|summary=Rob is out to kill us all, and is going to take some beating. He already has many advantages, and can adapt easily where he finds a fault in his plans. He already has most of us dead, or in concentration camps. Rob is the generic nickname for all robot-kind, all controlled by one supreme Artificial Intelligence, who is set on eradication of our species.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857204122</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|title=Back Dated
|author=Chris Niblock
|rating=3.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=
Sci-fi writer Ray Flaxman returns home from a weekend away with his fiancee with a dealine to meet. But he finds his flat broken to into and trashed. Nothing of value has been taken. So Ray suspects his stalker is to blame. Serena has been calling and writing, declaring her love for Ray and her urgent desire to have his child. But Ray has never met her. Even so, he is keen to keep this mystery girl a secret because his fiancee, Frankie, has huge jealousy issues.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>B004W0JR7G</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Trevillian
|title=The A-Men Return
|rating=3.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=It's been several years since the Phoenix Tower came down and the A-Men split. Dead City is a shadow of its former self: an urban wasteland and the centre of the sort of gang warfare that finds and exploits drugs and hopelessness with a ruthless talent.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184876619X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephen Mark Norman
|title=Meklyan and the Fourth Piece of the Artefact
|rating=3
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Four billion years after our Sun has become a red giant and died, taking all life with it, there are still humans in the universe. How so? By man-made panspermia. When Earth's civilisation realised it couldn't master long distance space travel in sufficient time to avoid annihilation, it sent out DNA probes filled with bacteria far out into space, to planets in the temperate zones of solar systems; planets that could potentially sustain life. And on eight planets, sustain life they did.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956202713</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Morden
|title=Equations of Life
|rating=3
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=It's a book that is certainly not short of action. We are not told what the Armageddon event was, although aspects of it are hinted at. Perhaps that will become explained later in the series. What we do know is that it has wiped out Japan, and one of the first victims of the event in London appears to have been the Congestion Charge as it is now a heaving metropolis with gridlock traffic (although this and the masses of people seem to mysteriously evaporate as the story unfolds).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184149948X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paolo Bacigalupi
|title=The Windup Girl
|rating=3.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Although only recently released in paperback in the UK, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl has been gaining considerable critical acclaim across 'the pond'. Set in a future version of Thailand, it's an interesting take on the environmental meltdown scenario that has garnered it a couple of science fiction awards (the Hugo and Nebula awards) and was named as the ninth best fiction book of 2009 by Time magazine. No less than three of the review extracts used by the publishers in this edition liken Bacigalupi to William Gibson. High praise indeed. Does it rise to these expectations?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0356500535</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=K S Turner
|title=Chronicles of Fate and Choice: Tumultus
|rating=3
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=This is the follow up to [[Before the Gods (Chronicles of Fate and Choice) by K S Turner|Before The Gods]], a debut novel lauded for bringing a breath of fresh air to the world of speculative fiction and one of Bookbag's [[Bookbag's Christmas Gift Recommendations 2009|top picks of 2009]]. Tumultus is the second of the planned trilogy and I was looking forward to seeing how the author would really cut loose now that readers were already familiar with the Shaa-kutu and the story of their link to the origin of the human race.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956224210</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tricia Sullivan
|title=Lightborn
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=In an alternate but contemporary United States, everyone uses Lightborn technology, or shine, as it's nicknamed. Providing entertainment, education and self-knowledge, people live in the ultimate plugged-in society. And then the Fall comes. Rogue AIs in the shine field around the city of Los Sombres start sending out bad shine and the adults all go loco - becoming violent and murderous, or broken down and reduced to performing repetitive tasks over and over.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841494070</amazonuk>
}}
{{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
|title=The Handmaid's Tale
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In the near-future USA that they call Gilead, society has changed. For the worse, of course. The population is dying out, and people who are capable of breeding the next generation are given a cherished status of Handmaid - gifted to any male of enough esteem, called a Commander, who balances the household with his wife and what is practically a walking womb. Other women get drudge work, or run horrid finishing schools for the Handmaids, or are packed off to what are reported to be polluted hellholes abroad, for laborious work for life. Men are restricted too - Handmaids are off-limits to everybody but their Commander, and those households are patrolled carefully by other eunuch types. It's up to our nameless narrator and main character, however, to show us just how cherished the status of Handmaid feels.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099511665</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Iain M Banks
|title=Surface Detail
|rating=5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=It is perhaps appropriate for a book that centres around the battle for the afterlife to begin this review with a confession: this was my first encounter with Iain M Banks' Culture series of science fiction novels. At first, I worried that this put me at a significant disadvantage as for the first 100 or so pages, I spend most of the time being completely confused about what was going on. However, as the strands started to come together, it became apparent that this is partly Banks' style and indeed it's one he uses in his non-science fiction books too. Keep going, it does come together.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841498939</amazonuk>
}}