World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

by Max Brooks

Take out the letter Z and put in II and you would get a perfect telling of an actual war. The zombie war hasn’t actually happened but Max Brooks does a great job of making it seem as if it has.

The war is told to us in a collection of individual stories from different people who survived it. People from all across the globe, even those in the international space station, get to tell their story of survival.

WWZ is a follow up book to The Zombie Survival Guide, also by Brooks. Brooks actually mentions the survival guide in WWZ as a book that people used to help them.

The best part about WWZ is that Brooks uses a fictional tale of zombies to make wonderful social comments about the world today. Brooks uses real life world issues to tell his story; such as a Palestinian boy living in Kuwait refusing to believe that there are zombies, thinking that it is a trick by Israel.

The story raises the question of whether there is a victory or not. The epidemic still rages in many different parts of the world, but humanity is surviving and fighting back.

Reviewed by Mollie

Under The Dome

By Stephen King


There are people who say that Stephen King is past his best. There are people who say that he has become less sympathetic, more misanthropic since his accident at the turn of the last decade. There are people who say that he can’t write endings. And then he goes and writes “Under The Dome”.

At 877 pages, this is a big book with a capital B, I & G, bigger even than “The Stand” (a lot of people’s favorite King book). But even at that length it doesn’t feel underpowered, slow, or tricked out with padding and accessories. Uh-uh, this book is a souped-up, stripped-down custom car, pedal-to-the-metal, no time for sight-seeing, barely a stop to refill the tanks.

Its size begs comparison with “The Stand”, but the similarities don’t stop there. King has said elsewhere that the failing of “The Stand” was that it had too much space, that the survivors of the Captain Trips flu had the whole of the country’s resources with which to rebuild society. So, in “Under The Dome” he re-addresses the themes of the earlier book, but in a highly compressed environment. Instead of the whole country, the setting is a town of a few thousand people cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious invisible, unbreakable wall. Instead of the months it takes for events to come to a head, the whole passage of this book is less than a week. Instead of unlimited resources, the inhabitants have the contents of the local supermarket, and a rapidly staling air supply.

Spot the other similarities: an outsider/drifter hero, a man with a burden of guilt on his conscience; a religious maniac; an upright, courageous heroine; a sympathetic police chief; a plucky kid genius; a song that is on everyone’s lips; a society that is devolving into Civil War, because of one man’s lust for power.

But “Under The Dome” is more, much more than a rehash. It is also a parable about isolationism, pollution, about politicians claiming the mandate of God, about seeing terrorists in every shadow, and using the threat of terrorism to promote fear, force through fascist policies and take an ever tighter grip on the people.

And more than this, it is a gripping read, and King, whatever failings he may be accused of, is never less than a master of readable prose. As a plot mechanic, he weaves his multiple strands to keep the reader turning the page (and, in this reader’s case, actually shouting out warnings to the characters of what lies around the corner). The characters themselves are warmer than King has created of late - “Duma Key” being a notable example of a less-than-sympathetic lead - and King’s habit of killing his cast offhand and callously that was demonstrated in that book is reined in tightly here. That is not to say that anyone is safe, far from it; but in “Under the Dome”, when King has someone die it serves a purpose both to the narrative and to the reader’s sense of the inevitable (and sometime unjust) nature of death.

King is often dismissed as a “horror” writer. In truth, with books like this he is much closer to the British “disaster” SF novelists of the Fifties (John Christopher and Wyndham, for example), and perhaps “Under The Dome” will go some way to making him appreciated as something more than a horror comic writer with delusions of grandeur.

He still can’t write endings, though. But sometimes it is the journey that counts, not the destination.

Reviewed by Mike Deller

The Nano Flower

by Peter F Hamilton

The Nano Flower is the third book in the Greg Mandel series, set in a not-too-distant future following global warming, economic and political crises. The novel can be read as part of the series but also stands well by itself. Unlike some of Hamilton's more epic works, these stories are not quite so "hard" Science Fiction. They're more like murder mysteries and other crime tales, though set in a future world. Don't worry, hard SF fans will still enjoy the big ideas and big hardware, though they're not so up-front as in the Confederation or Commonwealth series.

The Nano Flower, like the previous two, features Greg Mandel, a psychic with artificially enhanced abilities who helps to solve crimes. This one has the additional feature of involving humans' first encounter with an alien species. This first contact is by no means conventional and certainly far from some of the clichés in lesser tales. Characters are very real and very diverse. The new world is clearly painted; a recovering and hopeful one, following the Warming and its associated troubles.

Anyone who still thinks SF is full of cardboard characters, spaceships, bug-eyed monsters and girls in bikinis is in for a big shock: the genre has moved on and grown exponentially since the "B movie" days (where have you been for the last six decades?). I can highly recommend this and all of Hamilton's work for the great stories, great characters and huge ideas. Open your minds and find out what you've been missing.

The Nano Flower is available from Pan Books, ISBN 978-0-330-33044-2
See also Mindstar Rising (978-0-330-32376-8) and A Quantum Murder (978-0-330-33045-9).

Reviewed by Captain Black

Extra(ordinary) People

by Joanna Russ

For someone who is not a huge fan of science fiction, I have been reading a fair bit recently. Rather, I have been revisiting old favourites. And Joanna Russ’s work certainly comes into the category of favourites – of any genre. In fact, as far as I’m concerned she is one of the best writers I’ve ever read.

Her work is intelligent without relying on obscurity or cleverness; she writes with passion and clarity; tackles difficult subjects with ease, wit, and humour (which isn’t always the same thing); and has done more to stretch the boundaries of her chosen genre than most other writers.

Extra(ordinary) People is more than a collection of short works without quite being a novel. This, in itself, makes for an interesting and vibrant format where themes can be explored from different angles without creating the false or awkward situations that might be necessary in a single piece. These themes and ideas are carried forward in a way that unifies the pieces, even though they are outwardly disparate.

As well as the themes that are explored (of which more in a moment); there is a common underlying viewpoint that binds the stories.

A lesser writer would, perhaps, have made something of this structure, creating and peopling an elaborate back story, yet Russ has allowed the stories to do that through the voice of the central character(s). A sense of alien presence, of otherness, is conveyed through what is highlighted as absurd in humanity.

The stories in the book are about communication and about understanding what it is to be human, especially for one half of the human race. And this is why I have left the themes of this book until now. Russ is a feminist. And already I can hear the sound of hordes of sci-fi fans (and others) walking away. Which is strange and saddening. Yet it is no rare thing for sci-fi apologists to expound its ground breaking qualities whilst accepting books that are misogynistic, militaristic, or at best paternalistic without batting an eyelid or bruising their delicate consciences. Make one mention of the position of women in a future or alternative world and we are told this cannot be real sci-fi (unless of course the women in question are young, blonde, pneumatic and wearing skin tight space suits). The same holds for fantasy.

Yet some of the very best sci-fi and some of the very best fantasy has been and will continue to be written by, for, and about women. And long may it continue. I don’t want a literature that excludes half the planet’s population, or treats its members like a housewife in a fifties sitcom. That is degrading and downright unrealistic.

Russ examines the place and experience of women in the world. This world. Other worlds. She stands assumptions on their heads. She explores possibilities. She even discusses the nature of fiction. And she does it as part of a long and grand tradition of women writers in the genre. Yet it is not polemic. That makes for bad fiction. And if there is one thing that is certain, it is that Joanna Russ writes good fiction – extraordinary fiction.

reviewed by Graeme K. Talboys