Books

Tidhar’s most recent novel, A Man Lies Dreaming (Hodder) is a strange beast. I’m not sure what I expected, but what I read wasn’t it. His prose is musical, brilliant to read. And the story? Odd. I had heard of ...

Moorcock is one of those writers that any SFF fan has probably heard of, if not read. I have to admit that I had never read any Moorcock before The Whispering Swarm and perhaps that has put me at a ...

Retellings of fairy tales are very popular these days. And why shouldn’t they be? Classic stories updated and made relevant for today’s audience are bound to have mass appeal. Writers have been reinventing these classics for years and there are ...

I enjoy a good dystopian YA thriller as much as the next Hunger Games fan, but there comes a point when I’ve got to say enough is enough. They have all become so samey. Once the initial depressing world is ...

Time Salvager is another SF novel that has been massively hyped before it even hit shelves. The book is due to publish on July 7th but has already been optioned for a film adaptation with Michael Bay signed on to ...

A number of reviews of The Gospel of Loki have talked about it as Joanne Harris’s first fantasy novel. I find that baffling. What about Chocolat and its sequel The Lollipop Shoes? They might not have been quite so ‘out there’ with the fantastical elements, ...

Sometimes I worry that my critic brain has superseded all else. Books, films, TV shows that everyone else loves I scratch my head and wonder what I’m missing. I’m poking holes in all of them, asking ‘but why?’ over and ...

For a 62 year old character, James Bond sure has been in the news a lot recently. Some of the news has been good, some bad, but most of its been less focused on the titular Bond and more on ...

This collection of critical writing on SF taps into the SF community and the debates happening around what we all love best: speculative fiction. This doesn’t just mean SF writing (though this is where the bulk of the essays are ...

With Mental Health Awareness Week last week in the UK, mental health issues are a hot topic. Aly Sidgwick’s debut novel will tap into this zeitgeist perfectly, helping to dispel some of the myths around mental illness. The novel pulls ...