James Lovegrove, The Foreigners
Gollancz, 2000, 421pp, £16.99 ISBN 0-575-06894-9
The Foreigners appear one day - fortuitously after all the rioting that would mean the end of the civilised world had broken out, but not so late that civilization itself has been destroyed - bringing with them crystech technology. Not every problem is solved by their arrival but it helps. In return the authorities try to please them - holding back on microwave devices, and allowing minstrels of all types to sing for The Foreigners. This prompts the delightful thought that if The Foreigners arrived today there would be no more mobile telephones, but has the disadvantage we could only repay this kindness with Solid Gold Sixties Weekends at Butlins.
Our current vacation resorts, even where they have not been inundated, will be inadequate, and so new resort cities, floating in warm international waters will strive to take business from their terrestrially fixed rivals. Jack Parry, formerly of the Metropolitan Police and now of the Foreign Policy Police in New Venice, returning from a depressing visit to his sister in an England no longer bathed in the Gulf Stream, is immediately sent out to an investigation. A Foreigner has disappeared, possibly become incorporeal, and his Siren - human musician - has been murdered.
Now the moral kicker is two-fold: there is a global anti-Foreigner campaign, run in New Venice by a Maori, who objects to The Foreigners on the basis of what human foreigners did to his people, while the craven authorities know that where Foreigners are attacked they simply leave the resort, whose business then collapses (as has already happened off Thailand). Parry is limited in a number of ways - his police force has no powers of arrest, while The Foreigners are so distant and alien that no one knows what they know, including whether they are aware of their presence or absence.
And the body count mounts.
Lovegrove's previous novel DAYS was compared to J. G. Ballard's HIGH-RISE, and there are compatibilities between the business world of THE FOREIGNERS and SUPER-CANNES, but as a police procedural where music is a running theme I can't help thinking that Ian Rankin would have melded it better. I rarely heard the sirens singing to me.