Tag Archives: science fiction

Jonathan Cowie and Tony Chester’s Essential SF: A Concise Guide

Take a huge group of science fiction fans. Ask them what they think are the most important books, films, TV shows and conventions. You’ll get some strong opinions. Trying to come up with a “Greatest Hits” of any kind is … Continue reading

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Alastair Reynolds‘ Eversion

Doctor Silas Coade is the ship’s physician on sailing ship Demeter in the 1800s, on a voyage of exploration to a previously unreachable inlet. They crash on the coast of Norway, and find an earlier ship, Europa, already wrecked there, leaving a … Continue reading

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Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility

I love a good time travel book. I wasn’t sure this was going to be one of those, but it eventually won me over. Emily St. John Mandel has followed up two best sellers – the 2014 post-apocalyptic dystopian sf … Continue reading

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Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (Ray Porter, narrator)

Ryland Grace was a microbiologist, and then he wrote a paper that pissed everyone off. He quit and became a schoolteacher. He was very happy as a schoolteacher. And then another scientist, in a very different field, saw something strange … Continue reading

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Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword

In the first book of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, Ancillary Justice, we met Breq, a lone soldier who used to be a starship with dozens or even hundreds of ancillary bodies, now inhabiting just this lone survivor of an … Continue reading

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Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice

Imagine your world has been invaded by a spacefaring human civilization – highly advanced, rapacious and unspeakably cruel. They want your world’s resources and they’re going to take what they want, and in the process of invading – which they … Continue reading

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Poul Anderson’s The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 1

Poul Anderson began writing his own “future history” in the 1950s, with its starting point being that there would be a limited nuclear war at some point in that decade. From that point would develop a secret effort to build … Continue reading

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Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace

“I am still learning how to write a novel,” Arkady Martine says in the Acknowledgements at the back of her second one – and second in the Teixcalaan Empire series – A Desolation Called Peace. Seeing as how her first, … Continue reading

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Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire

Mahit Dzmare has been chosen to represent her world as Ambassador to Teixcalaan, the galactic superpower. Her “world” is tiny Lsel, a space station housing some 30,000 souls, affiliated with no planet, which controls a small sector that’s rich in … Continue reading

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Roger Zelazny’s Eye of Cat and Isle of the Dead

The protagonist of the first short novel in this omnibus – which is in fact Eye of Cat – is William Blackhorse Singer, a Navaho born in the 20th century, and still alive and fit and healthy, almost two centuries later. … Continue reading

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