Termush by Sven Holm

First published in Denmark in 1967; published in translation by Faber & Faber in the UK in 1969; published by ‎Farar, Straus & Giroux (FSG Originals) on January 9, 2024

Termush was “rediscovered” by Faber editors who dug through the Faber vaults to find forgotten novels that might deserve to be regarded as classics. Faber released it in the UK in 2023 as part of its “Faber editions” series.

Termush is the name of a remote hotel on an unidentified ocean. The narrator paid a substantial sum for a guaranteed spot in the hotel as a shelter from catastrophe. His lodging includes access to underground shelters, stored provisions, uncontaminated water, and security against outsiders. The hotel’s luxury yacht is berthed nearby, providing egress if life in the hotel becomes unsustainable.

We aren’t given the details, but a disaster (presumably a nuclear war) gave the wealthy guests reason to check into the hotel. The guests are finally free to venture outside, subject to radiation warnings that send them scurrying back to the shelters. There is little to see; vegetation has gone up in flames, birds are dying.

The novel is intentionally surreal in its depiction of hotel guests as largely undisturbed by disasters that don’t immediately affect them. Perhaps the world outside their walls has nearly come to an end, but they are still able to order dinner from a full menu. The guests display little curiosity about the world’s fate. Occasionally returning to underground shelters when the wind brings too much radiation to the hotel grounds is inconvenient, but most guests are content to follow the directions of hotel management.

The hotel staff is sending out reconnaissance parties to look for inhabitable areas, but their radioed reports are censored before reaching the guests. The narrator opposes the censorship; he wants to know what is left of the world. Management isn’t sure the guests can handle the truth. Most guests seem to feel the same way. If the news is bleak, they don’t want to know.

The narrator understands when a guest who can no longer tolerate “this closed compartment cut off from the world” flees from “the game of make-believe that nothing had happened.” Eventually, a few more follow the path of freedom, leading hotel management to act more like jailers than servants. Perhaps an insurrection is coming.

When survivors appear in search of food and medical care, the hotel guests consider whether it is appropriate to be charitable. The survivors come bearing news of the outside world, which is a good thing, but the outsiders didn’t pay a fee for the hotel’s protection, as did the guests. The guests quickly vote on rules that allow a few survivors at a time to enter the hotel for food and water, but only for one night. This leads to a discussion about the perils of democratic decision-making.

Nor do some guests want their reconnaissance teams to be helping survivors. That’s not the job they’re paid to do, after all (payment presumably meaning continued access to the hotel and its resources), so most guests feel the team members should set their humanity aside and do what they’re told. Termush illustrates the divide between ruling class and working class with more flair than Marx.

The narrator develops an intimate friendship with a woman named Maria, but she is an enigma. She never seems to speak, communicating by expressions that convey her emotions. “She keeps close to me, follows me almost stride for stride, as if this were an order.” I was left wondering whether Maria actually exists.

Much of the time, the narrator seems to be in the dark about the world he now inhabits. Hotel management attributes a guard’s injured arm to being “careless with a hand grenade.” Why does hotel security have hand grenades and what did the careless guard intend to do with his? They later morph from “security” to “soldiers” in ways and for reasons that the narrator does not explain. Eventually, the hotel seems to be under siege, but by whom? The narrator refers to “the strangers” and “our adversaries,” later designating them as “the enemy,” but seems to have no clue about their identity. Nor does he seem to care. The narrator is so detached, so free from opinions, that the story’s moral questions are left unfiltered. Should the hotel help outsiders? Should hotel “soldiers” kill them? Readers are free to make of these issues what they will.

The story’s surreal atmosphere is illustrated by the final sentence: “Outside the sea is still; there is no darkness and no light.” Without darkness or light, what kind of reality exists? The novel’s ambiguities might explain why the Faber editors regarded Termush as a potential classic. The story could be set in any country, in any time. While the guests are sheltering against drifting clouds of radiation, any other apocalyptic event could as easily be substituted. The story resonates because of its focus on group responses to crisis and how those responses may be a function of social class.

