Books tagged with: diverse cast

A Bag of Bedtime Tales is an anthology of diverse short stories set in a variety of worlds and genres. The stories are grouped into three sections, one series focuses on the fictional town of Durrington and the strange events that occur there, the next is firmly fantasy genre with stories set in the...

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 littl...

To relate to this novel you need to understand the reason for the book, memories. Those snapshots of time stored in our own personal biological computer situated in our noggin. In many ways it's these recordings of our travels through time (and if we are very lucky, space) that make us the people w...

Crossed Genres Year 2 is a collection of twelve short stories featured in the Crossed Genres magazine between issues 13 and 24. Crossed Genres has a different theme each month so there is quite a varied mixture on offer here. All have been written to a high standard and each have a distinct voice....

Dangerous Visions was originally published in 1967 and was the brain child of it's editor Harlan Ellison. Anthologies rarely attract the kind of attention that this one has over the years but then most don't win major awards for more than half a dozen of it's stories either. Hugo award wins include...

Escape from Bagdad! is a novel riding the wave of modern, alternative fiction that provides a fresh and marked difference to the over-subscribed European / American setting. As the title implies the story is set in Bagdad during the US invasion. With the American military, Religious fanatics, Mercen...

This is a substantive collection of short stories from Alchemy Press, varying in setting, premise and idea but all focusing around the concept of a moment in time as mentioned in the title. These moments are all pivotal and memorable, life defining and changing in each case. The stories themse...

Lessons Learned follows on from the life-changing events of Gentle Reminders serialised right here on SFBook. Finding themselves without a Captain, Maur and the Jump Cannon crew try to adapt to their new roles and face some of their deadliest missions yet. The Free Man group is still lurking in the...

LoveDeath is a speculative fiction novel by the award winning author Dan Simmons. I met Simmons at a recent Danish book fair and had a small talk with him about the range of his published work and the problem of categorising books. Not being a very well read Simmons fan (The Hyperion Cantos and Car...

Stories from Adam Roberts are always challenging as well as entertaining. Saint Rebor follows this trend, being a diverse collection joined together by the writer’s conceptual ideas in the prologue. Whilst you might expect a variety of story premises in a collection, in Saint Rebor, you have a much...

Selected Shorts and other methods of time travel is a collection of short stories especially created for Young Adults, written by David Goodberg. The Year is 2051 and time travel has become a commercial success. Opportunities abounded for curious history buffs, futurists, and corrupt entrepreneurs....

In Denmark there is a thriving science fiction subculture with many short stories being written every year. Since 2007 the Danish science fiction association (Science Fiction Cirklen) has published an annual anthology of a selection of these original stories, written by Danish authors. For the very...

Star Wars was a huge part of my childhood, the original was the first film I ever saw at the Cinema and for a period I watched the film (and the two proceeding) pretty much every day - at one point I could recite the whole script if you'd asked me to. Must have driven my poor mother to distraction....

Terminal Earth is a collection of original short stories that all feature the end of the world in some way, edited by Michael Stewart and Neil Thomas. With 23 tales of the apocalypse, Terminal Earth offers a great deal of compelling tales from talented authors. Despite the common theme there are so...

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was originally funded as a small kickstarter project and self-published as a result. It was such a hit that it found a big publisher, got nominated for a ton of awards and has been raved about by many, many people. What struck me in particular wasn't just what ev...

This second volume in a collected anthology of Ursula Le Guin’s work showcases more of her Science Fiction and fantasy stories and has a more prominent escapist theme than the first. Her introduction to this volume is deeply insightful, commenting on the writer’s perspective of genre being more abou...

There seems to be a bit of a resurgence in the superhero story and this new wave of fiction manages to offer a different slant on the traditional tales, combining the modern interpretation of a superhero set within with the contemporary urban fantasy framework. Turbulance manages to go one better a...

When I received this anthology to review I hadn't delved into the background behind its journey to publication. It was interesting to see its crowd-sourced origins and development. There are some misconceptions people have with crowd source funded books, firstly that the quality of the writing might...

The first Wastelands anthology, released back in 2008 was widely regarded as not only a fine collection of apocalyptic tales but one of the finest anthologies full stop. Big shoes to fill then. The Editor John Joseph Adams is clearly up to the task though and has managed to get together some of the...

What were once Miracles are now Children's Toys by Ira Nayman is a collection of news stories from alternate realities, as told by the intrepid reporters from the Alternate Reality News Service and is the second volume in the collection. The Author Ira Nayman is the recent winner of the "2010 Sw...

There is a much bigger speculative fiction scene within China than most people realise. The main barrier to these stories for the western reader is of course language. It's wonderful to see writers such as Ken Liu translating important Chinese works so that a wider audience can begin to enjoy...

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 a...

Daughters of the Forgotten Light is set in a deep space penal colony called Oubliette. Floating in space, it's home to the most savage criminals and other members of the population Earth no longer wants. To survive on Oubiette you need to join a gang and Lena "Horror" Horowitz leads the Daugh...

2001: An Odyssey in words is a collection of twenty-seven stories, all exactly 2001 words in length and written to honour the late, great author Arthur C Clarke. The anthology is a collaboration between The Arthur C. Clarke Award and NewCon Press which began life as a kickstarter...

Junction asks the question: what would we do if we had access to a brand new, virgin world? Would we destroy it like we are doing with our own world? Or would we learn from our mistakes and treat this as a second chance to do things right? Daisuke Matsumori is a Japanese nature show host who happen...

It is not hard to see where Marvel Studios get all their ideas from as they sit upon a rich heritage of characters and storylines that will take decades to exhaust. I am somewhat of an old school Marvel fan and know the classic runs. Therefore, the newer creations flummox me. Captain Marvel is more...

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a talent for writing deep, meaningful scifi. He won the Arthur C Clarke award in 2016 for Children of Time and the 2019 BSFA best novel award for the follow-up Children of Ruin. There are few authors that can quite match his vision for non-human intelligence, or his flair for...

I like to read a collection of short stories on occasion as they act as a wonderful palette cleanser after so many full-length tales. The authors need to be succinct with their ideas as they have 20 pages to get their point across, rather than 400. An ant...

The genre of Science Fiction has always been a wide one in terms of ideas. You can set a book on our own Earth with only one or two tweaks to the norm. This Speculative Fiction is Sci Fi, but so are the Space Operas that span eons and are inhabited by alien races. Although the nature of Sci Fi can c...

I set a high bar set for science fiction short story collections that is in no way the fault of any modern author. Unfortunately for them I read The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury at an influential age. I rate a collection against the creepy science fiction/horror tones that Bradbury was able to cr...

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...

I do enjoy a set of short stories. There are typically two types that you can get, a collection, or a theme. The Price of Memories and Other Stories by Sally McBride is a classic style collection of an author’s works brought together over years into a curated whole. Are there themes that imbue...

What makes a bunch of short stories gathered together a collection? It could be the works of the same author, or it could be some sort of theme that means they are all derived from the same place. A collection's origins can significantly impact the type of stories you are about to read. Is it an est...

The thought of travelling to space and living on the International Space Station has no interest to me. Stuck in a metal box, isolated, miles away from civilisation with only the same people as company sound like a one-way ticket to madness. You do not need to go into space to create such a feeling....

Graphic Novels have an advantage over prose in terms of kinetic visuals. You can show in a panel the action taking place and all the colours, in a book you need to describe this. This advantage can be too tempting for some and the book becomes all action and not enough depth. The best comics are alw...