SFBook - 20+ Years of Reviews
Providing book reviews of speculative fiction since 1999. Read our story
I read and listen to books in all formats, but still prefer the feel of paper in my hand. Audiobooks are great for the commute, but they are just not pacy enough for me, I read quickly, and a narrator often seems to go in slow motion even at 1.5 speed. 2000AD and Penguin Audio must know my brain...
Science Fiction writers love a dystopia, there are so many ways that it could all go wrong. Overpopulation is one. It not a pleasant thing to think about, but we already use too many of the world’s finite resources and as the population grows, this is going to get even worse. In The...
Horror is a wonderful genre full of fear, but it does not often scare me. I am not afraid of monsters that go bump in the night because I am a rational human being who knows they don’t exist. However, some horror does get to me; anything that threatens children or based on real life...
We have all come to loath the Flu virus and its even worse cousin, but how are we as humans to prevent the spread of life? It will find a way. For mammals it is making babies, for a virus it is infiltrating a host and multiplying, then moving onto the next host. The virus does not care that...
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
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...
Having grown up in a village, life there had its pros and its cons. There is a real sense of community, and everyone knows each other. Great, but also not so great. Any small incident can become gossip, no matter how benign, so I can only imagine what would happen should a fire break...
Science fiction is a brilliant tool for pondering what happens after the inevitable fall of humans. There is only so long that the Earth can sustain us, but that does not mean that other civilisations may not develop after. Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley is a Sci Fi mystery told from the...
I am at an age where I genuinely believe that Science Fiction is the best genre there is and I have read enough books of all types to have developed this opinion. I love it because it can be so many different things. Space opera to speculative fiction. A Sci Fi book can also be a riddle...
A college student sits alone. Their housemates are away for Christmas, and a storm howls beyond the walls, the branches of a tree tap-tap-tapping against the window. The wind drops for a moment, and in the pause they hear a creak on the stairs, a footfall where there should be none. Their breath catches in their throat.
The woodsman nails a plank across the window to his hut, making sure to hammer those tacks all the way in. He knows...
One of those books I missed the first time around, The stone man is the first in a series of science fiction thrillers. It looks like it's already become a bit of a self-published success story and the second in the series, The empty men is out now.
The story begins on one July afternoon...
Placing a restriction on yourself should not be a freeing experience, but the opposite can be true, especially in the arts. Making films under strict rules can lead to innovation as film makers struggle to achieve their vision under restraints. Creating an anthology about one subject matter...
Sherlock Holmes is such an iconic figure that it is easy to believe that he was real. A great detective walking the streets of Late Victorian London solving crimes that conventional police could not hope to solve. But he was not real, neither was Watson and they are both out of copyright which...
Time travel is fascinating, it is also some of the most fictional science fiction you will ever get. What has happened must have happened, lest you rip apart your universe in a paradox. The scientists in A. G. Riddle’s Lost in Time seem to have found a workaround as they send the worst...
The sense of adventure and bravery that someone needed to explore space in the 60s and 70s is beyond me. All that separates you from the vacuum of space is a few sheets of glass and metal. The technology onboard is simpler than the type of things you would get in a child’s electronic...
Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
Fantasy does not have to be massive epics set over several books that see dynasties rise and fall. Some of the best modern fantasy books concentrate on the characters that may have hidden in the background of Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. The humble conman for instance and their crew. I...
I love science fiction, but it can sometimes be hard to relate to the characters if they are flying spaceships in far off galaxies. Sometimes it is nice to read something a little closer to home, bizarre things happening to normal people. David Quantick’s Ricky’s Hand is a twisted...
James Bond has evolved through the decades from the original Ian Fleming books to a world-famous series of films and even classic computer games, but at their heart the best Bonds all hark back to Fleming’s style. Double or Nothing by Kim Sherwood is a surprise then as it is a Bond book...
The supernatural has always worked well with noir as they are both genres of the night. It is only an undead hop and skip between a detective finding a corpse in the alley and that corpse waking up. Conan Doyle walked the line between the supernatural and the super-real, Holmes always discovered...
No matter how many books are in a series and how long the journey, fantasy stories do end. But we all know that they never do. There is always an itch to discover what happened next, or what happened before, a rich lore and world to explore further. In Stephen Aryan’s The Coward we already...
Humanity is a parasite sucking the recourses from the Earth until there are no more. Like a remora attached to the undercarriage of a shark, humans will one day need find a new host. The alternative is to change our ways, but that does not seem likely. Titan Hoppers by Rob J Hayes follows a...
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