The Strange Taste of Metal, by KA Burgess

Part of my Readit series in the Prom Coast News

It’s great to be able to recommend a cracking adventure by a regional Australian writer. Even better, seeing writers take advantage of new technology and distribution to deal with the inhuman behemoths of media and publishing. KA Burgess lives in the New England region, NSW, and this “indie” novel, her first, is widely available.

Without fuss or explanation, The Strange Taste of Metal plunges us into the realities of medium-future life on Mars, neither revolutionary nor corporate, populated by the variety of workers, bureaucratic duffers, dodges, and everybody else absent from many space operas. (Elon Musk is merely a park name on the KA Burgess Mars. Another nice crack is that at least one of the Rolling Stones is still alive!)

Our hero, John Spark, has a past he doesn’t make too much of either.

At the start of The Strange Taste of Metal he’s a tour guide, capable and hard-working but not obviously heroic, though the novel’s opening demonstrates his quick thinking to solve a problem that might panic others. He’s unlucky in love, if not without good friends whose love is true. He’s had adventures on other worlds and moons.    

All this before we’re spirited away to a world more genuinely alien than most sci-fi I have read in a long career.

A world of vivid sights and smells and wind and rain, outdoor danger, plus plausible but gadget-free space manoeuvres, all written with the sure pitch of an author both well-researched and actually experienced in matters away from a room of her own. Burgess doesn’t wear other learning too heavily either—with the story start and later sequences’ Martian landscape rendered in a few lines and never interrupting the action.

We are introduced to an alien system by a crew comprised of pilot, IT guy, leader,  scientists, and our jack-of-all-trades, Spark. They travel via “wormhole” in space, one of a number of cool concepts Burgess takes for granted we know, leaving out razzle-dazzle and history except to show in a completely human way how sick interstellar travel makes you. Our characters have their problems with one another, much more important. Espionage is on the cards.

The rigours of the planet—they dub it Aemelia themselves, names and naming a joy of science fiction writing—are partly physical in the manner of any good wilderness adventure and definitely also down to the perilous and creepy encounters with alien lifeforms.

For Aemelia is a completely odd world of neither horror nor unimaginably advanced wizardry. It really is alien. After the manner of the octopus—motivations quite different to ours.

Ultimately, conflict and story arise for reasons having everything to do with humanity and alienity, if you will, and nothing to do with cartoon evil, or what is known as an “idiot plot,” which only functions if everybody involved is daft. These are capable people but not superheroes; dangerous foes, but not Nazis or monsters dressed up by an art department.

Right to the last page, KA Burgess spins a gripping “hard science” take of believable, un-hyped dimensions: space battles, bravery, problem-solving under pressure, and ultimately the kind of group-binding, wisecracking humanity which keeps us coming back. Fortunately, a second John Spark story has just come out.

I read the first book at Lorne, a great beach read for the break. I look forward to The Possession of Metal.

The John Spark novels can be found at https://books2read.com/b/3Jw0yB and https://books2read.com/u/mlO5Y9 as well as many Australian bookshops. A discounted copy for Prom Coast News readers is available via her page.

John Spark #1 and #2

KA Burgess

KA Burgess

208 pp

1/10/2024