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Winter's Gifts by Ben Aaronovitch

First published in the UK in 2023; published in a deluxe edition by Subterranean Press on December 1, 2023

Winter’s Gifts is a good book for readers who miss the X Files. The supernatural/horror elements in this short novel (or long novella) are . . . wait for it . . . snow zombies. Don’t let that discourage you from reading the book. Being made largely of snow and trash, they bear little resemblance to ordinary zombies.

The novel is the most recent in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London urban fantasy series. Winter’s Gifts features Kimberly Reynolds, who appeared in a couple of earlier novels in the series. Reynolds is an FBI agent who, like Mulder and Scully, handles cases for the FBI that have “unusual characteristics.”

A retired agent named Patrick Henderson contacted the Bureau and asked for a meeting in Eloise, Wisconsin to discuss such a case. Eloise is way up north, not far from the Apostle Islands. Reynolds must contend with a blizzard as she makes her way to the small town. She arrives just after a snow tornado destroys the town hall.

A neighbor tells Reynolds that she saw Henderson being dragged from his house by a shambling creature with antlers. The neighbor assumed she was dreaming and went back to bed. When Reynolds finds a mutilated deer, she wonders if Henderson was abducted by someone carrying a deer head. Her subsequent discovery of a human arm suggests that there is more to the case than animal mutilation.

Reynolds wonders whether the mystery that troubled Henderson ties into the Marsh expedition. Its explorers made camp in Eloise in 1843 before they disappeared. Reynolds finds the journal of a Canadian trapper in the local library that provides clues to the fate of the explorers. Reynolds suspects that wolf spirits may have been involved. Scott Walker, an ethnographer from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, helps Reynolds understand local legends and native history relating to supernatural creatures, leading Reynolds to suspect that a weaponized spirit may be preying on the community.

The other significant characters are the local librarian (Sadie Clarkson), a meteorologist (William Boyd), a little girl named Ashley, a grandmother named Ada Cole who owns the local hotel, and a missing hotel guest named Bunker. Some of the characters are magicians/wizards/witches. Some characters who aren’t practitioners of magic are knowledgeable about the supernatural. Bunker seems to have been compiling information about Henderson, Walker, and Clarkson for a mysterious purpose. Reynolds needs to decide whether she can trust characters who dabble in magic.

A couple of Native Americans join the cast in the novel’s second half. One of them is probably a supernatural being, although he’s not a snow zombie.

The explanation of the snow zombies involves desecration of the environment. The spirits are bothered by people who litter. Well, who isn’t? By definition, supernatural story elements don’t need to be rational, so the novel’s sketchy explanation of snow monsters is probably as good as any.

Aaronovitch keeps the story moving, adding elements of mild horror to an investigation of unusual circumstances before hastening the pace with chases through the snow and across the ice. While the story isn’t particularly frightening, the characters are entertaining. Reynolds develops a romantic attachment that might be more accurately described as a lustful attachment, although the G-rated narrative suggests that Reynolds hasn’t cast aside her religious upbringing to embrace the joys of hedonism.

While I’m not generally a fan of urban fantasy, I’ve found Aaronovitch to be one of its better practitioners. Readers who are fond of urban fantasy should be pleased with this latest entry in the Rivers of London series.

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Scorpio by Marko Kloos

Published by ‎ 47North on January 1, 2024

Scorpio is a novel in Marko Kloos’s Frontlines universe. There are, I think, eight Frontlines novels. Scorpio begins a new series called Frontlines: Evolution.

Humans colonized and terraformed various worlds and were getting along just fine fighting with other humans until aliens known as Lankies appeared. Scorpio is a planet that was being terraformed when Lankies showed up and began stomping on people. Most colonists died but about 150 are still alive, eight years after the Lankies arrived.

The surviving humans clustered in an underground facility. It isn’t easy to venture outside because the Lankies are reversing the terraforming, reducing oxygen and increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The survivors nevertheless take occasional trips to the remnants of their other settlements to scavenge for rechargeable batteries and lemon bars and whatever else they can find.

