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Providing book reviews of speculative fiction since 1999. Read our story
Melek Ahmar, the Lord of Mars, the Red King, the Lord of Tuesday, Most August Rajah of Djinn, wakes up three millennia after being knocked out cold in a bar fight. Though his magic is weak at first from disuse, he struggles out of his stone sarcophagus, which is sealed with aging spells cast by...
Europe in Autumn was my first experience of Dave Hutchinson's unique and astonishing voice. It is simply sublime fiction, a deep and intelligent story and one of my favourite reads of recent times. It was impressive enough to win SFBook Book of the Year in 2014. Europe at Midnight is the much...
Wars can go on for years. Not just the moments of action in which thousands of people die, but the cold wars between. Different factions may have an uneasy peace, but is this peace just an excuse to build for the next conflict? You may not imagine that Star Trek: The Next Generation is the best...
I've always said that Hutchinson is an under-appreciated author. His Europe series not only being an accomplished trilogy, but also somewhat prophetic given the UK's current realtionship with the EU.
Acadie is a step away from his near-future,alternative fiction series,...
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
What if God was one of us? Just an Artificial Intelligence like one of us. Just a stranger on the internet, trying to wreak our lives. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Bible will know that God can be a little tricksy. If that God can flood the world or demand you sacrifice your child, what...
Following the events of A Time of Dread, this book raises the stakes even further. Drem and friends flee the horrors at Starstone Lake. They must warn the Order of the Bright Star that a Demon has risen, but Fritha, the Demon's high Priestess has other ideas and is hot on their heels....
The Star Wars tie in novels have a rich and varied galaxy to explore. An author can reach into the distant past or take on the history of an obscure character. Sometimes you just want to read about the big hitters. What happens between those massive blockbuster movies? Whilst we are waiting for...
A Memory called Empire is the debut of Arkady Martine, although reading the book you'd be forgiven for thinking she's been writing best-sellers for years.
The vast, interstellar Empire of the Teixcalaanli have appointed Mahit Dzmare as new Ambassador to the capital. When she arrives she...
Computer Games used to be a child’s plaything, but as gamers grow older and are still playing this is no longer the case (if it ever was). As many gamers mature their reflexes deaden and will they one day even be able to pick up a conventional controller? Something like Virtual Reality may...
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...
We are only one mutation away from an organism that could wipe out humans. Sound all dystopian and farfetched? This is what I was reading in the paper this very morning as super bugs are becoming increasingly prevalent and our conventional medicines are having no effect. David Koepp is an...
No Way is the follow up to the gripping thriller One Way. A perilous journey to the Red Planet by a group of convicts. Deciding that it was much more economically viable to train people that would have otherwise rotted in a jail rather than a group of experienced and highly trained...
Star Wars is a franchise rich with great characters, but who to choose? It is tricky writing a cannon book on the likes of likes Han Solo or Rey lest you impinge on the films themselves. Thankfully, with such an abundance of history to choose from, there is always an interesting character to...
The sequel to the 2016 Clarke Award winner, Children of Time, the story of the far future human and spider civilisations picks up several generations after the events at the end of the previous novel.
A terraforming team, led by Dirsa Senkovi and Yusuf Baltiel discover alien life on a...
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
A fantasy writer needs to be aware that they could fall into a rut. Another trilogy of books set in the same world, with similar characters doing similar things. This may appease those fans that fear change, but to drive themselves as a writer it is important to evolve; even if evolving within...
Heroic Fantasy doesn't always get the credit it deserves, but when done well can be powerful, energetic and immersive fiction. Sky in the Deep is one of the best examples of recent times and an equal to Gemmell's past stories.
The story follows Eelyn, a member of the Aska...
Sherlock Holmes is long dead, but this has not stopped the character’s legacy from living on. Sherlock was incredibly popular in his Victorian heyday, but the number of TV shows, films and books still being made today suggests that this popularity is still the case. Taking the concept of...
Crowfall is the third novel in Ed McDonald's Raven's Mark series, following on from Blackwing and Ravencry. If you haven't read the previous two books I recommend you do so before reading this book, or indeed this review.
Some time has passed since the events of Ravencry,...
There is an inherent problem with superheroes. Sometimes they are just too super. How is any mortal person meant to take down a being that can fly into the sun or bounce bullets off their bracelets? It is up to the comic creators to come up with an enemy that will match the super heroics with...
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...
In Stephen Baxter's collaboration with the late Terry Pratchett, he imagined that there were a limitless number of parallel dimensions just a small step away, each with a slightly different version of Earth (although none others of which contained indigenous humans). In his latest novel, World...
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...
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