Keith Stevenson's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2024
• 2025

TR Napper returns us to his dark cyberpunk future

Endel ‘Endgame’ Ebbinghaus is an enforcer for the Macau drug cartels. He often meets unsavoury people and sometimes he has to kill them. Endgame is a violent abusive husband, and he keeps away from his wife and kid because he’s afraid of what he might do to them. Endgame is a mindless assassin, programmed, set loose and mind-wiped when his target is eliminated. Endgame is a loving partner and parent to his two children, but they don’t live together anymore because of some poor life choices. Endgame is all of these things and none of them. He’s also something else, but he forgets what that is and may never remember.

In The Escher Man, TR Napper returns us to the cyberpunk world he so effectively realised in 36 Streets. The Escher Man was published after 36 Streets but written long before and that may explain why it’s an excellent companion piece to 36 Streets but doesn’t quite hit the high-water mark set by that novel.

In this shared world, the cochlear glyph – a behind-the-ear implant that works like a mobile phone on steroids – has become near ubiquitous, and users are losing the ability to lay down memories, searching instead for the next social-media-delivered dopamine hit, and then the one after that, and the one after that. But memory is not a problem as the c-glyph also contains a memory pin, giving the user complete and perfect recall. Unless they allow their pin to fall into the hands of another who can edit, wipe or implant whatever memories they choose.

Endgame’s boss – Mister Long – frequently accesses his memory pin. It’s convenient for anyone involved in criminal activities to regularly purge inconvenient memories and replace them with watertight alibis. But Endgame is starting to suspect that Long’s editing is a lot more fundamental as his battered mind keeps on dredging up incongruous thoughts and feelings. It’s time, Endgame thinks, to work out what his true history is. And that leads him into a whole world of pain.

Napper has an expert grasp of the cyberpunk form and his descriptions are vivid and bone-crunchingly brutal as Endgame pieces together his broken life, reunites with his estranged family and goes on the run from Mister Long. The plot whips along at breakneck pace – and many necks are indeed broken in Endgame’s headlong dash to freedom. While I really enjoyed the book, it does have its more formulaic aspects – more so than 36 Streets. After all, the anti-hero trying to leave his life of crime only to be pulled back in is a very familiar trope. And I felt that the ending, while satisfying, did feel a little too easy given the obstacles Endgame was facing to his own ‘happy ever after’. As a result, The Escher Man doesn’t quite achieve the nuanced apotheosis of 36 Streets, but it does pull off a hugely entertaining and action-packed story.

Another brilliant read from Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the most prolific author working in today’s science fiction field. He also consistently manages to create engaging adventure stories combined with thought-provoking ideas. As a case in point, last year’s Alien Clay spun a tale of political prisoners incarcerated on a planet with a deadly – and very strange – biosphere, while also subverting and reimagining what it is to be a dissident and how the systems of power created to grind down opposition can be rendered useless with a shift in perspective. Likewise, the latest instalment in his Children’s Series – Children of Memory – has a multi-species crew (including humans and portiid spiders) trying to unravel the mystery of a human colony that shouldn’t exist while narratively dissecting what it means to be sentient, the different modes of sentience that can arise and how easy it is to ascribe sentience to something when it’s not really there.

Bee Speaker is the third instalment of Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War Series, driven by another big idea about ‘uplifted animals’ that have been operated on to create intelligence and sometimes physically changed as well in order to better do humanity’s bidding. The creation of an animal slave species is obviously an ethical minefield, which is explored in earlier books in the series. But in the world of Bee Speaker, time has moved on and animal ‘bioforms’ have been emancipated and are viewed as ‘people’ just like everybody else – at least on the nascent human colony on Mars, where humans had to operate on and change their own biology to survive.

While Earth has slid into a post-apocalyptic dark ages with different groups struggling for control or simple survival, Mars’s colony was guided away from certain doom by the intervention of Bees – a distributed intelligence existing across an uplifted swarm of actual bees.

The colony on Mars don’t know much about what’s happening on Earth as most of the technology that could transmit a signal to them has broken down during the collapse. But then they receive a distress call from ‘another’ Bees and send a small group to help. That’s when things start to go wrong.

