The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August is the winner of the second Self Published Science Fiction Competition, and it’s easy to see why it came out ahead of the hundreds of other novels. But before I get into my review, I’d like to say how grateful I am that SPSFC exists. Without […]
Strange Encounters – 3 Science Books for SFF Readers
Strange encounters with alien places and intelligences are the staple of science fiction and fantasy, yet it’s not only in fiction where these can be explored. Many recent popular science books look with great sensitivity and imagination at forms of intelligence on Earth that have been overlooked in the past and at the real environments, […]
Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Lords of Uncreation is the third and final volume of the Final Architecture series, including Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void. What draws me most to this series are the amazing descriptions of the encounters of the Intermediary Idris Telemmier with the creatures of unspace, a level of space beneath the […]
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh set herself a difficult task in Some Desperate Glory. Present the reader with a young protagonist raised in a militaristic society who is all about duty, war-breeding, xenophobia, homophobia and worse, then draw her through enough world-shattering experiences to make her interesting, flaws and all, from start to finish. And Tesh hits the […]
Meru by S.B. Divya, The Alloy Era, Book I
Meru by S.B. Divya is an intriguing space opera that presents a future Earth, ruined by humans, and now dominated by evolved sentient beings, known as alloys. A distant planet, named Meru, is evolving primitive life forms and has oxygen in its atmosphere, but humans, in their baseline form, are forbidden to settle there or […]
Ringworld by Larry Niven – #VintageSciFiMonth
If you’re new, as I am, to Larry Niven’s Known Space world, you’ll find an astonishing amount of information online about this hugely influential series of novels and short stories. Ringworld (1970) was Niven’s first novel in the sequence. There are articles about all the characters, alien species, technologies and events of Known Space as […]
