Mount Ararat isn’t your average extrasolar agrarian colony. A world the size of an asteroid yet having Earth-standard gravity, Mount Ararat plays host to a strangely confident family whose children are protected by the Devil, a mechanical killing machine, from such passers-by as Mr von Trapp (an escapee from a penal colony), the Made (manufactured humans being hunted by the State), and the super-rich clients of a gravitational health spa established at Mount Ararat’s South Pole. But it soon transpires that the Devil is harbouring an ancient and deadly secret.

‘Smallworld‘ is original, fast-paced and brimming with chaotic energy. It’s funny not in a laugh-out-loud way but in an “Oh look – satire – how drole!” kind of way.

It creates an absurd but almost plausible small (tiny) world and populates it with and extended family of Cult survivors, an intelligent and lethal Made Thing that looks like a devil and an Anchorite who seems to have been an interstellar dictator before he became a hermit. Oh, and goats. Lots of goats. And an ass.

The small world then gets visited by various people who either do bizarre and violent things or have bizarre and violent things done to them or both.

At first, I was stunned into silence by the energy and originality of the story. Then I began to smile at how clever it was. Then, not very long after that, I became bored.

There was nothing for me to engage with. None of these people felt real. The ideas were bright as fireworks but how long can you watch a firework display and keep going “Oooh!” and “Aaah!” with any sincerity? I knew I couldn’t manage 385 pages of “My but this satire is as dry as bone, isn’t it?” so I’m setting it aside at the 18% mark.