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    Europe at Midnight
    Europe at Midnight
    Europe at Midnight
    Audiobook11 hours

    Europe at Midnight

    Written by Dave Hutchinson

    Narrated by Graham Rowat

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Europe is crumbling. The Xian Flu pandemic and ongoing economic crises have fractured the European Union, the borderless Continent of the Schengen Agreement is a distant memory, and new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight. For an intelligence officer like Jim, it's a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns, a new and unknown national entity which may or may not be friendly to England's interests; it's hard to keep on top of it all. But things are about to get worse for Jim. A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has come who may hold the key to unlocking the mystery.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 18, 2018
    ISBN9781501981982
    Europe at Midnight
    Author

    Dave Hutchinson

    DAVE HUTCHINSON was born in Sheffield in 1960 and read American Studies at the University of Nottingham before becoming a journalist. He’s the author of five collections of short stories and four novels. His novella The Push was nominated for the BSFA Award in 2010, and his novels Europe in Autumn and Europe at Midnight were nominated for the BSFA, Arthur C Clarke, and John W Campbell Memorial Awards in 2015 and 2016 respectively. Europe at Midnight was also shortlisted for a Kitschie Award in 2016. He now writes full-time, and lives in North London.

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    Reviews for Europe at Midnight

    4/5

    81 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I enjoyed Europe in Autumn enough to continue the series. This did not feel at all like a sequel to the first for a while, but you eventually see where it fits in. I would say this one is a bit better than the first.
    • 3/5
      When I saw the synopsis for this book , and the others in the series, I was rather worried that it was going to be a political diatribe for/against the unity of Europe (mainly pro United Europe I'd guess). But it was actually a rather intriguing setup - the world had suffered a devastating flu epidemic a few years earlier, which had led to a fractured US and a Europe that was fracturing in front of people's eye; Venice has finally declared UDI from Italy so the English intelligence office Jim has plenty on his plate but when he is tasked with investigating the asylum claim of someone who could have been born up the road from himself, he finds that the politics of a fractured Europe were relatively simple. Not one hidden reality, but two; one, the Campus, a group of academics and the Community, apparently a refuge of an England that had never really existed in quite that form.Another in our reading group's read through of the 2016 Arthur C Clark award, it has certain thematic similarities with one of our previous books, Iain Pear's 'Arcadia', in that the focuses (foci) of the stories are based on novels (Arcadia) or maps (this one). I don't know how likely the Community would be but I could see the superficial attraction it would have to a certain type of person. The Campus was completely artificial and utterly dependant on the Community even though it was completely unaware of the Community or our own reality (is it ours?). Overall, in the end I did find that this was an interesting tale.
    • 4/5
      It's important to accept a book for what it is, and then to enjoy it for what it is. This is not great literature, not a great spy novel and not a very imaginative science fiction narrative. What it is for me is a reminder of what Neal Stephenson's 'REAMDE' wasn't - a fully maintained world which we have a window into. There are benefits to staying within your comfort zone, and this book remains honest for it's entire length. It totally succeeds in normalising a strange near future, whose parallels with real life are at the very least interesting. It is constrained in many ways, but the mundane pace helps to keep everything in place.
    • 4/5
      A little bit Twilight Zone, a bit more Southern Reach, and a lot of China Miéville, "Europe at Midnight" is about a place you can't get to from here.“In October 1822, the Whitton-Whyte [family] publish the first edition of Sheet 2000, a map of the area to the West of London. It contains a number of... errors. It includes a village called ‘Stanhurst,’ where no such village exists. Over the next seventy years or so, they publish a number of revisions which not only compound the error, but add to it, until the final revision shows a completely imaginary county, called ‘Ernshire,’ in great detail." "There’s an invisible county where Heathrow is, it’s full of people, and we have no idea what they’re doing." It's a pocket universe.The situation is no clearer inside Ernshire where rival factions are at war for control of what? A tiny country that you can ride across on a bicycle.I have not read "Europe in Autumn" and I enjoyed the added surrealism of not having an information base. I felt exhilarated, much as I did when I mistook the title order of Southern Reach and started with Book 2.Very little is what it seems. The characters are intelligent, if a bit impenetrable. I enjoyed reading.I received a review copy of "Europe At Midnight: The Fractured Europe Sequence Book 2" by Dave Hutchinson (Rebellion) through NetGalley.com.
    • 5/5
