Dane Shipps is a worker aboard the spaceship King Space Void, a gigantic ship that fuels itself by eating planets. He and the other workers worship the ship as their god and believe it will take them to a paradise called the Edge. On an especially bad day for Dane, he meets a woman from […]
Book Review: A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe
February 10, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Gene Wolfe’s A Borrowed Man (Tor) is a novel that sneaks up on you. Beneath its cosy exterior, elegant origami-like folds of spare prose and apparently simple storyline, beats a very dark heart. A hundred years in the future, when our civilisation is virtually gone, the recloned narrator, former author E.A.Smithe, is now nothing more […]
Book Review: Journey, A Short Story Volume I by Mykl Walsh
November 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Journey, A Short Story Volume I begins in the year 10,001. An expedition team from Earth lands on a planet in a neighboring galaxy. Exploring the planet, they find that human-like life once existed on the planet a long time ago. While most signs of civilization are now gone, they still discover several preserved relics. […]
Book Review: Star Wars Aftermath by Chuck Wendig
October 28, 2015 by Leave a Comment
The galaxy is reeling and planet Earth is no different – the status quo for the Star Wars universe has changed and for the better. When we last visited Star Wars, or at least when I last visited that galaxy far, far away things were… a little bloated. It was as bloated as Jabba on […]
Book Review: Ichthyic in the Afterglow by Jason Wayne Allen
October 23, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Ichthyic in the Afterglow is the kind of book that the subgenre “bizarro” was invented for. It uses the mythologies of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers, but it isn’t really horror. It takes place in a dystopian future, but it isn’t really science fiction. Its story is driven by factions of warring cults, but it’s […]
Book Review: If Then by Matthew De Abaitua
October 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment
What if there was an equation to help us understand and ultimately eliminate war? That is one of the central themes of Matthew De Abaitua’s latest novel, If Then (Angry Robot Books). The title itself suggests the principles of certain formulae, such as computer coding (“if this…” “then that…”), although if, like me, you find […]
Book Review: Sexbot by Patrick Quinlan
September 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment
I know what you’re thinking. But despite the title and the cover, this isn’t Kindle porn. For one thing, I have a paperback copy of it. For another, Patrick Quinlan is an established author of thriller novels. That background shines through in Sexbot. Susan Jones and her partner Martin Wacker were robotics engineers who made […]
Book Review: Birdsnatch by C.J. Cummings and Mark Ryan
September 4, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Birdsnatch (also available at Amazon.co.uk) is apparently the first in a planned series called “A Tale Told Twice.” The idea behind the series is that two authors take the same title and build separate stories around only the title. This is the first result of that experiment. In C.J. Cummings’s novella, an irreversible computer error is causing […]
Book Review: Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg
August 12, 2015 by Leave a Comment
“I never had much use for science fiction… Science Fiction gave the program a bad name. It was so disreputable in the minds of most people that the program had to be as businesslike as possible in order to seem legitimate.” Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg was first published in 1972 by Random House. […]
Audiobook Review: THE REBIRTHS OF TAO by Wesley Chu (Narr. Michael Naramore)
July 16, 2015 by 1 Comment
Wow. That’s it. The last book for Roen Tan. Thankfully, this isn’t the last book for Wesley Chu, and not even the last in this universe of alien-hosting humans and their not-so-secret war to save Earth. Thankfully-thankfully, this isn’t even the last book Wesley will publish this year. Tor will release his next novel, Time […]
