This piece was written as part of the BSFA’s Vector Reviewers’ Poll for 2011. Vector reviewers get to nominate their five favourite books of the previous year. In 2011 my five were: Silver Wind, Nina Allan (Eibonvale Press) City of Bohane, Kevin Barry (Jonathan Cape) The Islanders, Christopher Priest (Gollancz) By Light Alone, Adam Roberts […]
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 […]
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 […]
Stephen King stopped being a “writer” decades ago. These days Stephen King is a giant, steamrollering, cash-making machine that trawls across the landscape of our ecologically over-burdened planet raking off a vast slice of humanity’s combined wealth before one day – just as the final sliver of rainforest is gasps its last – Stephen King […]
David Gunn’s debut novel, Death’s Head, isn’t going to win prizes for originality. Its galaxy-spanning setting, cast of stock characters, and plot that has a super-powered hero planet-hopping to save damsels in distress and prop up tottering empires, rehashes every trope in the military sf armoury.
Do you want to know how smart Adam Roberts is? His latest novel, Land of the Headless takes its name from a story you don’t know by a writer you’ve never heard of, whose lasting claim to a footnote in history is mostly that he went to school with Pushkin, someone you’ve probably never read. […]
There is something huge out there in the dark. Something vast and terrible and relentless that will not let you escape. It demands your attention. It wants you to worship it. Yes Dan Simmons’ new book is so huge it’s scary.
The temptations of self-publishing are obvious. Every aspiring writer looks at the dross that sometimes makes it through the professional filter – in books and magazines – and thinks to themselves: if they publish his shit, why won’t they publish mine? Self-publishing offers the hope of getting your work “out there,” bypassing the established professionals’ […]
There’s something about being faced with a volume whose cover proclaims in large and luridly pink lettering that it contains 5 Great Novels by Philip K Dick – a book five centimetres thick (that’s two inches in old money), cumbersome and gaudy – that makes you wonder whether anyone in the publishing industry ever reads […]