Sanctuary

The Aftermath #3

by Dave Hutchinson

The stunning return to Dave Hutchinson's post-apocalyptic vision of the future in a world ravaged by climate change.

After surviving the war of the Parish, Adam is looking forward to a period of peace while he recovers from his injuries. No such luck. His commander is concerned about the rumours coming from Oxford and its surrounds, rumours that Father John - the only man who escaped Plymouth's grasp - is building an army, and decides to send Adam to investigate.

Upon entering Oxford, Adam meets Leonie Mellow, a member of the police force. To Adam's surprise, the city appears to be thriving, with a healthy populace and objects not seen since before The Sisters fell.

However, it does not take long before dark events start to concern Adam. Murders, paint-splashed graffiti on walls, people going missing - and he can't help but wonder if the past is following him.

Genres: Science Fiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published November 7, 2023

About the author

UK writer who published four volumes of stories by the age of twenty-one – Thumbprints, which is mostly fantasy, Fools' Gold, Torn Air and The Paradise Equation, all as David Hutchinson – and then moved into journalism. The deftness and quiet humaneness of his work was better than precocious, though the deracinatedness of the worlds depicted in the later stories may have derived in part from the author's apparent isolation from normal publishing channels.

After a decade of nonfiction, Hutchinson returned to the field as Dave Hutchinson, assembling later work in As the Crow Flies; tales like "The Pavement Artist" use sf devices to represent, far more fully than in his early work, a sense of the world as inherently and tragically not a platform for Transcendence. His first novel, The Villages, is Fantasy; The Push, an sf tale set in the Human Space sector of the home galaxy, describes the inception of Faster Than Light travel and some consequent complications when expanding humanity settles on a planet full of Alien life. Europe in Autumn (2014), an sf thriller involving espionage, takes place in a highly fragmented and still fragmenting Near-Future Europe, one of whose sovereign mini-nations is a transcontinental railway line; over the course of the central plot – which seems to reflect some aspects of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 – the protagonist becomes involved in the Paranoia-inducing Les Coureurs des Bois, a mysterious postal service which also delivers humans across innumerable borders.

- See more at: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hutc...

Works
* The Villages (Holicong, Pennsylvania: Cosmos Books, 2001)
* Europe in Autumn (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Rebellion/Solaris, 2014)

Collections and Stories
* Thumbprints (London: Abelard, 1978)
* Fools' Gold (London: Abelard, 1978)
* Torn Air (London: Abelard, 1980)
* The Paradise Equation (London: Abelard, 1981)
* As the Crow Flies (Wigan, Lancashire: BeWrite Books, 2004)
* The Push (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2009)

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third volume of 'The Aftermath' series, but it's a bit odd because it follows on from the end of the first volume. Both are written by the same author and it's almost as if the second volume hadn't happened. The story is set about a century after a sequence of asteroids collided with Earth. The world is starting to experience a normalisation of the climate, with seasons becoming less extreme and growing seasons returning to what we might expect them to be.

We are two or three generations after the disaster. There are vestiges of the old technology remaining, but this is very much an unpowered world. Transport consists of walking, horse power, and the odd bicycle here and there. The cycling largely occurs in Oxford, which is where the story is set because the roads outside of Oxford haven't been maintained all that well. It is a landscape of flooded plains, with hills moved a bit here and there by asteroid debris, giving rise to drainage patterns that are different to how they are today.

It is interesting that, in addition to echoes of modern technology, we also have echoes of modern society. This is what aroused my interest in the book. The Oxford colleges have maintained their dominance upon the city, in a world where knowledge is at a premium. And yet, there are forces to subvert this structure that are active within the city. Outside it's walls, industry is starting to make a return, mainly by smelting down scrap metal, and it is the tension between the old and the new that provides the drama of the book.

The book revives some characters from the first volume, and these are blended well to provide a platform for the introduction of a new set of characters. I found most of them to be credible, sympathetic with some, and not with others. They all play a part, one which I quite enjoyed.

I found the story engaging and written at a nice pace. The book is written well and a joy to read. I will be on the lookout for a fourth volume because the story didn't quite arrive at a resolution and I think that it does have further to travel. I can thoroughly recommend this book.

[MRS CA THOMSON · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third in the series but it fits more after book 1. This time the action moved to Oxford which is a community in turmoil - though on the surface all seems good. We meet Adam who is a spy for Guz - basically Portsmouth. He is sent to find out what the situation is but it is soon clear that not is all as he thinks it is. We also have North from book 1. He is a terrifying man with a terrible mission. We also finally meet Father John.
This is a very dark book in places but you end up having faith that the good in people might win out.

[Tony T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! And a strong follow up to Hutchinson's "Shelter"(part 1 of the trilogy, Sanctuary follows on directly from it).

You've never read a book like it... Part police procedural, part post apocalyptic fiction, throughly engrossing and believable. All characters developed thoroughly. I literally couldn't put it down, which is (in my lowly opinion) because it's so well written, original, well structured, often wrily funny...

Read Shelter first. You won't be dissapointed.

[Ben Brackett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hutchinson has an extremely rare talent to be able to create fully realized worlds with political complexity and intrigue in a way that seems effortless. There's just the right balance of action and exposition to keep every page exciting and me fully invested in the characters and the story.

[Jacquie Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third in The Aftermath series:
In post-apocalyptic England, very few centres of civilisation persist. One is Plymouth, taken over by the Royal Navy when the deadly comet struck a century previously.
Now Adam Darby, spy and reconnaissance agent for the Plymouth authorities, is sent to infiltrate Oxford, still a centre of science and scholarship. Rumours are emerging that the warlord Father John, who nearly overthrew Plymouth years ago, is building an army nearby.

Adam does manage to get into Oxford, and immediately everything goes wrong. In a maelstrom of murders, missing persons and betrayal, Adam is forced to work with the truculent strong-minded Inspector Léonie Mellow, descendant of generations in the Thames Valley Police.
In a quickly-shifting world of treachery and danger, Adam and Léonie must work out who’s really in charge of Oxford, and how to survive their dangerous search.

Dave Hutchinson, also author of the Fractured Europe science fiction thrillers, is a captivating writer whose terrible near-future worlds are vivid suggestions of how awful the less salubrious parts of our history must have been. After the withdrawal of the legions in AD 410 is a period that springs to my Romanophile mind. His stories are peppered with the unexpected, the shocking, and at times the downright gruesome. Thank goodness he also creates some of the strongest and most vivid characters in the business, to get us all through to the other side. Maybe.

You can’t do better if you love pacy, clever, hard-hitting dystopian science fiction mysteries. I certainly do!

[Geoff Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do enjoy the world that Roberts and Hutchinson are building, even if the political intrigue feels a little over-complicated at times. We’re all confused, and all want things to keep going as they are, but often that’s just not possible, even in the heart of civilization.