EUROPE AT DAWN, fourth Fractured Europe novel, wraps a terrific series

EUROPE AT DAWN
DAVE HUTCHINSON (Fractured Europe Sequence #4)
Solaris Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Alice works at the Scottish Embassy in Tallinn in Estonia as a member of the Cultural Section. When two men bring her the jewelled skull of a Scottish saint her world gets turned on its head, and she becomes the latest recruit to Les Coureurs des Bois.

On a Greek island Benno is just one of hundreds of refuges dreaming of a new life in Continental Europe. After hatching an audacious escape plan, he may just get his dream, but at the price of serving some powerful mysterious new masters.

Rudi and Rupert, the seasoned Coureur and the scientist in exile from a pocket universe, discover that someone they thought long dead is very much still alive. Not only that, but the now defunct Line – the railway that once bisected the European continent – may be being used for nefarious means.

THE FRACTURED EUROPE SEQUENCE REVIEWS:
EUROPE IN AUTUMN—EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT—EUROPE IN WINTER

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A DRC AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: Old friends make reappearances...old problems need solutions again, the only ones at hand are the ones that didn't work before...new faces wear old clothes and frighten us out of our sleep because the monsters under the bed never left.

An island in the Aegean Sea, the Scottish Embassy in Tallinn, a folk duo of no discernible talent but a huge reputation, and a pair of refugee teenagers tear through the pages trailing clouds of story as Author Hutchinson makes his last scheduled stop in hideously Fractured Europe.

So let me start with this. You're not going to make this your first stop on the route of the Coureurs des Bois. It would be a serious error of judgment to jump in any old how. It is necessary to read EUROPE IN AUTUMN first because so many things that happen in each book suddenly make sense in light of remembering events from the ones before; and starting from the first story helps make the experience of reading the fourth richly textured and satisfying.

The multiverse that Author Hutchinson posits, with its pocket universes and its bizarre cartographic secrets and its stunningly amoral and conscienceless elite, doesn't suddenly make sense in this book's denouement. It doesn't really ever make sense. It all—all the books, all the maps you hear about, all the baggy, wrinkled bits of story-cloth left on bushes here and there drying at their own pace—makes perfect sense as soon as you realize that. I'm not trying to be sibylline or obfuscatory. I'm giving you the effect of reading Author Hutchinson's deeply sculpted, complex story. What vistas open to you are important, but not decisive and defining. They're fractal artifacts of a universe possessed of no higher law than randomness. Remembering the things in your subjective past isn't always helpful, though it's always a good idea to rattle the dice in the brain-cup and see if boxcars or snakeyes come up. Either roll can be the winner because, like the real universe, shit just happens, what the hell. (Yes yes, it's a Terry Pratchett line, but believe me when I tell you that Author Hutchinson has a similarly depraved sense of humor to Sir Terry's.)

What you need to know about this book in particular is that Rudi coming back into focus, Rudi from the Krakow restaurant who really never wanted too much of what happened on his watch to happen...Rudi snaps the pieces of this shattered place's soul into focus as only he could. He still wants to feed people and be a cog in a machine that lacks malevolence for its constituent parts. And he is the reader in that sense, he is the character who does what he must but wants some of his work to matter in a simple way without Overtones.

He wants to live a boring life in boring times. The opposite of the "ancient Chinese curse" we've grown up hearing about. Europe's fracture due to the hideous plague of dubious origins is irreparable. The world cannot be put back together again. I think the Western Romans, especially the Britannians, of 500CE must have felt this way. It look the same. The sky's the same. The birds didn't change. But nothing will ever work again so what shall we do now?

Then there are those alternate places that aren't a thing like Fractured Europe...do they fit together better, are they functional societies, and what are we all going to use as glue to hold all the truly jagged pieces in place? There are no answers. There are no better-framed questions. There are a lot of smug bastards pretending they're on top of stuff. They're not. And you know what? Since no one is, since there's no top to be on, the world will sail on. Over the falls. Off the edge. Into safe harbor. Simultaneously.

This, my friends, is why I read Author Dave Hutchinson's books. Do not kid yourself. He sees reality, he tells you what's happening in eleventeen voices, he weaves disparate strands of story together and snips others without warning. This is what life actually is without the comforting lie of linear time to soothe our monkeybrains with story. Author Hutchinson tells us the story but unwraps it so we can get down in the gearbox that only quantum mechanics know how to grok.

