"The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man" by Dave Hutchinson

Dave Hutchinson is a weirdly good writer, and I don’t quite know how to characterize The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man precisely because of that skill. Absorbingly readable, it’s nonetheless doing some very odd things at the meta level, things that left me with a definitive feeling of “huh” when it was all over.

Alex Dolan is a recently out-of-work science writer, a Scot, who is offered a lucrative book deal by an eccentric American billionaire, Stan Clayton. Reluctantly signing on, Dolan makes his way to the still-developing Sioux Crossing Supercollider in Iowa, Clayton’s pet project. Lightly enmeshed in the lives and politics of the science team and native Iowans, Dolan is also roped into light espionage by the British government, and faces an escalating series of threats from an unknown antagonist. Finally, three-quarters through the novel, Dolan must deal with a bizarre accident at the supercollider, and its aftermath.

Secretly Crossing Invisible Lines: Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe" Trilogy

Yes, I also keep thinking that's David
Boreanaz, Britney Spears, and...
shadowed guy.

"My grandfather writes of maps having a power over the land, and theorises that if an imaginary landscape is mapped in great enough detail, it will eventually supplant the actual physical landscape, as a wet cloth wipes chalk from a blackboard.

My great-grandfather, on the other hand, wrote of all possible landscapes underlying each other like the pages of a book, requiring only the production of a map of each landscape to make it real."

I've really wanted to share something about Dave Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe" series, so rather than just reviewing the latest (and final?) installment, Europe in Winter, I'm going to do a bit of a review of the trilogy entire.

It seemed to me that Europe in Autumn (2014) flew weirdly low under the radar: it's an ambitious and well-executed novel, a genre blender that seems like it could be a real hit, but it barely blipped on my review & nominations-based "to-read" radar.

But! I'm glad I got around to reading it, as well as the sequels.

Set in the very near future, the books envision a Europe that is fragmenting into smaller and smaller microstates. Initially following Rudi, a chef who sort of stumbles into a world of espionage, organized crime, and mysterious activity, the weirdness in these books ramps up exponentially as parallel and virtual realities make themselves known.

I found these books a delight to read, for two main reasons. Firstly, these are a stylistic genre-departure for me: these are very grounded, unglamorous spy novels, essentially. Individual sections are well-drawn, character-focused; but the larger plot is often completely obscure, with both the reader and the point of view characters unsure from where, or why, danger is coming.

Against this world, and this is the second joy of the book, Hutchinson slowly doles out evidence of these deeply, seriously weird developments. He walks this very interesting line of making them huge and real, yet also refusing to let the story turn completely to the science-fictional elements. The world and its problems continue, just with some very big additions.

You can tell how hard I'm fighting spoilers. There will be some after the jump.