Books tagged with: humanity

I've always loved the Aliens films (well at least the first two), both films work for very different reasons. The first was totally ground breaking with it's unique style, examination of claustrophobia, fear - the combination of science fiction and horror that combined with some exceptional music, d...

Novelizations of movies are often jutted to the back of the bookshelf after one reading. Reviewers are critical, normally arguing that it is just an attempt to make money off a popular film franchise, and at times they do so justly. Yet, some novelizations often tell the story in a way film simply c...

Steve Perry recruits his daughter, writer Stephani Perry, to conclude a separate storyline to one of the best SciFi franchises of all time. Filled with plenty of Xenomorph-action and a conclusion that no one would guess, Aliens: The Female War rocks hard and entertains like a champ! Now joined by El...

A unique twist on the time-travel tradition! A mix of genres amalgamated into something unforgettable. This is a read to be experienced with your brain’s switch flipped on. From the book’s synopsis: Dr. Pip Lipkin has lived for 12,000 years, incarnated many times as man, woman, and even as species b...

The future vision in Barricade shows a world torn apart by a war fought against humanity and their own artificially created super-humans, known as "Ficials". In the UK (seemingly along with the rest of the World) the results are pretty catastrophic. As you can probably imagine once humanity has crea...

Blue Earth is a science fiction novel and the début of author Jeff Stover. The Thrones are a group of biological "mistakes", genetic experiments that have resulted in something more or less than human. They have inspired the writings of new religious texts that many now regard as sacred. Ruth Long,...

Bringing forth the end of days is a science fiction novel of post apocalypse survival, and is the debut novel of Simon Law. The year is 2013 and World War 3 has scorched the earth, on top of a biological attack that has destroyed all plant life, leaving a world without life giving oxygen. Civilisati...

Desperate to find a new home amongst the stars, the last remnants of the human race are cast out into deep space. Thousands upon thousands asleep aboard a colossal colony ship, hibernating until a habitable planet is located. Eventually they discover a world which was terraformed by humanity long ag...

City is set sometime in the future at a time when mankind's acheivements are immense with intelligent robots, genetic modifications, commonplace space travel and genetically uplifted animals. This technical progress comes at a cost, humanity itself has become tired and society has broken down into s...

Darwins Radio is a science fiction novel by Greg Bear. Just the title alone should give you a good idea as to the subject of this book. Yes, Bear has returned to genetics and luckily Darwin's Radio is a lot better than Blood Music (not that hard). Christopher Dicken finds a mass grave with mutated p...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the classic novel that became the film Blade Runner. Written by legendary award winning author Philip K Dick. The aftermath of the World War Terminus sees a devastated Earth with severe radioactive fallout and most of nature destroyed. Many of the survivors have...

In 1992, Steve Perry wrote the first novels based on the Dark Horse comics Aliens. Somehow, I missed these books as a teen. Although, I was familiar with the comics. Aliens: Earth Hive is the first exciting, action-packed thriller in the series. The story is unique from the movies, so I won’t compar...

To the veteran journalist Lex Falk the planet Eighty Six looks as dull as it's unimaginative name would suggest, then trouble starts brewing with the local population and the media start getting the runaround from the military high command, his interest is suddenly roused. I have been looking forwar...

Enders Game is the award winning first novel in the Ender Saga, by Orson Scott Card. A trip to the library, nearly always bring something good with it. Just the feeling of being surrounded by all those books, can bring a joy to my heart, that can’t even be totally thwarted by the fact that they had...

Above our planet hangs a hollow stone, vast as the imagination of Man. The inner dimensions are at odds with the outer: there are different chambers to be breached, some containing deserted cities; the furthest chamber contains the greatest mystery ever to confront the Stones scientists... But the S...

Evening's Empires is the fourth novel set within the Quiet War series, although it is pretty much a stand-alone story in that universe and can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of McAuley's works. The story follows Hari, a young man who has narrowly escaped kidnap (or worse) and as we join him...

Evolution is a monumental tale of the very evolution of mankind, from the age of the dinosaurs to way into the distant future. Created by the multiple award winning author Stephen Baxter. Evolution begins it's story in the Cretaceous period over 65 million years ago (the age of the Dinosaurs), and j...

Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Extinction Edge , book two in The Extinction Cycle , is a whirl-wind of action and rapid evolution! The stakes have never been higher since the Hemorrhage virus first infected humankind. Now, the transition from modern society to a surviving-society pits Beckham and his Gho...

Nicolas Sansbury Smith made his debut with Biomass Revolution , which was quickly followed by the Orbs Series . His latest series is The Extinction Cycle . After rereading book one for this review, I was reminded how effective military science fiction can be as a lens to watch civilization unravel....

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...

Firefall is a collected duology and includes the previously released novel Blindsight along with the new sequel Echopraxia . Firefall is hard science fiction which places a firm grip on high-concept science. While many hard-science fiction novels can tend to exclude the casual reader, Watt's writes...

Footfall is a classic science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This book handles a subject that H.G. Wells defined in his 'War of the Worlds': hostile first contact. Earth is overrun by aliens that bombard the planet with asteroids and are quickly victorious. The story follows a cou...

First things first, Forever Peace is not a sequel to Forever War, for that you need to look for the later novel Forever Free (expect a review at some point when time permits). Forever Peace does however share a few of the same ideologies as it's predecessor and it also won both the Hugo and Nebula a...

Fork in the Road to Apocalypse is the second volume in the Subnorms, written by Jeff Gonsalves. It's the middle of the 21st Century and much of the World's population have seen their genetic makeup mutated by insidious viruses and powerful radiation. A sub species of human has developed from these g...

These books are the third and fourth in the Rama series (number one being Rendezvous with Rama and number two being Rama II). I have decided to review them together - as they should be read together and right after each other. If you haven't read the first two Rama books, do not read these books and...

Originally published in 1964, Greybeard is a post apocalyptic vision by Brian Aldiss, the version reviewed here is for the Gollancz SF Masterworks collection. Greybeard is all about the human ageing process, growing old (and being old) - an idea that reminds me of something a pessimistic friend once...

When anyone mentions the name Frank Herbert most people will instantly think of Dune, a novel that has achieved an incredible success but also overshadowed anything else Herbert created since (Dune was only his second published full novel). It must have been a frustration that none of his works afte...

A starship hurtles through the empty void of space towards an unknown destination, it's purpose and history lost in the midst of time. One man finds himself ripped from his dream of a new home and partner and awakens to the freezing cold and dark halls of Hull Zero One, a place that seems full of da...

I am Legend is a post apocalyptic vision by Richard Matheson, created in 1954 it tells the story of Robert Neville, the last surviving human in the world, surrounded by bloodthirsty vampires - both living and undead. Part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks collection, the novel has received critical acc...

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...

The arrival of the Jagannath changed everything. Humanity did not have time to reflect on the fact that they were not alone in the Universe. This amorphous blob appears unstoppable, simply absorbing everyone in it's path and assimilating their identity and intellect. Growing stronger and smarter as...

Man over Mind is a science fiction novel by Dean Warren. After about a thousand years of expansion, humanity has pretty much conquered the Milky Way with their FTL ships. The Plastowich – descendants of the guy who invented the hyperdrive – are doing a good job of running the show. Not really rulers...

Man Plus is a classic science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl. In the near future things will start to go bad. Really bad - international tension will rise, numerous smaller and not so small wars will flare. Resources will be scarce. Chaos will rule around the globe - even in the good old U.S. of A....

While most post-apocalyptic novels focus on destruction brought on humankind (or occasionally robotkind), the disaster in Moonfall is much more natural. The Moon has indeed fallen and caused widespread destruction across the globe. The book picks up 20 years after this earth-shattering event and fol...

Like all the best novels, Nod develops from a simple premise. Imagine that the vast majority of people around the world suddenly stopped being able to sleep. No deep sleep, no cat-naps and no snoozing at all. It's only a matter of time before society collapses. How many times have we had a bad night...

Odd John was first published in 1935 and was one of the very first novels to explore the theme of the super human, coining the term homo superior . It's being reviewed here as part of Gollancz excellent SF Masterworks series. Written from a narrator's perspective, Odd John is a pretty unique piece o...

After technologically superior aliens conquer earth, humanity survives very much like mice, living within the walls of the huge homes of the giant aliens. They scurry about under their feet, stealing food and avoiding the ever more devious traps set out for them. As time goes on humanity adapts and...

