Books tagged with: satirical

Alternate Reality Ain't what it used to be by Ira Nayman is a collection of news stories from alternate realities, as told by the intrepid reporters from the Alternate Reality News Service. The book is split into different sections for technology, relationships, games, politics etc. and each section...

Harry Harrison was a genius. The way he managed to use absurdity, satire and slapstick humour to talk about some pretty grim subjects is nothing short of remarkable. Way before Pratchett, Holt, Adams and Naylor, Harrison was creating some of the funniest books on the planet. Bill, the Galactic Hero...

Cat's Cradle is my first foray into the world of Kurt Vonnegut, I have heard his name mentioned over the years but for one reason or another I have never actually picked up one of his novels. My youngest brother recommended his works (specifically siting Slaughterhouse five) and I have been picking...

Code of the Lifemaker is a science fiction novel by James P Hogan. I can hardly believe that this is the same author, which wrote Realtime Interrupt. Okay, it's not exactly a character driven story, but it's much better than RI and Hogan has a lot of interesting things to tell here. Code of the Life...

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...

Oleg Kashin’s debut novel ‘Fardwor, Russia’ takes its reader on a surreal journey through the political landscape of Russia’s seedy underbelly. Drawing on his experience as an award-winning journalist and polemicist, Kashin skilfully blends fact and fiction, shining a light on some of the most sinis...

Good News from Outer Space is a science fiction novel by John Kessel. This probably the strangest book that I've read in a long time. Taking place in the last days of 1999 the book is mostly about faith run amok. Kessel paints a picture of an alternative timeline that's dark and that I do not care f...

It's a fact that following the explosion of technology we now give away vast amounts of information freely and often unknowingly. Big companies have got smart at figuring out just how best to get such information. Many sell that data on without compunction. Fast forward to the year 2066 and big corp...

In the Hall of the Martian King is the third volume in the Jak Jinnaka series by the American author John Barnes. This is the third book in the Jak Jinnaka series. Jak, has gotten him self an easy job administrating the Hive base on Deimos. Noting much is supposed to happen, but of cause something d...

Simply put this is a witty outlook on modern life and the consumerists of today. It does bare great similarities with the classic Orwell novel but where that can be quite dark and bleak this novel, although fatalistic somewhat is rather funny. The characters in the novel all having surnames from the...

Review by Luis Villazon. Ira Nayman bills himself as the proprietor of the “Alternate Reality News Service”, a sort of Reuters for the multiverse. This collection of short stories is structured like a newspaper, with technology stories, crime reports, obituaries and advice columns supplied by ARNS c...

After technologically superior aliens conquer earth, humanity survives very much like mice, living within the walls of the huge homes of the giant aliens. They scurry about under their feet, stealing food and avoiding the ever more devious traps set out for them. As time goes on humanity adapts and...

R.U.R. (Russum's Universal Robots) is a "play" written almost 100 years ago and first introduced the world to the word "robot" which was derived from the Czech word "robota" meaning serf labor or hard work. ?apek has actually credited his brother (the painter and writer Josef ?apek) as the actual in...

Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the most famous and controversial science fiction novels, by the legendary author Robert A Heinlein. A best seller and Hugo award winner - having never been out of print, Stranger in a Strange Land was written in 1961, almost 50 years ago. The original published...

Terra is a very different novel. It doesn't take itself too seriously and on the surface appears very light-hearted, a safe novel with prose full of soft curves rather than sharp edges. This is after all a young-adult novel and yet there is much more to this book than meets the eye. The story follow...

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...

Reviewed by Philip Graham. Kurt Vonnegut was, until recently, my personal Leo Tolstoy. By that I mean that I knew his name, I knew he was a famed author, and I knew that I really should have read more, or even some, of his work. So finally I went out and got "The Sirens of Titan". I chose this book...

The System of the World is the third and final volume in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. In 1714 Daniel Waterhouse arbitrates the irrational dispute between the aging mathematical giants Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, both angrily insisting they invented the calculus. However as th...

Tritcheon Hash is a science fiction novel by Sue Lange. The first thought that popped into my head after having read a couple of pages of T. Hash was; “What? Lesbian Science Fiction?”. After at few chapters it's clear that it isn't and after having finished it, I'm not even sure that it qualifies as...

Death, the final frontier, the one inescapable and inevitable fact of that we call life, or is it? What if even after you died you could come back for a limited time and in some limited form to once again see your loved ones and experience the linear existence we so often take for granted. In the vi...

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 Swift...

Science fiction is a crowded market. There are a variety of ways in which a writer can try to tell a story that gives a sense of a possible future. Some of those ways are close to our reality, some are not. Complete Darkness by Matt Adcock certainly offers a glimpse into something futuristic. A worl...

That one time you saved the world with stick with you for a lifetime. You may bask in the glory one day and wake up with cold sweats the next, either way, the event will be forged in your memories forever. What about two times? Three or four? Do you think that James Bond can remember one supervillai...

The world will not die with a bang, but with a whimper. Similarly, it won’t be the robots that uprise and destroy humans, but our own incompetence when it comes to programming. Build and programme things correctly and everything should be fine, but this is modern life and doing things correctly seem...

I enjoy it when the publishing community gets together and decides to proclaim there is a new subgenre. These are a collection of books that have already been written but are now herded into a common bracket. Romantasy and Cosy Fantasy are doing great, and I have read a few of these. Low stake conse...

There was a time in my life that I would sit down and read some Dystopian Fiction and not consider at all that it would happen in my lifetime, but all I need to do is some doomscrolling on my social medias to think that elements of Carl Wilhoyte’s Ultimart may not be long in our future. This is a bo...

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...