Free Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews by John Grant Page B

intends to lose, even though just capitulating and getting out of town could well be his wiser course. But to win it he's going to have to be very inventive indeed ...
    This is modern, straightforward, fast-moving, no-nonsense caper fiction at something close to its finest. The characters are beautifully and economically drawn, in the best noir tradition – not just the major players but also the supporting cast, including notably the cops Stanton and Delgado and their fed counterparts Brock and Jones (Jones is an especially delightful creation). At times the text is as laugh-out-loud funny as anything by Donald E. Westlake; at other times it's as grim as anything by Westlake's auctorial alter ego Richard Stark. Always it's possessed of a lively wit and intelligence ... and it would make a marvellous movie.
    This little gem of a novel is thoroughly recommended.
    —Crescent Blues

Expatria
    by Keith Brooke
    Cosmos, 177 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1991
    It used to be difficult, most of the time, to tell British sf apart from its American counterpart: in cargo-cultish fashion, British sf writers did their best to imitate the strand of the genre originated by the fixed notions of John W. Campbell Jr, which notions shaped American sf for better or worse. However, there has always existed alongside this a distinctly British version of mainstream sf, which looks back less to Campbell than, arguably, H.G. Wells. Whereas Campbellian sf relies for its effect on the use of twinned floods, if not torrents, of event and ideas, this distinct British strain sets the ideas – which may be every bit as radical – to play second fiddle to two other elements: first, the actual craft of writing, which includes the grace of the prose and the concentration on character; and, second, a subtext ... what the book is about , as apart from what the tale tells.
    There have been many distinguished contributors to this strain of sf aside from Wells: some that come to mind are Keith Roberts, Christopher Priest, Michael Coney (despite his departure from the UK as long ago as 1973), John Wyndham, Edmund Cooper (when on song), J.G. Ballard (in his earlier days, before he struck out to carve a niche all his wonderful own), Eric Brown, John Christopher ... There have even been a few US writers who have worked along the same lines: George R. Stewart and Walter M. Miller are two.
    Keith Brooke's novel Expatria , now deservedly reissued, belongs to this tradition. While some of its events are startling, even approaching the melodramatic, its carefully measured, consciously understated prose eschews any of the customary cheap stunts used by genre authors in their attempts to keep the reader whizzing through the pages. This is a novel that happens to be sciencefictional rather than the escapist whirlwind that is normally implied by use of the term "sf novel". To describe it as gripping would be accurate but would at the same time mislead: it grips because of the reader's absorption in the characters and the significance of the events rather than through any nonstop pulse-racing action. It introduces you to a world which, without your perhaps consciously realizing it, comes to permeate your mind, so that you have to shake your head to return yourself to 21st-century Earth.
    Mathias Hanrahan, who believes people should embrace technological ways and exploit all the artefacts still surviving from the earliest days of colonization, is heir to the Primacy of Newest Delhi, capital of one of the two major nations on the planet Expatria, colonized generations ago by the occupants of Space Arks sent out from Earth. The people and governments of Expatria have largely rejected the science and technology their ancestors brought with them, and now live in a sort of progressive-medieval culture. Mathias's father – the Prime of Newest Delhi – is murdered, and Mathias is framed for the crime. He flees first to the anarchic city of