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WORK TITLE: The Outlaws of Kratzenfels
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Born in England.
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Fiction writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born and raised in England, M. Jonathan Jones is a freelance writer of science fiction, steampunk, fantasy, alternative history, and traditional horror. Claiming his head is in different realities, he is a fan of dragons and dwarves, steampunk air-caravans, and sleek silver Martian Racers. Jones has written the “Tethys Trilogy,” an adventure thriller set in the post-apocalyptic undersea remnants of Earth, as well as short stories online from FictionPress.com.
The Outlaws of Kratzenfels
Jones’s 2017 The Outlaws of Kratzenfels is a fantasy-steampunk fairytale that pits machines against magic. The kingdom of Kratzenfels has just fallen to the dastardly Count von Falkenhorst, leader of the Iron Knights, who killed King Sigmund and imprisoned Princess Helda. The count wants to marry Helda to make his invasion legal, but she convinces him to wait until after her mourning period. Strong-willed Helda manages to escape and is being hunted by spider-wights, which are half-man, half-machine, and war-walkers. But she is helped by her magical ability that she got from her witch-queen mother Raggana, and by the Twain brothers, whose mechanical bodies contain two halves of one brain. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted: “Jones’s story is decidedly lacking in world-building, but what is there is imaginative.”
With a setting reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian culture and touching on the struggle between the agrarian and superstitious world against the oncoming industrial and scientific revolution, Jones offers a “fully original work, drawing its feel and fantasy from older Slavic traditions which are then punched through with a steampunk conquest and the attack hounds of terror,” according to Faith Jones in a review online at Medium. The reviewer also praised the author for the expert characterization of the super-villain Count and the resourceful Helda.
Thalassa
First in the “Tethys Trilogy,” Jones’ 2017 Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves is set a thousand years after floods have drowned Old Earth, and human survivors live in the underground world of Thalassa in cities of salvaged steel. Of the vast number of small enclaves of civilization, one large empire, The Tethys Federation, has been amassing territory, assimilating smaller colonies, replacing their leaders with its own, ruling by fear, and removing all vestiges of self-determination. A coup is destined to happen. In this world, Moanna Morgan lost her brother last year in a submarine accident when he was exploring aqua incognita. But now she learns that the accident was faked. She goes out to investigate and learn if he is still alive, in the meantime discovering secrets that have been hidden for a thousand years.
Praising Jones for being a consistent, independent writer with diverse interests, Medium website reviewer Faith Jones reported on his ideas for undersea living, such as breathing and air purification, food sustainability, and engineering of underwater housing, adding: “Apart from being well told and having a good plot, there are many colourful and attractive elements to this book, from the housing complexes, the way social interaction is still possible, the frontier mentality, the lost ship on a secret mission mystery, piracy, Manta craft (personal submarines) and the Thunderball-style battle.”
In book two, Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, Moanna had gone to find her lost brother and found the end of the world. Now The Tethys Federation is under attack from hostile forces beyond the Frontier. Tensions and animosity have been festering for years, pioneers and colonists are preparing for war, and the Sunken City is in danger of revealing its long-held secrets. One person hiding in Aqua Incognita can save them.
Race the Red Horizon
In 2018, Jones published Race the Red Horizon, a desert-chase science fiction adventure. Written in the present tense and set sometime in the future on the planet Mars, the story follows a person known as the Pteronaut who is running across the dead desert—from what and why are slowly revealed. Without food, water, or weapons, he is hunted by a fierce, determined opponent in a pounding machine that draws ever closer. Jones develops empathy for the runner and hope against his death. But is the Pteronaut innocent or does he deserve to be chased?
Online at Medium, reviewer Faith Jones observed that Jones provides convincing description for a prolonged chase extending over the full length of the novel without spoken word or padding to slow it down. “This is an astounding accomplishment for an independent author and it is also the first time I’ve ever seen this done properly in sci-fi. … Only writers who are naturals for detailed observation, scouring the imagined geography for the quirks they can use, who maintain a consistent thread in the direction of their tapestry, are good enough to attempt this,” said the reviewer. In answer to how the Pteronaut can survive on the planet, the reviewer noted: “There’s a balance to the science aspect of the science fiction that integrates next-generation solutions into the story smoothly.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2018, review of The Outlaws of Kratzenfels, p. 93.
