The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

Harkaway presents us with a hell that is left when the weapon to end all wars instead ends the world as we know it. Humanity in this future is confined to the Livable zone: a thin strip alongside the Jorgmund Pipe which sprays out a substance known as FOX. Outside this safe area there are horrors, people don't stay people, there are mutants, all the dark things we were afraid of in the forests of our imaginations. Our narrator rides with lifelong friend Gonzo and the rest of the crew of roughnecks known as the Haulage and HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Comapny of Exmoor County, corporate HQ the Nameless Bar. They are the troubleshooters of this new world and when the Jorgmund Pipe catastrophically explodes they are the ones sent into fix the breach. But something terrible happens to Gonzo and everything that we readers thought we knew gets turned on its head with a sickening lurch. Narration moves between the past, to life growing up with Gonzo in cosy Cricklewood Cove, school and finding peace with martial arts, across a glittering cast of characters moving across the post apocalyptic landscape of this new world to a terrible truth coiled at the heart of the Jorgmund Corporation. Bewitching and often confusing, but confused is where you should be cos then you start thinking

Walker's idea is very interesting, but the execution less so. Julia is an ordinary Californian teenager, waking up with her friend Hanna from a sleepover to another sunny morning. But everything has changed, the spin of the earth is slowing. Hanna's Mormon family leave for Utah to receive guidance from their leaders and when she returns their friendship has shattered apart. Julia's loneliness and her longing for the boy next door, Seth, is set against a landscape of unfolding horrors. The days continue to lengthen, becoming lethally hot, the night temperatures dipping to below freezing. The magnetosphere falters and fails, unleashing radiation onto the Earth's surface, and flora and fauna begin to die.

This would have been excellent as an epic, but it feels slight and not worked out.  Walker's use of an ordinary teenage life with the horrors of high school, adolescene and the tensions of tensions within her own family and divided loyalties is a refreshing angle. It was a brilliant idea but so disappointing in the end, I wanted to know more!

After the Snow by SD Crockett

Willo is alone, hiding in the snow on the mountain above his home. His family are gone, his father, stepmother, brothers and sisters dragged away by strangers.

As Willo's speaks in his own demotic speech his life takes shape before us. Willo is very unusual in being born on the edge of the Welsh mountain he is hiding on. Most people live in what is left of the cities but he is a 'straggler', a person living on the edges of a diminished society. We are not too far in the future, global warming has caused the Atlantic currents to shut down resulting in the Snowball Earth scenario - Britain is covered by snow which only thaws for a very brief period in the summer time. Willo has been taught by his father to survive in these extreme neo Ice Age conditions, to hunt, set snares, make furs and clothing from them.

Willo gathers his courage and goes in search of his lost family, aquiring Mary, abandoned by her father, and struggling to survive in the much altered city of Manchester. He navigates his way haphazardly through a host of characters Dickensian in their suffering in an anarchic city teetering on the edge of total disaster: an old couple sewing fur coats for the rich with a secret utopian hope; a ratcatcher who gives Willo and Mary shelter for the night; an impossibly rich beautiful woman living in luxury; and roaming gangs of brutal inebriated enforcers and feral children. Resistance to the authorities is swiftly crushed, and when Willo finds himself betrayed by the one person he trusted most all seems lost. But there is always hope.

I really enjoyed Crockett's book. Willo's idiosyncratic speech mannerisms bring to life a young man on the edge of adulthood unwillingly promoted from pack member to lone wolf. His wildness and connection with the landscape are vividly communicated, as is the bleak possible future we all face if our climate does fail. I found Willo's choices brave, his struggle between his survivalist 'dog' mind and his deep humanity compelling. Crockett's plotting is brave, she doesn't allow for improbable happy endings and Willo has to endure terrible horrors to become the person his father raised him to be, a 'beacon of hope'.

A perfect dystopia, in that it made me reflect on the present but wasn't completely pessamistic, there was hope that perhaps humanity can do better than just devolve into savagery

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond

Billy Dean is born in the town of Blinkbonny, just outside Alnwick, the day the bombs explode razing his town and plunging his country into war. He grows up knowing only the walls of the tiny flat where he and his mother live, and the face of his father who is an occasional visitor, preaching hellfire and teaching his son Bible stories. At the age of 13 his mother takes him out into the post apocalyptic landscape of rubble for the first time and he becomes a phenomenon, can speak to the dead and heal the living. As his father returns and the truth of his birth and the reasons he was shut away come to light the narrative comes to a climax involving redemption and the holy island of Lindisfarne.

Almond has written almost the entire book in Dean's own demotic, a sentence structure that is coherent and complex but often childlike, and words written phoenetically much as a 7 year old child would write. This makes it perhaps a little harder to read but also compelling and with a sense of authenticity as a boy who was shut away from the world for 13 years, knowing nothing of rivers, bombs, hills, wind or rain struggles to narrate his own history

The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman


I'm not a fan of horror films, this was selected for me by one of my current comic pushers at my library and I'm glad he did.

Rick Grimes wakes up in hospital having been in a coma, only to find himself the survivor of a horrific plague that has turned people into cannabilistic zombies.  Grimes makes his way to Atlanta in search of his wife and son and just escapes being eaten alive.

Rather than being splatter gore zombie fare Kirkman looks at what it means to be a survivor, how it feels to be left alive and what survival does to people's character.  Excellent execution (excuse the pun) and writing.

Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

Waverley is sixteen, the eldest of the daughters born in space to the crew of the starship Empyrean, a mission of last hope travelling from the poisoned Earth in search of a new world to colonise. Kieran, the eldest boy, has just asked her to marry him and she is considering his fumbling proposal and the presence within the fog of the nebula through which they are passing of their sister ship, the New Horizon.  The ship launched a year before the Empyrean, she should be much further ahead and and their captains are in closeted heated discussion.  There seems no cause for disagreement, both ships contain vast domes of crops and livestock providing them with all the food, oxygen and water they need.  But the Empyrean does have something the New Horizon does not, the children.  As Waverley finds herself prisoner on the sister ship and Kieran one of the boys left without any adults on the Empyrean both struggle for survival and their characters emerge along the way.  This is a good read, but I felt the plotting was a little heavy handed at times, the theme of religious and xenophobic intolerance could have been handled with more subtlety.

Akira Volume 2, by Katsuhiro Otomo

Tetsuo's powers and his instability are on the rise.  He becomes obsessed with Akira, the mightu force that destroyed Tokyo 38 years earlier.  Trying to stop him are the clandestine government forces that hold him, headed by the Colonel, and the underground resistance, and Kaneda and the street gangs of Neo-Tokyo.  As the novel Akira rises, a young boy, seemingly innocuous.

Akira Volume 1 by Katsuhiro Otomo

Kaneda is a disaffected rebellious teenage boy growing up in dystopian 2030 Neo-Tokyo, a city built around a crater of destruction from the massive detonation that exploded in the heart of Tokyo at 2.17pm on December the 6th 1992.  He leads his gang of anarchic motorcyling teenage delinquents breaking into the zone of destruction and his friend Tetsuo is badly wounded as they crash trying to avoid a mysterious wrinkled faced child who disappears.  Tetsuo is taken away by mysterious forces and return to their school for out of control teens strangely changed.  A wild adventure of gang warfare, underground resistance, a beautiful girl and awesome psychic powers begins, a 360 page long but absorbing fabulous ride.