Books tagged with: first person

Graham Trevennan is one of those people who coast through life without great aspirations or desire to own the world (or even a secret hollowed out volcano). Having split with his girlfriend he's mooching about pretty aimlessly when he get's the shock of his life - secret lumps of rock, shady and arm...

Science fiction set in the near future, Azanian Bridges is a rough diamond, drawing on a variety of influences to deliver a real and wrenching story. Our setting is an alternative South Africa, where Mandela was never released and Apartheid didn’t end. We follow two characters, Martin and Sibusiso a...

The future vision in Barricade shows a world torn apart by a war fought against humanity and their own artificially created super-humans, known as "Ficials". In the UK (seemingly along with the rest of the World) the results are pretty catastrophic. As you can probably imagine once humanity has crea...

Code Name Atlas is a post-apocalyptic science fiction tale told by Tony Evans. A war hero trying to leave his past behind finds himself using his skills to survive after the earth is ravaged by unknown forces. In the midst of this destruction anarchy reins and he finds himself raising an army to fig...

This review was originally published in 2012 and has been re-published following the launch of the book in the US, published by Crown Publishing. I often start a review with a bit of blurb about the book itself, setting the scene for the reader and I try to never give too much away - limiting the in...

Tanyana has the innate talent to manipulate the very particles that hold matter together, as one of the most skilled pionners in a far-future society she can craft almost anything with just her concentration. An accident however brings her whole life crashing down and she is virtually cast out of th...

A book filled with ideas and scenes that demonstrate a strong command of both language and writing, Dream Alchemy by Nicholas Boyd Crutchley is a tricky text to review, mostly because it lacks a coherent story. Crutchley is playing with a multiple reality concept. We have occasional hints of this wi...

One of the reasons I review books is to find stories that impress me and writers I can learn from and certainly there’s a lot of learning to be had in Exit Eleonora – Richard Allan’s debut novel. The story is first person and set in AD 2047. Earth is re-organising itself after a devastating plague t...

First things first, Forever Peace is not a sequel to Forever War, for that you need to look for the later novel Forever Free (expect a review at some point when time permits). Forever Peace does however share a few of the same ideologies as it's predecessor and it also won both the Hugo and Nebula a...

If you missed out on Michael Moorcock the first time around, the collated paperback editions of his work from Gollancz are an excellent way to discover his stories. Kane of Old Mars collects three Kane books, Warriors of Mars , Blades of Mars and Barbarians of Mars . All of Moorcock’s adventures are...

These days Science Fiction is a crowded market. To 'make it' is a difficult and relative term. Each writer has their own journey to an audience and John Scalzi's has been an interesting one since Old Man's War was first serialised in 2002. His writing has a polish and shine to it that makes you thin...

The sequel to the BSFA Award winning novel Dark Eden , this book returns us to the dark planet, fast forwarding the generations to a fractured and disparate society that has come to colonise many of Eden’s different landmasses. Much of the themes hinted at in Dark Eden are developed here in the sequ...

New Model Army is a science fiction novel by Adam Roberts. Pantegral is a giant, a democratic gestalt entity whose thoughts are populated from the thousands of minds that make up a New Model Army, it's intelligence is born from the almost limitless knowledge available on the internet. Stalking throu...

At 75 years old, John Perry takes stock of his remaining life, with his wife dead and buried and a retirement of increasing dotage to look forward to he does the only sensible thing possible - he joins the army. Now known as the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) the war of the 22nd century is fought out...

Painkillers is a thought provoking read. I completed it in less than three days, which is something I haven’t done with a book for nearly fifteen years. During that time, I tried to work out what was keeping me absorbed as it is a very atypical Science Fiction novel, but perhaps that’s it. There is...

Podkayne of Mars is a science fiction novel by the legendary author Robert A Heinlein. One of the good old stories from the golden age of SF. One that I for some strange reason hadn't read before. I've always had strange feelings about Heinlein - I love most of his stories, but almost all of them le...

The smash hit science fiction debut from Cline in 2011, Ready Player One has been written about and reviewed many times since. What more can we say here at SFBook? Cline’s story is a first person narrative that describes a new virtual utopia woven out of eighties culture. The real world socio-econom...

Running Black is a science fiction novel, the debut of Patrick Todoroff. For the last eight years, the North Korean mercenary Tam Song has headed up Eshu International, a private security team that takes any job for the right price, no questions asked. Based in the Belfast Metro Zone, they're repute...

