Books tagged with: community

A Good Old Fashioned Future is a collection of science fiction short stories written by Bruce Sterling. Seven stories and 250 pages by Bruce Sterling. I once started on Heavy Weather, but couldn't get into it, but I can easily say that that wasn't a problem with this one. Maneki Neko Strange little...

Divergent is the kind of book I stay awake reading until 4am. It gripped me and didn’t let go, staying with me when I closed the book with a rush of adrenaline and a serious hankering for its sequel. The novel takes place in Tris Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, where society is divided into five fa...

Waking up on a strange world with no memory of his past, our intrepid protagonist finds an unusual group of people surviving on the slope of a mountain chain that forms a ring around a vast sandy dust-bowl that appears to hold dangers unseen. Everyone else seem to also have no memories of their past...

Hooded Man collects the three novels Arrowhead, Broken Arrow and Arrowland (along with a short story set between the first and second books), all of which are part of the shared post-apocalyptic universe known as the "Afterbright Chronicles" - which includes this years SF Book of the year School's O...

Makers is a near future science fiction novel of economic, social and technological change, written by the very talented author Cory Doctorow. Perry and Lester are inventors, but more than that they make things from Junk, the most environmentally friendly inventors possible. Some of their inventions...

Day One - The Georgia flu sweeps the globe, a pandemic on a scale not seen before. Reports put the mortality rate at 99%. Week Two and most of Civilisation lies in ruins. Twenty years after the cataclysm and pockets of humanity have rebuilt settlements across the US. Things seem a lot less dangerous...

Bees are quite complicated little creatures and most of us know very little about them. Those that practice apiculture are becoming worth their weight in gold (or bees). We've been collecting their honey for over 15,000 years and we are just beginning to understand just how important to our survival...

The Big U is the first novel by the award winning author Neal Stephenson. Reading the reprinting of the first (and unsuccessful) novel of a now successful author can be a mixed blessing. Sometimes there’s actually a good reason why it wasn’t that successful the first time around. The Big U has been...

Another novel being published by those good people at Scifi Cafe, The Inosculation Syndrome is something of a surprise. The book tells the story of the astronaut Kal who becomes stranded on an alien planet due to a series of errors after losing touch with his star ship while charting regions of spac...

This is a sorta Bradbury esque horror attack of the pod people subtle down home lets conform and all is well book. Like his other great(er) book THE GREEN BRAIN it takes on evolution of a society without a wage of sin or shame in front of it. Is it cool for you to abandon your humanity for a better...

The Years of the City is a science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl. Subtitled A Chronicle of New York in the next Century, this book is about actually not as much about the big city as about the people in it and how they interact or rather doesn't. The book is split in to five different stories telli...

I have a sort of self imposed resolution to read all of the books that have won a Hugo award and to be honest this is the only reason I first picked up this book. I haven't read anything else by the author although I am of course aware of him, however as a more "literary" author he's not someone who...

Without warning, on the eve of the second Gulf war an unknown energy blast hits the USA - destroying all fauna while leaving flora and buildings intact. America as we know it vanishes in the blink of an eye. It's 2003 and in Kuwait US forces are poised for the invasion of Iraq, in Paris a covert age...

I missed out commenting about this novel when it was first released. There was such a rush by everyone to say how great it was I felt that I would be adding but a small ripple to a raging Tsunami. Everyone from the big papers to the big authors have commented how magnificent the book is, and they ar...

Newcon Press’ second novella series is a beautiful collection of four books. The Wind by Jay Caselberg launches straight into the kind of folk horror/ weird fiction premise that seems to emerge from a particular sense of British society. There are shades of Mythago Wood and The Wickerman in Caselber...

Zoe’s Tale is one of the Old Man War series of books by John Scalzi and covers the same time period and events as The Last Colony , (the previous book in the series) but from a different character’s perspective.  Despite this, it can be read as a standalone novel.  Zoe is moving to a new colony with...

