The story is set hundreds of years into the future where a police officer, Tara Fraser, is chasing a terrorist, Yuna, across space. Tara comes across the previously unknown Dyson wheel, and his ship is captured and dragged in. He assumes the same thing happened to Yuna with her ship, so he goes looking for her, thinking that when he captures her he will worry about escaping the Dyson wheel. He is a really committed cop.

He discovers the wheel is inhabited and stops to ask the natives if they had seen Yuna, using his computer implant to translate. Instead of helping, they capture him. He now has another problem, dealing with a treacherous native population.

The story is written in a light-hearted tone, along the lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A tone I found refreshing after reading a lot of hard science-fiction and literature. This tone is reflected in the banter between Fraser and Yuna. Fraser is a stick in the mud, doing everything by the book even though he knows his employers are not the nicest people. While Yuna loves to break laws and rules and is prone to impulsive actions. Some of which are successful, others which are not.

I have read a couple of other of Graham Storr’s novels in the Timesplash series, which I plan to return to with his third novel in that series. They are time-travel thriller novels, while Never Ending Day is more of an adventure novel with plenty of humour.

I did find the dialogue slightly disconcerting to begin with, as Yuna and Fraser conversed like they were living in the late 20^th Century. But who knows how people will talk in the future. I recently listened to a radio program on trends which said that everything old is coming back in again, so maybe in hundreds of years times it will be trendy to talk like people in the 20^th Century. The dialogue was very funny at times.

 After reading a lot of hard science-fiction, I enjoyed reading something fun. I very much cared for the protagonists and really hoped they could come to some mutual arrangement to escape the wheel and its somewhat suspect inhabitants.

Having read Claire G. Coleman’s The Old Lie, I knew she was an Indigenous Australian who wrote science fiction that commented on the historical and present-day treatment of Indigenous Australians. When I started reading her earlier novel Terra Nullius, I was immediately looking for science fiction elements.

The novel starts as if set in the outback of 19th-century Australia. It has a few main characters and constantly switches point of view between them. They include Jacky, who is on the run from his “master”. A heartless nun in charge of a mission. She thinks the “natives”, who have been stolen from their families and placed under her dubious care, are sub-human and not worthy of her time. Another character is Johnny, a trooper who has deserted after participating in a massacre of natives. There are a few other main characters but describing them will spoil the plot of the novel.

The first half of the novel reminded me of the horrors that have been inflicted on Indigenous Australians by their colonisers, including Indigenous Australians dying on mass from diseases the colonisers introduced, the stealing of their land, the use of natives as slave labour, the massacres of tribes, the stealing of children from their parents and attempts to re-educate them into the white man’s ways, the introduction of alcohol and its devastating effects on Indigenous Australians, etc.

It seemed like the perfect book to read on Australia Day, or Survival Day, as many Indigenous Australians call it.

As a science fiction reader, I wondered about the lack of descriptions of certain characters and the lack of wildlife. The “mounts” the troopers rode as they chased Jacky were not described. So, I began to wonder where and when the novel was set. About halfway through the reader finds out.

I found the narrative gripping and emotionally engaging. I hoped that the “natives”, as the colonisers called them, would survive. But I knew they were no match for the weapons and other technology of their colonisers.

When reading Australian science fiction my interest always picks up when indigenous characters appear as they are rare. When in the hands of white authors, the Indigenous characters tend to prevail in the end. This is probably a result of the guilt white Australians have about what has happened and is still happening to Indigenous Australians. Whereas, Indigenous Australian authors view their future, from my limited reading, as continuing the fight for survival.

The manuscript and novel deservedly won awards and was short-listed for many others, like the Stella Prize.

Terra Nullius is one of the best novels I have read by an Australian science fiction author.

Us and Them is a collection of short stories and poems that will open your heart to the lives of others, especially the mind of its author, Anthony J Langford. The collection will have you thinking about how you interact with others, and had this reader vowing to be more open to what might be going on in other people’s lives.

About half of the stories are autobiographical scenes from the author’s life, giving insight into events that have influenced the person he has become. They illustrate his quest for adventure and his genuine desire to understand others.

But among that desire to open up, it is a book of regrets, of things not said and done. In one story, he is haunted by a girl crying on the streets of New York and his failure to ask her what is wrong, instead being like all the other people who just walked past her. As he says in one of his poems, “It is always worth it, To reach out, Even if it doesn’t go well”. The collection also ponders aging and its effect on us.

It is a book about someone looking back at their life and contemplating what he could have done better.

Collectively, the poems and stories had me contemplating how well I have lived my own life.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct. We say we care but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.

Anna is the main protagonist, a successful architect, who, rather than face her mother’s pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. She frequently forwards articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taking responsibility for what is happening around her, and in the world, generally by staying uninformed and deferring action to others.