ONLINE
Medium, https://medium.com/ (December 20, 2017), Faith Jones, review of Race the Red Horizon; (April 3, 2018), Faith Jones, review of The Outlaws of Kratzenfels; (September 1, 2018), Faith Jones, review of Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves.
I’m a part-time writer with 4 books out (Amazon page here). I like science-fiction, steampunk, fantasy, alternative history, and (traditional) horror more or less in that order. My fourth book, Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, the second book in the Tethys Trilogy and the sequel to Thalassa – the world beneath the waves, was published in December 2017. I’m currently (June 2018) working on the final part of the Tethys Trilogy, Thalassa: Fire & Flood, as well as on scraps of other things; some old, some new, some yet-to-be, some maybe the next trilogy…
Sample chapters of my books are available for download in PDF format from the individual pages above. The books are available in paperback, for Kindle, and via Kindle Unlimited.
I also have some short-stories online – you can find these on FictionPress.com.
I’ve decided against the time and hassle of moderating comments on a blog here. Instead, I’ll continue to host my blog on Goodreads. Looking is open to anyone: sign up to comment.
I was born and raised in England, but my head was always in various different realities, ones full of dragons and dwarves, steampunk air-caravans, or sleek silver Martian Racers.
I published two books in 2016: Race the Red Horizon, a desert-chase sci-fi adventure, and Thalassa the world beneath the waves, an adventure thriller set in the post-apocalyptic undersea remnants of Earth. My latest book, The Outlaws of Kratzenfels, is a fantasy-steampunk 'fairytale' and was published in May 2017.
I write part-time and I'm currently working on the sequel to Thalassa the world beneath the waves, which is called Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, as well as a number of other projects.
The Outlaws of Kratzenfels
Publishers Weekly. 265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p93.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Outlaws of Kratzenfels
M. Jonathan Jones. Brandyke, $5.99 trade paper (162p) ISBN 978-0-9935200-5-1
Jones's steampunk-esque fantasy world calls to mind the dark origins of fairy tales. Princess Helda of Kratzenfels is forced to watch as her kingdom is conquered and her father killed by Count von Falkenhorst after a long war of machines vs. magic. To cement his claim to the kingdom, the count wishes to marry Helda, but she's able to convince him to wait after her mourning period is over, allowing her time to devise a plan to kill the count and take back Kratzenfels. As Helda searches for a way to escape her imprisonment, she discovers that the count is responsible for much more sinister things than just the war. Jones's story is decidedly lacking in world-building, but what is there is imaginative, such as the terrifying part-man, part-machine creatures called spider-wights that hunt Helda relentlessly, and the Twain brothers, two halves of one brain in two different mechanical bodies, who prove to be valuable assets to Helda in the final battle. She is a strong and engaging character who uses her wits to get her out of trouble, and she also happens to be a crack shot. Ages 12-up. (BookLife)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Outlaws of Kratzenfels." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 93. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532795/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=62fda9f8. Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532795
Faith JonesFollow
Reviewer, Having Faith Book Blog
Apr 3
Book Review: The Outlaws of Kratzenfels, by M. Jonathan Jones
I should have reviewed this when it was fresh in my mind but things got in the way and, trying to spin that into a good thing, at least discussing it a while later mires my opinion in the respectability of perspective. What’s impossible to forget about this book is the heavy Austrian Empire style and the creative diet of credibly adapted loan words, each with a vivid mental picture attached to it. I can imagine those words as early foreign stamps, crenelated with the suggestion of lavish cultural depth behind each fleeting thumbnail. Those words contain the spark of life and might have saved Mary Shelley or Prometheus a busy night.
