Another End by Vincent King

👍👍👍👍👍 It was the first paragraph of the blurb, along with the weird cover art, that convinced me to pick up this book and give it a read. I’m very glad I did. 

I love stories that stretch across space and time, stories so vast that they seem to reach all the way to the edges of the universe. This novel is exactly that kind of story. 

It follows one human protagonist and an AI/probe/starship as they travel, and travel… and travel, searching for life. But after hundreds of thousands of years, they still haven’t found any. 

The atmosphere Vincent King creates is absolutely perfect. There’s a profound sense of solitude, frustration, claustrophobia, and resignation. A feeling of having wasted a life, or perhaps hundreds of lives. The pilot and the probe continue to wander the universe, driven by their original directives, long after those directives have ceased to make any real sense. This is the first part of the novel, and I loved the bleak, existential mood of it. 

Then the second part takes a complete 180 degree turn and goes completely mad. 

A new character appears and causes all sorts of trouble. I won’t say more because of spoilers, but suffice it to say that this is one of the weirdest and maddest characters I’ve come across in a novel. 

Strange, bleak, enormous, and completely bizarre in the best possible way. Read it.