Antony Jones

Raft was originally a short story published in Interzone back in 1989. Baxter admitted struggling to contain the story to such a short space however and eventually Raft  became the authors first published novel. It's also the first book in the authors Xeelee sequence (although no Xeelee make an appe...

Hutchinson's writing has, at times, turned out to be worryingly prophetic - he wrote about the break-up of the European Union while Brexit was just a twinkle in David Cameron's eye, in his astounding Fractured Europe series. This time he's writing about life in rural England after an apocalypse. Wor...

As the name suggests, Pandemic explores what happens when a deadly infection takes the leap from epidemic to pandemic. A sobering passage on the cover aknowledges, it's not a question of if but when . There are many things that endanger the human race but with the exception of the zombie apocalypse...

Empire of Silence is the debut of Christopher Ruocchio and the first in the Sun Eater series. It describes the early life of Hadrian Marlowe, an infamous figure who is remembered galaxy-wide as both hero and monster. The man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. The man who destroyed a s...

The Quanderhorn Xperimentations is a book thats been adapted backwards via the future from the Radio 4 series before it was made. It's pure, british comedy gold from the genius minds of Rob Grant and Andrew Marshall. The story is set in England, 1952. A time of (relative) peace and regeneration. The...

I don't know how he does it, but Adrian Tchaikovsky manages to get inside the heads of different creatures and allow us to see through their eyes. Last time I read one of his books it was Spiders, this time it's Dogs, Bears, Bees and Lizards. Dogs of War imagines that we've got to grips with bio-eng...

From Distant Stars is the follow-up to Sam Peter's impressive debut From Darkest Skies . Detective Keon Rause has mostly come to terms with the death of his wife five years previously and his illegally created AI Liss has gone - presumably destroyed. He's tasked with investigating the death of milit...

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, instead set in the far-future...

Mallory Grace had been successfully hiding out in London for some time until she met Obadiah in a seemingly random encounter. Now she's just had to kill someone and if she wants to survive the next few hours she'll probably have to kill again. To survive the night she'll need a miracle. Obadiah Maci...

Zero Day features a return to those creeping, swarming and skittling spiders that were introduced in The Hatching and Skitter . The world is a quite different place and the realisation that there is some co-ordination to the vast deadly swarms of arachnids raises the difficult question of what the U...

People have been imagining life on Mars for hundreds of years but it seems to becoming an increasingly popular destination at the moment. We've got a growing number of films, games, VR "experiences" and of course books. NASA has it's own "Journey to Mars" program of sending humans there in the 2030'...

Cade Sura finds himself in the unenviable postion of having within his hands the galaxies ultimate weapon. A weapon that promises to bring about peace from the Evil Praxis Kingdom and it's fantatic overlord Ga Halle. Cade never wanted such responsibility and would do anything he can to get away from...

This Christmas a member of the family introduced me to NCIS. For those who have yet to discover this long-running US-based TV show it's a police-procedural series that follows the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Until this time I hadn't even known such an organisation existed, not to mention t...

Elysium Fire is the sequel to Aurora Rising (also known as The Prefect), set in Reynold's Revelation Space universe but before events of his previous novels. Like Aurora Rising, it can be read as a stand-alone novel. It's the 25th century (with no Buck Rogers in sight) and humanity has, in many ways...

Aurora Rising is a stand-alone novel written within the authors Revelation Space universe, set before other novels and before the cataclysmic event of the Melding Plague. It's worth noting that Aurora Rising was published in 2007 as The Prefect . Reynolds fan's who are looking for a new book will ne...

Paul McAuley is a vastly under-appreciated author. His books are inspiring, hypnotic and inventive. Austral is all of these and more, a book set in a plausible, climate-changed future where the planet has a new continent with a partial thawing of the Antarctic. There are still vast vistas of ice but...

You hear about those couples having the ill-concieved notion of getting matching permanent tattoos shortly after they've met, despite the real probability their relationship may not last. Crossover goes one further with that premise. Instead of tattoos it's a "simple" medical procedure ( EED ) that...

It's great to see Philip K Dick stories continue to be explored and consumed in different forms of media. His writing still popular long after his death. For those who aren't aware, the UK TV station Channel 4 (Broadcast in the US via Amazon Video) has started a new 10 part anthology series called E...

Killing is my Business (not to be confused with Megadeth's debut album) is the second novel in Adam Christopher's LA Trilogy, following on from Made to Kill . Featuring the robot Assassin Raymond Electromatic, disguised as LA's only artificial private investigator. it's a unique blend of hardboiled...

The Furthest Station is a new novella that continues the adventures of PC Grant and the Folly in the Rivers of London series, investigating crimes that are a bit more out of the ordinary. PC Grant joins British Transport Police officer Jaget Kumar to investigate ghost sightings on the Metropolitan l...

After the Flare is the second book in the series which describes the a near future Nigerian Space program. Since a massive solar flare wiped out much of the worlds electronics, Nigeria find themselves in control of one of the last working spaceships and functional spaceport. Kwesi Bracket, formerly ...

Alien Covenant - Origins is a prequel to the latest Alien story, describing the journey of getting the colony ship launched on it's ill-fated journey, bridging the gap between Prometheus and Alien Covenant . Written by Alan Dean Foster - the author who has been writing about Aliens since the very be...

Apocalyptic fiction has been growing in popularity for years, with most stories following some big cataclysmic event such as a zombie uprising, sweeping plague, nuclear war or the rise of artificial intelligence. Recently though novels have started to appear that seem much closer to reality, some of...

It's funny how you can read books as far afield as China and Australia and not realise there are talented authors on your own doorstep. I  discovered the author Robert Gibson in Morecambe bay, only a few miles from my home. Robert has been writing science fiction stories for a number of years, The S...

It's hard to believe that Dune is over 50 years old. Originally released in 1965 it won the inaugural Nebula award for best novel and tied with Roger Zelazny's This Immortal for the Hugo Award. It's sold well in excess of 12 million copies around the world and is one of the world's best-selling scie...

The War of the Worlds was originally written in 1897 and it's never been out of print. It's one of the earliest stories to depict conflict with an alien race and has been influential in film, radio, TV, music and even science. The Guardian has gone as far as to say: A true classic that has pointed t...

While many stories depict the fight between man and machine, Sea of Rust shows a future where the machines have already won. Humankind has been wiped off the face of the Earth by the very robots that were built to serve them. Now the planet is controlled by vast intelligences (known as One World Int...