Sometimes I feel that reading post-apocalyptic tales are less an escape and more training for the future, after all as a race we aren't doing a great job of preventing this self-destructive outcome. Luckily there is no shortage of literature to teach us about survival in a future wasteland and Schoo...

Sirius by Olaf Stapledon is a science fiction novel and part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks collection. Sirius is the pinnacle of Thomas Trelone's experiments, the body of a large dog with the intelligence of a gifted human. He is raised as an equal in the Trelone household, alongside the scientist'...

The Affirmation is one seriously good book, managing to create a complex and mind bending scenario that plays on the structure of reality, levels of existence and the nature of the mind - the very notion of "self" and the idea of identity. The story is narrated in the first person by the central pro...

The genuine autobiography of one of the bravest, most dashing and heroic starship captains to ever bodly-go into the depths of space. You may be pleased to know that this Kirk is the real one, not the imposter who has more recently been seen in the latest films. This Kirk doesn't get command of the...

The Book of Adam: Autobiography of the first human clone is a science fiction novel and the debut of Robert M Hopper. On February 22, 1997, the world was shocked with the announcement that a lamb named Dolly had been born, the first mammal cloned from adult cells. The reaction was largely one of out...

Gene Wolfe is perhaps one of the most under-rated and criminally overlooked writers in genre fiction. The New Yorker recently called him Sci-Fi's Difficult Genius . Authors Michael Swanwick and Patrick O'Leary have gone so far as to say he is: The best writer alive today. Ursula K LeGuin is frequent...

The Carhullan Army is a dystopian science fiction novel set in an around the cumbrian fells, written by Sarah Hall. With much of Britain underwater due to a biblical level of flooding, the surviving population exist in concentrated pockets and ruled by the rather sinister sounding "Authority". While...

There is something gritty and slightly dirty about Simon Spurrier's writing, making it an acquired taste in science fiction at times. Certainly in The Culled, the first book of the Afterblight Chronicles published by Abaddon Books, we are introduced to our main character in a way that parades his vi...

Hig is a survivor, a lone pilot who's wife, friends and almost all neighbours are long dead. Living in the hanger of a small abandoned airport with only his dog and his gun-toting neighbour for company. He flies his 1956 Cessna around the perimeter looking out for trouble and occasionally sneaks off...

Journalist Cormac Easton is chosen to join a group of elite astronauts as they take part in the very first manned mission into the furthest reaches of the solar system. Documenting the greatest journey of human-kind should secure his place in history as one of the outstanding explorers of the age. I...

The Martian is one of those books that if many authors had attempted it, wouldn't have worked. The majority of the novel follows one man surviving on Mars with little more than a shelter, 2 rovers, a few space suits, air, water and potatoes. There are no monsters, no antagonists (unless you count th...

The Nomad of Time trilogy (The Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar), compiled into one volume in this paperback edition from Gollancz is a nostalgic treat for fans of steampunk and alternative history. These three stories are the memoirs of Oswald Bastable, Captain of the 53rd...

Far in the future the humans of Earth have spread to the stars, but at great cost to Earths fragile ecosystem. For a world that is largely concrete and plastic, wood has more value than gold and the Terrans waste no time in establishing a logging colony and military base named "New Tahiti" on an idy...

Melbourne, Australia - a metropolis that at one time was the biggest and wealthiest city in the world, ranked as one of the top three world's most liveable cities and a mecca for the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, sport and tourism. It also happens to be the only city in the world left st...

Three hundred years in the future and the world is a vastly different place with humanity fighting a seemingly endless war against an implacable alien enemy. The planet is in constant danger from alien infiltrators and religious hackers while orbital elevators allow easy access to space, a huge conv...

War of the Worlds: Aftermath is a novel written by Tony Wright that expands on the novel by HG Wells. The original War of the Worlds was first published in 1898, 113 years ago and told the story of the alien invasion of Earth - narrated from the first person perspective of a philosophical writer who...

A near future Science Fiction story packed full of action, when it starts, Whistleblower by David Smith has all the punch of a Hollywood blockbuster. Jake Redwood is part of a special police task force ordered to apprehend suspect alien children and subject them to a set of rigorous tests before the...

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...

While many stories depict the fight between man and machine, Sea of Rust shows a future where the machines have already won. Humankind has been wiped off the face of the Earth by the very robots that were built to serve them. Now the planet is controlled by vast intelligences (known as One World Int...

Paul McAuley is a vastly under-appreciated author. His books are inspiring, hypnotic and inventive. Austral is all of these and more, a book set in a plausible, climate-changed future where the planet has a new continent with a partial thawing of the Antarctic. There are still vast vistas of ice but...

