Newest Science Fiction Reviews
Science fiction
The Fourth Wall by Walter Jon Williams
Sean Makin was a cute, much demanded child actor. Then he grew up and the cute became creepy as the baby face that had made him famous remained (due to a physical condition) but was unsuited to an adult's body. So the demand dried up and Sean tries to come to terms with his change of fortunes by writing a 'how to act' blog, intoxicating substances and appearances on a reality celebrity martial arts fight show. One day, whilst being beaten up for the cameras in a wrestling ring full of cottage cheese, he realises the depths to which he's sunk. Something has to change! Luckily change soon arrives in the form of 'Alternate Reality' magnate, Dagmar Shaw. Full review...
Artemis by Philip Palmer
With every novel, Philip Palmer is going from strength to strength. I've not always enjoyed his writing style, but his eye for a story is wonderful and his imagination is seemingly endless. Every time I open one of his novels, I wonder when he will find the limits of his inventiveness and it's never that time. Artemis is no exception to that rule. Full review...
The Lunar Chronicles: Cinder by Marissa Meyer
This Cinderella does not have to sweep the grate and clean the dishes - she has to mend maglev vehicle tracks. This Cinders does not leave her shoe behind when invited to the ball, she has her entire foot fall off. This Cinder does not live in a realm of fairy queens and pumpkin carriages, but New Beijing, a massive city of just two and a half million, due to the Fourth World War. She's a cyborg - hence the foot, but she's still owned by a crotchety bigot of a step-mother, with two step-sisters. And this is a very different world, where a global plague is going to be brought too close to home... Full review...
Hell Ship by Philip Palmer
Some time ago, I read Philip Palmer's debut novel Debatable Space. Whilst there were aspects of that novel I didn't feel entirely worked, it was a well paced read for the most part and I marked Palmer as a writer to watch. His subsequent novels, Red Claw and Version 43, have been well received here at The Bookbag and his fourth, Hell Ship, isn't bad either. Full review...
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
'It can't be a coincidence that Stepford women are all the way they are' says Bobbie, Joanna Eberhart's only friend in Stepford. Joanna has recently come to live in the idyllic suburban town of Stepford with her husband and two children. She is an independent woman with her own part-time career as a photographer, is intelligent, liberated and has a keen interest in feminism. Full review...
Leviathan Wakes by James S A Corey
Humanity has managed to venture into the solar system and colonise Mars, various moons and some asteroids and stations in the (asteroid) Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Those inhabiting the Belt have evolved to be significantly thinner and elongated compared to Earthers and Martians, due the low gravity in which they live; their difference in appearance and a difference in attitude form the basis for a lot of the tension and uneasy relationships in the novel. Full review...
The Final Evolution by Jeff Somers
Don't assume too much when starting this book. Certainly, do not assume you can jump straight into this series at this, part five - start much nearer the beginning, as I did. Don't assume the first person narrative means the narrator survives, for this is a world of cyborgs, and psychic human intelligences stored in robot hardware, and more. Don't assume the lulling opening chapters herald a simple revenge actioner, as Avery Cates lives in a tangled web of vengeful villains, and nothing is very straightforward. And don't assume the unremarkable opening is from an author low on ideas, for when Cates is proven to be the one man to save the world, we find it suitably meaty, and gripping, despite that old saw - and it's a rich nightmare of post-apocalypse for him to be saving, as well... Full review...
Robopocalypse by Daniel H Wilson
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. Full review...
Back Dated by Chris Niblock
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. Full review...
The A-Men Return by John Trevillian
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. Full review...
Meklyan and the Fourth Piece of the Artefact by Stephen Mark Norman
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. Full review...
Equations of Life by Simon Morden
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). Full review...
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
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? Full review...
Chronicles of Fate and Choice: Tumultus by K S Turner
This is the follow up to 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 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. Full review...
Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan
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. Full review...
Version 43 by Philip Palmer
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' . Full review...
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
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. Full review...
Surface Detail by Iain M Banks
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. Full review...
Zero History by William Gibson
It's almost obligatory when writing anything about William Gibson to recall that in an earlier short story, he invented the term 'cyberspace'. Gibson remains at the cutting edge of what is 'cool'. Like most of his books, Zero History is a thriller, but at its core are issues surrounding technology, how we interact with it, branding and marketing. It would be easy to criticise much of his content as being too shallow and concerned with 'nothing' - but then that's part of his point. Full review...
The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
Our world is not as it seems. We share it with aliens, zombies, demonic spirits, with ancient god-like entities that are all keen to eat our bodies and devour our souls. It's lucky, then, that we have the British secret service to protect us, more specifically a top secret branch of the secret service called The Laundry. This organisation is so secret that even the bosses at MI6 don't know of its existence. The point of the Laundry is to keep all the myriad of terrors endangering the Earth at bay by the careful use of science, technology and magic, magic being a little known branch of applied maths. Full review...
