Science Fiction Book Reviews
Not all books have to be linear or simple reads. There are enough books already like that so when something experimental like Kuzhali Manickavel’s A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School lands on your doorstep, as a genre reviewer you are...
One of the magical things about Science Fiction is that you do not always have to explain why something has happened. Some Space Opera epics will go into great detail describing how the ships work, or how space travel is made possible, but some of the best genre fiction just does not tell you....
According to the publisher’s website, The Hyena is ‘a surrealist alternate history’. ‘Surrealist’, I’m happy to accept, although really it’s more of a meta-commentary upon that avant-garde movement. But ‘alternate history’? Now there’s...
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
If you had the chance to go back in time for four days, when would you go? Would you choose to revisit a loved one that is no longer with us? Perhaps relive an experience, or go to one you missed? The answer should be thought through carefully as the consequences of any changes you make in the...
Every so often you finish a book, and you sit with it for a while before you feel able to tell people about it, or indeed write about it. I am still turning bits of this book over in my head as I write this. This is, I think, Claire North's best novel to date, and that is not a small thing to...
A new Dave Hutchinson novel is, for me, one of the more reliable pleasures the genre has to offer, and The Essence is a particularly welcome arrival.
NewCon Press have done a handsome job with the trade paperback, a 276-page edition with cover art by Ben Baldwin, published in December...
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...
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
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...
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...
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