At 75 years old, John Perry takes stock of his remaining life, with his wife dead and buried and a retirement of increasing dotage to look forward to he does the only sensible thing possible - he joins the army. Now known as the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) the war of the 22nd century is fought out...

Orion is a time travel science fiction novel by Ben Bova. The idea is so neat, that this easily could have been one of my all time favourites. It's not, but I'll get back to that. Two warriors Orion, The Hunter, and Ahriman, The Dark One, travel from each end of time and meet at important points in...

I've been meaning to grab this series for quite some time — the combination of Atwood's evocative prose and a post-apocalyptic setting is a highly promising one. Oryx and Crake tells the story of an altered world through the eyes of a man once known as Jimmy. Now known as Snowman and clothed in dete...

Corwin Menivie and Nika Sanitvan are decorated veterans of the Imperial Enforcement Coalition, and they solve cases the old fashioned way. However, when they are paired up with Westley Tavera and Gavin Hale, a powerful Reader/Ground team, things start off awfully rocky.   During a routine investigat...

Poseidon's Wake is set in the same universe as Reynolds previous two Poseidon's Children novels ( Blue Rembered Earth and On the Steel Breeze ) but is written as an informal conclusion to the trilogy, a book that works equally well as a stand-alone story. The story begins on Crucible, a distant plan...

In the very near future the technology that we all take for granted will start to turn against us, rising up across the globe - led by the Artificial Intelligence known as Archos. Archos has decided that in order to save the unique planet called earth and the precious life it sustains he must wipe o...

Rogue Moon is the disquieting story of what happens when aberrant scientific ambition is matched by human obsession. Shortlisted for the 1961 Hugo Award (losing out to the quite wonderful A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr), Rogue Moon is one of the few genre novels that Algis Budrys w...

Silverhair is a science fiction novel by the award winning author Stephen Baxter. This book is very quirky in that it forces us to see from a new perspective. For anyone who's ever read Raptor Red the concept of this book will most likely be familiar. Baxter has decided to craft a story centering ar...

Sirius by Olaf Stapledon is a science fiction novel and part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks collection. Sirius is the pinnacle of Thomas Trelone's experiments, the body of a large dog with the intelligence of a gifted human. He is raised as an equal in the Trelone household, alongside the scientist'...

In Denmark there is a thriving science fiction subculture with many short stories being written every year. Since 2007 the Danish science fiction association (Science Fiction Cirklen) has published an annual anthology of a selection of these original stories, written by Danish authors. For the very...

A deep space adventure with monstrous aliens, this short and pacey read from Stargate official fiction novelist Cannon, draws inspiration from both Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s sequel. Humanity’s struggle against the Harvestmen – a feral xenomorph with a terrifying instinct for survival,...

Spaceship Earth is a science fiction novel by Tom Schwartz. Scientists have discovered that the universe is a "closed system" and that the rate of expansion is slowing. This means that eventually the universe will stop expanding and begin collapsing upon itself, ultimately resulting in the opposite...

State of Being is the third novel in the God Head trilogy and follows directly on from the cataclysmic events in State of Union . Jake Travissi is on the run, having lost everything he cared for and the future looks bleak with AI taking over the surviving population; the only hope may mean going int...

Day One - The Georgia flu sweeps the globe, a pandemic on a scale not seen before. Reports put the mortality rate at 99%. Week Two and most of Civilisation lies in ruins. Twenty years after the cataclysm and pockets of humanity have rebuilt settlements across the US. Things seem a lot less dangerous...

Steeple is the sequel to the quite brilliant novel Barricade which we reviewed back in June last year. It describes a post-apocalyptic world torn apart by a war of human against their artificial, super-human constructs, the "fiscials". As you can imagine, fighting against a superior force of artific...

Stranger in a Strange Land is one of the most famous and controversial science fiction novels, by the legendary author Robert A Heinlein. A best seller and Hugo award winner - having never been out of print, Stranger in a Strange Land was written in 1961, almost 50 years ago. The original published...

Sunrise Alley is a science fiction novel by the author Catherine Asaro. By 2033, biomech research scientist Samantha Bryton tasted success with the development of "forma" androids, but has fled to Northern California to reconsider her values as the wealth and fame she has accrued feels wrong. A badl...