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
The reader is plunged straight away into the busy, bustling centre of Istanbul. And climate change appears to have arrived. In 2022 thousands of Istanbul's citizens died in a heatwave and now, only three years later it's 'Thirty-three degrees in April, at seven in the morning. Unthinkable.' You can almost hear the collective thrum of all those air-conditioning units trying to make life bearable for the local people. Full review...
The Terminal State by Jeff Somers
In this future, desolate, post-apocalyptic world, the last thing Avery Cates wants to do is choose a side. The police are androids, artificial cases for clones of people who die in the making, and the other source of power is not much better. But it's them that pressgang him into joining their army. What little freedom and power he had as a lone gunman is lost, as he's given nanotech augments to make him a super-soldier. Which is bad news - as is the fact the two most powerful and hated people in Cates's universe are the very people who buy him from the army to do one last job - and they can be very persuasive about him accepting it... Full review...
The Unit by Terry Dehart
We all know about the nuclear family, well now meet the post-nuclear family in Terry De Hart's brutal vision of a post apocalyptic America.
We know the score; terrorists attack key US cities with nuclear devices, US retaliates on the nations supporting the terrorist. There is only one possible outcome, mass casualties and the breakdown of civil society leading to the rise of barbarism in a devastated landscape in the grip of a nuclear winter. Within this madness a family survives not knowing how much of the country or the world has been destroyed. Full review...
The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod
Lucy Stone works for a videogame company in Edinburgh. She enjoys the job - particularly being one of the boys - and it's given her a sense of belonging that she'd craved but never had. And then her mother calls. A CIA spook, Amanda wants Lucy's firm to rewrite their upcoming game to feature the mythology of a small ex-Soviet republic. Krassnia is where Lucy was born, where she lived for her first seven years, and where she spent the scariest day of her life. Amanda wrote a seminal work on Krassnian mythology and Lucy uses this to reshape the game, knowing that it's likely to be used as a tool in a hoped-for colour revolution. Full review...
Black Lung Captain: Tales of the Ketty Jay by Chris Wooding
Things on board the Ketty Jay have never been as low. Darian Frey and his crew are even having trouble thieving from defenceless orphanages. So when the next token job-they-can't-refuse comes along, they fall under it's spell. An explorer has returned with tales of untold riches, courtesy of the most mysterious artefacts and treasures of an unknown civilization. The fact that the remains are those of an aircraft crashed in the most Arctic of rainforests, inhabited by the most evil beast-men monsters, is neither here nor there. The problems start with what they find there, which is worse than anyone could have expected - or indeed years ago, with a mysterious connection between the remains and the more unusual crewmember... Full review...
The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett
In the near future, only Illyria city stands for science, technology and progress in a world dominated by religious fundamentalism of every faith (and then some). The city was founded as a haven for those intellectuals not possessing any such religious convictions, who advocated reason and logic instead, and were persecuted for their 'blasphemies' in the early stages of the upheaval. George Simling, the introvert protagonist and second generation Illyrian, falls in love with a beautiful woman called Lucy. Unfortunately however, Lucy is actually a syntec, a robot ASPU: Advanced Sensory Pleasure Unit, a prostitute. As George obsessively visits her, he realises that she is starting to develop a level of consciousness and self-awareness outside of her programming. Lucy is due for a routine mind-wipe so George decides to flee with her to the technophobic outlands in order to save this newly discovered consciousness. Full review...
I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
Meet John Smith. By all appearances he is the usual fifteen year old American kid, except for the fact he and his 'father' shift location every few months. John is certainly not his real name, but has to face up to reality - school bullies, hot girls and in fact any friends being unattainable with such a peripatetic lifestyle. 'Dad' stays at home, scanning the internet and all news sources, in order to protect the pair - for they are among the remaining dozen or so inhabitants of Lorien, living in hidden exile on Earth, but hunted by their enemies from yet another alien race. Can the fact they are permanently pursued grant them any peace - especially when 'John' is about to undergo some rather prominent alien-style puberty? Full review...
The Orphaned Worlds (Humanity's Fire) by Michael Cobley
The planet Darien, once a lost outpost where earth colonists co-existed with the native Uvovo, is now the focal point of an intergalactic struggle. Hegemony forces are in occupation mode, Earth is standing back reined in by inter-planetary politics, whilst planet-side local alliances are fighting back guerrilla-style. This is the least of the galaxy's concerns, however. It might even get air-brushed out as a little minor difficulty in the history-books-to-come. There is a much bigger problem to worry about. Full review...
