This is the first Slovenian novel I’ve read, and it does a nice line in snarky, brutally honest character analysis, particularly of the Wolf family, whose part-demented/part-deeply ordinary relationships mean a fiftieth birthday party takes almost a year of emotional chess to arrange. The book is set twenty-five years in the future, and looks at […]

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

One of the things I love about the modern age – and despite the political vileness, there is much – is writing a title like that and imagining how chuffed my younger self would be looking at it, while having no clue as to what it meant. In fact it’s the third and final of […]

A determinedly SF take on the occult, this series novel looks at magic as data of dubious provenance that needs to be managed accordingly. Post-Cold War, a new arms race is underfoot with elder gods instead of nukes and assorted uncanny agents employed in a Great Game of vampires, superheroes and undying psychopathic entities. The […]

Elegantly written and packed with left-field English wit, I worried at first about the avalanche of characters and ‘You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here But It Helps’ tone. Additionally, there are no POC characters and everyone exists in a bit of England called Rotherweird that has been cut off from the rest […]

Virtual Futures filmed my performance of the ten-minute AI-themed science fiction piece The Minus Four Sequence with a really impressive camera and recording system. Click here to watch it on YouTube.  

Efficient near-future crime thriller in which paraplegics operate robot avatars called threeps (presumably after Theepio) in a sport whose point is to rip the head off an opponent and use it as a football. No more stupid than any other mass-entertainment game, this one at least highlights the glaring disjoint between the absurd activity itself […]

Gorgeous meditation on the ephemeral, humanising nature of memory, filtered through an insightful and original take on AI. It’s 1997 and teenage genius Laura Bow deals with the mysterious disappearance of her father ten years earlier by creating a nascent intelligence called Organon, named after a line in a Kate Bush song. Music, as a […]

Click here to see Part 1 of my performance of short science fiction piece The Minus Four Sequence at Virtual Futures on Tuesday March 12 2019. It was part of an event called Autonomous Agents that explored the seductive terrors of artificial intelligence, and was recorded in two parts because the Machines became worried and interfered, probably. Part 2 is here. Total […]

This remarkable book is political rather than technological science fiction, because instead of electricity the creature is reanimated by the spirit of a soldier killed in a suicide bombing a couple of years after the pointless invasion of Iraq in 2003. Spirit is a key theme in the book, the spirit of Baghdad in particular, […]