The Outlaws of Kratzenfels reads as if it’s a high-calibre writer returning to the roots of his influences, not just typing away but having fun. This is only a longish novella but it’s still a wordsmith’s egg. Using a better metaphor, the small seed it plants burrows into the memory and the book seems more influential later than should be justified by the page count it actually has. An example might be comparing on a memorable impact scale the US Declaration of Independence at 1,337 words and the EU directive on the export of duck eggs at 26,900 words. M. Jonathan Jones creates most of his world himself, yet the reader still somehow associates it with the Bohemian-based Holy Roman Empire and Austro-Hungarian culture that really existed for three hundred or so years and ended by the 1920s. With the exception of the zeppelins (a glorious watermark lofting through all of steampunk), the magic and contraptions in this book simply did not exist in those real empires, yet the smart use of style and influence claims all of it into their world. The pieces fit.
At a superficial level, this story is about the struggle for a kingdom, which is an oft told fairy tale. The thing about inheriting the monarchical torch and ruling a kingdom is that it’s really a caretaker’s position. It sounds good but your life is no longer your own. You have to do what you’re told, smile all the time, never let the side down, always turn up punctually and attend events you have no interest in and then, when you do make a mistake, carry rock-loads of guilt that a large number of subjects who trusted you have died because of you and it won’t be over until you, personally, sign the capitulation and then your head wobbles off the block to herald the new era. Is that really worth all the frocks and canapes? Sorry for my mood but I’m a student. Some say students light the future. Then you find the game you’re in really is that it is this generation of students’ job to repay all the groaning overspending of the previous two generations and you’ve been hoodwinked. It’s all unfair and our future will be rotten, but at least we will inherit the infrastructure, if we can get any of it out of hock. I’m from the generation that won’t be allowed to keep and enjoy any of their earnings but at least won’t have to dig ditches to lay a network of water mains or wear their front teeth out nibbling railway tunnels through mountains; although endemic lifelong poverty may feel like that. Still, chin up. It’s not as bad as being a monarch. Was there a point to any of that? Oh, yes. When our heroine Helda inherits her kingdom, it’s quickly snatched away by a usurper but she still feels that noblesse oblige responsibility to the population to rescue them and, since they had loyalty to Sigmund, Helda’s father, she hopes to rally them to her cause. It’s like the worst of both worlds, doing the public image thing, carrying the guilt and risking your life but with no frocks and canapes at all, not even bath salts or one of those nasty sour cream canapes which are last to go because they have chopped chive and possibly fish droppings on the top. In my experience, countrysiders feel disconnected from the doings of high-ups in the capital, so do not feel affinity for them or want them to regain their posh jobs; but perhaps the dynamic was different in the olden days. Perhaps they shared the bath salts.
This book also covers the oft told struggle between the agrarian and superstitious world and the incoming industrial and scientific revolution. Tolkien used this metal vs. wood clash in The Two Towers (I nearly wrote The Two Towels, but that’s getting up at 4am for you), in which Saruman of Many Colours has a metal staff and harnesses the power of the water mill to run his forges which tear down the natural world for fuel and resources to build his engines of war — but his diametric opponent in the struggle (for the policy direction the world will take) is Gandalf, with his staff of gnarled wood, undyed cloak and his living, natural world of friendships, root, lore and sustainable, organic wholegrain goodness. Oppressive, mechanical exploitation vs. the poetic celebration of life. Pick a side. Just ask yourself though, if these were business models, which share price would go up? Would there be any Type 2 companies in the FTSE Top 100? That’s humanity’s free decision and you know it’s true. Humans preach one thing and do the other.
