Review

Jonathan E is not the hero you’re looking for In 1975, my dad took 13-year-old me to see Rollerball at the Odeon Cinema in Renfield Street, Glasgow. The queue for the box office stretched right round the block and we ended up seeing Dad’s Army instead, which was quite a tonal shift from what I

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter My rating: 4 of 5 stars A worthy sequel to The Time Machine HG Wells’s The Time Machine is rightly acknowledged as a Science Fiction Masterwork. It’s spawned two movies and two TV series (and counting), the best and most faithful adaptation being the 1960 George Pal movie, and

Scavengers by Robert Hood My rating: 5 of 5 stars A vivid Aussie crime thriller with supernatural elements Robert Hood is best known as a writer of horror and fantasy and he’s been described as ‘Aussie Horror’s wicked godfather’. But he began his publishing career in crime fiction and also commissioned and co-edited the anthology

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 4 of 5 stars Tchaikovsky’s creativity and ideas are on full display On the future Earth of Alien Clay, society is in the grip of a bunch of ideological zealots that would give the Spanish Inquisition a run for their money. The ‘Mandate’ insists on a scientific orthodoxy

Conquist: A Novel by Dirk Strasser My rating: 5 of 5 stars A rip-roaring lost world adventure For more than a century our collective imaginations have been set alight by tales of lost worlds and the brave or foolish explorers that stumble into them. Stories like Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot, Conan Doyle’s

The Final Shroud by Nathan Burrage My rating: 5 of 5 stars After creating a lived-in world in The Salt Lines Book 1 – The Hidden Keystone that is at once historically accurate and vividly realistic, Burrage doubles down on the more fantastical elements of his story in the series finale The Final Shroud. In

Aliens: Bishop by T.R. Napper My rating: 4 of 5 stars Feels like a middle episode in a longer story. Writing a tie-in novel has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are that the writer gains exposure to a broader readership by producing a book in an already established and popular intellectual property. If they happen

Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars For a novella, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Firewalkers” contains a whole novel’s worth of ideas as well as a densely imagined world which is wholly original and at the same time completely inevitable. We’re in the endtimes of the climate crisis and the people of the small

A lot of negativity has been directed toward this movie and the women in it for months – years even – before it opened. As far as I can tell that negativity comes from boy-men who are terrified of people with vaginas or angry that they don’t have a girlfriend, or both. It’s the same

36 Streets by T.R. Napper My rating: 5 of 5 stars TR Napper paints a vivid picture of a cyberpunk future Vietnam in 36 Streets. In TR Napper’s 36 Streets, part of Vietnam is again under occupation, this time by the Chinese military, but a protracted battle still rages in the south of the country,

The Hidden Keystone by Nathan Burrage My rating: 5 of 5 stars A marvelous blend of the historical and the fantastic.In the Holy Land at the end of the 11th Century, Crusader Godefroi de Bouillon prepares to wrest the holy city of Jerusalem from the Saracens. In France in 1307, Bertrand de Chatillon-sur-Seine is about

Plutoshine by Lucy KissickMy rating: 2 of 5 stars I tried hard to finish this book. I got to eighty per cent. But in the end I gave up because I just didn’t care about how it ended. Plutoshine defies expectations, but not in a good way. Which is a shame, because on paper the

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars In his Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel, Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky began a millennia-spanning story of failed and not-so-failed terraforming projects and the manipulation and ‘uplift’ of a growing number of non-human species. The first novel in the series plotted the evolution

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris My rating: 4 of 5 stars It’s impossible to talk about The Second Sleep without SPOILERS, so stop now if you intend to read the book. All civilisations think they are invulnerable. History warns us none is. 1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin My rating: 3 of 5 stars The cover blurb for The Dispossessed makes it sound like a thrilling exciting narrative, filled with tension and action: Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of

The Chanur Saga by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 5 of 5 stars I’m working my way through a re-read of this saga. First up: The Pride of Chanur. The The Pride of Chanur is a first contact chase drama that’s told with breakneck pacing while also unfolding a complex and richly detailed piece of worldbuilding.

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson My rating: 2 of 5 stars This is the second time I’ve tried to read Termination Shock and given up. This time I managed to get past the interminable section on the queen trying to land a plane, splashed through the truly comic book alligator attack and crashed into the

3 stars As one of Alastair Reynolds’s more sarcastic characters, such as Scorpio the Hyperpig – or Triumvir Ilia Volyova – might say, ‘you don’t read Alastair Reynolds for the breakneck, frenetic pacing.’ His dialogue also tends towards the wordy. But you do read Alastair Reynolds for the jaw-dropping concepts. In the case of Inhibitor

Hellburner by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 4 of 5 stars Hellburner is a direct sequel to Heavy Time and, according to Cherryh, these are the only two books that need to be read in order, which says something about how she’s constructed the whole Company Wars saga with multiple entry points into the narrative. Cherryh

Two episodes in and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has me well and truly hooked. The production looks beautiful. Shot in New Zealand, of course, and with an eye-watering per episode budget that means the CGI, sets and costumes are spectacular, no-one could fault the visuals. It also has the feel

World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’ve enjoyed the single-minded investigations of Hank Palace, resolutely sticking to his job while society disintegrates around him in the face of an impending and world-ending meteor strike, and World of Trouble rounds out the trilogy nicely. Ben Winters has done a

The Buried Ark by James Bradley My rating: 5 of 5 stars The first Book of the Change, The Silent Invasion, channelled classic YA speculative fiction like the Tripods and Tomorrow series and ended with one hell of a cliffhanger. See my earlier review on Goodreads. The Buried Ark picks up the action immediately after

Tiamat’s Wrath by James S.A. Corey My rating: 5 of 5 stars James SA Corey postponed the release of Tiamat’s Wrath so they could concentrate on getting it right. It was worth the wait. Persepolis Rising (book 7) was a difficult book, bringing in a significant time jump for the lead characters and ending on

Heavy Time by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Klondike days of asteroid mining are long over and it’s getting harder to make a living with the government and corporations slapping regulations over routes, assays, claims, flight certification. A lot of it the name of safety, but really it’s all about Earth

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin My rating: 2 of 5 stars When an SF book wins so many awards for best novel, it must be really good. That’s certainly what made me pick up Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem. And the first scene was really vivid: that body dangling on the fence! I know very

Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge My rating: 5 of 5 stars In 1984, I read Vernor Vinge’s Peace War when it was serialised in Analog Magazine. Years later elements of that story still stayed with me and – since this was the age of e-books – I decided to read it again. For obscure reasons,

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Stars Are Legion is refreshing on so many fronts. Firstly it’s a stand-alone not a trilogy, so not weighed down with all that entails. Secondly the world building and technology is visceral – literally: bio-organic spray-on spacesuits, walls and floors on

Lotus Blue by Cat Sparks My rating: 3 of 5 stars World building is the real star of Lotus Blue, the debut science fiction novel for Australian author Cat Sparks. Very quickly in this novel Sparks creates a vision of a future Australia – an already ancient land – that’s further weighed down by centuries