The best recent science fiction, fantasy, crime and horror – book review roundup
Sarah Baker's debut novel, Red Wall (Penguin, £12.99), presents a plausible post-pandemic society following the enforced division of England by a ten metre electric fence. Chris lives north of the wall in the ruins of X-Manchester, hollowed out by poverty and disease, but seeks reconciliation with childhood sweetheart Beth from virus-free Cambridg£. One of them must find a way across the barrier which divides them, deftly dodging the Border Force robots who shoot presumed migrants on sight, without triggering the microchipped BloodKlot implant which keeps wayward youth in check. Baker movingly charts Beth's coming of age story as her world and Chris's collide.
When a defeated President refuses to leave the White House quietly, a dangerous stand-off ensues. Robert Drakeman's latest thriller, Bunker Down (Faber, £14.99), imagines an entirely hypothetical situation in which a trigger-happy narcissist refuses to attend his successor's inauguration and takes refuge on a golf course with the nuclear codes. As FBI agents surround the clubhouse, social media bosses must decide whether or not to delete the President's account before Air Force One drops its deadly payload. Although Drakeman ramps up the tension from the tee-off, the denouement is sadly below par.
In Rollback (Titan, £8.99), Kendra McKay presents a frighteningly real near-future in which global health systems have been overwhelmed by a super-infectious virus. A team of scientists builds a time machine to send a vaccine taskforce back to 2018 in an attempt to warn society and prevent the outbreak from occurring. But in a very obvious twist which even a schoolchild could have seen coming, they unintentionally take the virus back with them and set off the whole crisis off several months early, so that when they return to the future they discover things are ten times worse. A subplot involving a cat giving birth to itself fails to lighten the mood.
Billed as a political pseudo-thriller, Party Games (Gollancz, £18.99) is the latest novella by Orion-winner Bernard Castle. After the Queen abruptly dies from Covid-19, her infection is traced back to a superspreader party celebrating Wilfred Johnson's 1st birthday at 10 Downing Street. As the country enters an unprecedented period of riotous mourning, DC Lena Nblisi must tackle an official veil of silence to uncover the wilful incompetence at the heart of power. An incisive tale of subverted justice, party favours, post-truth and plausible deniability.
A high-concept saga as much as a dystopian page-turner, Seb Danzig's Tuktuk (HarperCollins, £16.99) is the tale of Amir Kumar, a downtrodden Peckham resident eking out a hard life as a scooter-based delivery driver. With the English economy having flatlined, the Bankrupt are forced to carry out menial tasks for the Loaded to make ends meet, and a missed coffee-drop can be the difference between a bed for the night and going hungry. But when a redundant librarian offers to pay off Amir's health insurance debts in return for a delivering a mystery package, liberty and creative endeavour are cruelly compromised by political and socioeconomic reality.
Micaiah Holman's entertaining second novel, Nemesis (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99), opens with an announcement by the WHO that a successful coronavirus vaccine has been discovered. But even as the world celebrates, an unprecedented iceberg calving event causes the Gulf Stream to accelerate sparking methane plumes across the Arctic and setting in train an irreversible surge in global sea level, plunging the population back into unmitigated despair as they realise things are never going to get any better and 2019 was as good as it ever gets. Without offering too many spoilers, Ms Holman will not be writing a follow-up novel.
Family troubles drive the plot of author Kit Percher's latest release, Stay Indoors (Vertigo, £9.99). Set in an unnamed suburb where a global pandemic has confined citizens to their homes, Jean and Ken spend their days watching TV, surreptitiously tending to their garden and waiting for the weekly grocery drone-drop. But when the internet fails and Radio 2 goes silent, the couple are forced to talk to each other over what's left of the coffee, opening up long-buried wounds. As the power cuts become more persistent and the sudokus run out, the race is on to settle old scores before hypothermia sets in.
In Last Christmas (Random House, £11.99), an exciting collaboration between Elizabeth Kay and Caitlin Lam, the nation's festivities are disrupted by a cavalcade of calamities. On the first day red tape at the Channel ports prevent delivery of Yuletide essentials, on the second day a global stock market crash wipes out the banking system and on the third day an additional coronavirus is discovered and runs rampant across the Home Counties. By the time the aliens land on day six the tension has been ratcheted up to unbearable levels, and in the end humanity's fate is a toss up between a solar flare and an unexpected meteor strike. The ideal uplifting 2020 stocking filler.
