Books

I’ve long been a fan of Jen Williams’ fantasy writing. She creates interesting worlds with characters who positively ooze character. That said, her second and current series, The Winnowing Flame, hasn’t captured my imagination as much as The Copper Cat, but that’s ...

Age of Assassins was one of my favourite books of last year. It had everything you could want: great characters, tense mystery storyline, political machinations of the most Machiavellian kind… The question is whether debut author RJ Barker could sustain the ...

I found Planetfall to be a confounding read. At first, I struggled to get into it and had some issues with the prose. Then I found I loved it, but still questioned the pacing. Leading up to the ending, I could not ...

Last year, I was honoured to interview the Queen of Cyberpunk herself, Pat Cadigan, at FantasyCon. During the course of the interview, she recounted an anecdote about a reader who told her she wanted to read Synners. While the book ...

What rights should artificial intelligence have? Are they more than just the sum of their code? Can AIs love? Any science fiction fan worth their salt has pondered these questions at length. And these questions pop up time and again ...

Literary fiction awards rarely go to works of science fiction and fantasy. We review a lot of genre fiction on Pop-Verse. Mainly science fiction and fantasy. These books might be lauded in their own fields but are, with some exception, ...

When I was ten or so, my mother bought me the classic children’s book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. It sat on my shelf for twenty years. But with the film coming out in a few months, I decided it ...

If you enjoy Dungeons and Dragons and/or sword and sorcery stories, you should be reading The Black River Chronicles. The young adult series follows four students at an adventurer’s academy, where – you guessed it – they are all separated into ...

I’m a critic. It’s become something of a bad word. I’m a critic of stories: spanning many types of storytelling mediums – film, TV, books, comics… I love stories. I know stories – I’ve studied them extensively. I know what ...

I love discovering a fantasy series on my own – one that I come to without the influence of hype or expectations. It is rare these days, but it does happen. For me, this was Hounsom’s Worldmaker Trilogy, which has ...