This is a charming and zeitgeisty novel which has a strong start and fulfils the promise of its blurb. What if your autonomous vacuum cleaner was sentient and was very sad about your wife's death?

It pays obvious homage to the Brave Little Toaster, 100 Acre Woods, Beauty and The Beast, and hundred other what-if-your-toys-came-to-life stories. Along the way we discover what it is like to be a transfem robo-hacker in domestic peril, why clocks are so bossy, and whether art is a cure for grief.

The world-building is a little basic (The Algorithm™ is managing humanity's decline) but the characters are well constructed. A little derivative, it's true. Nevertheless, it is a touching tale, told well, and with a decent pace.

Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute.

This isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of Volume or Sliding Doors became The Names, instead this is a new and twisty concept rendered through the lens of a chick-lit comedy.

It's proper laugh-aloud funny, while playing with all the clichés of both sci-fi and romcoms.

The thing I liked most is that Lauren is an active and intelligent protagonist unlike, say, Carol Sturka from Pluribus. Sturka never engages with the premise of her odd situation, she doesn't try to discover the rules of the world she's living in and is content to let things happen to her. Lauren spends a good deal of time at least trying to get to grips with the (un)reality of her husband-dispensing portal. I found that made for a rather gratifying story and didn't leave me shouting at the pages "JUST TRY SOMETHING!"

It's also refreshing to follow the adventures of a (slight) antihero. Lauren mostly knows when she is being monstrous. She flings between feminism and self-directed misogyny - with a smattering of misandry. Her discrimination against those of us men who wear socks with individual toes is, of course, an unforgivable sin.

The pacing is excellent - with an perfectly timed plot twist just as things are settling down. The afterword talks briefly about the multiple possible endings that were considered. I'd love to know what ideas were rejected although, in retrospect, there's only one narratively satisfying conclusion.

I read a lot of science fiction - probably more than is healthy - and The Husbands is a welcome addition to my shelf. The practicalities of the plot-device are as unimportant as how Warp Drive works; science fiction is about exploring the possibilities of a fantastical situation. If you could instantly swap your spouse because they lost the TV remote again - would you? In a world of no consequences, what would you get away with? If you discovered a break in reality, what would you try in order to exploit or understand it?

The Husbands gets fairly dark. Never grim, exactly, but it gnaws away at the cosiness proffered by domestic bliss. Although Lauren can be a bit of a bitch, the story just about strays away from making her morally repugnant. An exemplary piece of storytelling.

What's better than one Adrian Tchaikovsky novella? Three Adrian Tchaikovsky novellæ! Or is it "novellii"? Either way, a delightful triptych of stories on a common theme. On the surface, they're about travelling to a new destination (Space! The Future! For-Copyright-Reasons Not Narnia!)

Except, deep down, they're about loneliness. No matter how far or fast we run, no matter where or when we go, we can't outrun ourselves. When you enter the void, sometimes the void enters you.

There's also the constant theme about the hunter becoming the hunted. All three of the stories reminded me a bit of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - in that I was never quite sure if the characters were simply delusional and waging war on an enemy of their own making.

It brims with a pathos which I find rare in modern science fiction. That's offset with the perfectly placed British humour within it. Yes, there's a touch of the Weir/Scalzi "Only I, a nerdy guy, can save the universe in a self-knowing way" - but those authors aren't brave enough to mention Reading town centre or have their hero hail from Stevenage. Whereas Tchaikovsky knows what's up with the Furries.

An excellent collection of tales.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is available to buy now.

Short stories offer you the chance to dip briefly into a world and then skip out so there's not much time for development; just straight in to the plot and off we go. But this is all exposition and very little action. Rather than let the plots develop naturally, there are just vast passages of infodumping. I'm sad to say this is a rather dreary and insipid collection of stories.

Some of the stories start out with an interesting premise but then just fizzle out. There's a reasonably good idea in "The Materiality of Emotions" which describes people buying little trinkets which induce emotions in them. Again, emotions as drugs is well-worn stuff, but this builds up momentum nicely before suddenly ending.

The highlight is "Spectrum" which has some delightful world-building but, like the others, it's rather derivative of older stories. A woman's space ship crashes on a strange planet and she tries to befriend the local hominids. You've almost certainly read it before.

