Keith Stevenson's 3 favorite reads in 2024

TR Napper paints a vivid picture of a cyberpunk future Vietnam in 36 Streets.

In TR Napper’s 36 Streets, part of Vietnam is again under occupation, this time by the Chinese military, but a protracted battle still rages in the south of the country, proving once again that the Vietnamese are difficult if not impossible to conquer. The 36 Streets in question is a ‘neutral area’ in downtown Han Noi ruled over by several street gangs. The Chinese government leave their operations relatively unmolested because it serves their purpose to do so.

Lin Thi Vu is a young Vietnamese woman raised – along with her twin sister Phuong – in Australia by her adoptive mother, Kylie, who took both girls in as orphaned refugees and eventually resettled with them in Vietnam because Australia’s immigration regime is even worse in the future than it is now.

Lin resents her Australian upbringing because it means she doesn’t sound like a local. That’s part of the reason she’s driven herself hard to become number 2 in the Binh Xuyen street gang. Gang leader Bao Nguyen took a shine to her when they met and subjected her to a brutal training regime (shown in a series of flashbacks) involving bloody fights with a Japanese martial arts master.

All of this is to say you don’t want to fuck with Lin. She’s hard drinking, hard fighting and takes zero shit from anyone. The fact the book has a benedictive cover quote from Cyberpunk Grand Master Richard Morgan tells you just what sort of person Lin is. She’s not well-suited to the next job her boss gives her – to play private detective for a well-paying British games simulation entrepreneur who thinks his business partner has been murdered.

And so we find ourselves well and truly in the cyberpunk/ neo-noir wheelhouse with Lin pounding rain-soaked neon-lit streets looking for clues. Napper does a tremendous job in bringing the sights, sounds and smells of future Han Noi to us. And in his hands, the city becomes a character you’ll know just as well as Lin.

But 36 Streets is also a meditation on memory, and much of that revolves around technology that allows everyone to record, edit and potentially erase their memories thanks to ubiquitous cochlear-glyph implants. The implants have a lot of other uses, completely replacing today’s mobile phones, allowing ‘heads-up’ in-retina displays and containing data ‘pin drives’ that can be easily extracted or swapped. Sure, the technology is very handy – just like your mobile phone is handy – but it’s a gateway to some very scary stuff that Napper explores and extrapolates to the max. What would it be like to have your memories edited, or to lose whole days or years, or to have the memories of someone else implanted instead? I loved this aspect of the book and how it ties in with Lin’s own feelings about her personal history, and how memory can make you strong, but it can also make you weak.

Away from the 36 Streets, Lin has another life – kept entirely separate from her gang persona – with a sister she loves and is annoyed by and a mother she insists on giving a hard time to. While these relationships add another important facet to our understanding of Lin, the scenes of family life felt a little flat compared to the hyper-realism of the gang world. Maybe that was the aim, but if so they needed to feel more real than they do in order to stand up against the book’s other settings.

But that’s a minor quibble in what is a substantial piece of science fiction writing. As you might imagine, Lin’s detective case goes south very quickly, and she finds herself in a world of pain that only she can get herself out of. She pays a heavy toll – and so do those around her – and the book’s conclusion combines everything that has gone before in a hugely satisfying climax that is at once grand and cinematic in its execution but also intensely personal and – truth be told – heartbreaking.

On the future Earth of Alien Clay, society is in the grip of a bunch of ideological zealots that would give the Spanish Inquisition a run for their money. The ‘Mandate’ insists on a scientific orthodoxy that stifles true scientific thinking and enforces its worldview with a jackbooted fervour that tolerates no alternatives. Those who dare to dabble in ‘free thinking’ are captured, interrogated and squeezed until they give up their comrades before being exiled to a prison colony on some far-off world.

Such is the fate of Anton Daghdev, xeno-ecologist and political dissident, who finds himself cast out to the Earthlike-only-within-the vaguest-meaning-of-that-word planet of Kiln, there to be brutishly inducted into the prison colony and scientific research station maintained there by the Mandate.

Yes, not content with banishing identified Public Enemies to die on alien worlds, the Mandate forces its transportees to toil among the often-inimical alien lifeforms to develop scientific theories that bolster the orthodoxy they cling too, and real facts and science be damned. Daghdev finds himself sequestered with other political dissidents – some he knows, others he simply knows of – all of them suspicious of each other as potentially being the one that fingered them to the authorities.

And then there’s the bounteous alien life on Kiln, which does its level best to infect the Earthlings that venture out into Kiln’s biosphere, all of it searching for the genetic key that will unlock the biome of these newcomers so they can become part of the rich tapestry of Kiln life. After each sojourn, the poor dissidents find themselves subjected to scouring decontaminations that are almost worse than sprouting alien flora and fauna in their stomach linings and elsewhere.

On first viewing, Alien Clay is familiar ground for Tchaikovsky. He’s written about prison life in Cage of Souls, in which the poor prisoners suffer many similar privations, and the actions of alien life on unsuspecting humans is a rich seam he’s explored in the Children series, so I was a little worried this book might not be sufficiently different to be truly original. In addition, it’s told in first person through the eyes of Anton Daghdev, which can make for a very restricted form of storytelling with an emphasis on ‘telling’ rather than ‘experiencing’. However, Tchaikovsky has used first person to great effect before in Walking to Aldebaran and in this case there is a solid plot-driven reason to stay in first person, and the story opens out once Daghdev and his comrades find themselves adrift in the alien landscape.

The point of view and the setting also play into a beautiful exposition, subversion and reimagining of what it is to be a dissident and revolutionary and how the systems of power created to grind down opposition can be rendered useless with a shift in perspective. As with Children of Memory, Tchaikovsky has a point to make and he does so – powerfully – through the narrative and most powerfully of all in the uplifting and chilling ending.

It's often said that the movie is not as good as the book it was based on, but All You Need is Kill and Edge of Tomorrow are as good as each other for different reasons. They both share the same premise and a wry and kinetic plot that moves quickly and pulls no punches. Edge of Tomorrow broadens out the world of the book and - as a visual medium - delivers more visceral action scenes, but All You Need is Kill brings us closer to the characters, what made them and what drives them and provides a different story arc and ending - one a Hollywood Tentpole could not and would not attempt - that is at once sad and uplifting and absolutely right.