Archives 2016
This is a list of all the reviews that SFBook have published in 2016.
I've been a fan of Hugh Laurie since he first made an appearance on Blackadder (series 2 and onwards) in the early 80's along with "A bit of Fry and Laurie" and the the TV adaption of PG Wodehouse' "Jeeves and Wooster". He is a talented comedian but it took me years to finally watch his long...
The fifth book in the dragon series by Stephen Deas, Dragon Queen is certainly value by weight of pages. The previous tale, The Black Mausoleum weighed in at just over three hundred in the mass market paperback, whereas Dragon Queen is twice that and a little more.
The first trilogy of...
I've said a number of times now that Adam Roberts is a gifted author and this is increasingly evident with each new book he writes. His work overflows with ideas and at the same time he seems to delight in using different structures, to experiment in forming his narrative. This time he's turned...
Ben Elton is a talented fellow. I've loved most of the TV programs he's been involved in from the Young Ones and Blackadder to Blessed and the Thin Blue Line. His humour is often satirical, off-the-wall and almost always makes me laugh.
The only novel I've read of his prior to Time and...
Crossed is riding the heights of topical subjects, that of environment, ecology and global warming. In the very near future a cartoon is created that will ultimately change the world. It follows the adventures of a sea turtle who crosses the ocean and encounters other marine life struggling...
Defeatism. Fatalism. These are universal, recurrent maladies that everyone experiences at points throughout their lives. Even if one moves forward - how do we find meaning in such a vast, uncaring universe?
Only here, the universe isn’t uncaring, it’s quite pointedly predatory. These...
Brandon Sanderson needs little introduction: wantonly imaginative; rollicking action scenes; well thought-out magic systems. Firefight, the second book in his YA Reckoners series is perhaps less well known, and centres on a group of humans in post-apocalyptic American cities hunting evil X-Men -...
I’m already a fan of Landy’s previous work, Demon Road shows some of the same great dialogue and riveting narrative that made his Skulduggery Pleasant series such a great read. But his latest offering is definitely darker in tone and content, with murderous demon parents, twisted witches,...
The Bands of Mourning, part of the second series of Mistborn books, taking place hundreds of years after the original Mistborn trilogy, follows the adventures of Wax, Wayne, Marasi, and Steris once more. The Bands of Mourning are the mythical metalminds owned by the Lord Ruler, said to grant...
Just a month into the New Year and already I've found a must read book. All the Birds in the Sky is the debut novel of Charlie Jane Anders who has been editor-in-chief of the popular SF site IO9.com for quite some time.
All the Birds in the Sky follows the paths of two very different...
Behold the Man was originally written as a novella in 1966 and won the Nebula award for best novella. It was later expanded into a very slim novel in 1969 — although at 128 pages it could still be considered novella length. Gollancz has quite rightly chosen to include it in their SF...
A steampunk fantasy set in a world that draws some uncomfortable inspiration from our own, Foreign Devils is the sequel to John Hornor Jacobs’ The Incorruptibles and follows the adventures of Fisk and Shoe – two would be mercenaries making their way through a world of demons, feral elves and...
Philip K Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle is one of my favourite all time reads. An alternative history novel that sees the Axis winning the second World War and splitting the USA between Germany on the East coast,Japan on the West and a small neutral zone in the middle. There is an...
Science fiction set in the near future, Azanian Bridges is a rough diamond, drawing on a variety of influences to deliver a real and wrenching story.
Our setting is an alternative South Africa, where Mandela was never released and Apartheid didn’t end. We follow two characters,...
The Falconer by Elizabeth May is the first in what appears to be a series of books following the adventures of Lady Aileana Kameron (or Kam) as she lives the double life of daughter of the Marquess of Douglas on one hand and the life of a fairy hunter (or aforementioned Falconer) on the...
The Vanishing Throne by Elizabeth May is the second in a series of books following the adventures of Lady Aileana Kameron (or Kam) and the action follow on directly from the first book. If you haven’t read The Falconer I suggest you do, as this review definitely contains spoilers for the...