Overall I found it underwhelming.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

Apparently I reviewed the previous version of this book four years ago but have no real memory of it. Did you ever have a dream which was vividly realistic yet somehow slightly askew from reality? Obviously there is no antimemetics division, nor could anyone write a book about it. If they did, their mind would instantly be liquefied and their mere existence would be purged.

So, why is there a new version of the book out and is it worth reading again?

As the copyright page says:

Earlier versions of this material were previously published in serial form on the scp wiki under Creative Commons 3.0, and subsequently self-published by the author in ebook and paperback format. The work has been substantively revised and updated since.

As the FAQ makes clear, getting a "proper" publisher to put money into a CC project is unlikely. So many of the original elements have been rewritten and reworked. The writing, plotting, and characters have all been substantially improved. The ending, in particular, has become something quite special.

The story itself is still recursively memetic and a metacommentary on itself. The bug-eyed-monsters are mindbending and the good guys are all morally compromised. The concepts are gorgeously impossible and the pacing is exciting.

There's simply nothing like it.

The eBook is mostly well formatted. Excellent use of monospace fonts for reports, there are accessible redactions where suitable, and the images all have alt text. Weirdly, one "monster" is named వ - a character which failed to render correctly on my eBook. That gave it a rather sinister appearance! The ghosting of eInk made it look like there were faint words behind the various redactions which was delightfully spooky. An excellent book and a satisfying update.

However, it is worth noting that ███████ this book will ██████████ ██████████ ██████████████ and could lead to ████ █████████████ ██████████████. Although the retailer won't accept refunds on any book stained with █████████ █████████████████ ████ or ████ ██████████, it is possible to summon ██████ ████████████████████ ████████████ ███ ████ ███████████ in an emergency.

This is fun, silly, charming, and much better than The Murderbot Diaries despite being superficially similar.

Imagine you are an interstellar ship and, of course, your AI is conscious. What would you do if your passengers were killed - not by a terrifying alien, but by Count Dracula???

What if, on the return journey, another set of your passengers were similarly slaughtered. Except, this time, by a Werewolf? How would that make you feel? Would it drive you mad? Could you cope with the bullying from other starships? Or would you feel the need… the need for REVENGE!

As I said, silly and campy fun. It is episodic adventure with just the right amount of Hammer-style horror and not too much technobabble. All the classic monsters are here - depression, intrusive thoughts, envy, fear.

Oh, and Frankenstein’s spider.

As an ebook, it makes great use of fonts - which give it a delightfully retrofuturistic feel. There are some fun binary Easter-Eggs as well.

Everyone raves about this series, so I thought I'd grab the first book. It's basically fine, I guess.

It is moderately amusing having the Muderbot be an awkward teenage boy who just wants to watch videos and cringes when people stare at him. But it is a bit one-note. Similarly, evil corporations hiding details from exo-planet surveyors is a trope which has been a thousand times before.

This is a novella, serving to introduce the protagonist and fill us with a little too much exposition. The trouble is that nothing much happens. There's a bit of world building and a light smattering of action - although I found it rather plodding.

Essentially, a lot of telling and not much showing. Rather underwhelming given the hype. I might give one of the many (many!) sequels a go once I reach the end of my reading list.

This is Star Trek before Star Trek. It is Alien long before Alien. It is the template for so much modern science fiction. What it is not is particularly good.

I don't intend to dump on the classics (and this is undoubtedly a classic) but 1950s sci-fi takes place in an almost alien media environment. Even if you ignore the anachronisms (like having to develop film in order to see photographs) and the archaic language (lots of vibrators being used against a big pussy) it is hard to get over how unconvincing it all is.

In the first story, the crew of the Space Beagle find an alien monster. It probably killed one of them. They bring it aboard and just let it lounge about in the library! Yes, all the science is fun, and the "competency porn" of the professional crew is suitably heroic, but the characters and their motivations are frequently bizarre. It is only through the complete absence of girls (urgh!) that there's no interstellar sexism.

The protagonist, Grosvenor, is a cipher for every geeky kid who ever felt he was smarter than everyone else. He is a sneering, taciturn, and deeply unpleasant character. When given the opportunity, he relishes the chance to become dictator.

