Books tagged with: suspenseful

There are some books that arrive into your life early and never quite leave it. Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of those for me. I read it as a teenager, watched the Kubrick film not long afterwards, and have been turning both of them over in my head, in one way or another, ever sinc...

Nine years after the disastrous Discovery mission to Jupiter in 2001, a joint U.S.-Soviet expedition sets out to rendezvous with the derelict spacecraft to search the memory banks of the mutinous computer HAL 9000 for clues to what went wrong and what became of Commander Dave Bowman. Without warning...

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...

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...

A Quantum Murder is the second volume in the Greg Mandel Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton. Greg Mandel on his second case for Julia Evans and the Eventhorizon company. If you have any of the other two Mandel books you'll know what to expect. QM isn't quite as well written as Nanoflower, but it's in the s...

Acts of the Apostles is a science fiction novel by John Sundman. I'm a bit less qualified to review this books, than normal, as it's part of a genre that I know next to nothing about, namely the conspiracy genre (if there's such a thing), or maybe it the techno-thriller genre, I don't know. But I'll...

Against A Dark Background is a novel by the noted author of science fiction Iain M Banks. Yes, more Banks - Since Crow Road and Use Of Weapons he has definetly become one of my favorite authors. Against a Dark Background is Science Fiction at its best. Suspence, love, action and high-tech gadgets ar...

Alien: It’s more than just a novelization of the movie. Alan Dean Foster’s ALIEN is fantastic. That having been said, you can easily guess the direction of this book review. Normally, I do a formal review but this one just seemed to be stifled by a synopsis and straightforward critique. Instead, I w...

The second installment in the new Alien series by Titan books is quiet different from the first and doesn’t quiet fit in the way I expected. Yet, it delivers what any fan of the Alien franchise craves: insane amounts of Xenomorph action. Alien: Sea of Sorrows takes place on LV178, which is what conn...

Novelizations of movies are often jutted to the back of the bookshelf after one reading. Reviewers are critical, normally arguing that it is just an attempt to make money off a popular film franchise, and at times they do so justly. Yet, some novelizations often tell the story in a way film simply c...

The story behind LV-426 is more terrifying than anything my childhood imagination lent after watching Alien and Aliens on VHS. Although before my generation, both Ridley Scott and James Cameron contributed to one of the most terrifying storylines in cinema history. And for this reviewer, it has beco...

Amortals is a science fiction thriller of high octane action and is the novel of Matt Forbeck, published by Angry Robot Books. The year is 2168 and Secret Service agent Ronan "Methusaleh" Dooley is hot on the trail of a vicious killer, but this case is a bit of a twist as the victim happens to be hi...

Amped follows on directly from the events of Wired reviewed late last year. We rejoin the brilliant scientist Kira Miller who has discovered how to boost the human IQ to extreme post-human levels for short periods of time. With this extreme intelligence comes the danger that the same process brings...

Reviewed by Matt Karder. I have never been an ardent fan of short stories but this collection certainly is an exception. The flow within the prose is a major factor. Short sentences bursting with content focus the reader’s attention very effectively. A Worm In The Well & The Worm Turns The first two...

Architect of Fate is a Space Marine Battles Anthology which collects together 4 novellas that make up the series featuring the infamous greater daemon of Tzeentch, Kairos Fateweaver. A master of manipulation who schemes and uses his prodigious power to play with the fates of thousands, even the unwi...

Area 51 - also known as Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Home Base, Watertown Strip, Groom Lake and Homey Airport - is one of the worst kept secrets in the world, a top secret government facility located within the Nevada Test & Training Area that even now, the US government refuses to admit existence of....

Blue Earth is a science fiction novel and the début of author Jeff Stover. The Thrones are a group of biological "mistakes", genetic experiments that have resulted in something more or less than human. They have inspired the writings of new religious texts that many now regard as sacred. Ruth Long,...

Carrion Comfort is a Dan Simmons horror novel, best known for the Hyperion and Endymoin series. Except for the stories in Dark Visions this is the first horror by Dan Simmons that I've read. I'm not sure what kind of expectations I had for this book before I started on it, but I can't say that I was...

Children of the Thunder is a science fiction novel by John Brunner. John Brunner has written a really wonderful book 'THE SHEEP LOOK UP' that I should probably re-read. This book came close but not quite to the despondancy that Earth is supposed to face in the present/near future. There is developin...

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...

Today we are all too familiar with the assault of digital information and various forms of media which work hard to blur the definition of reality. Robertson has created a world where that idea is pushed to its disturbing conclusion. On the Station, where the remnants of humanity orbit a toxic world...

Crossed is riding the heights of topical subjects, that of environment, ecology and global warming. In the very near future a cartoon is created that will ultimately change the world. It follows the adventures of a sea turtle who crosses the ocean and encounters other marine life struggling within a...

Cryptonomicon is a speculative fiction novel by the American author Neal Stephenson. I've been a bit apprehensive about starting on Cryptonomicon. Neal Stephenson is a bit like Vernon Vinge – they both make wonderful books, and they both take their time about it. Also Cryptonomicon is about mathemat...

Dagger of the Mind is a speculative fiction book by Bob Shaw. Dagger of the Mind, is a strange book. It takes off normally (well..) enough, Redpath is an epileptic living in a small english town. To make a buck, he participates in a series of experiments involving a new drug Compound 183. The book s...

I brought this one by mistake – I thought that it was the new collection containing a new Stephen King short story set in the Dark Tower universe. It wasn't but it's still a nice "little" collection of horror stories. Dark Visions contains seven stories; three by Stephen King, three by Dan Simmons a...

Darwins Radio is a science fiction novel by Greg Bear. Just the title alone should give you a good idea as to the subject of this book. Yes, Bear has returned to genetics and luckily Darwin's Radio is a lot better than Blood Music (not that hard). Christopher Dicken finds a mass grave with mutated p...

Dead Lines is a science fiction horror novel by Greg Bear. Peter Russell’s life turned out much different than he expected. He wanted to write books but instead made a living taking picture and making movies of naked people when the soft porn industry flat-lined. Now he is a little more than an erra...

Distress is a science fiction novel by the Australian author Greg Egan. Once again Egan grabs an idea and takes it to the limit, this time to the ultimate limit. In Quarantine he tackled quantum Mechanics, this time he takes on nothing less than the Theory Of Everything (TOE). The year is 2055 and A...

Divine Extinction is the second volume in the Evilution series, a near future series set in an alternative history, written by Hylton H Smith. Four years after the narrow escape from a cataclymic disaster humanity thought itself safe and sound, recovered and with a stronger, safer SACRED system. But...

Every so often a book lands on the review pile that is interesting less for what it is than for the curious circumstances of its existence, and Doomsday Planet is very much one of those. It is, on the face of it, a slim and unassuming piece of 1960s space adventure, the sort of thing that filled the...

