Eon, Greg Bear

"Above our planet hangs a hollow Stone, vast as the imagination of Man. The inner dimensions are at odds with the outer: there are different chambers to be breached, some even containing deserted cities. The furthest chamber contains the greatest mystery ever to confront the Stone's scientists.

But tombstone or milestone, the Stone is not an alien structure: it comes from the future of our humanity. And the war that breaks out on Earth seems to bear witness to the Stone's prowess as oracle . . ."










If Through Darkest America was unsure whether it wanted to be post-apocalyptic, civil-war epic, Western or teen drama, Eon at least has the virtue of not needing to choose what it is by being everything to all things. It's big sci-fi, hard sci-fi, in the classic vein, with a plot that is followable but not necessarily understandable for all the right reasons.

When the cold war is interrupted by the arrival of a massive meteor, orbiting the Earth, science teams are sent to investigate. At which point every expectation about what's coming next breaks down as Bear decides to just skip over the bits you assume will come next, like the initial reaction to the stone's arrival, or the consequences of a world-ending nuclear war.

This is not a story that's afraid to hit its audience over the head thematically, but it's in the actual science that things can go a bit off the deep end. When your main character is an experimental physicist so brilliant a civilisation literally centuries ahead needs her mind to advance their science you know there's not going to be too much slowing down for the kids at the back to keep up. And so it proves, as the book seeks to set up a mathematical concept allowing a TARDIS to hijack a space rock out of its dimension and back through time. And then there's a space war. Everyone in the book is 'brilliant' in their own way, which can be distracting but is probably more fair in the context of a top secret scientific exploration of future-tech and alien activity.

It makes very little sense but is terrific fun, and works as a wonderful example of truly well thought out xenofiction, up there with anything in the Ender's Game books (a series which did very well at imagining lots of very alien species).

It also has a couple of sequels which I won't be hunting out but would certainly read if I came across them.

Also Try;
Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
K. A. Applegate, The Ellimist Chronicles

The Violent Century, Lavie Tidhar

"For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart. But there must always be an account...and the past has a habit of catching up to the present. Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism, - a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields - to answer one last, impossible question: What makes a hero?"









A surprise Christmas present from my good friend and fellow Impossible Podcaster Caleb, Lavie Tidhar's World War 2 superhero romp is a work of depth and scope, one which manages to be interesting to both the historian and comic fan in me.

The Second World War is fertile ground for reimagining, with almost every alternate history writer ever having written at least one book set in Europe between '39 and '45. From 'The Man in the High Castle' to 'Fatherland', most revisionists have chosen to present an alternative of Axis triumph - I've reviewed a few already that have included a picture of either a British collapse before 1941 or a comprehensive Russian defeat after, the two most common ideas.

To Tidhar's credit then, this is not simply a 'What If'. Instead, he imagines a world in which superpowers, distributed evenly simply balance out the sides, meaning no war-winning advantage. Forget Captain America punching out hitler, or Superman sinking Japanese ships. These 'heroes' are flawed, weak individuals, whose impact is as important for propaganda (the American super-soldiers) and intelligence gathering (the British super-spies), as actual battle (the Russians).

In fact, each nation utilises it's new powered assets differently, sending some into the heart of the conflict and using the talents of others for their own purposes - the NAZIs begin to use theirs to hunt down Jews and Allied heroes for Dr. Mengele.

It's a hard line to tread, mixing the fantastic with a perils of history that was almost unprecedentedly brutal, with countless atrocities. The Violent Century doesn't shy away from this, instead addressing these head on, and as time passes and it moves onto Vietnam, Soviet-era Afghanistan and the course of history passes unimpeded their presence only acts as a spotlight on the other historical acts of aggression perpetrated by all the Great Powers on their vassal states.

Mixing real events and individuals (featuring cameos from a comic-less Stan Lee and Siegel and Schuster) with the more imaginative (Sabra, the Israeli hero of the Warsaw Uprisings who is killed rescuing hostages at the Munich Olympics, is an inspired example), the book treads a course through much foreign policy of the Cold War years.

The USP of The Violent Century though is not its use of real and imagined characters or narrative sweep, but it's staccato text and grammar-less drive. Entire conversations pass without the need to hang quotation marks or apostrophes. Far from liberating the words, this adds a paranoid, disconcerting immediacy - a sense, intentional I'm sure, that things are not quite as they should be. This is a world without punctuation; what if, rather than "What If?" 

Also Try:

Kieron Gillen, Über

Harry Turtledove, World War series

Stephen Fry, Making History

Alan Moore, Top Ten