Update 2

Well, I hope you all have a delightful festive season and a happy new year. I have returned and updates will resume on a bi-weekly basis. 

Update!

Hi folks,
I'm going to be away over Christmas and New Year day and so updates to the blog will be on hold until I return.


Stay safe readers and have a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Book Review: Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky - 4thwallfly

This week's science fiction book takes place deep underground in a world with little hope. Actually, in all honesty, the book's world has no hope. It is a story of the dying struggles of mankind as it turns slowly away from the world above and spins its own myths and legends in the world below.
It's Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky.

Cover Art copyright of respective owner.

'The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. A few thousand live on, not knowing if they are the only survivors on the planet.
They live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever build. It is humanity's last refuge. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct - the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price. 

VDNKh is the nothernmost inhabited station on its line and still remains secure. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared. Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. He holds the future of his native station in his hands, the future of the Metro - and maybe the whole of humanity.' Metro 2033 - Dmitry Glukhovsky [2007], Translation - Natasha Randall [2009]

Metro 2033 is set in a world of dingy darkness. The world has been ravaged by nuclear war (during a Cold War that had not remained cold but had ended up getting rather hot). The surface is an uninhabitable wasteland that belongs to the mutated creatures that now thrive in the light of the radioactive cities. Artyom is a young man whose home station is under terrible threat. He is directed by a Stalker called Hunter (Stalker is the title of near-mythic heroes who run salvage missions on the surface) to tell the heart of the metro, Polis, of the threat that faces VDNKh. This threat, coming from the next station along, the abandoned botanical gardens, is a threat that might bring ruin to the entire metro.

The story is episodic in style, each station and each step of the journey is almost an entirely separate world from the previous. Artyom's travels allow him to realise that his station is not some far-flung outpost that protects the metro alone, but merely one of many struggling for survival and within the metro itself, stations vie with each other over resources, ideology and creed.

The Moscow Metro is a classic tourist destination for visitors to Moscow thanks to the beautiful architecture within the stations, however, Metro 2033 turns away from its beauty and presents a world alone and in the dark. Mankind has become so used to the flare of emergency lighting that they are blinded by the light of the sun. Stalkers only dare operate at night.

This is not the story of a bright future, or of mankind banding together to face the threat of the ruined world. This is not the story of progressive mankind. This is the story of man's descent into smaller and smaller communities as they turn their back on the world they had once known and embrace the darkness below with their own myths and legends. Such is the darkness of the world that each station lives in that these myths and legends have taken life as facts.


Food for thought:


Frankly, this is a lovely setting. Not entirely original (though in this day and age that's a hard mantle to assume). It is a bleak tale certainly, and a bleaker setting, but this story nevertheless conjures some fantastic differences between stations and there is great detail in the world setting throughout the book in the form of the people Artyom meets and the stories they share.
However, that does lead directly to the first problem. The setting of Metro 2033 is strongly developed but mostly told to the reader by characters, rather than shown (which is always the more subtle and more interesting way to develop 'lore' around a setting). The other issue is that, despite this deep and dark (pun intended on the Metro there) setting, there is actually very little drama for Artyom. His story is less about his journey through the metro and becomes more a vehicle for the author to use to display the metro. It is only near the last quarter (or so) of the book that Artyom's tale rises to the forefront, but the majority of the book revolves more around the various stations that Artyom finds himself at.

In its own way, the author has written charicatures of ideologies and creeds in each of Artyom's encounters, one dimensional belief systems that control stations. Artyom meets with Communist stations that war with the fascist Fourth Reich, he is captured by cannibals, talks with traders of the capitalist Hansa and listens to stories from born-again Christians, Trotskyists and more. Sadly, each of these examples are rendered without much depth which results in the feeling that Metro 2033's universe is deep and intriguing but without much impact.

On the interesting side, the author frequently visits the concept of humanity and what exactly that means in this dark age. The world is grim, highlighted by small realities (the currency for example is ammunition, to have weapons and bullets is to have both physical power and spending capability). The threat to VDNKh and the rest of the metro is not at all physical but psychological. There is little humour in this book to relieve the reader of the story's tone.

However, in the midst of all this, we are treated to Artyom's education of the world he inhabits. Raised in one of the metro's far-flung outposts he is the equivalent of an unworldly, untravelled person. He is essentially himself an innocent to the metro, though this is true in its own way of each station's inhabitants. There are endless myths that Artyom cannot separate from fact because his world differs so vastly from ours. There is no ability to merely 'check' the truth, no ability to merely be sceptical as the world is dark enough to believe near anything. As an example, Artyom is told that there is a station that takes people and forces them to dig downwards. The station is run by satanists who believe that the metro and life there is merely just a layer of hell itself and that to connect the metro with the hell that ran deeper would be to bring about the end of days. He is told rumours about the Kremlin, that he should never look too closely at it, for should the light catch those domes he might be drawn in like a moth to the flames. He even encounters a society of luddites who worship a 'Great Worm' that they attribute as the creator of the metro's tunnels, arguing that mankind had arrived after it had passed to build in its wake. There's no real way that Artyom can prove or disprove anything he is told and it boils down to a simple fact for the young man. He is free to choose how he should think on his world. The world of metro is shaped mostly by belief and almost regressive 'caveman-like' behaviour of wild stories around campfires, though Artyom does not ever commit to any one of the beliefs around him.

In our world it is easy to scoff at say, the satanists for example, but in Artyom's world, a world were strange beasts roam the surface and stranger creatures threaten the metro, a world where some stations are so badly affected by horrific creations of science and a by-gone war that the tunnels must be collapsed, it would be hard to tell where truth ended and fiction started. There are stories of the souls of the dead caught in the pipes of the metro, strange anomalies that incite fear and terror, rumours of a Soviet missile base still functioning. 

It is ironic that despite the setting and the slow pace of the narrative that we are treated to fairly blunt intimations that Artyom possesses an unique destiny with even Artyom himself coming to believe that he has an allotted path, and should he continue on it he would remain unharmed. It is rare that the character of a book acknowledges his own plot-given right to survive no matter the odds.

In summary, the book has an interesting setting but fails to deliver a plot to match with it. Artyom's tale results in the feeling that even Artyom is merely along for the ride as he is taken from station to station and shown the glory (and horror) of the metro world.

Book Review: Compile Quest by Ronel van Tonder - 4thwallfly

Welcome to the Fly on the Fourth Wall. This week's book is an interesting tale of dystopia on Earth.
It's Compile Quest by Ronel van Tonder.

Cover art copyright of Ronel van Tonder

'In the year 2036, solar storms batter Earth crippling electrical infrastructures across the globe. Night falls and the ensuing pandemonium claims millions of lives, catapulting the world into chaos.

In the midst of this global turmoil a hero emerges. The altruistic SUN Council intercedes, constructing enormous domes on each continent to protect the world’s population from the radioactive CME’s of the incessant solar storms.

But not everyone makes it to the domes. In an attempt to survive the deadly radiation, hundreds of thousands of people dig into the earth, living in squalor under an oppressive military dictatorship.

Now centuries later, the final stage of the SUN Council’s plan to decimate the world’s population approaches. But as victory glimmers on the horizon, two women from discordant halves of this new world start to unravel the conspiracy.' Compile:Quest - Ronel van Tonder [2014]

Compile Quest is a story that revolves around two women and a male, Jinx, Peppermint and Ray respectively, who live lives that are so far apart they may as well be anathema to each other. Their story is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth, ravaged by solar flares and centres around South Africa. Switching back and forth between the two, the reader is gradually brought into the world of the SUN Council's domes. Peppermint is a survivor of the disaster that struck the Earth and lucky enough to be a resident of the Africa Dome, enjoying a life of luxury such as our world has never seen. She has a soft life and lives out of touch of the reality of her situation, only coming to realise that her world is highly regimented when she is personally impacted by the Africa Dome's policies. Jinx is a soldier of the Rooivalk Digger Colony which occasionally struggles with the Wildebeest Colony while Ray is a farmer and later recruit for the Wildebeest Digger Colony. Their lives seem far apart (though Ray and Jinx are perhaps closer together than they both are to Peppermint) but they are intrinsically linked.

Food For Thought:

A couple of things caught my eye with this story and I had a mix of reactions towards it. My first delight was the technology present in the book. The SUN Council has gone well out of its way to develop a closed world that is kept content and placid. We see this throughout Peppermint's experiences as she lives (without quite realising it until later) under the thumb of the SUN Council's requirement. At her disposal is a level of technology that brings about a level of hedonism unheard of in today's world. Peppermint's world features robots and virtual reality, recreational drugs and wild parties (and polygamous relationships). The word robot derives from robota which itself derives from a word referring to a form of slavery or forced labour. In this bright new world, mankind appears to enjoy a hedonistic lifestyle on account of the SUN Council's magnanimous organisation of their upkeep. Even clothes are provided from dispensers called weDress (which is probably a subtle dig at the Apple I- product lines). A concept to consider is how likely this is to occur to a human population. Are we, as humans, content to remain catered and cared for at the expense of our curiousity? Alot of human technological progress has managed to make life easier for mankind (admittedly resulting in larger workloads to compensate for the time saved). It bears thinking that in a closed society that didn't seek to progress but rather sustain itself indefinitely it would be possible for technology to entire replace the requirement for people to work themselves. This is sometimes thought to lead to a hypothetical death by boredom. That without struggle and given the resources to do whatever one pleases, one would eventually find every aspect of life boring and without purpose. Which begs the question: Can mankind truly be 'human' without driving goals and struggles to fight?

The book also details the SUN Council as a form of benevolent corporate entity (if we assume benevolent to mean protective and constrictive). Provided a dome citizen follow the SUN Council's mandatory requirements, then that citizen is provided with a luxurious lifestyle. I've talked about this issue before, how society and our environment controls how we interact with the world around us. Currently, it is harder and harder to avoid a homogenous culture thanks to the Internet, but in the world of the Africa Dome, it is all too easy to dictate how every citizen should think and behave. Every citizen must wear a Cerberus Unit that effectively monitors them and must receive regular check ups to determine their physical and mental health (here referring to their compatibility with acceptance of their situation). In a closed society without external influence then, it is too easy to see how one can be controlled. However, people within that closed society would be unable to recognise their situation, seeing it more as 'the way things are.' It is simply impossible to shed those subjective influences on our views (i.e. true bias is impossible). The SUN Council presents a warning to the reader, reminding us that we choose to limit our choice of information sources at our own peril.

Outside of this, I have only a few observations to add. Some of which might be interesting to note. Events that impact our individual culture's history tend to lend great weight to how we create our villains. For example, Harry Potter's Deatheaters are influenced by the Nazi SS Deathheads (same motif, similar goals of racial purity, a fascination in their innate superiority as the world's master race, rule by fear and violence). In much the same way, I would theorize (can't be proven, too few sources to back it up), that a South African book might be influenced by the Soweto (South Western Townships) that edge around Johannesburg, much like the parallels drawn in real life by the Soweto and the city of Jo-burg proper, Compile Quest highlights the differences between the rich and poor, those who live in Domes and those who live in Colonies. Ray's viewpoint provides the greatest comparison between the struggle for life that every day in the Wildebeest Digger Colony requires compared to Peppermint's near idyll lifestyle. The natural tensions caused by friction between have and have-nots is a very powerful thing and in the world described by Compile Quest, it would be enhanced by the sheer size of the contrast between the rich and poor. The Domes of Compile Quest are probably analogous with the compounds that formed in South Africa.

I was quite endeared to the use of Afrikaans in the book (despite having no actual knowledge of the language at all). I found that the dialogue and interactions are written well enough that it is easy to parse meaning when Afrikaans is being spoken. There are admittedly some issues with the terminology used by the Africa Dome denizens (whose language has quite understandibly evolved to reflect their high-tech society), I think that was well thought out (though I disagree with the idea that 'data' should be an epithet as data is neither a positive nor negative term on its own).

Overall though, I believe this book to be an enjoyable read. It gives some interesting insights, it has a fantastic setting and is young (but not in the young-adult sense). I look forward to seeing what else van Tonder decides to put to pen.

Thank you and have a sunny day.

Book Review: Outpost by Adam Baker - 4thwallfly

Welcome to the Fly on the Fourth Wall. This week's book review is a both a horror and a science fiction that deals with a group of isolated people, far away from the rest of the world as the world quite simply ends around them. 
It's Outpost by Adam Baker.

Cover photographs copyright of Getty Images, Corbis (cityscape).
 
'They took the job to escape the world.
They didn't expect the world to end. 

Kasker Rampart: A derelict refinery platform moored in the Arctic Ocean. A skeleton crew of fifteen fight boredom and despair as they wait for a relief ship to take them home. 

