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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Adrian Tchaikovsky interviewed by Ian Whates at BSFA 22.02.17 Adrian Tchaikovsky is the 2016 Clarke Award-winning author of science fiction epic ‘Children of Time’, in which a nano-virus intended to help seed mammal life on a distant planet instead speeds the spiders and ants who were meant as mere background life towards sentience and the […]
Because a Super Relaxed Reality Club just wouldn’t work I was apprehensive about attending because I have a tendency to be tense. Would I be allowed in? And if I was, would there be enforced massage from a large troll of indeterminate gender wearing too much make-up and a Minion onesie? Or is that just, […]
‘Children of Time’ is one of those books one devours obsessively and then mourns once it’s finished. Such has been its impact that I don’t know what to read next (apart from more of this author’s books). Either way, I’ve had to go off-genre and read a bloody thriller for my next book. Yes, ‘Children […]
Like Led Zeppelin albums, Unsung Stories’ spoken word evenings are individually numbered, adding to the unique sense of each. Tonight’s intersection of fact and fantasy was the observation by regular MC George Sandison that today was Diana Wynne Jones’s birthday. Jones, who was at Oxford when CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were lecturing there, is […]
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