Celestial (SF) - M. D. Lachlan ***

An important point first - despite being labelled as such, this is not science fiction at all. It's science fantasy, a once-popular genre that has become relatively uncommon these days. Celestial is very much in the same category as Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. (I don't usually review fantasy here, but I'm making an exception for this one, partly because I didn't realise it was.)

The setting is an alternative 1977, where the US and the USSR are both sending manned missions to the Moon. A mysterious hatch has been discovered in the Moon's surface, leading to what may be alien technology - something both sides want to get their hands on. The central character, Ziggy da Luca is a linguist, an apparently strange choice for a NASA crew, who ends up having to deal with difficulties both from her own crew and Soviet cosmonauts. I ought to stress it being an alternative 1977 isn't why I'm calling it fantasy - that seems to be a pretty much accepted part of the SF genre.

So far, so Arrival. But once they're through the hatch, the astronauts and cosmonauts experience a world of total weirdness that for me seemed to have three strong points of comparison. The first is the final segment of the film 2001, A Space Odyssey - with its combination of psychedelic effects on the way in and distinctly mystical woo in what then occurs. The second is Lewis Carroll's work. There's both the nightmare/dream aspects of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and the mix of dark/light in the quest of The Hunting of the Snark - though in this case totally lacking any sense of humour.

Finally, there was a lot that reminded me of the weird lost ships in Karl Drinkwater's Lost Solace series, though Celestial benefits considerably from having a group of people to react to what's happening, rather than a single individual with only an AI for company in Lost Solace.

For me, there was just too much weirdness - I can cope with the bit at the end of 2001 because the main part of the film is so brilliant, but here, apart from opening and closing chapters, pretty much the entire book is set in the randomly odd environment, which has very little attempt at scientific plausibility, relying instead on a mythical/fantasy foundation.

Nonetheless, the book is well written and I stuck with it rather than giving up part way through because there was always the promise of rationality returning (it just never did). If you want to try something really different from a traditional space SF novel, this is well worth a try. But for me, this snark was a boojum.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here