Reviews with titles beginning F
Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury which depicts a dystopian future society where books that have any intellectual value are banned and destroyed where-ever they are found. With a Hedonistic and lawless society, the highest achievement for any individual is happiness and...
Fallen Dragon is a science fiction novel by the British author Peter F Hamilton. There is a unrecognised Science Fiction genre, that deals with the transition from a society of limits and into one of plenty (an utopia or nirvana, if you want). Or maybe not the transition itself but the events...
It should not matter what format you ingest a novel – on paper, on the screen or even via audio, but it does. I do not always get on with audio as I am such a fast reader, even on speed up the narrator cannot keep up with my awful lack of attention. However, the right book works as an...
Falling Free is a science fiction novel by the award winning American author Lois McMaster Bujold and takes place within the Vorkosigan Saga. Taking place in the same universe as the Vorkosigan adventures, but not featuring any of our beloved characters, for the simple reason that Falling Free...
The locked room scenario is a classic tool in crime fiction that most great authors in that genre have tried at least once. The premise is that someone has apparently been murdered in a room that no one else can get in or out of. This may mean that the killing should have been...
Science Fiction has been inspired by religion ever since it started being written, Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus even has the Greek Gods in the title. The word science may be in the title of the genre, but it is also a genre about wonder, about questioning the things around us. Science...
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...
It's 2118 and humanity has not only got over the coronavirus, but have reached out into space - colonising the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Europa. It's still early days of mankind's expansion though and the ship Khidr is part of a small fleet who travel between the different colonies, assisting the...
Feersum Endjinn is a science fiction novel by Iain M Banks. I don't really feel that I can do a fair review of this book, as I only read about 3/4 of it. The reason for this is that about a quarter of it is written in a kind of phonetics, that I just couldn't read. I'm not sure why I couldn't...
Mike French returns to the world of An Android Awakes with this initially more conventionally presented sequel. Fictional Alignment is not the same animal as its predecessor – an oversized picture story book anthology of the attempts of Android PD121928 to create fiction that can be accepted...
Dan Abnett and Nik Vincent have come together to tell a tale of a future that feels and sounds not like what one would envision, resembling more our distant past then our near future. Many readers will know of Dan Abnett and his prolific work with Marvel, Abaddon, Games Workshop, and his most...
Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others quite different. If you would like to go straight to the segment unique to this review, please start with paragraph 4.
Drafting a book must be like standing...
Finders Keepers is a comedy scifi novel and the debut of Russ Colchamiro. On a backpacking trip through Europe, Jason Medley and Theo Barnes stumble through hash bars and hangovers; religious zealots and stalkers; food poisoning and thunderstorms; cute girls; overnight trains; fever pitch...
Finity is a science fiction novel by the author John Barnes. The writing of a Science Fiction story that takes place in an infinite-multiple-universe setting often runs into the basic problem of stopping the main character from just finding the best possible universe and then staying there....
Firefall is a collected duology and includes the previously released novel Blindsight along with the new sequel Echopraxia. Firefall is hard science fiction which places a firm grip on high-concept science.
While many hard-science fiction novels can tend to exclude the casual reader,...
It has been nearly 20 years since I first read a Warhammer 40K novel, way before Games Workshops publishing company Black Library was formed. I was and always will be a big fan of anything Games Workshop related, spending a vast amount of my formative years playing a myriad number of games and...
America of 2036 is a wasteland in economic ruin, plagued by Terrorism and extreme acts of violence. Society escapes from this harsh reality by numbing itself on the drug Flashback - a euphoric yet cripplingly addictive drug that allows its users to re-visit their happier, past experiences. It's...
Flatland is a novel by Edwin Abbott Abbott about a two dimensional world. The story tells the tale of a humble square as he guides us through some of the idioms of life in two dimensions. He has a dream about visiting Lineland, a one dimensional world and while there try's to convince the...
The only science fiction novel that the immensely talented Cecelia Holland has written, Floating Worlds is taking it's rightful place within the halls of Gollancz SF Masterworks collection. The novel tells the story of humanity 2000 years in the future where capitalism has been overthrown and...