Christopher Golden is an acclaimed American Author. He has worked in Horror, Fantasy, Teen and Young Adult fiction. He's known for his tie in novels for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and his collaboration work with Mike Magnolia, Nancy Holder and Amber Benson.
His latest book ‘Dead...
As someone who likes their fantasy fictions quite traditional, i.e. heroes riding on horses, rather than riding subways, I was a little apprehensive of The Immortals (Olympus Bound) by Jordanna Max Brodsky. However I was pleasantly surprised.
The story is set in modern day Manhattan,...
In a future where fossil fuels have dried up, global warming has decimated ecosystems, and governments are culling populations, Antonia Honeywell’s debut sees teenager Lalla escape the ruins of London to live on her father's utopian Ship with 500 others keen to enjoy a 'happy death'. Their...
Down Station is actually a real station on the London Underground. You can't however visit this place though, the Trains don't stop there and if you're lucky you can but catch a glimpse of it between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner on the Piccadilly Line. You can see the outside of this...
Adrian sul’Han, known by the nickname Ash, is a powerful healer who wants revenge. After being forced into hiding after a series of murders throws the queendom into chaos, Ash went into training for healing. During his...
Dead Things was one of the few books I bought with post-christmas vouchers, after first seeing the author on twitter where he regularly trades jokes with Chuck Wendig. It's an urban fantasy adventure that follows the life of Eric Carter.
Eric's a necromancer, an angry young necromancer...
John Scalzi is a household name as character-driven sci-fi goes. The Human Division, 5th in his Old Man’s War series detailing the fate of the Colonial Union and it’s increasingly tenuous relationship with the Earth, is...
Live roleplaying, ritual sacrifice and 14th century magic. There’s a lot of buttons being pushed right upfront in Sara Townsend’s very English hobby horror.
We begin amidst a woodland adventure with our main characters introduced in a blur between real (fictional) life and their...
Every so often I like to lift my head above the science fiction and fantasy world and read something unconnected. The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen was the choice this time, a classic novel of discovery.
Matthiessen was a literary giant, the only writer to win the National Book...
Book six of the Memory of Flames series picks up right from the moment book five – Dragon Queen ends. This time we’re in the ruined aftermath of Zafir’s ride to destroy the city of Dhar Thosis and Baros Tsen T’Varr is contemplating the ruination of his plans.
This is not a book...
Fresh from the publication of The Vagrant and all worthy plaudits assigned to this, Peter Newman’s next book, set in the world of the Albion Online MMORPG is a very different affair.
We follow the trials and tribulations of Tia, her daughters and her crew as they first arrive in...
Like all the best novels, Nod develops from a simple premise. Imagine that the vast majority of people around the world suddenly stopped being able to sleep. No deep sleep, no cat-naps and no snoozing at all. It's only a matter of time before society collapses. How many times have we had a bad...
Medusa’s Web by Tim Powers follows the story of siblings, Scott and Madeline, required to stay for a week in their aunt’s house by her recently amended will. Their cousins Claimayne and Ariel, who live in the house are less than pleased by this requirement.
The story has a...
Artificial by Jadah McCoy is the authors debut and the first book in a planned series called The Kepler Chronicles. Set in 2256, the story unfolds on Earth’s first colony amongst the stars, the aforementioned Kepler.
As humanity traversed through the deep dark of space, they decided to...
The Year of the Flood is the second novel in Margaret Atwood's post-apocalyptic series and follows the viewpoints of Toby and Ren, members of a religious cult. The book tells the story of some of the events leading up to the cataclysm mentioned in the previous novel Oryx and Crake and there is a...
Phineas (Finn) Gramayare has an unusual occupation. He's a part-trained necromancer, returned to the mortal world after being exiled to the Fairy realm for 25 years for a crime he didn't commit. Along with his Necromancy ability, Finn has decided to use his connections to offer a match-making...