When Alexandra (“Alex”) Archer traveled to Scorpio with her family, she was too young to form memories of the voyage. Now she’s 21. The first two-thirds of the novel follows Alex and a group of soldiers and civilians on a scavenging trip. Alex is a civilian, but she’s attached to the military because she has trained and handles a military dog who alerts when Lankies are coming close.

The scavenging trip is the stuff of traditional military science fiction. Colonists who were assigned to the military operate cannons and handheld weapons to take out attacking Lankies. The scavenging seems to be going well until it isn’t. The scenes that depict the shit hitting the fan are intense.

The novel’s last third follows Alex after she returns to Earth. This is an interesting approach to military sf, as Alex’s story (after she leaves Scorpio) has little to do with military action. She gets into a tussle with some muggers and shows her moxie, but the deeper story involves Alex’s poor adjustment to a life in which she doesn’t feel a sense of purpose, a life in a place where she doesn’t belong.

I assume Alex will be the star of the Frontlines: Evolution series. She’s a likable character. Kloos’s prose is smooth and straightforward. He clearly admires the military, but he doesn’t go overboard with praise of heroism and brotherhood. I prefer anti-military science fiction, but I give Kloos credit for being a good storyteller. Military sf fans who are looking for a new series to follow, as well as current Kloos fans, might want to give Scorpio a try.

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Generation Ship by Michael Mammay

Published by Harper Voyager on October 17, 2023

If it is impossible to travel faster than light or to circumvent that restriction with wormholes or warp drives, generation ships will be necessary to expand humanity beyond our solar system. Unfortunately, humans don’t always play well together. Thousands of humans living on an interstellar cruise ship probably won’t last more than twenty years before their society starts to fall apart. After a century, chaos seems inevitable. Non-Stop remains my favorite example of a generation ship that has gone to ruin.

The ship in Michael Mammay’s novel has defied the odds. It has been in flight for more than two centuries. As the novel begins, it is one hundred days from its destination. The ship has maintained order with elements of authoritarian rule. Power is shared between the governor (who makes decisions based on politics) and the captain (whose job is to keep the ship safe). The ship’s charter requires everyone to work in an assigned job until  they reach the age of 75, when they have a nice birthday party before being recycled. The ship’s population is capped at 18,000. Each death permits a new birth, which must be authorized by bureaucrats.

The idea of dying before the body is ready for a natural death doesn’t bother the ship’s population until they near their destination. Continuing to kill people when the ship may soon be sending colonists to the planet seems unnecessary to those who are about to die as well as their families and friends. Protests mount.

On the other hand, it isn’t clear that colonization will occur. Every probe sent to the planet (apart from those that scout uninhabitable land masses) has malfunctioned. A probe that managed to send pictures before the connection was lost seems to have taken a picture of something with eyes. Probes flown over a desert land mass seem to show the ruins of a building. Some people believe that the ship should press on to a new destination rather than interfere with indigenous life, although conquering or killing indigenous life is pretty much the story of human history.

Each chapter focuses on a character. The key characters are Mark Rector, who works in the security force (Secfor) and believes government should rule with a fist; Jarred Pantel, the governor whose sole goal is to retain or increase his power; Sheila Jackson, a scientist who opposes the governor’s plan to start colonization before they have more data about the planet; Eddie Dannon, a coder and hacker who develops a way to jack her mind into the ship’s software; and George Iannou, a reluctant protest leader whose loyalties are unclear.

The plot noodles around for way too many words, wrapping around familiar concepts that include first contact, the development of digital sentience, and the Gaia hypothesis. Most of the story, however, consists of passengers on the ship arguing with each other. It takes far too long for passengers to make their way to the planet and solve its mysteries. Once they finally arrive on the planet, they take their shipboard arguments with them. The ensuing events seem secondary to the quarrels that are the novel’s true plot. I suppose it might be fair to say that political revolution within a confined spaceship is the true plot, but this isn’t the kind of meaningful revolution we got from Heinlein, who had grumpy but determined men using catapaults to chuck moon rocks at the Earth. Mammay's is a revolution reminiscent of the January 6 insurrection, where aimless people wandered around and made noise.

