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==Science fiction==
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{{newreview
|author=Philip Palmer
|title=Version 43
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Version 43 is a Galactic Cop, a cyborg law enforcement officer sent from Earth to tackle an unusual murder case in Lawless City, a sort of sci-fi Baltimore on the distant planet of Belladonna. He gets sidetracked from his original objective and decides to rid the planet of its evil gang bosses while he's there. A huge war ensues in which all the bosses (and thousands of others) are killed, but it soon becomes apparent that the true rulers of the planet are the dead eyed 'children' he has seen dining in the most expensive restaurants, the sinister 'ancien régime' .
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841499218</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Margaret Atwood
|summary=One of the major problems with science fiction series is that the titles aren't always terribly imaginative. At first glance, the cover of ''Orphan's Triumph'' gives away exactly how the story is going to turn out. It's great credit to Robert Buettner that what I expected wasn't what happened.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841497622</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Stephen Woodworth
|title=Through Violet Eyes (Violet Series)
|rating=3.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=To every generation, a few souls are born with violet-coloured eyes. These Violets can channel the dead. Viewed by the government as a commodity, they are taken into the care of the School from an early age and taught to use their abilities. While the School does teach them to control the souls constantly trying to invade their bodies from the black of death, it also trains them to serve the government – calling on the victims of murder and horrific accidents to ascertain exactly how they died or who killed them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0749941278</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle
|title=Graphic Classics, Volume 17: Science Fiction Classics
|rating=4
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=So, an introduction. The Graphic Classics collection is a series whereby the best in genre fiction, from sources both highly likely and remarkably unexpected, is collected and dressed up for us in graphic novel form. This seventeenth edition, a belated best-of sci-fi volume, is their first foray into full colour, and is headlined by a version of The War of the Worlds. The supporting material ranges from a one-page strip to thirty-page stories.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0978791975</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Sean Williams
|title=Earth Ascendant (Astropolis)
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Science-fiction has come a long way since H G Wells first looked up at the night sky and thought how cool it would be to have giant Martian tripod war machines trampling all over the Home Counties. Now that the most daring innovations of even quite recent science-fiction can be found readily in your home - from videophones to genetically modified food - the genre continues to evolve and develop.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841495212</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Samantha Hunt
|title=The Invention of Everything Else
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Nikola Tesla, born in 1856, was a young engineering student in Croatia, a Serb with a ferocious talent for invention when he sailed to America armed only with a note of introduction from his former employer to Thomas Edison which said: ''I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.'' Promised prodigious amounts of money to reorganise Edison's workshops, he was in the end cheated by Edison, who made a joke about the American sense of humour when Tesla asked to be paid.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099524007</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jaine Fenn
|title=Consorts of Heaven
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Fantasy and science fiction are genres that mesh well together. Some authors have written successfully across both genres, but not usually in the same story. Jaine Fenn has managed to combine both in one book and it's an interesting read.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0575083239</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Bernard Beckett
|title=Genesis
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=The reviewer sat down with the fancy hardback review copy of ''Genesis'' by Bernard Beckett and turned the pages, not knowing at all what to expect.
* What did he find?
* He found a science fiction tale set in a futuristic New Zealand. The setting of the book is based on current concerns - environmental problems, global oil wars and animosity, and so on, and a plague war has meant NZ is cordoned off with a Great Sea Fence. It is living under a strange Plato's Republic, based on a mix of ancient Greek life (naked wrestling and so on) with the modern (relationships arbitrated by rampant gene testing). One of the soldiers defending it, Adam, takes it upon himself, however, to betray his state, and let a young girl alone on a raft through the cordon, and befriend her. But it is not her that will provide the crux of the book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847247296</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Neal Asher
|title=Shadow of the Scorpion (Novel of the Polity)
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=''Shadow of the Scorpion'' is a better book than either the title or the cover (a cartoon-ish mechanical scorpion) might at first suggest. It's an engaging espionage-type thriller of course, but the emotional repercussions are sensitively dealt with.
 
The body of the novel is set during the aftermath of an interplanetary war between the Polity, humans as governed by benign AIs, and a vicious alien race named the Prador. Cormac, the protagonist, is a 22 year old recruit for Earth Central Security (ECS), the military arm of the Polity. He is assigned to guard a crash-landed Prador spaceship on a remote planet and prevent some alien weaponry from falling into the wrong hands. Due to circumstances outside of his Control, Cormac is required to infiltrate an underground network of Separatists, the Terrorists of the future, who rebel against the AI rule: a perfect set-up for some gripping interrogation and torture scenes of the technologically advanced type. But, there is more to the novel than that.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230738591</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=D J MacHale
|title=Quillan Games (Pendragon)
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=I would like to start with an admission. I know by now, having read three earlier books in this series, the set-up. We have a demonic entity creating chaos and destroying life itself, territory by territory, and a young teen and his friends, originally scattered across said territories one by one, combatting the nasty and putting each and every world to rights. What I don't know is to what extent this is a religious allegory. I saw a lot of sloth in book four (or, if you prefer, the first commandment), and gluttony and covetousness in books five and six, which had similar plots. But I wasn't helped by the ending of book six, in wondering if this is a straightforward Christian tale, disguised as teen fantasy. Does acolyte equate to apostle? How messianic are the characters going to turn out to be? Do the ten planets and ten adventures here point us to the Decalogue?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847385060</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Philip K Dick
|title=Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
|rating=4.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=World War Terminus is over, and Earth is in ruins. While most people have emigrated to Mars, some continue to live their lives on Earth while radioactivity slowly impairs their brain and reproductive function.
 
Upon emigrating to Mars, all citizens were given a highly sophisticated android servant, and now six have escaped from captivity and fled to Earth, killing all in their path. Rick Deckard is the bounty hunter commissioned to track down and destroy these androids, almost indiscernible from humans, in return for a fee.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0575079932</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Chris Wooding
|title=Retribution Falls
|rating=4.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Things are never quiet when it comes to life on the Ketty Jay. For Captain Frey and his mismatched band of friends, colleagues, call them what you will, that make the raggle-taggle crew of the craft, will always find a dodgy scrape, a damsel in distress or some risky cargo to transport – and up til now have survived the consequences.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0575085142</amazonuk>
}}

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