SFBook - 20+ Years of Reviews
Providing book reviews of speculative fiction since 1999. Read our story
Are you playing the game? Made you look. The idea of a metagame that embroils a hero is not a new one, but it is hard to pull off. The amount of financial resources and secrecy that is required to convince Michael Douglas to jump off a building is beyond what the...
I have always wondered how people can believe in some things but not others. If you have a world that has vampires roaming at night, what makes bloodsuckers so great that they get to be the only things that bump in the night? Ry Herman already introduced us to the idea of...
by Ry Herman
I have always been fascinated by the period when Odysseus, great hero of Greek mythology, became the World’s Biggest Asshole.
That probably requires some explanation. The Greek myths were never written down in any single, canonical text. They changed over time, and the shifting details could radically alter the meaning. The earliest stories of Odysseus depict him as a hero with a keen mind and a silver...
Haimey is the engineer aboard the Singer, an interstellar salvage vessel named after its shipboard Intelligence. Haimey is genetically modified for zero-G, and she has brain-enhancing implants that connect her to the rest of the crew and chemically manage her emotional state. Haimey, Singer, and...
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."
When I think about heroism I often think about the conversation between Cat and Rimmer in Red Dwarf. There‘s an old cat proverb that goes, "It's better to live one hour as a tiger than an entire lifetime as a worm.” There's an old human proverb...
Asimov’s ‘Three laws of Robotics’ have become synonymous with any book that contains robots. Nearly all these books will not allow their robots to hurt humans, but what happens if these rules broke? In C. Robert Cargill’s Day...
Of the many things that the pandemic has taught us, it is that we can work well online. I have completed projects online with never meeting my team or the stakeholders in person. What it has also taught me us is about Digital Poverty. Although I may have been happy to work in the...
Once a noble lord, after a failure on the field of battle, Silas Bershad "The Flawless" was stripped of all titles and forced into the life of a dragonslayer, moving from one perilous hunt to the next. Stalking dragons and collecting their valuable oil, his only escape seems to be death. But...
Mystery is a powerful tool. You can exude a sense of power from the shadows that may not be true if a light was shined on you. The premise of T.S. Willberg’s Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder begins thus, with a mysterious detective agency, but we...
I have conversations with my colleagues and a surprising number of them are dismissive of Science Fiction as being too farfetched and complicated. This is not true, as it is such a wide genre. There are Sci Fi books that will cater for readers who only want a touch of the unreal, but there...
For many people, the leading writer of speculative fiction in the 90s and 00s was Michael Crichton who was able to marry a level of scientific reality with some outrageous ideas. A theme park full of dinosaurs, intelligent apes, nanobots that can kill? He was able...
Failed science writer Alex Dolan is just floating along, struggling to find work when multi-billionaire Stanislaw Clayton provides a surprising, well-paid offer out of the blue. He wants Alex to write a book about the world's first privately funded high-energy physics facility - the...
Some of my favourite Urban Fantasy is about a normal world that is unaware of the creatures that lurk in the night. Whilst we are all safely asleep, there is are demons and witches lurking around the corner. Most of us will never even know that these things exist,...
I find it amazing how easy it is to miss things that are right on your doorstep. I grabbed this book online (not by choice, this was before the shops had re-opened) because I was after some easy reading. I often find good urban fantasy easy and immersive. It was only after actually picking the...
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Stories about monsters were told back in the day as a way of making people scared. And they should be. How do you stop a curious child from walking in the woods at night or going for a swim in a deep lagoon? You speak of vampires, werewolves and merfolk that...
For a span of twenty years, genre fiction fans had the opportunity to live through what many call the greatest science fiction tale of all tune, Frank Herbet’s epic Dune series. The saga consists of six novels: Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God...
The Alien franchise can be seen as one of two things: an awesome series of Space based horror and action stories, or a textbook example of Corporate Malfeasance. The Aliens may be the most reoccurring characters, but the second is not Ripley, it is Weyland...
Australian authors of dark fiction often remain scarcely known outside their country and that’s a shame because the quality of their work is usually very good.
The present volume is the debut collection by Rebecca Fraser, a mix of short stories, flash fiction and dark poems....
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