Sunday, 25 August 2024

Ranking the Alien

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With the release of a new addition to the Alien canon, Alien: Romulus , I've noticed a number of people have made rankings of the film...
Monday, 17 June 2024

First ever hustings

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As part of the whole “General Election 2024” thing, I went to my first hustings event ever last night. It was being run out of our local lib...
Sunday, 4 September 2022

Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson

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Interstellar colonisation is a staple of science fiction, both on the page and screen. It's usually presented as a given, with the act...
Thursday, 6 January 2022

Anti-Dystopian Future History

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The Ministry for the Future , Kim Stanley Robinson The standard model for climate change fiction is a narrative of calamity piling up, or ...
Monday, 21 June 2021

Heads, Greg Bear

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This is a reread of something I must have first (and last) read 30 years ago. It's novella length, but its inventiveness and audacity ...
Saturday, 5 June 2021

All Her Father's Guns, James Warner

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An inconsistent, pleased-with-its-own-cleverness, shambling mess of a novel. Full of characters too caricatured to engage with or to like,...
Sunday, 25 April 2021

Love Is Blind, William Boyd

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While more restricted in its scale than usual, Love Is Blind sits on the fictional biography shelf of Boyd's canon, taking in much of...
Saturday, 24 April 2021

A Line Of Forgotten Blood, Malcolm MacKay

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Hitherto, MacKay's books have taken place in a stripped-back, contemporary Scotland, amped-up by stylish prose and meditative criminal...
Saturday, 3 April 2021

Axiom's End, Lindsay Ellis

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Cora is not having a good time. Her low rent existence is already a mess of government intrusion because of her dead-beat and secrets-leak...
Saturday, 20 March 2021

Seven Devils, Elizabeth May & Laura Lam

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Having had a great run of sci-fi recently (thanks entirely to C's book-picking skills), a correction was inevitable. Seven Devils , an...
Sunday, 7 March 2021

Baghdad Central, Elliott Colla

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Having seen the TV series, and being a fan of the crime subgenre "crime drama in an exotic / foreign locale", this was a shoe-in...
Saturday, 6 March 2021

The Golden Scales, Parker Bilal

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Another day, another crime story set in an exotic foreign locale. This time the Cairo, and surrounds, familiar to its author, Bilal, the a...
Saturday, 20 February 2021

The Second Sleep, Robert Harris

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Sent by his Bishop to officiate the funeral of a fellow cleric, Christopher Fairfax discovers a brewing heresy in the impoverished rural b...
Sunday, 14 February 2021

Bone Silence, Alastair Reynolds

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This is the third and, for now, concluding novel in Reynolds' spaceships and pirates mash-up series. What seemed (to me) an incongruou...
Monday, 1 February 2021

The Space Between Worlds, Micaiah Johnson

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There is a multiverse. The histories of several hundred universes are close enough to our own to permit travel between them. But jumping t...
Monday, 11 January 2021

Mr Loverman, Bernardine Evaristo

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It's easy to take pot shots at prizes in the arts. Distilling the distinctive, diaphanous and diverse into a "Best Of" list ...
Sunday, 3 January 2021

Inland, Téa Obreht

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Some books you race through, enjoying the whole journey and missing it when it's done. Meanwhile, some books you read to the end becau...
Saturday, 21 November 2020

An African In Greenland, Tété-Michel Kpomassie

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An unusual (for me) foray into non-fiction with this rather unique ethnographic travelogue. I caught reference to it in a brief magazine r...
Sunday, 20 September 2020

Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson

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Epic in every way - in complexity, in characterisation, in actual physical weight - it's a strange feeling to finally finish KSR's...
Sunday, 23 August 2020

Daemon's Departure

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The Secret Commonwealth , Philip Pullman Unlike the first volume, which largely tees up His Dark Materials ( HDM ), this second volume o...