The book could almost work as a compendious excuse to exhume neglected figures from the past, because Arnott assembles a fascinating cast of misfits who have been consigned to the margins of history. There is Jack Parsons, the rocket scientist and Crowley devotee who set up a hedonistic commune in California in the 1940s, before accidentally blowing himself up. And Katharine Burdekin, the British feminist who in 1937 wrote Swastika Night, a work of visionary dystopia that has been compared to Nineteen Eighty-Four. But this novel is more than a collection of obscure biographies; it’s also about timing and dislocation, and how life and history rest on what sci-fi readers may know as a “Jonbar Hinge”, a point at which the future could have taken a different path.

The House of Rumour by Jake Arnott – review