But the world beyond their frozen wasteland has gone to hell. Cities lie ravaged by a global pandemic. One by one TV channels die, replaced by silent wavebands. 

The Rampart crew are marooned. They must survive the long Arctic winter, then make their way home alone. They battle starvation and hypothermia, unaware that the deadly contagion that has devastated the world is heading their way...' Outpost - Adam Baker [2011]

Outpost is a horror story set on the Kasker Rampart refinery in what is effectively the middle of nowhere. There is just a skeleton crew that can't wait to be sent home until they find that there is no home to go to anymore. They are isolated, alone and the very last to know what is happening to the world they knew. Worse, the trouble comes their way, ensuring that even in the middle of nowhere there is no escape.

The story follows the trials of the Rampart's crew as these misfits struggle to survive off the coast of Franz Josef Land, a mere fifteen people occupying a structure designed for thousands, maintaining the refinery until such time as the company decides to restart the pumps.


Click below for the full synopsis (click to open/close):

The story starts, following Jane, an overweight pastor who had decided to come to the Kasker Rampart. She is so overweight that at times it hurt to walk. She uses her time aboard the refinery to run, once a day, her reasoning for going to the refinery was that it was a simple opportunity for her to lose weight over the six month period (by ensuring that she had no access to supermarkets and junk food. She heads back to her chapel and delivers her sermon to an empty room. Her sermon finished, she takes a chocolate bar from her stash behind a bible and eats it. On the way back from the refinery's chapel she passes a door to the exterior and stops. She had decided earlier that morning to kill herself that night, but she realises that she had no real reason to even wait that long. She goes outside of the refinery onto a walkway but finds she is unable to throw herself off the edge, too afraid of pain, too afraid of falling. She heads back inside with plan B as backup, an overdose of painkillers. She stops on the way back to take a tub of icecream from the canteen kitchen. As she swallows the painkillers with the aid of the tub of icecream she is suddenly interrupted by Punch, one of the crew,  who tries to enter the room. She spits out the painkillers in her mouth but a sudden onset of purging prompts Punch to take a closer look and he is shocked to find out she had been trying to kill herself, though he tells her as he helps her up that Rawlins had sent him to get her.

The crew are assembled and watch a broadcast from Britain, watching chaos. Checkpoints, armed soldiers at hospitals, riots and looting. Britain is experiencing some form of plague that has turned the country upside down. It had been building up slowly but with little access to the news this is the first that some of the crew have heard of it. At the end, Jane asks Punch what he had thought and Punch admits his family live in Cardiff, one of the city's they had seen on the news. A city where the centre had been seen on fire. As the group breaks up, Jane decides to move room in the refinery, not keen on remaining in her old room. However later, she is called to meet Rawlins over the refinery's tannoy. Rawlins shows her a tape of the news that he had not shown the rest of the crew, a video that shows a woman being shot and still attacking her victim before being gunned down. Rawlins takes her outside to tell her that the Oslo Star would no longer be coming to pick them up as Norway had declared a nationwide quarantine shutting all borders (air, land, sea). Rawlins had also been given executive authority to evacuate by ConAmalgam (the owner of the derelict refinery). Rawlins tells Jane that that is just a nice way to tell them that they were on their own. Fortunately, there are other support vessels at sea and Hamburg had told them it was arranging a substitute vessel. From Marco, an agent in Hamburg, Rawlins has found out that the panic and threat seems to be global with rumours of people actually leaving the cities for fear that they would be firebombed to contain the plague.

Jane goes out to talk with Nail who was in the gym. Nail is the head of the refinery's gym rats, a big man. Jane tells him that despite their mutual dislike, she would be holding a service in the chapel for the crew, a fresh start. She holds the service, with Nail and his friends at the back followed by an announcement from Rawlins who tells them that the Oslo Star would not come for them but the following morning an oil support vessel, Spirit of Endeavour, would arrive to pick them up as a substitute vessel. However, the next morning, they are dismayed by the vessel they see arriving, barely larger than a fishing trawler. The crew crowding around the view ports are able to see that it is clear some people would need to be left behind. Rawlins takes Jane and Sian (the rig's administrator) into his office and tells them to create a shortlist of people who would need to go off the refinery. Meanwhile, Nail is thinking about seizing the vessel for himself, and he directs his fellow gym buddies to grab knives from the kitchen. The Captain of Spirit of Endeavour meets with Rawlins and tells him that his first mate had seen the plague first hand, a woman who had attacked individuals, biting them with her teeth. When the police arrived they shot both the woman and every person she'd bitten, piled up the bodies and burned them. After Punch gives the Captain some much needed food and water Nail and his buddies attack only to find themselves facing the business end of the Captain's shotgun. They are forced to disarm and assist the loading, watched by the Captain and his first mate, both armed.

When the chosen four are taken off with the fishing trawler, the rest remain behind. CNN no longer broadcasts, Sky only has a test card and the BBC is presented by a haggard man who Jane recognises as the weatherman. With all the chaos erupting in the world, they can't help but wonder if they had given the four a ticket home or death. Rawlins orders Jane and Sian to man the radio station on the refinery and broadcast regular maydays. It has an effective range of two to three hundred miles though as they start off, they receive no response. They have only three weeks until the sun disappears 'for good' (being on the arctic circle) but after some time they receive a response from Apex One, a botanical research project. Rawlins is not keen to dispatch a  rescue ship for them because they would drain the refinery's limited resources further and wouldn't provide much benefit. They decide to send Rajesh Ghost, a Sikh who was also the refinery's resident fixer. Ghost tells Rawlins the distance is too far, but hard though it was, he would need the people at Apex One to meet him halfway at a whaler's cabin at Angakut. In order to save the refinery's fuel, Rawlins directs the crew to pull their belongings into a single section. Jane joins Ghost in the refinery and asks Ghost what sort of boat the refinery has (as it clearly had one if Ghost was to go onto the land and rescue the group). Ghost tells her that they couldn't manage an escape with the little outboard they had, nor could they realistically use the lifeboats as they had no form of propulsion. Ghost's plan that he shares with Jane is to ferry the crew and supplies across onto a passing iceberg and ride the iceberg further south before taking to the lifeboats they could tow behind it. However, he has not suggested the plan to Rawlins, pointing out that at the moment the crew were quite happy to stay aboard, but as food supplies ran out, then they might be prepared to roll the dice. Later, Ghost radios Apex Base and tells them to get going, even though one of their group has frostbite, he tells them that they have little choice, their best opportunity would be now before the weather got worse. Elsewhere, Punch is ordered by Rawlins to take an inventory of food supplies and to provide him and Punch with keys and a lock for the food locker because Rawlins is worried about how the crew might act when food supplies got short.

Sian is watching the seas when she spots a ship. She alerts the crew and Ghost fires a flare into the air. Through the binoculars, Rawlins tells them that the ship is Japanese, they could see the flag, though the ship neither slows nor changes course for them. When they try to raise the ship on the radio there is no response. They are being deliberately ignored by the ship. Jane continues to man the radio and becomes a voice of encouragement for the people walking from Apex One to the cabin. They are weak and have no more food. Nail and his gang had taken up the top floor of the section still with power while Jane took up a position on the ground floor, choosing to convert one of the rooms into a form of chapel. Rawlins calls Sian and Jane to the radio room where he tells them that the group from Apex One had decided to continue into the night, choosing not to camp. Alan, the person with the frostbite, had fallen through the ice. Ghost is sent to rescue them with Punch and Rye immediately due to Alan's accident. They head to an abandoned dump for Soviet-era nuclear reactors, and pick up weapons from a cache hidden inside. Rye explains that they kept the weapons aware from the refinery under Rawlins' orders but they might need the weapons to defend themselves against polar bears. Contacting the Rampart, they are told by Jane that a larger storm front is heading towards them and that the people from Apex One appear to have become delirious meaning that she was unable to ascertain their exact position. Ghost votes to go, as does Punch, though Rye tells them they ought not to. They leave with half of Rye's provisions and her medical kit, leaving her behind. Jane, on the refinery, discovers that they had been given rules for rationing of the food and spent a moment tugging hopelessly on the padlocked doors. The crew eat in sullen silence as they watch dead channels. When Jane is cleaning up she steals two packets of M&Ms wondering how long it would be before fights broke out over the food. She finds a note from Punch hidden away under her pillow later reading 'if I don't come back.' She opens it, her curiosity getting the better of her and finds that Punch had performed the inventory and found out that there was only enough food for half the winter. He has left her and Sian a map that leads to a hidden storage room where Punch had been stowing away food and other supplies, the implication being that it is clear that the entire crew couldn't survive the whole winter, but perhaps three people who hide away might.

Ghost and the rescue team take high ground at Darwin Sound and are surprised by the arrival of a bright light in the sky that impacts hard on the ground in the distance. Simon and his group from Apex One are in a bad shape but are finally rescued by Ghost and Punch. Simon's right hand is completely blue and Ghost comments that he would definitely lose the fingers on that hand. They strap Alan to a sledge, unsure if he was alive or dead before they slap Simon and Nikki awake and tell them they would be riding pinion. With a storm closing on them, they have no choice but to cut Alan free of their skidoos. Ghost tells Nikki and Simon that he had made the decision, responsibility would be his for Alan's fate as they are unsure if he was alive or dead. They hole up in the Soviet-era waste bunker and contact the Kasker Rampart, letting them know what had happened. Neither Nikki nor Simon knew what had happened to the world at all. Once they had picked up Rye, they return to the Rampart with Ghost issuing instructions to prepare the refinery for Simon's medical attention. They manage to rescue Simon, though Nikki remains shaken by the guilt of surviving. Sian talks with Simon, sharing the events that they had seen on the news while Jane coaxes Nikki into helping out with the radio broadcast shifts. They only have enough medicine to provide Simon with two days of pain-free injury. Jane decides to take a waterproof bag and attach it to a weather balloon, telling the crew that it was unlikely to work, but that they might wish to record the things they wish they could have said before she released it. Jane is called over with Rawlins to the medical centre where they find Simon with his wrists cut. They hold a funeral that day, going out onto the ice around one of the refinery's legs and disposing of the body in the sea. Disappointed with all the misery they are dealing with on the rig, Jane decides to go with Punch to investigate the meteorite they had seen earlier.

Leaving the rig, Jane is struck by how large the facility is, but also by how much larger and emptier the arctic sea appears. She is not convinced they have what it would take to survive outside the refinery, to make a safe journey back to warmer lands. Back on the rig, Nikki and Sian make contact with Kasker Raven, though they are in urgent need of help. Jane and Punch report that they were hearing strange sounds over the radio, like a Geiger counter, meanwhile, Rawlins tells the seven desperate men of Kasker Raven that he could not justify risking their sole sea-going pontoon to rescue them. He tells Nikki and Sian to find Ghost, hoping he might have a plan that could help after telling them that with all the stress of command recently he'd been considering throwing himself down the stairs. Not to kill himself, but merely so that someone else might have to take charge. Nikki finds Ghost in a pump room at the bottom of the rig, rolling an empty oil drum. She tells him that Rawlins wanted him to develop a plan of rescue for the marooned crew of Kasker Raven. She also tells him that she knows he is making a boat and promises not to tell anyone provided he is honest with her about his purpose down there, though Ghost refuses to admit that he was building a boat and after telling him she could help, she goes instead and talks with Nail and his friends in their gym.

Four miles inland, Punch and Jane find an abandoned seismologist camp and more interestingly a crate of explosives (for punching through the ice). They load the crates onto the zodiac (their pontoon). After that, they continue on towards the crash site. Aboard Rampart, Rawlins tells the Kasker Raven crew that they could get into their lifeboats and ride the natural currents towards Kasker Rampart, but with the ocean being what it is, that was no guarantee that they would even come within visible range of the refinery. The crew reply, telling him it was a hard sell and though they really had no other options and daylight was fading, they might delay on a decision. Jane and Punch return with a digital camera and show what they had found to Rawlins. They had found a Russian Soyuz capsule that had crashed. Rawlins tells them that he would go with Ghost to investigate the capsule and see if they could open it (in order to switch off its beacon, the source of the interference with the Rampart's radio). Jane talks with Ghost as he decides to cut off his hair (a big decision for a Sikh) and then they discuss the boat. Ghost explains that the boat needs to be extremely large even for just two people in order to be able to stock the provisions they would need. Jane questions Ghost's use of 'two-man' and is told by the Sikh that he quite liked her company.

