The Wise Friend by Ramsey Campbell As I noted of Ramsey Campbell’s Think Yourself Lucky, the writer is best known for his highly accomplished horror writing (according to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, he is “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”), from such groundbreaking collections as Demons by Daylight onwards. While most of his non-supernatural novels can be classed as crime fiction, The Count of Eleven adroitly parodied the serial killer genre. At the beginning of The One Safe Place, an American professor antagonises a Manchester motorist and attracts the wrath of his criminal family, and in Silent Children, Hector Woollie kidnaps and kills children because, having watched a sibling die of spina bifida, he can’t bear the thought of their suffering. Think Yourself Lucky was a classic example of Campbell’s genre-straddling, dipping into a variety of genres. But there is one thing utterly consistent about the writer — and that is his skill at unsettling the reader on a variety of levels, from a queasy minor destabilisations to jolting shocks. The new book, The Wise Friend, trades in the same kind of subtle and understated disquiet that has long been Ramsey Campbell’s stock in trade. His protagonist Patrick discovered as a boy evidence that his aunt Thelma, an artist with an obsession with the world of the occult, was given to visiting eldritch locales to assemble a selection of strange objects. But after she dies, this collections appears to have disappeared. As an adult, Patrick visits (with his fractious teenage son Roy) the locales that she talked about, but – needless to say – the journeys take him and his son into very dark waters. Apart from Campbell’s acumen in the art of disturbing us, one fixed point may be observed about his writing – the sheer elegance in the use of language; a skill that is fully in place here. The Wise Friend is published by Flame Tree Press
War of the Maps by Paul McAuley Always the most protean of writers, Paul McAuley has long demonstrated his ironclad credentials as one of the most authoritative of hard SF writers in the United Kingdom. In Into Everywhere, human destiny changes with the intervention of the enigmatic alien Jackaroo, who have opened up the universe for the human race. But discovered on the new planets are puzzling relics of lost civilisations, all recipients of Jackaroo largesse — and all extinct. As usual, McAuley imparts mind-bending SF concepts in prose that is always elegant and precise. The writer’s White Devils plays on fears about the dangerous world we all live in. What is it that’s going to finally do for us all? Once it might have been rat-borne plagues, but we’ve learned to be wary of many more things: currently, it’s Sino-viruses. And, of course, genetic engineering. The furore about this grey area of science springs from its many possibilities, and McAuley’s chilling novel plays cannily on our fears of unrestricted experimentation in such areas. McAuley’s new book, War of the Maps, has less emphasis on hard science than we are accustomed to with this writer, and uses a quest/adventure scenario to power the narrative. His seasoned protagonist, the Lucidor, is a futuristic lawman whose beat is a massive artificial world, at the centre of which is a synthetic sun. He is on the trail of the perpetrator of an atrocity, but the latter’s particular skills are too useful to the authorities for him to be incarcerated – he has been sent to a war zone to wreak havoc among the enemy. This does not sit well with the Lucidor, who has jettisoned his customary life to enforce justice. But the terrain in which he works is undergoing terrifying transformations, with an unknown force exacting genetic changes in both the plant and animal world – with lethal results. The style here is more direct and forceful than one might expect, with the world building less given to spectacular set pieces and phenomena than McAuley’s work usually affords. But that strategy is at the service of a narrative which has a clear and defined line. The beleaguered protagonist is a conflicted individual, and his interactions with those he encounters are strikingly delineated. For McAuley admirers happy to accept this change of direction, the rewards here are plentiful, and the book is proof that this writer’s skills remain undimmed. War of the Maps by Paul McAuley is publshed by Gollancz