The War of the Worlds was originally written in 1897 and it's never been out of print. It's one of the earliest stories to depict conflict with an alien race and has been influential in film, radio, TV, music and even science. The Guardian has gone as far as to say: A true classic that has pointed t...

I have always been a fan of Roger Zelazny. When I was a teenager, The Chronicles of Amber were a library book quest to find the whole set, which never quite happened, so it wasn’t until later in adult life that I was able to purchase the bumper edition that contained them all. Doorways in the Sand w...

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...

An interstellar expedition, tracing an anomalous signal back to its origin. Three men on board a ship called the Fargo , all returning dead, two hundred years later, but with the cargo hold full of an unknown mineral that makes the fortune of the company that sent them into the unknown. Twenty-five...

Empire of Silence is the debut of Christopher Ruocchio and the first in the Sun Eater series. It describes the early life of Hadrian Marlowe, an infamous figure who is remembered galaxy-wide as both hero and monster. The man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. The man who destroyed a s...

A new space opera story from an author with a strong legacy in SF is a nice treat. Powell’s work on Ack-Ack Macaque has always intrigued me, but never enough to go out and read it. Whereas this, a more conventionally presented science fiction novel with comparisons to Ann Leckie and Iain M. Banks em...

The sassy, media loving AI ‘Murderbot’ returns in Exit Strategy , the fourth entry in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Murderbot first burst on to the scene in 2017’s All Systems Red . In that first instalment, Murderbot was hired as a security unit (SecUnit) to protect a team of scientists le...

Illustration ©2018 Stephen Hickman from The Folio Society edition of Starship Troopers The Folio Society has produced a beautiful, limited edition of Robert Heinlein’s classic book, Starship Troopers, first published in 1959. In 1998, aged 22, I went to the cinema to see Paul Verhoeven’s adaptation...

A change of pace and approach from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls is a first-person past narrative, presented as a journal. This is a collection of writings from Stefan Advani, the chronicler of the last days of the last city of humankind – Shadrapar. Our story begins with Stefan being brought to...

As the world tears itself apart in front of us, there is something comforting about reading a good dystopian novel. If we are going to go out, at least it will not be due to zombies, bombs, viruses or all the bees dying out. Then again, it could be all of these together. Once the nuclear fallout has...

The way that humans treat each other in real life is far darker and harrowing than any science fiction book that you can create, but this does not stop some authors from exploring the depths of the  human  condi tion. If we are only as good as how we treat the weakest in society, the people who inha...

Making an author come up with a single science fiction  concept  is tricky enough, but to ask them to come up with an infinite number of multiverses is just plain mean. Tim Pratt only have themselves to blame  as they choice to take  Zaxony   Delatree  on an adventure across a multitude of worlds.  ...

When an intellectual property becomes huge it can go one of two  ways,  a homogeneous blob of the same stories on repeat, or a vibrant  universe full of different adventures. Star Wars was already massive, but  recently has branched out even wider. This included a reset of the tie in novels and rath...

One of those books I missed the first time around, The stone man is the first in a series of science fiction thrillers. It looks like it's already become a bit of a self-published success story and the second in the series, The empty men is out now. The story begins on one July afternoon in a busy c...

If you could find out your exact time of death down to the last second, would you take up the option? For some it could be liberating, they will pack their lives until the last moment. For others, their death will become even more of a looming presence as it draws ever near. In James Kennedy’s  Dare...

After a string of novellas that were, frankly, brilliant, the fifth book and first full-size novel in The Murderbot Diaries , Network Effect stormed the science fiction scene when it was released, winning the holy trinity of Hugo , Locus and Nebula awards for best novel. As I write this the first (i...

Unto Leviathan was originally released back in 2001, under the title Ship of fools , winning the Philip K Dick award in the process. It's since been re-released by Orbit under the current title. The generational ship Aragonos  travels the galaxy, looking for signs of life and a possible place to cal...

Resilient is the second book in Allen Stroud's Fractal series , picking up right after the events of Fearless . As such it's impossible not to provide some minor spoilers about Fearless while talking about Resilient . I will however try my best to give away as little as possible, and anything mentio...

There is no doubt that Tchaikovsky is a prolific author - I'm counting at least 38 novels and many novellas and short stories. Every few months, there seems to be a new book on the horizon. But that regularity of releases doesn't seem to impact the quality of his writing or the sharpness of his visi...