Escapology by Ren Warom (Titan Books, 2016) If I reveal that the characters in Escapology, Ren Warom’s first novel, have names such as Amiga, Shock, Twist and Deuce then some of you will immediately deduce a great deal more about the book. You’ll intuit that this is an everyday story of hacker folk. You may […]
Arthur C Clarke by Gary Westfahl (The University of Illinois Press, 2018) Gary Westfahl has been a bit unlucky. After reading his Arthur C Clarke – an instalment in the “Modern Masters of Science Fiction” series from The University of Illinois Press – and while I was trying to work out what to say in […]
About fifteen years ago I was given a book to review by the then editor of Vector – it was Fine Cuts, by Dennis Etchison. It was the first book I’d read by him, but in a (too brief – he didn’t write enough) binge I immediately tore through the rest of them. There was […]
The latest issue of The BSFA Review (no.4, Summer 2018) has been published. It contains two of my reviews. The first one – of a pair of military sf novels by Bennet R Coles – is below. The second will follow shortly. Bennett R Coles is a former Canadian naval officer. His first two novels […]
The latest issue (no. 3) of the BSFA Review is out, and it contains my review of Alastair Reynolds’ Aurora Rising (previously released as The Prefect). This is a slightly extended version. I jumped into the ebook of Alastair Reynolds’ Aurora Rising without glancing at the cover or paying any attention to any publicity or […]
The High Ground by Melinda Snodgrass (Titan Books, 2016) When I was a child I loved the breakfast cereal Ready Brek – instant porridge whose television advertisements used to feature a young boy protected from the winter elements by a warm glow of healthy goodness. I would eat Ready Brek for breakfast, supper and, basically, […]
Those she talked to who wanted the store to come here had hardly embraced evil. They talked about how hard things were, how they needed to shop more cheaply without spending a lot of money on petrol, how they and their relatives needed the jobs Sovo would provide. There was something of a class divide […]
The overwhelming sensation left at the end of Tricia Sullivan’s strange, awkward, new novel is of things straining and stretching and struggling to be free. This is true of the characters, all of whom seem to be constantly pushing against something literal and/or metaphorical, but also true of the book itself – it feels as […]
Back at the end of 2010 I interviewed David Rain for the British Science Fiction Association’s Focus (no.54, 2011) – a magazine for writers. David was programme leader for the MA in Creative Writing at Middlesex University, which was at that time unique in having a science fiction thread to its teaching, and I was a […]
Why would an author write a story in which the main characters are bees? One reason might be simply that bees are interesting little creatures – fascinatingly social, successful, widespread and apocryphally busy – and we are intimately familiar with them. Their hives and lives offer the writer useful opportunities for allegory and metaphor. Or, […]