The Smoke

The Great War caused a division in humankind: the bombs created the chickies--deformed, highly sexual, base people--while the "immortality ray" conceived the Bund: intelligent, beautiful, and technologically advanced individuals. With these distinct species of humanity, the race is on to leave the planet and its impending clashes. After breaking up with his long-term girlfriend Fel, Stuart Lanyon has been staying with his dad in a town in Yorkshire filled with spaceship-parts factories. He finally heads back to the ostentatious city of London to do a final clean of the apartment he and Fel shared and to pursue memories of how their relationship ended. Stuart is a standard-issue human; Fel is a Bund. It was obvious to Stuart that he was just a dalliance, because Bunds could never love regular humans, could they? With varying perspectives and time lines, this complex work takes on mortality and prejudice through the lens of emotional connection. VERDICT Ings (Wolves) crafts smart alternate history that takes a deep look at belief systems and the judgment of others based on perception. The use of genetic manipulation to create superior and lesser human species speaks to the bias that exists in the real world.--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Starred review from January 1, 2019
Ings isn't one of those SF writers who explains in great detail how his fictional world came to be. Rather, he drops a hint here, a tantalizing bit of dialogue there, and the resulting sense of uncertainty actually adds a layer of suspense to the story. His fictional world?an earth that followed a different historical path from our own?is beautifully constructed, with three different human subspecies; and around that world, he builds a wildly complex and decidedly surreal plot that concerns an alternate UK in which the primary narrator, an architect from Yorkshire, is drawn into a high-tech global crisis stemming from the fracturing of humanity into those three subspecies. Meanwhile, the narrator, often speaking in the second person, must deal with a range of realistically rendered domestic issues typical of mainstream fiction. In all, it's a wonderfully imaginative story, the sort of thing Adam Roberts might write, or perhaps Christopher Priest: stories about history that didn't happen but feel oddly like they did, and characters who are very different from us but at the same time very familiar. For those who don't mind if their alternate worlds are liberally dosed with surrealism, this is likely to be a very special book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)