Feed by Mira Grant
In 2014 the common cold was cured. So was cancer. But in their wake something terrible came – the two viruses used to cure the ailments combined to form a terrifying plague that turned humans and large animals into the living dead. Now what's left of the human race lives every day with the fear that the virus they hold dormant in their bodies could go into amplification, causing them to turn. People stay indoors, stop meeting in crowds, and conduct most of their lives online. Full review...
Salvage by Robert Edric
Some time about a hundred years hence and the predictions have come to pass. The sea levels have risen; the Gulf Stream has shifted its path. Climate change has hit Britain with a vengeance. Global Warming is the misnomer; of course the temperatures are, on balance, warmer. Snow is something most people only hear or read about. The real change, however, is the wet. Full review...
Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt
The blonde bombshell in question in Tom Holt's latest book of that name is Lucy Pavlov. If you are reading this review in 2017 of course you will know who Lucy Pavlov is. She's the beautiful, talented, wealthy, CEO of PaySoft Industries - the revolutionary operating system that is running on every computer in the world. Of course, if that is indeed the case, then we've got a problem. A very big problem. Because what Lucy doesn't know is that she is literally a blonde bombshell - well she knows she's blonde, just not that her body is a shell for a bomb. A very big and a very smart bomb, but nevertheless a bomb. And she's been sent to destroy the planet. It kind of makes Bill Gates seem OK for the time being. Full review...
Extras by Scott Westerfeld
In the future city of this book, many people live with what is called a reputation economy. With everybody practically a cyborg, they're online permanently, using optical and brain implants to see everybody's status, output and more. Many people have hovercam companions, to make their own documentaries and film their own lives. They rely on metablogs to interact and keep their popularity up. They continuously spread their opinions and interests in order to become more well-known. A girl called Aya is struggling to get any renown, but things change, when she meets other people doing incredibly notorious things, but in complete secrecy and anonymity. Full review...
Specials by Scott Westerfeld
In the un-named city of the future, all the adults are living in the delusion that their city is right. After a teenage life as an ugly, they all undergo a welter of medical procedures, to make their minds and bodies conform to the bland, but gorgeous, society norm. But one young woman is not like that. She is going to a party, looking ugly, and she knows it is not what we look like, but how special we feel inside, that is of most importance. The good news is that this woman is our returning heroine, Tally. The bad news is that her ugliness is a temporary disguise, and worse than that - she knows how to feel special inside, because she IS A Special. Full review...
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
In the unnamed city of the future, all the adults are pretty. They've had mental and physical surgery to make them calm, placid and perfectly aesthetic human beings. If they have any trouble as young adults it is the problem of what to wear at parties, or how to get rid of their hangovers when they wake up at 5pm. Unfortunately, one of these bright young things is our heroine, Tally, one of the few people in the world to have learnt how damnably horrid and sapping the life of Riley can be. Full review...
The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers
This book stands out in the high-energy, hard-edged sci-fi adventure/thriller genre, in that it covers two stories at the same time. In one chapter we have Avery Cates, practically the best gun-for-hire in his post-apocalyptic North America, being told to kill one of the most protected and important people left in the world, by other, almost as important people, in the cruel mix of powerplays that make up the current politics. In the other corner is Cates, being thrown in prison - one of those basic, hell-on-earth, surrounded by miles of desert, prisons. Here, too, he will be told to do jobs for other people... Full review...
Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card
'Ender in Exile' is the most recently published in the series set in the universe of 'Ender's Game', a long standing and one of the best known series of science-fiction by Orson Scott Card. It's been defined as an 'interquel', fitting chronologically between 'Ender's Game' and the 'Speaker for the Dead', the first two (and probably the best two) novels in the sequence. Technically speaking, 'Ender in Exile' actually fits in-between the last chapters of 'Ender's Game' and describes in more detail events outlined in the resolving sections of 'Ender's Game'. Confusingly for the uninitiated, 'Ender in Exile' is also a sequel to the 'Shadow of the Giant', a parallel sub-series from the universe of the 'Ender's Game'. Full review...
WE by John Dickinson
Paul Munro has been disconnected from the World Ear in readiness for a mission that will last a lifetime. Sent to man a tiny station built at enormous effort and expense on a desolate moon in the outer reaches of our solar system, he will never be able to return. Gravity is one-tenth that of Earth and his flesh has wasted, his bones enbrittled without the strength of calcium. 'If he stood on the Earth now... his skeleton would splinter under his weight.' It took eight years to get there and the rest of his life stretches before him fearfully. Full review...
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin
It's hard to believe that The Left Hand of Darkness dates back to 1969: forty years on, it reads as well, or even better, then when it was originally written, and - deservedly - enjoys a classic status in the science-fiction canon, as well as being perhaps the best known sci-fi novel by Ursula LeGuin. Full review...
