Books tagged with: worldbuilding

A Fire Upon the Deep is a science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. This is the first book, by Vinge that I've read and it couldn't have started much worse than it did or end much better. aFud starts off with a family crash-landing their space ship on an uncharted planet, the parents get killed nearly...

A Million Open Doors is the first volume in the Thousand Cultures series by the author John Barnes. When I started on this I was quite surprised; Barnes starts the story off in a tavern, with tales of sword fights and honour. Afraid that Barnes had hidden a fantasy behind the rather futuristic cover...

Billed as a ‘graphic novel, novel’ An Android Awakes tells the story, through pictures and words, of Android Writer PD121928 as it tries to produce stories that a publisher will accept before the submission limit on its programming runs out. What we have here is an innovative throwback; something th...

Black Market Memories is a science fiction novel by David A Schramm. From the third millenium the human race have spread to the stars and intergalactic space explorers have settled on worlds in distant solar systems. 250 light years from earth, the newly settled colony of Jamestown is still adjustin...

Blope is about segregation, plastic surgery gone wrong, and all sorts of messed up religion. For a little background, it is basically another version of history where the American Southwest becomes part of an extreme Taiwanese empire. Its ruler uses the American Southwest as an experiment & segregat...

Brave new world was written over 80 years ago; back in 1932 and describes London in the year 2540 - or 632 AF as the year is described in the book. The AF stands for "After Ford", meaning the American industrialist Henry Ford who has become something of a messianic figure in Huxley's World. It's bee...

Desperate to find a new home amongst the stars, the last remnants of the human race are cast out into deep space. Thousands upon thousands asleep aboard a colossal colony ship, hibernating until a habitable planet is located. Eventually they discover a world which was terraformed by humanity long ag...

By the end of the eighteenth century, our world had become fully charted, catalogued, mapped and explored. No longer could it be imagined that beyond some distant horizon there lay a land of extraordinary wonders—a hidden utopia, for example, nestled away somewhere safe from the corrupting influence...

I've always known that Paul McAuley can write, as far as I am concerned he's one of the finest writers in the genre right now however he's also vastly under-appreciated. I'm really hoping that the release of confluence will help in addressing this oversight - not only is it an incredibly well writte...

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...

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

I've been collecting Neal Asher novels for ages however until now I've not had chance to read much of his work. Luckily Dark Intelligence has been sent in for review and so I've finally had chance to discover the delight that is the Polity Universe. Dark Intelligence is all about transformation. Phy...

Diaspora is a science fiction novel by the Australian author Greg Egan. About a thousand years in our future an entity is born. Not of man and woman , but as an orphan of Konishi Polis. A Polis is a virtual reality society, where a group of computerbased intelligences are living. There are several P...

Divine Endurance and Flowerdust, - two novels collected together for the first time exclusively as an e-book and known as "The Last Days Of Ranaganar" - are set within a far-future south-east Asia, a future that is hardly recognizable from the present and one that seems both medieval and futuristic...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the classic novel that became the film Blade Runner. Written by legendary award winning author Philip K Dick. The aftermath of the World War Terminus sees a devastated Earth with severe radioactive fallout and most of nature destroyed. Many of the survivors have...

It's hard to believe that Dune is over 50 years old. Originally released in 1965 it won the inaugural Nebula award for best novel and tied with Roger Zelazny's This Immortal for the Hugo Award. It's sold well in excess of 12 million copies around the world and is one of the world's best-selling scie...

Dying Star: Prophecy is the first volume in a new Scifi series Dying Star, written by Samsun Lobe. The Star Shu is slowly dying, becoming a black dwarf as it's remaining energy depletes. This causes the orbiting planet Gebshu and it's moon to change beyond recognition. The world becomes engulfed in...

This is a very interesting book, a sort of post-apocalyptic, post-cyberpunk tale that also weaves in a good dose of historic fantasy and mythology while told in a very confident voice dripping with poetic, imaginative prose. Essentially the story goes that the human race almost wiped itself complete...

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...

Empire State is the début novel of the talented author Adam Christopher, combining a superhero tale with an alternative reality prohibition era noir-esque New York. Throw in gangsters, private investigators and a rogue robot and even a slight nod to steampunk then you have one daring mix. The parall...

Sequel to Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion – there's no reason to read this book if you haven't read those two books. Actually the question is if there's any reason to read this book at all! Fall of Hyperion ends the story of the Cantos and the Web quite nicely, with nearly no loose ends. So that's no...