Because the book started life as a set of short stories, it works reasonably well as a "monster of the week" show. It is episodic, with well-placed cliffhangers. The science is very sciency with some excellent speculative elements. You've got aliens planting eggs in people (like Alien) and a ship's engineer who says "Nooo! The walls couldn't stand it. They'd melt." (like Scotty) and any number of concepts you'll recognise from your favourite TV shows.

The obsession with hypnotism and mind-control feels a bit icky, especially when understood in association with the author's dalliance with the pseudoscience of Dianetics.

The language (when not steeped in 1950's idiomatic phrasing) can verge on the poetic. Every story includes a chapter or two from the alien's viewpoint. They are deliciously weird and elevate this book beyond what might be a slightly forgettable slice of sci-fi.

It is absolutely worth reading - if only to see how influential it has been - but it can be a bit of a weird slog at times.

This is an astounding bit of high-concept sci-fi. Imagine a world where crossing a border literally split your body in two. A young woman emigrates from South Korea - one version of her stays in Seoul, another version goes off to live in New York. This is the way humanity has always existed. People bifurcating and dealing with the consequences.

It is heady stuff. The book spans life, love, politics, religion, and folklore. It layers on narrative and meta-narrative. Like any debut novel, there are too many ideas to be contained and the plot seems to spill beyond its pages. What would the fascist ICE do with immigrants who were mere clones of the people they left behind?

The dizzying implications of the story are matched only by the gorgeously intricate plot. Does the tale need to occasionally be told in the second-person? You don't think so, but you also can't think of a better way to illustrate how strange it is to argue with your other-self. You enjoy all the literary and scholarly references and find they add poetic texture to balance out the increasing tension.

Unlike other hard sci-fi, it doesn't spend too much time on exposition; it gets drip fed to the reader. But it is happy to dive into the practicalities of a world where refugees might leave behind more than just memories. There's a small but necessary amount of technobabble, and a large but necessary amount of moral philosophising. Tuvix did not die in vain.

Sublimation lives up to the hype. It is dramatic, powerful, intriguing, and - above all - fun.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. Sublimation is available to pre-order now for delivery in July. I recommend reading it twice.

This is an an interesting and varied set of sci-fi/fantasy stories. Some barely a couple of pages, others cutting short at just the right time. They are all on a similar theme - the strife between parents and children. Whether it is a twisted take on classic fairy tales, or a dive into the far future - there's always something interesting going on.

Samantha Mills has a excellent eye for neologisms and isn't afraid to deploy humour with sometimes devastating effect.

The titular "Rabbit Test" is excellent but - like most of the others - it is a riff on some genre classics. That's not a bad thing; it's always fun to explore tropes from a different angle. Each story is entertaining, but most left me thinking "now where have I heard that before?"

One of the lovely things is the story notes at the end. Like a little behind-the-scenes feature on a DVD extra. More books should give the reader a glimpse behind the writing process.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. Rabbit Test is available to pre-order now.

This is an intriguing and mostly satisfying sci-fi tale. It has shades of Oryx Crake mixed in with A Canticle for Leibowitz - we are mere observers of the tattered remains of humanity. Watchers guide scattered settlements as they strive to evolve and understand their place on a corrupted Earth.

The writing is dreamy and hazy - reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It isn't immediately clear what's happening; the story is drip-fed to us. Unfortunately it is rather undone by the penultimate chapter which is a great-big data-dump of exposition.

If you've ever seen the show Don't Hug Me I'm Scared you'll be well at home with the surreal and oblique nature of the storytelling presented here. The language is obtuse and confusing, reflecting the confusion these new humans feel.

I think part of the story is a rejection of the hierarchy and artificial inter-personal structures often seen in societies like Japan. Everyone is simultaneously desperate to escape their confines while rigidly enforcing the status quo - with predictably disastrous results.

It is a meandering tale, spanning eons, which ultimately feels a bit depressing.

This book is ridiculously zeitgeisty. It's all brain-rotting AI, social-media meltdowns, mixed with some cracking technobabble.

She thinks about erasing more: all the practice session recordings; her own encrypted cephaloscripts; the dream-guide neuromesh of her personal AI; the interviews, fan messages, reviews—food for her vanity, training data for her egolets.

Fab! But, for all that, it's pretty realistic. Sure, it's set five-minutes into the future, but all the tech is plausible and all the hacks somewhere in the ballpark of reality. It is much better than The Ministry for the Future simply because all the technowizardry passes the smell test.

