Q, by Christine Dalcher

ISBN: 9780008440602
Amazon ID: B07YLC2QJN

This is the author's second book, following up on Vox, which I thought was pretty awful.

I got this book, too, as an Amazon Deal of the Day, for 99p - that's the most I was prepared to risk, considering what the first book was like.

Q seems (I'm in chapter 10 of 78 as I write this) to continue quite strongly with the Persecuted Females theme from Vox, and so far the story appears to be Brave New World, but run by the Nazis.

The temporal setting of the story seems odd. A newspaper headline "from the past ten years" in chapter two refers to climbing immigration rates, and "projections for 2050", which at first made me think that the story itself was set in the 2050s (ie: up to ten years on from a short-term projection made just before 2050), but then I found oddities such as:

• people are still using iPads - surely Apple will have come up with a replacement by then?
• Honda is still manufacturing Acuras - again, don't we think there'll be new names for cars in 30 years' time?
• cars and buses are still running on petrol, and petrol stations are not uncommon
• schoolchildren are bringing home hardback books to do their homework with
• one of the characters, who is a hundred years old, relates that she was 14 years old in 1933, thus solidly re-setting the book's story time to 2019
• another character, in her forties in the story, recalls listening to radio interviews with Queen Noor of Jordan (who reigned from 1978 to 1999) and Ray Charles (who died in 2004), and the interviews don't sound like something a child would have been interested in

Thus I came to the conclusion that the story is in fact set in the time when it was being written (2019), but therefore in an alternate reality (rather than simply being set in a potential future), and that the "projections for 2050" are in fact 30-year predictions.

Oh, and referring back to my summary that the story is "Brave New World run by the Nazis" (which I wrote when I'd got as far as chapter 10), the Nazis get their first mention in chapter 17, and Brave New World gets a reference in chapter 25.

A little later (in chapter 37), I encountered the amazing sentence "It's so flat, it might as well be concave". The author seems to think that "concave" is an extreme form of "flat". So much for a doctorate in theoretical linguistics, which is what she has.

By the time I finished the book, which is a lot better written than Vox, and has a far more sensible and plausible ending to it, I realised that my first impressions (well, from chapter 10, at least) were correct - this is Brave New World run by the Nazis. Or, if you prefer, it's the eugenics movements of 100 years before the book was written, which the author readily acknowledges in a note at the end of the book.

So, it's a much better-written book than the author's first attempt, but not in the least bit an uplifting or entertaining story. If you decide you're going to read it anyway, make sure you're in a good mood before you start.

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