British Summertime
Paul Cornell
404 pages
published in 2002
British Summertime was a novel I didn’t have high expectations of, but which pleasantly surprised me. It was one of the first books I picked up on my latest library run, as something that looked good enough to take home if I didn’t find anything else. Although I did find several other, more promising novels that day (including Ink and Swiftly, I still took it home with me, read a couple of pages and banished it to the bottom of the stack. It was only when I’d finished all the other novels I’d picked up that I started on this and to my amazement found myself utterly captivated. I was all the more surprised because it quickly turned out that this was a deeply Christian novel, while I am anything but.
Usually, religion is politely ignored in science fiction, apart from the occasional made-up pagan rites to spice up some space opera or other. And when it does appear, it’s usually because the author has an axe to grind. It’s rare to find genuinely Christian characters in science fiction without them being stereotypes, but British Summertime has them, as well as a plot revolving around the literal truth of Christianity and manages to do so without me throwing the book against the wall. Not a mean feat, that. It works because Cornell treats it as just another interesting science fiction idea to play with.