Nikki goes looking for Nail and finds him in the dive room, practising knife throwing. She tells him about Ghost's boat, adding that Ghost didn't have it in him to actually leave them. She figures he would finish the boat but not be able to bring himself to escape, leaving the others. She tells Nail that she could see him and her doing that quite easily. Punch and Jane show Rawlins the explosives they had found while Nikki is with Nail. Rawlins decides to keep the explosives hidden in the Soviet-era waste bunker and tells them not to breath a word of it to the others. Ghost and Rawlins head over to the crash site and examine the ship. Close to it, they are unable to raise Kasker Rampart on the radio due to interference. They open the capsule, taking note of the warning that the door had explosive bolts and look inside, finding a cosmonaut strapped in and facing the instrumentation panel. To their surprise the cosmonaut is soviet-era and Rawlins tells Ghost that he had clearly been in space for decades.  When Rawlins opens the man's helmet and sees a face with chrome-like skin, metal teeth he is attacked by what should have been a dead-cosmonaut.

Punch and Jane are going through the kitchen inventory and decide to ask if anyone knew how to fish before they are interrupted by Sian who tells them that Ghost had just called in. Rawlins was hurt. They head over to the refinery's leg and watched Ghost's pontoon arrive. Rawlins' arm is wrapped in foil insulation and Ghost tells them not to touch any part of his skin at all. They haul him to Rye and Ghost tells her no skin contact. After they take Rawlins into Rye's office, Rye begins cutting open his jacket causing droplets of blood to fall from the table. Ghost again tells them to treat the blood as if it were AIDS. At first Rye thinks it is a mere bruise or frostbite but looking closer she sees needle-fine splinters of metal bristling on his hand. Ghost tells them that Frank had been attacked and bitten by the cosmonaut who should have been dead. He took Frank Rawlins out and used a thermite grenade on the capsule. Rye discovers the metal filaments appear to be bonded to his skeleton and spread slowly. They decide to amputate Rawlins' arm. They throw the waste, blood and clothes over the side while Rye places the severed arm into a plastic box and seals the lid. She tells Jane to get rid of it who goes down with Punch and burns the box with kerosene.

Rye suddenly calls Jane and Punch over to the medical bay. The operating table is empty. Rawlins is missing and had somehow managed to walk out despite having just had an amputation. Elsewhere on the refinery, Sian sees Rawlins and flees from him. Jane, Ghost and Punch who are attempting to find Rawlins stumble across the airway tube that had been in his throat. Jane tells them that perhaps this was what the news around the world had been reporting, that perhaps it would pay to be prepared just in case. She tells Punch that he should tell the others, ensure they are barricade themselves into their rooms while Ghost and Jane head onto the island to grab the shotguns. Rawlins finds himself naked in the dive room. He finds that self-awareness comes and goes. He sees himself in a mirror, one eye black as onyx. Using a knife, he cuts out his own eye, feeling nothing and severs the optic nerve. He smashes the mirror with a scuba tank. Punch tells Sian to keep herself barricaded in Rawlins' office and use the status board to tell him if any of the doors opened. He arms himself with a pool cue and Rawlins' taser. As Punch patrols the accommodation block, he hear Rawlins knocking on one of the sealed doors, though Rawlins doesn't seem to hear or understand him. Rawlins moves off and goes to the gym, alone. He dresses himself and lies on a sunbed. He can see metal spines extruding from the gauze that wrapped his amputated arm. Jane and Ghost return, armed with shotguns. Rawlins watches them for a while, fighting a tide of bloodlust, but doesn't reveal himself. The two of them find him later in the fuel store, soaked in kerosene with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Rawlins tells them that the disease has an agenda and that he intended to go while he was still himself. They try to talk him out of it, but Rawlins ignites his Zippo lighter. Jane and Ghost attempt to extinguish his body but the flames spread to the propane tank in the room and they are forced to flee. They are unable to raise Sian over the radio. The refinery itself is damaged by the explosion and leaking water. Punch is unable to activate the fire suppression system and instead decides to try to rescue Jane and Ghost. He is swung across by a crane into the burning part of the refinery and manages to rescue them. As they flee, Jane and Ghost stop to grab as much of the medical provisions as they can, sending Punch on ahead to the cargo pallet attached to the crane.

Nail enters Rawlins' office and tells the crew over the intercom to abandon the rig. Ivan, the crane operator leaves, leaving Sian in charge of the crane as she waits for Ghost and Jane. Punch finds Nail unconscious on a staircase and helps him, guiding the crew to the pontoon. He takes them ashore as the fire continues to rage. Though the crew manage to survive, including Jane and Ghost, the refinery is damaged badly. The fuel section had collapsed away, exploding and the generators are knocked out by the fire. Ghost, badly weakened by the fire, pushes himself afterwards to do what he can with the generators. He tells them that they might be able to repair one of Kasker Rampart's three generators. He tells them to give him adrenalin injections to keep him going as the alternative is to die in the cold anyway, even though working in his current state might kill him too. Nail and Nikki inspect Ghost's hidden boat and decide that if Ghost survives he could finish his boat for them, if he didn't then the plans Ghost left would be sufficient to finish it themselves. Nail takes Nikki over to D block, the section that had collapsed into the sea and finds his old room. With no desire to go back to the others, he takes out a stash of hidden drugs and gets high with Nikki. Ghost manages to repair the generator but is unable to find a way to transfer its output. They are left with a single domestic lead to power a single stove. The survivors take turns sitting in front of the fire. With the added power, Jane is able to get back into contact with Kasker Raven. They have been waiting, ready to go the entire time. She tells them about their problem with the generator and asks them to bring medical and electrical supplies with them. Ghost continues to get worse though and Rye is forced to operate on him by flashlight. While Ghost is being operated on, Nail has begun to work on the boat with Nikki. Nikki is revolted by Nail, but desperate for her own survival has forged her link with him, trading sex for a place on the boat. Jane spots Nail and follows him before returning to a post-surgery Ghost and tells him about Nail. Ghost tells her that he had planned to sail off into the sunset with her, but now no longer wants to do that. They shake hands, agreeing to be the last men off the refinery. That night, they spot a large storm front moving in... something that would make it even harder to find the crew of Kasker Raven.

Using a GPS, Jane and Ghost search for the Kasker Raven crew, following a beacon. They find a smashed portion of a lifeboat with the beacon attached and a drowned crewman. As they head back, Ghost suddenly swerves to avoid an iceberg coming out of the mist, only to realise that it is in fact a massive passenger liner called Hyperion. They get back and wake the others. Jane arms herself with a shotgun as they eye their potential rescue. They might use the ship to get away from Kasker Rampart but Jane would not allow anyone to deny her that. Given how fast the ship is drifting, they do not have time to ferry the guys on the island over. Aboard the ship, the manage to access the bridge but find many of the access ways to be barricaded and marked with red crosses. However, the lure of fresh water, electricity, warmth and potential food supplies draws them to search the ship for the master ignition. Jane and Ghost find the purser's office and the keys. Punch stands on the skylight to the ship's ballroom and listens to the music over the PA as the engines and generators are restarted, but he's more concerned with the fact that the bodies in the ballroom have begun to stir. After discovering how to drop the anchors manually, they head back to Kasker Rampart to sell the crew on the idea. Most of the crew are delighted by the promise Jane offers, though Nikki finds she'd rather trust Nail and his boat (she had also been learning from a book how to sail the boat on her own, telling herself she might not even need him). Rye, the doctor also has little faith in Jane.

Aboard the Hyperion they decide to organise raiding parties to find food and supplies and Jane finds the captain's diary. Reading through it she learns of the ship's loss, how the infection aboard had started with a single waiter taken on at port. How the ship's engines had been shut down. The Captain and his crew were slowly whittled down to a mere seventy-four by the infected until they chose to leave the ship and try to use the lifeboats to land ashore. Ghost and Punch are let out of the barricaded section and make their way to the engine room. They encounter an infected engineer and swiftly dispatch him before turning on the engines. As the ship's engines wake up, some of the barricades begin to shake as the infected passengers begin to try to gain entry. Ghost examines the engineer's body, surprised to find that even his brain had been converted into metal, spotting metal filaments coming out of his nose. As they leave, heading towards the bridge again, Jane begins experimenting with steering the ship before setting a course for Kasker Rampart. However, the infected passengers show signs of being able to break into the bridge through a partially ajar door. Jane assists Ivan in slamming it shut, but both are horrified when an arm severed by the door continues to move. Punch and Ghost are trapped in the ship by a group of passengers. The bridge is attacked by the infected and Ivan is brought down by them as Jane finds herself trapped on the roof of the bridge. The Rampart crew watch and find their excitement turning to dismay as the passenger liner scrapes the refinery and plows onwards towards the island without slowing. Dr. Rye rescues Ghost, Punch and Jane each after the crash after Ghost and Punch switch off the engines.
 
The passenger liner has torn her plates and is beached. They learn from Rye that Nail's arm had been broken when the liner had scraped alongside the refinery. Jane withdraws into her cabin aboard the refinery, gripped by her failure. When Ghost and Punch decide to see what they can find on the beached ship she refuses to go. Armed with Molotov cocktails they manage to secure some power lines for the refinery. With the power restored, Nikki heads down to inspect the boat and opens the bay that it was held in. Jane visits Nail who is heavily drugged though he is concerned with Nikki but too weak to go after her, for he realises that with the power restored Nikki might escape without him. Nikki does indeed decide to escape and is caught by Jane who throws her a radio, telling her that after Kasker Rampart saved her life, the least she owed was a few minutes of her time. Jane tells Nail when he recovers what a mistake he had made by not taking steps to ensure the bay couldn't be opened without him before going on to meet Sian. She points out that having power didn't mean they were out of the woods yet. As Jane recovers from her funk she goes to check on Rye. She finds her cutting her own name into her thighs with a knife. She's clearly got problems though she refuses to discuss them with Jane. It all comes to a head when Jane discovers Rye had been kidnapping and restraining infected passengers from Hyperion and taking them aboard Kasker Rampart. Rye shares with Jane that the infected appeared to be afflicted by some sort of 'super-parasite.' Their organic bodies are merely a shell for the metallic growths that spread from the central nervous system. Jane is horrified by the experiments that Rye had been carrying out on the infected, worried about the possibility they might get free. She shoots all four of Rye's subjects and tells her if she did it again she'd shoot her too. '

The story switches to the perspective of Dr. Rye's private diary where she reveals she had in fact been infected. Cutting off the infected finger did not bring any reprieve as she found a metal filament growing from the wound. She tries cutting off her finger to the knuckle and is disappointed yet again. She hides her problem from the crew by keeping her hand in a glove at all times. She helps Ghost and Jane cut away ladders and staircases to prevent the infected gaining access to the refinery for as the winter stretched on, a natural bridge of ice would form between the island and the refinery. The crew of the Rampart ensure that the only access to their shelter would be through the lift system. Rye discovers that she barely feels the cold now, despite the fact that the exterior of the refinery reached as below forty degrees. She observes how the crew have slowly taken their own small steps away from sanity. One of the crew, Gus, insists on being referred to as the Duke of Amberly and directly called 'Your Lordship.' The rest of the crew don't mind, understanding each other's need to avoid sanity. Due to the growing presence of the infected near the refinery, they decide to shift from the rampart to the Soviet-era bunker as part of a plan to destroy the infected. At the bunker, Jane and Ghost reveal the C4 and thermite they had kept. They manage to kill a mere thirty or forty with their explosives a move more for their morale than achievable results. Dr. Rye has also discovered that she feels a strange bloodlust within her, something that appears to be linked to her infection. When the crew head back to the Rampart, from the bunker, Rye remains behind.

Ghost leads the men later to the Hyperion's officer's quarters. They use kerosene to set passages alight and go through the ship, slaughtering the infected where they can. After securing the officer's quarters and re-establishing the barricades, they relax, enjoying a level of luxury they had never experienced before. They booby trap the doors with thermite grenades and settle down as the crew discuss what they might do if they made it back to their homes. Jane however, remains on the Rampart, manning the radio alone as the rest of the crew move over to the Hyperion. They discover one of the crew members, Mal, dead in a storehouse with his throat cut. They tell Jane via the radio but Ghost is worried about the possibility of murder. Ghost convinces Nail and Gus to examine the underside of the Hyperion, to determine the extent of the damage. They find a large tear in the ship's hull which they relay back to the refinery which lets them realise the ship might still be sailable.

Nikki is at sea, on her boat as she talks with Jane via the radio. The weather appears good and her supplies and ship have held out. She sails on, unable to raise anyone else on the radio but the refinery. She spots a storm heading her way and readies herself, determined to survive at any cost. Meanwhile, aboard the Hyperion though Rye's infection has spread through her body she still retains her self-awareness, something that's almost a disappointment to her. As she enters the ship's casino, moving past several infected passengers without comment she is surprised to meet an infected passenger acting as a dealer for a card table and the passenger teaches her how to play blackjack. On her exploration through the ship she finds a doctor who is sane though infected and talks to him. Dr. Walczak tells them that they had thought they had contained it at first, taking passengers and forcibly quarantining them. Naturally, families started hiding their infected relatives and the infection continued to spread. Gangs were formed to kill and take charge of the infected by force. He points at the ballroom and tells her that it was there that the ship was truly lost. Infected passengers broke out of the infirmary and swept into a full ballroom. She kills him on his request. She returns to play cards with the other passenger, before he shares with her what happens to all of them eventually. He refers to it as migrating and 'blood music' which is the term for the blood-lust Dr. Rye feels as she draws closer to the area where the Rampart's crew live.

