I finished reading Simon Ings’s latest novel The Smoke last night. By coincidence, this morning’s Start the Week programme on Radio 4 featured a 45-minute interview with the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Anyone with an interest in writing science fiction – or anything, really – should listen to the Harari interview, and then follow it up with a reading of The Smoke, in which Ings appears to explore an alternate future whilst actually detailing the same unfolding rupture in our realworld present that Harari describes.
I will be writing about The Smoke in greater detail soon. For the moment I just wanted to point out that this is one of the must-read science fiction novels of 2018, and that Simon Ings is one of the most original and accomplished science fiction writers working today. I would also highly recommend Jonathan Thornton’s interview with Ings for Fantasy Hive, packed with important and insightful thinking on The Smoke, the science fiction community and writing generally.