I’ll preface this review with a warning for the more delicate amongst you. If you choose to read any further please note there will be some swearing. I normally try to keep things PG13, but I’m reviewing a Joe Abercrombie novel and if ever there was an appropriate time for a little mature content this would be it. The chimneys of industry rise over Adua and the world seethes with new opportunities. But old scores run deep as ever. On the blood-soaked borders of Angland, Leo dan Brock struggles to win fame on the battlefield, and defeat the marauding armies of Stour Nightfall. He hopes for help from the crown. But King Jezal’s son, the feckless Prince Orso, is a man who specializes in disappointments. Savine dan Glokta – socialite, investor, and daughter of the most feared man in the Union – plans to claw her way to the top of the slag-heap of society by any means necessary. But the slums boil over with a rage that all the money in the world cannot control. The age of the machine dawns, but the age of magic refuses to die. With the help of the mad hillwoman Isern-i-Phail, Rikke struggles…

Sæmundur the Mad, addict and sorcerer, has been expelled from the magical university, Svartiskóli, and can no longer study galdur, an esoteric source of magic. Obsessed with proving his peers wrong, he will stop at nothing to gain absolute power and knowledge, especially of that which is long forbidden. Garún is an outcast: half-human, half-huldufólk, her very existence is a violation of dimensional boundaries, the ultimate taboo. A militant revolutionary and graffiti artist, recklessly dismissive of the status quo, she will do anything to achieve a just society, including spark a revolution. Even if she has to do it alone. This is a tale of revolution set in a twisted version of Reykjavik fuelled by industrialised magic and populated by humans, interdimensional exiles, otherworldly creatures, psychoactive graffiti and demonic familiars.  Something a bit different this week, some Icelandic fiction. Shadows of the Short Days, by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson, is an urban fantasy novel with a distinctly political air. The huldufólk (hidden people) of Icelandic folklore walk among us. These magical beings that live in and around Reykjavik are subjugated for being different and otherworldly. Decades of near slavery has pushed the huldufólk to their limit. Change is in the air,…

An ex-corporate enforcer, Hakan Veil, is forced to bodyguard Madison Madekwe, part of a colonial audit team investigating a disappeared lottery winner on Mars. But when Madekwe is abducted, and Hakan nearly killed, the investigation takes him farther and deeper than he had ever expected. And soon Hakan discovers the heavy price he may have to pay to learn the truth. Time for some gritty science fiction from the brain of Richard Morgan, he of Altered Carbon fame. Down on your luck and given a choice between jail time or a body guarding gig, what are you going to do? Hakan Veil, Hak to his few friends, Veil to everyone else, opts for the latter. The only problem is that within a matter of days, and an epic error of judgement on his part, his charge has been kidnapped. Veil could just walk away but he is far too stubborn for that. No one is going to stop him from doing his job. There is a blissful lack of complication when it comes to Veil’s methods of retrieving auditor Madison Madekwe; direct doesn’t even begin to cover it. His game plan, at first glance, appears to be shoot anything that…

A land under occupation. A legendary sword. A young man’s journey to find his destiny. Aren has lived by the rules all his life. He’s never questioned it; that’s just the way things are. But then his father is executed for treason, and he and his best friend Cade are thrown into a prison mine, doomed to work until they drop. Unless they can somehow break free. But what lies beyond the prison walls is more terrifying still. Rescued by a man who hates him yet is oath-bound to protect him, pursued by inhuman forces, Aren slowly accepts that everything he knew about his world was a lie. The rules are not there to protect him, or his people, but to enslave them. A revolution is brewing, and Aren is being drawn into it, whether he likes it or not. The key to the revolution is the Ember Blade. The sword of kings, the Excalibur of his people. Only with the Ember Blade in hand can their people be inspired to rise up . . . but it’s locked in an impenetrable vault in the most heavily guarded fortress in the land. All they have to do now is steal…

It was not his war. On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives–even the Emperor himself–against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier. Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he will find himself fighting a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love Hadrian Marlowe is bound by tradition. He is the first son of a noble family and is expected to follow his father’s orders. The only problem is that Hadrian is his own man. He wants a different life. He wants to explore the cosmos, following in the footsteps of his heroes then forging his own path. During the early chapters of the…