Jane examines Mal's room with Ghost and discovers some evidence of drugs in his room. She talks with Ghost, wondering if Nail might have killed him over a drug deal, something that might explain Nail's recent drinking issues. They discuss how they might dispense justice even if they did prove Nail had killed Mal. Ghost suggests finding a pretence to take Nail out onto the island and ensuring he didn't come back. Jane tells him that wouldn't work, but Ghost presses her that there was one additional problem. Ghost found Nail's discharge papers and tells Jane that the distinguishing marks listed on the discharge paper were different to the ones Nail actually had, which could only mean for whatever reason, Nail was not the real Nail. There are many people who take the job on the rigs to escape some part of their prior lives but Ghost tells Jane that the sooner they cut him loose, the better. While Nail is busy with one of the raiding groups aboard Hyperion, Jane searches his room but fails to find anything incriminating. At the end of a couple of attempts to question him subtly, Jane is convinced that Nail is guilty. After Mal's funeral, they dispose of his body in the sea.

Nikki remains at sea, battered by the elements. Her boat is damaged by the storm and her supplies within scattered about. She is bruised and struggling and says as much over the radio to Kasker Rampart. Nikki tells them that the welds were split by a huge wave, warning them to build a stronger boat if they decide to do so. That is her last transmission with them as she passes out of range of the Rampart's radio. Some time later she finds herself close to an island belonging to Norway but she does not see any boats or aircraft patrolling. When she passes a fishing village she is greeted by the sight of infected people and lets the current carry her further south. Evidently, Norway's self-imposed quarantine had not worked. The next morning she finds a floating Air France 747 and boards it. She takes what she can for herself and is surprised to find a survivor locked in the airplane's toilet who refuses to come out at all. When she leaves, she tries again to talk to the survivor, only to be told she had best leave him. After all, that's what she had done before. Confused, Nikki breaks down the door to find an empty cubicle. Her dead boyfriend's voice taunts her as she questions her sanity. She asks the voice if he could take her back to Kasker Rampart. She sits later, eating crackers and watches red lights in the distance. The wrong time of day, wrong point of the compass for sunset. Europe is burning.

Rye is still self-aware but now suffers blackouts. During each blackout she finds herself in a new part of the ship. After one blackout she finds herself clawing at a door with other passengers. She starts to beat them away using a fire extinguisher only to blackout and come to, once again clawing at the door. On one other occasion she finds herself before a door leading to where the Rampart's crew were living. She finds a thermite grenade wired to the door and takes it. She can't bring herself to use it to kill herself though. She wakes up on the card table and is greeted by the card dealer. He is alone now and still himself, though he is fused to the floor by the parasite. When Rye tells him she couldn't use the thermite grenade, he asks for it and thanks her when she gives it to him. She finds herself later leading a group of the infected through a passageway that had been overlooked, going through a submerged section to appear near the officer's quarters. She tries to stop the other passengers that had been following her but a moment later could no longer remember who she was or what she had been doing, driven only by the blood music.

Nail and Gus manage to make it to the Soviet bunker, entering it for shelter. They had managed to escape the attack though were wearing mere shirts and shorts. They were fortunate to make it to the bunker as they would not have lasted any longer than that. They were halfway across the ice when the grenades that had gone off at the booby trapped doors managed to spread the fire to the fuel stores and detonate the ship. They create a fire and manage to warm themselves, using wood from the quarters within the bunker to fuel it. As they are talking, Gus suddenly tells Nail that he didn't want to scare him but he thought he could see someone standing behind him, by the wall. Nail turns to see a figure dressed in heavy snow gear and approaches. It's Nikki.

On the ice outside, Jane, Ghost, Sian and Punch make it out of the ship. They had had the presence of mind to get dressed in survival gear before escaping. As they make their way across the ice they are suddenly attacked by an infected crewman, but unlike the others, this one was driving a forklift. Ghost dispatches him but it isn't until they are back in the dubious shelter of Kasker Rampart that they realise Sian has been stabbed. Sian hadn't been stabbed by the forklift but by some debris from the explosions aboard Hyperion. They fail to meet up with anyone else and decide that they would refuse Nail entry to the Rampart if he should try to return. Jane disables the blast doors that lead to their accommodation, choosing to seal themselves in. Together they decide that their best bet is to use explosives from the Soviet-era bunker to blow away the refinery's couplings allowing the rig to float free. As they prepare to go back to the island one final time, Ghost gives Jane a flamethrower he had created using a SCUBA tank and a spraygun. In the bunker, Nail, Gus and Nikki appear to be in a bad way. Gus is still badly wounded from the burns he'd received aboard Hyperion, Nail is sweating cold turkey as a result of withdrawal from his own drugs and Nikki remains mumbling to herself. They discuss the possibility of cooking the virus from an infected body and being able to eat the remains. With Gus afraid of being left alone with Nikki, Nail invites Nikki to come with him and look for firewood to keep them warm. As they explore the bunker he asks her why she had come back. She can only tell him she had seen cities on fire, that the governments of the world had nuked cities in their bid to stop the virus. She can't tell Nail how she arrived at the bunker, not being all that sure how she had come to get back here.

At the installation manager's office Nail finds a trail bar which he shares with Nikki, giving no answer when Nikki asks about Gus' share. They cut up a leather jacket they find and chew it to relieve them of their hunger pains. They return and Nail asks Gus why he had wanted to be called the Duke of Amberley. Amberley was a place he had wanted to live in and Duke simply because there was nobody left to tell them otherwise. They could label themselves whatever they wished. Nail leaves Gus alone with Nikki as he heads out to 'explore', well aware of what that would mean. Step by step Nail is aware that he is damning himself. He had killed Mal and begged the dying man's forgiveness as he tried to stop the blood flow and now he had let Nikki kill Gus. Together, they sate their hunger with Nail weeping as he eats from Gus' corpse.

On the rig, Jane and Punch decide to go to the bunker, leaving Ghost and Sian aboard as they recover the explosives within. Jane arms herself with the flamethrower and Punch takes a shotgun. The infected that hadn't burnt with the ship were succumbing to the cold but could still present a danger. Upon reaching the bunker they find signs of habitation and surmise that it must be Nail. Continuing, unafraid, towards the location of the explosives they find the words 'Hellbound' scrawled in blood on the walls. They also find the remains of Gus. They suddenly spot a figure trying to trap them in. Punch shoots and misses before wrestling with the unseen adversary and Jane uses her flamethrower to send the figure running, partially burnt. They have no sympathy for Nail and she shouts threats at the figure's back. On the way back, with the explosives, they are attacked by an infected passenger. Punch dispatches him and Jane is knocked down and set alight by the flames of the burning passenger she had ignited. She puts out the fire on her arm and finds that Punch had disappeared. With a blizzard in full swing she has no choice but to continue on to Kasker Rampart. She returns safely, though Sian is distraught by the loss of Punch. She is unable to offer Sian much in the way of comfort or help, her only suggestion being to open a bottle of wine. They have a memorial wall on the rig dedicated to the crew that had died. Nail's picture lay on a chair. Jane feels Nail didn't deserve to be remembered. Ghost tells Sian to take out the lift's fuses as they had no more ammunition. Instead, she descends in the lift, so morose at Punch's disappearance that she sought to have her life ended by them. Her descent is suddenly stopped and the lift's motion reversed. Ghost stands at the controls and tells her that they would just pretend she hadn't tried to do that. Ghost and Jane go out to set the charges to free the refinery but Ghost keeps a small charge and decides to fix it to a table in the canteen. If they couldn't free the rig he thinks he might invite them for a meal and just end their struggle quickly and clean.

Nikki, still haunted by the voice of her dead boyfriend, is told by that very same voice that the other survivors could not be allowed to leave. She is standing, watching the rig as they detonate the charges, commenting to her inner voice that they were remarkably tenacious. The rig still isn't moving though due to the ice that locks it in place. Ghost is struck by an idea and they go to raid Rawlins' office for his security codes and keys. They initiate a full system purge and await the countdown. Punch wakes and is kicked by Nikki who intends to use her bound captive for trade. Punch is forced to give Nikki proof of life, something only Sian would know. The rig has reversed the flow of oil stored within the refinery and as it pools out onto the ocean, Ghost sets it afire with a flare. The sea burns, the ice melts, the rig begins to move. As the rig begins to move, Jane searches for Sian and instead happens across the radio room where she could hear a faint voice. She contacts Nikki and enters a flurry of activity as she arms herself with an axe. She needs Sian to drop her onto the ice so that she could rescue Punch. She does not intend to trade fuel or food with her. Sian tells Jane that at most she only has two hours before the rig would go past the ice-field, effectively giving her only an hour before she had to turn back. Ghost, who didn't have his radio with him, finds out that Jane had left to rescue Punch and hurriedly dresses and arms himself to follow her. He tells Sian to remain on the rig to rescue them before using the crane to drop to the bottom. He forgets to attach crampons for the ice and has a brief struggle to clear the rig's path. He falls into the sea and hauls himself out with the axe he brought. Left with the choice to return to Kasker Rampart or push on after Jane, he decides to go after Jane, leaving behind the axe that had become stuck.

Punch is left tied to a wall girder near Nail who is also tied up. In the darkness he can see the shape of the Soviet capsule that had crash landed, somehow dragged into the bunker. Nail appears to have become just as mad as Nikki and he attempts (and fails) to cut his wrists with a sharpened coin he'd been working on. Punch asks for the coin and attempts to saw himself free while Nail answers that his real name was David. He tells Punch that Nikki had an entire army in these bunkers, the passenger and crew of Hyperion, who for some reason obeyed Nikki. Ghost arrives at the bunker before Jane (because she had tried the Hyperion first). He settles down and re-ignites Nail's former campsite to warm himself. Jane arrives and makes her way within, burning an infected passenger that screams and to her concern, something replies to that scream. Further in the tunnel she encounters another infected, this one a chef. He is equipped with jars on his body like a suicide vest, jars filled with kerosene. He sets himself alight and the explosion sends Jane to the ground before she is attacked by another infected driving a digger. She manages to burn him and proceeds onward, finding a section of wall with the writing: 'Welcome home Jane' in blood. She uses a claw hammer to kill another kerosene jar-jacketed crewman and takes a jar from his body before descending further.

Nikki drags Nail and Punch away from where they'd been held captive, taking them to the capsule where Hyperion crewmen stand sentry, like strange worker bees. From the cosmonaut's helmet, tendrils of metal extend and fuse with the wall. Punch meets up with Ghost who had been captured and tied to a chair. Ghost tells Punch that the best thing they could do was wait and be ready for Jane. Jane's watch alerts her that there is no time left, her only chance to save herself would be to turn around but she takes off the watch and continues. The generator room she finds is cold and silent, yet the facility is still powered. The next crewman she encounters doesn't move but just watches her. Something deeper within knew she was present but was content to let her through.

Nikki talks to her captive audience as she tells them she was there to help them. She sees the virus as the dominant species on the planet, especially after she had witnessed the nuclear fires that had ravaged the world. She forces a piece of metal from the cosmonaut's helmet into Nail's mouth and swallows a sliver herself, telling Punch and Ghost that she was anxious to talk to Jane. She wanted them to volunteer to be infected. The infected clear a path for Jane as she finally arrives, announced by the body of Rye which was fused to a static-filled screen. She enters, seeing Ghost and Punch unharmed, Nikki standing in the centre and Nail, weeping and sobbing. She moves closer and throws her knife to Ghost who cuts himself and the other captives free. They begin to edge away towards the exit, though Nail makes a run for it after freeing himself. As they talk, Nikki entreats Jane to join them and instead is knocked down when Jane throws the claw hammer at her head. The infected begin to close on them and Jane buys time for the others buy throwing her kerosene jar and igniting it with a flare before escaping. Nail attacks Punch and Ghost as they make their way out, biting Ghost on the cheek before they fend him off. They continue to run out of the bunker, though Ghost tells Punch he'd be better off leaving him after receiving a bite from an infected person. They take a Skidoo and head towards the refinery. Sian spots them and uses the crane to collect them though she can't help but feel guilt at the hope that one of the two is Punch, even if it meant one of the others had died to rescue him. However, at the last minute, Ghost turns away and leaves Punch to ascend to the refinery alone, taking a walk out onto the frozen sea. Jane has meanwhile made her way across the ice, running to Kasker Rampart. She lets loose purple flares that are spotted by Sian and Punch but as she steps forward to grab the hook she's hit by a snowmobile and spots Nail at the controls. She uses her parka coat to jam the snowmobile and struggles with Nail. She throws him off and looks around for the hook, spotting it dangling 50 metres above before Sian drops it on Nail, crushing him entirely with the half-tonne hook and breaking the ice beneath him. Jane grabs the hook on the way up. As Kasker Rampart floats away, Jane contacts Ghost through the radio, and they say their farewells as they pass out of radio range, a single red-distress flare fired off in the distance as Ghost's final salute. As they float south, Jane mans the radio, broadcasting a distress signal.

