This won the Kitschies last year, which should be enough to sway you, but in case not… In a word, batshit. Charmaine & Stan are living in their car as the world collapses around them. It’s somewhere between The Road and The Walking Dead, but they hear about Consilience: a social experiment which takes private […]
The second in Jemisin’s trilogy storms out the gate – mysteries are deepened even as they turn to secrets and are uncovered. The scale of what she’s working on – from the role of humanity as a form of social control through to the meaning of parent child relationships – is starting to become clear, […]
There are four seasons in a year, but the danger of a fifth season lurks everywhere. The ground is unstable: volcanoes, geysers, and earthquakes loom, and a massive, planet-killing event waits just around the corner to usher in an unending winter in which humanity must struggle to survive. Orogenes have the skill to mediate the […]
If you like your fiction horrible and terrifying like the end of the world might be ushered into via a council estate via a disabled man with a hellbourne mobility scooter, this might be the book for you. It’s endlessly inventive and dark, as it weaves together the people that the modern world has left […]
Paris, after the war. You know. The big one. The one with the massive bombs that ended the age of empires. The one that meant that angels were kicked out of heaven. The first world war. De Bodard has linked the wars to create a postapocalyptic Paris as her backdrop. This is a story of […]
When I started Department 19 it felt like a very well done but pretty standard hero’s journey story: Young teenager discovers a secret government department hunting vampires and of course he’s got a place in it. What’s evolved over five books is something much richer and much darker – the final volume should be humanity’s […]
Ian Sales has finished his Apollo Quartet, and the final book is brilliant. You should read the first three first, as they will loop you into this series of worlds all linked by the Apollo programme, all four obsessively researched, in very slightly alternate histories. The fourth book focusses on the wife of an astronaut […]
1968, Chicago. Thirteen year old Sam is the son of a prominent civil rights activist, a protegée of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but the Black Panthers have come to town; his older brother Stick believes in their message. What’s amazing about this book is how it does not fulfil expectations: Hollywood will […]
This is an odd creature of a book: it’s based around Trace Italian, a massive turn-based story game, created by a recluse who became terribly disfigured as a young man. Imagine Zork, but played by post. The world and the game sound fascinating as the story uncovers the past of Sean Phillips – it’s not […]
These books shouldn’t be my thing, but I enjoyed this very much. The first two were enjoyable in the way that you could watch the craft of the writer evolve – the second book just felt more polished than the first – and Curran’s Glaze is a triumph, but this took me by surprise. The […]