Publications of the type:
From a literary standpoint, there’s little to say about Ramez Naam’s Nexus; in terms of plot, pace and prose, it barely musters the lumpy momentum of the airport technothriller, and the only relation it bears to science fiction is as a reminder of how much weird cultural swarf got lodged in Silicon Valley during the…
One of the time-honoured methods for reviewing a short story collection is to tease out the commonalities between the pieces, seek out the underlying theme, that sort of thing. Adam Roberts deftly stymies that approach right from the get-go; at first glance, the tales in Adam Robots represent a checklist of classic skiffy riffs and…
Walter Jon Williams’s Dagmar Shaw series have come to embody, for me, one of the oft-angsted-over perils of writing fiction set in the very near (albeit unevenly distributed) future. While the plot device chugging away out on the back-lot of The Fourth Wall hasn’t quite been pipped to the post by reality (unlike those from…
I was on a panel at Bristolcon a few weeks back with a guy who’d never heard of Bruce Sterling. This came as something of a surprise. The chap in question was older than me, and clearly fairly well-read in genre terms—he was defending Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962) in one of those “battle of the books”…
You’ve been reading Rule 34 by Charles Stross, and as a result your internal monologue has shifted into the second person present tense. On balance, this is a good indicator of how well Stross has got to grips with this difficult narrative mode because—as disconcerting as the experience is once you stop reading and try…
I admire die-hard Neal Stephenson fans who splash out for the hardback; reading this paperback ARC of REAMDE without using a lectern is an invitation for carpal tunnel syndrome. That heftiness is par for the course with Stephenson, and REAMDE shares other hallmarks of his work: set-pieces of epic scale; complex international intrigues; and obsessive…
Coming late to writing a review is gift and curse at once. Wandering the Perpetual Now of the internet, one can’t but hear the buzz around a book of note, and Embassytown—China Miéville’s ninth novel—was certainly a book of note when it was published to great fanfare back in May. So what might you already…
It took me a long time to find a way into this review. That’s due not to a paucity of interesting themes or angles from which to approach this selection of stories from Gwyneth Jones’s career, but to their abundance; The Universe of Things—as its title implies—burgeons with things to talk about. This is due…
Never have I been quite so tempted to write a review in a pastiche of the subject book’s style than I have with Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch. Unabashedly paying homage to the classic hard-boiled detective novels, Finch—both the novel and its eponymous hero—speaks in clipped sentences through a clenched jaw. It’s a strong flavour, and VanderMeer…
OK, let’s start this properly with a statement of prejudices (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it). Before Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical came through my letterbox, I’d never heard of Robert Shearman in anything more than passing. Furthermore, I predominantly read science fiction of various stripes—not because I have…