The best new sci-fi: action-packed plots and pure ‘nerdstalgia’

In 1990 a mountain taller than Everest materialises out of nowhere in the middle of the Pacific. A team of scientists is secretly enlisted to scale its heights and plumb its mysteries. Thirty years on, letters written by one of the team, Dr Harold Tunmore, to his niece are unearthed. They tell a vertiginous tale of discovery, horror and weird, time-bending phenomena . . . not to mention marauding tentacled monsters.

Using the mountain as a metaphor for humankind’s constant striving towards grace and knowledge, Nicholas Binge’s Ascension (HarperVoyager, £16.99) explores themes of faith and determinism, with plenty of hardcore science thrown in.

The novel’s epistolary format and frequent references to the Sisyphus myth help to elevate it above its pulp-thriller concept, but the author also provides well-sustained tension and some excitingly wrought scenes of violence.

Where Ascension ventures answers to some of life’s more perplexing questions, Nina Allan’s Conquest (Riverrun, £18.99) cheerfully trades in obfuscation. Its plot — private detective investigates missing-person case — is a clothesline on which hangs a patchwork quilt of viewpoint narratives and excerpts of “found” text that as a whole don’t quite align and aren’t meant to.

The missing person is Frank Landau, an autistic young man obsessed with Bach, Bowie and codes. Fearful of an impending covert alien invasion, Frank is convinced that an obscure and oblique 1950s SF novella called The Tower will unlock the truth behind his irrational-seeming beliefs. After he disappears in Paris, his girlfriend hires police officer-turned-PI Robin to find him, a task more personal to Robin than she at first realises.

Allan challengingly evokes a world of paranoia and delusion where imprecise, elusive connections can be made, if one is bold or mad enough. By contrast, rigid certainty typifies the protagonist of Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory (Orbit, £18.99), at least in the book’s opening sections.

Space soldier Kyr — short for Valkyr, an appropriate name for a female warrior — has been instilled since birth with hatred for the majo, the aliens who inflicted genocide on planet Earth. Bred to enact vengeance on behalf of humanity’s last few survivors, she begins to question the belligerent creed she lives by when her brother is sent on a deadly assignment and she herself is relegated to childbearing duties.

The novel, taking its title from a line in Wilfred Owen’s savagely ironic “Dulce et Decorum Est”, traces the awakening of Kyr’s conscience and her efforts to shake off the chains of a martial, heteronormative upbringing and embrace otherness. If that makes it sound dry and worthy, it is anything but. This is vigorous, action-packed space opera with a progressive slant.

“Vigorous” and “action-packed” are equally apt descriptors for The Malevolent Seven by Sebastien de Castell (Jo Fletcher Books, £20). This fantasy adventure, centring around a bunch of foulmouthed, morally compromised anti-heroes, draws as much from Quentin Tarantino movies as from the classic 1960 Western whose title it imitates.

Cade Ombra is a “wonderist”, a war mage who sells his skills to the highest bidder. Reluctantly he finds himself tasked with gathering six like-minded mercenary sorcerers in order to combat the supposedly virtuous sibling wizards known as the Seven Brothers, although his band of recruits seem scarcely able to agree about anything, let alone form a cohesive fighting unit. It’s all part of Cade’s involvement in an ongoing conflict between otherworldly forces of good and evil. Here angels and demons are neither as divine nor as devilish as one might suppose, and tend to treat the mortal realm like their own personal chessboard.

There is no way you can read this book without a grin on your face as the Canadian author gleefully dishes up murky motivations, gory deaths, snarky quips and a fair few reversals and plot twists, while not neglecting to make clear how the various magic systems in his fictional world work.

If you are a fan of vintage British TV SF, you may recall another septet of unscrupulous, squabbling desperadoes, namely the main characters of Blake’s 7, together launching an ultimately doomed resistance against the corrupt, autocratic Terran Federation. The series, which ran from 1978 to 1981 and might be summarised as “Ken Loach does Star Wars”, is fondly remembered to this day, despite shoddy production values and a relentlessly downbeat tone. Now its first season has been reproduced in prose form as Blake’s 7: Origins (Big Finish Productions, £134.99), a handsome box-set of seven hardbacks, each by a different author and each retelling two episodes apiece.

Said authors, who include Paul Cornell, Una McCormack and Steve Cole, are all well respected in the SF field and have, while cleaving to the original teleplays, seized the opportunity to add back-story and character depth and reconcile a few plotline inconsistencies. Granted, it’s an exercise in pure “nerdstalgia”, but hard to resist when done with such passion and aplomb.

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