Part of Series
The stunning return to Dave Hutchinson's post-apocalyptic vision of the future in a world ravaged by climate change. After surviving the war of the Parish, Adam is looking forward to a period of peace while he recovers from his injuries. No such luck. His commander is concerned about the rumours coming from Oxford and its surrounds, rumours that Father John - the only man who escaped Plymouth's grasp - is building an army, and decides to send Adam to investigate. Upon entering Oxford, Adam meets Leonie Mellow, a member of the police force. To Adam's surprise, the city appears to be thriving, with a healthy populace and objects not seen since before The Sisters fell. However, it does not take long before dark events start to concern Adam. Murders, paint-splashed graffiti on walls, people going missing - and he can't help but wonder if the past is following him.
Author
UK writer who published four volumes of stories by the age of twenty-one – Thumbprints, which is mostly fantasy, Fools' Gold, Torn Air and The Paradise Equation, all as David Hutchinson – and then moved into journalism. The deftness and quiet humaneness of his work was better than precocious, though the deracinatedness of the worlds depicted in the later stories may have derived in part from the author's apparent isolation from normal publishing channels. After a decade of nonfiction, Hutchinson returned to the field as Dave Hutchinson, assembling later work in As the Crow Flies; tales like "The Pavement Artist" use sf devices to represent, far more fully than in his early work, a sense of the world as inherently and tragically not a platform for Transcendence. His first novel, The Villages, is Fantasy; The Push, an sf tale set in the Human Space sector of the home galaxy, describes the inception of Faster Than Light travel and some consequent complications when expanding humanity settles on a planet full of Alien life. Europe in Autumn (2014), an sf thriller involving espionage, takes place in a highly fragmented and still fragmenting Near-Future Europe, one of whose sovereign mini-nations is a transcontinental railway line; over the course of the central plot – which seems to reflect some aspects of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 – the protagonist becomes involved in the Paranoia-inducing Les Coureurs des Bois, a mysterious postal service which also delivers humans across innumerable borders.
- See more at: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hutc... Works * The Villages (Holicong, Pennsylvania: Cosmos Books, 2001) * Europe in Autumn (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Rebellion/Solaris, 2014) Collections and Stories * Thumbprints (London: Abelard, 1978) * Fools' Gold (London: Abelard, 1978) * Torn Air (London: Abelard, 1980) * The Paradise Equation (London: Abelard, 1981) * As the Crow Flies (Wigan, Lancashire: BeWrite Books, 2004) * The Push (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2009)