I should emphasise that despite the previous paragraph, there’s no Tolkien (Teutonic myth; Ring cycle) influence at all in this. This is fully original work, drawing its feel and fantasy from older Slavic traditions which are then punched through with a steampunk conquest and the attack hounds of terror. Most of the characters are very up-tight, serious and unsympathetic, the kind of people who line their troops and pencils up as if they’re the same thing, which many readers will probably interpret as standard Germanic inhuman autism. The blending of steampunk into Central European references, i.e. Czech mountains and Austrian attitude, works brilliantly but I do know of another example that the author might not yet be aware of: Jack London’s book The Assassination Bureau (which is resolved by a drowning) was made into a film starring Oliver Read (which was instead resolved by a zeppelin threatening a medieval Austrian hilltop castle). The mixture of old Austrian Empire, pre-WW1, with its stiff Prussian officers, brass buttoned uniforms with industrial gas-bags floating on the winds of change is in that too. Kratzenfels is more evocative, more imaginative even, but it doesn’t have Oliver Read.
What it does have is a super-villain of the highest order, the best I’ve read in years, one Count von Falkenhorst. This character is straight out of the Nogbad the Bad imprint of polite cunning and devilment. He’s a creative maker/builder type of baddie with bounding energy and a cheeky smirk you love to despise. Dick Dastardly is another classic example of the type, or Richard III if you look pre-industrial. There’s no show without Mr Punch, as the saying goes, so letting him die in the final scene would be wrong, a tragic waste of personality-driven plot-blasting talent, I said to myself, so please don’t do it! This character is the most glorious of unforgivable beasts, malevolent to the bone, beyond hope of reformation and reintegration, a genuine good to be bad anti-hero and loving it. Can any man sport a cape and get away with it? This one can. Given enough time at the helm and he’ll grow a moustache and lay his own railway lines just for the fun of tying people down on them. Then again, I pause because the “von” in his name is a traditional appellation awarded when a family has done brave service to their country (to King Sigmund?) and his reluctance to murder Helda indicates a residual sense of that old honour. Nogbad didn’t have a sense of honour, did he, so that’s where the characters part ways. It’s also the weakness in his inventive armour that ultimately ruins his designs as it gives Helda her break. It’s the gap he couldn’t bring himself to patch.
Falkenhorst and his evil understudy (kind of a Rosa Klebb from SMERSH) star in a dungeon scene which carries the same, fascinating pantomime menace as the one in Wyrd Sisters (in turn, based on Macbeth) but this one is excruciatingly creepy — a dungeon cell you can’t wait to get away from. It’s more minimalist than a cheesy Museum of Torture but still has that awkward queasiness, suggestion of funny smells and “Eeeew” damp factor that makes the scene gel. Falkenhorst is one of those people in history who come along and assume control of organisations which already exists but achieve nothing (good or bad) with their potential because they are so disorganised. In this case, the ambitious Count takes control of an organisation called The Iron Knights, who are essentially amateur metalwork enthusiasts. After stopping the in-fighting, then organising and directing their potential to serve his own machinations (1938?), it’s suddenly all zeppelins and spider wights, which are terrible crawling alloys of cadavers and clockwork. With these toys, he defeats the old ways and the users of magic, then makes his abrupt power grab, which is where the book starts, so that’s hardly a spoiler.
Helda is a very strong female lead, as trainee battleaxes go, but you’ll notice I’m profiling her second. She is designed to be resourceful, Falkenhorst’s equal and a balancing weight in their power struggle. Her supporters are slightly more sincere than his and you, dear reader, will be expected to agree that she has a divine right to rule and look after the country but I can’t help thinking that her attitude and absence of compassion suggests descent from someone who got in the door at the point of a spear and what goes around comes around. I’d oppose him on principle, fine, but I wouldn’t give her a leg up either. Is there a third way? Objectively, this is a very well-drawn character because it’s an observation of thousands of leaders who were like that and it illuminates the old human behaviour pattern of supporting things without bothering to think them through, just because there’s a threat on the horizon which is uglier. Why support one gladiator over another and keep coming back for your dose of misery every year when you could be using the arena for something better in which no one leaves sideways?
