Reviews of titles beginning with M.
If you can imagine what a science fiction novel written by Raymond Chandler might be like (while Chandler is known to have hated Science Fiction stories rumours persist he did write one) then Made to Kill is about as close as you will likely ever get (short of resurrecting the late author). It...
It makes me comfortable to think that we all have small voices in our heads on occasion telling us to do something. The important thing is to only listen to them when they are giving good advice. Ask that person out – sounds scary, but a good plan. Put that spoon in between your teeth and...
There are books that ruin it for anyone else. Harry Potter has basically made it impossible to make a book set in a magical school without someone saying, “rip off”. Just don’t mention to those people that The Worst Witch has been around a lot longer. Still, it takes a brave...
Magic Parcel: The Awakening is a young adult fantasy novel by Frank English. Jimmy Scroggins is a lively nine year old, full off the inquisitiveness of youth, living with his mother since his father passed away he spends much of his spare time with his Uncle Ruben, to the relief of his...
Jimmy is trapped in the realm of the Omni with no one to help him unless Ursula can learn to control her raw and unrefined powers. For the natives of Omni this intrusion of otherworldlings could be seen as a potentially destructive threat to their stability and possibly even their own existence....
Majipoor Chronicles is the second volume in the Marjipoor series by Robert Silverberg. Took me a bit of time to verify that this is the second book in the Majipoor series. It seems that the reason why this isn't widely discussed is that it doesn't really matter when you read this one. The story...
Makers is a near future science fiction novel of economic, social and technological change, written by the very talented author Cory Doctorow. Perry and Lester are inventors, but more than that they make things from Junk, the most environmentally friendly inventors possible. Some of their...
Are villains made or are they born? I believe more in nurture over nature, that someone is not born inherently evil but is made so by their experiences. Alyce is not a bad person, but her heritage as half-Vila makes her a pariah in the Kingdom of Briar. The people hate her, but her elixirs are...
Man Against The Future is a collection of short stories by Bryan Young, author of “Lost at the Con”. I love short story collections, not just because I have the attention span of a small yapping dog, but they can be a great introduction to a new author or genre. They can be quite hit and...
Man over Mind is a science fiction novel by Dean Warren. After about a thousand years of expansion, humanity has pretty much conquered the Milky Way with their FTL ships. The Plastowich – descendants of the guy who invented the hyperdrive – are doing a good job of running the show. Not...
Man Plus is a classic science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl. In the near future things will start to go bad. Really bad - international tension will rise, numerous smaller and not so small wars will flare. Resources will be scarce. Chaos will rule around the globe - even in the good old U.S....
Manroot opens in the spring of 1930 with Katherine Sheahan and her father, Jessie, looking for work in the tourist town of Castlewood, Missouri. Jesse gets a job as a handyman and Katherine as a hotel maid. While her father eventually embraces the drink and disappears, Katherine makes a living...
Since the days of The Lord of the Rings the fantasy genre has had a close relationship with the idea of a fellowship of characters. A group of disparate people of all races brought together to fight for a common cause. This produces a sense of shared responsibility and...
Comics have a complex history with some storylines going back decades. Even the relatively new superheroes can have intricate lore. Moon Knight has had plenty of time to muddy the waters with almost 50 years of stories to look back on, but it is not the depth of the stories that make Moon Knight...
Keeping it in the family sounds like a wonderful idea. Surround yourself with people you can trust, blood is thicker than water, but do family businesses work? Why do so many fail by the third generation? The first generation build the company from nothing, the second grow it further, the third...
Mystery is a powerful tool. You can exude a sense of power from the shadows that may not be true if a light was shined on you. The premise of T.S. Willberg’s Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder begins thus, with a mysterious detective agency, but we...
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...
Mars Plus is the sequel to the science fiction classic Man Plus, by Frederik Pohl. Long awaited follow-up to the excellent novel Man Plus, takes place forty years after Man Plus - Mars has been settled, not only with Cyborgs (read the review of Man Plus), but also with normal people and...
My partner and I went through a stage of watching only noir films. Many of them felt the same, but some stood out. The French films had an effortless style, Barbara Stanwyck was always amazing, and one film was just a little bit insane. That film...
With the new films, TV shows and cartoons it is sometimes hard to keep up with the Star Wars Universe and all its moving parts. Some of the less fashionable elements could be ignored in favour of big flashy characters like Han Solo or Boba Fett. Thankfully, the Star Wars books are continuing to...
Mecha Samurai Empire follows on from the United States of Japan, an alternative history novel which continues the story of Philip K Dicks seminal novel The Man in the High Castle (now an established TV series). For those who are aren't aware, the idea is that the "Allies" lost World War two and...
The product of a 2013 Kickstarter, Mechalarum is Emma Larkins debut work and has clearly benefited from her efforts to crowd fund. The process has allowed her creative control and enabled her to seek professional assistance in assuring the work comes up to scratch.