Dan Abnett and Nik Vincent have come together to tell a tale of a future that feels and sounds not like what one would envision, resembling more our distant past then our near future. Many readers will know of Dan Abnett and his prolific work with Marvel, Abaddon, Games Workshop, and his most succes...

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...

Future Hope is a science fiction novel written by David Gelber. The novel is set in the year 2156 and the Earth is getting a pretty crowded place. While many of the social and economic problems have been eradicated - along with most illnesses, new problems have taken their place. Principal amongst t...

After hearing about the passing away of Poul Anderson, I pretty much ran out and picked up this book. I figured that it would be good therapy and a good way to honour him. This worked fairly well, I hadn't read any of his new stuff before, so I was unsure as to what we missed out on. Genesis is an e...

There is a particular pleasure in returning to an Arthur C. Clarke novel that nobody talks about much, and Imperial Earth is one of those. It does not have the reputation of 2001 or Rendezvous with Rama , it rarely turns up on best-of lists, and when it is mentioned at all, it tends to be with a sli...

I first read one of Paul J McAuley's novels over 20 years ago, picked up completely at random for reason's that are shrouded in the midst of time. The book was Secret Harmonies and it became one of the most memorable novel's I have read before or since, managing to evoke a powerful feeling of travel...

To think that it has been nearly a year since I read any Banks last – not strange that I had to consume this one over a single weekend. Sometimes a book is just so good, that it becomes hard to review properly, without reverting to long sentences overflowing with superlatives (which quickly becomes...

Lord of Light is a science fiction novel written by Roger Zelazny. Reading classics, isn't exactly what I would call a duty, but one should remember to pick up a classic once in a while and see why it became a classic. Some of them are actually quite good! I don't think that I've ever read any Zelaz...

Lord Valentines Castle is the first volume in the Marjipoor series by Robert Silverberg. The hardest thing about reviewing this book is to label it correctly. We are on a humanly colonised planet at least ten thousand years in the future. We share this world, of gigantic proportions, with several al...

Majipoor Chronicles is the second volume in the Marjipoor series by Robert Silverberg. Took me a bit of time to verify that this is the second book in the Majipoor series. It seems that the reason why this isn't widely discussed is that it doesn't really matter when you read this one. The story take...

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

No Time Like Tomorrow is a collection of science fiction short stories by Brian Aldiss. This little book is all Aldiss shorties that end real abrubtly or have sort of nice wrapped up endings that are reflecting on the rest of the story in this light of 'well that was...ok'. There is one particular s...

With On the Steel Breeze Alastair Reynolds has managed a little slice of futurism, how? Elephants. It seems we've been vastly under-estimating the intelligence of these gentle giants, at least most of us have - Reynolds hasn't. Recent research now suggests that Elephants are at least as intelligent...

Asdrubael Vect has ruled the dark city of Commorragh for millennia, ruthlessly disposing of any who would dare cross him. His reach is long and his position unassailable... or so he thinks. The ambitious Archon (highest ranking member of a Dark Eldar Kabal) Yllithian thinks otherwise and joins force...

Prophets of the Ghost Ants is about as different a story as you are ever going to read (and given the sheer breadth of works around nowadays that is saying something). It's already been optioned for a film trilogy and has been lauded by such people as Lawrence Bender - the Oscar winning film produce...

I have been eagerly waiting for this novel, more than most. I thought Wolfhound Century was that good that I chose it as Book of the year for 2013. Truth and Fear — the second volume in the series, narrowly missed out from being book of the year 2014 (That accolade going to Dave Hutchinson's Europe...

Richard is a Level 5 Artificial Intelligence and a Private Eye, his partner a German ex military cyborg named Klein. Their newest case takes them on the hunt for a killer who has jumped realities, hiding in the artificial construct of Reality 36. Unless Richard and Klein can stop him his powers coul...

Ringturn is a science fiction novel by British Author John C Mawson. A number of people are abducted from earth during the time of the black death by alien forces and repopulated on a planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani, eleven light years from Earth. Slowly those frightened humans build a new civilisat...

Snow crash is an acclaimed speculative fiction novel by the award winning author Neal Stephenson. Never getting into the Cyberpunk thing and hating the much-hyped use of the word Cyber, I've stayed away from everything that fell within the Cyberpunk category, with William Gibson as the centre of my...

