100 word review: Cakes in Space, by Sarah McIntyre and Philip Reeve

100 word review: Cakes in Space, by Sarah McIntyre and Philip Reeve

This book is ridiculous. Let’s get that out of the way. It is the story of a little girl who asks an artificial intelligence robot for “the best cake” before going down into cold sleep on an interstellar spacecraft which is taking her family and hunderds of other colonists on a journey to a new […]

100 word review: Touch, by Claire North

100 word review: Touch, by Claire North

It takes a certain chutzpah to have a first-person narrator with no name, and yet this book does. The premise: there exist beings (no spoilers) who can take over a body; they pass between them by touching flesh. They live out our lives, in moments or decades, and move on before they die. Many of […]

100 word review: Wolves, by Simon Ings

100 word review: Wolves, by Simon Ings

This is a troubling book, a dark imagining of a future five minutes from now, or five minutes ago. It’s a portrait of technology entrepreneurs, recalling the heady late 90s Internet boom “before it was cool”, and the heady and terrifying successes that could come about. It’s a story of augmented reality, something a little […]

100 word review: Cataveiro, by EJ Swift

100 word review: Cataveiro, by EJ Swift

The second in the Osiris trilogy, and this one is a corker – there’s no need to have read the first book at all. In a climate change ravaged world, Ramona Callejas is the only pilot – and mapmaker– of the last aeroplane in the technophobic country of Patagonia, a poor state at the southern […]

100 word review: Europe in Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson

100 word review: Europe in Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson

This book is a slow burn, and most of the time, much like Gibson or Le Carré, you have little idea of what’s really happening, reading along trying to keep up. Rudi is a cook in a future Europe in which the nation-state is a fragmentary being. Rudi is quiet, and stays out of trouble, […]

The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara (Atlantic Books) (Gold Tentacle)

The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara (Atlantic Books) (Gold Tentacle)

Yanagihara is a writer for Conde Nast – and has now put out this book. Like unreliable narrators? Disturbing imagery? Georgeous, lush prose? Dive into this book. It’s a confessional narrative, framed as someone trying to set the record straight, about a young doctor in the 1950s who’s gone to the south Pacific to investigate […]

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers (Self) (Gold Tentacle)

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers (Self) (Gold Tentacle)

The Kitschies‘ first self-published shortlisted book, and a debut to boot. Chambers had put together a fun, silly space opera that’ll keep you up at night reading by the light of your Kindle (if not by a torch under the duvet), and this is how you should read this book: like you’re young again, and […]

Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta (Voyager) (Gold Tentacle)

Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta (Voyager) (Gold Tentacle)

Another dystopia, this time with a woman – seventeen year old Noria – becoming one of the world’s only, if not first, tea masters. Water is the world’s most precious resource; created from desalination plants and completely managed by distant imperial masters in New Qian. Noria is entrusted with a deep secret, one that could […]

The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne (Blackfriars) (Gold Tentacle)

The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne (Blackfriars) (Gold Tentacle)

A set of devices that gather power from the waves stretches from the coast of India to Djibouti. A woman leaves her old life behind to walk this bridge, illegally, crossing to a new life, searching for something. In parallel, in an earlier life, a young girl escapes death or slavery in West Africa, heading […]