We want speculative fiction to unfold against a complex background, without getting bogged down in incidental facts that an average person would take for granted. Yet noticing the uncanny details of our lives is all we seem to do lately, and few authors can compete with the strangeness of the real world ... Jones has figured out a formula that seems to rise to the challenge ... An iceberg is a huge metaphor, and Jones cleverly establishes the narrative long before its central subject appears, which allows its impending arrival to set off reverberations in advance ... evokes Jones’s ability to put an object in motion and capture rivulets of insight as his characters ... Jones breaks up his text with generous white space, turning it into an album of snapshots of survival ... By highlighting passing moments of connection, Stillicide feels more true to life than most science fiction ... Jones’s strengths — his love of animals, his obsessive noticing, his interest in traditional crafts — are put to good use, although he rarely draws on the sure touch with action that he displayed in his earlier work. The result is spare but effective, and its theme of endurance in the face of loss hints at how the genre may evolve to reflect our own continuing catastrophe, for which the most dystopian fantasies may turn out to be nothing but a dry run.
... fragmented, marvellously compressed ... it is this image of dripping water and its powers of erosion that comes to define his book as a whole, both as a novel that confronts the challenge of describing what climate crisis might look like, and in the way a slow accretion of pertinent detail gathers cataclysmic momentum ... has a terse, minimalist quality that is at least partly down to how the text is presented on the page. Short paragraphs and generous line spacing encouraged me to read the novel as a series of prose poems. The radical distillation of language, the sense that every word has been individually chosen, results in a blunt perfection that heightens this effect. Narrative exists, but it is secondary to form. On first encounter at least, the pleasures Stillicide offers appear to be more aesthetic than dramatic ... can be added to the growing roster of powerful and urgent meditations on the future. As a tract of written language, it is close to perfect. As a repository for ideas, it is imaginative and far reaching. As a story of and for our times, it is very human, and deadly serious.
Jones' prose is stark and brittle when conveying violence, cruelty, and hard truths, but also lush and lyrical when the natural world intrudes ... New concepts authenticate the dystopia...and short, spaced-out paragraphs heighten the drama. But for all the imaginative leaps and formal risks, Jones never loses sight of the human element. This novel presents a bleak new world and depicts a frantic attempt at damage limitation. It's a terrifying vision but a captivating read.
The variety of voices means that reading this novel is a less intense experience than Jones’s last two books, but Stillicide will never be mistaken for a comedy ... In his books, higher consciousness is sidelined and people take their place in nature, motives and thinking pared back. The language is correspondingly stark, the sentences cut close ... This simplicity of language means that when emotion is portrayed directly, such as Branner’s dying wife dictating a letter to him, the effect is devastating. How big this small book is, giving the barest details of its future world — water tokens, alittlements, soilmen — so the reader has space for their own interpretations. A lesser writer would have made an epic, with hundreds of pages of world-building, and it would have been immensely boring. Stillicide, like Jones’s earlier books, is never boring, but exciting, upsetting and essential.
Sometimes real-world problems are best explained through fiction. BBC Radio Four must have had this in mind when they gave Cynan Jones the green light to write the tense, stark, and beautifully paced connecting stories in Stillicide, which describe a future Earth on which water has become an increasingly precious commodity ... The landscape of Stillicide encourages a powerful sense of isolation ... Jones presents his narratives in short bursts of prose, accumulating like drops of water ... If you weren’t reading too carefully, and saw the short paragraphs falling down the page, you might think he was applying the by-now-common fragmentation technique to create a grander image or scenario in the reader’s mind, but in fact the brief paragraphs serve mainly to move the events described ahead faster ... Calling these stories narratives is a stretch — they more closely resemble portrayals of psychological positions, places the characters have ended up.
Jones’s writing style is wonderfully pared back and impressionistic, and he has a knack for deploying staccato sentences and one-line paragraphs at moments of maximum drama to give the sense of time slowing down ... might not be quite as detached as the Dark Mountain Manifesto would seem to require – at its core it is really a love story – but a more powerful parable about the dangers of super-intelligent apes constructing 'sophisticated myths of their own importance' is hard to imagine.
Jones beautifully reprises his distinctive voice and poignant themes ... This novella-length meditation excels in its thoughtful considerations, quietly lyrical language and memorable lines and characters ... Many of these characters remain nameless, so that even in their specificity they stand in for a larger human experience, and the effect is that this thirsty world is a little blurred ... a sobering consideration of a possible near future, and a moving work of fiction. Jones is easy to appreciate also for his writing ... The marksman guarding the water train, where the novel both begins and ends, drives home questions about what to value and protect, and when to let go. This is a quiet masterpiece of language, imagination and grim possibility.
Jones creates a stiflingly bleak world ... Everything is rationed – even Jones’s prose, which rarely allows for more than a couple of sentences per paragraph. It can be a jarring experience to read, but it seems to suit this world where resources have been depleted and the seas are empty of fish. Less a linear narrative than a layering of images, Stillicide is an exercise in matching literary form to a visual idea: as Cynan Jones’s sparse, clear words accumulate down the page, we are left feeling the chill of a slowly melting iceberg.
Jones’ signature, sparse style lends itself well to this apocalyptic slice of life. There are no elaborate plots or extravagant technologies. Rather, nature weaves in and out of these stories in the form of hovering bees, seaweed, and a dampness treasured and elusive. There are more than a few passages here could be taking place today. Stillicide will linger in its poignancy.
Jones’s compressed, minimalist style heightens the effect of a precarious future for a world where climate chaos is deadly serious, creating an absorbing narrative for sophisticated readers.
... haunting and lucidly written ... The story receives unique resonance from its multiple perspectives ... Terse, often poetic sentences surrounded by white space develop a rhythm, suggesting both an inevitability and a resignation. Jones’s visionary tale is a singular, brilliantly crafted addition to the climate fiction genre.
In prior novels, Jones has proven masterful at spare, aphoristic sentences that create a sense of foreboding, whether his subject was drug trafficking or hard-luck rural hunters. There are glimpses of that here. But though Jones’ long-running concern with nature makes climate change a natural theme for him, this novel lacks the earthy grit of his earlier work and the kind of clarity a thriller demands, even an ersatz one ... Jones finely captures the mood of a country nearing collapse, but his plot threads are loosely woven.