Please note, Zero Day is a direct sequel to The Hatching and Skitter. You really need to be reading them before you read this book. In fact, don’t venture any further than this paragraph if you haven’t. Trust me. You don’t want to miss out on all that gloriously squishy goodness. It’s also likely this review might contain some spoilers. Consider yourself suitably warned! The world is on the brink of apocalypse. Zero Day has come. The only thing more terrifying than millions of spiders is the realization that those spiders work as one. But among the government, there is dissent: do we try to kill all of the spiders, or do we gamble on Professor Guyer’s theory that we need to kill only the queens? For President Stephanie Pilgrim, it’s an easy answer. She’s gone as far as she can—more than two dozen American cities hit with tactical nukes, the country torn asunder—and the only answer is to believe in Professor Guyer. Unfortunately, Ben Broussard and the military men who follow him don’t agree, and Pilgrim, Guyer, and the loyal members of the government have to flee, leaving the question: what’s more dangerous, the spiders or ourselves? I think…

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. I’m always happy when I hear that a genre novel is being adapted for the screen. It doesn’t matter if it is a movie or television, the prospect of seeing an author’s vision reinterpreted makes me happy. The growth of streaming services like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix means that…

“Snapshot” is the disturbing story of a Silicon Valley adolescent who finds himself threatened by “The Phoenician,” a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid Instant Camera that erases memories, snap by snap. A young man takes to the skies to experience his first parachute jump. . . and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero’s island of roiling vapor that seems animated by a mind of its own in “Aloft.” On a seemingly ordinary day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails—splinters of bright crystal that shred the skin of anyone not safely under cover. “Rain” explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge of nails spreads out across the country and around the world. In “Loaded,” a mall security guard in a coastal Florida town courageously stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun rights movement. But under the glare of the spotlights, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it. When an out-of-control summer blaze approaches the town, he will reach for the gun again and embark on one last day of reckoning. I’ve become a real admirer of Joe Hill’s work over…

The Inspiration for the Upcoming TV Show Though perhaps most famous as a novelist, over the course of his career Philip K. Dick wrote more than one hundred short stories, each as mind-bending and genre-defining as his longer works. Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams collects ten of the best from across his career. In “Autofac,” Dick shows us one of the earliest examples (and warnings) in science fiction of self-replicating machines. “Exhibit Piece” and “The Commuter” feature Dick exploring one of his favorite themes: the shifting nature of reality, and whether it is even possible to really perceive the world as it is. And “The Hanging Stranger” provides a thrilling, dark political allegory as relevant today as it was when it was written at the height of the Cold War. Strange, funny, and powerful, the stories in this collection highlight a master at work, drawing on his boundless imagination and deep understanding of the human condition. When it comes to short story collection reviews, I normally cobble together a bit of a preamble. Gather together some thoughts about each of the entries. Discuss my favourites and then come to some sort of conclusion. Not so in this case. The anthology…

Please note Skitter is a direct sequel to The Hatching and if you haven’t read that then there is a distinct possibility that this review may contain something akin to spoilers. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya! Tens of millions of people around the world are dead. Half of China is a nuclear wasteland. Mysterious flesh-eating spiders are marching through Los Angeles, Oslo, Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, and countless other cities. According to scientist Melanie Gruyer, however, the spider situation seems to be looking up. Yet in Japan, a giant, truck-sized, glowing egg sack gives a shocking preview of what is to come, even as survivors in Los Angeles panic and break the quarantine zone. Out in the desert, survivalists Gordo and Shotgun are trying to invent a spider super weapon, but it’s not clear if it’s too late, because President Stephanie Pilgrim has been forced to enact the plan of last resort: The Spanish Protocol. America, you are on your own. Last year I read The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone. I loved it. Horror has always been my favourite genre and I like nothing better than a bit of nasty, flesh munching evil. Fear of spiders gets a checkmark…

It has been 14 years since the Martians invaded England. The world has moved on, always watching the skies but content that we know how to defeat the Martian menace. Machinery looted from the abandoned capsules and war-machines has led to technological leaps forward. The Martians are vulnerable to earth germs. The Army is prepared. So when the signs of launches on Mars are seen, there seems little reason to worry. Unless you listen to one man, Walter Jenkins, the narrator of Wells’ book. He is sure that the Martians have learned, adapted, understood their defeat. He is right. Thrust into the chaos of a new invasion, a journalist – sister-in-law to Walter Jenkins – must survive, escape and report on the war. The Massacre of Mankind has begun No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty first century that a reviewer would read a book created by an intelligence far greater than his own. The reviewer would scrutinise and study the text as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. The reviewer even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet,…