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There’s a tradition in British science fiction of the cosy catastrophe. In these tales the world ends with a whimper, not a bang. With Kairos, James Tiptree award winner Gywneth Jones gives us her version of the great British disaster novel. Originally published in 1988, this is the 1995 rewrite of Jones’ third adult science fiction novel.
It’s the day after tomorrow, and Britain is dropping out of the first world into the third. Somewhere out there the Third World War is being fought, but no one really seems to care. The police are out of control, and the underclass are struggling to survive. BREAKTHRU, a right wing religious group, thinks it has the answer: a new drug, Kairos. Unlike most psychedelics this one can really change the world, rewriting reality through a miracle of quantum physics. Now, with Kairos, BREAKTHRU plans to rebuild the world in its own image. But too many different people have taken the drug, and the world is starting to fall apart at the seams.
In Jones’ home town of Brighton a group of drop outs and anarchists find themselves caught up in a conspiracy of angels and puppies. Otto Murray, her son Candide and her estranged lover Sandy Brize must each journey across a fractured England under a fractal sun, pursued by BREAKTHRU’s gilded apocalyptic children, seeking both each other and Candide’s kidnapped dog. Finally in an abandoned research laboratory near Coventry Sandy must confront the power of the Kairos she’s taken, and attempt to knit the tattered world back together again.
Kairos is one of those brave novels that transcends the boundaries between science fiction and mainstream. The science fiction reader can delight in the broken Britain as an obvious homage to Michael Moorcock’s seminal Jerry Cornelius tales and M. John Harrison’s The Committed Men, whilst the literature student can deconstruct Kairos as a guide to the mental geography of England after Thatcher. Jones’ novels are never easy reads, but her powerful prose and dramatic bleak landscapes mean that Kairos rewards the effort it demands.
Originally published in SFX
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