On the ice, Ghost's body sits, kneeling on the ice with his hands in his lap. He is dressed in his t-shirt and shorts, having stripped himself of his coat and gloves. He will never move again for his body has hardened and frozen. A white statue smiling at the stars.

Food for thought:

On the face of it, Outpost is your typical zombie horror story. There's a disease of unknown proportions that causes its virulent victims to attack the non-infected and the disease is so dangerous that it results in the destruction of mankind's way of life. That right there is practically most zombie horror stories in a nutshell. However, a great many of these type of stories start off with a happy paradise that turns into hell. This is more a story of a rough and tough place to live being made worse. It's also unusual because most stories of this calibre tend to run on the assumption that 'escape' is the good ending, that there is no doubt some safe haven where the survivors are safe and where society (with all its trappings) continues. Outpost delivers a harder tale, becoming a story of not triumph over adversity but rather a story about stubbornness over adversity. Even without the threat of the infected, Kasker Rampart is not a place where mankind can thrive or even survive without specialist equipment.

It does raise a question as to what sort of people we are underneath. We all have hidden reserves and are capable of feats we might not normally imagine ourselves doing (both of courage and cowardice, of selfishness and selflessness). This story is about people coming out of their shells, adapting to the change in their circumstances as they are rudely separated from the life that they had been quite content with. Jane is a key example of this, starting off as a priest who had wanted to matter, who wanted to be important and have her place recognised. By the end of the story she is someone who has cast away her role as a priest and become a colder person for it. She may still love Ghost but it takes the arrival of the infection to really bring about a metamorphosis. From a suicidally-inclined fat woman to one so vibrant and covetous of life that she would quite happily take 'cold-blooded' decisions. When the trappings and social net that dictates our behaviour is gone, the person that remains may be a very different creature indeed. By social net I simply refer to the established concept of 'society' and 'community' that control 'accepted' behaviour. As an example for this, there are numerous 'survivor' stories where the survivors that are rescued have had to make some very tough calls in order to live. It's a form of behaviour that cannot be reconciled with the life they return to. They made their decisions in order to live. The survival instinct is extremely strong and in dark times it clashes with our understanding of civilised behaviour. Just so in Outpost. When the chips are down and times turn from bad to worse, it is then that we discover what we as individuals are capable of doing. And we are capable of such acts of necessity.

I did like the unusual take on zombies. It isn't necessary nor required (the technological infection does not really alter the flow of the tale from that of the same story with zombies), but it adds a new element to an otherwise standard affair. Like many horror stories though, the focus is on the horror itself, on the struggle to survive at the detriment to the plot's devices. There are no grand revelations, no great understanding that makes itself felt. Even Nikki fails to provide much insight to the infection. However, one can't help but wonder if the Geth from Mass Effect were chosen as inspiration for the zombies here. There are too many questions left unanswered by the book, but this is to be expected. We see things from their perspectives and they have no reason to really care or look deeply into the reasons of the calamity that has befallen them and mankind.

There's one final note to make here. It's rather cliche but a common theme to zombie stories. There is this assumption that we (mankind) exist rather than live. Society requires conformity and jams square pegs into round holes because they must fit. In its own way, the arrival of the infection brings with it a terrible freedom. There is no one else out there to judge them, to tell them what they are or where they belong. At the cost of the world, the crew of Kasker Rampart are liberated from a mundane existence and thrust headlong into a horrifying, bloody but ultimately very vital life. They aren't just wiling away days in boredom waiting for rescue, they are living with every fibre of their being, fighting to ensure that they have that much more life.

Book Review: Inverted World by Christopher Priest - 4thwallfly

Welcome to the Fly on the 4th Wall. This week's book review will skirt the edges of science fiction to a story about a city that cannot stop. No, I'm not talking about New York City.
Presenting the city in:
Inverted World by Christopher Priest:

Cover art copyright of Chris Moore/Artist Partners

'The city is winched along its tracks through a devastated world. Rails must be laid ahead of it and removed in its wake. If the city does not move, it will fall behind the 'optimum' and into a crushing gravitational field. The alternative to progress is death.

The rulers of the city make sure its inhabitants know nothing of this. But the dwindling population is growing restive. And the rulers know that the city is falling further and further behind.' - Inverted World, Christopher Priest [1974]

Inverted World delivers on its promise, presenting the story of Helward Mann (a fitting name if ever there was one) as he grows up in the city of Earth, coming to terms with the world around him in Earth's desperate struggle for survival. The people of Earth haul their city ever northwards, aiming for the ever elusive 'optimum' ahead of them, navigating a hostile landscape to do so. Helward Mann, thanks to his father's prestigious position, joins the guild of Future Surveyors and embarks on a journey that takes him away from Earth, learning about the world outside the city, the truth behind Earth's constant struggle north and the fate that awaits the city in the south.

The story is set in a universe that is the inverse of our own. We live in what is effectively (though not actually) an infinite universe on a finite planet. However, Inverted World is set in a finite universe upon an infinite planet. There's a rather impressive and enjoyable twist at the end, so not much more will be said on this beyond an explanation of the Inverted World premise.

Inverted World is told primarily from Helward Mann's point of view with only a few parts told from Elizabeth Khan's point of view, though nothing will be revealed of her either for much the same reason as above. Despite being entirely cryptic about book, I recommend reading it as it delivers a fascinating world setting and a twist that leaves you feeling delighted at the end.


Click below for the full synopsis (click to open/close):

The book opens with a prologue, starting with Elizabeth Khan's point of view. She appears to be a visitor to a village of people, witnessing their dancing and some parts of their lives, though she is a visitor like Father dos Santos. The villagers appear to live a simplistic lifestyle but as Elizabeth goes through the village she spots Luiz, someone she had not seen at the festivities, clutching a satchel of supplies and in the darkness of the falling night she hears the sounds of a horse galloping away.

The story picks up again from Helward's point of view who had just reached six hundred and fifty miles in age. He is a young man who has become 'of age' and is readying himself for the initiation into the life of a guild apprentice, following the steps of his father who is a guildsman himself. He had grown up without a mother, a woman who had left Earth shortly after his birth and been raised in a creche. Helward's life is planned for this moment, his marriage to Victoria Lerouex already arranged. A guild administrator ushers him into a chamber filled with guild representatives who ask Helward to confirm his identity and age for them. Having done so, they ask all of those who are not part of the first rank guilds to leave the room. Once the room is clear, they ask Helward what guild he intends to join to which he replies the Future Surveyors. His nomination to the guild is proposed by his father (Future Surveyor Mann) and seconded by Bridge-Builder Lerouex. Having been proposed successfully, Future Surveyor Clausewitz (head of the Future Surveyor Guild) asks Helward to decide there and then if he is willing to take the oath of the guild. The oath is not to be taken lightly as breach of the oath would be met with death. Helward decides to take the oath, repeating the words required by the Lord Navigator. However, contained within the oath is a mention of keeping confidential whatever Helward should see and learn of the nature of the world beyond Earth. Having taken the oath, Helward is greeted as an apprentice of the Future guild.

Helward notes for the first time that his father and fellow guildmembers' ages don't seem to match quite right with their peers in other guilds. He continues to brood on his acceptance into the guild, pleased with the idea that his promotion into the guild proper as a guildsman was said to be based on ability rather than time. He decides to ask one of the Traction guildsmen about Gelman Jase, his friend from the creche (though a several miles older than him), only to be told that he was away on guild business and would be away for many miles to come. The administrators are invited back into the hall and food prepared as they announce Helward's acceptance into the Future Surveyor guild to the administrative staff, though not before reminding Helward that the terms of his oath and the secrecy inherent applied immediately. Before starting the ceremony, Clauswitz announces the arranged marriage between Helward Mann and Victoria Lerouex. Though Victoria is brought into the festivities, the two of them are given no opportunity to talk to each other.

Helward is given a key to the city's creche and told to continue using his cabin there until accommodation with the guild could be sorted out for him. The next morning, he is awoken very early by one of his fellow guildsmen, Future Denton, who takes Future Mann silently through Earth, leading him to a dark and cold place. As his eyes adjust slowly, Helward realises he is outside of Earth for the first time in his life, standing with his hands on a rail with the enclosed and opaque city behind him. New sensations such as the cold wind and the smell of the soil excite Helward as he goes on to witness the first sunrise in his life, though the sun Helward sees is not the one we know. The sun is described as a rounded light with two spires of light above and below the rounded part. He is then left in the care of Track Malchuskin who makes a coffee for Helward, telling him he knew his father, that the two of them had been in the creche together, though Helward finds it hard to believe Track Malchuskin and his father were the same age. Track Malchuskin tells Helward not to worry about it, that he would find out the hard way just like other guild members had. He orders Helward to come with him and uses a wrench to wake up a collection of men, telling Helward that he was not to spend too much time with these men as they were not from the city and prone to creating some trouble (though Malchuskin's meaning is that these people are lazy and prone to stopping work at the slightest excuse). Malchuskin goes on to point out Rafael, the leader of the group as he was the one with the best knowledge of English.

After a few hours with these men, Helward is given the same impression of their lack of work ethic, despite being hired and paid by the city. Though Helward is able to empathise with them because the weather was hot and the work exhausting. Helward's work applies to four rail tracks that stretch south of the city for half a mile, each capped by a timber sleeper that was built on a sunken concrete foundation. The hired labour and two guild members work on shortening the rails south of Earth by digging up the tracks and moving the sleepers forward, though a large concrete buffer is left in place to prevent Earth sliding back on the rails should the winches that towed her ever break. Malchuskin adds that the Earth had slid back once before and that the buffer wouldn't really put up much resistance to the city's slide, but was nevertheless left in place. At the end of the day, Malchuskin reveals his distaste for the hired labour, mentioning that procuring a workforce was the domain of the Barters guild and that he'd prefer city folk but due to the guild system could not be expected to tell the city-folks of the outside world and its requirements. Before sending Helward to sleep, he suggests he should stay behind to watch the sundown during which Helward observes the same sun as he had seen that morning, a spherical shape with a line of solid light both above and below the sphere. Malchuskin points out to Helward that the guild believed in throwing their apprentices into the deep end, the better for their apprentices to realise that the world was not the same as they had been taught. He adds to Helward that he should think on the nature of the sun he had observed, before letting Helward go to sleep.

The next morning, Helward awakes in great pain, his body simply unused to the physical labour he had demanded from it yesterday, though he is given some comfort from Malchuskin's comment that it is always the same for the apprentices fresh from Earth. Malchuskin sends Helward off to eat breakfast then take a hot bath within the city. From the city's exterior, Helward is able to gain an understanding of his home, taking from his excursion outside that his home was smaller than he had imagined it to be. Earth, by Helward's reckoning, is not more than 200ft high and almost entirely constructed from timber. He estimates Earth's length at around 500ft, giving the impression that this is not a city in the modern understanding of the word. Far from it. On finding the doorway back into the city though, Helward realises he has no idea how to enter Earth and has to be shown by Malchuskin. After some initial awkwardness, he manages to find his way to the fourth floor and is directed to the baths. When he finishes, he decides to explore some of the city, using an elevator system to travel along several of the floors then settles on finding Victoria. Failing to find her, he returns to Malchuskin who hardly notices his return.

Helward continues to work with Track Malchuskin for a week before Malchuskin tells him that in three days he would be given leave, then he should return to him for another mile's work. Helward asks Malchuskin how he was rationalising using both miles and days for his measurement of time. The work supervisor replies that despite the fact that the city was currently immobile, the city made an average of one mile every ten days, giving 36.5 miles in a year. Rather than work out time based on how far the city had moved, he uses the 'optimum' or the distance which the city should have moved. To maintain the optimum, the city is required to move a minimum of a tenth of a mile per day. He goes on to mention that currently the city was three miles behind the optimum, that since he had been working he had not known a time when the city had reached or exceeded the optimum, but that his father had once known the city to be ten miles behind optimum. Track Malchuskin adds that the optimum is not a fixed point but if the city got ahead of the optimum they would be able to relax and move slower.