In 1992, Steve Perry wrote the first novels based on the Dark Horse comics Aliens. Somehow, I missed these books as a teen. Although, I was familiar with the comics. Aliens: Earth Hive is the first exciting, action-packed thriller in the series. The story is unique from the movies, so I won’t compar...

Nathan Brazil had been the guardian of the Well of Souls, where the Well World's master control lay. But now the universe faced a threat more grave than mere destruction: an unnamed and utterly alien entity had somehow been released from its ancient prison and was bent on the corruption of the Well...

Edge is the first volume in an original science fiction story by John Meaney, writing under the name Thomas Blackthorne. Based in a near future britain, carrying knives has been legalised and a system of dueling to settle arguments now exists which is sensationalized with the TV show Knife Edge wher...

Elite - Reclamation is the third book in our ongoing review of the Elite: Dangerous novels. 10% of the proceeds of this book are being donated to the Ashford Dyslexia Centre. Elite - Reclamation is quite different to the previous stories, it feels much more of a slow burn - a political thriller set...

Enders Game is the award winning first novel in the Ender Saga, by Orson Scott Card. A trip to the library, nearly always bring something good with it. Just the feeling of being surrounded by all those books, can bring a joy to my heart, that can’t even be totally thwarted by the fact that they had...

Above our planet hangs a hollow stone, vast as the imagination of Man. The inner dimensions are at odds with the outer: there are different chambers to be breached, some containing deserted cities; the furthest chamber contains the greatest mystery ever to confront the Stones scientists... But the S...

Europe in Autumn was my first experience of Dave Hutchinson's unique and astonishing voice. It is simply sublime fiction, a deep and intelligent story and one of my favourite reads of recent times. It was impressive enough to win SFBook Book of the Year in 2014. Europe at Midnight is the much sought...

Extinction Game is a clever novel that mixes a post-apocalyptic setting with parallel worlds and a thrilling plot. It all begins with Jerry Beche who believes he is the only survivor following a viral pandemic that sweeps the globe. While eking out an existence alone in the quiet wilderness that sur...

Finity is a science fiction novel by the author John Barnes. The writing of a Science Fiction story that takes place in an infinite-multiple-universe setting often runs into the basic problem of stopping the main character from just finding the best possible universe and then staying there. Once rem...

Firefall is a collected duology and includes the previously released novel Blindsight along with the new sequel Echopraxia . Firefall is hard science fiction which places a firm grip on high-concept science. While many hard-science fiction novels can tend to exclude the casual reader, Watt's writes...

America of 2036 is a wasteland in economic ruin, plagued by Terrorism and extreme acts of violence. Society escapes from this harsh reality by numbing itself on the drug Flashback - a euphoric yet cripplingly addictive drug that allows its users to re-visit their happier, past experiences. It's also...

Footfall is a classic science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This book handles a subject that H.G. Wells defined in his 'War of the Worlds': hostile first contact. Earth is overrun by aliens that bombard the planet with asteroids and are quickly victorious. The story follows a cou...

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...

Furnace: Lockdown is a young adult science fiction novel and is the first volume in the Furnace series, written by Alexander Gordon Smith. The Furnace Penitentiary is an underground prison, buried a mile beneath the earth's surface, where juveniles are sentenced for life, with no hope and no chance...

A title that gives a hint as to what we might expect, but ruins no surprises at all, Gemini Gambit by D. Scott Johnson is an intriguing story of the near future, immerses us in a world a generation or two further on from our own. Elite hacker ‘Angel Rage’ – whose real name is Kim Trayne has retired,...

When a territory engineer dies in suspicious circumstances, three qverse experts are brought in to investigate. Initially the three hacks choose to work separately on the case, but as they continue their investigations they discover clues leading to some of the most powerful figures in the qverse. S...

When anyone mentions the name Frank Herbert most people will instantly think of Dune, a novel that has achieved an incredible success but also overshadowed anything else Herbert created since (Dune was only his second published full novel). It must have been a frustration that none of his works afte...

A starship hurtles through the empty void of space towards an unknown destination, it's purpose and history lost in the midst of time. One man finds himself ripped from his dream of a new home and partner and awakens to the freezing cold and dark halls of Hull Zero One, a place that seems full of da...

Ill Wind is a 1995 disaster novel by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, one of nine collaborations between the two and one of the more successful of them. The Anderson credit is the one that sells the book; the Beason credit, less well known to the average reader, is the one that explains why the sc...

In the Blood is a science fiction novel by Robert J Sullivan. The Utu festival was only three days old when the first body was found, 22 year old Gloria Ashlock, naked except for her shoes, lashed to a column in a warehouse and stabbed 35 times. The discovery was a shock but not a surprise to the po...

Infernal Devices is a steampunk fiction novel by K W Jeter. INFERNAL DEVICES-K.W. Jeter. Oh dear reader, the book I have just read flamed the mind with it's fancy and mystery to make the fragile bones of my pudenda quiver with delicate joy such that I have never felt afore! Goddam what a book. This...

Is Death really necessary is a science fiction novel by Judi Moore. It's the year 2038 and the potential of Nanites are finally being realised, with the power to heal the terminally ill quickly and safely the technology could be seen to be a breakthrough in humanities ever elusive quest for immortal...

Utopia takes place five years into the reign of Alvar Kresh as the governor of Inferno, who is now married to robotisist Fredda Leving. The re-terraforming effort is doing fairly well, but many believe still doomed to failure. The plot centers around a plan created by an Infernal named Dalvo Lentral...

Adam Roberts is one of those rare authors who not only manage to create a rewarding, entertaining story but also does so in a way that challenges your perceptions, encourages you examine that which you take for granted and often plays on accepted norms of the genre. Jack Glass is no exception. We be...

Jem is a classic science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl. Pohl writes a new book every year, this one is high on the pile of what I've read. It was just sitting simply and carefully almost precariously in the 'forget it' pile up til page 80 and then whammo! I got so jumped on with the typeface I scra...

If you like your science fiction with a dystopian edge, this might be a good book for you. The Afterblight Chronicles is a shared world series published by Abaddon Books. Originating in 2006, with Simon Spurrier’s The Culled and passing through the hands of several different writers over the years,...

If you thought a book written on a plane might be a bit rough around the edges - a few plot holes, perhaps, or precious little scene setting - think again, because when Brandon Sanderson does it, the result is nothing less than first class. The celebrated author’s 2011 novella Legion (reprinted this...

Two years ago something happened in Broken Hill, something that killed thousands, the entire population of the small Australian mining town. Although everyone was encouraged to believe that some form of "environmental disaster" was the cause there are a few people who know what really happened. Emil...

