Ridiculously excited to know that Braking Day is now out in Japan, courtesy of the good folks at Hayakawa Publishing (株式会社早川書房). Hayakawa Publishing is the largest science fiction publisher in Japan; almost all winners of the Seiun Award for Best Foreign Novel are published by the company. I still remember when my agent, the estimable Brady, let me know that Hayakawa had agreed to take Braking Day on. If, like me you are a person of a certain age with a certain taste of music, you will understand that it took me days to get Alphaville’s Big in Japan out of my head!
As is the case with most publishers, Hayakawa were kind enough to send me courtesy copies of the Japanese version. Ten, in this case. My son was addicted to Manga when he was younger, so I was prepared for the fact that it has to be read “backwards.” The Japanese read top to bottom and from right to left. What I was not prepared for though, was the size. The book is beautifully built, with a transparent vinyl cover to protect the contents, but it is tiny. A true pocketbook.
L-R: UK hardback, UK paperback, Japanese pocketbook
I do not, unfortunately, read Japanese, but for a page or two it is fun to pretend. Here is page 326 of the Japanese version:
which overlaps with page 143 of the English version:
Of course, once the pretense is over, reality returns. I still can’t read (or speak) Japanese and I have nine beautifully made books that deserve to be read. I am on the hunt for suitably good homes for them. Some of you will no doubt recall that the publisher sent me ten copies, not nine. But I’m definitely keeping one for myself!
Anyway, having taken further liberties with my TBR pile, here is my take on the second of them: Ten Low, by Stark Holborn.
One of the great joys about reading science fiction is that it gives you a lot to unpack. You have the surface level story, of course, but bubbling away underneath is a ferment of ideas and what-ifs that seep into the reader’s subconscious without them necessarily knowing. Holborn’s Ten Low is a great example of that.
On the surface, Ten Low is a gritty, sci-fi Western, heavily reminiscent of Firefly. Watch the pilot episode of that much-mourned TV show and it is easy to visualize Holborn’s adventure playing out against a near-identical backdrop of dust, horses, and advanced hardware in the bitter aftermath of a failed war of independence.
A combat medic who fought on the losing side, Ten Low finds herself washed up on the desert moon of Factus, a backwater world where the central authority is weak and people’s lives are dominated by armed gangs, an organ-stealing cult known as the Seekers, and a mysterious half-sensed presence that may, or may not, be real. She spends her time here trying to use her considerable medical skills for good: a course of action that brings her to a crashed spaceship and a badly wounded child. The child, it turns out, is a ruthless, genetically engineered soldier responsible for the death of many of Ten Low’s former comrades. Despite this, and somewhat against her better judgment, she nurses the child back to health, fully aware that said child might kill her for her troubles.
That, though, is the easy part. Hostile as her patient is, the two are forced into an uneasy alliance as it becomes clear that the crash was no accident. Forces from both on and off world would like to see the both of them dead. Woman and not-quite-child flee across Factus, enemies known and unknown in hot pursuit. This is breathless, action-thriller stuff, well executed and fun to read. If some of the incidents feel ginned-up just to keep things moving, it is a small thing and easy to forgive when everything else is so good.
So much for the surface. Beneath the action-thriller stuff lies a nest of intriguing concepts that I don’t have room to lay out and which, I suspect, will be different for every reader: SF at its best! For me, though, three things really hit home.
First, point of view is everything. Two people sitting on opposite sides of a table will see the same pepper pot. But to one, the pepper is on the left, to the other, the right. The very human inability/refusal to see the other side is very much in play here. Ten Low and the child see the war and its aftermath from the perspective of their own side. Each makes sense. Neither is inherently right or wrong. Holborn has the wonderful knack of twisting the reader’s sensibilities as she jumps effortlessly from one side of the table to the other.
Second, a focus on where the pepper pot sits on the table can blind everyone to the fact that the table itself is rotten. Now the war is over, both Ten Low and the child have been cast aside, their “usefulness” at an end. Large organizations, be they governments or corporations, only care when it helps them achieve their aims. Once that time is past, the people who relied upon and trusted them find themselves either abandoned or crushed underfoot. Something for the reader to think about long after the pages are closed and Ten Low takes its place of honor on the bookshelf.
Third, there are a whole slew of ideas here that have not yet been fully developed. Holborn’s world is far bigger than what we see in Ten Low. Ten Low is a fine, stand-alone book but it leaves the reader wanting – and expecting – so much more from the sequel. A lot of writers, when writing a series, write one story and chop it off arbitrarily at page whatever, leaving the reader feeling they’ve been conned. A long story is not a series, it’s a long story. The writer should finish it in one go. Holborn does not make this mistake. Ten Low is a story with an ending – and a good one at that. It’s simply that there are more books here to be written. Holborn’s is a world of depth and nuance with room to go deeper into the rabbit hole. I, for one, will be delighted to follow along.