The country the city moves through is ideal for the Track guild, mostly smooth without too many distinguishing features. Malchuskin tells Helward that the issues that bothered him the most was rough terrain. Ridges could be rounded, but forests and rocky ground caused trouble and the very worst was rivers, because though rivers solved the city's permanent shortage of water, a river had to be crossed. After finishing the buffers for the city, Helward asks Malchuskin where the labourers went each day after work. He is told that they come from a village not too far from Earth and though they might dislike the work, there was always pressure to work for Earth because Earth provided synthetic food for the labourers (and it is implied that their alternative is starvation). Malchuskin also adds that this wasn't all the local people did for Earth, but refuses to comment further on that though he does explain to Helward about the guild system, that the guilds preferred their apprentices to learn about the nature of their world through practise not theory.

The next morning Rafael returns with most of the men from the previous day as well as some replacements for the ones missing. They work to knock down and replace their temporary work shelter, moving their work site to the top of a ridge line ahead of the city. In the dark, Helward is challenged by one of the guards who spots him approaching, though they relax when they realise it his him, stopping only to ask how long he had been a guildsman for and what guild he is part of. When he answers the Future Surveyors they laugh and tell him they prefer a long life. Helward realises that the two guards were about his age and asks them if they had been raised in the creche like he had. They tell him they had though Helward does not recognise them at all to which they tell him that they had been 'down past.' They warn him about remaining out at night, that the tooks (their term for locals) might attack at any time as there are a great many that do not like the city.

Helward is given two days leave after another two days with Track Malchuskin who tells him that he needed Helward back immediately for they would be winching the city and he would have need of Helward's help. During his leave, Helward meets his wife, Victoria who decides to take leave to spend time with her husband. Victoria asks him, when they are alone, if Helward had been outside yet, causing him to wonder what he should tell her, it being in direct conflict with his oath. She tells him to relax, that she already knew that secret. Future Mann doesn't feel like talking and listens to Victoria discuss some of the city's problems, including the fact that not everyone is born in the city and more worryingly, for reasons they could not determine, the majority of births were male and is combined with a low birth rate. Their conversation is stilted and formal though with Helward showing little inclination to talk at all. Victoria asks him if he goes outside at all, showing him a viewing platform that provided views of the city's exterior, though the room is locked during most of the daylight hours. Mindful of his oath, Helward doesn't provide Victoria with much information. Helward comes to realise that Victoria is resentful of his life, jealous of the advantages he benefits from, benefits she is forbidden. When Helward suggests applying to a guild, Victoria tells him that the guilds only accept men, that women are too valuable to the city's population requirements to be endangered outside.

Helward asks Victoria if she wanted to marry him though she tells him that the point is moot. If it wasn't him, she would have to marry someone else. She invites Helward into her home, telling him that it was nothing she had personally against him but with the guild system and the entrenchment of their positions. Victoria manages to pry from Helward the fact that the first-order guilds demand secrecy when he accidentally mentions the oath he had been forced to swear. That night, Victoria comes to him and they sleep together. After the act, they talk together for a moment and Helward shares with Victoria the fact that his oath comes with a death penalty for breaching any of the terms. Though she manages to pry out a few answers from him about the nature of the sun, learning that the sun is not at all how they had been told.

The next day, Helward is shown about town by Victoria, discovering that the city was larger than he had thought and also that the layout of the city had been changed in the past from old plans that rested beside new ones. He also notes that some of the directions are not only in English but also French and other languages, including German, Russian, Italian and Chinese. Later, Future Mann heads back to work with Victoria's promise that she would look into the formalities involved in their marriage. He rejoins Track Malchuskin and gets to work, though the other guildsmen on the site are concerned. When he asks why, he is told that there had been some delay in setting up the winches meaning that by the time the city started winching at two miles a day, they would nevertheless end up falling behind the optimum which moved forwards two and a half miles each day. Worse, the Traction guild is concerned about the presence of hills to the north, though it is still faster to go straight up the hills than it is to go around them because of the optimum's northward movement. The tracks are not finished being lain by the evening, though Track Malchuskin points out that they would be ditching the locals who had been working for them as the Future guild had found a larger settlement to the north that was desperate for work (something that meant they'd accept the conditions and work harder than the prior group). Helward spots an argument between Malchuskin and the Traction guildsmen. Track Malchuskin tells him that they had suggested winching ahead of schedule while they continued to lay the tracks, though Malchuskin had refused. Helward points out that it sounded quite reasonable, especially given that it was theoretically possible, but Track Malchuskin pointed out that with the city under motion there would be incredibly large strain on the cables. A broken cable would cut a man in half before he even heard the bang.

As the Traction guild prepares to winch the city, Helward stays to watch, seeing armed militiamen with crossbows guarding the winches. He presumes that in the past the tooks must have attacked the winches and stopped the city's motion. He decides to walk over to get a closer look but is quickly waved off by the Traction guildsmen who tell him to stay well clear now that the cables are under strain. Returning back to the labour gang, where Malchuskin had told him to remain, he is met by Jamie Collings of the Barter Guild who is there to pay off the workers. Barter Collings asks Helward about the nature of the men, how they had performed, who their leader was. As Barter Collings talks to Rafael, Helward spots an antagonised crowd form around him and asks if he can help, to which the other man tells him to fetch four of the militiamen. The militia arrive, a group of ten, who wade into the crowd, bludgeoning them aside. Helward enters the melee to help Collings though ends up suffering badly for his trouble. He asks Collings what had caused the men to attack him and Barter Collings tells him that he had told them that some of their wives were staying with the city, that the city had bought them.

Later, Track Malchuskin tells him off for being instrumental in causing a brawl. He tells Helward that the city came through these poor regions and took what it needed for minimal pay because it didn't have to offer anything more than the bare minimum and soon they would be gone again, returning the region back to its poverty stricken level. A new group of workmen are taken from the village to the north of the city and trained up as Malchuskin tells Helward he is most concerned about the tracks that remained south of the city. He tells him that the city was quite far south of the optimum and that the southern tracks would be in danger of buckling if they remained in place. Helward is shocked at the condition of the tooks they receive, many of them malnourished, though Track Malchuskin tells him not to worry, that most of the tooks they hired started like this but a few days work and proper meals would see them fit and able again. The next day they start early, travelling south to inspect the tracks. There, Helward sees the buckling effect in the form of the tie bars having been bent out of shape and some of the sleepers had their wooden portions split. They recover as many of the rail segments as they can.

With his ten-day allotment to the Track guild finished, he is given two days leave in Earth once again where he meets Victoria. She tells him that she had asked why the city had moved, though simply been told that it was not her concern. Helward's question to her lets her realise that not once had she ever felt the city move through her life, prompting the suggestion that perhaps she had acclimatised to its movements from an early age. Helward shares with Victoria that the city moved on rails and that its goal is to reach the optimum ahead of it, though it cannot stop and must continue to chase the optimum. Helward admits that he is not clear on the reasoning but merely that it was the case. Victoria tells Helward that she is rather frustrated with the guild system, that the system appeared designed to withhold information though he tells her that from his talks with Track Malchuskin, there is the definite suggestion that the city does not move because it can but because it must. Helward cannot bring himself to promise Victoria to tell her what he discovers through his work in the guild causing a brief argument though in the end the two of them decide to continue with their marriage.

After the Track guild, Helward is assigned some time with the Militia guild though he first sees Future Clausewitz, asking why he couldn't join the Future guild as he was now. Clausewitz tells him that it is necessary at times for the city to recruit extra militia from the other guilds and so it is vital that those guildsmen be given some basic training with the militia. With that, Helward finds himself Crossbowman Second Class Mann. Helward detests working with the militia, something that undoubtedly made him the least popular of the recruits. By the end of three miles with the militia, he learns to defend himself and is then transferred to the Traction guild and is at once happier. He had not enjoyed working with the militia but finds his apprenticeship much more pleasant with the other guilds. Within the Traction guild he discovers that the city housed a large nuclear reactor that powered the whole of Earth. The primary function of the reactor used complex recycling devices to re-use any liquids. To Helward's horror he finds out that the synthetic food producer is linked to the sewage filtration devices. The Traction guild frequently discussed the merit of switching from the five winches they used normally to four or six. Four would allow more time for bearing servicing, though using six helped reduce the wear and tear on individual units. During his time with the Traction guild he asks about Gelman Jase, his friend from the creche who had signed up with them, though he confirms that his friend had joined the Traction guild he is told that Jase had left the city, headed down past and that his friend would be away for a while.

After the Traction guild, Helward is sent to the Barter guild where he meets Barter Collings once again. Barter Collings asks him how he fared with languages, though Helward admits he was not particularly gifted with them, something that amuses Barter Collings who tells him it was just as well he hadn't applied to join the Barter guild, languages are their trade. The Barter guild mostly hires men for the Track guild though sometimes would hire gangs of men for the Bridge-Builders too. They also dealt with 'transference' which was the city's term for hiring the women of the land to stay with the city for a while and perhaps even give birth to new citizens of the city. The women stay to give birth to a child and are then returned to their villages. If the birth is a girl, the city keeps the child, but if the birth is a boy the decision to keep the child is left with the mother. Helward's mother had come from outside the city.

He is taught later by Barter Collings how to ride, something that he tells Helward he would need for his work with the Futures guild. Barter Collings and Helward look into two settlements ahead though do not negotiate with them, the city's needs having been met for the time being. The city's route continues through a level area though would need a bridge to cross a large chasm and as a result, much of the city's available manpower from the guilds is apportioned to the Bridge-Builders who are even now designing and assembling a bridge for the city. The chasm is about sixty yards across and without much time to prepare, the Bridge-Builders decide on a suspended design. As Helward helps work on the bridge with the other men, he is told that the optimum had caught up with the bridge's location, though he fails to see anything special about the optimum. With the bridge being such high priority, his apprenticeship is momentarily suspended as he is drafted into the labour force for the bridge construction. It is during one of his leaves while working on the bridge that Victoria tells him that she is pregnant, something that delights him. The Bridge-Builders grow more worried with each day after the optimum's arrival for the same reasons that Track Malchuskin had been worried about the south rails. They fear that if the optimum goes too far north of them that there would be the buckling problem to contend with. Victoria's questions about the outside renew as Helward finds himself confused at the two worlds that seem so far apart, from the frantic building outside the city and the calm, unaware nature of Earth's interior.

When the bridge is officially declared as ready, the city is winched across slowly, in a worried silence as Bridge-Builders keep a close eye on the load meters. As Earth crosses, one of the winches snap, slicing through a line of militiamen, though no delay is made, the remaining four winches continuing to draw the city across the bridge. The city crosses without further issue, though by now Earth is four and a half miles behind the optimum.

The story resumes with Helward riding a horse, returning from a settlement to Earth. He looks forward to seeing his wife who is healthy and many miles pregnant. He is given more time off as a result and is thankful the terrain ahead remains unbroken ground for he is aware that another bridge would strip him of the time he had with his wife. He waits for his apprenticeship to end, the one guild he had not yet worked with being his own Future guild. Helward is to see Future Clausewitz that very day to discuss his progress thus far. During his work up north he occasionally had met his father, though his father seemed to harbour some discomfort with his son, something he had been hoping their shared work might alleviate. As the end of his time with Barter Collings draws near, he shares his two worries, namely that of the optimum and the oath. The former, Barter Collings tells him that he cannot help him with but assures Helward that he would understand in time why the optimum always moved north, the latter, Collings tells him not to concern himself with, that as far as Barter Collings saw it he had not violated his oath by telling Victoria what he had. Barter Collings goes on to tell Helward that he should bear in mind that the optimum is stationary, that he had been misinformed about the optimum moving, instead it is the ground that moves southwards from it.

Arriving at the city, Barter Collings says goodbye to Helward, telling him that Helward would be away for a very long time. Helward goes on to meet Future Clausewitz who tells him that he considered Helward's apprenticeship to be over barring one last task. He also tells him that he should not worry about his results from the militia, not everyone is suited for military life after all. Despite his wife's pregnancy, Helward is told he may be away for hundreds of miles of time. Future Clausewitz tells him that he must take the Took women whose time with the city was up, back to their villages. Clausewitz gives him no choice and tells him that it must be done, failure to accede to the guild's requirement would see his oath drawn into light and appropriate punishment delivered (that being death). Future Clausewitz also adds that the oath meant he had promised to act in the interests of the city's security first and foremost and that Helward's trip southwards would help him understand why Clausewitz had to be so inhuman, why he could not be present for the birth of his child. Clausewitz ends the talk with Helward, telling him that he had a mile (five days) to spend with his wife but would then need to head south where much would become clear as a result, though not all.

