Books tagged with: multiple timelines

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post apocalyptic science fiction novel by Walter M Miller. It is a strange story of a post apocalyptic monastery, which tries to save information about the time before the great destruction. The idea is good enough, but I can't say that I like what Miller has done with...

Agustin de Rojas was a Cuban author of science fiction. Within that country he is thought of as a legend and has even been described as "Patron Saint of Cuban science fiction". Agustin wrote A Legend of the future back in 1985, following his award winning novel Espiral (Spiral). El año 200 (The Year...

Across Realtime is a science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. This is Vinge's first full length novel. For some strange reason, I've never gotten around to it before now. I'm not sure why, but maybe it has been a combination of fear that it couldn't live up to the expectations that A Fire Upon the Dee...

Ancillary Justice has won more awards this year than any book before it. Not only that but the awards it has won are most of the major ones in science fiction. The Hugo, the Nebula, the BSFA, the Arthur C Clarke and the Locus award (for first novel). It's clear to see that the science fiction genre...

Fallen Dragon is a science fiction novel by the British author Peter F Hamilton. There is a unrecognised Science Fiction genre, that deals with the transition from a society of limits and into one of plenty (an utopia or nirvana, if you want). Or maybe not the transition itself but the events that l...

Galileo’s Dream is a brand new novel from Kim Stanley Robinson and follows Galileo on an amazing journey from the dawn of the modern age to a future on the brink of a scientific breakthrough. While on the brink of the modern world, Late Renaissance Italy is still surrounded by Alchemy and the teachi...

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...

Christopher Priest is without a doubt one of the finest writers alive today. Rather than compromise his stories for the sake of easy understanding Priest writes undiluted and it's up to the reader to pay attention; to digest and to consider what the story really means, or at the very least what it m...

The Boat of a Million Years is a science fiction novel by Poul William Anderson. Starting in the year 310BC and taking us beyond our present day, The Boat of a Million Years takes on one of Poul Anderson's favourite topics, namely longevity. Most of the book follows Hanno as he lives through a coupl...

The 15th April 2012 marks a century after the RMS Titanic (operated by the White Star Line) sank after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. 1517 people died in those freezing waters. It's as much a lesson in human arrogance as it is in maritime disasters (...

Horror comes in different guises, it can be dark, chilling, violent, bloody and psychological; Simon Law’s second novel The Damaged is all of these themes. The story starts in 1987 during ‘The Great Storm’. Law does a great job of writing about the eighties that is both familiar to those who remembe...

The Dispossessed, a novel by the distinguished and award winning author Ursula K Le Guin It's been some time since I last read anything by LeGuin (I think that it was The Word for World is Forest, which I liked); I've never really been much into her for some reason. Got no idea why. She writes quite...

Anyone who has been following the Long Earth series will be eagerly awaiting this fourth and penultimate novel in Stephen Baxter's and Terry Pratchett's series. The Long Mars was the strongest novel in the series so far and so The Long Utopia has a lot to live up to. The Long Utopia is set some time...

The Man Who Never Was begins in 1986 with the discovery of human bones during the demolition of the old Coke works in Derwenthaugh. The find also includes a strange artefact, one that suggests that the death of the bones owner goes back to 1945 and a set of strange circumstances. The author has rele...

A collaboration between Science Fiction greats,  Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, The Medusa Chronicles picks up the story of Arthur C. Clarke's A Meeting with Medusa a Nebula Award winning novella published in Playboy in 1971. It takes the story of Howard Falcon, from his shattered aftermath i...

The Proteus Operation is a science fiction novel by James P Hogan. Once upon a time in the late 21st century, everything was just a-okay and everybody where happy. Utopia had been reached. Well, except for a couple of malcontents who where rather bored with all this be-good-to-thy-neighbour and nobo...

Strange arches are appearing all over the world and the brother of failed artist Ed disappears through one that suddenly jumps into being at the bottom of a London Escalator. With no visible way back Ed must put aside his differences with his brother's wife and go find him. Four hundred years into t...

The Sky Road is the fourth volume in the Fall Revolution Series by Ken Mcleod. Expectations are a funny thing. It has been nearly ten months since I read the first three books by MacLeod and loved them, and now I that I've read his fourth book I'm unsure as to the reason as to why I'm disappointed w...

The Stone Canal is the second volume in the Fall Revolution Series, following on from the events of the Star Fraction, written by Ken Mcleod. The third book from this soon to be grand master (if I have anything to say about the matter). Stone Canal takes place in two threads, the first one takes pla...

I've said a number of times now that Adam Roberts is a gifted author and this is increasingly evident with each new book he writes. His work overflows with ideas and at the same time he seems to delight in using different structures, to experiment in forming his narrative. This time he's turned his...

The Violent Century has been one of my Holiday reads, a book I bought when it first appeared but had not had time to enjoy until now. It has to be said that Lavie Tidhar is a master linguist. His voice is confident, it's boldy unique and daring. With The Violent Century the author turns his attentio...

