the times | Saturday April 9 2022 saturday review 19
The Shadow Glass
by Josh Winning
Titan, 400pp; £8.99
The cult film director Bob
Corman, creator of the
unsuccessful 1986 puppet
fantasy “The Shadow Glass”, is dead, and
his son Jack — washed up, middle-aged,
staggering under the weight of the sizeable
chip on his shoulder — has turned up to
sell off the family’s effects. But an unfeasi-
bly violent storm brings to life every film-
prop puppet in Bob’s attic: every dwarvish
wug and adorable lub, every foxy kettu and
grotesque, terrifying skalion.
The Shadow Glass is confident, unosten-
tatious entertainment: the years that the
author Josh Winning has spent writing for
Radio Times, Total Film and SFX have given
him a pitch-perfect command of the cul-
ture he’s so ably and affectionately sending
up. And the whole is lifted magnificently
by the pathos and humour with which he
conveys Jack’s fraught relationship with
his father.
Can Jack save the Earth from the cosmic
battles triggered by his dad’s failed pic-
ture? Can he reassemble the magical
Shadow Glass, prove his worthiness in the
Mirror Realm and heal the not-so-
fictional-after-all land of Iri? Oh, almost
certainly; readers will have their cake and
get to eat it too, is Winning’s solid promise.
Metronome by Tom Watson
Bloomsbury, 320pp; £16.99
What would it mean, in a dystopia, to just
get on with life? Aina (once a musician)
and Whitney (once a mover and shaker at
the Department for Energy and Resource)
have fallen foul of their country’s draconi-
an population-control laws. We meet
them in their 12th year of exile, fending for
themselves on a toxic island in the far
north. Every eight hours a clock in their
croft dispenses the pills that keep them
alive. Their reliance on this medicine lim-
its how far they can explore. When a sheep
arrives out of nowhere, Aina begins to
wonder whether their island is quite so iso-
lated after all.
Final reel: a cult movie to end the world
Plus, love in exile on
a toxic island and
Janelle Monáe’s debut,
chosen by Simon Ings
that had them steering clear of planets
containing ancient Originator artefacts;
now they just move the artefacts out of
the way.
Luckily (perhaps) the planet Arc Palla-
tor contains an entire city’s worth of arte-
facts; clearing them will slow the Archi-
tects down enough that the (mostly
human, or human-derived) factions may
be able to study their alien enemy and stop
them — although humanity is as likely to
go to war with itself.
There comes a point in every space
opera (unless you’re very careful) where
the constant production of incidental
invention teeters towards a kind of auto-
matic writing. Fingers crossed, Tchaikov-
sky will slow down for the final volume.Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima,
trans. Stephen Dodd
Penguin Modern Classics, 240pp; £12.99
This novel by Yukio Mishima, the cele-
brated Japanese novelist who committed
ritual suicide in 1970 after leading a failed
nationalist coup, has appeared in English
for the first time, 60 years after it was pub-
lished. This sly contribution to the UFO
phenomenon was by his own estimation
his best novel.
There’s a metronomic quality to Ste-
phen Dodd’s translation, which ups the
tension wonderfully as the Osugi family
become convinced that they each hail
from a different planet. Knowing they are
special, they try to save nuke-wielding
humanity from disaster. Juichiro, the
father, composes a letter to Khrushchev
and founds a peace movement. His son,
Kazuo, meanwhile, reckons the first step to
ordering the world is to standardise its
tableware and domestic appliances.
The utopian fantasies of an ordinary
Japanese family are charming enough,
and would be inconsequential were it not
that, watching for UFOs on quite a differ-
ent hillside, a frustrated assistant lecturer
called Masumi Haguro and two resentful
hangers-on are following another pro-
gramme altogether: “To temper personal
malice, and to rise to the level of hatred of
all humanity.” They are out to exterminate
mankind, and what better place to start
than with the peacenik Osugi family?
Ordinary people harbour the grandest
(and most terrible) thoughts in a cosmo-
logical fable as disconcerting as it is funny:
behind the simplest actions lie visions of
worlds in collision.Seemingly forgotten by their captors,
Aina and Whitney must decide whether to
remain in their half-life or stake every-
thing on an impossible journey. And who’s
to say, after all this time, whether they can
agree on a single course of action?
