![]() ![]() ![]() Hopper’s former Oxford tutor, Edward Thorne, is dying, and he has something important he wants to tell her. Sadly, though, we don’t get to spend much time on the rig. Her job involves lassoing icebergs and scuppering the numerous ships full of corpses which are drifting around the ocean. Our protagonist, ocean scientist Ellen Hopper, works on an Atlantic rig “frozen in a permanent autumn morning”. Britain is now a permanently sunny agricultural powerhouse, cooled by handy new North Sea currents and ruled by a dodgy authoritarian government hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. Our story is set, of course, in the boring bit in between, the narrow habitable region at the edge of the Hot Zone. The other is a sun-blasted wasteland whose few remaining inhabitants have been driven below ground by the constant heat. One side of the planet is frozen solid, populated by the corpses of those who didn’t escape in time. No more day and night, no more sunrise and sunset. So, the year is 2059, and the world has stopped turning. ![]() Because science fiction is for nerds, right guys? The marketing strategy seems to have worked, in any case, as the book was a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK. Despite its clear sci-fi concept (the Earth has stopped spinning, leading to ecological disaster), Andrew Hunter Murray’s debut novel doesn’t see itself as science fiction. ![]() The word ‘thriller’ appears so many times on the cover and endorsement blurbs for this book that it seems almost unfair of me to review it for a science fiction and fantasy magazine. ![]()
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