Science and technology fiction is experiencing a kind of renaissance these days, with such authors and scriptwriters as Ian McEwan (‘Solar’, ‘Machines like Me’) and Charlie Brooker (‘Black Mirror’) attracting millions of readers and viewers all over the world. Although well plotted, ‘The Passengers’ (Del Rey, £7.99, ISBN 9781785038884) leaves the impression of having been put together in haste and isn’t among the best works of this increasingly popular genre.

Author John Marrs – a much better plotter than stylist – skilfully plays on our growing and often exaggerated fears about the safety of autonomous vehicles, or in plain speak driverless cars. As evidenced by the current exhibition ‘Driverless: Who is in Control?’ at London’s Science Museum, the possibility of these vehicles of the near future proving to be easy targets for all kinds of hackers capable of taking full control of them remotely is just one potential problem.

Which is precisely what the book’s main baddy, known simply as ‘The Hacker’ (despite all its modern connotations, every time I hear this word I cannot help associating it with the characteristic nom de plume of a provincial British newspaper columnist of the 1980s), a sinister cyber-terrorist of the not-so-distant future, has managed to achieve. Having taken control of eight driverless cars, he sets them and their passengers on a lethal collision course. The passengers are a TV star, a pregnant young woman, a disabled war hero, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife – the parents of two children travelling in separate vehicles – and a suicidal man. The reader has to judge who should survive and whether the passengers are all they at first seem.

No spoilers here, but I found it hard to cope with this book. My problems were largely due to its structure, with chapter titles interspersed with imaginary news feeds and social media posts, and the narrative fluctuating rather sporadically from one of the ‘doomed’ eight protagonists to another. The characterisation of each is ambiguous and leaves much to be desired, to the extent that it’s easy to forget which character features in this or that particular chapter.

Technologically speaking, there are a number of question marks too. The main one, from my point of view, is that one of the leading principles of autonomous vehicles design is that in an emergency there must always be an option of regaining manual control of the vehicle to stop the engine, thus neutralising the danger of being hacked. None of the eight cars featured in the novel seems to have been equipped with that essential security mechanism.

Yet the main obstacle that prevented me grasping all the intricacies of the plot is the book’s style, in particular the stilted dialogue and the characters’ manner of expressing themselves: “‘This must be an opportune moment to mention there are many more details about you that I also know, Jack,’ continued the Hacker.”

Do people, even baddies and evil ‘Hackers’, really speak like that?

Or take another sentence: “And with his arm pulled back and the knife ready to push into her, a bullet shattered the glass in the door and hit him squarely in the throat.” Please correct me, if I’m wrong, but I was unable to make head nor tail of this. Who pushed the knife into whom, and how exactly did the bullet come out of “his arm”?

Anton Chekhov, my favourite writer and himself a brilliant stylist, once parodied such clumsy stylistic monsters in the classical sentence: “Having peeped out the window, my hat was blown off by the wind.”

Science and technology fiction is experiencing a kind of renaissance these days, with such authors and scriptwriters as Ian McEwan (‘Solar’, ‘Machines like Me’) and Charlie Brooker (‘Black Mirror’) attracting millions of readers and viewers all over the world. Although well plotted, ‘The Passengers’ (Del Rey, £7.99, ISBN 9781785038884) leaves the impression of having been put together in haste and isn’t among the best works of this increasingly popular genre.

Author John Marrs – a much better plotter than stylist – skilfully plays on our growing and often exaggerated fears about the safety of autonomous vehicles, or in plain speak driverless cars. As evidenced by the current exhibition ‘Driverless: Who is in Control?’ at London’s Science Museum, the possibility of these vehicles of the near future proving to be easy targets for all kinds of hackers capable of taking full control of them remotely is just one potential problem.

Which is precisely what the book’s main baddy, known simply as ‘The Hacker’ (despite all its modern connotations, every time I hear this word I cannot help associating it with the characteristic nom de plume of a provincial British newspaper columnist of the 1980s), a sinister cyber-terrorist of the not-so-distant future, has managed to achieve. Having taken control of eight driverless cars, he sets them and their passengers on a lethal collision course. The passengers are a TV star, a pregnant young woman, a disabled war hero, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife – the parents of two children travelling in separate vehicles – and a suicidal man. The reader has to judge who should survive and whether the passengers are all they at first seem.

No spoilers here, but I found it hard to cope with this book. My problems were largely due to its structure, with chapter titles interspersed with imaginary news feeds and social media posts, and the narrative fluctuating rather sporadically from one of the ‘doomed’ eight protagonists to another. The characterisation of each is ambiguous and leaves much to be desired, to the extent that it’s easy to forget which character features in this or that particular chapter.

Technologically speaking, there are a number of question marks too. The main one, from my point of view, is that one of the leading principles of autonomous vehicles design is that in an emergency there must always be an option of regaining manual control of the vehicle to stop the engine, thus neutralising the danger of being hacked. None of the eight cars featured in the novel seems to have been equipped with that essential security mechanism.

Yet the main obstacle that prevented me grasping all the intricacies of the plot is the book’s style, in particular the stilted dialogue and the characters’ manner of expressing themselves: “‘This must be an opportune moment to mention there are many more details about you that I also know, Jack,’ continued the Hacker.”

Do people, even baddies and evil ‘Hackers’, really speak like that?

Or take another sentence: “And with his arm pulled back and the knife ready to push into her, a bullet shattered the glass in the door and hit him squarely in the throat.” Please correct me, if I’m wrong, but I was unable to make head nor tail of this. Who pushed the knife into whom, and how exactly did the bullet come out of “his arm”?

Anton Chekhov, my favourite writer and himself a brilliant stylist, once parodied such clumsy stylistic monsters in the classical sentence: “Having peeped out the window, my hat was blown off by the wind.”