Lies, Inc. is a science fiction novel by the award winning author Philip K Dick. To control the aggressiveness of citizens living on top of one another in crowded file cabinets like anthills in overpopulated urban regions, Lies Incorporated uses computer software to keep people sublimely quiet. A me...

Little brother is a young adult science fiction novel written by Cory Doctorow. The novel has debuted at no 9 on the new york times bestseller list, spending 6 weeks in the top 10. The book has also won the 2009 White Pine award, is a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the 2009 Prometheus Award. S...

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 subtitle on this, my first book by McDevitt is "It's time to panic". I don't know about you, but a subtitle like that tells me a lot about what to expect from a book. It tells me that McDevitt or more probably his editor, didn't think that this was a serious piece of literature, aspiring to win...

Crazy fun! But not as good as Aliens: Earth Hive. Nightmare Asylum picks up immediately where Earth Hive ended. Wilks, Billie, and what remains of Bueller are headed back to Earth. Their previous encounter with a separate alien life form, one that possesses the power to effortlessly destroy Xenomorp...

No Safe Haven is the direct sequel to The Sixth Discipline and follows the fortunes of Ran-Del and Francesca who are now happily married parents. Ran-Del still doesn't know what vision his clan shaman had which forced him from his tribe however his own little known "psy" abilities have helped him to...

Like all the best novels, Nod develops from a simple premise. Imagine that the vast majority of people around the world suddenly stopped being able to sleep. No deep sleep, no cat-naps and no snoozing at all. It's only a matter of time before society collapses. How many times have we had a bad night...

One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy is a science fiction novel by Stephen Tunney. Two thousand years from now and the moon has been terraformed as an experiment - long before humanity perfected the technique on other planets. As a result the moon has a breathable atmosphere but has a bright red sky and is...

Antarctic research scientist Evelyn Edwards always knew that the bleak land of snow and ice held deep secrets locked within it's frozen grasp but when her team finds a 40000 year old body the discovery surpasses even her wildest dreams. This dream soon turns into a nightmare however as they become t...

Oxygen is the first novel in a Christian science fiction series written by John B Olson and co-Written with Randall Ingermanson. This is a review by the previous owner of SFBook.com - TC. What intrigued me about Oxygen was the fact that it was labelled as "Christian science fiction" - never having m...

Perfection, an audio drama from those wonderful people at Black Library; this time we are welcomed with the words of Nick Kyme who writes about those colourful, chaotic characters of the Slaaneshi Space Marines. The warped warriors of chaos have beseiged the world of Vardask and things look pretty b...

Planet Janitor Custodian of the Stars is a science fiction novel by Chris Stevenson. The Planet Janitor Corporation are experts in the handling of environmental clean-ups and close system jumps to pick up precious ores and space trash, led by Captain Zachary Crowe they have won a number of accolades...

Prey is a science fiction novel by the late author Micheal Crichton. Micheal Crichton, the well-known author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain continues his long list of precautionary tales in his most recent novel, Prey. If you are familiar with Crichton's work, you no doubt know that he lo...

This is the third audio book to be reviewed within the pages of SFBook and again we are firmly within the realms of Warhammer 40k, this time during that tremulous period of the Horus Heresy. Dan Abnett is the author and Prospero Burns the novel, narrated by Gareth Armstrong on eleven CD's representi...

Radio Free Albemuth is a science fiction novel by the legendary author Philip K Dick. Radio Free Albemuth is like Valis but without Horselover Fat. Just Phil Dick and his buddy Nick getting too involved with Valis and the gestapo political system that is sending the commies to work camps. Like MAN I...

The idea behind Red Planet Blues is a clever one. Mars has been colonised and is the new frontier with many parallels to the American gold-rush of the 1800's. This time around however it is genuine alien fossils that are in demand and fetch a high price. Since pretty much anything can now be synthes...

First published in 1972, Rendezvous with Rama is set in the 22nd century, and the story involves a cylindrical thirty-mile-long alien starship that passes through Earth's solar system. This story is told from the perspective of a group of human explorers, who intercept the ship in an attempt to unlo...

It's the year 2018 and Britain has been expelled from the European Union. Over in the Northeast of the country the body of a wealthy Industrialist is found, draped at the base of the iconic sculpture - The Angel of the North. D.C.I. Jack Renton soon begins to understand that this isn't a simple murd...

Schild's Ladder is a science fiction novel by the Australian author Greg Egan. Egans latest hard physics thriller Schilds Ladder, presents his yet hardest to understand story. This time I'm actually unsure whether it's worth the effort, to try to understand what he’s saying. I normally find great pl...

FBI Special Agent Jack Dawson's best friend and colleague is brutally murdered while pursuing an investigation into the genetic manipulation of food crops and Jack is convinced that a group of eco-terrorists are behind the killing, with the beautiful geneticist Naomi Perrault being the prime suspect...

Have you ever wondered what happens in those years after the Superheroes have saved the planet? Would they continue to fight crime or would it all turn into a big PR exercise? While many would see them as noble warriors who are elevated far above the common man what would happen if they themselves f...

Slant (/) is a science fiction novel by the award winning writer Greg Bear. With nano machines taking care of the human race, from food to both physically and psychologically health, we seem to have it made. There's even a small free heaven for the freaks that for some reason would rather live witho...

A deep space adventure with monstrous aliens, this short and pacey read from Stargate official fiction novelist Cannon, draws inspiration from both Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s sequel. Humanity’s struggle against the Harvestmen – a feral xenomorph with a terrifying instinct for survival,...

A near future that sees an altered world, changed by flooding, climate change and terrorism. The biggest change however is by the arrival of the aliens who call themselves the Jackaroo. The Jackaroo seem to be Earths hope and salvation, saving it from itself. At last the question of whether we are a...

Star King is a classic science fiction novel by Jack Vance. Scifi mystery novels are strange creatures. Quite honestly, I have not come across many, and I haven't enjoyed most that I have come across. One exception is Peter Hamilton's Quantum Murder series (at least I think that's its name). But eve...

State of Mind is a post-cyberpunk science fiction thriller by Sven Michael Davison. In the year 2030 you can eat all you want, take drugs and drink as much as you want without any negative side effects, you can call a friend, surf the web, listen to music, watch a film or even play a game without to...

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...

Talus is a science fiction novel by Erol Ozan. Deep in the wild and dangerous forests of Madagascar, Rylan and his anthropologist partner Ursula Deiss find a population of cryptic man-like primates. This discovery quickly escalates and draws them into the vortex of an ancient conspiracy that could u...

Tech Heaven is a science fiction novel by Linda Nagata. This is Linda Nagata's second book and is in a lot of ways, a lot better than her first (The Bohr Maker(TBM)). It's easier to read, it has a better flow and it also has a lot more to say. At the same time I think that it has lost something when...

