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 […]

Click here to see my performance based on new novel Celebrity Werewolf at EasterCon this weekend.

I’ll be doing a performance based on my new novel Celebrity Werewolf in the Discovery 1 Room at Ytterbium EasterCon this Sunday 21 April at 5.45pm. Joining me will be ace fellow authors Anna Smith Spark and Russell A Smith (a conspiracy of Smiths!):   Click here to read my write up of Russell interviewing Anna at the […]

My new novel Celebrity Werewolf launches at 5pm on Friday 19 April in the Tereshkova Room at Ytterbium EasterCon. Ytterbium is the 70th element, and this is the 70th EasterCon, hence the name. The launch is one of several by my publisher, NewCon Press, headed by the ever-inventive Ian Whates. Here are the other books coming […]

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 […]