I want you to read these novels. Don't start here. This is your reward for making a turbulent and beautiful journey. This is the final cataract on the river. You're prepared for it. And it's a great sense of understanding and accomplishment as you finish this book. For this is what it means to be awake and alive and fully present in a unique place. Control? None. Power? Illusion. A good dinner, some wine, and companions to enjoy. Do what it takes to keep that safe for the greatest number of people.

Happen I agree.

ACADIE, novella-sized space opera

ACADIE
DAVE HUTCHINSON
Tor.com
$3.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The first humans still hunt their children across the stars. Dave Hutchinson brings far future science fiction on a grand scale in Acadie.

The Colony left Earth to find their utopia--a home on a new planet where their leader could fully explore the colonists' genetic potential, unfettered by their homeworld's restrictions. They settled a new paradise, and have been evolving and adapting for centuries.

Earth has other plans.

The original humans have been tracking their descendants across the stars, bent on their annihilation. They won't stop until the new humans have been destroyed, their experimentation wiped out of the human gene pool.

Can't anyone let go of a grudge anymore?

My Review: What I love about reading Dave Hutchinson's work is the certainty that he's going to flip the script on you at some point. Usually just after you've become comfortable with the world as it is. And always to the effect that you're longing to go back to the way things were. But, just like life, that's not on the table. You can't unsee/unhear/unlearn what's happened. It's a bear, innit?

Why would a sane person like that?! As if I'd know what sane people like, still less why.

In the space of a novella, Hutchinson packs a space opera's worth of concepts and creations. Chief among them is the first-ever pop culture mention of kudzu in a positive light. Kudzu for the uninitiated is a terrifying invader of the southern USA. It destroys any and every man-made thing in its path. It terrifies me. But given its incredibly thoroughgoing colonial growth habit and ability to fix nitrogen, it makes sense to us it for structural elements in a hab(itat) in space.

Stuff still gives me the willies.

I love the use of quantum-entangled bits (qubits) for instant communication across immense distances. It sounds so plausible that I just assigned it the mental label ansible and didn't think much about it again while I was reading. It is cause for pause that I'm using one fictional communication concept to explain another in my mind...maybe I read too much sci fi...naaahhh, not possible. Quantity "too much sci fi" not defined.

It's also the script-flipping ending of the book that leads me into the star-granting stratosphere. It's delicious. It's like the Big Bang...it leads to more questions than answers, which is exactly how I want my fiction. I began to go back over the beginning as I read the ending. It made more sense. It made different sense, really, not more, and that's something to savor. I've read a lot of books in my life so I'm always after a new sensation. When I find one it makes me very happy.

Which leads to that missing quarter-star. Why, given the praise I'm heaping up here, didn't I give the damn thing the full five?

Ninety-six pages. Ninety-lousy-fucking-six pages. Really, Dave? There'd better be more stories set in this universe.

Just sayin'.

EUROPE IN WINTER, a rare series novel that exceeds its predecessors

EUROPE IN WINTER
DAVE HUTCHINSON (The Fractured Europe Sequence, #3)
Solaris Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Rudi, the former chef-turned-spy, returns on a mission to uncover the truth—in a fractured Europe utterly changed by the public unveiling of the Community.

Union has been forged and the Community is now the largest nation in Europe; trains run there from as far afield as London and Prague. It is an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. So what is the reason for a huge terrorist outrage? Why do the Community and Europe meet in secret, exchanging hostages? And who are Les Coureurs des Bois? Along with a motley crew of strays and mafiosi and sleeper agents, Rudi sets out to answer these questions—only to discover that the truth lies both closer to home and farther away than anyone could imagine.

***AT THE AUTHOR'S BEHEST, REBELLION SENT ME A TREE BOOK OF THIS TITLE FOR REVIEW***THANKS GUYS***

My Review: The rarest read in a series-heavy publishing landscape is the sequel that improves on the previous books. This books is one of those rare birds. It might just be unique, I'd have to really dig deep in the wetware to be positive, because it's better than the previous books *because of* the previous books. My reviews of EUROPE IN AUTUMN and EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT tell part of the story.The twists and turns of the lives the characters are asked to lead are definitely in the best Cold-War-spy tradition. The patches of somewhat puzzling prose that seem to indicate that a different book has dropped into the one you were reading are exactly that...and this is what finally makes the series so deeply engrossing, twisty, and unputdownable.

