Science Fiction Book Reviews

Green Valley by Louis Greenberg

The average person seems to put a lot of trust in their Government. No way they are spying on me online and even if they are, what am I doing that they would care about? This attitude has shown that ignorance is not bliss, they may just sell your data to the highest bidder and before you know it they are able to predict who you will vote for or where you will shop with unerring accuracy. What are we to do? Put a tin foil hat on and watch out for phone masts? In the world of Green Valley peopl...

Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

Haimey is the engineer aboard the Singer, an interstellar salvage vessel named after its shipboard Intelligence. Haimey is genetically modified for zero-G, and she has brain-enhancing implants that connect her to the rest of the crew and chemically manage her emotional state. Haimey, Singer, and their pilot, Connla, discover an enormous wreck on the edge of inhabited space. The Derelict ship contains evidence of atrocities against one of the member races of the Synarche, the republic that gov...

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

A Memory called Empire is the debut of Arkady Martine, although reading the book you'd be forgiven for thinking she's been writing best-sellers for years.

The vast, interstellar Empire of the Teixcalaanli have appointed Mahit Dzmare as new Ambassador to the capital. When she arrives she realises that her predecessor was murdered, but no-one wants to admit it wasn't an accidental death. Mahit is from a small colony, a fiercely independent mining station that is due to be annexed b...

Thanos: Death Sentence by Stuart Moore

To anyone who has seen the latest Avengers movies you will know that Thanos is not a nice chap. He single handily (infinitely glovely) creates an intergalactic genocide. Despite this, the films try to give him some sympathetic elements; he only wipes out so many to save the whole. The Thanos of Stuart Moore’s Thanos: Death Sentence is not the Thanos of the films, but that of the comic books. This is an alien who has no interest in saving the galaxy for the long term, but wants to sit be...

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The sequel to the 2016 Clarke Award winner, Children of Time, the story of the far future human and spider civilisations picks up several generations after the events at the end of the previous novel.

A terraforming team, led by Dirsa Senkovi and Yusuf Baltiel discover alien life on a far distant planet that they had been sent to make habitable for humans. Baltiel decides to preserve this life and Senkovi agrees to redirect their work to an ice planet on the edge of the viable zone. S...

Broken Branches by Ben Ellis

In the not too distant future, your social standing is based on the "purity" of your genes and the ability to trace your family through the "national family tree" genetic database. All men are sterile and fertility drugs are only given to state-sponsored couples whose genetic match are approved. Those who can't trace their lineage are known as "Broken Branches" and considered outcasts, shunned by society.

Grace and Charlie are twins and Broken Branches, but Grace is given a chance at ...

From Divergent Suns by Sam Peters

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 way of life or it could be set many years into the future on a distant planet. Whatever the author chooses they need to produce a book that will sometimes have to take complex ideas and make them cohe...

The Crying Machine by Greg Chivers

Science documentary producer Greg Chivers’ first novel is a delightful combination of sci-fi, politics, and the three strange characters ensconced within them.

Chivers’ future Jerusalem is a city all but ignored as irrelevant by the world’s leaders, and in its anonymity the Holy City has become a haven for smugglers, exiles and extremists. While flying under the radar of the globe’s superpowers, the Middle Eastern metropolis teems with dubious characters, black...

No Way by S J Morden

No Way is the follow up to the gripping thriller One Way.  A perilous journey to the Red Planet by a group of convicts. Deciding that it was much more economically viable to train people that would have otherwise rotted in a jail rather than a group of experienced and highly trained Astronauts forms the basis of the story.

I can't really mention any more than that without spoilers to this first book - so if you haven't read One Way and are meaning to, it's best not to read any fu...

Master & Apprentice by Claudia Gray

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 explore the entire timeline including the somewhat maligned The Phantom Menace. I am an apologist for this film and particularly liked the relationship between Jedi Knight, Qui-Gon Jinn, and his Padawa...

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

A Hopeful Future

Review kindly provided by Vanessa Smyth. 

Welcome to the third and latest instalment in The Wayfarers series, Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers. This current narrative is set within the same captivating universe as the first two books and, despite a few oblique character links, this is an original story which can be read as a standalone novel, though I would recommend reading it in sequence. This is because you will get a sense of Chambers&rsquo...

The Magnificent Nine by James Lovegrove

Any show on the US TV network Fox has to realise that its days could be numbered. Fox have the reputation of axing cult shows before their time from Arrested Development to Family Guy. Despite their cancelation these shows are still being made. Firefly was not so lucky. This was a science fiction/western mash up that just cost a little too much for Fox to fund for more than a dozen episodes or so. But like a typical Joss Whedon character, the show would not stay dead. With the great film Sere...