Books

Since first reading Starborn, I fell in love with Lucy Hounsom’s work (read my review here). Her prose is elegant and a joy to read while her characters and stories are original and engaging. Now we are almost at the end ...

The issue of piracy regularly rears its ugly head across all creative mediums. The latest furor has arisen out of the SFF publishing world after bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater wrote a blog post about how book piracy had affected her. While ...

When I was a kid, I loved reading the Expanded Universe novels, particularly the ones I owned on cassette tape read by Anthony Daniels. They were my constant companions on family road trips (well, them and my Michelle Kwan biography). ...

This book is terrible. I don’t usually like to lay it down quite as harshly as that (though some people tell me I’m far harsher than I realise), but Artemis is a truly awful novel. It contains culturally insensitive characterisation, poorly executed ...

I had no idea what to expect with this one. I loved the cover and the blurb talked about AI – I was sold. The premise is very simple and I raced through the novel. When I reached the halfway ...

Tchaikovsky really excels at finding interesting ways to comment on society through the use of animals in science fiction and fantasy settings. In his Echoes of the Fall series, each group is a different animal and exhibits particular social traits ...

I can’t remember where exactly it was that I stumbled across a recommendation for Selena Chambers’ debut collection of short stories, Calls for Submission. What I do remember, however, was how the collection was described as weird and offputting. Such a ...

There’s a lot to be said for a strong authorial voice. Jeanette Ng’s debut novel, Under the Pendulum Sun is set in an alternate Victorian world where the fae are real. To match the setting, Ng employs a gothic voice akin ...

Why do we still have ‘women’s fiction’ as a category in bookshops? Amazon, for instance, lists ‘Women Writers and Fiction Books’ as one of the major fiction categories, and ‘Women’s Popular Fiction’, ‘Women’s Literary Fiction’, and ‘Women’s Short Stories’ as ...

Alec Worley’s collection of three novellas covers Judge Anderson’s first year on the job. Unfortunately for Worley, the book also reads like his first year on the job. Anderson is constantly told she is exceptional, some kind of psychic genius, ...