> SCIENCE FICTION ALEX GOOD

Rabbits

By Terry Miles

(Del Rey, 432 pages, $37)

Gaming culture is big — very big — which has led to a lot of books and movies about the blurring of the line between the game/ virtual reality and real life.

“Rabbits,” which is the outgrowth of a popular podcast by Terry Miles, is the latest offering in this line and it’s likely to appeal to fans of books like “Ready Player One” as much as it will to readers of Thomas Pynchon. The idea is that there’s a mysterious and dangerous game called Rabbits that involves the reshaping of reality itself. You play by noticing arcane connections and anomalies in everyday things, which before long leads to your getting sucked down a rabbit hole into alternate dimensions.

K and his pal Chloe, both dedicated gamers, are enlisted to play the latest iteration of Rabbits, and to save the world they’ll have to win the game. Given the nature of Rabbits, their fastpaced, puzzle-solving adventures are fuelled by lots of pop culture references and conspiracy theories, taking paranoia to the next level while the action keeps hopping.

A Cage for Every Child By S. D. Chrostowska (Sublunary Editions, 160 pages, $18)

The challenging stories in S. D. Chrostowska’s latest collection aren’t really science fiction, as they take place in a universe largely without science. But then they’re scarcely stories either, taking more the form of essays or parables set in fantastic worlds where giant worms are hunted or flowers sprout from the palm of your hand.

There’s a deliberate difficulty to Chrostowska’s work, from the almost awkward formality of the prose to the evocation of imagination as a supernatural gift constrained by our corrupt human condition. Children being raised in cages, the subject of one story, has an obvious political resonance, but is more allegorical than topical. Perhaps freedom is overrated?

There’s something almost medieval in Chrostowska’s antagonism of soul and body, as well as very modern in her exploration of perverse psychology. Kafka may be the presiding spirit, with the failure genius in one story being explicitly likened to Kafka’s hunger artist. He’s truly a master of the pathetic fit for our time: alienated from his world, from others, and from himself but trying to make something of it all the same.

Midnight, Water City By Chris McKinney (Soho, 336 pages, $35.95)

SF and future-noir detective fiction go so well together they constitute their own sub-genre. “Midnight, Water City” walks down these dirty streets again in the year 2142 as a tough detective discovers the body of Akira Kimura, a scientist who saved the Earth from a deadly asteroid decades earlier, chopped into pieces in her revitalization pod.

The whodunit angle may be familiar but Chris McKinney makes it work with his worldbuilding chops and the creation of an authentic protagonist. In terms of the former, there’s the now almost taken-for-granted split of society into two social classes (the Money and the Less Thans), but due to the degradation of the mainland much of humanity has moved offshore and now live in underwater seascrapers and floating ’burbs. Meanwhile, lifespans have been lengthened so that the narrator, though 80 years old and feeling weathered, not least from four marriages, is a long way from being over the hill.

Though he’s not always the brightest laser knife in the drawer our hero has psychic powers to go with his toughness, being able to see the colour of murder. This comes in handy, as soon there are bodies piling up and he’s going to need all the help he can get, even from beyond the grave, if he’s going to survive.

Jack Four

By Neal Asher (Tor, 431 pages, $33.99)

While it may be a cliché to call a book like “Jack Four” action-packed, it’s hard to think of a better description. We’re plunged straight into the madness on the first page as the titular narrator (so named because he’s one of twenty clones) hops out of a matrix “coffin” and almost immediately has to start battling for survival.

Non-stop carnage follows as Jack the Bioweapon takes on an all-star lineup of monsters and supersoldiers, enduring what should be multiple season-ending injuries but for his special healing abilities. No matter how much damage he takes he can be almost instantly repaired, leaving him ready to fight another (and another, and another) round.

Though this is a stand-alone volume set in the Neal Asher’s already wellstocked Polity universe you may feel a bit at sea if you’re not familiar with the crablike prador and their long-running war with humanity. But the device of beginning with Jack’s coming to consciousness and having to learn about his world as he goes along helps, even if you don’t get many chances to stop and catch your breath when the games begin.