Science Fiction Book Reviews

The Real-Town Murders by Adam Roberts

One of the (many) things I like about Adam Robert's stories is that they are always full of big ideas and The Real-Town Murders is no exception. This time the author has written a future-noir crime story which revolves around the "locked room mystery".

A popular subgenre in it's own right, "locked room" mysteries explore a crime (usually a murder) which has been committed without any visible means of detectable entry or exit.

In The Real-Town Murders this involv...

The Ion Raider by Ian Whates

The Ion Raiders is book two of Ian Whate’s Dark Angels series, however despite featuring some if the same characters as book one, Pelquin’s Comet, it is not a direct continuation of the same story so can be read without knowledge of the first.  Not to give to many spoilers, but the story does continue into the next novel making book three high on my 'need to read' list. 

Whates uses the wider description of the first scene to sharpen the readers foc...

Alien: Covenant by Alan Dean Foster

I've been a big fan of the Aliens series ever since I saw the first film back in the 1980's. I've read all the books, including the expanded universe (non-canonical) ones from Bantam, and more recently from Titan books. I've watched and read the Aliens vs Predator crossover media, some which is great, some not so great. 

I've watched all the films of course (the first two many times), including the dreadful Prometheus which promised much but delivered nothing. A...

Amatka by Karin Tidbeck

Karin Tidbeck has written a number of short-stories, her first english Language collection (firmly rooted in Weird Fiction), Jagannath, was nominated for the World Fantasy award and short-listed for the James Tiptree Junior award. It also received wide-spread critical acclaim. Amatka is her first novel length story.

Set in a world where the fabric of reality is shaped by language, Amatka tells the story of information assistant Vanja who is sent from her home city of Essre to the au...

Skitter by Ezekiel Boone

A few weeks ago we reviewed the spider-infested book The Hatching. This was preperation for the launch of the much anticipated sequel Skitter.

Skitter follows on directly from the dramatic events of the previous book and once more we are thrown into the middle of spidergeddon.

The first wave of spiders have died out, leaving countle...

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

Spiders (or arachnids if you are being posh) provoke strong reactions in some. One of my brothers, who still considers himself tough (even though he's now over 40) will move astonishingly fast in the opposite direction when encountering such a beast - usually with the result that his teenage daughter has to wrestle the creature into submission.

To be fair, I dislike all insects (and yes I know spiders aren't really Insects) with an equal vigor and only tolerate spiders becau...

From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters

It's funny how life seems to throw co-incidences at you. Until recently I'd never given the small island of Gibraltar any real thought. Then the company I work for expanded their services there which meant I needed to learn about this unusual British overseas territory.

A few weeks later the monumental car-crash that is Brexit reached it's Article 50 moment and Gibraltar hit the news. Not least as Spain took the opportunity to suggest they should claim it back - it's...

Haunted Futures by Salome Jones

Haunted Futures is a collection presenting the uncertain future in many guises. Originally funded as part of a kickstarter campaign and edited by Salome Jones it features short stories from authors including Warren Ellis, Jeff Noon, Tricia Sullivan and SL Huang (amongst others).

The brief these authors we given was simply "interpret the phrase Haunted Futures as a story". From over four hundred submissions, fifteen of the best were chosen. The style of each story varies greatly, as ...

Space Team by Barry Hutchison

Space Team is one of those rare gems, a genuinely funny science fiction story that manages to entertain from beginning to end.

The book follows the miss-adventures of small-time conman Cal Carver, abducted by aliens from incarceration due to a case of mistaken identity. His day goes from bad to worse after two-thirds of the human race is wiped out in a single stroke and he's cajoled into taking part on a mission that turns into a frantic battle to save an entire alien civilizati...

Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

Slow Bullets won the 2016 Locus award for best Novella and was shortlisted for the Hugo (along with making a number of must read lists). As you would expect from a novella it's a short read at 192 pages but it packs in more ideas than many more weighty novels manage.

Narrated in the first person by Scur at some point in the future, Slow Bullets begins at the end of a vast conflict between hundreds of human-colonised worlds. The "Central Planets" fighting against the "Peripheral ...

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

A Book that brings you Home: Becky Chambers’A Close and Common Orbit.

 It took me a while to  work up the emotional energy to read Becky Chambers’ A Close and Common Orbit. This is Chambers’ second novel. Her first novel, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, was a unique self-published sci-fi novel that blew up in popularity. It made it onto the lists for several awards, including the shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke Award and the longlist for the Baileys Women's Prize f...

Borne by Jeff Vandermeer

‘We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.’ Jeff VandeMeer’s Rachel summarises the theme of his latest book best. The author’s first novel since his acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy, Van de Meer’s Borne is a surreal piece of work that examines the idea of identity in a relentlessly unforgiving, post-apocalyptic setting.

Although broken into three sections, Borne is really a book of two halves. The first part is an intimate examination of Ra...