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I enjoy genre books of all kinds. I love a good kidnapping story as a well-oiled plan starts to unravel. I also like a horror story about the Old Gods, of human sacrifices and bloody gore. What you don’t normally get is a story that is both. The kidnapping crew in Kit Burgoyne’s The...
If pop culture has only taught me one thing it is that siding with the creatures from other realms is not a great idea. They tend to renege on contracts once they have what they want, usually via sucking your brain out through your nose. Also, the partnerships are not normally people you would...
Being successful and superrich would be great to allow you to do what you want, but it also comes with limitations. My mother never wanted to be too rich as she thought one of us would get kidnapped. She needn’t have worried had she made a deal with a demon, if anyone had tried to take one...
I love a good magic system in a fantasy novel, one that sets the rules in an interesting way and is still able to amaze. It is one of the reasons that I am not a huge fan of Fae magic with all its side clauses and tricks. You never know what you are really going to get or what you can trust,...
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
It's 2118 and humanity has not only got over the coronavirus, but have reached out into space - colonising the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Europa. It's still early days of mankind's expansion though and the ship Khidr is part of a small fleet who travel between the different colonies, assisting the...
There are certain historic events that I return to in fiction as no matter how many times I have read about them, authors have found new ways of exploring the past. I must have read about Caesar’s rise and fall twenty times or more, but there is room for more retellings. Caesar’s Spy...
As a Librarian I deal regularly with some of the topics raised in Ugo Bienvenu’s System Preference. I do not have firsthand experience of a robot bringing up my children, but I do know about data; what needs to be stored and what needs to be deleted. Do we just keep it all in the hopes...
If you read about the gods, most of them are a little messed up. If they are not descending to pretend to be a swan so they can sleep with woman, they are basically ignoring all the human suffering going on. Are gods omnipotent or just much more powerful than humans? Everything feels like...
There is something deeply pleasant about reading a classic whodunnit from the Golden Age of crime writing. Back in the day it felt that there was a proper set of rules to a crime and solving it. Set so long ago that people call these cases cozy but is there anything cozy about murder? I may have...
Resilient is the second book in Allen Stroud's Fractal series, picking up right after the events of Fearless. As such it's impossible not to provide some minor spoilers about Fearless while talking about Resilient. I will however try my best to give away as little as possible, and anything...
What do you want from a collection of horror short stories? A complex mix of different styles and authors, or a single voice? When it comes to horror, I want them to feel like a quick punch to the guts, only for you to look down and find that the punch was more of a stab. Clay McLeod Chapman...
Murder is in the eye of the beholder and Brandi Bradley’s Pretty Girls Get Away with Murder is the perfect example of how different people can see the same events. The police are always suspicious, open to any leads, until they find the person they think is the prime suspect. This suspect...
I try not to collect too much stuff, choosing to live in the now. If I kept every book that I ever read, every toy that I ever played with, or birthday card I received, I would have no room in my house. I certainly do not keep things “mint in box.” You could have an attic full...
Do you believe in luck? Gambling sites and Casinos hope you do as you believe there is a chance that you will win big. You may just do that, but there is a reason some of the richest people in the UK own gambling websites, the house always wins. You may win big, but elsewhere someone is losing...
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
I have always appeciated the rich tapestry that the extended Star Wars Universe has given the reader. Whilst the films are few and far between, and the TV shows more abundant but still limited, it is the books that allow fans to deep dive into characters and places that may not get as much love...
Conan was a character that had a rich and long life. You may be a fan of the films and only imagine the man as a loincloth wearing barbarian, cleaving the heads of various cult leaders. That is a large part of his appeal, but he was also a bandit leader, pirate and eventually a King. In fact, he...
I love programming because I find it the opposite of magic. I find it logic. I know that if I tackle a problem using certain rules I will finally get it to work. When I show a person the finalised product, they often comment that it seems like magic, but it is not. It is just hardwork,...
I enjoy reading about the occult in contrasting times in history. If someone came up to a modern person and said there was a witch in the woods stealing children, they would raise an eyebrow and swiftly walk in the opposite direction. A couple of hundred years earlier around the same woods the...
The fantasy genre is a form of comfort reading for me. The genre often follows similar tropes, and you can get into the rhythm of the story quickly. However, increasingly often in modern fantasy, authors are creating new and challenging ideas to shake up the genre. Magical systems are an area...
I stumbled across this one at WorldCon in Glasgow last year. You know how it is, wandering the dealer's room, picking up flyers, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone who looks like they want to talk about their self-published epic. But I’d previously attended a panel about...
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