Simon Morden’s first novel, a futuristic thriller, is set in London — even more multicultural and crowded than today’s city. Two decades after religious terrorists used nuclear weapons with the aim of igniting Armageddon, the London Metrozone is a heaving mass of people from all over the world, crammed in cheek by jowl, the poor living in boxes, tents, or steel containers stacked in parks and on commons, the more fortunate in luxurious skyscrapers.
His hero is Samuil Petrovitch, a mathematical genius from Russia who has worked out that his best chance of survival is to live beneath the radar, avoiding complications, never getting involved. Until, almost on a whim, he foils an attempted kidnapping, and then it is a question of whether his weak heart, a hired assassin or fall-out from his Russian past will kill him first.
Petrovitch is in some ways a typical cyberpunk antihero, although his physical weakness makes him charmingly different, as does his habit of using only Russian to swear and insult people. He acquires a bodyguard/sidekick in the form of Sister Madeleine, from the new Roman Catholic order of Joans, dedicated to a life of physical defence: unlikely, sure, but a nun with a gun is a welcome change from the usual genre stereotypes available to women.
The plot may not bear close inspection, but it speeds along with energetic panache, making Equations of Life a very entertaining romp. It will be followed by two more novels in the series, published over the next two months.
Equations of Life by Simon Morden, Orbit, 346pp, £7.99. To buy this book for £7.59 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134)