Containing themes of science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, the future and extraterrestrial life.
A strange, quiet book, where the speculative elements are painted so lightly, you won’t realise you’re reading sci fi until you’ve been sucked into a story about love, family and community in a forgotten West Country village. Jem runs a small rural Inn, serving brew to a smattering of locals Read more…
I read lots of great books this year, but have whittled it down to my favourite five. If you have any recommendations for books I should read in 2023, I’d love to hear them, so please drop me a note in the comments, and as always, don’t forget to sign Read more…
This debut novel, originally self-published via a kickstarter campaign, has since become a critically acclaimed series, totalling four novels and a short story. Unusual in its tone and pacing, the story follows the multi-species crew of The Wayfarer, a tunnelling ship, contracted to build wormholes in space. Books in this Read more…
This is a massive, multiverse-traveling, post-human piece of apocalyptic fiction, the likes of which—I’ll wager—you have never seen before. The book is extremely experimental, packed with ideas and risk, and VanderMeer’s prose is an experience all in itself; succulent and mellifluous. “Woken from a dream of blossoms into a swaying Read more…
There have been many pandemic books written since COVID, and this is one of them. Drawing on the themes of terror, political incompetence and social collapse, End of Men does something a little different with this device, using it to poke around in some ’what-ifs’ of current gender politics. The Read more…
If you haven’t read, A Memory Called Empire, I strongly suggest you put it at the top of your reading list and line A Desolation Called Peace up next. An ambassador from a small mining station is trying to avoid becoming political lunchmeat, when her handler—and one-time lover—from the heart Read more…
It’s halloween, and watching from an upper window, Jen sees her son kill a man. Her loving teenage boy barely looks at her, as tight-lipped and apparently indifferent, he is cuffed and taken away. At some point later that evening, shell-shocked and devastated, Jen falls asleep, and when she wakes, Read more…
In a world were you can get limbs and organs replaced as easily as car parts, Kobo is addicted to his own transformation. Or he was, until his funds dried up. Now this one-time baseball star spends his days scouting talent, and avoiding a pair of inanely vindictive, but motivated, Read more…
Winner of the 2019 Nebula, Locus and Hugo Awards, I had high hopes for this, the first in the Lady Astronaut Series. Honestly, I was disappointed. Overall I would say the set up is good and the world building is pretty solid: A comet hits 1950’s America and doesn’t wipe Read more…
This is a sophisticated book, long and meandering, which makes sense as it follows a character destined to live, die and be born again with his memory in tact, ad infinitum; a strange sort of immortality. After his entirely ordinary first life (and death), it takes Harry August a couple Read more…