Mammay’s prose is adequate, although his style is wordy and prone to lazy clichés (“it hurt like nobody’s business”). A good third of the novel could have been cut without harming the plot or character development. The essential parts of the novel relate a story that has some interesting moments, but not enough to stand as riveting fiction. As a fan of generation ship novels, I was disappointed.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Future by Naomi Alderman

Published by Simon & Schuster on November 7, 2023

In the infancy of their companies, tech entrepreneurs improved our lives with devices and apps that we now regard as indispensable. After the entrepreneurs became billionaires, they arguably did more harm than good. They stole our data, used AI to deceive us, and invented ways to control our behavior. Nobody likes tech billionaires.

The Future takes place in the near future, maybe a couple of decades from now. Its focus is on tech billionaires and their need for control. The über-wealthy characters believe they are in the best position to survive whatever catastrophe will be the tipping point that ends most life on Earth. They find survival assistance in software called AUGR that predicts catastrophes and plots the best strategy to stay alive.

Martha Eikhorn has access to AUGR. When she gives it to her lover, Lai Zhen, AUGR saves Lai from an assassin’s attack in the novel’s best action scene. Martha grew up as a fundamentalist who learned survival skills to prepare for the end of days. Martha’s story of using her skills during an encounter with a starving bear is mesmerizing.

Martha works for Lenk Sketlish, founder of a social media empire. Albert Dabrowski founded Medlar, a tech giant that manufactures phones and laptops. Ellen Bywater, a genius at corporate takeovers rather than tech, forced Dabrowkski out of his company. Zimri Nommik founded Anvil, which seems a lot like Amazon, before he built AnvilChat and AnvilParty to “snap up everything in his all-consuming maw.” He became the richest person on Earth by using data harvesting methods to manipulate advertising clicks.

The tech billionaires don’t care if the world ends as long as they inherit the post-apocalyptic landscape. To that end, they have created large animal habitats that are kept free of humans. They claim they are protecting plant and animal species, but they have established hidden bunkers inside the habitats where they plan to ride out the apocalypse. They are counting on AUGR to give them time to fly to their bunkers before the rest of the world knows that the shit has hit the fan.

The billionaires are counterbalanced by characters who would like to save the world rather than saving their own skins. Martha and Lai are among the good guys. Ellen’s child Badger Bywater is fed up with their (Badger’s preferred pronoun) mother’s contribution to the planet’s destruction. Zimri’s wife Selah has a similar view about her husband. A couple of additional characters who believe that tech, like nature, should benefit the common good round out the cast..

A clever plot has the bad guys and at least one good guy scurrying for hidden shelters when AUGR announces that the world is ending. One of the good guys compromises one of the hidden shelters in another strong action scene. The plot misleads in a good way, taking the reader on a journey to an unexpected destination

The novel ends on a surprisingly positive note. It turns out that responsible people, when given a bit of power, can improve the world for everyone. You just need to get the three worst ones out of the way. The unfortunate reality is that there are way more than three people leading the planet toward its destruction and most of them work in industries (like oil and munitions) other than tech. And the reality has always been that power corrupts responsible people soon after they acquire it. Still, it’s nice to imagine a better reality. In any event, the last few pages acknowledge the reality that political and religious extremists will always stand as barriers to progress.

The novel incorporates discussions of philosophy, including a series of blog posts about Lot and Sodom that interpret Genesis as a blueprint for survivalists. Those posts are a springboard for thoughts about hunters versus agriculturalists, urban versus country living, civilization versus individualism, symbolic expression versus the world unfiltered. The story might go a bit overboard with its discussion of Fox and Rabbit stories told by the founder of the fundamentalist religion from which Martha escaped, but I give Naomi Alderman credit for exploring broad ideas that most creators of apocalyptic survivalist fiction (and truly ghastly prepper fiction) avoid. But then, this isn’t really a post-apocalyptic or prepper novel. The market is saturated with those. Alderman was wise to tinker around the edges of the concept without writing another one.

I’ve read a few novels in recent years that imagine fictional versions of tech giants who create companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. This is a smarter story than most. Whether the reader agrees with any of the philosophical discussion is less important than the fact that the novel tells an engaging story while trying to say something worthwhile about the relationship between the present and the future.

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