The star of this speculative satire is Simone. But memories can also be weaponised to keep our identities in stupefied thrall to capitalism, and this darker aspect gets an ample airing in Oliver Langmead’s Glitterati. It is no spoiler to say that Reynolds shows how such stories can be moulded to make us better humans. Trust me, you don’t want this spoiled by more plot details. So much of the book’s joy is working out which bits are real and which are misdirection on the way to unlocking the final mystery.

Lovecraft with The Usual Suspects and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It isn’t every day you get to experience a perfect collision of the Romantic macabre of Edgar Allan Poe and H. The story starts on a ship dodging icebergs in the North Sea during the 17th century, and unfolds into a virtuoso genre-hopping puzzle. This strange space between recollection and construction is explored in two mesmerising books out this month.Įversion by Alastair Reynolds concerns itself with how this constant process of layering and recasting can create meaning and purpose in the most desolate circumstances. The remembered stories from which we braid our identity bend and swerve to serve the narrative needs of our circumstances because our minds happily trade veracity for coherence and narrative. YOUR autobiographical memory can’t be trusted, and science has determined that this isn’t a bug, but a feature.

Alastair reynolds eversion review