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The movie tie in novel is much maligned but I have always had a soft spot for them. I have spent many a pleasurable hour with the works of tie in master Alan Dean Foster who was able to improve several mediocre films with his prose. Films are great at bombastic action, but they often fail to...
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....
Humans always think we are special when it comes to science fiction. Somehow, we are better than the multitude of other alien races out there. How many times has Kirk used “this human emotion called love,” to win the day, or how often has an invading alien army been conquered by...
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...
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
The future could be Utopian, but if the vast majority of science fiction novels have taught us only one thing: it’s going to be Dystopian. The setting of Myke Cole’s Sixteenth Watch promises to be an uplifting one as humans have populated the moon and therefore found the resources...
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...
Above all genres, science fiction is my favourite. Why? Because anything can happen. You can have epic space battles between alien races you cannot pronounce or go in the other direction and create a subtle alternative reality where words have the power to kill. Ideas run the entire gamete and...
Post-Katrina New Orleans is haunted by history and destruction. Similar burdens are shouldered by the Street Magician Jude Dubuisson. He's got a gift of finding things people have lost - inherited from an unknown father. His gift has become an almost overwhelming curse following the storm, with...
‘It’s the greatest thing that’s happened to us since Maggie took us into the Falklands.’ This is the voxpop that sticks in my mind: a Benidorm resident quizzed on Brexit, one of many in the days after the 2019 election and just before our EU membership expired quietly in a corner with barely a whimper. Never mind whether the Falklands was triumph or absurdity nor whether Thatcher was hero or villain. What surprised me...
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...
Death is not something that people like to think about, but without death how are we to live? Within all of us in the unspoken knowledge that one day we will die. For this reason, we venture forth, live, breath, love and laugh. Some of us more than others, but without death would we even bother?...
A Hopeful Future
Review kindly provided by Vanessa Smyth.
Welcome to the third and latest instalment in The Wayfarers series, Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers. This current narrative is set within the same captivating universe as the first two books and, despite...
Let’s talk movies… sort of.
Okay, let’s actually talk movie deals and taking books to the silver screen. A thing that authors get asked a lot is, “Why don’t you make your book into a movie?” Ah, if only it were that easy. There is, of course, a lovely complement contained in that question. The reader is saying, “Hey, I think your book would make a great movie,”...
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.
Time is relative. We use this term in our everyday lives to explain why boring tasks seem to last an age, but the day flies by when we are having fun. Sounds good, but it is not what Einstein had in mind. His thought process was far more interested in physics and what happens as we approach the...
Jo Walton is a multi-award winning, talented and often under-appreciated author. A number of her novels examine philosophy, religion, divinity and humanity. Lent continues some of these themes along with her knack for creating irresistible, thoughtful and engaging fiction.
Girolamo...
Offer me a time machine and I would travel no further back than the 1980s. This would allow me to place loads of bets on sporting events I know the results to and invest in Apple Computers. You would not see me travelling hundreds of years into the future or the past, are you mad? The 1980s were...
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...
To the ill-informed all fantasy books must look the same. They are about elves and dwarves, just retelling The Lord of the Rings repeatedly, aren’t they? Fans of the genre know that this is anything but the truth. Fantasy is an evolving genre that encompasses high and low, fantastical and...
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...
The movie industry is seen as all glitz and glamour, but just beneath the surface Donald E. Westlake suggests that it is made up of lies and even murder. What type of person is drawn to an industry where you pretend to be fake – fake people. In Double Feature, two of Westlake’s...
The first in the Eidyn series, The Lost War begins its story part way through, in the aftermath of a ruinous war for the kingdom of Eidyn. The location of the opening scenes, in a tavern no less, and the easy interplay of two of the main characters Aranok the draoidh and Allandria, his bodyguard...
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