Daniel O’Malley’s first novel, The Rook, won the 2012 Aurealis Award for best SF Novel published by an Australian and comes laden with praise from writers like Charlaine Harris, Charles Yu and Lev Grossman. I found it hard to understand why. The Rook is the story of Myfanwy Thomas, holder of the eponymous title in […]
The thing that I like best about Chris Beckett’s short stories in general, and this new collection, The Peacock Cloak, in particular is the rage that is bubbling under the surface and that occasionally erupts from the page. Not all the stories grip you by the throat, “Atomic Truth”, the first in this collection, is […]
I did not like David Brin’s Existence. It is a book so distressingly unpleasant that it left me wondering – and this is no exaggeration – whether I had had enough of the whole of science fiction. I suppose you might say it caused something of an Existential crisis. Boiled down to its basics, Brin’s […]
My review of Simon Morden’s The Curve of the Earth is now online at Arcfinity. I quite enjoyed the first three novels, but this was a bit disappointing – though I’m still hoping the later volumes could bring a return to form and I still want to find out what Morden has in store for Samuil […]
This review was published in Vector 268 The Hammer by KJ Parker In most fantasy novels Gignomai met’Oc – the Loki-ish third son of a great aristocratic clan – would be the novel’s shadowy villain. He steals from his family and skives off from his duties, he lies and cheats and he plots the destruction […]
Don’t judge a book by its cover is sound advice. Even wiser words might be a warning that readers shouldn’t judge a book by the blurb a publisher puts on the cover. Even so, Audrey Niffenegger ‘s prominently displayed claim that Charles Yu’s first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, was […]
This is an unusual issue of Albedo One as the Irish magazine devotes the majority of its space to the six stories shortlisted for the inaugural Aeon Prize – a short-fiction competition organised by the people behind Albedo One and awarded at last year’s Worldcon in Glasgow.
For a reader who hasn’t been down these paths in a long time the first question was whether the strange odour in the air when opening the pages of the latest issue of Analog (Vol. CXXVII, no. 11 – November 2007) was the whiff of nostalgia or the tang of formaldehyde?
Facts are good! Facts are great! No, facts are fantastic! Aren’t they? Facts are what fans really want. With facts you can reduce everything down into neat categories that can be wrapped in laminated plastic and store for eternity. Take the thing you love, eviscerate it and pin it down so that it can never […]
It’s only fair to Lilith Saintcrow that I begin this review by admitting that I fall well outside the target demographic for Working for the Devil. This novel’s tale of spunky women battling/shagging demons is targeted precisely at a post-Buffy market from which I am excluded by gender, disposition and, probably, age. Even allowing for […]