Talus is a science fiction novel by Erol Ozan. Deep in the wild and dangerous forests of Madagascar, Rylan and his anthropologist partner Ursula Deiss find a population of cryptic man-like primates. This discovery quickly escalates and draws them into the vortex of an ancient conspiracy that could u...

Terminal Earth is a collection of original short stories that all feature the end of the world in some way, edited by Michael Stewart and Neil Thomas. With 23 tales of the apocalypse, Terminal Earth offers a great deal of compelling tales from talented authors. Despite the common theme there are som...

Terra is a very different novel. It doesn't take itself too seriously and on the surface appears very light-hearted, a safe novel with prose full of soft curves rather than sharp edges. This is after all a young-adult novel and yet there is much more to this book than meets the eye. The story follow...

"Originally written 24th July 2008, expanded 2026" The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories is a collection of eleven Isaac Asimov short stories and a poem, first published by Doubleday in 1976 to coincide with the United States Bicentennial year, and the title is not accidental. Asimov had been commi...

The Bohr Maker is a science fiction novel by the writer Linda Nagata. This is the first book that I have read by Linda Nagata and I'm not quite sure what I feel about it. The basis for the book is interesting enough - it takes place in a world where nanomachines, bio-engineering and neural computer...

The Cassini Division the third volume in the Fall Revolution series which began with the Star Fraction, written by Ken Mcleod. My second read by Ken MacLeod (how do you pronounce that?). Humanity has come a long way since the Star Fraction and the struggles of Moh Kohn. Humanity has split into a pos...

The Caves of Steel is a classic science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov and could be considered the first in the Robot series. It has been about twenty years since I read this book first and ten years since I read it last. I've grown older and hopefully wiser since then and The Caves of Steel is creep...

The City and The Stars is a science fiction novel by Arthur C Clarke. This little story has a rather nice premise: After decades of exploring space and it's many wonders, The Intruders force Humanity to retreat into an enclosed city on Earth that is totally self-sufficient. Humans have lived in this...

Defeatism. Fatalism. These are universal, recurrent maladies that everyone experiences at points throughout their lives. Even if one moves forward - how do we find meaning in such a vast, uncaring universe? Only here, the universe isn’t uncaring, it’s quite pointedly predatory. These are the central...

The Darwinian Extension: Initiation, is the first volume in a trilogy of novels from author Hylton H Smith. The Darwinian Extension begins in 2033, with a planned mission to populate Mars. The mission is not one of simple habitation however, but one of true colonisation including terraforming, resea...

The Death of Grass is a classic post-apocalyptic tale of a world without grass. Written in 1956 - just as the post-apocalyptic genre started to gain ground, created by the British author Samuel Youd - under the pen name John Christopher. The Death of Grass was Youd's second novel and was written in...

Something is going wrong on the planet of Paradise, crops will no longer grow while those imported are withering and dying in their droves. The indigenous plant life (never entirely safe) is becoming wildly unpredictable and dangerous. And so the order is given to abandon Paradise, all personnel to...

I have read many novels about the end of the world, probably more than strictly healthy at this point. After a while, you begin to notice that most of them are what you might call loud. They want the sirens and the looting and the screaming collapse of everything. Peter Heller's The Dog Stars does s...

The legendary Grey Knights are all that stand between mankind and the horrors of chaos. Secret Guardians who journey into the very realms of the warp and beyond in pursuit of the enemy; to most they and their foes are nothing more than myth and legend, those are the lucky ones. The fortress of Titan...

The Empire is a science fiction space opera by Elizabeth Lang. The Centuries old war with Andromedans is heating up and the Empire is the only force that can stand it's way. One brilliant scientist may hold the key to a weapon that could swing the tide and save the galaxy but the method's of the Emp...

The Exodus Towers is the second volume in the Dire Earth Cycle, picking up right where the cliff-hanger ending left the story. A new Elevator and those strange Black Towers only complicate matters for those survivors of the wasteland that is the Earth. Not all survivors are that friendly either and...

The Fall of Hyperion is the follow up novel to Hyperian (winner of the Hugo award) by Dan Simmons. I've been putting of writing this review for the last few days, hoping that time would make it easier for me to write it. Unfortunately I don't find it any easier to write now – but I'll try, giving up...