Tom Watson has conjured a relation-
ship corroded by compromise and capitu-
lation, and worked it into an extraordinary
love story — or rather, what love looks like
when affection and trust have fallen away.The Memory Librarian and Other
Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle
Monáe Harper Voyager, 336pp; £20
This collection of collaborative stories
comes with a soundtrack of sorts: the
singer-actress Janelle Monáe’s 2018 album
Dirty Computer. The “Dirty Computers”
are us. People. The meat-born. The un-
wired. Our future battle to retain personal
kinks, memories and identities in the face
of a gathering surveillance culture has
already shaped Monáe’s adventures in
fashion, video and stage show; now there’s
a literary offering.
In the title story, written with AlayaDawn Johnson, memories have become
a currency — the more you hand over to
the authorities, the more you will thrive.
Seshet, amnesiac director librarian of the
city of Little Delta, is confronted with an
outburst of urban dreaming that threatens
to clog her city’s memory filters. Is revolu-
tion brewing?
Timebox, written with Eve Ewing, is
another highlight: a simple enough
stopped-watch fantasy played out through
a relationship that’s as toxic as it is politi-
cally self-conscious. This is an odd project,
and unevenly handled — but the premise
is certainly intriguing.Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor, 608pp; £18.99
The second in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final
Architecture trilogy, after the disquieting
Shards of Earth (starships move through
subspace; subspace isn’t real; consequently
the pilots go mad) ups the stakes in a work-
manlike fashion. The moonsized Archi-
tects are back, spinning whole inhabited
planets into crystalline flower arrange-
ments. They have overcome the taboopaperbacks
The Sweetness of Water
by Nathan Harris
Tinder, 410pp; £8.99
“Most novels about the American
Civil War tend to concentrate on
the war itself but Nathan Harris’s
ambitious debut novel takes a
refreshingly different approach,”
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst wrote in
his review. In the immediate
aftermath of the war, after the
emancipation of black slaves,
George Walker, an ageing white
farmer in Georgia, finds two
brothers, Prentiss and Landry. They
have recently been freed from a
nearby plantation and are livingrough in a forest. Walker has just
received news that his only son has
been killed; what follows seems
initially to be “a cheering fable of
social integration... but it isn’t long
before things escalate into a scene of
bloody violence”. It was longlisted for
the Booker prize.Should We Stay
or Should We Go
by Lionel Shriver
Borough, 270pp; £8.99
On her 80th
birthday Kay and
her husband plan to
take fatal doses of
Seconal, thus sparing
themselves years of
pain and the NHS
thousands of pounds.
When the momentarrives, Lionel Shriver’s novel serves
up no fewer than 12 scenarios for
what happens next, enabling her to
examine the plan and its ramifications
from every angle you can imagine —
and some that you possibly can’t.
“The result is a work of undeniable
moral seriousness, yet one that’s
never just a series of (admittedly
juicy) discussion points,”
James Walton wrote.The Lamplighters
by Emma Stonex
Picador, 355pp; £8.99
In 1972 three men
disappear from the
Maiden Rock, a lighthouse
15 miles off Land’s End.
The relief-boat rescuers
arrive to find its door
locked from the inside, thetable set with an uneaten meal and
no trace of the three keepers. Twenty
years later a bestselling writer tries
to get at the truth by talking to the
wives and girlfriends left behind.
Such is the set-up of this offering from
Emma Stonex, left, which arose from
a lifelong fascination with lighthouses.
“As we come closer to the solution
the tension is almost unbearable, but
The Lamplighters amounts to much
more than a locked-room puzzle,”
Kate Saunders wrote. “It is about
love, loss and betrayal, with a
tantalising hint of the supernatural.”An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s
Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Bridge Street, 317pp; £10.99
An Ugly Truth makes a decent stab
at being the definitive history ofFacebook to date. Its authors are
New York Times reporters, and the
book is drawn from first-hand
testimonies, mostly of anonymous
former staffers of the social media
company. It takes you from its
early days — Mark Zuckerberg’s
beginnings as a Harvard
wunderkind — to its corporate
dominance and the appointment
of power feminist Sheryl Sandberg
as chief operating officer. All
the company’s worst moments
are here, such as its corrosive
impact on global democracy, with
damning chapters on Russia and
Myanmar. Although comprehensive
and diligent, “the Facebook story
of course isn’t over, which makes
this thoroughly engaging book
end a little unsatisfyingly”, Hugo
Rifkind wrote.science
fiction
Book
of the
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