Science Fiction

We are already in the future. In a future. A high-tech environment, in many ways different from every other earlier part of history. Of course, there were many possible futures, and we inhabit only one of them. Where are the moon bases, for example?

In Jo Walton's My Real Children Patricia Cowan lives in two futures, with two different pasts. The year is 2015, and she is old and confused. It's dementia, but it's also the weirdness and vertigo of two sets of memories of two very different lives. She has three children. Or she has four. There was a bomb over Europe. Or there wasn't.

This is the story of two women and two journeys, of passion and madness and longing for a lost mother. Meena leaves her home in India fleeing from a danger she is sure is coming for her. She tries to make her way over the sea to Djibouti, travelling along a wave power generator that stretches almost all the way. Mariam is also running, a child escaping from slavery and making her way across Africa to Ethiopia.

"I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread,” a famous fantasy character once said, and that quote neatly sums up the feeling I get from Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins as I read.