![]() There is little in the worldbuilding of The Dog Stars that stands up to any sustained scrutiny. Nina Allan’s review of the book at Strange Horizons is very much in line with my own opinion of it, and when she writes of Heller’s “thoughtless inconsistency”, this seems just right. The story of Colorado man Hig, it is set in the near future, following an apparently multi-causal apocalypse: there are references to both disease and climate change, and there also seems to be an ongoing confrontation with ‘Arabs’ in the background of this world. That latter book has a lot to recommend it – breadth of vision, unabashed ambition, memorable images – but may be defeated by the impossibility of its self-appointed task: as Vandana Singh has written, the novel trips over its own assumptions as it pushes its frame of reference ever outwards Intrusion may be slighter, but it also plays more consistently to its own considerable strengths.Ĭaught almost dead-centre in this dog fight is Peter Heller’s appropriately titled The Dog Stars. ![]() Of those, Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion seems to me more perfectly formed than Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, if perhaps as a function of a decidedly narrower imaginative palette. I’ve already reviewed two of the six shortlisted contenders for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award. ![]()
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