Zero Bomb by M.T. Hill (Titan Books) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in Interzone #280 (March–April 2019).

At the time of writing we are thirty-eight days away from the date on which Britain will currently, as David Allen Green puts it, leave the European Union "by automatic operation of law". An interesting time, then, to be reading and reviewing a novel that portrays how calamitous and corrosive this could end up being – economically, socially and personally. That my adopted home city of Birmingham gets the worst of things in this book only increased its impact for me.

Remi 's memory is rather scrambled. Secret observers, we learn later, believe him to be suffering from "acute dissociative amnesia", making him ideal for their plans. He remembers that his daughter Martha was conceived soon after "Brexit was made solid", and that she died aged seven in a fire. At the age of thirty-nine, he ran away, and kept running till he reached Birmingham, where he washed cars and huffed spark.

Most of the book occurs in 2032, when he is forty-six. He's now working as a courier in London, a desperate existence in a gig economy even worse than today's, but it lets him survive without having to be a person in the world. He lives in a converted Victorian gas holder and the closest thing he has to a friend is his bug: a flying device that gives him directions and takes its own photos.

While delivering a manuscript to Walthamstowe, he is attacked by a driverless car, and the subsequent series of bizarre events culminates in a robot fox getting him to read the manuscript: it's a science fiction novel from the seventies by Laurel M. Brace, who now lives inside a Faraday cage and, it turns out, is looking for recruits in her war against technology.

This novel – from a Philip K. Dick Award nominee – has an unusual and risky structure. The first half builds up to a significant event, focusing on Remi, while the second half shows the aftermath of that event from another point of view. The two halves are separated by thirty-six pages of extracts from Brace's book, and twenty pages of notes about Remi from an activist working on his case.

One risk is that the reader will enjoy the book-within-the-book more than the book itself, and how could they not when it's about seventy-two-year-old Miranda Mornington, who wears a suit of home-made organic "farmour" on a suicide mission to a terminator base? As Remi notes, it is written in a "slightly stilted, gently formal style" compared to the rest of the book, but this reader, at least, enjoyed that very much and would have liked to read the whole thing.

The other risk is that readers will chafe at a novel switching protagonists halfway through, but since it replaces a foggy-headed man stumbling through the world with a level-headed young woman who sees things quite clearly, many readers will appreciate the change. And since the second half is all about the consequences of what happens in the first, it makes sense that we move to a point of view character who can actually make sense of what is happening.

In some ways it reminded me of Everything Belongs to the Future by Laurie Penny, which told a similar story of people plotting to bring down an oppressive social structure. After setting off a bomb among civilians, the young terrorist in that book glibly excused her actions by saying: "what does [terrorism] mean, when everything else they don’t want to think about gets called terrorism, too? Teenagers writing slogans on the walls. Schoolkids reading the wrong books."

In contrast, the activists in this much more serious and infinitely better book are well aware of the enormity of their actions, and the weight of their moral choices. They feel it must be done, but can't always live with having done it – and we are not asked to take their side, since their Verlocian exploitation of Remi is laid bare for us to see.

The publisher suggests it will appeal to those who enjoy the work of William Gibson, China Miéville and Anne Charnock, but its first half put me in mind of Ramsey Campbell: it's science fiction that reads like urban horror, and I thought it was very good indeed.

One moment of bleak amusement comes when a farmer called Greenley, who grows replacement body parts on his allotment, notes that "we're still only six inches of topsoil away from total dystopia". However bad things get, it seems, we'll always know it could be worse. Stephen Theaker ****