I want to claim that the feel of the story is like Stephan Zweig’s books and short stories (to give you an idea, Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel was inspired by Zweig’s novels) but I read that excerpt book The Society of the Crossed Keys and it wasn’t in the same style as Grand Hotel, so without reading all of Zweig I can’t be sure if that’s fair to say. That more decadent film has that same old European empire salute to it, the sharply inclined scenery and the glassy frosting of displacement and it also shares a sense of history sweeping one type of society out of the way and the shock of ruthlessly imposing another heirarchy. Not change for good, just change you fear and need to find a way to keep your head down and muddle through until life becomes liveable again.
I recognised the “Krasny Karlsbad” capital as Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), with its medieval walls and picturesque (a candyfloss word) idyllic postcardyness. The Czech word “krasny” means pretty or cute, so this author knows his languages in detail and that explains the playfulness of his descriptive nomenclature. It’s hard to oppose the notion it would make a terrific capital for any kingdom as it has immense style, like this novel. It’s a standalone and unique work, light and entertaining in places but derived from a mixture or real and imagined culture that makes it tangible. I loved the villain, the book was fun, the wrong-footing of the reader kept it interesting and I’ve got no other suggestions for improvement other than the finality of the ending. Recommended, without caveats. What fun. I think I’ll put it on the favourites shelf.
Faith Jones
Reviewer, Having Faith Book Blog
Dec 20, 2017
Book review: Race the Red Horizon, by M. Jonathan Jones
The literature of descriptive escape was defined in 1968 by the novel Figures in a Landscape, by Barry England and the sub-genre without that iconic piece would be like a Japanese silk print missing Mount Fuji. Pushing the mountain aside for a minute, heave, this book is the best novel before or since in the literature of descriptive escape. Just to be clear, this is an astounding accomplishment for an independent author and it is also the first time I’ve ever seen this done properly in sci-fi.
To keep a pure feat of convincing description going for the full stretch of a novel, with nothing of the spoken word and without padding is very difficult to sustain. Only writers who are naturals for detailed observation, scouring the imagined geography for the quirks they can use, who maintain a consistent thread in the direction of their tapestry, are good enough to attempt this. Imagination is important, obviously, as is an arresting and encompassing vocabulary. The task cannot be done without the literary individual though, the big eye of the beholder floating over everything — and this author covers that requirement.
Long slogs over the terrain, moments of blind panic, hair-raising evasion, soaring flight, endurance bordering on the masochistic, demoralising inevitability and then hope, but easy victory is snatched away and narrows into the severing claws of a set-piece confrontational ending. By the end, there’s that weary feeling in the reader of a long road travelled in the company of the character, which leaves the sensation, the illusion, that this tough journey really happened — the same impression Tolkien managed to convey.
I spotted a single, solitary error, so this must have been checked by a spelling fiend. “That is the only way will he have a chance to reach safety before nightfall” — just one transposition, otherwise no mistakes and no further awkward sentences. That’s not a moan; it’s a commendation. Update: The author tells me they have fixed this and it’s been re-issued.
The majority of the book was written in the present tense, which works unusually well in this instance (elsewhere, I hate it), but I find myself in opposition to the author in one respect. Different readers will notice this in different places in the story but the description slips into the past tense for passages solely about “the crawler”, which plods after the Pteronaut inexorably, as if it were played by Peter Falk. Just when I was tuned into the live flowing narrative, bump, a palpable bump. I understand now that the tense change was an intentional aspect of the structure, quite deliberate, ripples in the flow to differentiate the chaser from the chased, but I thought it wasn’t necessary and the author thought it absolutely was. Okay, so there’s no right or wrong about this, just a difference of personal preference. Anyhow, I have no complaints about the rest of it. The rest of it was classic.
The novel has been set on Mars, at an undefined point in the future. The story of what has happened to civilisation on that world is revealed in tiny, gradual increments. Who is the Pteronaut, where has he come from and why is he running? For what crime has he been tagged and what exactly is it that chases him? These are fierce opponents in a hunt but what is the schism in their philosophy that has built such steely determination?
