Science Fiction Book Reviews
I had the pleasure of meeting Geoff Ryman at WorldCon in Glasgow in 2024, and like many such meetings, it left me with a renewed appetite for his work. Animals, his newest novel and his first since 2023's much-discussed Him, is precisely the sort of book I had hoped for: quiet, formally...
The Star Wars books cover a vast history of the franchise from the Old to the New Republics. An author has so many characters and places to choose from, they do not always have to focus on the core Skywalker story that dominated the films. If they do choose to use these well-known characters and...
Sequels can be a tricky thing, and second books in longer series are perhaps the trickiest. They have to honour what worked in book one while doing enough that is new to justify their existence, and they have to do all of this while leaving enough for later books to explore. Carl's Doomsday...
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
Parallel universes are like a giant delicious vanilla slice. Each universe is its own layer, some are thin flaky pastry, others are lines of yummy custard, all of them unknown to one another, but working in parallel. However, squash them altogether and you get a custardy, flaky mess. Still...
The Salt Oracle is a particular kind of post-apocalypse fiction that British and Northern European writers seem unusually good at.
Quiet, unnerving and constrained, set against a backdrop where the light of the world might have gone out, but the survivors are still recognisably...
There used to be a pretty clear distinction between literary fiction and science fiction, with critics and prize committees firmly policing the border between the two. Heaven forbid someone would try to dilute the DNA. That distinction has been quietly eroded over the last ten or twenty years,...
I came to Silvia Park's Luminous the way I've come to a lot of sci-fi books this year: as a judge for the 40th Arthur C. Clarke Award and a deadline rather than the luxury of putting it down for a fortnight. That kind of reading sharpens you up and prevents you from being as polite about your...
I've been reading for over 40 years, and writing about reading for over 20 of them. In that time I've read widely, even dipping my toe into non-fiction on occasion. I don't expect much to surprise me. There Is No Antimemetics Division surprised me. It surprised me by just how different...
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
We read for many different reasons. Sometimes it's to improve our knowledge. Sometimes it's to explore new ideas or examine someone's view of an important topic. Sometimes it's just for fun.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is a book you read for fun. I don't mean to dismiss it by saying that;...
As you might expect, given the state of the world right now, there has been a great deal of climate fiction doing the rounds these last few years. Some, like Jeff VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander and Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations, have used it as a backdrop to tell a different story,...
You cannot know who you are going to fall in love with. This is complicated enough when you are falling for a fellow human. When it comes to falling in love with a Meta-human that is even more complex. Throw in an intergalactic war and you have one hell of a complicated relationship, especially...
The wonder and the worry of the difficult second book in a trilogy. Book one is all introduction, book three is all conclusions. The second book is that awkward sandwich in the middle that gets you from one to the other. The best way to avoid a second outing being all filler is to make each part...
Last night a DJ saved my life. It can feel like that for some people as they crave the weekend, those hot sweaty nights dancing with the people they feel closest to. The community not of family or work colleagues, but the friends and family that you pick up on the way. In the case of The Disco...
M. R. Carey has built a career out of refusing to do the obvious thing twice. Across thirty-odd books he has slipped from the quiet apocalypse of The Girl With All the Gifts to the medieval strangeness of Once Was Willem, never quite landing where you expect him to, and Outlaw Planet is another...
Science Fiction novels are stories about an imaginary fantastic future, especially space travel. Science Fiction usually refers to technological abilities that are theoretically possible based on current understandings and there have been many cases were past Science Fiction authors have accurately gauged this technology and years later it has come to pass.
Science fiction book reviews are available here from stories that have been written by the great science fictions like Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury to the new breed of classic writers such as Allen Steele and science fiction book reviews of the independent and self published authors...
There are so many truly outstanding scifi books out there that it can be very difficult to choose them apart. Listed here are some of the more popular or most read worthy novels available, however if you know of one you would like to see added, let us know, or better yet send us your review and we will see it included on the site.
Book of the month
