Antony Jones
Books reviewed by Ant (857)
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FantasyKells Legend is the first volume in the Clockwork Vampires Chronicles and has been written by Andy Remic. Without warning came the vast albino army, the army of iron, invading Falanor from the north. To have any hope of survival a small band set off to warn the King. The band leaves quickly and with...
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Science FictionDreadnought is the fourth Volume in the H.I.V.E (Higher Institute of Villainous Education) Young Adult series, written by Mark Walden. Hive is a school where villains rule, students are trained to be the best at the worst in the hope they will become the next great super-villian. One of the most pow...
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Science FictionJust Another Judgement Day is the ninth volume of Simon R. Green's Nightside sequence, published in hardback by Ace in January 2009, and a useful demonstration of why long-running urban fantasy series end up the way they do. Green has been writing the Nightside since 2003. He produces these books at...
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Science FictionGalileo’s Dream is a brand new novel from Kim Stanley Robinson and follows Galileo on an amazing journey from the dawn of the modern age to a future on the brink of a scientific breakthrough. While on the brink of the modern world, Late Renaissance Italy is still surrounded by Alchemy and the teachi...
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FantasyNekropolis is the first volume in a new series of fantasy horror, written by Tim Waggoner and is based on his novella Necropolis. Matt Richter is a former cop now a private eye with a big difference, he is a zombie (could happen to anyone really). A zombie private detective does have it's advantages...
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Science FictionPassengers to Sentience is a science fiction novel and is the debut of the author Peter Salisbury. The Human race has reached the corners of the galaxy, colonising many worlds and enjoying advanced technology such as blindingly fast Data Transmission, organic metal alloys and the succesful manipulat...
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Science FictionBlack Light is an original science fiction novel, written by Christian Tremain. Josh Brenin is going through some pretty tough times. Since he lost his wife in a car crash, Josh has been unable to adequately deal with life. He loses his high paid exceutive job and begins to suffer from insomnia, cau...
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Science FictionThe Darwinian Extension: Initiation, is the first volume in a trilogy of novels from author Hylton H Smith. The Darwinian Extension begins in 2033, with a planned mission to populate Mars. The mission is not one of simple habitation however, but one of true colonisation including terraforming, resea...
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Science FictionVillain.net: Power Surge is the 3rd volume in the Villain.net series, one half of the merged series (with Hero.com) from the author Andy Briggs. Jake Hunter is now on the council of evil and is finally in a position to extract revenge on those most deserving. He also has a mission, to restore his fa...
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Science FictionFurnace: Solitary is a young adult science fiction novel, the second volume in the Furnace series by Alexander Gordon Smith. Furnace Prison is located a mile beneath the surface of the planet, a place where juveniles are sentenced to life imprisonment with no hope of release, a place where death is...
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Science FictionBringing forth the end of days is a science fiction novel of post apocalypse survival, and is the debut novel of Simon Law. The year is 2013 and World War 3 has scorched the earth, on top of a biological attack that has destroyed all plant life, leaving a world without life giving oxygen. Civilisati...
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FantasyDrood is an 800-page historical novel by Dan Simmons, published in 2009, and on the face of it that page count should be a warning. It mostly isn't. The premise comes wrapped in a conceit: the book purports to be a secret manuscript by Wilkie Collins, friend and rival to Charles Dickens, sealed away...
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FantasyBeautiful Dead: Jonas is the first volume in a new series by Eden Maguire. A young adult novel, Jonas follows the events surrounding the pupils of Ellerton High. Phoenix is the fourth teenager to died within the space of a year, the victim of a knife attack. The three previous deaths, Jonas in a mot...
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Science FictionFurnace: Lockdown is a young adult science fiction novel and is the first volume in the Furnace series, written by Alexander Gordon Smith. The Furnace Penitentiary is an underground prison, buried a mile beneath the earth's surface, where juveniles are sentenced for life, with no hope and no chance...
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FantasyDragonfly Falling is the second book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt sequence, published in 2009 and following directly on from Empire in Black and Gold. The premise of the whole series, just to get this out of the way early, is insect people. Tchaikovsky has built a secondary world in wh...
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Science FictionFrankenstein , or The Modern Prometheus, is a novel by Mary Shelley, first published anonymously in London in January 1818. It is a book that almost everyone in the English-speaking world has an opinion on, and a surprising number of them have never read. Most of those opinions are about the wrong c...
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FantasyEmpress is the first volume of the Godspeaker trilogy, by Australian author Karen Miller, and a book that does something unusual enough to be worth describing carefully. Most fantasy novels with a slave-girl protagonist follow a fairly well-marked road: the heroine is mistreated, escapes, gathers al...
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FantasyLamentation is the debut novel of Ken Scholes, published by Tor in February 2009, and the first volume of what is announced as a five-book sequence called The Psalms of Isaak. Scholes has been a name in the American short-fiction scene for some years, with a Writers of the Future win and a sheaf of...
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FantasyWho is Charlie Keeper, a young adult fantasy novel written and self published by Marcus Alexander with original Artwork by Lobak Oren. This novel has created such a stir that Graffiti artists, including the Corrupt Government Crew have previously tagged Charlie Keeper inspired characters around Lond...
