Elizabeth Hand's Aestival Tide.
Softback. £4.99. Bantam Books

Set in the same universe as Winterlong, Lizzy has come up with another fascinating novel. It's like Moorcock on Ecstasy, all very baroque and intricate. It's always so difficult to describe one of Hand's novels - the dyslectic cover blurb certainly fails and I suspect we will too - but here goes anyway.

There's this city, see. Big, like an archology, out by the ocean, and lots of people live there because the world has been fairly well sodded up by genetic wars. Society inside the city is over-ordered with various hierarchies, careers, factions, castes, and classes - which you spend most the novel trying to place with reference to our more comprehensible present, and then fit into the plot.

Which - as far as we can make out - revolves around the fact the city is crumbling with age and the various characters are trying to deal with this as best they can (by covering it up, trying to lead people outside, repair it etc).

The future probably will be this alien, but we sometimes wish our Lizzy didn't make it quite so distant and difficult for us 20th century thickies to get into. But hey, suck it and see; who knows, you may even like it.

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