***** Makes you miss your stop ***** A bold and disturbing love story ***** Vivid and original ***** Fascinating and essential ***** Mind blowing stuff! ***** An exciting and original world Fast-paced, clever and beautifully-written, the first ‘Diamond Roads’ book ‘Sons of the Crystal Mind’ is a richly-imagined dystopian thriller that introduces the latest in a long line of cool, […]
The sub-title on the beautifully-designed cover says ‘The story of a murderer’, while the inner title page describes the tale as ‘A Golden Age Story’. The acknowledgements at the end go further and say that the Golden Age referred to is both that of science and detective fiction, with the book an ingenious and original […]
I look for all sorts of different things in SF: big ideas, beguiling strangeness or some kind of compelling otherworldly mystery. Not many novels combine all three elements as successfully as this one does. It’s been a while since I have been gripped to the last page without any clear idea of how the tale […]
Richly Satisfying This compelling novel was originally called ‘The Whores Asylum’ but was apparently renamed to appease a certain chain of stationery stores who thought the title a bit much, despite being happy to stock popular S&M erotica and those amateur photography mags with half-naked women on the front. I’m not knocking either publication […]
One of the many satisfying things about this novel is that the usual everyman point of view character, FBI Agent Joseph Newcomen, as actually more of a nemesis. He’s an all-American jock but the America of the novel is a puritanical, reactionary state whose neo-Victorian values are depressingly easy to believe as a near future […]
An epic fantasy novel that actually has an ending! That alone would get it an above-average helping of stars but this novel is also a multi-faceted adventure that gleefully subverts a number of beguiling but insidious conventions, like the expected appearance of the main female character and tedious notions of manhood associated with warriors. We […]
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