The Space Between Us/The Collapsing Wave by Doug Johnstone
I'd like to be... under the sea...
What is it with the octopus these days? They are cute, they are tasty - and relatively smart. But it looks like authors have become a bit obsessed with the Octopus as a mythical creature: There are uplifted ones in both Stephen Baxter’s Manifold series (1999) and in Alistair Reynolds’s fascinating Children of Time trilogy (2015). In The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler (2022) an intelligent form of the octopus has been on earth for a long time and is only just being discovered by humans. There is My Octopus Teacher on Netflix. And then there’s the octopus from Enceladus in Doug Johnstone’s new trilogy. Well, actually it is a pentapus, but they seem to share many of the same properties.
Although Doug Johnstone has a PhD in physics, before publishing The Space Between Us (and the sequel The Collapsing Wave, with a third book in the series coming out later in 2025) he has previously written crime and thriller stories and this new series is his first foray into speculative (science) fiction. As it stands, Johnstone’s pentapus meets earth story is a solid entry into the genre, but with many known elements at times very much feels like a mash-up of other stories. That is not to say that the books aren’t enjoyable - just don’t expect too much innovation.
The book starts out in today’s England, when across the country an unusually large number of previously mostly healthy people suffer from sudden simultaneous strokes. Only three of them survive and end up waking up in the same hospital room: Lennox, a teenager living in a foster home, pregnant Ava who has been trying to escape her abusive husband, and Heather who suffered her stroke while trying to commit suicide. That same night, our first pentapus appears stranded on a beach, not far from where Heather had tried to kill herself and apparently near where a meteor has entered earth’s atmosphere. Our three stroke survivors quickly form a connection between themselves and then go on to rescue the lonely pentapus, snatching the alien animal away from the government only to be caught up in a game of cat and mouse as the British government has taken a keen interest in whatever appears to have come down from space.
Book two, The Collapsing Wave picks up a few months after the end of the first book. And without giving too much away, things didn’t go well for our three friends as they end up behind bars in a secret military facility. Of course, once the military is involved, things aren’t looking too good for humans and pentapuses alike. But all is not lost as some of the friends they have made in book one and a community of believers that have settled near the facility try to help them from the outside.
Throughout at least the first two books (the third one hasn’t been released yet), Doug Johnstone takes a very positive view of life: Our alien friends mean no harm and against all odds (and the combined power of the US and British military) good people acting together are almost invincible. That’s an uplifting story - but maybe a bit too simplistic and lacking nuance. Simultaneously the treatment of the aliens is clearly also an all too transparent and simplistic analogy of how we react to humans fleeing their home - in both good and bad ways.
None of this diminishes the series - it is genuinely quite fun to read. And yet, it failed to fully convince me. For one, despite this being a first contact story, most of the time it felt like a very human paper chase coupled with a permanent celebration of love and friendship. And, perhaps more importantly, the story was just too predictable at almost every turn. Too often, the Enceladus books felt eerily like a happy clappy rewrite of Noumena - but without any of the interesting backstory about the aliens, with characters who - despite some baggage are all just too good to be real.