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Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004) Authors who are considered to be part of the literary mainstream have often produced works which are clearly science fiction. Well known examples include Margaret...
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Review: Imperial Assassin by Mark Robson
This is the second book in Mark Robson’s Imperial trilogy, following on from the events of Imperial Spy. Here we see the centre of attention shift from Femke, the spy although she still plays a major...
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Review: Analog, October 2013
The October 2013 Analog is a definite improvement over the last issue, though there is an excess of dubious themes and plots. There are at least two wars with China in this issue, two Mars stories and...
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Review: Dragon’s Tongue by Laura K Underwood
Laura J Underwood has been a member of the Chronicles Network since August 2006, and although not a prolific poster looks in regularly. She has the stunningly clever user name of LauraJUnderwood. I...
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Review: Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales
To start with this is not the normal type of book that I would choose to read, and it is not a full length, rather a novella. Set in an alternative time line where the world suffered a third world war...
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Review: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection, Gardner...
At one point, when making my way through a particularly dense thicket of prose, it occurred to me that reading the Annual can be like eating my vegetables, but there is some dessert in here, too, and...
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Review: Analog, November, 2013
This month’s issue brings us eight stories, many of which assume catastrophic climate change as an obligatory part of the background furniture while only one really makes it central. The others cover...
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Review: We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ
We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ (1977) One of the notable characteristics of speculative fiction is the tendency for newer authors to build on the work of earlier writers. Sometimes the connection...
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Review: Impossible Spaces Anthology.
Have you ever wondered where that massive, ornate wardrobe leads to? You know the one. It’s at the back of the vintage shop. I know you wanted to kick out the mothballs and inspect the back, just to...
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Review: The Green Millennium by Fritz Leiber
The Green Millennium by Fritz Leiber (1953) Within the field of speculative fiction, comedy has usually taken the form of slapstick farce or parody of the conventions of the genre. Examples abound,...
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Review: The Road To Bedlam by Mike Shevdon
Mike Shevdon The Road To Bedlam In Mike Shevdon’s debut novel Sixty-One Nails the reader was introduced to a world of what might best be described as urban Faerie, a place of dangerous dark Faerie...
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Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds
Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds Gollancz, 496pp, £18.99 There’s a pun in the title of million-Pound author Alastair Reynold’s latest novel. It’s not an especially good pun but, sadly, it’s somewhat...
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Review: The Karate Kid (2010)
The rush to remake the 1980′s should be sign to lock yourself away from the world until it blows over. And the expectation is that the Karate Kid remake should be top of the list of cheesy cash-ins....
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Review: Keith Brooke, The Unlikely World Of Faraway Frankie
The Unlikely World Of Faraway Frankie In his four excellent novels as Nick Gifford, Keith Brooke explored worlds of the young adult where things go wrong – often seriously wrong. Filled with images of...
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Music for Another World, edited by Mark Harding
Music for Another World, edited by Mark Harding Mutation Press, 270pp, £8.99 Prominent on the cover of this first anthology from Mark Harding’s Mutation Press is the description “Strange Fiction”. I am...
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The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi Gollancz, 448pp, £12.99 The science fiction debut of 2010 was apparently Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief. Almost a year before it appeared, it was being said...
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Game of Thrones comes to Sky Atlantic
George R R Martin’s epic Game of Thrones finally airs here in the UK on Monday, broadcast on Sky Atlantic. And chronicles was given the chance to take a sneak peek at the the first two episodes before...
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Cinco de Mayo, Michael J Martineck
Cinco de Mayo, Michael J Martineck EDGE, 256pp, $14.95 Confession time: I’ve known the author of Cinco de Mayo for many years. We’ve swapped stories and novel excerpts, and commented on each other’s...
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Film Review: Thor
As it stands right now in Hollywood, if you want to make a superhero flick, you can go one of two ways. You can either use the source material as a springboard for a complex, powerful, character...
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Film Review of X-Men: First Class
About ten years ago, the words “X-Men movie” would have your average Marvel comics fan grinning from ear to ear. Director Brian Singer had taken the long running and popular Marvel icon and given it a...
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Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge
Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge Big Mouth House, 352pp, £10.99 Some time in the near-future, planet Earth finally gets its act together and institutes a single global government. The children born in the...
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Heaven’s Shadow, David S Goyer & Michael Cassutt
Heaven’s Shadow, David S Goyer & Michael Cassutt Tor, 356pp, £12.99 Each year, a handful of science fiction novels arrive with a resounding thud. If these books have one thing in common, it’s that,...
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Infidel, Kameron Hurley
Infidel, Kameron Hurley Night Shade Books, 376pp, $14.99 Nyxnissa, the ex-bel dame, was introduced in God’s War, also published by Night Shade Books in 2011. Infidel is not a direct sequel to that...
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Solaris Rising, edited by Ian Whates
Solaris Rising, edited by Ian Whates Solaris, 325pp, £7.99 Subtitled “The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction”, Solaris Rising is precisely that – a reboot of the George Mann edited The Solaris Book of...
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Leviathan Wakes, James SA Corey
Leviathan Wakes, James SA Corey Orbit, 561pp, £12.99 Leviathan Wakes, the first book of the Expanse series, landed with a substantial thud during the summer of 2011. According to George RR Martin, it...
