Seven Cities of Gold

Seven Cities of Gold, by David Moles, PS Publishing RRP£12, 66 pages

Good alternative-history fiction often echoes something in our present-day lives. Seven Cities of Gold centres on the search for a weapon of mass destruction wielded by a zealot with an apocalyptic agenda. The backdrop is a world fissured by longstanding religious conflict, particularly between Christianity and Islam.

South America, however, and not the Middle East, provides the setting, as a Japanese “Doctor-Lieutenant”, Chië Nakada, sets off upriver to find the deranged cult leader Clara Dos Orsos and put an end to her eschatological ambitions. En route, Nakada has many hideous and haunting encounters, the rainforest as festering and claustrophobic as Conrad’s Congo.

Moles has been accruing himself a reputation as an SF up-and-comer to watch, and this novella is a cracker. Measured, complex and unpredictable, it riffs on Heart of Darkness to great effect and delivers a bracing ironic commentary on the purpose and uses of faith.