Deserts, dystopias and planetary perils — a round-up of new sci-fi

The Book of Sand (Century £12.99) is the first novel under the name Theo Clare, a pseudonym for Clare Dunkel, an author better known by another pseudonym, Mo Hayder. As Hayder, Dunkel produced a string of highly successful and darkly visceral crime novels, starting with Birdman in 2000. Sadly, she died of motor neurone disease last July, aged 59, leaving The Book of Sand, along with its sequel The Book of Clouds, to be published posthumously.

What we have here is a fantasy about faith and the search for spiritual certainty — and while it isn’t quite as bleak as any of the Hayder titles, it’s not much less gruelling either. One of its dual narrative strands takes place in a strange, hostile desert where a group of diverse individuals strive to find an artefact known as the Sarkpont, which may or may not deliver their salvation; at the same time, they have to fend off rivals and hide from lethal, demonic creatures they have dubbed Djinni.

The other strand follows contemporary American teenager McKenzie, who is obsessed with deserts and — since she keeps seeing imaginary lizards — suspected of being schizophrenic. How the two plotlines dovetail is part of the novel’s unfolding mystery, and its not-quite-an-ending paves the way for next year’s follow-up, which, one hopes, will expand upon and clarify this book’s ambitious religious parable.

There’s a similar blend of mysticism and brutal realism in How High We Go in the Dark (Bloomsbury £16.99) by Japanese-American author Sequoia Nagamatsu. A collection of linked short stories, the book opens with the discovery of a millennia-old body in the thawing Siberian permafrost. A contagious virus lurking within the mummified remains gets loose and proceeds to wreak havoc across the world, killing first children and then adults by mutating their internal organs. The book traces its effects over a span of years, all the way to its successful eradication and beyond, into a far future when civilisation has been left depleted and irrevocably altered.

The book was conceived and completed well before the pandemic, and so, mercifully, does not come across as some impassioned Covid allegory. Rather, Nagamatsu uses his narrative to explore love, loss and grief. One section, “City of Laughter”, set in a theme park with a rollercoaster designed to euthanise youngsters, is particularly poignant; another, “Pig Son”, in which a scientist seeking a cure for the disease creates a pig with human-level intelligence, is pure tragicomedy. How High We Go in the Dark also encompasses interstellar travel, alien astronauts and life after death, and if ultimately it proves not to be greater than the sum of its parts, those parts themselves are individually enthralling.

Interstellar travel and aliens are likewise features of Mickey7 (Solaris £16.99), and so, in a fashion, is life after death. This excellent offering from Edward Ashton rockets us off to far-flung Niflheim, a frozen planet where a band of colonisers has settled. The titular character, Mickey Barnes, is what’s known as an Expendable. Every time he’s killed, his consciousness is uploaded into a freshly cloned body and he picks up where he left off. Naturally, the only jobs that come his way are the most menial and potentially life-threatening.

When his seventh incarnation suffers an accident, Mickey is left for dead but survives. Returning to the colony, he finds that an eighth Mickey has been generated in the meantime and there aren’t the resources to keep both of them alive. On top of this, conflict is brewing between the colonists and the large, insectile indigenes they’ve nicknamed “creepers”. It’s a tale told with rigour, verve and cheery black humour.

Also set in frozen climes, yet somewhat closer to home, is All the White Spaces (Titan Books £8.99), a debut by Ally Wilkes. Shortly after the first world war, some British explorers set sail for the Antarctic. They are close to their destination when disaster strikes, forcing them to take refuge on the ice. There, with barely enough equipment to survive, they have to contend not only with the treacherous sub-zero conditions but also with malevolent ghosts who lure them out of shelter to freeze to death.

Protagonist Jonathan Morgan has stowed away aboard the ship, determined to prove his worth after both his older brothers were killed in the trenches. It isn’t just notions of bravery that drive him, however: Jonathan, born female, wants to escape a cosseted life and be free to embrace his true gender.

The idea of a polar expedition beset by supernatural forces was the basis of Dan Simmons’s formidable The Terror (2007), but All the White Spaces differs inasmuch as the horror is subjective and deeply metaphorical, emblematic of a nation traumatised by war and struggling to process the catastrophe it has suffered. That and the main character’s well-drawn inner turmoil make this an original and arresting — not to mention unsettling — read.

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