Reviews with titles beginning with O.
Odd John was first published in 1935 and was one of the very first novels to explore the theme of the super human, coining the term homo superior. It's being reviewed here as part of Gollancz excellent SF Masterworks series. Written from a narrator's perspective, Odd John is a pretty unique...
First Impressions: Odyssey took some getting used to in order to plow through it! My only other introduction to the author Jack McDevitt is through his excellent novel, "Time Travelers Never Die" so I was hoping this book was going to be a continuation of the excellent style I was used to....
After technologically superior aliens conquer earth, humanity survives very much like mice, living within the walls of the huge homes of the giant aliens. They scurry about under their feet, stealing food and avoiding the ever more devious traps set out for them. As time goes on humanity adapts...
Growing up in Britain it can seem during certain times of the year that the sun has disappeared, but we all know it is still there, just behind many rain clouds in the few daylight hours of the winter. It would be a hugely different thing if the sun did disappear, for one, life on the planet...
At 75 years old, John Perry takes stock of his remaining life, with his wife dead and buried and a retirement of increasing dotage to look forward to he does the only sensible thing possible - he joins the army. Now known as the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) the war of the 22nd century is fought...
Olympos is a science fiction novel by the award winning author Dan Simmons. It's strange how something good, can be turned by it's association with something bad. I really loved the first volume in Dan Simmons Ilium/Olympos saga. I really did. But after having read the second volume Olympos,...
With On the Steel Breeze Alastair Reynolds has managed a little slice of futurism, how? Elephants. It seems we've been vastly under-estimating the intelligence of these gentle giants, at least most of us have - Reynolds hasn't.
Recent research now suggests that Elephants are at least as...
Any Doctor Who fan knows that this year is a big anniversary for the series and there is so much content coming that even the wider community may be aware that the Doc is turning 60. How do you stand out from the new books, audio series and episodes all incoming around the festive period?...
Not all authors write short fiction and those that do, do not always have enough to fill a complete collection, never mind several. Christi Nogle is a talented short story writer as their previous collections have already shown. One Eye Opened in That Other Place is one of the trickier...
One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy is a science fiction novel by Stephen Tunney. Two thousand years from now and the moon has been terraformed as an experiment - long before humanity perfected the technique on other planets. As a result the moon has a breathable atmosphere but has a bright red sky...
One of us will be dead by morning. Fifteen people trapped on Skek, a small, barren island in the middle of the North Sea between the coasts of Denmark and the UK. Skek is the home of the extreme sports company Hazelton Adventure Experiences, who specialise in corporate team building in an...
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...
Orc's is an anthology of Bodyguard of Lightning, Legion of Thunder and Warriors of the Tempest, 3 novels in the fantasy series Orcs, written by Stan Nicholls. In the world of Maras-Dantia the elder races lived along with each other, while not in peace at least in some tolerance of one another....
Antarctic research scientist Evelyn Edwards always knew that the bleak land of snow and ice held deep secrets locked within it's frozen grasp but when her team finds a 40000 year old body the discovery surpasses even her wildest dreams.
This dream soon turns into a nightmare however as...
The public love a superhero crossover tale, the billion-dollar hauls of various Avenger movies will tell you this, but they do not always work and at this point they can feel like going over old ground. Original Sin was a comic book arc conceived by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato...
Orion is a time travel science fiction novel by Ben Bova. The idea is so neat, that this easily could have been one of my all time favourites. It's not, but I'll get back to that. Two warriors Orion, The Hunter, and Ahriman, The Dark One, travel from each end of time and meet at important...
Orsinian Tales is a novel by the award winning author Ursula K Le Guin. This is not only the first non science fiction, but also the first short stories that I've read by Le Guin. Orsinian Tales is eleven stories and 215 pages of stories more alien to me than anything that I've read in a long...
I've been meaning to grab this series for quite some time — the combination of Atwood's evocative prose and a post-apocalyptic setting is a highly promising one. Oryx and Crake tells the story of an altered world through the eyes of a man once known as Jimmy. Now known as Snowman and clothed...
Joe is a private detective who after a visit from the obligatory attractive but mysterious woman is tasked with finding the author of the pulp-fiction series "Osama bin Laden: Vigilante". In this alternative history which seems to have split some time after world war two, the horrific terror...
I read a lot of science fiction and one element I am not duly bothered about is feelings. I prefer the imagery of cold steel roaring through space over the relationship between two characters, but without emotions what is the point of a story at all? Our Child of the Stars by Stephen Cox is a...
Having a family is a beautiful thing, but they can also be a pain. They do not listen and when they do, they get it wrong. Days are made up of petty squabbles that have lived below the surface for decades, but the foundation is all built on love. Writing a flawed, realistic family is not easy,...
Our Childrens Children is a science fiction novel by the award winning author Clifford D Simak. It must have been three or four years since I read this book last - enough time for my rotten brain to forget the most of it. Our Children's Children is a small master piece from one of the old...
I must admit that I missed the first 3 novels in this series although I have heard a lot about them (all good) and remember hearing about the (Tony winning) Broadway musical that was based on the first book "Wicked". The books themselves are inspired by Frank Baum's childrens classic "The...
Outies is the sequel to the much acclaimed novel The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This novel has been written by Jerry Pournelle's daughter, Jennifer. It has been a very long time since I read The Mote in God's Eye, the review on this site was written by my predecessor...
Oxygen is the first novel in a Christian science fiction series written by John B Olson and co-Written with Randall Ingermanson. This is a review by the previous owner of SFBook.com - TC. What intrigued me about Oxygen was the fact that it was labelled as "Christian science fiction" - never...
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