There are many factors that make the short stories in the extraordinary collection so compelling. One is that you aren’t quite sure what genre you’re reading, which makes the outcomes unpredictable. That you’re still not sure by the end is no failing of the author; rather it’s that he mixes a uniquely beguiling cocktail […]
‘The Beauty’ is a deceptively simple novella about the last men eking out a survivalist existence following the death from plague of their – and by implication all – women. The book’s sparse, elegant prose details the frictions and relationships of this truncated, hopeless little patriarchy as they stave off hopelessness with routine and the […]
The first of Stuart Aken’s ‘Generation Mars’ books takes three major contemporary social drivers – capitalism, religious fundamentalism and liberalism – and transplants them to Mars following economic and environmental collapse on Earth. The story takes the innovative form of a study based on recordings made by representatives of all three drivers with the most […]
Drew Wager is the author of ‘Elite Dangerous: Reclamation’, the first novel based on the online reboot of 80s classic computer game ‘Elite’. When game developer Frontier selected one of Drew’s Megaship stories for the online experience, the completed work included another first: that of an actor playing one of the characters. The character is […]
I read a lot of great SF books in 2016, but this is the only one that had me thinking, ‘I fancy being that character’ or ‘I could do that, if only I was good at flying and the fictional universe existed’. Well, in a way it does, because this novel is the first official […]
Jeff Noon has always been fascinated by borders. He describes his first novel, ‘Vurt’, as something brought across the frontier between this world and another. His early work was full of characters traversing portals, whether formed by physical structures or drugs. It’s an obsession that includes his writing process. Many writers listen to music while […]
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 […]
My aspiration for ‘Diamond Roads’ was this: Helen Fielding and Syliva Plath join forces to write a science fiction thriller about Lara Croft What do you think? In the meantime, here are some pictures of these three great women looking suitably like Charity Freestone:
Mansfield in Space With Fungus Some genre writers can’t avoid putting a robot or an alien into the narrative; Malcolm Devlin goes back and takes them out, leaving interesting scars. The resulting uncertainty is one of the few pointers towards a story being weird fiction, a sub-genre that takes pride in being almost impossible to […]
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