Book Review: Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar creates wonderfully vivid worlds in his books. Worlds where the strange and bizarre intertwine with the mundane, where history is slightly different and where Jewish culture and language permeate the tale. In Unholy Land, the Jews have a homeland in East Africa known as Palestina and the horrors of the holocaust did not come to pass.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Rex is a bio-engineered dog designed for war, given limited autonomy to command his small troop of other creatures and sent out into the anarchy of the civil war raging through Mexico. His world is quite straightforward: kill enemies, don’t kill friends and obey orders.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Putting the Science in Fiction

Putting the Science in Fiction is out today, including my chapter on Waste Management in Science Fiction.

Parsec Award Finalist

My story 'The Long Afternoon of Sir Rupert Moncrief' is shortlisted in the Best Speculative Fiction Story: Small Cast (Short Form) category of the Parsec Awards!

Book Review: By the Pricking of Her Thumb by adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is a great player with words, constructing lyrical prose and playful dialogue without any care as to whether it falls strictly within the rules of English grammar or whether indeed the words could be found in a dictionary. 

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Game of the Gods by Jay Schiffman

The first thing that struck me about Jay Schiffman’s debut novel Game Of The Gods was the characters’ quirky names, which struck me as somewhat Vancian and made a nice change from the usual run-of-the-mill popular name derivatives.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: One Way by S.J. Morden

I guess comparisons with Andy Weir’s The Martian are inevitable for S.J. Morden’s near-future Mars thriller, One Way. I can’t really make those comparisons directly though as I’ve only seen the film and not read the book of The Martian.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu

Another of renowned Chinese author Cixin Liu’s novels has been translated for our enjoyment by Joel Martinsen in the form of Ball Lightning, a hard-SF, physics-based tale of obsession, complicated mathematics and the force of nature.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Quivira

My 16,000 word novelette Quivira, co-written with Jonathan Gillespie is now available at The Society of Misfit Stories. 

Described (by me) as Avatar meets Lord of the Rings, I'm hoping it will be picked up by a major film director!

Book Review: Planetside by Michael Mammay

Set around two millennia in the future in a society of planetary colonisation and terraforming, Planetside is Michael Mammay’s debut novel of mystery and conspiracy against the backdrop of a prolonged planetary war.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.