SFBook - 20+ Years of Reviews
Providing book reviews of speculative fiction since 1999. Read our story
I adore the fantasy genre and as someone who reads it a lot, I have seen the ebbs and flows in the genre over the years. There have always been outliers, but there is a certain style of fantasy that dominated for each of the decades. Until recently, I have read a lot of Low Fantasy, a genre low...
Your average heist movie ends in one of two ways; a cliffhanger or the job complete. You rarely get to see what happens to the criminals as they make it off with their ill-gotten gains, or when they are thrown into the slammer. Unless you are Oceans 11, then you just get a couple more heists a...
What makes a bunch of short stories gathered together a collection? It could be the works of the same author, or it could be some sort of theme that means they are all derived from the same place. A collection's origins can significantly impact the type of stories you are about to read. Is it an...
What makes a good Conan novel? It seems like a simple calculation, a brawny barbarian, a massive sword, wine, woman, and violence. Mix the lot into a pot and you have a Conan adventure to be proud of, except it is not that easy. Conan lives in a vibrant and complex world that can be stodgy to...
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Bone Silence is the third book in Alastair Reynolds Revenger series and follows on from the events of Shadow Captain and Revenger.
First off, if you haven't read the first two books in the series, I suggest you do before starting Bone Silence. You could read it stand alone but it...
When the apocalypse inevitably comes do you want to know about it? Would you like the chance to peer out of the window and see the world burning, perhaps you can make a run for the high ground? Another option is to live in pure ignorance underground, competing with your fellow residents for the...
What do you do with an aging character? Some authors choose to pretend that their characters are immortal and never age. This is great for churning out the content, but it does hamstring you into writing the same type of story as you can never move on in fear of making the protagonist too old....
I enjoy it when the publishing community gets together and decides to proclaim there is a new subgenre. These are a collection of books that have already been written but are now herded into a common bracket. Romantasy and Cosy Fantasy are doing great, and I have read a few of these. Low stake...
As a committed reader, you start to see the signs that you are living a long life. One stark reminder is when a favourite author dies. This has happened too often already for my liking; one particularly heavy hit was Sir Terry Pratchett. In a world in which authors continue to write into their...
Adrian Tchaikovsky has a talent for writing deep, meaningful scifi. He won the Arthur C Clarke award in 2016 for Children of Time and the 2019 BSFA best novel award for the follow-up Children of Ruin. There are few authors that can quite match his vision for non-human intelligence, or his flair...
Horror comes in many shapes and sizes. The horror could be on this plane of existence, a creature that stalks you and your family through generations. It could be even closer to home, the horror of the mundane, the terror of ordinary people willing to do anything to achieve their goals, even if...
Christmas has many traditions from trees to strange men sneaking down the chimney in the dead of night. One tradition I like is the different genres that tackle the season. There is something spooky about the dark nights and folk traditions that make Christmas Ghost Stories so good, but it is...
I do enjoy a set of short stories. There are typically two types that you can get, a collection, or a theme. The Price of Memories and Other Stories by Sally McBride is a classic style collection of an author’s works brought together over years into a curated whole. Are there themes that...
Comics have a complex history with some storylines going back decades. Even the relatively new superheroes can have intricate lore. Moon Knight has had plenty of time to muddy the waters with almost 50 years of stories to look back on, but it is not the depth of the stories that make Moon Knight...
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
I have always enjoyed the Star Wars extended universe novels, be they the Legend set, or the newer relaunched series. The books allow us to explore the Skywalker saga in more depth, but for me the most fun is exploring the deeper cuts. I have read fantastic novels that have delved into the lives...
The creation of a new subgenre comes fraught with danger, there may be a good reason it did not arise before. I am seeing an increase in what can be called Cosy Fantasy, novels that have many of the tropes of the genre but concentrate on character interaction over the action. The threat is that...
You do not have to delve onto the fiction shelves to find horror, you can just watch the news. Wars breaking out, people starving. Closer to home there are murders and violence. Most of us are cocooned from these horrors, living in bubbles of our own creation, but some horrors we cannot escape;...
How big does a cult have to be to become a cult? Does it have to be thousands of people? Hundreds? Tens? Could one family be a cult? If you brought your children up in a remote location without access to the internet and media, it may be possible to make them believe almost anything. Like a tale...
People read for all sorts of reasons. I read to escape and have fun, my preference is for high action and laughs, but I understand that some people like to be challenged by their reading. This could be a complex Space Opera, or a piece of literature that tackles the life of a downtrodden mother...
Science Fiction is fun in so many ways and one of the most entertaining games to play is to think about if. What is Nickola Tesla invented a way to harness an all-powerful energy? Would such power be safe to use, not only for an individual, but for a nation? This was an era of World Wars; more...
Book of the month
Book Awards
Science fiction, fantasy & horror book reviews
SFBook.com is one of the oldest book review sites on the internet, founded back in 1999 in an age before phones became smart and when the leading figure of the free world was respected and even occasionally admired. A non profit site primarily aimed at the Science fiction, fantasy and horror genres (although we do have a growing list of general fiction). We strive to feature only the very best in Science fiction, fantasy, horror and speculative novels. We like to think we write personal, unique and constructive reviews.
We are constantly evolving and expanding the web site and strive to make the site a richer experience for the visitor. If you have any suggestions, or constructive feedback we'd love to hear from you.
We have dedicated pages for Science fiction book reviews as well as fantasy book reviews and horror book reviews but you can also browse by author, publisher, name, series or Sub Genre.
Reviews are provided by a team of regular and guest reviewers from around the world, mostly based in the USA and the UK. These include Ant - the site editor, Allen Stroud - chair of the BSFA and Sam Tyler, reviewer extraordinaire. We try our very best to prevent giving away any spoilers so that the reading experience remains as fresh as possible. Where spoilers are mentioned, we do our best to let you know in advance. We firmly believe that life is too short to struggle through a book you are not enjoying so often the reviews you see will be the books we've made it through to the end. However if you want to know about a book not listed, please feel free to get in touch.
If you are a publisher, author or authors agent who would like to see a book reviewed you can reach us on the Contact Us page. If you'd like to review books or related articles to feature on the site, get in touch with Ant.
Disclaimer: This is a disclaimer about the site in general and it's reviewers. As mentioned above this site is completely non-profit. The site owner (Ant) hates to see websites plastered with adverts and as such advertising is pretty much banned from the site. None of our reviewers accept any monetary remuneration or gifts for the reviews we provide and we not employed by any publisher or author. We do however accept advanced reading copies of books by authors and publishers so that we can review their work. The reviews on the site are not biased in any way and purely reflect the opinion of the reviewer.
Cookies and Ads We believe in privacy and don't store personal information about our visitors. We are one of the few sites in the internet who are cookie free. We also don't like the proliferation of advertisements that dominate the modern internet and as such you will not find adverts of any kind on this site.