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Embassytown, China Miéville
Embassytown, China Miéville 2011, Pan, 405pp, £7.99 There can be little doubt that China Miéville’s is currently the poster boy for British genre writing. His novels routinely appear on award...
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Review: Best Served Cold by Joe Abercomrbie
Joe Abercrombie’s “Best Served Cold” is a standalone novel set in the same world established in his “First Law” trilogy. Therefore if you’ve read that, some of the references and characters may be...
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Review: Alchemist Of Souls by Anne Lyle
In a marvellously envisioned alternate Elizabethan England, Queen Elizabeth mourns the death of her husband Robert Dudley, having retreated into seclusion in her old age. Elsewhere in the world, the...
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Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Penman
The War of the Roses is cited as a main inspiration for George R R Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, and as Sharon Penman’s novel is a highly regarded historical fiction of this period, I...
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Intrusion, Ken MacLeod
Intrusion, Ken MacLeod 2012, Orbit, 387pp, £18.99 Hope Morrison has refused – for reasons she can’t herself articulate – to take the Fix, a magic bullet taken by pregnant women to improve disease...
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American Gods: review
(Note, this is a review of the “Authors Preferred Text” edition) I enjoyed reading the Sandman comics in the 1990′s. So when I picked up American Gods, and found it started like an extension of the...
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The Amazing Spider Man: Review
At first it seems extremely odd to have a reboot of the Spider Man franchise. After all, it’s barely five years since the third in Sam Raimi’s series, featuring Tobey Maguire. And now, a completely...
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Review: The Daylight War by Peter V Brett
The Daylight War is the third in Peter V Brett’s Demon Cycle, detailing humanity’s struggle against demons that rise in the night to prey on them. Two powerful protagonists have been named as the...
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Review: Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden has been garnering many accolades. Having been the 2012 Sunday Times SF novel of the year, it was then shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA award, and now has won the Clarke Award....
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Review: The Whole Man by John Brunner
The Whole Man by John Brunner (1964) This novel tells the life story of a telepath, from birth to maturity. Gerald Howson is born a cripple, the illegitimate child of a terrorist and a woman who...
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Review: The Source by William G. Gee
Chronicles Member: bilhafan How to begin? The most important thing is to say that there is plenty of good to be said about this book. I would hate to know how much time Gee spent researching things...
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Review: Merchant of Dreams by Anne Lyle
Synopsis: Exiled from the court of Queen Elizabeth for accusing a powerful nobleman of treason, swordsman-turned-spy Mal Catlyn has been living in France with his young valet Coby Hendricks for the...
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Review: Watch the Northwind Rise by Robert Graves
Watch the Northwind Rise (1949) by Robert Graves (also published as Seven Days in New Crete) Tales of utopia have a long and varied history in literature. This subgenre of speculative fiction can be...
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Review: The Vorkosigan books by Lois McMasterBujold
For quite a while those who know my SFF reading tastes have been encouraging me to explore Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books. I did read the first two, Shards of Honour and Barrayar, a couple of...
View ArticleReview: Analog, September 2013
The September 2013 Analog puts me in the uncomfortable position of being more negative than I’d like. I’m happy to say what I do and don’t like but I’m naturally happier when the outcome is...
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Review: Iron Man 3 – Too many suits
It seems to me that Hollywood’s attitude to sequels is to insist that they conform to a generic selection of comparative adjectives; they have to be bigger, longer, louder, have bigger guns, more...
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Review: Man of Steel – A glaring atrocity
The one thing that I have learnt from watching Man of Steel is that Kryptonians are impressively stupid. The beginning of the film shows us the well known origin of Superman. He is a Kryptonian baby...
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Review: The King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
I think it is fair to say that the books of Mark Lawrence can be described as harsh. Not in a bad way, the world that is lived in and the characters are harsh, but there is more to it than that. There...
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Review: NOS4R2 by Joe Hill
A must have for any Vampire. No not the book. The car. Not my usual book this. I don’t generally wander toward the gory horror in a book store. But this one… well it whispered to me. Or perhaps it...
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Review: Violence, a Writers Guide by Rory Miller
Somehow Rory Miller’s book Meditations on Violence ended up on my radar. Not only was it a fascinating and educational read, it also inspired a lot of note-taking for my writing. The basic premise of...
View ArticleReview: World War Z – Zombocalypse
This film has left me with one perplexing question - ’how far from the source material can an adaptation be whilst still claiming to be an adaptation?’ It is almost like a zombie. In World War Z a...
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Review: Stravaganza: City of Masks by Mary Hoffman
This book is listed as a young adult book, and one of the tricks with writing such a thing is to not dumb it down for the reader. For me the best kind of young adult book is to deal with issues that...
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Review: Analog, December 2013
The final issue of Volume 83 brings us better non-fiction than last month, primarily focused on interstellar exploration, and worse fiction that is not focused on much, though time travel (of sorts)...
View ArticleGravity – Whoa! Heavy!
Gravity: Spanish director Alfonso Cuaron has managed to create one of the most interesting and spectacular films in recent history. Not only does this film actually use 3D properly and to great effect...
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Review: We Will Destroy Your Planet An Alien’s Guide To Conquering The Earth....
A Handy Guide For All Invading Alien Types. WARNING: I have laid my hands upon what should have been a most TOP SECRET document. That any sentient being can access the information is deeply concerning....
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