Space Marine is a rare novel that is set in the Warhammer 40k universe, written by Ian Watson. Space Marine is essentially a piece of history in the Warhammer 40k universe, but one that Games Workshop doesn't actually agree with, and was never re-printed. The novel itself no longer "fit's in" with t...

Sunshine Republic is a dystopian science fiction novel by Ted Brownstein. It's the year 2130 and the newly independent Republic of Florida is deeply divided over the use of technology, the Futurist party believe that their society could be vastly improved by the use of cheap, abundant robot labour a...

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 Bohr Maker is a science fiction novel by the writer Linda Nagata. This is the first book that I have read by Linda Nagata and I'm not quite sure what I feel about it. The basis for the book is interesting enough - it takes place in a world where nanomachines, bio-engineering and neural computer...

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...

The City and The Stars is a science fiction novel by Arthur C Clarke. This little story has a rather nice premise: After decades of exploring space and it's many wonders, The Intruders force Humanity to retreat into an enclosed city on Earth that is totally self-sufficient. Humans have lived in this...

The Confederation Handbook is a stand alone novel set within the same universe as the Nights Dawn Trilogy. "A Vital Guide To the Night’s Dawn Trilogy" the subtitle of The Confederation Handbook says and that pretty much says it all. Two hundred and thirty pages of facts about the culture, politics,...

The Darwinian Extension: Completion is the third volume in the The Darwinian Extension trilogy, written by Hylton H Smith. Over twenty years have passed since the Red planet was first colonised and contact was made with an alien intelligence. Much has changed in this time, Mars now has a thin, breat...

The Diamond Age is a speculative fiction novel by the award winning author Neal Stephenson. Where the core technologies of matter compilers and nanotechnology of this book is quite interesting and where Stephensons portrayal of a future based on nanotechnology is one of the best, that I've ever read...

Something is going wrong on the planet of Paradise, crops will no longer grow while those imported are withering and dying in their droves. The indigenous plant life (never entirely safe) is becoming wildly unpredictable and dangerous. And so the order is given to abandon Paradise, all personnel to...

The Fall of Hyperion is the follow up novel to Hyperian (winner of the Hugo award) by Dan Simmons. I've been putting of writing this review for the last few days, hoping that time would make it easier for me to write it. Unfortunately I don't find it any easier to write now – but I'll try, giving up...

The Fight for Naturah: The Reclamation is a speculative fiction novel by Lloyd Blake. The Year is 2085 and Mark Ashton has just finished his term as the President of the United States of America. Leaving in his wake a very successful 8 years with an improved economy, increased employment and a safer...

The Fractal Prince is the follow-up to the hit début novel The Quantum Thief that was released to a great deal of acclaim last year. Like the Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince follows two distinct threads, which while written in a vividly descriptive and disarming style offers a vision that is so di...

The year is 2175 and the Earth is a very different place with radiation from the long depleted ozone layer now reaching dangerous levels. A co-operation exists between the previously warring factions of humanity and their creation - the Cyborgs. An unexpected find on one of Jupiter's moons leads to...

The Long Earth is an outstanding novel; entertaining with some great touches and a unique story that has Pratchett's touch of genius about it - combined with Baxter's hard-scifi edge and world building skill. All the ideas and the vast scope of the story carried the book forward really well but it s...

The Middle Kingdom, the third volume in David Wingrove's re-imagined epic Chung Kuo series see's the Earth covered in continent spanning, mile high city of Ice; ruled by the seven T’ang, the Kings of China. A century of peace is shattered when the Minister of the Edict is assassinated and the seven...

The Star Fraction is a science fiction novel by Ken Mcleod. This is the first book by MacLeod that I've read but certainly not the last, not just because I've already bought The Stone Canal and The Cassini Diversion, but because MacLeod is a damn good writer. I mostly picked up these books on the ad...

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...

The Windup Girl is the award winning dystopian vision by Paolo Bacigalupi. Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's calorie representative in Thailand. Under cover as a factory worker he combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs long thought to be extinct. There he meets the Windup Gir...

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...

Transformers Exodus is the official history of the war for Cybertron, written by Alex Irvine. Before Autobots and decepticons, before Optimus Prime and Megatron, Cybertron was a planet with a strict caste system, each bot assigned a role according to their own caste. Orion Pax is a data clerk, sorti...

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...

This Frank Herbert fella wrote the book Dune which was a semi sleeper for me as it walked around this barren planet with some aristocracy stuff going on, got to try to read it again maybe I'm missing something? This other "WHIPPING STAR" is swell though. Frank's little obtuse and abstract words and...

