Synopsis: It is fifteen years since the Change and everyone who saw the event is now dead, for no human lives beyond their fourteenth birthday in the world of the Overlords. Well...almost no-one. As the Overlords and their inhuman servants fight their ritual battles over the blasted remains of humanity's empire, a handful of children have escaped from the dorms and evaded pursuit. Led by the mysterious Shade, these children are fighting back, but not all of them are convinced of Shade's good intentions. After all, how can Shade be the saviour of humanity if he isn't even human?

Review: There is a peculiarly Antipodean sub-genre of post-Apocalyptic, hard drama soft science-fiction which concerns itself with a world without adults; a world of children that is anything but Utopian. In Shade's Children, Garth Nix puts his own spin on this theme with the introduction of the Overlords: The bulk of the human race has not been eradicated by human folly or the ravages of nature, but by a malign and alien agency, served by cruel and unnatural miscreations. In his more overtly fantastic works, Nix has established himself as a master creature maker and the shift towards SF has not changed that. The servants of the Overlord are wonderfully macabre. It is hard to suppress a shudder at the mere idea of these corrupt fusions of technology and the flesh of dead children.

Through the device of audio diary transcripts, the human characters are neatly given their introductions without sacrificing pace of action. The four heroes are four very different children, but all are sympathetic, especially in the various ways that they fail to cope with the hideous reality of their world. The old hands are a fantacist, a fatalist and a self-deluding zealot, while the new recruit barely thinks beyond survival. Each one possesses an uncanny, psychic 'Change talent', but they lack the preternatural stoicism which would deny any real reader empathy. Through their flaws we can come to love them.

The Change talents themselves are worthy of note. It is not unusual for post-Apocalyptic humans to possess a degree of extrasensory ability and the difficulty of such a device is that it can come to dominate a story unless carefully handled. The Change talents receive just such attention; they are plot devices, intended to serve specific purposes in the story - and in particular to facilitate the very last scene of the book - and they are so constrained that they do not form a universal get-out clause and our heroes are still forced to work for a living.

Then there is Shade himself. He is something of a cypher in the narrative itself, but here Nix employs an effective literary conceit. Between chapters he inserts snatches of Shade's data files, including surveillance transcripts, those audio diaries and a great deal of the information that he hides from his children. We learn a little about the enemy from here and some cold, hard truths about Shade's rebellion. Coldest and hardest is the statistical records of the escapees, recruits and casualties for each year since the change, showing just how few of the children survive their involvement with Shade's cause.

Shade's Children is dark with a capital D-A-R-K and contains what they call 'adult themes', and so is one for older readers and not recommended as light escapism. Even fans of Nix's other work - particularly Keys to the Kingdom - might find the going a little harsh. But for anyone to whom 'The Tribe meets The Terminator' sounds like a good thing, this is as close as you're ever going to get.

2006-10-29