Sometimes echoing the abandonment element of The Martian Chronicles, along with the uncatchable fox and the inescapable hound, the Terminator and the 1971 film The Duel, it stands equivalent to all of them and still provokes the reader’s empathy, leaving us rousing and cheering the torch of human hope against the inevitability of death. The pounding machine draws close, fusion engines restless, the rolling of tracks relentless, insatiable, no quarter, night and day, through heat and ice, a metal-headed industrial machine mind bent on one purpose: cornering and snuffing out a single life. It’s like Amazon’s attitude to independent book reviewers.
There’s a balance to the science aspect of the science fiction that integrates next-generation solutions into the story smoothly, so any intensive technical types can accept how the Pteronaut can survive and transport himself in this place and time, yet those who aren’t into nitty picky realism can surf through to their satisfaction too without an information dump. NCC-1701 souvenir schematic blueprints do not interest me in the slightest, yet I do like to see a satisfactory, informed layperson explanation of why any future technology works because I don’t believe in magic — and my cynicism was appeased, which it isn’t always. Another tick.
Going quasi-Byron for a second, what is this book if it is not an iron-red streak across the realm of written science fiction? Figures was nominated for our highest prize in writing, so how close to it sits this one on a scale? Where indeed to place it, as ranking is relative and in science fiction at least it lacks any known rival in descriptive escapology that I can think to peg it to.
Without any sign of a speech mark throughout, these animate characters develop physical personas with their aches and adrenaline, rusting, living iron and the ravines and traps of a majestic alien landscape that bring it all alive to pick out every hard-won, red grit experience in the sequence as real and edgy. Expect a progression measured in tension as well as by distance. There’s a hint of humanity’s hubris in the civilisation that failed to take root, an excursion seeded onto an alien world, where the irrelevance of our beliefs when lifted out of context just spear them into absurdity like a candelabra melting in a furnace. Humanity’s territorial, anti-social nature is its weakness and that is brought out in extremis, when conditions are harsh and supplies are short. This is Life on Mars.
I wanted the Pteronaut to beat the odds to thrive and wheel away in that tangerine sky, but accompanied this feeling with reservation because I wasn’t sure what he stood for, until the end. He might have deserved to be chased. Objectively, if this was a world in which nothing else lived, what beliefs and constructs he stood for would be a total irrelevance. There was once a cartoon, in The New Yorker I think, of several hippos wallowing in an oasis, an isolated pocket of timelessness in an endless desert where nothing ever changed and one day blended into the next and one hippo says to the other “Is it Thursday?” I did want him to get back in the air though, not just to be safe but to be at one with the thermals and currents because a bird on the ground is sacrificial art.
To collectors of science fiction literature, I would say that your library is incomplete without this novel. To occasional readers of the genre, I would recommend it as an experience isolated from anything you may have read before, to skim through the air and make footfall on the red earth with an ever-present rumble of apprehension behind you.
Faith Jones
Reviewer, Having Faith Book Blog
Aug 8
Book Review: Thalassa; The World Beneath The Waves, by M. Jonathan Jones
This is the best underwater adventure I can ever remember reading. I preferred this author’s other two books (Race the Red Horizon and The Outlaws of Kratzenfells), those being on totally different subjects — and yet he’s entered a rare club because all three got my top rating. This is an unusually consistent independent writer with diverse interests. How long will he remain indie?
I’m strangely drawn to ideas like underwater living and sea-steading, including the engineering problems that need to be solved. I think that to solve population growth (demands on land), food sustainability, sea-level rise and inconsistent air temperature, making better use of the sea for habitation is incrementally becoming optimal and comparatively more affordable. This book is therefore a prediction of what I already guess we need to consider later in this crowded little century. My proposal would be to fill a large bay (e.g. Poole Harbour) with thousands of units of floating accommodation, half under the water and half above, tethered to the bay but rising with the tide. These would be open to the air above the surface, removing several of the design obstacles. However that venting can’t be done in this book because the air is toxic. There’s also been serious climate change, war and plague, so these people need to go down, down and stay there for centuries. It’s amazing what can be achieved to survive when there’s no alternative.