After spending the night with Victoria, who tells him he should go, to find out the truth of the matter, he meets Clausewitz at the Futures' room who provides him with gear and a map, though Clausewitz tells him that the map that one inch equates to one mile and that the map would prove unreliable. He tells Helward that distance and direction would become confusing, that he should follow the city's tracks both going down south and returning. With a distance of only forty two miles to cover, Helward cannot understand how he might miss the birth of his child, thinking that he should be able to complete the trip in only ten days. Clausewitz goes on to warn him that he should not expect to live off the land, that as he travelled further south of the city, away from the optimum, even the foods would change and would likely make him sick (something that had happened to Clausewitz). Before he leaves, he is visited by his father and at the end, Helward comments that his father looked so old, older than his years, to which Clausewitz tells him it is an occupational hazard.

Helward goes on to meet the three women he is set to escort back, one of them taking with them a boy (whom she hadn't wanted to leave with the city). He discovers that his early estimation of time it would take to complete the journey is overly optimistic. The women move slowly and complain to his annoyance. He doesn't understand their language much, but is amused by the fact that they share his complaints about the synthetic foods. He is later angered by delays from the women as they deliberately stall moving off for a little extra rest. As they travel further southwards, the girls warm a little to Helward, no longer glaring at him with silent resentfulness. Helward realises that there was no way he could possibly have maintained the rate of travel he had wanted to do in the first place thanks to the hot sun and hard ground. On the way south he meets a fellow apprentice coming the other way called Torrold Pelham. When Helward asks Torrold about what is down south, he is told that it could not be explained. Torrold expresses some surprise at how far the city had gone, though after talking with Helward comes to realise that he had been away for only nine miles, something that shocks him because Torrold is certain he had been away longer than that. When Pelham leaves, he leaves telling Helward cryptically that if he decides he wants to 'spend some time' with the women, he is advised to do so before it is too late. The baby is ill as they travel further south, but the event brings the group closer together after Helward shows his concern for the child. That day though, the women's shoes are almost entirely worn through.

Later, the women are ill, the synthetic food giving them severe stomach upset. Helward can determine nothing wrong with the food though and when he eats it, it fails to upset his stomach. The women are able to make do with apples found along the way though, recovering slowly. Later that day, Helward reaches the chasm the city had crossed earlier and finds himself confused. The chasm appears only ten yards across where the city had crossed, though Helward distinctly remembers the city having to cross sixty yards. He compares measurements of the rail and suspension towers, finding all the distances to have warped. He is both confused and worried as he returns to the camp. There, the girls appear healthy, though they tell him the baby had been ill again. Helward comes to think that perhaps Clausewitz is right. That he would find the local foods dangerous for his constitution because he was of the city, but so too would the women find the city food dangerous because they were not of the city. The baby that one of the women had was of the city and testing this idea, he asks the mother for permission to feed the child synthetic foods, something that the baby takes to. As they continue southwards, one of the girls, Lucia sleeps with him causing some jealousy between her and another woman, Caterina. When he decides to negotiate with one of the local settlements for food for the women, he takes with him Rosario (the mother of the baby) to avoid giving a show of favouritism to the other women. As they journey further south, Helward notices another change occurring. The women with him begin to appear shorter and squatter than he recalled and it becomes apparent that as they travel further southwards the women continue to grow shorter and squatter, ruining the city clothes they had been issued with. The land appears to become 'shorter', landmarks passing faster, though each marked section of the city's rail is vastly wide. By this stage, the women are no taller than three feet and grossly distorted, though the baby isn't, something that seems to horrify Rosario. Clearly, the baby and Helward, being of the city are unaffected by the phenomenon he is observing. A little later he finds himself discovering a strange pull on him from the south, although the land appears to be flat towards the south. Likewise, when he tries to head north he feels as though he is walking uphill despite the ground being flat.

As they draw closer to their destination the women share their fears with Helward, becoming reluctant to return, worried their husbands might kill them for their infidelity within the city. By this stage the women are no more than twelve inches high and about five feet broad. He goes further south, telling the women to wait only to find himself pulled so hard southwards that it negated gravity itself. He finds himself thrown against a mountain range that even as he watches begins to spread towards the east and west, shrinking in height until it is flat. Fortunately, he makes use of a grappling hook within his pack to secure himself. The world flattens in the south, almost entirely two dimensional as Helward is forced to lie low on the ground to continue breathing. He watches the sun set, realising that the sun was an echo of their world, a broad flat disk with two pillars of light at its north and south poles.

With great difficulty he crawls northwards, finding the pull of the south diminishing as he continues north until once more he can crawl and then finally stand. He puts some distance between him and the south, not keen on being drawn back into that incredibly strong field of gravity towards the south. However, the event has taught him that the guilds were right to keep the city moving, that the city had to move for to stop moving was to let the city get drawn south and flattened into a smudge that ran east to west. Though Helward does not understand the reasons behind the world they live on, he fully accepts what the guilds had been advocating. Disturbed by the realisation that he could feel the pressure from the south on him, he continues northwards. After a night's sleep, he looks back south only to see the mountain range returned. Walking back south sees them shrink and become lateral stains while walking northwards sees the mountains regain their height. He continues onwards, shocked when he reaches the chasm once more, this time the chasm is only five or six yards across.

The following night sees Helward returned to terrain that appears more normal. He continues north, unsure of the fate of the baby that had travelled with him and as he continues northwards he is struck by the same impression that Torrold had had, believing that somehow the city must have made better speed than he had anticipated and perhaps even crossed the optimum, something Helward hopes means that the city could enter a region where the land didn't move under it and perhaps even stop its frantic journey north. He is brought aid from an apprentice travelling down past, someone he recalled from the creche called Li-Chen. He realises the similarities between the meeting with Li-Chen and his with Torrold. He gives Li-Chen the same answers that Torrold had given him, and departs, learning that the city remained five miles ahead of him. He takes from Li-Chen one packet of food, warning him that he would need the rest of his food and repeats the advice Torrold had given him about the women. Continuing north, Helward still fails to catch sight of the city, something that aggravates him. In the falling night he is attacked by a guildsman who turns out to be Gelman Jase, neither of them immediately recognising the other. Jase tells him that things had changed in the city, that normally the city sent back apprentices every mile or so, but the tooks had caught on and were killing apprentices and taking their uniforms. Jase himself, had been attacked on his way back. The two of them travel together, making their way towards the city. As they walk they discuss the anomaly they had observed to the south, neither of them able to make sense of it. Jase's experience had been different to Helwards, his journey south resulting in the deaths of the women with him and an attack on him from a band of tooks. He'd been caught in the same zone as Helward had, where the land had mysteriously flattened out and the suction from the south threatened to pull him away. Jase had got lost on the way back north and so was a little more aware of the surrounding area than Helward was. He shares with Helward that he had seen a city to the west, a city unlike Earth. This city was owned by the tooks and lies flat on the Earth, immobile. Most of the city seemed abandoned though the entire city was gigantic, far larger than Earth. Jase warns Helward that as time went on they might find themselves attacked by the tooks from the city, once they had become organised enough, Earth is hated.

They are both shocked when they catch sight of the city, spotting a blackened, misshapen patch on the rear section of Earth. They are stopped by a line of militia and have their identities checked. The city had been attacked twice by the tooks, the last resulting in the deaths of twenty three militiamen while bodies within the city were still being counted. The creche had been razed, the children within having died in the attack. Helward's father had died from angina shortly after Helward left the city. His apprenticeship is over, Victoria had given birth to a boy who had died in the creche. He learns that his wife had signed papers pronouncing their marriage over and taken up with another man, pregnant once more. Finally, Helward discovers that in the midst of his world having been turned upside down, Earth had moved a total of seventy-three miles and was eight miles behind the optimum. Subjectively he had been away for thirty days (three miles), but had in fact been away for two years. However, an attack is due again and he is given little time to brood on this.

Of concern to Helward is the fact that the tooks from the city have rifles, about one hundred and fifty armed men while the city had only its crossbows and twelve rifles taken from the bodies left behind, though the ammunition the city had looted had been expended in the previous attack. The main advantage the city has is its appreciation of information gathering. In the growing darkness, three ranks of crossbowmen stand ready around the city, while Helward is part of the counter-attack force. Earth is crossing a bridge at the time of the attack as the tooks begin to open fire in the darkness towards the city, a target hard to miss for both its size and the noise of the winches winding. Arc-lights set up upon the city are ignited, blinding the attacking tooks as the three rows of crossbowmen open fire before dowsing the lights. They shift position and repeat the procedure, catching the tooks out once again. With the city on the bridge there comes a shout and the tooks charge towards Earth. From his position, he hears and spots an explosion and then another, the first striking the city, the second the bridge itself. As the tooks begin to take care, aiming at arc lights the reserve force with Helward attack, throwing them into confusion once again before the tooks withdraw. The city manages to cross the bridge, though the superstructure remains alight as it reaches the other bank, fought by men within the city. However, the tracks and bridge remain on fire.

The tally of lives for the city is relatively minor, fortunate overall, but Earth itself had suffered some damage including the loss of one of its great wheels with no option but to discard it. No replacement can be made. The bridge had collapsed resulting in the loss of several hundred yards of rails. After two days salvaging work, Helward is requested to meet with Future Clausewitz. As he heads through the city he is disturbed by the change in atmosphere, noting how those working outside seemed caught between despair and desperation. Gone is talk of reaching or chasing the optimum, all minds focused instead on the crisis with the tooks and Earth cannot hire took labour anymore, forced to use what little manpower it has available to see it through the crisis. Instead of meeting Clausewitz he is met by Future Denton who tells him that Helward is set to accompany him. Denton is a man who keeps to himself though he shares their assigned duty, namely to map and survey the areas ahead of the city to ensure that the city might continue to make its way northwards. The Futures guild would normally send teams on differing routes and then return to share these mapped routes out with the council of Navigators (who would then determine which path to follow).

As Helward works with Denton, he comes to realise that the education he had received in the creche was always directly relevant to the work that the guilds required. The history lessons he received about Earth (the planet) teach him the similarities between the city and the world they had left and helped prepare the way for those who would seek to become Barter guildsmen. Helward had not been given any understanding through his education as to how Earth (city) had arrived on this world. Helward picks up the Futures trade quickly, working well with Future Denton. Before the work is finished and they head back towards the city, Helward decides to record the sunset and examining the stored image is reminded of something. It is as they are heading back towards the city, in no rush (because there is no 'hurry up future'), that he recalls where he had seen an image like that. He recalls being taught theoretical mathematics and the shape of a hyperbola. He muses that perhaps those lessons had been included to teach the nature of their own world in a subtle manner. After thirty days, Helward grows alarmed that they had not yet seen the city, believing that the city should have made much more progress. Future Denton explains to him that north of the optimum time was subjectively sped up, an opposite to the effect that occurred down past. Denton explains that even if the city were to move north of the optimum the city could not stop, it would need to continue moving, though it could do so at a slower pace. The problem lies in the fact that north of the optimum time moves subjectively faster, but the concept of time on Earth (city) is derived as a mile equalling ten days worth of motion, so being north of the optimum would result in lost motion (due to faster days). He goes on to say that the city's founder, Destaine, had suggested that the world was infinite, stretching millions and millions of miles to the south. The optimum is named so because the optimum is the point at which Earth (planet) conditions can be found, where subjectively one day equates to twenty four hours. When they return to Earth, Denton suggests that Helward read the Destaine Directive, a document mentioned in his oath to the guilds. He is given three days leave by Clausewitz before being detailed back to the Tracks guild for work.

During his leave, he attempts to meet Victoria, though is told from her work colleagues that she is unavailable. Some time later he meets another member of his guild, Future Blayne when he enters the Futures' room, looking for a copy of Destaine's directive. As they talk, Blayne tells him that he should not have filmed the sunset, tape was considered a rare resource, however, Blayne goes on to share with him the nature of their world which in theory is infinitely large due to the hyperbola effect. To the north, the land stretches almost infinitely vertical and to the south, the land stretches almost infinitely horizontal. He tells him that though the guilds could not explain it, the world spun at a near infinite speed at both infinite points, explaining the force Helward had experienced down south. The universe they are in is completely at odds with that of planet Earth's, as in theory the sun too was infinitely large, yet occupied a finite space.

