The cloaking device used by the titular spaceship to sneak into alien territory feels like a metaphor for the characters in Ian Whates’s bracing space opera. Most of these people have ulterior motives, with the motives of one so ulterior she doesn’t even know them herself. Such duality seems to be a survival mechanism in […]
Cheese is strange, isn’t it? We fiddle with a cow, let what comes out go mouldy, then eat the result. Tastes great of course, but still. Anna Smith Spark, who is a quarter Chinese, made this point to put the business about Chinese people eating dogs into perspective. She is one of those writers with […]
In ‘The Outer Spheres’, Charity Freestone is aided by characters who were previously antagonists. One is a special forces operative called 23, who becomes Charity’s heavily armed fairy godmother. The protean 23 is never encountered in person; Charity doesn’t even find out what she looks like. Instead, 23 appears as a giant cannon, a warship […]
Wound right up The horror underlying much of Jason Arnopp’s fiction often feels rooted in remorse. Invariably, his miserable, thwarted but very identifiable characters have made some dreadful decision and are awaiting the dire consequences. It’s that hinterland between realisation and outcome that gives the narratives their particularly febrile atmosphere, a bit like the moment […]
The unfortunate subject of politics Advances in real world technology and medicine add detail to the understanding of the human mind. However, has society ignored the need to develop individuals and given them technology instead? It could be why people are so willing to give control up to technology, for example in the many instances […]
This is a densely-written novel, whose rhythmic narrative is as much of an accomplishment as the convincing world-building; the latter detailed with such invention you forget it’s not, in fact real. Links to our realm – stupid attitudes towards refugees, the desperate politics of smaller countries who want to go their own way without some […]
Don’t forget the nuts and bolts How much of a problem loss of our ‘specialness’ presents depends on how future generations interact with technology. All it will take is for one generation to overlook analogue realities and pretty soon nobody will know how the technology works, rendering it ‘magical’. Add user interfaces shaped like wands […]
If Aliette de Bodard and Anne Leckie joined forces to write their version of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ set in a space war imagined by Iain M Banks it might end up a bit like ‘Ninefox Gambit’. For all that, the novel is entirely original, with a sonorous, almost detached rhythm that makes it uniquely […]
From the Innominate Eastercon panel ‘Fantastic Lessons for Scientists’ on 15 April 2017, with Adrian Tchaikovsky, Aliette de Bodard, TJ Berg, Christianne Wakeham & Dr Justin Newland PART 1: We are all special The word ‘fantasy’ is derived from the Greek ‘phantasia’ and means ‘to make visible’. This definition immediately places the magical genre in […]
This book is so good I bought it twice, once as an ebook and once as a paperback for a gift. Yes, it’s one of those novels you end up buying for other people. The set-up is disarmingly simple: in a world reshaped by an ancient nuclear war, people only give birth to twins. One […]
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