On the edge of Earths Empire, far out in space, an elite group of soldiers are on a training mission. A training mission preparing them to face their implacible enemy against which a war rages across the galaxy. Deep in the heart of the hollowed out asteroid where their training takes place a chilli...

Peter Hamilton doesn't just write Space Opera, he defines it . The Abyss Beyond Dreams is the start of a new series that takes place in his wonderfully rich Commonwealth universe. It's no secret that we love the works of Peter Hamilton at SFBook and The Abyss beyond Dreams is no exception. To co-ins...

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 Art of War continues David Wingrove's epic re-imagining of the Chung Kuo, the fifth novel in the 20 book series and things are starting to really heat up. It's five years after the events depicted in Ice and Fire and the story picks up in the summer of 2206. The Dispersionists who have vehementl...

The Augmented Agent is a collection of science fiction short stories by Jack Vance. Jack Vance:I read the intro and.....Basically it was a campaign for Vance heroes as regular fellas running around and doing incredible things to the environment they are written into with wits and brains rarely emplo...

The Beautiful Land makes excellent use of the parallel dimensions theory as it relates to time travel. Here you don't directly travel in time but to a different point in a parallel world which could be almost like our own or vastly different depending on the changes that have taken place. Here thoug...

The Big Time won the coveted Hugo award for best novel in 1958 - the fourth novel to win such award; a science fiction story written by an author best known for his fantasy stories. It's unique in style and form, reading as much as a play as it does a novel. This feeling is re-enforced by the fact t...

Seen as how BOB has been hanging around the website for some time now (he's the robot at the top left) I thought it was about time that I reviewed The Black Hole, the book (and film) that features BOB. The book is a direct novelisation of the 1979 Disney film of the same name, written by Alan Dean F...

The Blood Red City, the second novel in the   Never War Series, following the dramatic alternative history novel Suicide Exhibition . The story picks up not long after the events of the first novel and it's advisable you read this book before reading The Blood Red City . Where the first laid the gro...

The Caves of Steel is a classic science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov and could be considered the first in the Robot series. It has been about twenty years since I read this book first and ten years since I read it last. I've grown older and hopefully wiser since then and The Caves of Steel is creep...

Douglas Richards has a wonderful way of injecting science fiction elements into a thriller style plot without upsetting the balance and comparisons to the late Michael Crichton are inevitable. If anyone was to compare authors it would also be fair to say that Richards is a worthy successor to Cricht...

It's the 23rd Century and Earth is changed forever following the arrival in Darwin, Australia of the alien "builder" technology that provides a "tether" out into space; humanity finally has a space elevator. No-one knows why, or even if these elusive aliens will return. Some time later the planet is...

The Demolished Man was the first ever novel to win a Hugo award for "Best Novel" in 1953. As with much of Alfred Bester's works, it remains an understated classic. The novel is set in the 24th Century with a society who can no longer hide their crimes following the rise of police telepaths (known as...

The world of The Dervish house is a reflection of it's parent city of Istanbul which is itself a reflection of the nation of Turkey; ancient, paradoxical and divided like the brain of a human being. In the year 2027 on a swealteringly hot summers day there is a small explosion in Enginsoy Square, a...

The Exodus Towers is the second volume in the Dire Earth Cycle, picking up right where the cliff-hanger ending left the story. A new Elevator and those strange Black Towers only complicate matters for those survivors of the wasteland that is the Earth. Not all survivors are that friendly either and...

The Gemini Factor is a supernatural thriller from the award winning author Paul Kane, whose previous novels include "The Lazarus condition", "Broken Arrow" and "Peripheral visions". The novel tells the story of a twisted and highly successful serial killer who's victims are always one of twins and a...

The Houses of Iszm is a science fiction novel by Jack Vance. HOUSES OF ISZM-Jack Vance. The Iszic have been growing some wicked pod homes with security, pipes, and furniture included for 200,000 years. The secret and origin of growing these homes are very guarded because this is what keeps the plane...

The Human Front is a science fiction novel by Ken Mcleod. I read this after finishing the Engines of Light series, and to be honest didn't expect a whole lot from it, especially after finding out that it was only 90 pages long... but to my pleasent surprise, my inital views were nothing to go by. Ch...

Over a 100 years have passed since the annihilative events of 2045 and the world is a very different place. With the earths climate raging out of control and ice spread across much of the globe humanity is forced to survive in nomadic pockets around the narrow band of the "Temperate Zone" near the e...

The Man from Primrose Lane - an elderly recluse who wore mittens all year round; a man who seemed to have no friends or family, is murdered one summers day. The murder goes unsolved with little or no evidence until a day four years later when Best-selling author David Neff learns of this strange dea...

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...

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 Plague Forge is the dramatic conclusion to the Dire Earth Cycle. With the Builders plans still hidden and time running out, can Skyler and his team recover the four remaining relics before the final Builder event takes place? No-one really knows what will happen when the five artifacts are retur...

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...

The Sacred Protocol is a near future novel of an alternative history, written by Hylton H Smith. After the Spanish Armada defeat the English fleet in 1588 the great British Empire is overthrown and Spain control most of Europe. Moving forward to 2016 and the Internet collapses causing mass chaos as...

This is a sorta Bradbury esque horror attack of the pod people subtle down home lets conform and all is well book. Like his other great(er) book THE GREEN BRAIN it takes on evolution of a society without a wage of sin or shame in front of it. Is it cool for you to abandon your humanity for a better...

The Shadow of Heaven is a science fiction novel by Bob Shaw. First copyrighted 1969, this "terrifying novel of the future" is surprisingly unjaded by time. In The Shadow of Heaven, World War III isn't the nuclear inferno as must feared at the time, but something a lot closer to what we fear today. A...

A secret Russian mind research laboratory in Podol'sk is destroyed in a freak accident involving one of its patients. The resulting devastation leaves thousands dead and a mile wide crater where the ground has quite literally been pulverized. Plucked from discredited obscurity, parapsychologist Beau...

The Three-body Problem was originally written in Chinese by Liu Cixin. Launched to great acclaim within China, it became one of the most popular science fiction novels within the country and won the 2006 Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award. Thankfully it has now been translated by the talented auth...

Anthony J. Melchiorri’s The Tide (Tide Series Book One) is set in the present. It ties Japan's secret attempt to prepare its people in case of a major American assault following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mysteriously, a protein complex capable of altering the weakest of mankind...

The Venom of Vipers is a science fiction novel by KC May. A supervirus is threatening to wipe out the human race and the only hope may be a human hybrid created by scientists, treated as sub human, locked away and hated. When a brilliant young scientist learns of this secret she must not only fight...

This Alien Shore is sort of a corporate mystery novel set in the far future, written by C S Friedman. The reader knows about as much of what is going on as the main character. She learns something new, you learn something new. Despite not having any big fire-works ending, this book is good. Very goo...