Now then. The entire focus of my reviews is always why. Why did I read this book, why do I think you should (or shouldn't) read this book, why do I rate it the way I do...and here I'm going to make my "why" extremely explicit: This book, this series, this concept of reality, is much more than escapist entertainment. The author has done a good deal of deep thinking about the world, how it got where it is, why it's not some other way than it is. He's taken that thinking, those long dark tea-times of the soul, and rendered them into sophisticated, witty (Putingrad! HA!) tales of great subtlety. The interconnections among the volumes are, for those with good memory mapping, sometimes physically jolting. For the run-of-the-mill reader there's no loss of forward momentum, no sense of being at sea; for the more savvy reader, there's an added frisson of pleasure and often amusement. Make no mistake, there is not one non-sequitur in the series. Sometimes you'll need a minute to see if that's an echo or a whisper. Whichever you decide it is, you're right. Much like reality, these books won't dictate your perception of them; the author has laid many a trail through this forest. His mapping skills are, well, hard to equal. We're not talking Rand McNally here, and even the USGS topologists' skills are tested.

And that is at the heart of my pleasure in reading these books. I don't often have the opportunity to engross myself in the unfolding of a narrative across multiple volumes. The last time I can remember was the outstandingly complex world of Barsetshire, begun by Anthony Trollope and continued by Angela Thirkell. It makes me very sad that, since Mrs. Thirkell's death in 1961, no English author has seen the enormous potential of exploring social change through the lens of Barsetshire. Science fiction has multiple universes, some shared by authors with fans and others not; I was most recently bitterly disappointed in James S.A. Corey's The Expanse, which didn't live up to its deeply twisty promise until it made the leap to television. With the Fractured Europe Sequence, I am not left with the painful sense of failure to launch. The ideas are immense, the execution equals their scale, the scope does not show any signs of running out of Lebensraum.

In this entry, a few details need to be remarked on. One is aging. Our loosely conceived narrative universe contains time, and some of the main characters are experiencing its indignities and outrages. Some are quite remarkably not in sync with the world's idea of time. This is enough in itself for a dissertation. Rudi's life trajectory, set off for us in Poland at Max's restaurant in Europe in Autumn, has taken a timely twist that will repay the re-reader of the whole sequence. Another is the prominence of food: don't start this read if you're hungry or there will be near-obsessive levels of snacking. I speak from experience. In fact, I need to make groceries today because of this. Lastly, I bring up the nature of relationships in this world. Nothing is, or realistically can be, permanent; friends wander off, lovers leave, family? What's that when it's at home? Nations expand, contract, vanish, alter out of recognition, and all of it is the natural evolution of the fluid system we call culture. Like all evolution it can be speeded up or altered entirely by hybridization, selective breeding, or habitat destruction. A bleak thought. A hopeful fact. Both, and neither.

Much like life.

A final note: Today, the 19th of December, is Author Hutchinson's birthday. I planned this review to appear yesterday, a week before Yule, and held off a day to celebrate the day. This review will have to do in place of buying you a pint down at the Wolf & Bird, kind sir, as my thanks for creating and continuing to create such delightful entertainment out of the cloth reality hands you.

EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT weaves many threads into a glorious tapestry. Thanks Dave Hutchinson!

EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT
DAVE HUTCHINSON (Fractured Europe Sequence #2)
Solaris Books (non-affiliate Amazon Link)
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a fractured Europe, new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight.

For an intelligence officer like Jim it's a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns a new and unknown national entity which may or may not be friendly to England's interests. It's hard to keep on top of it all.

But things are about to get worse for Jim. A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has appeared who may hold the key to unlocking Europe's most jealously guarded secret...

My Review: I have to disclose that, although I bought this book with my very own United States dollars, I'm pals with the author on social media. Believe me it affected my reading and opinion-making not at all, since an honest review is a better gift than a bunch of hot air. Also note that there are spoilers for EUROPE IN AUTUMN following.

At the very end of AUTUMN, a concept was introduced that's central to this book: The existence of "pocket universes," a modern-day physics concept that boggles my tiny 2-volt brain. It's defined as: "A pocket universe is a concept in inflationary theory, proposed by Alan Guth. It defines a realm like the one that contains the observable universe as only one of many inflationary zones." Wikipedia rocks, and everyone should throw some donations at Jimmy Wales.

So anyway, this pocket universe concept is the source of some really bad-ass events in the world we live in, including a hideous pandemic flu that's done what the Black Death did to 14th-century Europe. The devastation caused much economic misery. But as we all know, money for "black ops" will always flow copiously because there's always a secret to learn, one to protect, and no one dares to reveal it publicly in case The People rise up and shut off the money pipe. So our story threads all center on British Intelligence, the surviving Professor of Intelligence from a pocket universe called "the Campus," and the beloved (to me) Coueruers du Bois we learned so much about in AUTUMN.

