Inspired new colony story, in which three species try to find a practical, ethical equilibrium over generations on a beautifully-rendered alien planet called Pax, whose otherness is depicted with clever hints and subtle imagery. Gravity exerts more force, for example, so children are smaller and stronger, while their parents’ flesh droops with age like melted […]

BOUNDLESS BODIES Bodies are often a product of the environment in which they are situated. Likewise, minds are partially shaped by both what they receive from the world around them, and the receptors they use to process reality. There is no guarantee that the Earth will be able to maintain its current ecosystems, or that […]

This politically and psychologically insightful epic is set in a gloriously-realised post-ecological/social collapse floating city named after a flooded Inuit town, and has some of the best character introduction/development arcs I’ve read in a while. It actually had me shouting ‘Oh no!’ at a sequence near the end – see if you can guess which […]

Unlike most clever dick SF ‘comedy’, this book is actually funny, because the author understands all too well that humour comes from humanity (clue in the name there) as well as wit. Thus, the painful travails of Alice as she negotiates life in the newly independent Scotland’s Estonian embassy while trying to find a decent […]

Deft and unapologetically populist novel about a traumatised girl who can see the future and a cult leader who wants to exploit her, Halcyon has the feel of mid-career Stephen King. It’s more supernatural thriller than SF, although the antagonist and her tormentors are straight out of the Crash handbook as they engineer atrocities to reach an […]

As we learned from the Millennium Bug, a single digit can cause potential havoc with a complex, number-based system. Yoon Ha Lee brilliantly extrapolates this contemporary reality in science-fictional terms by depicting a densely hierarchical civilisation that spans thousands of star systems, all in thrall to ‘the calendar’, an agreed system of ethical, scientific and […]