      Rating: 4.5* of fiveThe Publisher Says: In a fractured Europe, new nations are springing up everywhere, some literally overnight.For an intelligence officer like Jim it's a nightmare. Every week or so a friendly power spawns a new and unknown national entity which may or may not be friendly to England's interests. It's hard to keep on top of it all. But things are about to get worse for Jim. A stabbing on a London bus pitches him into a world where his intelligence service is preparing for war with another universe, and a man has appeared who may hold the key to unlocking Europe's most jealously guarded secret...My Review: I have to disclose that, although I bought this book with my very own United States dollars, I'm pals with the author on social media. Believe me it affected my reading and opinion-making not at all, since an honest review is a better gift than a bunch of hot air. Also note that there are spoilers for EUROPE IN AUTUMN following.At the very end of AUTUMN, a concept was introduced that's central to this book: The existence of "pocket universes," a modern-day physics concept that boggles my tiny 2-volt brain. It's defined as: "A pocket universe is a concept in inflationary theory, proposed by Alan Guth. It defines a realm like the one that contains the observable universe as only one of many inflationary zones." Wikipedia rocks, and everyone should throw some donations at Jimmy Wales.So anyway, this pocket universe concept is the source of some really bad-ass events in the world we live in, including a hideous pandemic flu that's done what the Black Death did to 14th-century Europe. The devastation caused much economic misery. But as we all know, money for "black ops" will always flow copiously because there's always a secret to learn, one to protect, and no one dares to reveal it publicly in case The People rise up and shut off the money pipe. So our story threads all center on British Intelligence, the surviving Professor of Intelligence from a pocket universe called "the Campus," and the beloved (to me) Coueruers du Bois we learned so much about in AUTUMN. All the adventures, the nightmares, the violent justice and injustice meted out are in search of a means to neutralize a threat to whatever place the character's loyalty lies. These people play hard and for keeps. Much bloodshed. All of it for ends that, in my opinion at least, make our world's conflicts seem as foolish as the story's stakes. Why is the mere existence of people your country can't or doesn't control so intolerable as to justify genocidal biowarfare? EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT doesn't answer this question, raising it and examining it from several sides, but foregoing a simple and pompous jingoistic resolution. The use of pocket universes allows the author to compartmentalize the stories, in best spy-fiction fashion. The twist is that these pockets were created, not discovered, by a family of map-makers. The conflicts, therefore, are engineered and need not ever have happened had the greed and selfishness of one group not taken form in such an unusual way.Or so it seems in this novel. The pocket countries that litter the near-future Europe after the pandemic, the pocket universes...were they created? Were they discovered and exploited, as the powers that be exploit the fragmentation of today's populations at the hands of venal and manipulative oligarchs?If I've learned one thing while reading the Fractured Europe sequence, it's that perspective alters everything. I don't for a single second imagine that Hutchinson won't change our perspective on Fractured Europe in EUROPE IN WINTER, forthcoming late this year. Goddesses willing and the crick don't rise.
    • 3/5
      A dystopian fever dream - That's what Europe at Midnight is. You know - the kind of dream that is full of stress and anxiety, where small things become warped and enlarged and terrifying; where the normal logic of exits and entrances and paths and roads no longer apply, allowing entrance through solid walls and roads which veer suddenly into the swamp but appear straight and unobstructed; where there is a continual sense of danger and foreboding; and where reality is twisted beyond logic in a sweaty cacophony of noise and delirium. A dystopian Europe is not a pleasant place, nor, at midnight, is it a pleasant read.The point of the story seems to be for the reader to have the raw experience of the weirdness and chaos that follow the Global War On Terror, scientific hubris and ensuing plague. The reader will go from idyllic scenes of fishing in a quiet river to nuclear holocaust in a snow-globe, from gentle professors of literature to mad scientists creating mutant viruses through outlawed gene manipulation, from a European Union (EU) that has become a degenerate set of paranoid city-states to a pair of pocket universes, one only 200 miles across, that exhibit limitations similar to the city-states and similar nightmarish consequences to their societies. Everybody is a prisoner in their existential environment and everybody wants freedom to change their circumstance, but the city-states have closed themselves off from each other. Borders are sealed, walls built, armed check-points manned, all travel stopped. There are coureurs who have found secret pathways between some of the city-states and these few individuals are the smugglers of information and people and contraband. There are also a few people who have discovered paths between points in the EU and the pocket universes.The author of Europe at Midnight, Dave Hutchinson, compounds the chaos the reader faces by telling the story from the point of view of two different characters - one from the EU and a very similar character from one of the pocket universes. Each of these two narrators visit the other universe in the course of their work as spies and may even change their identities. The most confusing part is that Hutchinson does not overtly signal changes in place/universe and in point-of-view. They just happen and, following along in an episode told by a character who refers to himself only in the first person (I, me), the reader suddenly realizes that this is not the same person speaking who was the narrator a few pages back. The only way to discover that the narrator has changed is through the context of the events or the narrator being referred to by name by another character (keeping in mind that the new narrator may have changed names and identities.) Confusion reigns! This is not a story to be read piecemeal, in snatches. Even when reading it in long continuous bursts of effort, note-taking is recommended so one can keep track of who the narrator is, what events that individual has experienced, who the secondary characters are, what is going on at the moment, and untangle the twisted and mutated logic of the events. The story is expertly written, but it engulfs the reader in its delirium.