D. M. Wozniak

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I came into this edition having already read the two main pieces of this book. This collection of Perihelion stories features: The Perihelion, An Obliquity, and a bonus novella: The Rue Cler Decommission. The books are set in a alternate version of Chicago that Wozniak has dubbed Bluecore 1c, I mean if that does not get you going what will?!, and set in the not to distant - distant - future. Its a cyberpunk dystopia where daily survival is the main objective of life. Among the many moving parts in these stoires is the utterly fascinating crew of characters. There are six main characters and they are not 100% human our six main people are part animal. The animal parts of our main characters imbue them with amazing abilities as to be expected though this creates other problems. For instance there is Leo who is part leopard and the writing in those scenes is sharp and tense and, I suppose leopard-like, in any-case it works and Wozniak does an effective and thrilling job going at all the angles here with the animal-people abilities.

The concepts that Wozniak weaves are compelling and as the story lines merge and and the characters begin to intertwine this book will be in your hands to the end. UNPUTDOWNABLE. Immensely readable and deep and lyrical and just totally beautiful. This is special science fiction. The sci-fi effects are not all that wholly original per say but what Wozniak does with them is truly special. It is full of bold beautiful writing.

Deep. Immersive science fiction.… (plus d'informations)

I first discovered D.M. Wozniak when I was sent a copy of The Perihelion for review and was struck by the grownup nature of the writing and how he handled the useful literary tool of one particular type of character to open up the story – revealing an almost artificial urban landscape of the future captured from various angles through a photographer’s lens. The photographer isn’t the main protagonist but he adds historical confirmation and realistic depth.

Although all characters were placed in tragic plights, and still are in this sequel, the author found beauty in human flaws and redemption in both human and non-human suffering, when to the characters themselves it must have seemed like the ordinary subjective baseness of living for survival’s sake. The Perihelion was a story of how one great event unfolded, a chaotic inversion of social order in the name of freedom. An Obliquity is an aftermath novel, the story of what happens to the characters next and how they come to terms with what they have done. I had expected this to be an escape from the city adventure, how they get away with it, but that’s only about ten percent of this multi-faceted story.

Apart from the author’s trademark public education mission to teach readers the meaning of a neglected word in the title of every novel, the message of this series appears to be Yin and Yang, where something good survives in every evil and vice versa. It isn’t so much cause and effect as each finding wave has a few droplets turning the other way. The thug mercenary of book one turns saviour in book two, the scientist creator figure alternates as the destroyer, the hummingbird hero of the persecuted turns betrayer and the protectors of the public ignore their plight and seem more like the problem. Even the art-plagiarist swallows the punishment of his comeuppance with good grace and emerges in book two forgiven, as an equivalent and original artist to the one he took from after all – right time, right place, right instincts to seize and document the moment. The finest example of this is the juxtaposition of human perfection, flawless camera models, losing any worth they had in magazine artificiality and yet a two hundred pound hybrid leopard man, easily led and handicapped by a simplistic mind, is the purest, most trusting and innocent soul of all. He saves lives with no expectation of reward and blames no one for his suffering. The part-human and part interesting species thing sounds silly, just another comic book fantasy you might think, but it’s really not like that at all. It’s skirting with what’s realistic and soon to be attempted. We already splice broccoli genes into strawberries to keep them fresh and jellyfish genes into mice to light them up, so it’s a realistic research question to see how the human brain would alter if a similar insertion happened to us.

Babies die in this tale, but they, like the photographer’s models, are artificial creatures plugged into no living mother but instead to a wall socket at a repository. When some of these dear abstract values are lost, it’s as if the parents’ safe deposit box has been raided. Placing the babies in the same building as the bank was, again, a subtle artifice. When over 300 souls are endangered, notably only one mother goes to them. Will we really become so chique?

