As the weather goes crazy, read some great and funky sci-fi!
All Fool’s Day by Edmund Cooper was a great find. This worthwhile novel was recommended to me by another sci-fi lover on Instagram. I review a lot more books on Instagram and more than sci-fi and fantasy. If you want, follow me on Instagram! We’ll chat about books.
Anyway, Cooper is an author from the 1960s I never heard of. I’m glad that error has been remedied. The Edinburgh Evening News had this to say about All Fool’s Day: The wackiest book of the year — this tragic, ingenious and entertaining novel.
Wacky? That’s like a calling card to me. This was good writing and a very original story. The main character is a reluctant hero (one of my favorite tropes) and not very likeable. Yet, Cooper kept me engaged and reading.
The premise is the sun starts having sun spots that put out a strange and new kind of radiation that makes people want to kill themselves. The only people immune are those with different minds – the geniuses, the crazy, the neurodivergent, the psychopaths, etc… Yeah, it’s a nutty plot idea, but it makes sense in the story and Cooper writes it well.
The writing is old-fashioned to what’s currently in vogue (third person omniscient), but the story is compelling and keeps moving forward. With packs of murdersome rats, dogs, cats, and pigs, it was a compelling read about how the transnormals face the end of civilization.
Here’s the blurb:
Summer 1971. A marvellous spell of weather, idyllic in its warmth. But new sun-spots had appeared; and with their appearance came a significant increase in the suicide rate. The wonderful summer continued for a decade: simultaneously Radiant Suicide reached endemic proportions, the only people to escape its effects being the supposed transnormals, the obsessionals, the eccentrics and the psychopaths. These were to be the only remnants of the ancient ‘homo sapiens’ . . .
