Authorial Summary 2024

 It's been a very fruitful year this year, with 25 publications - my second highest ever total. This includes translations into twelve languages, four of them new for me: Russian, Punjabi, Sinhalese and Farsi. On top of that, I have another seven stories accepted for publication - one in English and the other six in six different languages, including another three new languages. That's beside the ten-part serialisation of my novel Galaxy's Game.

I've only written two short stories this year, but I also managed to complete my fifth novel, A Sense of Justice, writing the last 20,000 words or so. I then plunged straight into my sixth novel, with the 2500 word introduction. Hopefully I'll get a bit further with that next year.

Book Review: Flux by Jinwoo Chong

There’s a fascinating juxtaposition of high-tech thriller and noir detective tale in Jinwoo Chong’s debut novel Flux. Three strands of the tale are woven together with references to the hard-boiled 80s detective show Raider, whose iconic storylines are seemingly reflected in the events of the novel’s protagonists Bo, Brandon and Blue.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

This is my 324th review, and my last for the foreseeable future. Suffering from reviewing fatigue, I've decided to take a break.

Book Review: A Candle for Malka by Louise Carey

I enjoyed Louise Carey’s debut solo novel Inscape a year or two back, a sparkling mix of cyberpunk, espionage and post-apocalyptic social stratification. This new novella, A Candle for Malka is more of a hard-SF, near-space corporate saga which I imagined from reading the blurb was going to have an Alien vibe. I was intrigued to see whether the brightness and freshness of Inscape would be reflected in this book.

Read the rest of my review in ParSec issue #6.

Book Review: Karma of the Sun by Brandon Ying Kit Boey

When nuclear war destroys most of the planet, the Tibetan plateau is spared, sheltered by surrounding mountain ranges. A century later, it has become a place of superstition and legend, of bandits and warlords and, still eking out a living, poor villagers living their traditional lives.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Neom by Lavie Tidhar

Set in the world of Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station novel, Neom shares the same rich and varied history, multiple cultures, traditions and strange exotic secrets. It also emulates the measured and mesmeric quality of prose that first captures readers with the original Central Station stories that appeared in Interzone magazine.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Redspace Rising by Brian Trent

Redspace Rising is Brian Trent’s action-packed SF thriller brought to us by relative newcomers Flame Tree Press. I was surprised to discover on opening the cover, that this book is the second in the Ten Thousand Thunders series, following on from Brian Trent’s previous novel Ten Thousand Thunders.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Review #320.

Book Review: The Extractionist by Kimberley Unger

Eliza McKay is an extractionist, someone who specialises in extracting personas from virtual reality and reuniting them with their bodies. Equipped with augmentations that allow her to work in virtual reality and write code intuitively, she would be in high demand if it weren’t for a problem in the past that put her the government’s blacklist.

Read the rest of my review in issue #5 of ParSec magazine.

Graphic Novel Review: The Circle by Cixin Liu

Adapted into graphic novel format by Xavier Besse, Cixin Liu’s The Circle is unusual among this series of adaptations and, from what I’ve read of his other short stories, in that it is set wholly back in history and does not give the impression of being a Science Fiction story.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Graphic Novel Review: For the Benefit of Mankind

For The Benefit Of Mankind sees the arrival of an alien race in the skies of Earth, whose orbiting ships light up the dark world of professional assassin Smoothbore as he takes on an unusual contract amid an uncertain future.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Graphic Novel Review: The Devourer by Cixin Liu

One of the recurring themes in Cixin Liu’s short stories is the arrival of an enormous alien artefact in the skies of Earth. Whether this is good or bad news depends on the story but, despite the same trope being used several times, I have always been surprised at what happens next in any given story.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Graphic Novel Review: The Butterfly by Cixin Liu

It’s been a year since the first four Cixin Liu graphic novels were released, so the arrival of the next four is very welcome. Adapted and illustrated by Dan Panosian, The Butterfly is based on a story I don’t recall having read before.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Skyward Flight by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson

Skyward Flight is the omnibus edition of three Skyward novellas: Sunreach, ReDawn and Evershore, all of which are related to Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward Trilogy. I didn’t realise this before starting the book but, although these novellas refer back to events in the first trilogy, I was able to follow the story without any problem.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I finally got round to reading The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G.Wells just over a year ago, one and a quarter centuries after it was first published (though it should be noted that I was not actually alive for much of this time), so that the book was still fresh in my mind when I received a copy of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new re-imagining of the tale, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau.

Read the rest of my review in issue #4 of ParSec magazine.

Book Review: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds was a little-known contemporary of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Dafoe. His only novel of note was the seagoing adventure Eversion, which followed the crew of the sailing ship Demeter as is it searched for a previously unexplored fissure in the fjords of Norway, leading to a hidden lagoon and unknown treasures.

Read the rest of my semi-fictional book review at SF Crowsnest.

Review #312

Book Review: The Unfamiliar Garden by Benjamin Percy

In his fast-paced novel The Ninth Metal, Benjamin Percy introduced us to a future where a comet that passed close to the Earth left a trail of countless meteorites that rained down strange and exotic substances on the planet. Mentioned in the background of that novel are various bizarre things that have happened around the globe since then. The Unfamiliar Garden introduces us to a new set of characters who are dealing with some of these odd happenings.

Read the rest of my review in issue #3 of ParSec magazine.

Book Review: The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang

The Way Spring Arrives And Other Stories is a brand-new collection of stories translated from Chinese, with essays and a couple of stories originally written in English thrown into the mix, offers a much broader spectrum of Chinese speculative fiction than the other translations I’ve read in previous years.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Seven Mercies by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May

Seven Mercies is the sequel to last year’s Seven Devils and the concluding part of this duology. It continues the action-packed, entertaining, fast-paced story of a group of seven rebels who have now taken on the nickname the Seven Devils, based on the empire’s mythology.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Delightful Review

 SF Revu has the first review I've seen of ParSec #2 and calls my story Five Ways to Accidentally Save the Earth from Alien Conquest 'Hilarious and a delight.' 

Which is delightful.

Book Review: Wergen: The Alien Love War

 I have previously read most of Mercurio D. Rivera's Wergen stories as they appeared in various magazines and anthologies, and I enjoyed them all immensely.

Read the rest of my review in issue #2 of ParSec magazine.

Book Review: Tomorrow by Chris Beckett

Chris Beckett has his usual effect on me with his new novel Tomorrow in that, as soon as I start reading it, I fall into a trance-like state of comfortableness.

Read the rest of my review in issue #2 of ParSec magazine.