The plot is, charitably, basic. A woman has been kidnapped and her husband (who is a suspect) enlists a Private Eye hacker to solve the mystery. But you're not reading to discover whodunnit; you're there to revel in the pitch-perfect future-gazing and cower before the (hopefully not too accurate) predictions around how technology will be subverted to protect the powerful while leaving everyone else helpless.

The neologisms are off the chart - "Darcybots" to help you date, a "Fiscjinn" to interrogate your finances, and an "Oneirofex" to… well, I'll let you discover that! You'll need to have a good grasp of what's going on with modern technology in order to get more than half the references. I've no idea if the book will be intelligible half-a-decade from now. Perhaps we'll have our self-hosted AIs translate it for us?

At times, it feels less like a book and more like a series of parables woven into one story. The ending feels a little rushed - but it fits in with the fast-paced nature of the plot. A great slab of sci-fi to chew on.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy. The book is released in October 2025 - and will probably remain relevant for at least half-a-dozen weeks.

Second Contact is a compilation of Lower Decks issues #1–6. You get a bunch of stories spread out over 145 pages. The great thing about a comic of a cartoon is that all the characters look identical to their TV counterparts. There's no pesky rights issues to get in the way.

The stories are exactly what you'd expect from Lower Decks. The gang have to deal with aliens, not-too-strange new worlds, and some heavy meta-textual crises. And, yes, it is delightfully meta. There are plenty of call-backs to the show, TNG, and the original animated series. Perfect for nerds like me.

It also introduces some new lore:

Kirk sometimes liked to unwind in his quarters by making a fanvid of his own day. This is canon.

There's also the first(?) appearance of the "Starfleet Corps of Rhetoric Engineers" who, as their name suggests, help provide some much needed exposition for the technobabble.

Oh, and we find out that the noise the transporters make is "SVRRRRRMMMMMM". Which seems about right.

The episodic pacing is nice and there is a genuine laugh-out-loud moment every few pages. It doesn't try to do anything new or innovative with the comic book format - it's pretty much small panels, the occasional bigger art piece, and one double-pager.

On a technical note, the speech bubbles are in text, rather than raster, format - so your TTS should be able to read them aloud.

Second Contact is the sort of comic book which will keep you giggling with glee at the misadventures of lovable misfits.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy. The book is available to pre-order now - with delivery mid-September 2025.

An off-the-books colony has vanished. Only one woman has the martial and intellectual skills to save the day. With her trusty alien companion she's in a race against time to save the galaxy!

The plot is a little thin, and has a slightly annoying habit of jumping forward and then giving retroexposition in "flashback". Some of the prose is gorgeous - "All you need for an avalanche of chaos is one inebriated snowball." - but it is used sparingly. That gives it a rather cold and utilitarian feel - which matches the alien surroundings our protagonist finds herself in.

I also found the humour to be a bit repetitive - the alien doesn't quite get that you shouldn't talk aloud about human's sexual habits - but the story is well-paced and keeps the intrigue high without delving too deeply into convoluted political machinations.

It doesn't really add much to the science fiction pantheon in terms of Big Ideas, but it is rather good fun.

Thanks to Pan Macmillan for the advance copy, the book is out in September this year and can be pre-ordered now.

The plot is delightful - what if carbon credits extinction credits were the new capitalist plaything? What second, third, and forth order effects would that have on the world? The worldbuilding is sublime - with an prescient look at the evolution of DRM, Smart Contracts, AI assistants, and targetted assassinations.

The characters are perfectly fleshed out and gradually reveal their motivations and insecurities:

one big thing about the socially normal was that they loved their social norms. Whereas Resaint couldn’t stand the politics, the niceties, the meetings where she had to spangle her expression and tone of voice with false enthusiasm just so people didn’t think she was a bitch.

There is a slight tendency towards Socratic dialogue as a means of exposition. The satire itself isn't exactly subtle - but when it has this many twists and turns I can forgive it for laying it on a bit thick.

The ending(s) genuinely shocked me.

The stories are mostly dark and brooding, with the macabre turn. They're fun - but the constant theme is "what if I, an intelligent person, got trapped in the brain of a dullard?" Robots who are self-aware of their limitations reveal to us how terrifying dementia must be.

