TC (Thomas Christensen)

Anvil of Stars is the sequel to The Forge of God, written by Greg Bear. Sometimes reviewing a sequel is nearly impossible without spoiling the first book for people who hasn't read it. This is one of those times and I'm not going to try, so if you haven't read The Forge of God (tFoG) yet, don't read...

The Sky Is Falling is a speculative fiction novel by Lester del Rey. Waking up in a world of magic isn't an easy experience for, just dead, computer engineer Dave Hanson. It doesn't get any easier for him when he learns that the sky is falling and he has been destined to do something about it! Comin...

Komarr is a novel in the Miles Vorkosigan Adventures series by Lois McMaster Bujold. Probably the strongest book yet in the continuing saga of Miles Vorkosigan. Bujold has moved a step beyond her usual "let's keep it simple and stick to Miles' point-of-view" for this story and is letting one of the...

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...

Memory is a science fiction novel in the Miles Vorkosigan Adventures series by Lois McMaster Bujold. On an otherwise successful mission Miles Naismith (a.k.a. Admiral Naismith a.k.a. Lord Miles Vorkosigan) have a seizure and nearly cuts the rescued hostage in half. Miles has to go home and become Lo...

The Stainless Steel Rat and Angelina enjoy a belated honeymoon on a planet run by a dictator who rigs elections to get into office, so they set the Rat up as a candidate instead. Very much a satire on banana republic politics and a parody of adventures set in Latin America I regretted buying this bo...

The Genesis Machine is a science fiction novel by James P Hogan. (take a look at the clothes the guys are wearing on the cover - wow!) Written in 1978 and taking place a few of years from now, The Geneses Machine pretty much read as an alternative history story, even if it wasn't intended as such. I...

The Bridge is a novel by the award winning British author Iain M Banks. I'm ever in awe over Banks - where The Wasp Factory was a really strong debut novel, The Bridge as his third published novel is just so much more. It's fantastic to see him develop as a writer and storyteller - Yeah, I know I sh...

Shards of Space is a collection of short science fiction stories by Robert Sheckley. Normally I make a short mention of each of the stories in short story collections, but there's has to be a limit. Shards of Space contains eleven stories and none of them are worth the time (my time) or space (this...

The Wasp Factory is the stunning debut of the British author Iain M Banks. Having read everything by Iain M. Banks and finding this book while browsing my brother's bookshelves, made for some hasty rearrangements of my to-read stack. Mostly the words "first novel" on the cover intrigued me - what co...

The Ceres Solution is a science fiction novel by Bob Shaw. It's important to read the copyright page closely, before you start on a book. Knowing the year a story was written (or first published) can greatly change the way you'll understand a story. I had somehow gotten the impression that The Ceres...

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

The Dark Side of Technology is a science fiction novel by Mark Antony Rossi. The tale of the mad scientist is even older than the Shelly novel of Frankenstein. Since the dawn of the written word man has tried to altered his appearance, environment or internal makeup in a vain attempt to gain more po...

Mirror Dance is a science fiction novel by the author Lois McMaster Bujold. A friend gave this to me to read after I had given him Use of Weapons by Banks, and again I'm positively surprised at how many excellent writers there are out there - all of which have written tons of books, just waiting for...

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...

Cosmonaut Keep is the first volume in the Engines of Light trilogy by Ken Mcleod. This is the first book in a brand new universe, called "Engines of Light", and as that the first book that MacLeod has written outside the universe of Star Fraction and Cassini Division. As I've understood it the unive...

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...

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...

Caesars Bicycle is a science fiction novel by the American author John Barnes. Mark Strang is a Crux Ops, which means that he hops around in timelines fighting the Closers (your basic timeline hopping bunch of slave drivers). This is the third book in the Timeline Wars series (the first two being Pa...

The Song of the Swan II is the sequel to The Song of the Swan by Arthur D'Alembert. This Part II is a direct continuation of the first Song of the Swan even if it takes place fifty years later. As that it's kind of uninteresting if you haven't read the first part, but then again it's interesting to...

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

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...

Earth Made of Glass is the second volume in the Thousand Cultures series by the American author John Barnes. It has been ten years and Giraut and Margaret of "A Million Open Doors" have been working as diplomats/undercover agents on just about every possible world in The Thousand Cultures. They are...

LoveDeath is a speculative fiction novel by the award winning author Dan Simmons. I met Simmons at a recent Danish book fair and had a small talk with him about the range of his published work and the problem of categorising books. Not being a very well read Simmons fan (The Hyperion Cantos and Carr...

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...

The Naked God is the third novel in the Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton. Sitting with the final and conclusive volume of The Nights Dawn and looking at it's massive 1150 pages (at 1.5Kg it's just about the heaviest book I've ever read), I felt kind of intimidated. My faith in Hamilton and hi...

Silverhair is a science fiction novel by the award winning author Stephen Baxter. This book is very quirky in that it forces us to see from a new perspective. For anyone who's ever read Raptor Red the concept of this book will most likely be familiar. Baxter has decided to craft a story centering ar...

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...

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 Years of the City is a science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl. Subtitled A Chronicle of New York in the next Century, this book is about actually not as much about the big city as about the people in it and how they interact or rather doesn't. The book is split in to five different stories telli...

The Neutronium Alchemist is the second volume in the Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton. In The Reality Dysfunction , the presence of an energy-based alien lifeform during the death of a human on the colony world of Lalonde somehow "jammed open" the interface between this universe and "the beyo...

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...

Cydonia is the second volume in the Web series of young adult fiction, written by Ken Mcleod. Some where out there there's a link to this page saying that I've reviewed everything MacLeod has published, which can't be true all the time, but I can do my best and review as much as I can find. Even if...

A Deepness in the Sky is the prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Long awaited prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. The stories are taking place in the same universe, but are otherwise not connected. I don't think that it matter what order you read them in – the important thing is that you r...