The Guns of Ivrea is a seafaring fantasy adventure that immediately establishes its author, Clifford Beal as eminently knowledgeable in his chosen subject area and a strong storyteller to boot.
Our plot revolves around the fortunes of Nicolo Danamis, a pirate in the same vein as Sir...
Thomas Olde Heuvelt won last years Hugo award for his novelette The Day the World Turned Upside Down. Reading Hex I can see why.
The idea is incredible — A woman named Katharine is killed as a witch in the 16th Century and then begins haunting the woods around the village of Black...
An epic fantasy story that begins The Chronicles of the Exile, there is a lot to like about Turner’s first book in this series.
The beginning requires some perseverance. We are introduced to Luker Essendar and his former associate Gill. What follows is a very long exposition as...
At the basic level, Marc Turner’s Dragon Hunters is about three things: huge water-dragons, awesome sword-fights, and Machiavellian politics. The second book in Turner’s Chronicles of the Exiles trilogy - although not strictly a sequel to the first When The Heavens Fall - also has a...
Joe Hill is one of those authors who improves with each book and The Fireman is nothing short of spectacular.
A highly contagious spore has begun to spread across the World, a pandemic that see's people break out in beautiful gold and black marks before spontaneously self-combusting....
The Malice is the follow-up to one of my favourite fantasy reads last year, Peter Newmans The Vagrant. It's a story set in a post-apocalyptic future where forgotten technology intermingles with demonspawn and twisted lands full of twisted mutants.
It had the dark, haunted flavour of...
I’m always guilty of making snap judgements of books and their covers. Sci-fi covers don’t tend to help. Andrew Bannister’s The Creation Machine is not going to draw you in with its generic spaceship framed by a generic planet, and the woefully reductive, sensationalist logline of ‘It...
Night Shift continues the story of the rich and rewarding urban fantasy series Midnight Texas by Charlaine Harris.
Harris writes fiction that is comforting, warm and relaxing with a feeling of the familiar. Her characters are people you want to meet and (mostly) befriend. Those who...
The world is a terrible place to live after the zombie apocalypse, but probably for none more so than a vampire. Without humans, the blood supply is all dried up, unless you find a random animal. The buildings are decayed and in ruin, with gaping holes the sunlight streams through and...
A collaboration between Science Fiction greats, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, The Medusa Chronicles picks up the story of Arthur C. Clarke's A Meeting with Medusa a Nebula Award winning novella published in Playboy in 1971. It takes the story of Howard Falcon, from his shattered...
The crew of the Keiko are back. Mike Brooks hammers out the sequel to his epic, sci-fi adventure, Dark Run; Dark Sky, and it truly is an incredible adventure. It continues the rapid-fire wit from the first, harkens back to the space opera/western of Firefly and blends two different perspectives...
A continuation of the story from the comic books, Powers: The Secret History of Deena Pilgrim is a standalone novel, that links into the comic book story arc. Fans of the Playstation Network TV series may notice a few inconsistencies in terms of the background of its principle character, Deena...
Mongrels is a book that grips you by the jugular right from the start, a bit like the way a werewolf might. Funny enough that's what Mongrels is all about - a family of werewolves who are forced to travel around the USA avoiding the authorities and others who take a dislike their kind....
Reading The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August got me hooked into Claire North's (also known as Kate Griffin and Catherine Webb) wonderfully rich, clever and entertaining stories. As such I've been eagerly awaiting The Sudden Appearance of Hope for some time.
One of the things...
The Kings Justice is one of two new stories released this month from one of the veterans of the Fantasy scene - Stephen Donaldson.
It's a tale of an enigmatic figure known only as Black who goes in search of evil deeds. He has powers that help him route out evil, not least the...
And so we come at last to the final volume in the remarkable journey that is The Long Earth. It also happens to be the swansong of that singular author Sir Terry Pratchett.
And what a finale it is. The Long Cosmos lives up to the promise the authors have been building with this series, it...