We meet robots who are reassured that they are without sin, and those which long to sin. Perhaps malicious dæmons reside in their programming just as bugs reside in our souls?

A fine collection.

The base model TM-31 runs on state-of-the-art chronodiegetical technology: a six-cylinder grammar drive built on a quad-core physics engine, which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a rendered environment, such as, for instance, a story space and, in particular, a science fictional universe.

Come on! That's great, isn't it? Very reminiscent of Jasper Fforde; using the power of science to dive into fiction. But, unlike Fforde, Yu never really commits to the conceit. There's some lovely stuff in the start about being a child and pretending to be in Star Wars, only to grow up fixing time-machines for the real/fictional Skywalker family. But it doesn't get developed much past that.

The writing is beautiful, with some lovely phrasing and heartbreaking prose mixed in with hilarious observations on the near-future.

Phil is an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0. His passive-aggressive is set to low. Whoever configured him did me a solid.

Is it really a science-fiction novel? I think it was the author Debra Shostak who pointed out that most contemporary American fiction was about disappointing one's father. It's easy to read this book as an allegory for a child having a traumatic breakdown and retreating into fiction rather than facing up to the strained relationship they had with their dad.

Or, maybe, their dad did invent a time machine and now their child is cursed to travel "chronogrammatically" in search of meaning; both literal and figurative.

A fine brain-bender of a book.

The protagonist is best described by one of the character's off-hand remarks about her being “The very best space fascist girl scout of them all.”

Can you feel sympathy for someone who has been manipulated into being evil? What about if given every chance to change, they turn back to their abusers? Is it OK to use sexism to your own advantage? If you had the chance to rewrite your history, would you?

The pacing is perfect - with a big reveal at exactly halfway through. It is fairly imaginative but I found it a bit too hand-wavey and, dare I say, a little generic. The prose is spectacular, though, and some of the difficult subjects are handled with appropriate sensitivity.

What would happen if the UK Civil Service had access to TIME TRAVEL!?!?! It's a brilliant idea for a novel and is written with a seemingly-real understanding of the number of forms, systems, emails, and subterfuge needed to set up such a premise. It is perfectly observed - both in terms of the protagonists' lived experience and their trauma.

Along the way it touches on Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, moral relativism, and whether people can be absolved of their involvement with The Empire.

What starts as a fish-out-of-water comedy (how does a Victorian officer feel about Grindr?) slowly morphs into a terrifying confrontation with cold-blooded bureaucracy. It is a story about how people find themselves moulded into the shape of their own oppressors, and how love can spring from nowhere.

It is a delightful tale, well told, expertly researched, with just the right balance of humour and tension. I'm tempted to knock off half a star because of its mention of What3Words - but that would be most ungallant.

Scalzi's latest book is cheesy homage - fromage if you will - to that giant of literature. It asks an equally important question.

What if, without warning and for no apparent reason, the moon turned into cheese?

That's it. That's the novel.

It is gloriously silly - but no less reverent to humanity. Rather than focus on one single story, the book floats around a dozen different people. We sample the plebeian to the rock-star, President to hausfrau. Everyone gets to bathe in the moonlight (cheeselight?) of the story. And what a story! As with any good slice of sci-fi, it is light on the technobabble and high on the everyday drama.

Yes, there are obvious parallels to the shared emotional trauma of Covid, but it doesn't dominate as a theme. And, of course, the fractured nature of our shared reality is likely to be the focus of most literature for the foreseeable future. Scalzi instinctively understands what makes sci-fi absurd and how to gently squeeze the humour out of it. Because sci-fi is intrinsically funny. It's about us playing a massive game of "what if" and seeing where it takes us.

The laughter is offset with just the right amount of heartbreak. The moon turning in to cheese isn't all fun and games. No one gets off scot-free, but all the villains get their just desserts. It is impossible to read without a smile on your cheeks and a lump in your throat.

As with his two most recent books - The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain - these are stand-alone novels. There's no massive trilogy to commit to reading and no prior knowledge is assumed.

If you've read Neal Stephenson, Andy Weir, and Mary Robinette Kowal, you'll probably get a little bit more out of it than the casual reader. It is fully of fun little sci-fi references and tropes, all expertly shaken out for a daft laugh.

The book is released in March 2025. Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy - the rest of you will have to pre-order.