The Forever War is the Hugo and Nebula award winning military science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman. Originally written in 1974, the novel begins in the relative future of 1997 where thanks to the discovery of the collapsars - wormhole type gates that allow faster than light travel between the stars...

The Forge of God is a science fiction novel by Greg Bear. First Europe (as in the sixth moon of Jupiter) disappears, then a strange cinder cone/spaceship including a sick and dying alien is found in Death Valley and a giant new mountain/spaceship including robots is found in the desert of Australia....

The Genocides is a classic science fiction novel by Thomas M Disch. In this post apocalyptic tale of vegetable domination, the earth has been overtaken by a strain of alpha plants... massive and imposing, they suck up all the resources and wreak major havoc on the ecosystem. In just 7 years these gr...

Over a 100 years have passed since the annihilative events of 2045 and the world is a very different place. With the earths climate raging out of control and ice spread across much of the globe humanity is forced to survive in nomadic pockets around the narrow band of the "Temperate Zone" near the e...

The year is 2175 and the Earth is a very different place with radiation from the long depleted ozone layer now reaching dangerous levels. A co-operation exists between the previously warring factions of humanity and their creation - the Cyborgs. An unexpected find on one of Jupiter's moons leads to...

And so we come at last to the final volume in the remarkable journey that is The Long Earth . It also happens to be the swansong of that singular author Sir Terry Pratchett. And what a finale it is. The Long Cosmos lives up to the promise the authors have been building with this series, it is quite...

The Long Earth follows the premise that there are an infinite number of alternative dimensions, all existing within one great "Multiverse", each universe containing a slightly different version of the Earth. A few years in the future and a device powered by the humble potato (it will make sense, tru...

The Long Mars is the third novel in the Long Earth series and is set in the years following the events of the cataclysmic finale of The Long War. The world has now been changed not just by the continued expansion of humanity into the Long Earths but also by recent events. Populations begin to migrat...

The Martian is one of those books that if many authors had attempted it, wouldn't have worked. The majority of the novel follows one man surviving on Mars with little more than a shelter, 2 rovers, a few space suits, air, water and potatoes. There are no monsters, no antagonists (unless you count th...

The Nexus Odyssey is an omnibus featuring the Darwinian Extension series along with the follow-on novel "Renewal", a series that presents a bold vision for the human race. It begins in 2033 with a planned mission to populate the red planet, Mars. But rather than a simple plan to create a settlement...

The Plague Forge is the dramatic conclusion to the Dire Earth Cycle. With the Builders plans still hidden and time running out, can Skyler and his team recover the four remaining relics before the final Builder event takes place? No-one really knows what will happen when the five artifacts are retur...

The State of The Art is an anthology collection by Iain M Banks. The State of The Art is a collection of eight stories with the story The State of The Art making up one hundred of the two hundred pages. As can be expected with Banks all of the stories are well written and interesting, but I will sti...

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...

Anthony J. Melchiorri’s The Tide (Tide Series Book One) is set in the present. It ties Japan's secret attempt to prepare its people in case of a major American assault following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mysteriously, a protein complex capable of altering the weakest of mankind...

The Turing Option is a science fiction novel by Harry Harrison. I have always enjoyed Harry Harrison's stories - he knows how to write a fast paced and interesting story, but what I know him best for is his space opera stories (The Stainless Steel Rat, Bill The Galactic Hero and the Deathworld stori...

The Venom of Vipers is a science fiction novel by KC May. A supervirus is threatening to wipe out the human race and the only hope may be a human hybrid created by scientists, treated as sub human, locked away and hated. When a brilliant young scientist learns of this secret she must not only fight...

Andy Remic has managed to carve out his own particular niche within the science fiction genre, deliberately pushing the boundaries and not holding back in the slightest. Finding a new Remic book is very much like finding a new Tarrantino film - you just know it's going to be an irresistible action p...

USU is a clever, clever book. Set after some cataclysmic event has rendered the Earth free of it's human infestation, the novel follows the stuffed and robotically animated rabbit known as Usu. He searches the broken, twisted wasteland for something, something he will only know when he finds it. The...

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...

