Airedale: A Near Future Science Fiction Thriller

by Dylan Byford

Police Analyst Haz Edmundson arrives at a crime scene in one of the abandoned warehouses of a megacity now covering West Yorkshire. Riots are rolling across the city and the police engage in street warfare
against protestors.

Haz discovers the body of an activist who has crashed through the warehouse roof, cocooned in a wingsuit used in a daredevil sport, her head shattered by
a mysterious mid-air impact.

The case is swept aside and labelled an ‘accidental death.’ However, Haz knows there’s more to the case than the higher-ups are letting on.

someone (or something) is working hard to bury a murder, and the more Haz investigates, the more dangerous the trail becomes.

Set in a near-future Britain where technology has engulfed the landscape with sprawling megacities. The population is under heavy surveillance, memories are sold back to them for entertainment, and robotic drones intrude on both life and liberty.

Welcome to Airedale.

400 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2021

About the author

Dylan Byford is writer of science fiction and cyberpunk from the north of England. He is the author of Airedale, a northern-set near-future thriller, as well as the epic SF series The Lost Archive, set in a crumbling and colonised solar system, where all of humanity’s accumulated knowledge has been destroyed.

As well as producing books, Dylan blogs about the writing process, politics, systems and emergentism on his blog site www.dylanbyford.com.

Sign up for his emails (http://eepurl.com/cFKNVX) and get a free and exclusive map of the Lost Archive universe and irregular nuggets of mythic history, ‘deleted scenes’ and vignettes of exotic settings.

Communicate with Dylan at his Facebook page here: www.facebook.com/dylanbyfordwriter/

And follow him on Twitter here: twitter.com/dylan_byford

Reviews

[Mike Finn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a gritty, low-key thriller of the kind where the sense of threat and the feeling of helplessness close around you like the walls of a room slowly pressing in from all sides.

The main character isn't the typical hero. He's a single dad, who has bad dreams about his wife's death, finds conflict difficult, prefers machines to people, is hopeless at dating. His main talent is his ability to see patterns in data. He loves to lose himself swimming through large quantities of data, finding the currents flowing through them and riding them until he finds the patterns relevant to whatever he's investigating. He's not a cop. He's just a contractor the police use to crunch the data. So when he finds himself looking at a pattern that says 'murder' that everyone wants to label as 'accident', he should let it go and move on. Except he can't. He keeps diving deeper and it keeps getting him into more and more trouble as he starts to find patterns that shout 'conspiracy' and 'corruption' and implicate some very powerful people.

The world-building in 'Airedale' is clever, credible and deeply depressing. It takes some of the things that I like least about the UK at the moment: our slow slide into authoritarianism, the removal of our privacy, the prevalence of cronyism and corruption and the ongoing war on the poor and gives them time and space to blossom into a future that is nightmarish mainly because it is so plausible.

I loved that this was set in Yorkshire. It adds to the nightmarish quality to think of the Dales turned into a megacity. There's a long history of the police going to war with the people in Yorkshire. It's seen many a riot and that makes it plausible that it will see many more.

The puzzle at the heart of the story is complicated and the technology needed to solve it is inventive but very much an extrapolation of what we already have rather than some unexplained leap forward.

Perhaps the most realistic thing about the book was how little power Haz Edmunson had, how and how few choices were open to him. This was never going to be one of those thrillers with an explosive ending where the hero triumphs through derring-do. What it offers is an as-good-as-it's-going-to-get compromise. In some ways, this was anticlimactic but I felt it made the novel stronger.

'Airedale' is the first book in a series. I look forward to reading the next one.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

A good start to the Cyberdale series. I liked that the future world felt plausible. It's gritty and realistic. You felt the frustration along with the main character. A single dad at the centre was good, as not often seen.

Just a warning though... I was not prepared for the spiders at the beginning of the book, and almost couldn't read on. However that part is thankfully brief and then I could enjoy the story. I am really scared though and have missed out on good books because of this 😅

Such an interesting concept, exploring crime through a cyber/data lense. Very original. I look forward to reading the next book.