The novel has elements of magic realism that work. Other reviewers have likened it to The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen, a book I enjoyed. It was full of characters deceiving others and themselves.

Much is going on in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. I was particularly interested in it as I have an elderly mother the same age as Francie, whose mental capacity and stamina have been declining in the past few months after a fall, and I wonder how I would respond if she, like Francie, lying in a hospital bed in pain, requested the last rites. Would I have the courage of my convictions to let her pass? It’s a bit like how the father with dementia drew me into The Corrections, as my father was battling dementia when I read that novel. But then climate change, the destruction of the planet, and my feeble attempts to do something about it come to the fore. I hope this novel will get me to do more.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a novel that will get people and possibly bring to the surface their guilt and fears.

It is an utterly compelling read.

Caught Between Love and Loss

This story begins as if it is going to be a story about Richard, a guy who buys a block of land in the bush and decides to build a house on it, but then gradually becomes a story about his girlfriend, Rachel, as she struggles to define what her relationship with Richard is. Is he just a lover or perhaps a potential long-term boyfriend? Is she in love with him, or is she just in love with the idea of building a house and living in a beautiful rural Australian setting? The house becomes a metaphor for their relationship as the reader wonders whether it will ever be complete. The story tugs at the heart as you hope they can find a way to really connect.

A Refugee’s Rage

In contrast to the first story, A Refugee’s Rage is a very angry story. It is the story of a sixteen-year-old Romanian refugee, Alexlandru, in Rome. He has had to look after himself for most of his life and will do anything to survive. He is a volatile character who readily resorts to violence. The story is written in the first person, so the reader sees the world almost exclusively through the eyes of someone who is not only a refugee in a foreign land but, in many ways, a refugee from society. One day, he meets a Syrian refugee, Ara, and the story revolves around their attempts to survive and whether his desire to survive will allow him to develop a relationship with her.

I think the linking factor between the stories is that both main characters are searching for a place in life. The writing is excellent and frequently poetic (Anthony J. Langford has authored a few books of poetry).

I thoroughly recommend this book’s stories, as they will engage the reader while taking them out of their comfort zone.

I enjoyed Steve Amsterdam’s award-winning apocalyptic, climate change novel Things We Didn’t See Coming, so I quickly purchased a copy of his follow-up novel What the Family Needed. Calling Things We Didn’t See Coming a novel might be a misnomer as it is a collection of short novellas. But they all feature the same character and are told in chronological order. Amsterdam uses the same technique with What the Family Needed, but each story is told from the viewpoint of a different character. 

What the Family Needed begins with teenagers Giordana and Ben arriving at their Aunty Natalie’s house with their mother, Ruth. Once again, their mother has deserted her husband. Giordana is looking forward to the normalcy of her aunt’s stable family life, but she has not factored in the fantasies of their son Alek.

Gordiana feels her mother does not care about her opinion of her father and that she is taken for granted by her mother. It’s like she is invisible. While being entertained by one of Alek’s made-up fantasy games, he asks her to choose a superpower of invisibility or flight. She chooses invisibility. Minutes later, she wishes she could sneak downstairs and listen to what her mum is saying about her dad, and she suddenly becomes invisible.

Ben, Ruth, Natalie, cousin Sasha, Uncle Peter, and Alek all tell their own stories. The stories are in chronological order, so they don’t overlap or show an incident from a different viewpoint.

Ben’s story starts a few years after Giordana’s. He is unemployed and full of regret for marrying and having a baby too young.  He wants to be free.  Guess which super ability he gets.

Ruth is a nurse who wants to make the lives of her patients and families as comfortable as possible. If only they would tell her what they really want.

Sasha has never been able to form a long-term relationship. He would do anything to get his lover to return his love.

Natalie is busy—too busy to help fix her delusional son, Alek. If only she were more efficient.

Peter wants his family to stay stable and for nothing to change.

They each acquire a super ability, but their abilities have mixed results.

The novel is written in a wry tone. Most readers will identify with the characters’ desires: Wouldn’t it be nice to find out what people are saying when you are not around, to flee a boring life, or to know if nothing ever changes?

The novel ends with Alek’s story. It is clear from the start of the book that he is the catalyst for the gaining of super abilities by his relatives and other members of his family. I was very keen to find out how and why. Alek’s story offers surface answers but not the bottom-of-the-iceberg answers I sought. I felt a bit dudded and disappointed. 

Things We Didn’t See Coming had a sense of urgency about it. It demands that we change, and has a character that changes to suit the environment. While What the Family Needed shows that change can be hard to cope with, even when magic intervenes. In the end, it says to be careful what you wish for because the change might not be worth it. It is a gentle novel, perhaps too gentle.