Stephanie Johnson

Waterline by Chris Else (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2019), 311 pp., $34.99

Chris Else’s new novel fits neatly into the zeitgeist of current speculative fiction. Around the world, not surprisingly, writers are meditating on the environmental ruin of our planet, the precariousness of our personal freedoms, the perilous health of democracies and the encroaching all-powerful reach of corporate-owned artificial intelligence. From these depressing influences spring story after story of not too distant imagined futures. In some cases, such as in Ian McEwan’s recent Machines Like Me, the chronological setting is in the past but presents us with an alternative history – i.e. fiction that speculates on how life might have been had certain major technological advances and/or catastrophes taken place earlier. [Read more…]

Majella Cullinane 

The Unreliable People by Rosetta Allan (Penguin Random House, 2019), 352 pp., $38

In the last two decades New Zealand writers who have explored settings outside New Zealand include Elizabeth Knox with her 1998 The Vintner’s Luck set in France, Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip, set in Papua New Guinea and, more recently, Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize-winning novel The Wish Child by Catherine Chidgey, which takes place in Nazi Germany. Rosetta Allan’s second novel, The Unreliable People, immerses the reader in the world of 1930s Soviet Russia and, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1990s St Petersburg.  [Read more…]

Vanda Symon

The Nancys by R.W.R. McDonald (Allen & Unwin, 2019), 400 pp., $32

The blurb for this novel runs:

Tippy Chan is eleven and lives in a small town in a very quiet part of the world – the place her Uncle Pike escaped from the first chance he got as a teenager. Now Pike is back with his new boyfriend Devon to look after Tippy while her mum’s on a cruise.

Tippy is in love with her uncle’s old Nancy Drew books, especially the early ones where Nancy was sixteen and did whatever she wanted. She wants to be Nancy and is desperate to solve a real mystery. When her teacher’s body is found beside Riverstone’s only traffic light, Tippy’s moment has arrived. She and her minders form The Nancys, a secret amateur detective club. [Read more…]

Octavia Cade

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press, 2019), 666pp., $35

Fantasy comes with expectation. It’s a genre of escapism, often involving a very literal escape from one world and into another. Escape, however, is rarely so linear, and there is an expectation that the problems of one world manifest themselves in new ways in another. What it means to be left behind, what it means to compromise yourself, what it means to lose faith and then find it again … these are questions of isolation, of consequence, and of the transformation of self that goes with the movement between worlds.  [Read more…]