Miniaturising humans, as a sci-fi trope, has given us novels such as Gordon Williams’s Micronauts trilogy and Lindsay Gutteridge’s Cold War In A Country Garden and its sequels (both series from the 1970s), as well as, more recently in 2011, the technothriller Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston. It’s also given us movies ranging from the serious — The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Fantastic Voyage (1966) — to the humorous — Innerspace (1987), Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989) — not to mention the Marvel superhero Ant-Man and his DC Comics equivalent the Atom.
It’s one thing to portray just a single person or a handful of individuals getting reduced in size, as in the above examples. In Mikey Please’s The Expanded Earth (Corsair, £22), by contrast, that very fate is visited forcibly upon the entire global population, and of those who undergo the transformation — a repulsive, traumatic experience — only a small fraction emerge alive.
One such minimised survivor, Giles, is separated from his daughters, and heads off in search of them through the wilds of the New Forest, where dogs, foxes and polecats are, to him, now towering, monstrous man-eaters, and many of his fellow Lilliputian-sized humans prove no less deadly. Interleaved with his narrative is a storyline detailing the origins of the disastrous worldwide diminution, which has come to be known as The Descent. Perhaps predictably, maverick science is to blame; but that’s the only predictable thing about this excellent, inventive novel from an author whose career in stop-motion animation, including work for Aardman, appears to have given him a solid grounding in seeing things from a small-scale perspective.
Silvia Park’s Luminous (Magpie, £16.99) similarly asks us to reframe how we look at ourselves and our place in the grand scheme of things. Set in a future reunified Korea, this debut novel centres around brother and sister Jun and Morgan Cho, the former a trans man working for Seoul’s Robot Crimes Unit, the latter a designer at robot-making corporation Imagine Friends. During childhood they were raised with a third sibling, a robot called Yoyo, who has since wound up in a junkyard and is discovered by Ruijie, a young girl gradually being enfeebled by a wasting disease.
There’s a lot going on here, as Park — Korea-born but now resident in the US — explores issues such as body modification, the contrast between organic consciousness and artificial intelligence, and the prospect of posthuman immortality. At times the storytelling is a touch strait-laced and heavy-going, but flashes of humour (“Never had a robot been mourned so publicly, not since Audrey Hepburn caught on fire during the less-racist remake of Breakfast At Tiffany’s”) lighten the load.
Speaking of robots, Tim Major’s short-story collection Great Robots Of History (Black Shuck Books, £11.99) is a wonderful, wryly intelligent survey of automata, androids and humanoid machines in all their many forms, real and fictitious, down through the ages. Its 16 tales focus on, among others, the relationship between Pygmalion and Galatea; the chess-playing Mechanical Turk, that ingenious 18th-century fraud; Talos, the mythical bronze giant built by the god Hephaestus; and Ask and Embla who, according to the Norse Eddas, were the first man and woman, fashioned from wood and imbued with life by Odin and his two brothers. Included, too, is “The Brazen Head of Westinghouse”, winner of last year’s British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, which features Elektro, a talking robot with aluminium skin and photoelectric eyes that was exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Each story is a spoke radiating from the hub of the book’s core theme, offering a range of intriguing viewpoints. Robots, for all that they’re unnerving and uncanny, have long held a fascination for us and, it seems, always will.
Finally, a brace of novellas from Australian author Venero Armanno, each involving a woman enthralled by a charismatic, dangerous man and suffering the consequences. In The Rays Slip Away (PS Publishing, £29), set predominantly in the late 1980s, Samar meets Michael Kei when he and three female companions rescue her from an attempted rape outside a nightclub. Michael, a vampire, inveigles her into a world of bloodlust and sensuality, which Samar is torn between rejecting and embracing.
In Thunder On The Mountain (PS Publishing, £29), the sinister tempter is religious guru Gustavo Landy, into whose orbit Jonette Yun fell briefly while at university. Years later, Landy turns up at her house, apparently unchanged despite the passage of time, before vanishing like a ghost. Jonette then commits suicide, and her partner David sets out to find and confront Landy. His quest leads him to an abbey in an alpine Italian microstate and forces him to address questions of faith and predestination.
Each novella acts as a neat companion piece to the other, both depicting unhealthy relationships and the difficulty of escaping past sins. Both, moreover, are written with a rare grace and delicacy.
James Lovegrove’s latest book, his 69th, is ‘Conan: Cult of the Obsidian Moon’
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