It's true that I have a soft spot for a good post-apocalyptic story, there is just something about the setting that appeals to me. I'm clearly not alone in this regard either, post-apocalyptic scenarios are dominating the film world this year while in the world of books we have excellent examples li...

On first impression Ragle Gumm is pretty much an ordinary man leading a fairly ordinary life - the only exception being that he makes his living by entering a newspaper contest every day - and winning every day, for the last 3 years. After a few strange occurances that break the otherwise relaxed mo...

In the near future, the world is falling apart. Wars, unrest, economic collapse and ecological disasters plague the globe - as it tries to hold the pieces together, the USA deploys a new weapon, the Tin Men. They are remote controlled drones piloted by American soldiers who have their minds virtuall...

To Live Again is a science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg. Recently i finished a silverberg book where about 10% of the population can be "reincarnated" sort of. their personas are imprinted onto another person's brain (IF they've got the cash), so in a way they get "To Live Again"...as the book...

An Assassin's bullet strikes President Seth Jerrison on the eve of a top secret military operation, he is taken to the nearest hospital where doctors fight to save his life. At the very same hospital Dr Ranjip Singh is carrying out experiments with a device that can ease traumatic memories. In the o...

As the name would suggest, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea takes on the classic Jules Verne 19th century novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as inspiration to create a remarkably clever and entertaining novel that is in parts as thought provoking as the original must have been when it...

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...

We are here; fairly innocuous words that little prepare the reader for the tightly written thriller that Michael Marshall has penned. It all begins with the struggling author David and his wife Dawn visiting the publisher in New York who has finally agreed to print his debut novel. As he returns to...

While the Gods Sleep is a science fiction novel of a dystopian future, written by Johnny Fincham, a futurologist and distinguished palmist. Not too far in the future, there is a cataclysmic event that turns nature against humanity. The air becomes poisonous, plants die and virulent strains of super...

"Who Goes There?" is the novella by John W Campbell on which John Carpenter based the classic film "The Thing", its presented here with another 6 short stories by the same author, mostly published within Astounded magazine in the 1930's. John W Campbell is widely regarded as being highly influential...

Kira Miller is a highly gifted engineer working in the field of gene therapy; she manages to enhance the function of the brain to such a degree that makes immortality a real possibility through a savant like consciousness. But what secrets could be unlocked by playing god with the human brain? Wired...

Without warning, on the eve of the second Gulf war an unknown energy blast hits the USA - destroying all fauna while leaving flora and buildings intact. America as we know it vanishes in the blink of an eye. It's 2003 and in Kuwait US forces are poised for the invasion of Iraq, in Paris a covert age...

I missed out commenting about this novel when it was first released. There was such a rush by everyone to say how great it was I felt that I would be adding but a small ripple to a raging Tsunami. Everyone from the big papers to the big authors have commented how magnificent the book is, and they ar...

How do you shake up the familiar “war that never ends” trope? James Barclay has one answer; add alien DNA with lizards to create genetically modified dragons; then fly those dragons into the battlefield burning your enemies to a smoking crisp. If that wasn’t enough, he also adds a variety of fun and...

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...

In the dark future of Defender , the majority of the worlds population have died. Killed by themselves and others who were listening to voices steering their horrific actions. Those who survived live in a hostile environment, unable to trust strangers and fighting over limited resources. On a long d...

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...

It's funny how life seems to throw co-incidences at you. Until recently I'd never given the small island of Gibraltar any real thought. Then the company I work for expanded their services there which meant I needed to learn about this unusual British overseas territory. A few weeks later the monumen...

Spiders (or arachnids if you are being posh) provoke strong reactions in some. One of my brothers, who still considers himself tough (even though he's now over 40) will move astonishingly fast in the opposite direction when encountering such a beast - usually with the result that his teenage daughte...

A few weeks ago we reviewed the spider-infested book The Hatching . This was preperation for the launch of the much anticipated sequel Skitter . Skitter follows on directly from the dramatic events of the previous book and once more we are thrown into the middle of spidergeddon. Haven't read The Hat...

I've been a big fan of the Aliens series ever since I saw the first film back in the 1980's. I've read all the books, including the expanded universe (non-canonical) ones from Bantam, and more recently from Titan books. I've watched and read the Aliens vs Predator crossover media, some which is grea...

Killing is my Business (not to be confused with Megadeth's debut album) is the second novel in Adam Christopher's LA Trilogy, following on from Made to Kill . Featuring the robot Assassin Raymond Electromatic, disguised as LA's only artificial private investigator. it's a unique blend of hardboiled...

Alien Covenant - Origins is a prequel to the latest Alien story, describing the journey of getting the colony ship launched on it's ill-fated journey, bridging the gap between Prometheus and Alien Covenant . Written by Alan Dean Foster - the author who has been writing about Aliens since the very be...

Newcon Press’ second novella series is a beautiful collection of four books. The Wind by Jay Caselberg launches straight into the kind of folk horror/ weird fiction premise that seems to emerge from a particular sense of British society. There are shades of Mythago Wood and The Wickerman in Caselber...

Aurora Rising is a stand-alone novel written within the authors Revelation Space universe, set before other novels and before the cataclysmic event of the Melding Plague. It's worth noting that Aurora Rising was published in 2007 as The Prefect . Reynolds fan's who are looking for a new book will ne...

Elysium Fire is the sequel to Aurora Rising (also known as The Prefect), set in Reynold's Revelation Space universe but before events of his previous novels. Like Aurora Rising, it can be read as a stand-alone novel. It's the 25th century (with no Buck Rogers in sight) and humanity has, in many ways...

After Atlas is Newman’s follow up to her science fiction debut, Planetfall . This story is not a sequel, instead it focuses on our future Earth, that has been left behind by the colonists on the Atlas mission. This aftermath is the setting for a murder mystery plot involving a selection of those lef...

Mallory Grace had been successfully hiding out in London for some time until she met Obadiah in a seemingly random encounter. Now she's just had to kill someone and if she wants to survive the next few hours she'll probably have to kill again. To survive the night she'll need a miracle. Obadiah Maci...

With the premise of Holly Cave's new novel, you could be forgiven for thinking it's a literary version of The Good Place. But Heaven Architect Isobel is no omnipotent Ted Danson, and The Memory Chamber no comedy. Cave's idea here is an interesting one. After you die, your consciousness is transferre...

A new fantasy series from Stephen Donaldson, the author of the Thomas Covenant chronicles and the two Mordant’s Need novels. The first book, The Seventh Decimate tells the story of the war between the nations of Amika and Belleger that has raged for generations. Its roots lie in the distant past, be...

People have been imagining life on Mars for hundreds of years but it seems to becoming an increasingly popular destination at the moment. We've got a growing number of films, games, VR "experiences" and of course books. NASA has it's own "Journey to Mars" program of sending humans there in the 2030'...