All the adventures, the nightmares, the violent justice and injustice meted out are in search of a means to neutralize a threat to whatever place the character's loyalty lies. These people play hard and for keeps. Much bloodshed. All of it for ends that, in my opinion at least, make our world's conflicts seem as foolish as the story's stakes. Why is the mere existence of people your country can't or doesn't control so intolerable as to justify genocidal biowarfare?

EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT doesn't answer this question, raising it and examining it from several sides, but foregoing a simple and pompous jingoistic resolution. The use of pocket universes allows the author to compartmentalize the stories, in best spy-fiction fashion. The twist is that these pockets were created, not discovered, by a family of map-makers. The conflicts, therefore, are engineered and need not ever have happened had the greed and selfishness of one group not taken form in such an unusual way.

Or so it seems in this novel. The pocket countries that litter the near-future Europe after the pandemic, the pocket universes...were they created? Were they discovered and exploited, as the powers that be exploit the fragmentation of today's populations at the hands of venal and manipulative oligarchs?

If I've learned one thing while reading the Fractured Europe sequence, it's that perspective alters everything. I don't for a single second imagine that Hutchinson won't change our perspective on Fractured Europe in EUROPE IN WINTER, forthcoming late this year. Goddesses willing and the crick don't rise.

EUROPE IN AUTUMN...political thriller, predictive futurology, alternate history, and all done well

EUROPE IN AUTUMN
DAVE HUTCHINSON (The Fractured Europe Sequence #1)
Solaris Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 6* enthralled stars of five for 2015, when I read it

JUNE 2021 NEWS The Fractured Europe Sequence will be on your TV before too terribly long! I'm so delighted for Dave and grateful for the Peak-TV age.

The Publisher Says: Europe in Autumn is a thriller of espionage and the future which reads like the love child of John le Carre and Franz Kafka.

Rudi is a cook in a Krakow restaurant, but when his boss asks Rudi to help a cousin escape from the country he's trapped in, a new career - part spy, part people-smuggler - begins.

Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line, a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-Europe railway line, goes wrong, he is arrested, beaten and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.

With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him.

With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws, Rudi begins to realise that underneath his daily round of plot and counter plot, behind the conflicting territories, another entirely different reality might be pulling the strings...

THE FRACTURED EUROPE SEQUENCE REVIEWS:
EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT—EUROPE IN WINTER—EUROPE AT DAWN

My Review: If book 2 is out, I'm orderin' it for myself for Xmas.

This isn't a uniformly kinetic book. The characters, by whatever names their current legends require, (oh, and "legend" here is a term of art) are shown thinking, strategizing, reflecting on their world and its insanities as much as they're shown whizzing around with cool spy stuff and lots of ways to blow people up and steal their money.

My favorite piece of spyware in the book is a towel that rolls out into a computer. WANT. NOW.

Rudi, by various names, does many reprehensible things and feels...remorse is too strong...as if he's failed when he has to resort to reprehensibility to get what he's been sent after. He meets and re-meets many folks from his pasts. He is a darn good, fun hero-on-the-border-of-antihero-ness, and I want to see him in book 2, Europe at Midnight.

And now I'm going to do something really, really mean: At the end of the book, Rudi makes a complete worldview-changing discovery that is, at least for me, unexpected to the point of jaw-dropping, and I am NOT going to spoiler it. It makes some oddly rough, even poorly fitting, facts make absolute sense. Moments when I looked at a sentence and thought, "...the hell...?" weren't frequent, but there were more than enough of them for me to perk my ears. (Of course I was evilly hoping I'd get to say something condescending and unpleasant, and alas could not.)

The Fractured Europe foreseen in this series of books is only barely fiction. In fact, only a pandemic is needed in addition to the refugee crisis going on now and hey-presto Hutchinson = Nostradamus. Of course it's all safely printed on pulpwood paper. There's no expectation of this being futurology, only fiction. Excellent fiction that has me fingering my invisible copy of Europe at Midnight....

I really, really liked this book. I hope there's no let-down coming!

And lest there be any doubt, I'm acquainted with Mr. Hutchinson through social media, but I bought the book with my own United States dollars. Neither the six-toed McHutchface nor Solaris Books think I'm cool enough to pass me freebies.