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Sci-fi round-up: Near and distant futures on Mars and in mighty metropolises

MAT COWARD looks at the latest works from Sophia McDougall, Stella Gemmell, Hugh Howey and Nnedi Okorafor

In our near future an invisible alien invasion has engineered a new ice age on Earth and, in Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall (Egmont, £6.99), 12-year-old Alice, both of whose parents are in the armed forces, is among the first intake of an experimental evacuation programme. 

On partly-terraformed Mars she and her fellow pupils attend school while being prepared for a life as military cadets. When disaster strikes their small settlement, Alice and friends set off across a hostile and largely uninhabited planet in search of help. 

But of course the only thing that can really help children caught up in war is peace. 

Lively, humorous writing and engaging characters produce a very exciting space adventure for older children and adults of any age. 

Stella Gemmell’s The City (Corgi, £7.99) is a 700-page epic fantasy novel of military conflict and political intrigue. 

The eponymous city is ancient and vast, as labyrinthine below ground as above, but its greatest days are behind it. 

As the mightiest metropolis in the world it has been at war with its neighbours for generations. The ruling clique’s commitment to endless, mutually ruinous violence forces a disparate group of the city’s inhabitants to contemplate the unthinkable — collaborating with their enemies to overthrow the emperor, rarely seen but rumoured to be immortal, and negotiate peace before it’s too late. 

This an unusually fine example of an overcrowded genre — intelligent, moving and memorable. 

Sand by Hugh Howey (Century, £18.99) is set in what seems to be a future version of our world which, for undisclosed reasons, has become buried in ever-shifting sand dunes. 

While populations fight a day-by-day, even hour-by-hour, battle to maintain a fragile civilisation against the desert and the wind which carries it, specialist treasure-hunters dive down into the sand, as if through water, in search of buried loot from the old world. 

This terrifically fresh and well-realised setting provides the background for a richly emotional story about families and communities — how they become divided and what brings them back together. 

Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (Hodder, £13.99) is really a novel about Lagos, the city that “rhymes with chaos.” 

The author, a US citizen of Nigerian descent, has clearly started with a personal variation on one of SF’s oldest and most basic questions. So instead of the usual “What would happen if aliens arrived?” she asks: “What would it be like if aliens chose to make themselves known in Lagos — and only in Lagos?” 

The tone of her answer, exasperated and affectionate, will be familiar to anyone who has ever lived in, and endured a love-hate relationship with, a great city. Bravery and panic jostle with venality and kindness, while hope and wonder battle against fearful superstition, often all in the same person. 

Inevitably it’s the setting, both geographical and cultural, that makes this book so enjoyable and interesting to readers from elsewhere. 

Okorafor’s skilful mingling of hard science-fiction with African fantasy creates an unusual and uplifting story.

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