Cage of Souls

"You said he’s a very established author; I’d go further, and say he’s phenomenally prolific. He wrote a massive fantasy sequence before moving into science fiction with Children of Time , and since then he’s been almost unstoppable to the point in the last couple of years where I suspect he can write novels almost as fast as people like me can read them! Cage of Souls is a big book too, so if you like big science fiction, this one is definitely for you. It uses the ‘dying Earth’ trope that I talked about earlier: we are in the final city on Earth, during what we might term as a slow apocalypse. Everything is dying, everything is running down. There’s still a lot of technology that we would all consider hugely advanced, but he doesn’t explain how any of it works; in fact, the characters don’t know, and that sense of decline is what informs the book. Humanity is dying out. The rest of the planet, however, may not be, not just yet anyhow. Is Adrian a front runner for this year’s prize because he’s won before? Well, right now it’s a one in six chance, but I can say that this book is every bit as good as Children of Time , if not better. In many ways the book is almost fantasy, not because the science is implausible but because it’s set so far in the future and because it doesn’t try to explain everything. The book’s written in the first person so our narrator is either taking things we find amazing for granted and so not bothering to explain how things might work or, in many cases, he doesn’t know either and so can’t tell us. You’ve heard of the unreliable narrator, well this time around we get the unknowledgeable narrator. It’s refreshing to read something that feels both old—there’s something distinctly 19th century in the style of the first person telling—and far-future at the same time. From a technique point of view that juxtaposition is fascinating."