by Harry Ritchie
Last updated at 7:18 PM on 26th January 2012
Eden is a far-distant planet accidentally colonised by humans after two lost astronauts were marooned there. now, 163 years after the arrival of Tommy and Angela, this Eden’s Adam and Eve, there are more than 500 of their descendants.
They are struggling to survive because Eden is no paradise – it is a cold, sunless planet, lit only by the stars and the strange trees that give off light, heat and a constant low hum.
It’s up to a rebelliously free-thinking teenager to challenge the set, fearful ways of this tribe of hunter-gatherers that suffers from inbreeding and the almost-complete loss of all Earth’s technology, culture and expertise.
The young rebel forms a breakaway group, and then sets off to find out what lies beyond the mountains.
Human plight and alien planet are both superbly evoked in a captivating and haunting book.
At the age of 130, Eunice Akinya – the grand old lady of science and solar system exploration, and matriarch of the family business empire she created – dies.
Geoffrey Akinya, one of Eunice’s grandchildren, has no time for his family’s empire or politics, completely devoted as he is to the elephants he studies.
But lured by promises of lavish research funds, he is drawn into a treasure hunt for which Eunice planted the clues and which lead him first to an underground city on the Moon, then the frontier settlements of Mars and eventually the very edge of the solar system.
The storyline has its ho-hummish moments, but they’re more than compensated for by the hugely intelligent and brilliantly imagined vision of the high-tech world of 2162.
Zombies seem to have had a new lease of life of late, and to confirm it here’s a stonking 800-page ‘compendium of the living dead’.
Expert editor Otto Penzler has dutifully included earlier zombie stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu, but the creatures really date back to the Twenties and W.B. Seabrook’s tales set in Haiti and H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, both included here.
With more than 50 other brain-munching, ghoul-blasting stories from the zombiefest that has burgeoned since, this is a must for fans of the undead apocalypse.
To quote from Stephen King’s Home Delivery: ‘Burt – you got them chainsaws?’
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