Harare Review of Books

434 pp. September 16, 2025, Titan Books. SF.

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Who would you choose if everyone else was gone and you could resurrect only one other person?

In the first story in this collection, the narrator wakes up in a tank of blue gel and encounters robot doctors. Everything’s going to be ok, they tell him—but is it really? It’s billions of years after he entered the tank, and something’s very wrong with the sky. At first, this feels like an Adam story (last/first man), complete with a woman presented to him… (Side note: Is it even worth being alive if you’re all that’s left, even if you’re given a partner?) But it’s so much more strange than that (bubble worlds, and eventually an arkship), and so deeply melancholic. Because isn’t Earth kind of a bubble world itself, drifting alone through the universe, and aren’t we hopeful that greater beings than us have a plan? 

Ok, how about this mind-bending idea: warships with brains from human soldiers with a little canine DNA thrown in? I enjoyed this concept too (maybe because I love-love mil-SF and sentient ships!), and these were cool with all of their different personalities. And then they develop consciences, and PTSD, just like regular human soldiers. That story, “Waiting for God Knows” (ha!) is from Embers of War; so’s the one about the warship that’s retired to become a combine harvester but gets called back into service with a chance to change the past. That’s a tightly written and very enjoyable story, as are most in the collection. So it’s not at all all warships, though (even I might have got a bit bored with that); there are arkships and “roulette” ships, too. Oh, and a residential cruise ship for those who can afford it. 

“From the Table of My Memory I’ll Wipe Away All Trivial Fond Records” (a really cool potential name for a sentient ship, yes?) is about (spoiler) one immortal playing a god-level prank on another. Or, wait: how about if you had a critical wildlife emergency on Mars and no one to answer your call for help? In one story, a man has an encounter with an angel (apparently not Biblically accurate because)/advanced human one night when he’s dying. Anded there’s another truly amazing and hair-raisingly unearthly “angel” in “Entropic Angel” that feeds off energy; only one thing in the world can kill it, and it’s not exactly the prayers or brass cross of the village’s vicar. There’s the boy band that wants to see the alien crash site and take cool pics, but maybe there’s a lot more going on than a simple UFO incident. One excellent story that ponders redemption also explains vampires in a, well, sci-fi way (parts of this plot being reminiscent of Fringe, and the Observers). 

There are also stories about hackers and illegal share traders, also other good old-fashioned crime—always with an added layer of advanced tech. The Reef stories are about intelligent nanotechnology gone wrong; it infects everything with which it comes into contact, and not in a fun way. (The last story in the collection takes that to the extreme: it’s about grey goo, a sci-fi concept I just realised I’ve always been obsessively fascinated with). One of the best stories in the collection is “The Wind Through the Tall Grass”; it imagines what one human might experience if they jumped forward through time and came back to the same place each time. I liked the ending; it’s hopeful.

Powell explicitly explores simulated reality in quite a few of these stories; in “The Redoubt,” aliens make copies of humans and allow them to decide if they’ll go on a journey to the end of the universe (a little like in Mondrup’s Zoi). The main thread running through much of this book is the aftermath, mostly, of apocalypse: great/unexplained wars, riots, a monkey eats the internet, what happens to the remnant of humanity, etc. In two stories, the protagonists weigh up the loss of many lives against that of many more. Bubbles—islands of life, if you will—are a theme; so are swarms. And AI—the real thing, not the marketing fantasy we’re being asked/forced to accept today—is mostly neutral, or even benevolent: when humans wipe themselves out or are wiped out, artificial intelligences bring them back to life. 

This is an exceptionally strong collection from Powell; it’s exactly how I love to spend my time. I enjoyed every single story. Powell is, as everyone knows, a master of the short story form, and many of his first lines are incredibly memorable and hook-y: “My first thought is that I don’t remember dying” … “We were breaking into shipping containers the day we found the blue horse” … “The pack and I were at rest relative to the local frame of reference” … “As penances went, life as a combine harvester wasn’t so bad.” I could go on. He’s also, undoubtedly, a master of tension, able to ratchet it up and then deliver excellent twists and surprises. What a delight.

Oh, and the question of the title? It’s answered in that very smartly conceived final story (complete with Adam/Eve redux, like in the first—poetic, full circle, I guess). 

Very highly recommended. Thank you to Titan Books for the DRC.

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