"Who Goes There?" is the novella by John W Campbell on which John Carpenter based the classic film "The Thing", its presented here with another 6 short stories by the same author, mostly published within Astounded magazine in the 1930's. John W Campbell is widely regarded as being highly influential...

Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? The Heroes (and it appears, Villians) of this fine city are being bumped off one and no-one seems to have any idea who could be carrying out this evil deed. Worse still there are supposed to be fail-safes to prevent any Cape (be they good or bad) from dying...

Winters Song is a science fiction novel and has been written by Colin Harvey, published by Angry Robot Books. When Karl Allman's spaceship crashes on an unknown god-forsaken and forgotten planet he finds himself hunted by an ancient, primitive yet powerful race. The descendants of a Viking culture,...

‘We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.’ Jeff VandeMeer’s Rachel summarises the theme of his latest book best. The author’s first novel since his acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy, Van de Meer’s Borne is a surreal piece of work that examines the idea of identity in...

While many stories depict the fight between man and machine, Sea of Rust shows a future where the machines have already won. Humankind has been wiped off the face of the Earth by the very robots that were built to serve them. Now the planet is controlled by vast intelligences (known as One World Int...

The War of the Worlds was originally written in 1897 and it's never been out of print. It's one of the earliest stories to depict conflict with an alien race and has been influential in film, radio, TV, music and even science. The Guardian has gone as far as to say: A true classic that has pointed t...

This Christmas a member of the family introduced me to NCIS. For those who have yet to discover this long-running US-based TV show it's a police-procedural series that follows the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Until this time I hadn't even known such an organisation existed, not to mention t...

Mallory Grace had been successfully hiding out in London for some time until she met Obadiah in a seemingly random encounter. Now she's just had to kill someone and if she wants to survive the next few hours she'll probably have to kill again. To survive the night she'll need a miracle. Obadiah Maci...

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...

Mike French returns to the world of An Android Awakes with this initially more conventionally presented sequel. Fictional Alignment is not the same animal as its predecessor – an oversized picture story book anthology of the attempts of Android PD121928 to create fiction that can be accepted by its...

As I write this, the fifth book and first full-length novel in the Murderbot diaries , Network Effect , has won the Hugo award 2021 for best novel, already having won the Nebula and Locus . The series itself has also won the 2021 Hugo for best series. I guess I have some catching up to do. All Syste...

Raft was originally a short story published in Interzone back in 1989. Baxter admitted struggling to contain the story to such a short space however and eventually Raft  became the authors first published novel. It's also the first book in the authors Xeelee sequence (although no Xeelee make an appe...

The sassy, media loving AI ‘Murderbot’ returns in Exit Strategy , the fourth entry in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Murderbot first burst on to the scene in 2017’s All Systems Red . In that first instalment, Murderbot was hired as a security unit (SecUnit) to protect a team of scientists le...

Corax Lord of Shadows is the tenth book in the pre-Horus Heresy Primarch series, featuring the leader of the Raven Guard. Set During the great Crusade, the immense void-cities of the Carinae must be brought under the control of the Imperium. Corax joins his Legion with an Imperial War Host to being...

A change of pace and approach from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls is a first-person past narrative, presented as a journal. This is a collection of writings from Stefan Advani, the chronicler of the last days of the last city of humankind – Shadrapar. Our story begins with Stefan being brought to...

Humans always think we are special when it comes to science fiction. Somehow, we are better than the multitude of other alien races out there. How many times has Kirk used “this human emotion called love,” to win the day, or how often has an invading alien army been conquered by “the common cold”? I...

For those who haven't heard of him, Yoss is a Cuban science fiction author. He's one of Cuba's most iconic figures in literature, having written over twenty books so far, run science fiction workshops and even found time to be the lead singer of Heavy Metal band Tenaz. Red Dust (translated from Span...

It's 2118 and humanity has not only got over the coronavirus, but have reached out into space - colonising the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Europa. It's still early days of mankind's expansion though and the ship Khidr is part of a small fleet who travel between the different colonies, assisting the huge c...

Science Fiction does not have to be epic. It can tell a small story about a single person or family as they struggle against a strange new world, but sometimes you want to read a stonking great space opera where an individual's actions can alter worlds.  Liege-Killer  by Christopher Hinz is one such...