Flow my tears, the policeman said is a science fiction novel by the legendary award winning author Philip K Dick, has been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards and won the 1975 John W Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel of the year. Jason Taverner is a TV idol, singer and host...
Time travel is one of the most complex and difficult concepts to write in fiction. On the screen you can use visuals as shorthand to try and explain what on Earth is going on, but in fiction you are required to explain it all, or not. There is a choice. Do you go down the route of hard science...
Footfall is a classic science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This book handles a subject that H.G. Wells defined in his 'War of the Worlds': hostile first contact. Earth is overrun by aliens that bombard the planet with asteroids and are quickly victorious. The story...
The Trolley Problem is an interesting mental exercise that asks you would you let one person die to save many? To do so you would have to divert the trolley from the path of the five and be culpable for it hitting the one. In theory it makes sense, the many not the few, but could you really pull...
An interstellar expedition, tracing an anomalous signal back to its origin. Three men on board a ship called the Fargo, all returning dead, two hundred years later, but with the cargo hold full of an unknown mineral that makes the fortune of the company that sent them into the unknown.
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First things first, Forever Peace is not a sequel to Forever War, for that you need to look for the later novel Forever Free (expect a review at some point when time permits). Forever Peace does however share a few of the same ideologies as it's predecessor and it also won both the Hugo and...
Fork in the Road to Apocalypse is the second volume in the Subnorms, written by Jeff Gonsalves. It's the middle of the 21st Century and much of the World's population have seen their genetic makeup mutated by insidious viruses and powerful radiation. A sub species of human has developed from...
The Earth is an all but forgotten planet in the footnotes of mankind's history, a race who are now spread throughout the Milky Way as part of the vast Galactic Empire. An Dominion that looks after a quintillion souls and one that is becoming crippled by it's very size and complexity. A whole...
I have never wanted to travel to space. THUD. Not only would it be physically challenging, but also mentally tough. THUD. The knowledge that the only thing between you and the infinite void is a sheet of metal. THUD. The great expanse making you question your tiny existence and the insignificant...
Think too long on the multiverse and your mind will explode. Every tiny action you take splits off into another multiverse, then extrapolate that with everything making tiny actions. There will be an infinite number of universes that only differ from the way you tied your shoelace that morning....
Frameshift is a science fiction novel by Robert J Sawyer. I've waited a bit before I started on this review, in the hope that my feelings for this book would somehow clarify. But the truth is that I still don't really know whether I like it or not. I'm not even sure that I can classify this...
Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus as it is also known, is a very famous novel written by Mary Shelley when she was just 18 years old. By the Age of 19, in 1818 Mary had finished the novel and published it anonymously in London. It wasn't until the revised third edition, published in...
Frankenstein Unbound is a science fiction novel by the British author Brian Aldiss. Time is starting to break up, when Joseph Bodenland, a citizen of the year 2020, gets thrown back through time and space to Lake Geneva around the time when Mary Shelly was writing the original Frankenstein...
Frankenstein.com follows the sleuth DCI Jack Renton who we were first introduced to earlier this year in Resident Fear. Another murderer is on the loose in the northeast of England and this time it's a much more macabre, chilling murder scene that the detectives are drawn to. A horrific picture...
It's funny how life seems to throw co-incidences at you. Until recently I'd never given the small island of Gibraltar any real thought. Then the company I work for expanded their services there which meant I needed to learn about this unusual British overseas territory.
A few...
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...
Science fiction is a minefield for any author. So many others genres are available that have a set of rules that you can follow. Crime has it, even most fantasy books follow a pattern, but science fiction can be almost anything. It can be set in an alternative today with only a tiny tweak to our...
Furnace: Death Sentence is the third volume in the Furnace series, a young adult science fiction series of books, written by Alexander Gordon Smith. The Furnace is a juvenile prison located one mile beneath the surface of the earth, where kids are sentenced to life imprisonment and where dying...
Furnace: 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...
Furnace: 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...
Future 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...
The Earth has exploded killing all the inhabitants, the only survivors are those humans that happened to be off planet at the time. Does not sound like the start of a fun Science Fiction novel, does it? Douglas Adams would beg to differ and so would Gareth L. Powell. Future’s Edge is the...
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