On the whole, the story follows the “show not tell” rule of literature, with a few exceptions, although key events are revised when seen from another angle by a different character, when relating their personal story. Some readers like that reinforcement (e.g. Magnolia, with Tom Cruise, was popular) but there’s that risk that readers will think it’s repetitive, too much “show”, as if we either didn’t understand the scene first time or the author has jumped at a way to go back, revise it and add something after the fact. As I say, the non-linear technique was popular in film as a writer can experiment with changing your perception of the character’s motivation (or right and wrong), so it can work in books if kept neat and un-confusing. For this reason, I would recommend reading the first book before you reach this one, otherwise you won’t know why the ransom is being paid (when first mentioned in this novel) and you’ll think you’ve missed something; although it is revealed later. The same goes, arguably, for the connection between the characters and the disaster itself.

An Obliquity illustrates the concept that no matter how advanced a society is, the people are only three or four meals away from societal breakdown and anarchy. In that aforementioned Ying and Yang sense, it is noticeably well written and almost without a mistake, apart from a single typo “I do not thing (k) he knows”, but no one spots the exception to prove the rule because they’ve given up looking. There’s a very effective change-up in the use of language between the hybrid human characters, conveying the uncomplicated, short sentence thinking of the leopard-human against the aggressive, proactive busyness of the human-wasp. They might be 99 percent human and have a touch of a different animal’s DNA but that’s supposedly the same genetic distance between humans and chimps, isn’t it? In this imagined future, the difference between “99er” and human is reflected in the workings of their minds.

“Broken window panels fall through the air like metallic confetti, capturing the sunlight. They are slow to fall and are caught in the wind. Within seconds, the very tip of the spire overturns upon itself, a jagged finger resting downwards, steel entrails the only thing keeping it from falling to the ground.”

This author can write. They can also paint a picture that sparks a new mood. It’s more artistic than apocalyptic, image and feelings told through a consistent writing style almost suggesting the whole thing was committed to paper at one sitting on a single length of fax roll, Kerouac-style. I’m sure he didn’t do that but the intelligent storytelling voice is consistent and, for long reads, that isn’t what I usually see. The sectioned structural pattern I found to become more comfortable and grown-into over time, although these were often parallel threads encouraging some patience to tease the story out and remember who’s who and where their story left off previously.

Some problems are solved with violence and others are solved with dollars, which aren’t my favourite ways to progress any plot, but other pressures are met with kindness and upturned, hopeful eyes, so I suppose the latter doesn’t have much impact without the former to contrast it.

This is a human story around what happens when our advanced technology is turned off, what we deserve to become when unsupported by our engineered defences and who we think we are when we are put on hold with time for reflection and introspection. The same effect might be had by turning off the mobile phone networks but in An Obliquity the photographer character is there to catch it happening in another circumstance, to catch us confused, adjusting and revealing.

I do recommend this, with the advice though to read Perihelion first, in the awareness it was a difficult subject to take on. I can’t help thinking that, beyond a very confined epicentre, the chosen weapon has an invisible effect on physical material, so for the writer to describe the shattered city scenes and disruption by focussing on the damage that people have caused to their environment and each other as a result of the intangible change must have been a challenge to execute. It’s like being asked to describe and extrapolate fishing through the medium of examining dead fish.

The author has done a very good job of bringing all of this displacement alive, portraying a bad day in a potential future, where a species has tripped over its laces and been forced to take stock after landing unexpectedly on its bum in the rubble of hubris.… (plus d'informations)

The Perihelion is a striking and uncommon conceit, mature in both style, form and characterisation but also with something wistful and hopeless about it, another long dark teatime of the soul. The writing is assertive, suggesting the author has been in this game for a while. I also don’t think it was written quickly as it reads like the work of years. The motifs within this multi-thread plot are tragic and very human, yet they’ve been spun out of a dystopian premise in a terrestrial future. Some are analogies (capitalist/socialist futures, genomic meddling, the meaning of self-worth) and some are speculations rolled out in plain sight (modern convenience vs closeness to your baby). These ideas are delivered in a variety of ways and the reader finds they’re dwelling on different motes in a swirl of things to think about. As with everyday existence, some of the worries will always be beyond our scope to control, so the philosophical would say “Why worry? Leave it in their hands”. Who’s they?