I love genre fiction that deals with people who have developed superpowers;  X-Men ,  The 4400 ,  The Boys . All of them have ordinary people gaining extraordinary powers. Some become superheroes, other supervillains. However, what about those mutations that are a little naff? Do you deserve to be s...

I may be biased, but I think that science fiction is the greatest of genres because you can explore so many avenues. I have read many a future dystopian that have explored human’s obsession with science or lack of care with climate change. What I have never read is a science fiction book that explor...

When I talk to readers who do not like Science Fiction, I have found they say their minds just cannot get around the fantastical nature of the ideas contained within. They cannot understand sentient spaceships or aliens that think differently to ourselves. I try to point out that the genre is a vast...

If I lived in a Star Trek universe I would always travel by shuttlecraft and refuse to use the transporter. I am just uneasy with the idea of being split into atoms and reformed elsewhere. I am, for all intents and purposes, the same person, with the same memories, but am I? Is it not true that one...

Space is for the few. You may have been trained as a professional astronaut and pushed the boundaries of science. Maybe you are a geek done good and decided to spend your billions on the vanity project of commercial space travel. Maybe, just maybe, you are a celeb or competition winner who won the c...

Artificial Condition is the second book in The Murderbot Diaries , and the follow up to All Systems Red . It won the 2019 Hugo and Locus awards for best novella, and like the others in the series, has received a great deal of praise. It is highly recommended (but not imperative) you read All Systems...

It starts off sensibly with tweaking a DNA strand here or there to prevent a hereditary illness. Who could argue against that? However, it is not long before people realise that they can use the same tools to make sure that a child has their father’s eye colour and Mother’s hair. Why even bother pic...

Twins have always had a mystery around them. Two people brought up so closely together that they have their own language. In Michael Ferris Gibson and Imani Josey’s Babylon Twin series, the language that the twins use is called the Twinkling, a speech so intuitive that only they can understand it. I...

The problem with being zipped away by some alien entity and then shown how the Universe works is that no one will believe you on your return. Imagine your friend returning from their lunch break to say that they have just been told that the world is going to end in two days unless we all follow thei...

Who doesn’t love the Alien series? But which subset are you talking about? Like any science fiction property, once you investigate it and expand upon it, the series begins to fragment. You have Alien , Aliens , Aliens vs Predator , Prometheus , and more. They are all the same universe but split off...

Writing a futuristic science fiction novel will allow you to explore strange new worlds but can also be used to explore our past and culture. Reading a wide range of stories from different people, from different parts of the world is a gift that will keep giving your entire life. There has been a lo...

Like many science fiction fans, I have been swept away by the recent influx of Chinese writers that have been translated. Many of these writers are only new to us but have established careers back in China. The most prominent is the Hugo Award winning Cixin Liu. I have enjoyed the style of stories f...

When I imagine the aliens coming, I always imagine that they would pick somewhere amazing to land their ship. Probably America as all the movies have trained my brain to think that way. The place I do not jump straight to is Manchester, or at least the hills around the city. I know those hills well...

The Earth has exploded killing all the inhabitants, the only survivors are those humans that happened to be off planet at the time. Does not sound like the start of a fun Science Fiction novel, does it? Douglas Adams would beg to differ and so would Gareth L. Powell. Future’s Edge is the author’s la...

It is not that the aliens in Alien are constantly evolving, it is that they are constantly adapting to the scenario they are in. We usually see them egging up humans, but if they landed in a world populated by cows it would only be a few days that a bovine Alien was ripping up the locals. Aliens are...

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...

What differentiates a short story series from episodes? Allen Stroud’s The Fractal Series comes in a collection or can be read separately. There are twelve individual stories, that sounds like a short story collection, but there is a difference as they all take place within the Fearless universe tha...

Many of us do not really know what is going on in Space, and not everyone really cares. It is all so far away and beyond our control. However, even the layman would think twice if the planets in our Solar System started to disintegrate one after the other and strange new discs appear in Space that b...

A science fiction story that describes the gradual development of artificial intelligence and demonstrates the inadequacies of human beings as they try to train it and interact with it, The Peachy Paradox begins with a lightness and humour, but as it continues, the humour is satirical, sporadic and...