The engineering issues of underwater housing are extensive, e.g. condensation (from breathing and evaporation) running down the walls and turning everything to mould; people struggling with the effects of the artificially high air-pressure needed inside to counter the water pressure outside (large battleships pressurise hold air and crew members have gone strange from it); being un-tethered and washed away by currents, tsunamis and storms; efficient oxygen reclamation and air scrubbing; large scale de-salination; lack of vitamins from sunlight and plants; thickening of the bones; fuel; heating; then, not quite finally, the psychological impact of living in a confined space with the same people for a long time (NASA trained astronauts for space travel and filtered out the psychologically dubious candidates by abandoning them in an underwater laboratory for months at a time).
The heroine of this story is a teenager called Moanna, so we have to disregard Disney’s use of the same name (a Pacific Ocean folklore sea spirit). She’s growing up in a petty kingdom where the pioneer population harvest seaweed, mine for minerals and occasionally explore. Sadly, in an echo of our own experience of globalisation and political integration into pretend-altruistic transnational tyrannies, a large rival empire is steadily amassing territory and assimilating all free people into its gaping maw. It helps them to begin with, steady, steady, catchee monkey. It integrates them into its processes and economy, replaces elected local leaders with its people, invents a crisis so it can apply control, removes all vestiges of self-determination and by these means the empire moves on to tower over the next free colony like a malevolent wave. “Can we provide assistance? Better together, surely?” Petty rivalries seem distant worries when a coup like that is underway, so some colonies prefer not to announce their existence at all.
Apart from being well told and having a good plot, there are many colourful and attractive elements to this book, from the housing complexes, the way social interaction is still possible, the frontier mentality, the lost ship on a secret mission mystery, piracy, Manta craft (personal submarines) and the Thunderball-style battle the many designs of underwater vessel get caught up in. Moanna isn’t a super-hero with magical powers, so the realism is pitched about right, but she is a dynamic figure with personal resources of courage that put the rest of us to shame. She doesn’t give up or run away and even though the book would be worthy enough without her, this character is a bit of a star in a fictional world underwater that I, for one, want to help build and be part of. I just need the climate to go horribly wrong as that’s the best way to get everyone moving. It looks like that transition will happen anyway, so don’t blame those who don’t want to hang around. Yes, okay, it’s because I can’t afford a flat on land and am seriously considering moving into an old converted ambulance. What would you choose if you were caught between a rock and a wet place? There I go again, spoiling the review… but I did like the book.
The literature of descriptive escape was defined in 1968 by the novel Figures in a Landscape, by Barry England and the sub-genre without that iconic piece would be like a Japanese silk print missing Mount Fuji. Pushing the mountain aside for a minute, heave, this book is the best novel before or since in the literature of descriptive escape. Just to be clear, this is an astounding accomplishment for an independent author and it is also the first time I’ve ever seen this done properly in sci-fi.
To keep a pure feat of convincing description going for the full stretch of a novel, with nothing of the spoken word and without padding is very difficult to sustain. Only writers who are naturals for detailed observation, scouring the imagined geography for the quirks they can use, who maintain a consistent thread in the direction of their tapestry, are good enough to attempt this. Imagination is important, obviously, as is an arresting and encompassing vocabulary. The task cannot be done without the literary individual though, the big eye of the beholder floating over everything – and this author covers that requirement.
Long slogs over the terrain, moments of blind panic, hair-raising evasion, soaring flight, endurance bordering on the masochistic, demoralising inevitability and then hope, but easy victory is snatched away and narrows into the severing claws of a set-piece confrontational ending. By the end, there’s that weary feeling in the reader of a long road travelled in the company of the character, which leaves the sensation, the illusion, that this tough journey really happened – the same impression Tolkien managed to convey.
I spotted a single, solitary error, so this must have been checked by a spelling fiend. “That is the only way will he have a chance to reach safety before nightfall” – just one transposition, otherwise no mistakes and no further awkward sentences. That’s not a moan; it’s a commendation. Update: The author tells me they have fixed this and it’s been re-issued.