Ben Elton is a talented fellow. I've loved most of the TV programs he's been involved in from the Young Ones and Blackadder to Blessed and the Thin Blue Line . His humour is often satirical, off-the-wall and almost always makes me laugh. The only novel I've read of his prior to Time and Time Again i...

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a Hugo award winning post-apocalyptic tale of human cloning. For the Sumner family the recent droughts, floods, blighted crops, pandemic plagues and rising sterility all point to the demise of the human race. Their isolated farm in the Appalachian Mountains provide...

Apocalyptic fiction has been growing in popularity for years, with most stories following some big cataclysmic event such as a zombie uprising, sweeping plague, nuclear war or the rise of artificial intelligence. Recently though novels have started to appear that seem much closer to reality, some of...

On our first trip to Mars I hope that they send the best equipped, those with the skills and temperament to handle any situation that may occur. If disaster struck I would hope that these men and women would tackle the challenge dispassionately in an attempt to survive the oncoming end with as littl...

Batman stalks the villains of Gotham and for many he is their worst nightmare. Bats may be inherently scary to some, but in nature they are not the top of the food chain and several animals like to eat them for a snack. One such animal is the Owl, a natural enemy of the Bat. This being Gotham dressi...

When embarking on a new work based on a beloved IP the creator must have a haunting voice whispering in their ear…. “Fear the fan.” The most ardent supporters of a property can also be the most adamant to tear it all down if something is not to their liking. How many times have you read an uproar ov...

Star Wars is a franchise rich with great characters, but who to choose? It is tricky writing a cannon book on the likes of likes Han Solo or Rey lest you impinge on the films themselves. Thankfully, with such an abundance of history to choose from, there is always an interesting character to expand...

Above all genres, science fiction is my favourite. Why? Because anything can happen. You can have epic space battles between alien races you cannot pronounce or go in the other direction and create a subtle alternative reality where words have the power to kill. Ideas run the entire gamete and they...

As a superhero fan, the last couple of decades have been fantastic . The comics have had countless film  adaptations and prose novels. This  abundance  of content has allowed content creators to explore the idea of  super power s  more. We are no longer  in the age of Gods, when Superman fought othe...

Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others  quite different . If you  would like to go straight to the segment   unique to this  review , please start with paragraph 4.   Drafting  a book  must be like standing in fro...

They all tell you that having children is not easy, but nothing prepared us for the first six weeks of having a  defenceless  little t y ke in the house. You may have read the books, been to a few classes or asked r elatives and friends, but when it comes down to it, this is all on your shoulders al...

Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others quite different. If you would like to go straight to the segment unique to this review, please start with paragraph 4.   Drafting a book must be like standing in front of a s...

There are two ways that you can view the future. We are all doomed, or we will somehow save ourselves. The optimistic  The Day the Earth Stood Still  way of thinking is that humans will only get around to do something when we are really in a pickle. World ending disaster will be averted at the last...

For many  people,  the leading writer of speculative fiction i n the 90s  and 00s  was Michael Cr ic h t on who was able to marry a level of scientific reality with some  outrageous  ideas. A theme park full of dinosaurs, intelligent apes, nanobots that can kill? He was able to deliver on all of the...

I am not one to look back on my life, preferring to live and enjoy what I have in the present, but when I do it is often about my years at school and University. That person I could have treated better or the time I stood up in assembly by mistake. The events felt at huge at the time, but in retrosp...

I am at an age where I genuinely believe that Science Fiction is the best genre there is and I have read enough books of all types to have developed this opinion. I love it because it can be so many different things. Space opera to speculative fiction. A Sci Fi book can also be a riddle wrapped in a...

Social Media has changed the world we live in today by accelerating the polarisation of opinion. No longer is a debate a two-way conversation between people discussing their own point of view, but a slanging match in which neither side can see the others’ point of view. Until the last couple of year...

I am a massive fan of the Target imprint of Doctor Who books. Recently they have been filling in the gaps from the older series and producing new adaptations based on the past few Doctors. Taking stories out of any given season is a risky business. It could be a standalone monster of the week story,...

If I have said it once, I have it said a thousand times, science fiction is the best genre as it is so wide reaching. Stories can be grandiose, epic Space Operas with multiple characters on several planets. Or, stories can be personal affairs, titbits of speculative fiction that tweaks our own reali...

It is not that the aliens in Alien are constantly evolving, it is that they are constantly adapting to the scenario they are in. We usually see them egging up humans, but if they landed in a world populated by cows it would only be a few days that a bovine Alien was ripping up the locals. Aliens are...

A science fiction story that describes the gradual development of artificial intelligence and demonstrates the inadequacies of human beings as they try to train it and interact with it, The Peachy Paradox begins with a lightness and humour, but as it continues, the humour is satirical, sporadic and...