Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Cold Days book review : Dresden in decline? Keeping a well-loved character going for a whole series of novels is a tricky matter: authors never give up when a series is at its peak, and a sorry few continue to pimp out their protagonist long after most readers have lost …

BOOK REVIEW Something strange this way comes The difficult sophomore novel. At least that’s how it’s tempting to characterise Finnish-Scottish writer Hannu Rajaniemi’s latest offering, a wildly imaginative yet uncompromising continuation of the adventures of gentleman thief Jean le Flambeur, kick-ass Oort-cloud warrior Mieli and sentient spaceship Perhonen, a trio …

Redshirts by John Scalzi book review: Intertextual trekking There’s a genuinely shocking moment about 70 pages into Redshirts , which we’re about to spoil for you (you have been warned). Two words jump out of the page at the reader: Star Trek . Y’see, until this point, Redshirts has been …

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, Game Of Thrones is big – vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big. And even two seasons of a very dense TV series are piddling and insignificant next to the sprawling majesty of George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire novels; way too much, in fact, to …

The shadowy wonderland beneath London’s streets is growing as crowded as the pavement above. From Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere to Dan Simmons’s Drood via Kate Griffin, Ben Aaronovitch, China Miéville and more, the imagined underworld of Britain’s capital occupies a whole subgenre of its own. With his superlative novels The Anubis …

“At university I was eager to publish some short stories and I found a list of print magazines that accepted unsolicited submissions and paid per word. There were not many of these, but one was a magazine called Cthulhu Sex , which only took stories that included ‘sex, tentacles, or, …

Two years after the King Rolen’s Kin series, Australian Rowena Cory Daniells is back with another trilogy. It shares many strengths with her earlier series – well-drawn characters, a ruthless streak to the plotting – though it lacks some of the tightly-focused adventure that made The King’s Bastard and its …

As China Miéville himself discussed when SFX interviewed him recently, there’s a rhythm to his ouevre. Whenever he’s written a novel that’s been “hard won”, he’s followed it up with a book that’s less obviously demanding. So it was that Kraken , a romp of an urban fantasy in so …

Just as it’s intriguing to wonder how Iain M Banks’s career might have panned out had he first found fame for the Culture rather than as a literary novelist, Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels offer an interesting question. Specifically, would readers be so interested if King hadn’t first written Carrie …

Five more adventures (yes, five!) for the Eleventh Doctor This year’s Doctor Who Quick Reads title, designed to hook reluctant readers on the pleasures of literature, is The Magic Of The Angels . The Doctor, Amy and Rory visit a magic show, only to discover that conjurer Sammy Star is …