Blayne continues, telling Helward that Destaine had theorised their world was stationary at the north pole and that the apparent spin (that distorted the land) at the equator to the south was caused by the infinite speed of rotation. Destaine also believed that the 'southern hemisphere' a borrowed word to explain land behind the equator would suffer the reverse, moving towards the south pole and slowing down until stationary. Though it is impossible to rationalise, Destaine believed that the north and south poles are identical and that any ground that reaches the south appears immediately at the north. Effectively, Destaine believes their world is a solid hyperbola, that all limits on their world are infinite in value. After Blayne leaves, Helward reads through the Destaine directive, learning that Destaine had founded the guild system to ensure that the city continued its run towards the north, hoping that they would be rescued by Earth one day. The city's maxim would be survival at any cost. The tracks continue to be set in good time and the city's inhabitants are pleased by the fact that they were able to move the city away from the river without further issue. As a guildsman, Helward finds out that he is entitled to sit in on the sessions of the Council of Navigators (though not as an active participant). During the session, it is decided by a majority of one not to reintroduce the 'closed city' arrangement for the time being and that the city would be switched to continuous running on less winches and shorter distances (due to the loss of valuable rails) but through this method the city hopes to catch up with the optimum within twenty to twenty five miles. From the session, Helward is left with the realisation that the Council of Navigators were well appraised of the situation both within and without the city (unlike the general stereotype of a bunch of stuffy-headed people out of touch of reality).

Future Mann is detailed to a survey mission in the north. When asked if he would prefer to go alone or with another Future guildsman he decides to ask if he can have Blayne accompany him (which is granted). The night before he leaves he meets Victoria, catching her for a moment and talking with her. They share a moment of grief over their child David but Helward does not wish to tell Victoria about the exact reason his journey south had taken so long. However, the two have long gone separate ways. Victoria remains adamant that the guild system should be removed entirely and the city stopped, while Helward cannot bring himself to accept either of those propositions now that he understood the nature of their world. Over time the city returns to its placid state, the new system of winching being deployed with ease. To much relief the new system is faster and more efficient allowing the city to make detours from true north and still catch up to the optimum. Within a short amount of time the city catches up with the optimum, helped by the downward gradient of the land as they continue onwards. However, as the city re-introduces the Barter guild's work the division in the city grows and a group called the 'Terminators' begins to acquire public support. After they storm one of the public sessions of the Council of Navigators in an attempt to seize the chair, the sessions are turned into private councils once more, serving to bolster public support for the Terminators. The guilds respond with a re-education programme, adopting a hyperbola as the motif of the city but in spite of the resistance offered by the Terminators, the city continues ever northwards. Helward's work is mostly future surveys and as time goes on he begins to appreciate the problems with working in the north as he notes that he is ageing faster than those within the city. He settles with a transferred women called Dorita and applies to change to the Traction guild as a result of her pregnancy and also a result of the sensation that time was slipping by. When Dorita is returned, Helward rejoins the Futures guild, feeling too much of a misfit within the city to do anything else. He takes up drawing as a hobby as he continues his work north of the city.

The story switches over to the perspective of Elizabeth Khan who spots one day a deal being struck between the local villagers and two caped men from elsewhere. She watches the men depart and asks Luiz what they had wanted. He tells her that they had desired their labour in exchange for food and other supplies. Elizabeth follows after the second of the two men, following him to a river where she watches him use a camera to film it. When she tries to approach she startles him and freezes when she spots him with a rifle. He questions her in terrible Spanish but she surprises him by telling him she can speak English after she overhears him muttering in English. They talk and it is revealed that this man is Helward who tells her he comes from Earth, a city nearby. Helward refuses to tell her more than that though but before departing asks if he can sketch her. As Elizabeth looks over his completed sketch she is thrown by the strange perspective he seems to have, having drawn her too tall and skinny. Looking through his sketchbook though she spots other strange issues with his drawings. Helward is clearly very skilled but only his self-portraits and drawings of his horse appear to be correctly in proportion, his landscapes feature a sense of wrongness about their shape. She asks what the strange four-pointed object in one of his drawings is, only to be told it is the sun.

Back at the village, Elizabeth finds she has no more appetite for work. She tells Luiz to try to find out what the men had wanted and tells him that if they should come again, to stall them and try to find out where they were from. She heads back to her headquarters, arriving by evening where she meets a man named Tony, someone who fancied her. She asks Tony if he had heard of a settlement to the south called Earth and is told that he had not heard of one, something that is confirmed by the maps she reads, all of them agreeing that there are no large settlements in the south for sixty miles. She finds even the paper puzzling, discovering that the paper had been perforated and was signed IBM Multifold™. 

The next day, Elizabeth puts through another request for a doctor to the village she was working as a nurse for before she returns. Luiz tells her that the two strange men had not returned and after some half-hearted work she departs on horseback hoping to find Helward who intrigues her. She finds Helward by the same river they had met before and they settle down to talk. As they talk, Helward is alarmed to discover that Elizabeth is not from the settlement he had visited. Helward asks her where she is from to which she tells him England. Helward grows even more agitated on discovering this, asking if she was from planet Earth. Thoroughly confused, Elizabeth confirms this which seems to ignite Helward as he exclaims that they had found them at last. He doesn't understand how she cannot know what Earth city is, nor can he understand how she fails to understand that Earth city is differentiated from Earth planet. She is also confused by his reference of Earth city being only twenty five miles away today. When Helward explains that the city had survived for two hundred years waiting in hope for rescue from Earth he is confronted by more confusion. Elizabeth tells him that he is on Earth. Angrily, Helward takes Elizabeth and points at the sun, demanding to know what she sees, and Elizabeth tells him she sees the sun, causing Helward to stab a finger at his drawings insisting that this was the sun. She flees from him, returning to the village. 

She returns to the village late that evening and learns from Luiz that the villagers had made a deal with the men from Earth and would be giving them their women. A show of hands reveals the men are happy to take up the deal though none of the women are vote. In the night, Elizabeth ponders the questions that Helward raised. There is the issue with the sun, something that doesn't make sense to her, and another issue with the computer paper. Elizabeth is aware that there is only one computer within one thousand miles of her current location and that computer was neither made by IBM nor produced paper. Certainly no IBM machines had been created since the Crash. She makes a swift decision and visits Maria, borrowing her clothes. Wearing her disguise she takes the place of one of the women promised to the city. She is taken to the city, at first not understanding what it was and aware that the term 'city' was perhaps unfair as the structure was no more than seven storeys high and more closely resembled a pre-Crash office block. Within the city Elizabeth is passed a clean bill of health and taught rudimentary English (as she was pretending to be one of the local girls). She explores the city and comes across a copy of Destaine's Directive, reading it allows her to understand the mindset that Helward and others of the city had, but it is founded on one major flaw. Elizabeth looks at the flaw, a huge ball of light that is the sun.

Later, Elizabeth finds Helward within the city and talks to him. They apologise to each other over their last meeting but neither of them are able to convince the other of the reality of their situation. Helward insists that the sun and world he had experienced is the reality, that Elizabeth is mistaken (and he had experienced the centrifugal force in the south) while Elizabeth maintains that they are still on Earth and had never left it. Helward adds that after she had left the other day he had discovered some information that only the Navigators were privy to. Something that could drastically alter the city's situation. On a trip north to witness the issue that troubled Helward she talks with Helward's friend, Blayne, realising that they are all sincere in their understanding of the world, but she cannot think of a way to break their perception. They take her to a large body of water and begin surveying the area. Neither of them had seen the bank on the other side nor could they find a shorter area to cross. They ask Elizabeth what she made of the river, only to be told it was not a river. Neither of the men understand Elizabeth entirely nor take any effort to learn from her, instead continuing their work. Unable to convince them of the fact that they are in Portugal, she mounts her horse and heads away from the Atlantic. 

Helward and Bridge-Builder Lerouex stand together, watching the ruins of their most recent bridge smash against the surf. Lerouex tells Helward that they simpy need more timber and prepares to design another bridge. He tells Helward that they had a great amount of subjective time to build a bridge and that he is untroubled by the fact that he could not see the other bank. North of optimum dimensions are shifted/stretched linearly (north and south) and if necessary the city could wait south of the optimum to allow the distance to be subjectively closed. Helward is not so easily convinced, but is interested to hear that both he and Lerouex had been suggested as Navigator candidates. Lerouex cannot face the other idea currently bandied about the city, namely the construction of a ship. 

Later, Lerouex tells Helward that they had been suggested as Navigators as part of a new policy to bring active guildsmen into the policy making council. The two of them discuss Victoria for a brief moment who is now a main leader of the Terminators' movement. In this time there have been three failed bridge building attempts at the Atlantic shore due to storms and even Lerouex admits to Helward that perhaps a ship is the only option, that the Bridge-Builders had clearly failed. Helward rejects his invitation to the navigators when they tell him that the Council had decided to reach a compromise with the Terminators and build a ship to cross the 'river' and once across they would rebuild the city. When Helward goes to an open meeting of the Terminators with Gelman Jase he is shocked to see Victoria's father supporting their idea of stopping, clearly broken by his failures with the bridge, but he grows alarmed when he spots Elizabeth Khan standing behind him. He tries to push through the crowd, desperate to prevent her from speaking but to no avail. Elizabeth explains she is from England, on Earth and that she had returned from England with information that affected the city. She tells the assembled crowd about the truth behind the city's nuclear reactor, explaining that Francis Destaine had been a particle physicist who had lived in Britain. Destaine had developed a technique to provide near limitless electrical energy without any apparent fuel though his work had been discredited by scientists until the Crash occurred, when nations all over the world collapsed when fossil fuels ran out. Elizabeth continues, telling them that Destaine's original concept was both crude and dangerous unlike the more modern developments that utilised the same technology. Destaine had created a generator that created an artificial field of energy which when combined with another field could provide limitless electricty. His detractors had pointed out that it required far more energy to power the generators than was received. However, Destaine had found a natural window for the generators' fields which followed a circle around the globe and had set out to Guan Dong province in China to begin his research. He was never heard from again. She tells the crowd that Destaine had ignored the warnings of side-effects, of permanent damage to perception and genetic issues. Helward is disheartened by the way the people of Earth city listen to her message. Helward cannot believe Elizabeth because he had been down past. He had experienced the force in the south, had seen a child grow ill from the distorted foods, seen city made clothes fail to fit native women as they distorted. The story ends with Helward at the beach of the bridge building site, treading water as he watches the four-pointed sun sink below the horizon, watched by Elizabeth Khan.

Food for thought:

Naturally, there is one immediate problem with the book's premise. The concept of a world that has an infinite plane in two perpendicular directions is topographically impossible (the two planes would intersect each other after all as they rotate into infinity). However, that said, the concept and twist in this book is lovely. It is a complete reversal of the world we know, a world where the struggle to survive is paramount to all other things. 

One of the major themes in the book is the power of perception over our reality. We have no real way of knowing if what we perceive is actually 'real' in a factual sense, only that what we understand of the world can be verified by what we perceive. In fact, in our daily lives we take alot of things for granted which in theory are impossible, things which are verified by our perception but not by our scientific knowledge. The world around us is very different from what we perceive without the help of specialised equipment. Quantum physics proves that things exist because we detect it existing, even if we can't necessarily explain what they really appear as. For example, the electron is characterised as a physical sphere of negative charge within an atom, and there are experiments that can prove its nature as a particle. However, there are also experiments that prove the electron is not a particle but instead a wave. Quantum physics accepts that the electron displays the characteristics of a particle and a wave (despite the mutual contradictions) at the same time. It is comforting to think of electrons as a particle as this makes it easier to imagine the atom and we're all made of atoms. But even the concept of an atom is at odds with the day to day reality we observe. Atoms are proven to be 99.99% (recurring) emptiness. Given that we are made entirely of atoms then in theory we too are 99.99% emptiness and yet we perceive and interact with physical objects all the time. Likewise in Inverted World, while we accept Elizabeth Khan's perception as 'truth' (as we live in her perception of reality) we cannot necessarily say that Helward's perception of the reality around him is wrong. Reality and its perception is entirely subjective and quantum physics points out that we change the world by observing it. 

Likewise with one final example of the complexity of perception, there is no guarantee that any of use experience the same reality at all. When I look at the sky I can say 'the sky is blue.' You may be inclined to agree with me if you were to stand beside me. However, you and I could not prove that the colour we saw in the sky was the same, only that we had a mutually agreed term for what we perceived as 'blue.' As a quote, I would leave you with:
'All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.' - Friedrich Nietzsche
There are no truths, only agreed upon interpretations that are endorsed by the majority.

The book is also a fantastic celebration of human determination. The power to survive and prosper despite the odds arraigned against us is an uplifting tale. The world of the ironically named Helward Mann is grim, founded upon a need to survive at any cost and sustained by a weak hope and yet despite this, their civilisation has existed, triumphed against the odds for two hundred years. Two hundred years of stubbornness and refusal to simply give in. In a way, it is an analogy for our own personal lives, of our own personal struggles against the world around us for our own measures of survival. 
The alternative to progress is death.