The post-collapse landscape of Earth is peppered with different groups: bunker-dwellers who horde the weapons they’ve stockpiled in order to lord it over everyone else; bioform factories which stand as islands of still-functioning tech from the before times; an apiary run by an order of monks, devoted to preserving what knowledge of old Earth they can; and simple villagers trying to build a life on whatever tracts of less-polluted land they can salvage. But none of these things is exactly what it seems, just like none of the people the Martians meet can be taken on face value.

Tchaikovsky pushes these familiar post-apocalyptic scenarios into new and sometimes surprising territory, while also delivering an action-filled tale as the Martian team – which features two very entertaining bioforms, the ‘good dog’ Wells and the insanely contrary ‘dragon’ Irae – try to make sense of things and help who they can without getting killed in the process. But within all that, there’s also a fascinating inspection of distributed intelligence, what it can be and do, and how it might be a danger to every living thing on Earth. Because while Bees is the only distributed intelligence on Mars, Earth is far older and far more complex.

Bee Speaker is another top-notch science fiction tale from an author who – at least so far – can do no wrong.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Head of Zeus who provided me with an Advance Review Copy.

It gets better after the first half.

James SA Corey is, of course, the author of the hugely successful The Expanse Series, a galaxy spanning space opera of interplanetary war and alien threat that played out over nine books and spawned a TV series and other media. I love The Expanse. I’ve read all the books, listened to the audiobooks twice and consumed the show. So, when The Mercy of Gods was announced as kicking off a spectacular new space opera from the same author, I pre-ordered the title immediately.

But when I started reading it, I realised this was quite a different proposition from The Expanse. Firstly, marketing it as a space opera seems not altogether correct. It has space opera elements but this first volume, at least, is mainly confined to a small group of people and a single location. The second thing that hit me was how boring the first half of the book was.

The Expanse’s first book Leviathan Wakes starts with a woman being imprisoned after her ship is attacked and boarded and quickly shifts to another ship responding to an automated distress signal that leads to a violent outcome. From the very first sentence we are in the action and completely invested.

The Mercy of Gods starts with a statement from the alien invader protagonists of the book – the Carryx – laying out their long war of galactic domination and foreshadowing how coming across humanity brought about their downfall. And the very next chapter has one of the human characters – Dafyd – again remonstrating how his life was completely changed by what was to come. It’s foreshadowing on steroids and it’s not the only example before the invasion happens, as if Corey is aware this first section isn’t exactly engaging.

Because it isn’t. The first scene is an academic end of year ball in which we are introduced to Dafyd and a number of other academics and we begin to understand the byzantine politics of academic funding. Dafyd’s team is in the ascendancy but other institutions and study groups are looking to undermine them or steal their work. We also meet Dafyd’s colleagues, none of whom are particularly likeable or interesting for that matter and – even by the halfway mark of the novel – don’t seem well defined.

Because of all this the promised alien invasion seems to be a long time coming, despite hints and, yes, more foreshadowing. The first half of the book could have been told much more economically so we could get to the good stuff quicker.

And there is good stuff to be had. After the invasion finally happens – hooray! – The group are split up and transported to a planet owed by the Carryx. They’re given a scientific task to complete which will show whether their species will be useful to the Carryx or not. The implication is that if they’re not, they’ll all be killed. The facility they’re in is also inhabited by a wide range of other subject species all working on their own projects for – presumably – the same ends. Dafyd begins to seek out and talk to their Carryx supervisor and slowly works out that the test is more than it seems. He also encounters a spy who is working against the Carryx on the inside, so we start to get some real drama and intrigue and the story centres on how they can turn the situation to their advantage. But it’s Dafyd’s intuition about the psychology of the Carryx that points to a way they may be able to defeat their captors.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the book, but I’m still pretty annoyed about being subjected to the first half. I’m also worried that the story might turn into one about ‘human exceptionalism’. The idea that the other subject species just give up and succumb to the Carryx, but there’s something different about the rebellious human spirit that gives us an edge. It’s a pretty tired SF trope, but it’s also one that’s no longer possible to justify, given how terrible the state of our real world is right now.