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was originally funded as a small kickstarter project and self-published as a result. It was such a hit that it found a big publisher, got nominated for a ton of awards and has been raved about by many, many people. What struck me in particular wasn't just...
I was quite unprepared for Mechanical Failure. While the blurb mentions it as a "sarcastic adventure", such a description doesn't do justice.
Set in the far future after Humanity has spread to the stars and now live in a different Galaxy, mankind has managed to endure Two Hundred...
Dreams of Chaos, the first in a trilogy by Allen Stroud, is a companion piece to the computer game Chaos Reborn from Snapshot Games. Set in the 14th Century, it explores an alternative history of our world mainly set between Europe and the Far East with copious amounts of wizardry and religious...
Horror comes in different guises, it can be dark, chilling, violent, bloody and psychological;
Simon Law’s second novel The Damaged is all of these themes.
The story starts in 1987 during ‘The Great Storm’. Law does a great job of writing about the eighties that is both...
A near future Science Fiction story packed full of action, when it starts, Whistleblower by David Smith has all the punch of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Jake Redwood is part of a special police task force ordered to apprehend suspect alien children and subject them to a set of rigorous...
SOUTH is a dystopian fiction set in an alternate America, set in modern times, where a civil war breaks out between the North and the South. The story follows a variety of five characters, each trying to kill, hide or survive. The book follows Garrett and Dyce, on the run from the South’s law...
Smoke is a book that presents the idea - what if your stronger emotions were visible? People's Anger, Lust and Lies all visible as real smoke and soot that settles around them, permeating their clothes and the space around them. Within this world Children are born carrying "the seeds of...
A horror novella that sets out its stall early on, Becoming David by Phil Sloman is a carefully constructed novella that investigates the mind of a perfectionist serial killer from both the inside and the outside.
To begin, we are introduced to Richard, a self-sufficient serial killer...
Spoils of War, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is a volume of short stories set in the Tales of the Apt world and takes place (in the chronology of the world) before Empire in Black and Gold which is the first novel in that series. It tells stories of some of the minor characters from the main book...
Titanborn follows the life of "collector" (part bounty hunter part detective) Malcom Graves. Graves is a seasoned veteran who has seen the worst of humanity and is often tasked with cleaning up such flotsam. He lives in a future where mankind has spread to other planets and have adapted, with...
First Magyc, by Nicole Dragonbeck, the first book in the Guardians of the Path series is essentially a Young Adult portal fantasy where a girl, Ria, gets drawn into a magical land and it turns out she might be the subject of an ancient prophecy where only she can save the magic. While the...
Touch of Iron is not, as the Amazon blurb suggests, a tale of an epic quest of a Prince for a magic sword, although there is a Prince and he is on a quest for a magic sword. Neither is it is a story about Fae, as evoked by the title in the trend of supernatural fantasy. It is instead, the...
A Head Full of Ghosts was first released last year and won the coveted Bram Stokers award for Best Novel. It's also received pretty much the finest compliment a Horror novel can receive when Stephen King said of the book:
Scared the living hell out of me, and I'm...
Stratus wakes up in a field with no idea who he is. All he knows is that his name is Stratus and he doesn't seem to be human. He quickly learns that he possesses an in-human strength, natural gift in magic and an insatiable hunger. Well that and the fact that there seems to be a raging beast...
Alastair Reynolds has the kind of scientific imagination that few can match, his stories often explored on a grand scale. While the Universe in Revenger is certainly grand and gloriously imagined, the story itself it much more personal.
The far future Galaxy of Revenger has seen vast...
The Bastard Wonderland is something of a suprise. The debut of Lee Harrison, it describes a complex alternative world where a war wages between the North and the South. It's this tiresome war that is thrust upon northern lad Warboys and his father as they are strong-armed into a foolhardy...
There is much to like about Joe Abercrombie, particularly when he returns to his darker writing, as published by Gollancz. One of the founders of the ‘grimdark’ movement, Abercrombie’s gritty brand of fantasy delivers real consequences and hard bitten characters in all the different...