And come up to scratch...
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...
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...
Memory is a science fiction novel in the Miles Vorkosigan Adventures series by Lois McMaster Bujold. On an otherwise successful mission Miles Naismith (a.k.a. Admiral Naismith a.k.a. Lord Miles Vorkosigan) have a seizure and nearly cuts the rescued hostage in half. Miles has to go home and...
Space is for the few. You may have been trained as a professional astronaut and pushed the boundaries of science. Maybe you are a geek done good and decided to spend your billions on the vanity project of commercial space travel. Maybe, just maybe, you are a celeb or competition winner who...
Methuselah's Children is a science fiction novel by the author Robert A Heinlein. Another golden oldie from Heinlein. Through a selective breeding program, the Howard Foundation has managed to breed a much longer living human. Today there are about a hundred thousand people (The Howard...
The gothic novel should always have on the cover the image of a women with a ripped and flowing dress running away in terror from an imposing stately house. This is not the cover that Silvia Moreno-Garcia chose for Mexican Gothic, but it could so easily have been. The...
If I lived in a Star Trek universe I would always travel by shuttlecraft and refuse to use the transporter. I am just uneasy with the idea of being split into atoms and reformed elsewhere. I am, for all intents and purposes, the same person, with the same memories, but am I? Is it not true that...
Midnight, Texas is a small town located at the crossroads of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. From an outsiders perspective it looks like a run-of-the-mill, dried-up western town with lots of boarded up buildings and relatively few full-time inhabitants.
There's a Pawnshop, a Diner and...
Agatha Christie would have us believe that inter-War murder was cosy, taking place in a picturesque village or on a mode of transport whilst taking in the sites of the Grand Tour. Whilst Marple was eating muffins and Poirot was drinking Prosecco, most of us would have been thrown into the daily...
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?
...
Mindstar Rising is the first volume of the Greg Mandel Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton. First some ranting about the cover art: The cover "art" on this book is incredibly stupid looking - there's a picture of a "tough guy" (well, he looks more like a cheap actor to me) wearing a blue jacket with...
Some time ago, I reviewed the novel Mine by Lin Sten and at the time I had mixed feelings about the book, there were some great ideas, a strong central premise and in parts great dialogue however this was all obscured behind some serious lack of editing, poor language and quite ropey running...
Computer games and cooking are not the most obvious of bedfellows. Are there enough fans of a particular game that they would want to bake a cake based on it? For many games, the number of game loving foodies would not be enough, but this is not just any game, this is Minecraft, the most popular...
Mirror Dance is a science fiction novel by the author Lois McMaster Bujold. A friend gave this to me to read after I had given him Use of Weapons by Banks, and again I'm positively surprised at how many excellent writers there are out there - all of which have written tons of books, just...
Everyone knows the story of Sleeping Beauty, or do they? Malice by Heather Walter retold the story leading up to Aurora falling asleep, but with far more detail on Aurora and her relationship with Alyce, the person responsible for her curse. Misrule opens 100 years later and tells the...
The crime genre is a well-trodden one, so much so that anyone who reads the genre exclusively may find themselves jaded by similar storylines occurring over and over again. One way to excite both author and reader is to try and find new approaches. How about a crime novel told entirely from the...
Misspent Youth is a stand alone science fiction novel by the acclaimed British author Peter F Hamilton. Misspent Youth – try saying it to your self – Misspent Youth, not exactly catchy is it?. It sound so much like a story about maladjusted working class youngsters in some large industrial...
Children’s TV shows will always have an evocative place in your memory, especially those half-remembered tales from when you were young. Your cognitive powers had not yet full formed, so your memory of the show comes in snatches like magic. For me it will always be Wizbit. I picture a...
In Mistification Kaaron Warren creates a character called Marvo the magician; a stage magician whose magic is real. It’s a world where a small number of true magicians use the “mist” to keep the horrors of reality hidden from the world. It starts with Marvo trapped in an attic with his...
MMO RPG is a comedy fantasy novel by Charlie Foxtrott. Thila Online is a new MMO RPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) and when the developers pull the plug they forget to switch off the servers leaving the more advanced artificial intelligence characters that populate the...
Mockingbird reunites us with that wonderfully screwed-up, dark and acerbic character of Miriam Black; the girl who has the (mis)fortune to witness how someone will depart this mortal coil with just a simple contact of skin.
Some time has passed since we last met that crazy bird and after...
Back in the day the Doctor Who spin off novels had a real advantage over the TV show as they had no budget. The limit to what could happen in these books was not down to the pen pushers at the BBC or the naivety of special effects. The only limit to the books was the author’s imagination....
I adore science fiction, but it also frustrates me. I consider myself reasonably well read and clever enough to cope with most books, but occasionally a science fiction book comes along that I just cannot get my head around. Momenticon by Andrew Caldecott is a Bizzaro take on a dystopian future...
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....
