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Books to look out for in 2016

2016 looks set to be a big year for science fiction and fantasy, with some highly promising TV series - from Man in the High Castle to new episodes of Black Mirror, films from another Star Wars to JG Ballard's High Rise (with many in between) and of course lots of lovely books.

Some of the most talented authors writing today are publishing books this year including Stephen King,  Joe Hill, Tad Williams, Ben Aaronovich, China Miéville, James SA Corey, Dave Hutchinson, Steven Erikson, Paul McAuley and Guy Gavriel Kay — to name just a few. There is also host of new authors and those who are loo...

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Twelve Kings Extract

To celebrate the release of the quite excellent Twelve Kings, (click the link to see our review) we've been lucky enough to be provided with an extract of the novel and an introduction by the author.

Throughout the book, I have several other characters interspersed with those of Çeda, the story’s main character. One of those point-of-view characters is King Ihsan, known as the Honey-tongued King. This excerpt contains Ihsan’s first appearance in the novel. I chose it because it sets the tone for the Kings, shows that the Kings are not all the same, and that Ihsan in particular may have more plans than the rest of the Kings ...

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Hugo Award Winners 2015

As many readers will know, this year there has been a concerted effort by a small but vocal minority to "game" the Hugo awards and try and put science fiction back by a few decades. They don't want to see ethnic and gender diversity in "their" science fiction and many of the Hugo award shortlists for this year were full of this small groups short-sighted, predominantly white male fiction.

Thankfully the larger science fiction community has made their voices heard and have chosen "No Award" for five of the Hugo categories including Best Novella, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Editor Short Form and Best Editor Long Form.

While this does mean that for those categories many deserving people have missed out on a chance of becoming ...

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Gollancz July 2015 Paperbacks

Gollancz Paperback of the Month for July 2015 is the impressive novel The Relic Guild by Edward Cox, reviewed by our good man Allen Stroud back in September last year. Allen seemed impressed:

Sometimes a book comes along that reminds you of the pleasure of being a reader and/or a writer, a book that you start at the right time and cannot fail to admire... ...an exciting debut from a writer who plainly loves what he has made and I’m looking forward to the sequel already

The Relic Guild is a blend of Steampunk, horror and adventure, a tale ten years in the making and one that shouldn't be missed.

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Gollancz May 2015 Paperbacks

Gollancz Paperback of the month for May 2015 is Adam Roberts exceptional story of artificial Intelligence, Bête — which we reviewed last October. Roberts is a writer who seems to improve with each book he writes and Bête is quite simply stunning. It's set sometime in the near future and explores our relationship with the natural world and how that is changing with the steady march of technological progress. Witty and clever, it was one of my favourite books of 2014.

Gollancz is also re-releasing the late Harry Harrison's novel Bill, the Galactic Hero which happens to be ...

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Dataslate - A Book Review Podcast

For those of you that don't know, I've been pretty involved in the community around Elite: Dangerous the computer game since its successful Kickstarter at the end of 2012 . I wrote one of the official novels, reviewed here by Ant on SFBook and I help run the podcast Lave Radio, that's been following the development of the game since March 2013. 

In the last few weeks we've launched a sister show — Dataslate, hosted by myself and with John Richardson of &...