From Distant Stars is the follow-up to Sam Peter's impressive debut From Darkest Skies . Detective Keon Rause has mostly come to terms with the death of his wife five years previously and his illegally created AI Liss has gone - presumably destroyed. He's tasked with investigating the death of milit...

Before Mars is the third book set within the authors Planetfall Universe. As the name suggests it's actually set before the events of Planetfall and After Atlas. After months of travel, Anna Kubrin finally arrives on the Red Planet to begin her job as geologist and in-residence artist. She already m...

As the name suggests, Pandemic explores what happens when a deadly infection takes the leap from epidemic to pandemic. A sobering passage on the cover aknowledges, it's not a question of if but when . There are many things that endanger the human race but with the exception of the zombie apocalypse...

I missed reviewing Sleeping Giants when it first came out. I've finally got round to picking up a copy to find out it's now been out long enough that there are two further novels in the series: Waking Gods and Only Human. Back in 2016 It was one of those break-out novels such as The Martian and Wool...

We are told to live in the moment; don’t worry about the past or the future, it is now that you should care about, but how many of us really do? We spend endless hours checking our phones or having meaningless arguments online. If someone walked in on you right now and said that you are not actually...

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...

It is feels increasingly complex to be a Star Trek fan. Things started off being about Kirk and co, then Picard, then Sisko etc. By now there are various TV shows that have been and gone, but also films that are set in parallel universes and I have no idea what is happening in Discovery half the tim...

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 happens...

The original USS Enterprise was sent out on a five year mission to explore Space, but even the biggest Star Trek fan would not want to know about every single detail that happened on the voyage. We can forgo the times that they slept or went to the loo. Perhaps even skip a few lengthy sessions betwe...

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...

In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, a meme boiled up to the surface of our cultural dialogue about us having entered an age of “post-truth.” As the election showed us, we have arrived into a societal configuration, in which two major ideological groups do not just vote for different pa...

One of the many hats I wear is that of a professional software engineer. As a junior professional software engineer, I experienced acute imposter syndrome. It didn’t help that I was surrounded by people who had been engineering software for years, even decades, longer than I had. I resolved my pligh...

No Way is the follow up to the gripping thriller One Way.   A perilous journey to the Red Planet by a group of convicts. Deciding that it was much more economically viable to train people that would have otherwise rotted in a jail rather than a group of experienced and highly trained Astronauts form...

The sequel to the 2016 Clarke Award winner, Children of Time , the story of the far future human and spider civilisations picks up several generations after the events at the end of the previous novel. A terraforming team, led by Dirsa Senkovi and Yusuf Baltiel discover alien life on a far distant p...

Call me old fashioned, I am a little scared of the future. This is a sentiment that will hit many of us eventually. What is wrong with the way technology works right now? Do I really need to talk to my speakers or plug myself into the Matrix just to order a pizza? The idea of getting behind the whee...

Science fiction is a minefield for any author. So many others genres are available that have a set of rules that you can follow. Crime has it, even most fantasy books follow a pattern, but science fiction can be almost anything. It can be set in an alternative today with only a tiny tweak to our way...

There seem to be a worryingly large number of ways we, as a species, could become extinct. From huge extra terrestrial rocks hurtling through space or climate change making our world uninhabitable to Trump pressing the wrong button at the wrong time. A virus that seems to strike at random, causing t...

The average person seems to put a lot of trust in their Government. No way they are spying on me online and even if they are, what am I doing that they would care about? This attitude has shown that ignorance is not bliss, they may just sell your data to the highest bidder and before you know it the...

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...

When the Star Wars sequels were announced a world of fandom got very excited. What happened to Han Solo, Luke and Leia et al? Many Star Wars fans already had an inkling having read the many Star Wars tie in book that released from the early 90s onwards. However, like many a Star Wars film, there was...

There is an inherent problem with superheroes. Sometimes they are just too super. How is any mortal person meant to take down a being that can fly into the sun or bounce bullets off their bracelets? It is up to the comic creators to come up with an enemy that will match the super heroics with super...

What if God was one of us? Just an Artificial Intelligence like one of us. Just a stranger on the internet, trying to wreak our lives. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Bible will know that God can be a little tricksy. If that God can flood the world or demand you sacrifice your child, what wou...

Death is not something that people like to think about, but without death how are we to live? Within all of us in the unspoken knowledge that one day we will die. For this reason, we venture forth, live, breath, love and laugh. Some of us more than others, but without death would we even bother? We...

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...

  Having read more than a few  S tarship  loads of science fiction in my time I am  particular about  what type of aliens I like. I have a fondness for the  Star Trek  tactic o f gluing some plasticine to the forehead of a humanoid but in today’s fiction I like something truly alien. What  does that...

I am not a big fan of train travel. The route I take is usually into London on a packed train. I have been made to suffer by standing all the way and having no access to the t oilets. I have considered putting this into prose form in a science fiction  thriller but  needing the loo and having sore f...

The Butterfly Effect is a device used to explore alternative  versions of our world. The simple action of a time travellers going back to the time of the dinosaurs and standing on a butterfly would alter everything that followed, ripples expanding from that one point. Robert Ferrigno  decided to exp...

If you read enough Near Future fiction you will start to see a trend. The future is not orange at all but bleak and a little depressing. It could be giant robots, aliens or the undead. There always seems to be something around the corner that is more dystopian  than utopian. I can take all the UFOs...

I am not an argumentative fellow and the only two full on blowouts I can remember are well within the geek sphere. Who was the actor alongside Harrison Ford at the start of  Raiders of the Lost Ark  and how does time travel work? I may have been wrong about Alfred  Molina  but I am right about time...

I am not someone that goes in for Conspiracy Theories, I just don’t have the energy for t hem . Take for example the idea that nanobots are being injected into people so that the Deep State can track our every move. Why would they spend trillions of pounds on such technology when we are  all pretty...

It's 2118 and humanity has not only got over the coronavirus, but have reached out into space - colonising the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Europa. It's still early days of mankind's expansion though and the ship Khidr is part of a small fleet who travel between the different colonies, assisting the huge c...

A lot of the political hustle and bustle in today’s world has its  roots  in how far you think capitalism should go. Some countries are all for state control, others are far more lais s ez faire .  Do  private companies  already  have  too much power  pull ing  the strings behind  our  elected repre...

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...

Almost everything  that we see  daily  would feel strange and alien to someone out of time. Show  an  Ancient Roman a modern carrot and they would ask why it was so large and orange.  In Caroline Hardake r ’s  Composite Cr eatures   the world has changed a lot. The sky is constantly covered with thi...

I sometimes like to think about a singular change to  the  world and how  it  would affect the future. It  says  a  lot  about me that in most cases my thoughts  end up at dystopia.  Humans   are  always going to end at some point, I was just hoping that it would be a few years after I had gone. I a...