Watching television in the 70s and 80s was less about choice and more about just watching what was on. You only had four channels and not much catered for children, we would watch anything. Re-runs of The Land of the Giants or Star Trek became the bread and butter of...
When Will Calloway is wrongly accused of a serious crime he is sentenced to join the Moon Chase to prove his innocence. While at first glance this seems pretty straight forward and fairly safe with the fell walkers and huge Fellhounds of Thesk going along to help, he soon realises that proving...
Moon Crossing is the second novel in the Fellhounds of Thesk series and the follow-up to the young adult fantasy novel Moon Chase. We are once again joined with Wil Calloway and those huge Fellhounds and this time its to rescue one of Wil's friends, continuing on from the cliff-hanger ending of...
Reviewed by Ed Prior. Moon Over Soho is the second novel in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series about Metropolitan Police Constable and trainee wizard Peter Grant and his magical mentor DCI Thomas Nightingale. Moon Over Soho finds PC Peter Grant still living with the fallout from his...
A man falls from the roof of a building, pursued by agents unknown and Lawbringer Narin is asked personally by none other than a god to investigate the matter and help find a cure to the unconscious mans poison, thus begins Moon's Artifice.
What follows is a powerful, rich fantasy tale...
Moonbeams is an alternative reality fantasy novel by Lakisha Spletzer. When 3 clueless college students decide on a night out their fate is sealed, finding a strange flickering light on the way they suddenly find themselves in a very different land, populated by fantastic creatures, magical...
While most post-apocalyptic novels focus on destruction brought on humankind (or occasionally robotkind), the disaster in Moonfall is much more natural. The Moon has indeed fallen and caused widespread destruction across the globe. The book picks up 20 years after this earth-shattering event and...
The subtitle on this, my first book by McDevitt is "It's time to panic". I don't know about you, but a subtitle like that tells me a lot about what to expect from a book. It tells me that McDevitt or more probably his editor, didn't think that this was a serious piece of literature, aspiring to...
Mostly Harmless is a novel by Douglas Adams and the fifth book of a four part trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The title derives from a joke early in the series, when Arthur Dent discovers that the entry for Earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy consists, in its...
The sequel to the BSFA Award winning novel Dark Eden, this book returns us to the dark planet, fast forwarding the generations to a fractured and disparate society that has come to colonise many of Eden’s different landmasses.
Much of the themes hinted at in Dark Eden are developed...
Mother of Storms is a science fiction novel by the author John Barnes. I read an article recently saying that the big difference between old (anything not from the last ten years, I guess) and new science fiction is that the old stuff is more about technology and the new stuff is more about...
Mountain Man introduces us to a world that is now mostly inhabited by the walking undead and Augustus Berry lives a day-to-day existence that is largely composed of getting drunk, foraging for supplies and preparing for the day when the Zombie horde will come up the side of the mountain and...
Moving Mars is a science fiction novel by the award winning author Greg Bear. I nearly stopped reading this book around page fifty. Seldom had I been so bored and seldom had I felt so little sympathy for a lead character. Seldom have I been so happy that I hang on to it, but more about that...
Moxyland is the debut novel of Lauren Beukes and the first book published by Angry Robot Books. It is currently nominated in the longlist for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Set in Cape-town in the near future, four hip young adults live in a world where your online identity is...
Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day as I can indulge in some food I shouldn’t really be eating from sugary cereal to a full English breakfast. There are other more sensible options; porridge or bran flakes. The wonderful thing is that I can choose each day what I want. What I am...
Mr. Vertigo is a novel by the American author Paul Auster. Reading Auster is a bit like riding a bike, you’ll get a really good view of the scenery, you’ll have to do some of the work yourself and if you keep at it for to long your ass will start to hurt. Peter Aaron is a writer, Peter has...
Anthologies from Alchemy Press specialise in bringing myth to a contemporary setting and general involve adult characters living adult lives.
Music in the Bone is no exception to this. It’s quite a varied collection of Marion Pitman’s work from a number of different sources and spans...
The stories that the Brontë sisters wrote have an extreme gothic appeal and you only need to visit their old home in Haworth to know what inspired them. There did not seem much else to do than walk the moors and avoid dying. Whilst the town may be picturesque now, full of cobbled...
Fans of slasher films will recognise many of the rules that make up the genre. The Final Girl will win the day at the last moment when she realises her own strength. This character will be a bastion of good and innocence, but those around her will not. The rocker, goth, cheerleader, geek –...
I love time travel stories as you can tie yourself in knots figuring out what is going on. A writer can choose to do one of two things about the complexity of it all. Explore in great depth and try to make the inherent paradox work, or just go with the flow. Joshua David Bellin’s Myriad...
Mystery is a horror novel by Peter Straub. This is the first book by Peter Straub that I have read. I have seen his name mentioned in the alt.books.stephen-king newsgroup a few times and when I found this book at the library, I thought "why not?". The About the Author thing on one of the last...
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