Books tagged with: ethics

Blood Music is a science fiction novel by Greg Bear. BM is a story about an intelligent micro-organism experiment run amok. As the organism is human hosted, I guess that you could call it a DNA based Frankenstein's fantastic voyage-story for the last quarter of the twentieth century. The story may s...

Cat's Cradle is my first foray into the world of Kurt Vonnegut, I have heard his name mentioned over the years but for one reason or another I have never actually picked up one of his novels. My youngest brother recommended his works (specifically siting Slaughterhouse five) and I have been picking...

Cronix starts off with the old and rather underplayed question of what happens when we’re able to upload our minds into virtual reality, and everyone wanders off into imaginary fairylands. As I’ve personally spent many days in a gaming induced haze punctuated by sporadic breaks for work or food, I’v...

Falling Free is a science fiction novel by the award winning American author Lois McMaster Bujold and takes place within the Vorkosigan Saga. Taking place in the same universe as the Vorkosigan adventures, but not featuring any of our beloved characters, for the simple reason that Falling Free takes...

Frameshift is a science fiction novel by Robert J Sawyer. I've waited a bit before I started on this review, in the hope that my feelings for this book would somehow clarify. But the truth is that I still don't really know whether I like it or not. I'm not even sure that I can classify this book as...

Heads is a science fiction novel, written by Greg Bear. A hundred years in the future, Michael Sandoval is the manager at Ice Pit Station – a research station on the Moon. Two projects are taking place here. His brother in-law is trying to reach absolute zero in a small piece of copper. His sister i...

I, Robot is a collection of nine short stories by Isaac Asimov, which originally appeared in Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950. The fictional character Dr Susan Calvin (robopsychologist for U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Inc) relating these stories to a repor...

Utopia takes place five years into the reign of Alvar Kresh as the governor of Inferno, who is now married to robotisist Fredda Leving. The re-terraforming effort is doing fairly well, but many believe still doomed to failure. The plot centers around a plan created by an Infernal named Dalvo Lentral...

Schild's Ladder is a science fiction novel by the Australian author Greg Egan. Egans latest hard physics thriller Schilds Ladder, presents his yet hardest to understand story. This time I'm actually unsure whether it's worth the effort, to try to understand what he’s saying. I normally find great pl...

FBI Special Agent Jack Dawson's best friend and colleague is brutally murdered while pursuing an investigation into the genetic manipulation of food crops and Jack is convinced that a group of eco-terrorists are behind the killing, with the beautiful geneticist Naomi Perrault being the prime suspect...

Horror author William Massa has been terrifying me since I first watched saw the film he scripted— Return to the House on Haunted Hill . Since then, I have ploughed through his writings, recently reading his hybrid cyberpunk-android-civil-rights-commentary-action-packed-science-fiction-novel Silicon...

Douglas Richards has a wonderful way of injecting science fiction elements into a thriller style plot without upsetting the balance and comparisons to the late Michael Crichton are inevitable. If anyone was to compare authors it would also be fair to say that Richards is a worthy successor to Cricht...

The Dark Side of Technology is a science fiction novel by Mark Antony Rossi. The tale of the mad scientist is even older than the Shelly novel of Frankenstein. Since the dawn of the written word man has tried to altered his appearance, environment or internal makeup in a vain attempt to gain more po...

The Three-body Problem was originally written in Chinese by Liu Cixin. Launched to great acclaim within China, it became one of the most popular science fiction novels within the country and won the 2006 Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award. Thankfully it has now been translated by the talented auth...

Thin Ice is a science fiction detective novel by Phill Jones. Thadeus Rede is a detective who is trying to hunt a vicious serial killer on the streets of Seattle in the year 2037. The killer appears to be targeting the powerful political New Natural Law Party (NNLP) who are strong opponents of genet...

When I received this anthology to review I hadn't delved into the background behind its journey to publication. It was interesting to see its crowd-sourced origins and development. There are some misconceptions people have with crowd source funded books, firstly that the quality of the writing might...

Watch is the sequel to the acclaimed novel "Wake" (nominated for a Hugo award in 2010) and is the second volume in the WWW series by the award winning author Robert J Sawyer. Catlin Decter is a gifted 15 year old blind girl who is given the gift of sight for the first time in her life through the gr...

Kira Miller is a highly gifted engineer working in the field of gene therapy; she manages to enhance the function of the brain to such a degree that makes immortality a real possibility through a savant like consciousness. But what secrets could be unlocked by playing god with the human brain? Wired...

In the very near future the Internet has given birth to a sentient, artificial being. "Webmind" could be seen as a post-human event that could benefit the whole of humanity but some of the World's governments don't share that optimism and see this new digital life as an enemy of mankind, fearing tha...

Frankenstein , or The Modern Prometheus, is a novel by Mary Shelley, first published anonymously in London in January 1818. It is a book that almost everyone in the English-speaking world has an opinion on, and a surprising number of them have never read. Most of those opinions are about the wrong c...

With the premise of Holly Cave's new novel, you could be forgiven for thinking it's a literary version of The Good Place. But Heaven Architect Isobel is no omnipotent Ted Danson, and The Memory Chamber no comedy. Cave's idea here is an interesting one. After you die, your consciousness is transferre...

I don't know how he does it, but Adrian Tchaikovsky manages to get inside the heads of different creatures and allow us to see through their eyes. Last time I read one of his books it was Spiders, this time it's Dogs, Bears, Bees and Lizards. Dogs of War imagines that we've got to grips with bio-eng...

Cixin Lui writes incredibly imaginative fiction, exploring vast ideas and bringing them down to a human level. His Remembrance of Earth's Past series has won awards and brought much deserved recognition, with the first in the series The Three Body Problem even becoming a favourite of Barack Obama. B...

The way that humans treat each other in real life is far darker and harrowing than any science fiction book that you can create, but this does not stop some authors from exploring the depths of the  human  condi tion. If we are only as good as how we treat the weakest in society, the people who inha...

The Alien franchise can be seen as one of two things: an awesome series of Space based horror and action stories, or a textbook example of Corporate Malfeasance. The Aliens may be the most reoccurring characters, but the second is not Ripley, it is Weyland Industries. This corporation pops up in var...

H. G. Wells is a name to conjure with. Classic stories about time machines, invisible men, alien invasions and more. He was one of the earliest genre writers in a time when the idea of genres did not exist. He just wrote what he felt like. A modern author who has taken on this mantle is Silvia Moren...

War, what is it good for? Not a lot, but depressingly it is a real driver of innovation. What better way to inspire the greatest minds in the country than to task them with more efficient ways to kill the enemy? Arms races happen all over the place from conventional gun and bullets to newer types of...