‘If Then’ is a deeply original, compelling and often disturbing piece of very English science fiction. The mysterious title suggests early code with the variables removed and the book’s structure hints at the binary; it’s divided in two with the first part titled ‘If’ (suggesting the future), the other titled ‘Then’, (suggesting the past). The […]
Emma Newman is one of our most consistently intriguing, original and compelling storytellers. Able to switch from Regency fantasy (the Split Words novels) and Hugo Award-winning genre comedy (the Tea & Jeopardy podcast) to the otherworldly beauty of her first SF novel ‘Planetfall’; she now turns detective in a book I didn’t expect, […]
One of the few good things about growing up in the 80s was the horror, be it in movies or a political reality that meant instant death after a four-minute warning. The emotion also underpinned spy fiction at the time in print and other media; Ian Bannen’s terrified expression when he is cornered at the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
There just isn’t anyone else writing like Anne Charnock. Her exquisitely-crafted short novels are like super-distilled iced vodka, clear, compulsive and with a kick that comes later. You also don’t need much to get off your head. In this one, part of a series of four novellas by different authors published by NewCon […]
Acclaimed author Anne Charnock joined me for the Facebook launch of my latest SF thriller novel ‘The Outer Spheres’ on 8 December 2016. Anne is one of my favourite authors and there are links to her work at the end of this piece. We covered so much good stuff about writing, adaptation and performance […]
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