A shout out for Tricia Sullivan's Maul

Tricia Sullivan surely ranks among the top two or three writers working in science fiction today. While her work is uniformly inventive and deeply thought provoking in its extrapolation of where present trends might take us, one can see why she has said that she regards Maul as her finest work. It is reminiscent of Joyce’s Ulysses not only in the entire narrative covering just a single day, butin the quality of its writing. The characterisation is superb – seldom have I seen the teenage female mind done better, flitting from utter conviction to desperate uncertainty and back in an instant. Sun, the heroine, has a stronger moral compass than she knows, and manages to remain deeply likeable despite bouts of somewhat questionable behaviour. The dialogue crackles, the fast paced plot has so many twists and turns that the reader had better be concentrating, and the science and data science are spot on. This is sci-fi as literature, and that work of this quality is not currently in print is an indictment of both the current state of British publishing, and the public’s perception of the genre. Thankfully it is still available as a Gateway e-book, so buy it, read it, and let’s see if we can get it back in print – I want Maul on my bookshelf as a keeper.