SFBook - 20+ Years of Reviews
Providing book reviews of speculative fiction since 1999. Read our story
Have you ever sat down and read some Fairy Tales to your children? Not the sanitised versions that we read today, but the originals. If you have, you gave the kids nightmares as these are stories not about happiness and magic but of...
I love the ocean. I love its crash and roar, I love how it purrs violently at night. I love it in a storm, on a clear calm day, or when the full moon is sitting just above the horizon and turning all that black water to silver. I’m also terrified of it. It’s a force of nature: it doesn’t care that you’re there, you can’t negotiate with it, you don’t matter. It’ll eat you up, dash you on rocks, drag...
When an intellectual property becomes huge it can go one of two ways, a homogeneous blob of the same stories on repeat, or a vibrant universe full of different adventures. Star Wars was already massive, but recently has branched out even wider. This included a reset of the...
David Moody has been writing his Hater series (which has been optioned for a film by Universal Studios) since 2006, originally with the books Hater, Dog Blood and Them or Us. Then in 2017 he started from the beginning of the story again but from a totally different perspective with One of...
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
The genre of Science Fiction has always been a wide one in terms of ideas. You can set a book on our own Earth with only one or two tweaks to the norm. This Speculative Fiction is Sci Fi, but so are the Space Operas that span eons and are inhabited by alien races. Although the nature of Sci Fi...
The life of a fantasy hero is never easy. They are often thrust into an adventure not of their choosing, losing those that they love on the way towards an objective that seems impossible to meet. In C L Clark’s Unbroken, one of the protagonists is Touraine, a...
They all tell you that having children is not easy, but nothing prepared us for the first six weeks of having a defenceless little tyke in the house. You may have read the books, been to a few classes or asked relatives and friends, but when it comes down to it, this is all on your...
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...
I was walking down a towpath when I heard that my nephew had been born. I almost tripped into the glossy water as I flapped about with the news. I wanted to tell everyone: the person at the window of the boat we’d just passed, the dog walker being pulled along by a spotty terrier. My husband and I were boaters then. We’d been teachers before and now we’d become boaters. Both felt like full time occupations.
It was at...
Stephen King is rightly one of the bestselling genre writers of all time as he is not only prolific, but also the writer of some classics. Like many fans of horror, I read his back catalogue as a teenager and read terrific...
Growing up my group of friends was obsessed with America and all wanted to move there. They had all been taken in by the glossy American films and TV shows that suggested that even if you were unemployed, you would own a swanky loft apartment. I had relatives who live there and was far...
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...
If the past twelve months has taught us anything is that rules will only work so well. One person may stick fast the letter of the law, another may bend them a little, another may ignore them completely. All three believe they are doing the right thing and all three may be at...
One of my favourite characters to write for The Second Bell is also one of the least loveable characters, from the point of view of a reader.
Kalina is a young woman, living in the striga village, without any family and friends to claim her. Within their community’s the ultimate law is to bring the strigas’ other hearts under control. Self-knowledge and self-exploration are forbidden, for fear the...
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others quite different. If you would like to go straight to the segment unique to this review, please start with paragraph 4.
Drafting a book must be like standing in...
Fair warning, this isn't going to be a normal review, it's the first one I've written post-covid and is much more personal than usual.
Some years ago, my father started reading again. Previous to that he hadn't read much for the last few decades outside of Haynes manuals and instruction...
Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others quite different. If you would like to go straight to the segment unique to this review, please start with paragraph 4.
Drafting a book must be like standing...
Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others quite different. If you would like to go straight to the segment unique to this review, please start with paragraph 4.
Drafting a...
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.
Cookie (Biscuit) Consumption: As with every site on the internet, We (SFBook.com) do store Cookie however these are minimal, totally anonymous and purely consumed by Google Analytics for traffic analysis. This data is mainly used to provide bragging rights as to how many wonderful visitors happen upon our humble domain. Please visit as often as you can so more Cookies (Biscuits) can be consumed.