Engine Summer - John Crowley

 Engine Summer (1979) is a post-apocalyptic coming of age story.   A millennium or more in the future, Rush That Speaks grows up in Little Belaire, a town of truthful speakers.   The Storm has knocked humankind back into the stone age.   They have no writing or literature but pass on history as stories.   Here and there relics and ruins of former glories linger on, regarded as the work of angels and thus unfathomable.   Saints wander the land, spreading insights and speaking of other settlements elsewhere.   Rush That Speaks dreams of becoming a saint when he grows up.

But first he must deal with adolescence and his love for Once a Day, a neighbour belonging to a different cord but taught by the same teacher, Painted Red.   One day members of Dr Boot's List visit Little Belaire, as they do every year, to trade.   Once a Day decides to travel with them, and leaves.   Rush cannot fathom this.   Why would anyone want to leave Little Belaire?   Why would Once a Day leave him?   He expects her to return.   Everyone does.   But she doesn't return.   Finally, he feels he has no choice but to track her down and rescue her.

People have no transport, but believe that Road leads everywhere.   Rush gets distracted by a hermit called Blink, who lives up a tree and hibernates.   Rush had heard Blink called a saint, though Blink flatfly denies any such thing.   Ultimately Rush finds Once a Day in Service City.   The List have different skills and practices.   They lives with large cats and emulate the feline lifestyle.   Once a Day doesn't want to leave so Rush decides to stay with her.   He is assimilated into the List.   Finally, he is taken to meet Dr Boots, and learns his destiny, a revelation that sends him reeling, half-mad.   Visions, hallucinations, insights - until it is revealed who he is telling his story to.

From the very first page it is clear that Rush is speaking to someone other than us.   Every now and then someone asks italicized questions.   There is mention of crystals which seem to be recording what Rush says (recording? we wonder, in a world without machines?).   There are four crystals and each facet is a chapter.   The answer, when it comes, is quite something.

It is a boy speaking, so the style is straightforward and provides a framework in which we learn alongside Rush how to navigate his world.   The half-remembered names of things from Before the Storm is a fun device.   The title for example, try saying it aloud.   Avvenging and avengers took me longer to figure out.   Dr  Boots is best of all.   Rush's tortured pubesence is of course timeless, instantly familiar.   The characters are nicely defined, the locations differentiated.

All in all, an intriguing classic of the post-apocalypse.

A Wrinkle in the Skin - John Christopher

A Wrinkle in the Skin, A Terrible Title, is a 1965 disaster novel by John Christopher (Sam Youd), creator of the Tripods and author of the classic The Death of Grass.

Christopher has enjoyed something of a revival since his death in 2012. He is regarded as a prophet of ecological disasrer, which is certainly the case with The Death of Grass and The World in Winter. A Wrinkle in the Skin is certainly global but the disaster is not man-made. Vast earthquakes have reshaped the Earth, to the extent that the English Channel has dried up. The tidal wave that accompanied the quakes has wiped away coastal cities like Southampton and Bournemouth.

Our hero, Matthew Cotter, grows tomatoes on Guernsey. The quake makes a mess of his glasshouses but he is unscathed. He wanders about the island and finds others who have survived. They are very few, but they group together, find food and start to make a sort of life. Matthew, however, is determined to find his daughter Jane who he knows spent the night of the apocalypse in East Sussex. So he sets out to walk there, there being no deep water to stop him., accompanied by the orphaned boy Billy.

This is unfortunate - mature man and immature child on a mission of discovery has become a cliche of post-apocalyptic fiction (The Road, for example). To be fair, Christopher wrote in 1965 and I'm pretty sure it wasn't a cliche back then. So they meet a mad king (actually a sailor, the solitary survivor on an oil tanker stranded on the dry bottom of the Channel, desperately trying to keep everything literally shipshape. They meet a Preacher, a visionary of the apocalypse who foresees the Risen Christ approaching from the East. And they meet other groups, good and bad and extremely bad. It's all a bit predictable - except that I liked the ambition of making the ship a supertanker, I liked that the religious crazy was a hospitable host, and I really liked April, the sole female character who is fully characterised. There is a conversation between April and Cotter which is both shocking and moving - which inspires Matthew to pursue his quest to the bitter end (another excellent twist) and the scales to finally fall from his eyes.

A good book, then, not as significant as some of Christopher's others but effective and skillfully done.

Vulcan's Hammer - Philip K Dick

The last of the three early, short novels in this collection is Vulcan's Hammer. Is it the best? Hard to say: they are all different, all effective in their way. Is it the one I enjoyed most? To an extent. Is it the one that gave me the frisson? Easy answer. Yes it is.

Vulcan's Hammer was published in 1960, when computers filled warehouses and could barely count up to ten. Dick posits a post-apocalyptic world of about now when the world has come together in the utopian concord that everything will be fine so long as we agree to have policy determined by machines instead of men. That machine is Vulcan 3 which, spookily, occupies a facility in Switzerland not unlike CERN. In order to generate the best policy Vulcan has to be fed with every scrap of information available. Hands up who's thinking Google right now? Google's motto, Do No Evil, seemed cool to begin with, now it's morphed to ironic. Vulcan is also served by a multinational corporation. They call it Unity.

Dick accurately foresees the problem with super-super computers. There comes a time when they will replicate themselves, repair themselves, and if we stop feeding them information they will take measures to gather it for themselves. Should we be foolish enough to try and attack them, they will defend themselves. They may even fight back - which is where the hammers come in, in case you were wondering; I'm afraid they end up in their ultimate version as a prime example of an author who is halfway through his story when he realises he hasn't justified the title.

The writing is very measured for Dick, who notoriously wrote at a furious rate. The characters are very well drawn - as rounded as the protagonists in longer works such as The Man in the High Castle, written two years later and very much my kind of Dick novel. Essentially what makes the story zing is that the characters have doubts and consciences, a trait often missed in lesser SF where, of course, such things are personified as the enemy.

I have really enjoyed the three novels in this Millennium collection. I've learned quite a lot about SF signatures and tropes. I therefore recommend.

The World in Winter - John Christopher

John Christopher has often been likened to John Wyndham. Indeed, some people seem to think the two are one and the same, especially given the number of pseudonyms they both used. In fact John Christopher was Sam Youd (1922-2012) aka Stanley Winchester, Hilary Ford. Peter Graaf etc. Christopher was undoubtedly influenced by Wyndham (for Tripods see Triffids) but specialised in man-made catastrophe whereas Wyndham favoured space invaders.

Christopher is best known for his climate change novels, of which this is one. The title says it all: the northern hemisphere is plunged into a new ice age due to a decline in solar radiation. The major powers decide to pack up and head south. Those left behind turn feral through necessity. The emigrants likewise face disaster. The former colonies in Africa are perfectly willing to accept their former oppressors, but only as menials and slaves. The banking system collapses so all the money the Brits brought with them evaporates.

It is a great idea and even now, more than half a century after it was written, the resonances are still there, Christopher's problem is that he can't bring his ideas to life through his characters. His main characters here are preoccupied with their suburban menage a trois and unable to engage with their climatic enemy as much as one would like. Perhaps the scale of the disaster is just too big and humanity simply cannot win.

This is where Christopher falls short of Wyndham. I remember reading one of the Tripod series for young adults, probably the late prequel When the Tripods Came (1988) and the problem was the same. That said, there are some fabulous moments - I absolutely adored the idea of colonising the south coast of England by hovercraft, which of course can skim over the ice sheets blocking the Channel. It works even better fifty years later when hovercraft have become as redundant as traction engines. Perhaps that's something we should reconsider in this era of global warming.