Without any direct hooks to pin this feeling to, the echo moments of individual solitude and vulnerability in a large city space remind me of some of the established works of sci-fi, such as The Martian Chronicles and The Man Who Fell to Earth. I mean that in a complimentary rather than a critical way but this book could have been written a while ago and been a pillar of another era, so I hope it won’t be lost in the over-population we have now. Abandoned places, drifting sands, love among the ruins, yet it’s told from a functionally advanced city and that’s reconciled somehow. No matter how crowded your world is, or how advanced our society, remember when you close your eyes that everyone sleeps alone.

The 99ers programme is interesting because that could happen, or more accurately we can do that now (CRISPR) and only ethics prevents us, yet with 200 national authorities on Earth, it just takes one to conform to a different interpretation and the sequencing devices will be in business at street level. Wait and see. Would your child like a carapace? No problem. We’ll have to expand the definition of human. That’s the rub really. Change in what it is to be anatomically human has previously been an extremely gradual process – no homo erectus parent gave birth to a homo sapiens child because transition crept along in a granular way. Now we have the ability to apply significant change to the human form in one generation. A one percent change sounds like a reasonable risk but how do we control that getting into the shared gene pool permanently? The hybrids will have a 99pc case for human rights, which includes the right to reproduce, and most of them will be fully capable of saying so. Would you be on their side? Of course you would. It’s compassion. NB. The genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is one percent.

For me, the best part of the book was the story of the photographer who has built his career on a single decision to take advantage of an unethical opportunity. This thread covers temptation, right and wrong, the ‘devil’ tempting, dishing out success and riches but then turning it to dust and that leaves the reader with the concern they might have done the same in the circumstances, with that shallow gloss of inner justification which unpleasantly reminds them they’re just as rotten as he is. How many inventions, thoughts and quotes through human history have we attributed to the wrong person because the real originator faded into oblivion before shouting their name? How many people have accepted a medal for someone else’s contribution? How many distributed the blame?

This is one of the leading indie narratives I’ve read in the last year and I recommend it. It’s a next step speculation of the future but with pockmarked grandeur and a sense of place. What I mean is, everyone’s childhood includes a baseline landscape that they then compare a changing world against to decide whether they like it. This book has an identity that seems to have grown from an extrapolation of our current baseline and moved humanity into a time more progressive but subtly less comfortable, degrading even, where anything organic and wild is an aberration, a nuisance to be controlled, designed out or killed and replaced. The “wilderness” of the Redlands waits outside the city and there’s hesitation, they’re scared of it, not because it is dangerous but because they fear what is not under control.

I was trying to find if there is a measurable mathematical definition of wilderness, an algorithm, as I've heard it said that genuine wilderness no longer exists (therefore we need to drop the word or evolve its practical meaning into something that's still relative to us). It turns out there actually is one. The modern and adapted definition of wilderness can be seen in real time by anyone with a phone as the output of a population density and wireless coverage calculation. Put simply: Anywhere they don't bother to put a Pokemon.

We can go to the world of Perihelion, if we choose this path, but we will no longer be fully human when we arrive. Humans are creatures of matter, with meat and genomes, just like other animals, but unlike other animals half of us exists in the air (thoughts, aspirations, philosophy, spirit and principles), so the neat accomplishment of this book is to show a future where we are becoming progressively less human in both arenas. Will that future population even notice, if their baseline is not far behind? Then, if they do, will humanity pull the plug and re-set how the species chooses to live or will it just wimp out and stay aboard a train that’s going somewhere they don’t want to be?

It is notable that none of the reviewers of this book so far have agreed on anything much... except the five star rating.… (plus d'informations)