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...

A Book that brings you Home: Becky Chambers’ A Close and Common Orbit.  It took me a while to  work up the emotional energy to read Becky Chambers’ A Close and Common Orbit . This is Chambers’ second novel. Her first novel, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet , was a unique self-published sci-fi nove...

It's funny how you can read books as far afield as China and Australia and not realise there are talented authors on your own doorstep. I  discovered the author Robert Gibson in Morecambe bay, only a few miles from my home. Robert has been writing science fiction stories for a number of years, The S...

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...

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...

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...

Illustration ©Grahame Baker-Smith from The Folio Society edition of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells The work of H. G. Wells is both seminal and formative to our current interest in Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy. The collection of these two novellas in one volume is a common publication format....

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...

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...

Science documentary producer Greg Chivers’ first novel is a delightful combination of sci-fi, politics, and the three strange characters ensconced within them. Chivers’ future Jerusalem is a city all but ignored as irrelevant by the world’s leaders, and in its anonymity the Holy City has become a ha...

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...

For a span of twenty years, genre fiction fans had the opportunity to live through what many call the greatest science fiction tale of all tune, Frank Herbet’s epic Dune series. The saga consists of six novels: Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), He...

Humans always think we are special when it comes to science fiction. Somehow, we are better than the multitude of other alien races out there. How many times has Kirk used “this human emotion called love,” to win the day, or how often has an invading alien army been conquered by “the common cold”? I...

Time is relative. We use this term in our everyday lives to explain why boring tasks seem to last an age, but the day flies by when we are having fun. Sounds good, but it is not what Einstein had in mind. His thought process was far more interested in physics and what happens as we approach the spee...

What do we expect from the future?  I consider myself a half glass full type of person, but even my positivity has taken a battering in the past few years. A world buried under a sea of sand sounds like it may be better  in some circumstances. If we do find ourselves roaming a desolate future what w...

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...

Throughout history many have searched for ways to live longer, from healthy eating and exercise to eliminating illness and seeking an elixir of life. I think it’s fair to say it’s a common goal to extend our lifespan. What would you say if I told you there was a substance that, if ingested regularly...

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...

Science fiction is a brilliant tool for pondering what happens after the inevitable fall of humans. There is only so long that the Earth can sustain us, but that does not mean that other civilisations may not develop after. Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley is a Sci Fi mystery told from the persp...

The future is full of an almost infinite sea of possibilities and that’s what makes science fiction such a great genre. Whilst I may imagine a dystopian future of bleak radioactive zombies, you may think of a utopia. The best books should be a mix of the two, a dark future with a glimmer of hope, or...

Twins have always had a mystery around them. Two people brought up so closely together that they have their own language. In Michael Ferris Gibson and Imani Josey’s Babylon Twin series, the language that the twins use is called the Twinkling, a speech so intuitive that only they can understand it. I...

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...

Science Fiction is one of the best genres because you can explore subjects via a prism of the future. Writing a book about how we treat others does not have to be told via a historic story, or the present, you can look far to the future and draw parallels between that world and ours. What would happ...

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...

Writing a futuristic science fiction novel will allow you to explore strange new worlds but can also be used to explore our past and culture. Reading a wide range of stories from different people, from different parts of the world is a gift that will keep giving your entire life. There has been a lo...

As Star Wars fans we take the lore for granted. We know our Wookie from our Ewok, but to the casual person they are just two different types of furry alien. Take a step back and it is a complex universe, full of planets and species. It was tricky enough with just the three films, but six films later...

As comic book fans, we really are living in the best of days, not because there is so much content to read or watch, but because the artform is established. The concept of comics, superheroes and, in this case, Marvel are well enough known that we can play with the format. Marvel has been doing it f...

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...

What if your physical body were no longer a lifelong commitment? What if we could, instead, free ourselves from that mortal constraint and simply inhabit the hardware you happened to be running at the time? This is the central question at the heart of Francesco Verso’s The Roamers , a novel of ideas...

I love a good magic system in a fantasy novel, one that sets the rules in an interesting way and is still able to amaze. It is one of the reasons that I am not a huge fan of Fae magic with all its side clauses and tricks. You never know what you are really going to get or what you can trust, therefo...

What differentiates a short story series from episodes? Allen Stroud’s The Fractal Series comes in a collection or can be read separately. There are twelve individual stories, that sounds like a short story collection, but there is a difference as they all take place within the Fearless universe tha...