READ these six books at one go and you risk drowning in a sea of words and ideas. Single voices begin to blend, their worlds mesh, uniting around a distrust of authority, and the urge to unmask the holders of power and outwit or overthrow them. It’s an anarcho-syndicalist future: no one, it appears, should trust the state, now or ever.
But recall the books a week later and their strengths separate, and become clear. All six are full of people, properly fleshed out, individual, hideous, amiable, driven and diverted. They even live in worlds of believable other life forms.…