The majority of the book was written in the present tense, which works unusually well in this instance (elsewhere, I hate it), but I find myself in opposition to the author in one respect. Different readers will notice this in different places in the story but the description slips into the past tense for passages solely about “the crawler”, which plods after the Pteronaut inexorably, as if it were played by Peter Falk. Just when I was tuned into the live flowing narrative, bump, a palpable bump. I understand now that the tense change was an intentional aspect of the structure, quite deliberate, ripples in the flow to differentiate the chaser from the chased, but I thought it wasn’t necessary and the author thought it absolutely was. Okay, so there’s no right or wrong about this, just a difference of personal preference. Anyhow, I have no complaints about the rest of it. The rest of it was classic.
The novel has been set on Mars, at an undefined point in the future. The story of what has happened to civilisation on that world is revealed in tiny, gradual increments. Who is the Pteronaut, where has he come from and why is he running? For what crime has he been tagged and what exactly is it that chases him? These are fierce opponents in a hunt but what is the schism in their philosophy that has built such steely determination?
Sometimes echoing the abandonment element of The Martian Chronicles, along with the uncatchable fox and the inescapable hound, the Terminator and the 1971 film The Duel, it stands equivalent to all of them and still provokes the reader’s empathy, leaving us rousing and cheering the torch of human hope against the inevitability of death. The pounding machine draws close, fusion engines restless, the rolling of tracks relentless, insatiable, no quarter, night and day, through heat and ice, a metal-headed industrial machine mind bent on one purpose: cornering and snuffing out a single life. It’s like Amazon’s attitude to independent book reviewers.
There’s a balance to the science aspect of the science fiction that integrates next-generation solutions into the story smoothly, so any intensive technical types can accept how the Pteronaut can survive and transport himself in this place and time, yet those who aren’t into nitty picky realism can surf through to their satisfaction too without an information dump. NCC-1701 souvenir schematic blueprints do not interest me in the slightest, yet I do like to see a satisfactory, informed layperson explanation of why any future technology works because I don’t believe in magic – and my cynicism was appeased, which it isn’t always. Another tick.
Going quasi-Byron for a second, what is this book if it is not an iron-red streak across the realm of written science fiction? Figures was nominated for our highest prize in writing, so how close to it sits this one on a scale? Where indeed to place it, as ranking is relative and in science fiction at least it lacks any known rival in descriptive escapology that I can think to peg it to.
Without any sign of a speech mark throughout, these animate characters develop physical personas with their aches and adrenaline, rusting, living iron and the ravines and traps of a majestic alien landscape that bring it all alive to pick out every hard-won, red grit experience in the sequence as real and edgy. Expect a progression measured in tension as well as by distance. There’s a hint of humanity’s hubris in the civilisation that failed to take root, an excursion seeded onto an alien world, where the irrelevance of our beliefs when lifted out of context just spear them into absurdity like a candelabra melting in a furnace. Humanity’s territorial, anti-social nature is its weakness and that is brought out in extremis, when conditions are harsh and supplies are short. This is Life on Mars.
I wanted the Pteronaut to beat the odds to thrive and wheel away in that tangerine sky, but accompanied this feeling with reservation because I wasn’t sure what he stood for, until the end. He might have deserved to be chased. Objectively, if this was a world in which nothing else lived, what beliefs and constructs he stood for would be a total irrelevance. There was once a cartoon, in The New Yorker I think, of several hippos wallowing in an oasis, an isolated pocket of timelessness in an endless desert where nothing ever changed and one day blended into the next and one hippo says to the other “Is it Thursday?” I did want him to get back in the air though, not just to be safe but to be at one with the thermals and currents because a bird on the ground is sacrificial art.
To collectors of science fiction literature, I would say that your library is incomplete without this novel. To occasional readers of the genre, I would recommend it as an experience isolated from anything you may have read before, to skim through the air and make footfall on the red earth with an ever-present rumble of apprehension behind you.