THE FURIES by Keith Roberts

The USA and USSR have cocked things up again in their struggle for world domination, this time detonating dual nuclear tests that blast a crack in the world and set the poor old UK on a collision course with intelligences from the outer spheres, energy beings that materialize in the form of gigantic wasps and immediately set about conquering our shattered planet. This is illustrator and ad-man Keith Roberts' first novel, and a helluva debut it is! He blends high concept cosmic slop with painful portraits of characters like Bill Sampson (also an illustrator in advertising) who should be living up the bachelor life but now finds himself thrown into the apocalypse, grasping out for others like poor little rich girl Jane and cockney slattern Pete, two female characters imbued with depth and power far beyond the usual genre standards of the time, or our time for that matter. Roberts does not shy away from human ugliness but he also approaches everything with a reserved humanism, and Bill's first person narration reflects a witty, understated understanding of our foibles and of life and death among the new rulers, the wasps. Yesterday Bill had a fancy flat, a dynamite sports car, and a loyal Doberman - but now it's all gone to pot, the car and flat smashed to bits and the hero dog just one more victim of the Furies. Communications from overseas are cut off, the government's dissolved, and would-be military saviors are reduced to scavengers along with the other survivors, as Britain slides into a new dark age under an alien dictatorship. Roberts writes with grit and emotion as Bill and company navigate this new nightmare world, jacking lorries and ransacking drug stores to survive while holed up in a cave, reduced to savagery while feeding off the corpse of the old world.

Comparisons to Ballard and Wyndham are inevitable and accurate, but Roberts does Wyndham's cosy catastrophe one better. The triffids merely reflected our self-inflicted impotence back at us - in the country of the blind, the crawling plant is king. The Furies, meanwhile, are truly a superior species, swarming in incalculable numbers as they sting and shred our soft, yielding bodies to pieces, dragging us from our boltholes and barricades, stopping at nothing in their alien quest to dominate. Part computer, part demon, so near to us and yet so far beyond our imagining, not simply a monstrous threat but the indicators of a paradigm shift so jarring that there simply may not be a place for us in the new universe. The wasps quickly enslave the remaining humans for menial labor in the massive hives now splattered across the English countyside, but Bill and the rest wonder how long this is going to last before they're expediently put out of their misery and endeavor to go out fighting instead. A perceptive review by Leonard at Goodreads notes that "the uppermost goal of our little band of resistance fighters is the destruction of edifices made of *pulp*. No SF critic in nearly a half-century has noticed this?!" Indeed, Roberts is operating on levels far above simple pulp SF action, and his Furies are at once stunningly phenomenologically plausible and also almost besides the point. In the same way that the grinding of the earth's crust may explode into an earthquake that leaves thousands dead, so too did some obscure cosmic twitch beget these Furies, who sever our gossamer thread of civilization in an instant between their vicious jaws.

Above, a Pan edition from 1969 with a lo-fi cover that seems to call forth the creature features that would swamp the UK market a few years later in the wake of James Herbert's The Rats - a story with its own bleak but simpler vision.

"The Keepers still haunt the conscience of mankind; I think in the end they justified the name we gave them so lightly. To us, they were the Furies."

The Furies rates 4/4, a masterpiece.

A Berkeley Medallion Book, 1966