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...

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 ser...

Are you playing the game? Made you look. The idea of a metagame that embroils a hero is not a new one, but it is hard to pull off. The amount of financial resources and secrecy that is required to convince Michael Douglas to jump off a building is beyond what the average person can afford, unless yo...

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...

The Alien franchise can be seen as one of two things: an awesome series of Space based horror and action stories, or a textbook example of Corporate Malfeasance. The Aliens may be the most reoccurring characters, but the second is not Ripley, it is Weyland Industries. This corporation pops up in var...

Asimov’s ‘Three laws of Robotics’ have become synonymous with any book that contains robots. Nearly all these books will not allow their robots to hurt humans, but what happens if these rules broke? In C. Robert Cargill’s  Day Zero  the millions of robots that exist have full artificial intelligence...

The best Science Fiction will tell a story, but also build a world. I prefer my tales to hint about the wider world and what happened to land the protagonists in their current position. Take Ten Low for example, a medic who roams a dusty moon. Her only goal in life is to survive and help others that...

Obsession can be a powerful emotion and lead you down a dark path. Being stalked causes the victim so much fear, not only because they are having to deal with the reality, but also what might happen. In the case of Madison May, she does not know she is being stalked until it is too late. A strange m...

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...

The Force is a concept that underpins the Star Wars Universe, but it is good or bad? The entire point is that it is both. There is a Light Side and a Dark Side, and these two opposing elements must be in balance. During the Star Wars films, the Dark Side is on its uppers and therefore we follow a ba...

Science Fiction does not have to be epic. It can tell a small story about a single person or family as they struggle against a strange new world, but sometimes you want to read a stonking great space opera where an individual's actions can alter worlds.  Liege-Killer  by Christopher Hinz is one such...

There is one solution that would benefit our climate massively, but it is a bitter pill to swallow. Less humans. We are the cause of pretty much all the issues that the Earth is currently having and when we are gone, it will happily float around the solar system without us. A little bit grubbier, bu...

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...

When I talk to readers who do not like Science Fiction, I have found they say their minds just cannot get around the fantastical nature of the ideas contained within. They cannot understand sentient spaceships or aliens that think differently to ourselves. I try to point out that the genre is a vast...

The locked room scenario is a classic tool in crime fiction that most great authors in that genre have tried at least once. The premise is that someone has apparently been murdered in a room that no one else can get in or out of. This may mean that the killing should have been impossible, or that th...

If you had the chance to start over again from an early age and know what you do now, would you take it? A chance to live your life again; buy those shares in Apple, know some of the exam questions and football results? The answer for me is no. 80 years more life is not worth risking my family. What...

There is nothing quite like space for great action sci fi. The spaceships, the weapons, the futuristic or alien technology. Massive explosions and body parts flying about the place is great, but it is nothing without characters that you care about. Somone losing a hand means nothing if it is just an...

I have done my time at university where I drank too much and stayed out too late. Looking back now I can only think about my poor liver and the crazy never die attitude that many of the young have. I was never that adventurous and stuck to beer and whatever was on offer at the Student Union. I certa...

I have a love hate relationship with time travel stories. I love the mind-bending physics and puzzles that they create but hate the fact that most of them just could not work. How can people from the past learn what they need to from those in the future if they have not lived their own futures yet?...

The Fallen Star  by Claudia Gray is released on the first anniversary of the creation of  The High Republic  Universe, a bold move by the Star Wars novels to create their own sandbox in which to play, free from the Skywalkers. There are comics, YA books and more. At the centre are the core novels th...

When we colonise space, I hope that we send out the brightest and the best. These people will represent the absolute best that humanity has to offer, but what happens if the journey is a long one? The bright young things are not going to live to see the destination in 150 years, but their great-grea...

The concept of humankind travelling to other planets to colonise has been a staple of science fiction for decades and as the world in which we inhabit becomes increasingly tricky for humans to live on, the novels are set to keep on rolling. Some are action pieces, some concentrate on the colonists t...

I love sleep and have a deeper appreciation of it since having a family. I find myself able to drop off in a second as I snatch any five minutes I can before being woken up again at 5 am. The number of naps that I have would not be advisable in the world of Zaxony Delatree as I may end up waking up...

Reading about a dystopia is not as farfetched as it was once as we are living through a couple of ongoing ones as I write, but there is always space for a little more terror to add to the reality. What about a situation that is eerily possible? The sun belches out radiation daily and according to Da...

Time travel is fascinating, it is also some of the most fictional science fiction you will ever get. What has happened must have happened, lest you rip apart your universe in a paradox. The scientists in A. G. Riddle’s Lost in Time seem to have found a workaround as they send the worst criminals int...

Doctor Who is the same, but also different, in each iteration and that is what makes the characters so interesting. The Twelfth Doctor is one of the latest incarnations and one that reflected on the Doctor’s past as much as the present. The humour was still there, but also more of the historic grump...

Typography has a larger role in your life than you may think. It is important to get the right font in the right place. No one wants to have Beware of the Cliff written in Comic Sans. Advertisers spend millions on typefaces to make a brand instantly recognisable. All these things are noble pursuits,...

Science Fiction writers love a dystopia, there are so many ways that it could all go wrong. Overpopulation is one. It not a pleasant thing to think about, but we already use too many of the world’s finite resources and as the population grows, this is going to get even worse. In The Nursery by Roark...

I read and listen to books in all formats, but still prefer the feel of paper in my hand. Audiobooks are great for the commute, but they are just not pacy enough for me, I read quickly, and a narrator often seems to go in slow motion even at 1.5 speed. 2000AD and Penguin Audio must know my brain as...

It should not matter what format you ingest a novel – on paper, on the screen or even via audio, but it does. I do not always get on with audio as I am such a fast reader, even on speed up the narrator cannot keep up with my awful lack of attention. However, the right book works as an audio experien...

As a species we are doing a good enough job of messing up our own chances of survival, but what if I told you that we could also mess up another distant planet too? In Stephan George’s The Distant Stars Are My Only Friends , Arax is a traveller who does not go into space, but instead projects his co...

The public love a superhero crossover tale, the billion-dollar hauls of various Avenger movies will tell you this, but they do not always work and at this point they can feel like going over old ground. Original Sin was a comic book arc conceived by  Jason Aaron  and  Mike Deodato that brought vario...

There are many roads to enlightenment. You can spend decades mastering the art of meditation, becoming one with the universe. You can seek to achieve the divine through the depraved, in acts so vial that you push through what is acceptable into the other. Any of the routes take commitment and none o...

Imagine the sacrifice required to sign up for a long-term mission into the depth of space. You are to be cryogenically frozen for 80 years and will awake to a new world. It could be that this is what you wanted all along. A chance at a new life free from the Old Earth, but they have only gone and br...

