Turns out, you can just relive your childhood for £2.99 on eBay! I was exactly the right age when this book came out, and I was the perfect target audience. A boy in a sleepy suburb finds a mysterious device which allows him to understand every language. Could it be… Aliens?!?!?! It's all biking to the woods, arguing with siblings, navigating growing up, and living in a diverse community. Oh, a…
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A glistening pool of blood gently wept from the body. Crimson gore sparkled under rapid flash photography as it loosely clung to the wounds. So many wounds. Too many for this to have been an accident. "Bite marks," said the forensics officer. "A lot of bite marks." The detective peered at the ragged corpse. It was barely recognisable as human; just a series of holes where flesh ought to be. …
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Another one in the Panopticon series. Bouncy sci-fi which scattershoots its plots all over the place. VR, Mission to Mars, evil AI, underwater cities, eyeless technomages - this has it all. It probably has a little too much crammed in. But, hey, it's a great ride. A cliffhanger every other chapter, vaguely plausible science, and mortal danger at every turn. It looked like I was about to be part …
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This is a decent slice of sci-fi. It's the sort of story that probably could have been written any time in the last 100 years. The sole survivor of the human race is picked up by friendly aliens and spends his life as a specimen of scientific and cultural curiosity. And then... events occur! It's all rather silly fun. The aliens are all pacifists and spend more time negotiating rather than…
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This is a fascinating story told on an almost geological timescale. It is a tantalisingly glimpse, into a much larger world. It is a story of contradiction - there's an epic universe, but we're stuck in a parochial backwater. It is full of un-human creations - yet its politics are firmly a reflection of the 2020s. I loved the story - it's almost impossible to describe how wild it gets - but…
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The 2016 film "Passengers", with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, is a gruesome study in "because of the implication". JLaw's character wakes on a spaceship to discover that only Pratt's character is alive and has prematurely roused her from her slumber. She has, in effect, been murdered and the only way she can pacify this dangerous man is to sleep with him. It is a grim film. WHAT IF THAT…
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Is it possible to write a time-travel story which makes sense? Probably not - but this comes close! It's a bit of a slow-burn; not revealing its secrets until it is good and ready. If you've read a lot of time-hopping sci-fi you won't find anything too surprising; nothing can escape the long shadow of La Jetée. It is a lushly plotted and surprisingly prosaic look at the reality of living on the …
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The best thing about Shakespeare is that you can endlessly redefine the stories. Romeo & Juliet works as well set in NYC to a musical score as it does set in fair Verona. The Tempest is just as good whether the action takes place on an island or an alien planet. Shakespeare can be set in any number of high-schools without dampening its power. And so, Hamlet is now HAM(let) - Humanoid…
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I don't usually back Kickstarter campaigns - but I love sci-fi & fantasy, and I don't think I've previously read any from Ukraine. So this was an instant buy - and it is a delight. As with any translation, you have to accept that the phrasing may sound a little "foreign" and you won't immediately get all the idioms and references - but that's all part of the fun, right? A tiny drumming sound…
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Imagine a world with inter-city rockets, where tourists still use film cameras. Where self-driving trucks sport a wide array of sensor apparatus and record all their data onto miles of magnetic tape. Where the latest Androids are life-like and can perfectly clone a dead man's speech, yet are powered by punch-cards. People make video calls from public booths which eagerly accept coins as payment. …
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Everyone smokes in the future. It is such an obvious truism that sci-fi writers can predict faster-than-light travel, yet fail to see that manly men won't be smoking pipes on board their spaceships. Someone recommended that I read "Autofac" which is the sci-fi version of "The Magic Porridge Pot". But the story was surprisingly hard to find. Originally published in a magazine in 1955, it was…
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I'm a little behind on my reading - I've been busy, OK! This is a collection of tales from 2014. Which means it isn't in the shadow of a damned pandemic, lunatic president, or any of the other modern horrors which have caused shockwaves to authors' psyches. I love short stories. There's absolutely no commitment. I'm not going to be tricked into buying endless sequels of declining quality. …
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