Sleeper Beach (SF) - Nick Harkaway ****

After the success of Titanium Noir, it was almost inevitable that Nick Harkaway would give us another novel featuring his future noir detective Cal Sounder - and in many ways this doesn't disappoint. The action takes place at a faded beach resort with a weird (and not entirely explained) phenomenon that gives the book its title - hundreds of people are lying on plastic beds on the (not very pleasant sounding) volcanic beach, effectively having totally given up on life.

Sounder is there at the request of a Titan who has gone through the medical procedure that he has had once - this extends life but also makes the Titan bigger each time, and arguably less human. He is hired to look into the death of a young woman with a mysterious past who was found dead on the beach.

As he digs deeper, Sounder is both looking into the dominant (Titan-led) industry of the area and the revolutionary socialist background that the dead woman seems linked to. There's some nice detective work, and a few dramatic action scenes. As was the case with Titanium Noir, one of the fight scenes is both very dramatic and distinctly unnerving.

Overall it was a satisfying read, but I didn't like it as much as the first novel. In part it was because there was no introduction to the context - it's a couple of years since I read the previous book, and I couldn't remember how things got to the way they were. More so, when I read Titanium Noir, I pointed out how much more I enjoyed it than Harkaway's Gnomon, because that was so ponderous and filled with unnecessary detail. Sleeper Beach has lost some of the pared-down elegance of its predecessor. There's rather too much introspection on the nature of being a Titan versus a 'baseline' human. Also there was less of the gumshoe noir feel I so enjoyed in the first book - Sounder still speaks like a noir detective, but had lost some of the grittiness in his life.

That all sounds a bit negative, but I'd still recommend this book over many of the SF novels you will see recommended in the press by those who don't really understand the genre.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...

Search This Blog