There is a reason that you should avoid tackling the multiverse in a story as the very nature of them means that the possibilities are infinite. Every decision ever made split off to make two different pathways and so on. A story that spans multiple Earths will have to pick which ones to visit. Do y...

The problem with being zipped away by some alien entity and then shown how the Universe works is that no one will believe you on your return. Imagine your friend returning from their lunch break to say that they have just been told that the world is going to end in two days unless we all follow thei...

Most of us have a subject at school that we struggled with more than others and for me that was languages. Maths, English, Science, I was fine, but my brain does not feel designed for languages. So, if someone offered me a chip that would allow me to instantly understand all languages on Earth, I wo...

What would you do to protect those that you love? What is The Price of Safety ? This is a question that Michael C. Bland poses in the first of a trilogy set in a troubling future. It is a story about a genius, but also a family man whose inventions gets them all into danger. At what point do you dec...

I love time travel stories as you can tie yourself in knots figuring out what is going on. A writer can choose to do one of two things about the complexity of it all. Explore in great depth and try to make the inherent paradox work, or just go with the flow. Joshua David Bellin’s Myriad feels like a...

The science fiction genre is open to exploring alien worlds and alien ideas, but many times you find it is a very Terran feeling society being all human about things. It may be an android as the main character, but that android is following a classic crime noir style plot you could find on Earth. Wh...

It can be hard for the casual Doctor Who viewer to see the character as alien. They may have two hearts, regenerate once in a while, but fundamentally the Doctor looks human. It does not help that they are obsessed with human culture and like to hang around on Earth a lot (cheap sets). But fundament...

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,...

Doctor Who has saved the solar system on countless occasions and planet Earth even more than this, but some of these saves felt a little.... minor. Alien races trying their arm at taking over Earth with nary a plan worth writing on the back of a psychic beermat. Sometimes though the stakes are big,...

Shakespeare plays have been around for a long time, and you do not need to do a straight adaptation. Many of the terms used in the plays have entered the common vernacular and the storylines can be traced throughout modern film and television. I don’t recall Romeo or Juliet breaking out into song, b...

At its best science fiction can be a prism to view the current world’s ills in a more palatable manner. Reading about the destruction of our world in a dystopian future feels one step removed from simply looking out of the window. Like environmental catastrophe, some themes are too powerful to go un...

I love time travel stories, but the entire concept is a paradox. It just cannot happen. What happens to the version of you that was in the past/present once you have travelled? It can be hard to even think about it, but what happens if you live this paradox? The Farrow woman have all been cursed wit...

Who doesn’t love the Alien series? But which subset are you talking about? Like any science fiction property, once you investigate it and expand upon it, the series begins to fragment. You have Alien , Aliens , Aliens vs Predator , Prometheus , and more. They are all the same universe but split off...

It can feel at times like the entire world is out to get you, but who is the person you must watch out for the most? Your family, spouse, work colleagues? Nope, the biggest saboteur is often yourself. Your own thoughts and deeds coming back to haunt you. Iris Henderson has it worse than most as she...

Any story of colonial rescue, involving cryosleep spaceships and small crews operating to solve a crisis far from Earth has all the ingredients to be an exciting read. However, the way in which a writer organises these elements and makes them palatable as a story remains an issue at hand. Refraction...

One of the biggest problems to overcome when writing science fiction is how do humans communicate with an alien race? They may speak a different language or may not even have mouths in which to make noises. The Universal Translator is a popular cheat, or fundamental maths that should be universal, b...

Before a drug is allowed onto the marketplace, it must undergo rigorous tests. Firstly on animals and then eventually on humans. These tests will determine what side effects there are, and in many cases, there will be side effects. Do the positives outweigh the negatives? If a wonder drug saves the...

I have a soft spot for cyberpunk, the gritty noir feel mixed with high end science fiction. Like many subgenres it can be dismissed as a passing phase, in this case from the 80s, but fans know that there are still exceptional stories out there written today about crying androids or buildings that mu...

Over the years Star Wars has become a complicated beast, even the first film was a Space Opera that had a lot going on. Throw in various timelines and you have an epic on your hands, but some of the simpler stories are the ones that work the best. The Acolyte was series that expanded on The High Rep...

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...

What is your plan for when the apocalypse comes? One of the best things about reading speculative fiction is that you get loads of clever ideas on exactly what to do should a meteor plummet to Earth or the undead rise from their graves. The truth is that your plan is to curl up and inevitably succum...

Vigilance is the third book in the Fractal series from Allen Stroud, following Fearless and Resilient . You know how it is with series; by the time you hit book three, you've got a pretty good idea of what you're getting into. The big question is whether the author can keep the momentum going, or if...

I have always enjoyed the Star Wars extended universe novels, be they the Legend set, or the newer relaunched series. The books allow us to explore the Skywalker saga in more depth, but for me the most fun is exploring the deeper cuts. I have read fantastic novels that have delved into the lives of...

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....

When I imagine the aliens coming, I always imagine that they would pick somewhere amazing to land their ship. Probably America as all the movies have trained my brain to think that way. The place I do not jump straight to is Manchester, or at least the hills around the city. I know those hills well...

I have come across the argument that people do not read science fiction as they cannot connect it to their own lives. Most sci fi fans know that even a book set in deep space or thousands of years in the future is often just using images of tomorrow to discuss the issues of today. However, if a read...

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...

When we have finally managed to destroy Earth, some of us may already be living on Mars. If you stay inside the domes, I hear it can be quite pleasant. However, what happens when we start to destroy Mars? The issue with all these planets is not the landscape or the lack of oxygen, it is the fact tha...

War, what is it good for? Not a lot, but depressingly it is a real driver of innovation. What better way to inspire the greatest minds in the country than to task them with more efficient ways to kill the enemy? Arms races happen all over the place from conventional gun and bullets to newer types of...

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you went in there in the first place? Could just be a good old fashioned brain burp, but perhaps it is something more sinister. In Nicholas Binge’s Dissolution there is a character who knows too much, so much that their mind is being wiped to preven...

What would you do if you had technology that no one else in the world had. Would you use it to better your life, make some money? Perhaps you would share it with others to develop society as a whole? Or maybe you would use it for revenge. A series of impossible murders is stumping Detective Ethan Kr...

One of the best things about Science Fiction is that it also works as Science Fact. Much of the science and fantasy in the books are based on real research; taken to the nth level, but with a basis in truth. Exiles by Mason Coile layers this with some fundamentals in philosophy. Occam’s Razor sugges...

If you are like me, you will have an escape plan from the building you work in, just in case there is a zombie attack. My plan is to get to the roof and use one of the ladders up there to simply steer the zombies over the low edge. This might work, but not in the Antarctic, were there are few buildi...