Peter

Lehane was a well established thriller writer before he wrote The Given Day, set in an America coming up for air just after the First World War and just before prohibition and the roaring 20s.

The action in a thriller tends to emphasize the here and now, as we frantically turn the pages to find out how the ending can give coherence to the plot.

The title itself suggests the kind of immediacy that keeps modern newsrooms humming, and could even be the title of a 60-Minutes-type current affairs show.

Science fiction as a literary genre has long been outclassed by the mind-bending ideas of theoretical physics. String theory, for example, suggests that reality is a consequence of vibrating strings producing frequencies in a kind of cosmic harmony. Purple alien beings with 5 arms from the Plant Thrug sound heavy-handed in comparison, and a would-be SF writer must fight ever harder against this kind of space kitsch.