The global success of The Martian and its subsequent film adaptation, catapulted Andy Weir into the public eye. Whatever he chose to write next was always going to draw attention. Set in our near future, Artemis is the story of Jazz Bashara, a young girl living on the moon. Struggling to make a life...

Fire fighter Sean Grigsby’s near future debut sees the world infested with dragons risen from beneath the ground. The wingless wyverns rise up to destroy cities and take lives, leaving only the shadows of people - ‘wraiths’ - behind. It’s up to the ‘smoke. Cole Brannigan, a patriotic, hard-working f...

Hutchinson's writing has, at times, turned out to be worryingly prophetic - he wrote about the break-up of the European Union while Brexit was just a twinkle in David Cameron's eye, in his astounding Fractured Europe series. This time he's writing about life in rural England after an apocalypse. Wor...

Back in the day the Doctor Who spin off novels had a real advantage over the TV show as they had no budget. The limit to what could happen in these books was not down to the pen pushers at the BBC or the naivety of special effects. The only limit to the books was the author’s imagination. Go big or...

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/w...

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 l...

To the uninitiated, Star Wars is just a film. To everyone else, that is just nonsense. There are multiple films, games, books, toys, teddies and now a theme park.  A  small part of the Star War Universe  resides  in Disneyland. You can visit the outpost of Black Spire and experience what it is  like...

Modern life has highlighted the plight of The Other. People are marginalised for all sorts of reasons and from what I can tell it is more noticeable than ever. If you are different but can blend in with everybody else, would you keep it a secret or not? The Nobody People are hidden from view for now...

There is something magical about the idea of a circus, the lights, the action, the antics, and the acts. The reality in my youth was a little different with a threadbare tent being erected in a local muddy play field. Khan Wong has thankfully decided to capture the majesty that the idea evokes in Th...

What are you going to do if Godzilla arrives. You must have a plan in mind. At least one for home and one for the office. I used to have a great plan that would see me have an almost 100% chance of surviving, but then I went and started a family. Now I have no chance as their little legs are just no...

The concept of humankind travelling to other planets to colonise has been a staple of science fiction for decades and as the world in which we inhabit becomes increasingly tricky for humans to live on, the novels are set to keep on rolling. Some are action pieces, some concentrate on the colonists t...

Reading about a dystopia is not as farfetched as it was once as we are living through a couple of ongoing ones as I write, but there is always space for a little more terror to add to the reality. What about a situation that is eerily possible? The sun belches out radiation daily and according to Da...

Science fiction is a brilliant tool for pondering what happens after the inevitable fall of humans. There is only so long that the Earth can sustain us, but that does not mean that other civilisations may not develop after. Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley is a Sci Fi mystery told from the persp...

There are all diverse types of people that make a successful working environment. If everyone were the same, we would all be doing the same thing and loads of stuff would not get done. Some people like to stand out in the crowd and pitch ideas, others are happy to lead. Engineer may be the second in...

As Star Wars fans we take the lore for granted. We know our Wookie from our Ewok, but to the casual person they are just two different types of furry alien. Take a step back and it is a complex universe, full of planets and species. It was tricky enough with just the three films, but six films later...

Cyberpunk has always been an interesting mash up of ideas, taking the science fiction forward ideas of technology and giving it a gritty edge. Mixing the equivalent of early 80s synth with the raw punk that preceded it in a giant science fiction blender sounds like chaos, but both have origins of ri...

I stumbled across this one at WorldCon in Glasgow last year. You know how it is, wandering the dealer's room, picking up flyers, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone who looks like they want to talk about their self-published epic. But I’d previously attended a panel about Scottish sci-fi and saw...

I have always appeciated the rich tapestry that the extended Star Wars Universe has given the reader. Whilst the films are few and far between, and the TV shows more abundant but still limited, it is the books that allow fans to deep dive into characters and places that may not get as much love on t...

We all come of age at some point in our lives. If we are lucky enough this will be as part of a loving household and we come out of it not too messed up, but not everyone is lucky. In the real world it can be tough enough, but take this dysfunction and place it is space, things can get real bad. Haz...