There is a complex, even thrillerish galactic conspiracy plot at the heart of Tom Toner’s debut science fantasy novel, but that’s not really why you read it. Indeed, the threads of that plot are so disparate and spread out over so many years (and light years) that the reader simply has to accept what 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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