Alex Thomson
Alex Thomson is a British author whose debut novel brought a fresh and distinctly European perspective to science fiction, drawing on his experience living and working in France to construct a near-future scenario that feels both specific and unsettling. He has worked as a translator and has a deep engagement with French language and culture, influences that are directly reflected in the setting and atmosphere of his debut work. His translation background gives him an unusually acute awareness of how language shapes thought and how communication can simultaneously connect and divide.
Spidertouch (2021), available on WritersReview, is set in a near-future Europe in which a mysterious plague has rendered a significant portion of the population unable to process spoken language. In response, a new tactile language — “spidertouch,” communicated through patterns of finger movements on skin — has developed as an alternative means of communication. The novel follows a practitioner of this language who becomes entangled in political conspiracy and violence in an occupied Paris. The premise is brilliantly conceived, and Thomson executes it with considerable skill: the spidertouch language feels genuinely worked out, with its own grammar and limitations, and the novel’s exploration of communication, occupation, and resistance has obvious resonances with the history of France under Nazi occupation while remaining grounded in its science fictional premise.
Thomson’s literary instincts are evident throughout: this is SF that prioritises atmosphere, character, and the textures of a carefully rendered world over plot mechanics, and his writing has the quality of precise attention to sensory and social detail that marks the best literary fiction. The novel was well received and established him as a debut author with a distinctive voice and a clear sense of what he wanted to achieve — science fiction that is genuinely rooted in a specific cultural and historical context rather than in the generic pseudo-American present of much mainstream SF.
Thomson’s work represents a strand of European science fiction that brings the concerns and traditions of Continental literary culture to the genre, enriching it with perspectives and historical experiences that Anglo-American SF has often overlooked. His translation work and his bicultural sensibility give his fiction a texture that is genuinely its own, and Spidertouch marks an impressive start to what promises to be a significant career.
