Digging up the future

Jon Courtenay Grimwood on Absolution Gap | Incompetence

Absolution Gap, by Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz, £12.99)

Alastair Reynolds continues his rise to the top of British SF. There's an almost rock-like density to some of Absolution Gap, as if Reynolds expects his readers to act as archaeologists, digging through the layers of the plot to discover what actually happens to characters first introduced in Revelation Space and Redemption Ark. Time jumps a little too abruptly sometimes - whole centuries passing and then being revisited - but this is a small quibble compared to the scope and strength represented by the galaxy-spanning narrative.

In this conclusion to the sequence, the Inhibitors are continuing to cull the worlds of humanity, seeking to rid the universe of its latest emergent intelligence; a pig with a grudge and a very short temper tries to save the inhabitants of a doomed planet; a sentient spaceship ponders its next move; and on an obscure planet a young girl is growing up to become something very scary indeed. Revelation, Redemption, Absolution... Reynolds provides them all.

Incompetence, by Rob Grant, (Gollancz, £9.99)

A competent detective in an ever more incompetent world, Mr Vascular works for Europol. Of course, he doesn't, really, but then Mr Vascular isn't his real name... Welcome to a Europe where Article 13199 rules that no one discriminate against any other person by reason of age, sex, race, creed - or incompetence. As a result planes land at the wrong airport, it's impossible to buy a decent pair of shoes and an elevator is wired to reach the 33rd floor in a building only 17 storeys high.

Into the aftermath of the elevator atrocity comes Mr Vascular, hunting for a serial killer so fiendish that he'd be near-impossible to catch even if the local police didn't suffer from "anger issues" or have "non-specific stupidity". Although the pace in the early chapters is a little too frenetic to impress those who don't want to be grabbed by the throat, Grant writes well and the book gets stronger as it begins to ditch the jokes and face up to the plot.

· Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Felaheen is published by Earthlight