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FantasyA surfeit of mandrake is a short story Anthology which includes elements of fantasy, science fiction, history poems and original artwork. Edited by Chaz Wood and written by a diverse group of Dundonian's. Surfeit - "An excessive amount of something" Mandrake - a plant belonging to the nightshades fa...
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Science FictionThis Omnibus Edition Includes the First 4 books in the "Hitchhikers guide Trilogy" 5 book set. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is also the title of the first of five books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction series by Douglas Adams. The novel is an adaptation of the f...
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Science FictionThere is a particular pleasure in returning to an Arthur C. Clarke novel that nobody talks about much, and Imperial Earth is one of those. It does not have the reputation of 2001 or Rendezvous with Rama , it rarely turns up on best-of lists, and when it is mentioned at all, it tends to be with a sli...
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FantasyIn the sensational sequel to Poison Study and Magic Study, Yelena's apprenticeship is over - now her real test has begun. When word that Yelena is a Soulfinder - able to capture and release souls - spreads like wildfire, people grow uneasy. Already Yelena's unusual abilities and past have set her ap...
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Science FictionFuture Hope is a science fiction novel written by David Gelber. The novel is set in the year 2156 and the Earth is getting a pretty crowded place. While many of the social and economic problems have been eradicated - along with most illnesses, new problems have taken their place. Principal amongst t...
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Science FictionEvery so often a book lands on the review pile that is interesting less for what it is than for the curious circumstances of its existence, and Doomsday Planet is very much one of those. It is, on the face of it, a slim and unassuming piece of 1960s space adventure, the sort of thing that filled the...
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Science FictionIll Wind is a 1995 disaster novel by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, one of nine collaborations between the two and one of the more successful of them. The Anderson credit is the one that sells the book; the Beason credit, less well known to the average reader, is the one that explains why the sc...
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Science FictionThere is a particular category of book that exists only because of another, more famous work, hovering in its orbit like a small moon, and The Lost Worlds of 2001 is one of the most fascinating examples I know. It is not a novel, not quite a memoir, not really a making-of in the modern sense; it is...
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Science Fiction2061: Odyssey Three is the third installment in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey sequence, published by Del Rey in December 1987, five years after 2010 and nineteen years after the original 2001. By the late 1980s, the Space Odyssey books had become a firm fixture of mainstream science fiction, and...
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Science FictionThere are some books that arrive into your life early and never quite leave it. Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of those for me. I read it as a teenager, watched the Kubrick film not long afterwards, and have been turning both of them over in my head, in one way or another, ever sinc...
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FantasyWarblade is the third and final book of David Ferring's Konrad trilogy, and it arrives carrying a heavy burden. This is the volume that has to gather up every thread spun across Konrad and ShadowBreed and tie them off, and it is where my long affection for this series has to make its peace with real...
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FantasyShadowBreed is the second book of David Ferring's Konrad trilogy, and it picks up the instant the first volume leaves off, ramping the violence and the strangeness up considerably. If you have not read Konrad , start there; this is not a series to come into halfway, whatever the occasional bursts of...
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FantasySome books arrive in your life at exactly the right moment and lodge there for good, and Konrad is one of those for me. I came to it as a young reader, at a time when the Warhammer world was still new and strange and dangerous in my imagination, and whatever its flaws, and I will be honest about the...
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FantasyWizards First Rule by Terry Goodkind is the first volume in the sword of truth series and follows the adventures of Richard Cypher, an young woods guide who makes a life changing decision to help a lady in distress. The woman richard rescues is Kahlan Amnell (Mother Confessor), who has crossed the b...
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FantasyEragon is the first volume in the Inheritance Cycle and has been written by Christopher Paolini. Eragon, a 15-year-old boy and lives with his uncle and cousin on a farm near a small village. While hunting in a large range of mountains nearby, Eragon is surprised to see a polished blue stone appear i...
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FantasyThe Road to Underfall is a 1987 high fantasy novel by Mike Jefferies, the first volume of the Loremasters of Elundium trilogy, and one of those books that has earned its standing through readers' affection rather than publishers' fanfare. In 1987 the British fantasy shelves were busy. Donaldson had...
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FantasyThe Dragon in the Stone is a standalone novel by Allan Scott, published by Orbit in 1991, and one of the better and quieter pieces of mythologically grounded fantasy that came out of British genre publishing in the early nineties. Scott is the rarer of the two halves of his long collaboration with M...
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FantasyStone of Tears is the second volume in the epic Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. Darken Rahl has finally been defeated and Richard and Kahlan race off back to the mud people to marry. Nothing goes to plan however and as they are waiting for the wedding preparations to be completed three Sist...
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FantasyThere are writers you admire, and then there are writers who rearrange something in your head, and Clark Ashton Smith belongs firmly in the second category for me. I came to Lost Worlds more or less by accident, knowing Smith only as a name that hovered at the edge of the Lovecraft circle, and I was...
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FantasyEmpire in Black and Gold is the first novel in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt sequence, published in July 2008, and the book that gets the whole insect-people experiment off the ground. It is also, for the record, Tchaikovsky's debut. There is something faintly unfair about a writer arrivin...
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FantasyIn the Labyrinth, Marit and Hugh venture out to try and find Alfred. He turns out to be the prisoner of a Labyrinth dragon, which are almost the equal of the dragon-snakes in cruelty and savagery. With the help of the Cursed Blade, they drive it off and rescue Alfred. On Abarrach, Haplo is dying. He...