not read the first two parts, The Explorer and The Echo, you’ll probably want to skip this short review.

After the Ishiguro went missing in the Anomaly, followed 23 years later by the Lära with Mirakel Hyvonen at the helm, a third team led by Mirakel’s ageing twin brother Tomas, based on an orbital research station is investigating the Anomaly, which is getting closer and closer to Earth.

The story is narrated by Ali, an engineer, who as the novel begins, she is also traumatised by the death of Snipes, a crewmate she’d grown close to, who let himself out of the airlock. She also desperately misses her young son Theo back on Earth, but not her husband Xavier, who gaslights her on her calls home, controlling her time with Theo. This morning, missing Snipes, she gets up and her other friend, Monica, the station’s medic, tells her.

…’Don’t freak out.’
I look out of the window in front of us, and I see it. […]
The Anomaly isn’t years away from us; not any more. Until this morning, it was and now it is not. Now, it’s on our doorstep. I don’t know how far; or how close.
As we rotate towards it, our orbit so fixed and yet bringing us closer, closer, it’s clear that is isn’t where it was last night. It’s not there, it’s here, it’s right here, really.
I want to scream.

Of course things will start to get scary for those on the space station, with perhaps the exception of Tomas, who gets memory reboots in the privacy of his cabin to keep him functioning, so Tomas can no longer be relied upon to remember correctly. He, as you might guess, being the controlling twin and having lost Mirakel to the anomaly, has his own agenda and this leaves Ali as the ship’s remaining engineer in a difficult place.

Although the Anomaly is doing its thing, The Edge is less weird and experimental in structure than either The Explorer and The Echo; there are no timelooping phenomena. It’s a more conventional disaster in space thriller, although you could say that Tomas’ memory reboots are timeloops of a kind. Ali is increasingly uneasy and as she gradually uncovers the rest of the crew’s secrets and how that affects her own position, a sense of creeping paranoia sets in, and she’s sure she sees things outside the station.

So the least experimental of the three, but as a precursor to the final part, fittingly titled The End – we’re left in the perfect place to find out what happens (I hope). See Laura’s thoughts too here.

Source: Own copy. Titan paperback, 2021, 283 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s or Amazon UK via my affiliate links.

Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

I enjoy cli-fi and eco-dystopian settings; Camp Zero is set in the near future in 2049. People who can are migrating to cooler climes. America’s uber-rich live in a floating city, currently moored off Boston. There is no longer a fossil-fuel industry – but as we’ll see, oil can still be obtained. Innovations have enabled people to have a chip, a ‘Flick’, implanted at birth to interface with the world. In this world Sterling weaves three story threads together.

There’s Rose, who struck lucky at getting a job as a hostess on the floating city. Her mother remains on the mainland and Rose hopes to eventually bring her to the city, which Damien, the creator of the Flick, has promised her if she’ll undertake a mission to the North for him. She’ll go to the camp where she’ll join a small band of hostesses there for the managers building at Dominion Lake in Canada; her job to look after Meyer, a famous architect, and report back on him.

Next we meet Grant, graduate of the prestigious Walden, son of the Grimley family who own the floating city. Desperate to escape the shackles of privilege, he takes a job as a lecturer in a new campus being built in Canada’s North by Meyer. He gets there, but is shocked to discover the campus isn’t built yet, he’s expected to tutor the workmen, the ‘diggers’ for now in camp.

The final thread is that of the group of women who make up the White Alice climate research team in the far, far North who also look after a seed bank in the tundra. Their supply drops aren’t as frequent, and they must start to make contingency plans. Until the final third of the book, the White Alice group are totally separate from the rest of the world, except for those irregular supply drops. Their chapters are narrated in the first person plural, and the women are known by their specialities; the meteorologist, the botanist etc. This distinguished them from the rest of the novel as voices, but did detach them – I wondered if Sterling took inspiration from the similarly described all women team in Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, the first volume of the Southern Reach Trilogy, (soon to have a 4th part!).

As the novel progresses, and we find out more about the site of the campus, and the inhabitants of the camp, it does start to get slightly more thrillerish. Both Rose and Grant will wonder what’s going on, and as they uncover more of what’s really happening up there, it becomes a dangerous game. We’ll find out how the White Alice group fit into all this too. This novel has a strong feminist slant, although I’m glad to report not all of the men are bad, but there is plenty of toxic masculinity on show. It was a good and well-crafted read, but not outstanding (see again what Laura thought of this book).

Source: Own copy. John Murray, 2023, hardback, 284 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s or Amazon UK via my affiliate links.