Books tagged with: soft science

Philip K Dick first wrote this story as a short called "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" which was published in the August 1966 edition of the Amazing Stories magazine. Counter Clock World is the expanded, novel length version and was published a year later. The novel uses the Big Crunch theory t...

On the concrete balcony of a third-floor industrial complex in London, China Miéville was speaking earnestly about his early experiences of reading H.P. Lovecraft. He was remembering the Cthulhu. They were, he said, quite sexy. Three years later and the alien species of Embassytown are a language-im...

Passengers to Zeta Nine is a science fiction novel by Peter Salisbury, set within the same universe as Passengers to Sentience. Travelling for one hundred and twenty years, the minds of Raife and Nancy are electronically stored along with six hundred other couples aboard the ship Explorer, bound for...

A near future premise that quickly transforms into a Lovecraftian space opera, as you may guess, Static Push is full of surprises. The title, whilst directly relevant to the story really doesn’t do the ideas contained in the novel justice. A science team at Dennison Industries are investigating a me...

The Long Earth follows the premise that there are an infinite number of alternative dimensions, all existing within one great "Multiverse", each universe containing a slightly different version of the Earth. A few years in the future and a device powered by the humble potato (it will make sense, tru...

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...

As a football fan it is sometimes hard to understand that some people just don’t care about it. They see it as a  frivolous  game of kicking a pig’s stomach around a patch of grass.  In the context of life and death, it is just something to keep you busy on a Saturday afternoon. That is unless you a...

Comedy combined with Science Fiction is rare because it is so hard to do. When it clicks though it is worthwhile as you get some absolute classics such as Red Dwarf or Hitchhiker's . Those are mighty large shoes to try and fill, but Chris Panatier is giving it a go in Stringers , a book that feels l...

Science Fiction has been inspired by religion ever since it started being written, Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus even has the Greek Gods in the title. The word science may be in the title of the genre, but it is also a genre about wonder, about questioning the things around us. Science fiction a...

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...