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The tale is often told from the perspective of the victor, distorting the truth to make them look better. In an epic poem like Beowulf, it all points to one man being the hero, but what if there is more to the story. Shield Maiden by Sharon Emmerichs retells the final part of Beowulf’s...
We Brits have somewhat of a reputation on the international stage as stirring up trouble from behind the curtain. We were accused of it during the lead up to the World Wars and even today regimes will cite the UK as instigating unrest. Us, never! The likes of James Bond and David Gilman’s...
Twins have always had a mystery around them. Two people brought up so closely together that they have their own language. In Michael Ferris Gibson and Imani Josey’s Babylon Twin series, the language that the twins use is called the Twinkling, a speech so intuitive that only they can...
Any house of a decent age is haunted. There are no spectres, but there are ghosts of memories, the people that lived and died there over the years. I grew up in a house that was once a Victorian police station and then a Greengrocers. As I moved out, my parents stayed. When they left, instead of...
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."
I picked this book up some time ago as I like tales of immortality and time and what not, and it seemed intriguing that the same author who wrote The boy in the striped pajamas would write an historical fantasy. Of course it's one of those books that people who don't like fantasy will tell...
When the apocalypse happens, science fiction has taught us that some of us will run below and others will be left on the surface. Pick a side. Down below could be a Fallout or Wool situation, better than being on the surface, dead or a mutant. Up above could be The Time Machine or Mary...
Witches have a bad reputation, green skinned, covered in warts and prone to stealing children so that they can use their bones for broth. People feared the idea of witches so much that they would place innocent people on trial. Don’t they realise that if witches were as powerful as they...
I find sometimes find myself wondering how a dystopian world became so bad. What happened in a society that they thought making children battle to the death was a good idea? Or how a world forced woman to bear children? Sometimes it is better not to know how a society got there, but...
Given a time machine where would you travel? Reading a lot of Historic Fiction as taught me that the Roman Empire would not be my choice. Life was hard and short for many people and that included many of the emperors. It could be a challenging time to survive in. Becoming a...
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...
I am not one to look back on my life, preferring to live and enjoy what I have in the present, but when I do it is often about my years at school and University. That person I could have treated better or the time I stood up in assembly by mistake. The events felt at huge at the time, but in...
Hammered is the third book in Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles series, following the story of Atticus O'Sullivan, a 2,000-year-old druid who runs a bookstore in Tempe, Arizona.
The plot revolves around Atticus trying to defend himself and his store from the wrath of the Norse god...
Hexed is the second book in Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles, a series of urban fantasy novels featuring the adventures of Atticus O'Sullivan, a two-thousand-year-old druid who is trying to keep a low profile in modern-day Tempe, Arizona.
The story picks up where the first book,...
Hounded is the first book in Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles, a series of urban fantasy novels that follow the adventures of Atticus O'Sullivan, a 2,000-year-old druid living in modern-day Arizona. The story begins with Atticus, who has managed to keep his true identity and magical...
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
This time last year, I finally got around to reading the 1973 annual world's best science fiction, which had some interesting stories, but were all written by male, American authors. Hardly world fiction at all, and even then not the best of the previous 12 months. Nebula award stories...
It should not matter what format you ingest a novel – on paper, on the screen or even via audio, but it does. I do not always get on with audio as I am such a fast reader, even on speed up the narrator cannot keep up with my awful lack of attention. However, the right book works as an...
The Doctor can travel anywhere in the Universe and at any time. He can witness the last days of existence or visit a planet of peace. Or he could visit Tara, a planet that seems like our own feudal era Britain, but with added androids. And some odd feeling 70s chauvinism. Target Books have...
As a species we are doing a good enough job of messing up our own chances of survival, but what if I told you that we could also mess up another distant planet too? In Stephan George’s The Distant Stars Are My Only Friends, Arax is a traveller who does not go into space, but instead...
I have read more than my fair share of fantasy novels and I love them. As a rule, they fall into a couple of camps on how they are narrated – from a single point of view, or through the eyes of several people, normally 3-7. Leaping from one character and back again works in the genre as it...
The humble Private Investigator is a put-upon character, often lonely, whenever they find love, that love seems to end up dead. No wonder so many of them have a problem with drink, gambling, or drugs – perhaps a mix of all three. Few PIs can hold a candle to Happy Doll, he is not even a PI...
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