First of all: don't worry. Mark Samuels - the well known British horror writer- is alive and well ( although, maybe, crossing his fingers). It's not common to dedicate a new short story anthology to celebrate a living author ( whose career, hopefully, will last for many, many years to...
White Knight marks the ninth book in Jim Butchers urban fantasy series featuring Chicago's first and only Wizard P.I. Regular visitors to SFBook may be aware that we are (slowly) reviewing the series.
Those who haven't read any of the Dresden Files would be better starting at...
What if our day to day behaviour was recorded, analysed and mapped to create a copy of us in a digital utopia? How would this new reality transact with our own where people need to be born and grow up before they can be absorbed? What would the consequences be for those left behind?
...
I, Robot is a collection of nine short stories by Isaac Asimov, which originally appeared in Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950. The fictional character Dr Susan Calvin (robopsychologist for U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Inc) relating these stories to a...
Daniel Polansky is the author of the wonderful Low Town fantasy series, which shows how great a story-teller he is. A City Dreaming stretches these talents and more.
The book follows the life of M, a magically gifted drifter with a loose grip on morality and a quick, sharp tongue. He...
Book one of a proposed fantasy two-parter, Exile introduces us to a patch-work world of territories ruled over by the High King from his sacred city.
The earldom of Darien is betrayed and overrun. Its exiles scatter throughout the land, determined to reclaim their ancestral rights....
Given that today is Halloween, I thought it only right that we review a horror novel. It's also a damn good one - The Disciple by Stephen Lloyd Jones.
It all starts on a stormy night as Edward Schwinn navigates the country roads at the edge of Devil's Kitchen, Snowdonia. On a...
I found this book on Amazon while generally having a browse around and put it on my wish list for Christmas (yes, last Christmas). I finally got round to reading it, I'm glad I did!
Shovel Ready is set in a near future New York that has suffered much since a dirty bomb hit Times...
In the dark future of Defender, the majority of the worlds population have died. Killed by themselves and others who were listening to voices steering their horrific actions.
Those who survived live in a hostile environment, unable to trust strangers and fighting over limited...
I don't often get the chancce to read a crime novel and so when Titan Books let slip that the third novel in the Joel Sorrell series was about to be released I couldn't resist giving the series a try. Dust and Desire is the first book featuring the PI and sets the scene prefectly.
...
No one's tried to Kill Harry in almost a year and the worst problem he has faced in that time is trying to get stains removed from carpets caused by his bungling apprentice.
Anyone who knows Harry knows that this is too good to last.
The person to put such a spanner in...
"Life is but a dream" wrote Calderon De La Barca and "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream" confirmed Edgard Allan Poe. Dreams and nightmares constitute part of our nightly life, but they usually vanish as soon as we wake up. Sometimes, however, they stay with us and haunt also...
Oleg Kashin’s debut novel ‘Fardwor, Russia’ takes its reader on a surreal journey through the political landscape of Russia’s seedy underbelly. Drawing on his experience as an award-winning journalist and polemicist, Kashin skilfully blends fact and fiction, shining a light on some of...
There is a much bigger speculative fiction scene within China than most people realise. The main barrier to these stories for the western reader is of course language.
It's wonderful to see writers such as Ken Liu translating important Chinese works so that a wider audience can...
Steve Lockley and Paul Lewis form a British writing duo ( although they also publish individually) whose work has been appearing in various genre anthologies during the years.
Fifteen of their tales of horror and terror are now assembled in an enjoyable collection from Parallel...
The Hanging Tree is the sixth novel in the Rivers of London series. For those who have yet to experience these wonderful books imagine an Urban Fantasy with police procedural elements, warmly written with a disarming humour and celebrating the many hidden rivers that wonder through London (with...
Dead Man's Steel is the third and final volume in the Grim Company Series by Luke Scull. We reviewed the first book in the series - The Grim Company - back in 2013 and remarked that it was one of the best fantasy books of the year.
Last year the Sword in the North, the second in...
Book of the month
