WELCOME TO NIGHT CITY. THE CITY OF DREAMS. IF IT HASN’T CHANGED YOU YET, IT WILL . . . AND IF IT DOESN’T KILL YOU, YOU MIGHT COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE AS A LIVING LEGEND. In neon-drenched Night City, a ragtag group of strangers have just pulled off a heist, robbing a convoy transporting a mysterious container belonging to Militech. The only thing the group has in common is that they were blackmailed into participating in the heist – and they have no idea just how far their mysterious employer’s reach goes, or the purpose of the artifact they stole. This newly formed gang – composed of a veteran turned renegade, a sleeper agent for Militech, a computer nerd, a therapist, a ripperdoc, and a techie – must learn how to overcome their differences and work together, lest their secrets be unveiled before they can pull off the next deadly heist. I’ll begin with an admission; I haven’t played Cyberpunk 2077. It’s a shame, I love CD Projekt Red’s other gaming monolith, The Witcher, but I just can’t do first-person games. They give me terrible motion sickness. That said, I am still a huge fan of near-future cyberpunk dystopias,…

INFINITY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING. The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds – except that they’re really just the one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an AI threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they’ll eradicate it by whatever means necessary, no matter the cost to human life. Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth’s environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel. It could save everyone on her dying planet, but now she’s walked into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of. And she needs to choose a side before it kills her. Hadiz Tambuwal knows our days are numbered. We’ve ravaged the planet without a second thought. Resources have been pillaged to the point of ecological catastrophe. Hadiz’s view of humanity is probably best described as dispassionate. That said she does want to try and save us, even when it looks like we’ve passed the tipping point. How best to do this? Well, it just so happens that Hadiz has stumbled upon the secret to interdimensional travel. If our Earth has depleted its resources beyond…

Please note, Downfall is the third book in the Inscape trilogy. It is highly likely that what follows will contain minor spoilers if you haven’t read books one and two. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! THE SAFETY OF INTECH’S RESIDENTS IS PARAMOUNT. INSURRECTION WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. Tanta and Cole may have stopped the mass murder of InTech’s residents, but the cost was severe. Despite their efforts, Harlow 2.0 – the update to InTech’s mind-based operating system – fed out. Now its citizens are compliant zombies, and Tanta and her crew are trapped underground. All except for Fliss, who has no system to update. She alone can go outside, and it’s Fliss the crew are relying on to help get them out. For only then can they dismantle the damage Harlow 2.0 has done. If Tanta, Cole and InTech’s residents are to truly be free, it needs to be destroyed. But Tanta knows that task will put her on a collision course with the corporation that raised her, her oldest friends, and the woman who was once her soulmate. And this last mission might ask more of her than she’s able to give. After an extended break from The…

Ricky Smart is a nobody, a Miami Beach paparazzo who lives in a cheap apartment and scrapes a living snapping celebs. One day Ricky wakes up, and realises there’s something wrong with his hand. It’s not his hand. In fact, it’s someone else’s hand. How does he know it’s not his? Because it looks different, it feels different and – perhaps the biggest clue– it has a four-letter word tattooed across the knuckles. Then a week later, his other hand changes. A few days after that, Ricky gets a new arm… Ricky is losing his mind as well as his body parts, but he has to eat and pay rent so he manages to get things together enough to pursue his seedy paparazzi career. He’s after candid shots of pop sensation and local girl Scala Jaq, who’s staying in town. He trails Scala, who has a secret of her own, and to his surprise and shock comes across her at a support group for people with an unusual condition, led by an overly enthusiastic guy called Don. Scala and Ricky team up when they begin to suspect Don, who tells them he’s a time-travelling policeman with an interest in Ricky’s…

Outcast is a direct sequel to Inscape. If you haven’t read the first book in this series, then what follows will contain minor spoilers. Consider yourself duly warned! TRUTH. LIES. IT CAN BE HARD TO TELL THEM APART. When a bomb goes off at InTech HQ, everything changes for Tanta’s corporation. Order becomes disorder. Safety becomes danger. Calm becomes chaos. Tanta is tasked with getting to the bottom of the attack before violence and unrest overtake the city. But even though the evidence points towards rival corporation Thoughtfront, Tanta can’t shake the feeling that she’s missing something. There’s a dark secret at the heart of the case, one that will reveal more about her own corporation than Tanta would like. And the closer Tanta gets to the mystery, the more she comes to realise something terrible: Sometimes facing the truth can be the hardest thing of all. Back in January 2021, I had the opportunity to read the rather wonderful science fiction thriller Inscape by Louise Carey. It was great, you should all read it. This week, the sequel, Outcast, is released. Guess what? It’s also great and you should all definitely read it as well. The action picks up…

IF YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO CHANGE YOUR FUTURE WOULD YOU TAKE IT? Esso is running out of time and into trouble. After he is accidentally caught up in a gang war, he is haunted by a vision of a bullet fired in an alleyway with devastating consequences. A generation later, fifteen-year-old football prodigy Rhia is desperately searching for answers – and a catastrophic moment from the past holds the key to understanding the parents she never got to meet. Whether on the roads of South London or in the mysterious Upper World, Esso and Rhia”s fates must collide. And when they do, a race against the clock will become a race against time itself. . . The Eloquent Page is back after a short self-imposed break, and this week I’ve been taking a look at the time travel science fiction novel The Upper World by Femi Fadugba. Esso is a typical teen. He just wants to spend his days hanging out with friends or daydreaming about a certain girl at school. Unfortunately, the threat of gang violence is always present, and Esso has an uncanny knack for ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rhia is…

Celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of cutting-edge science fiction from the hit podcast, Escape Pod. Featuring new and classic stories from Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ursula Vernon and more.  From editors Mur Laffterty and S.B. Divya comes the science fiction collection of the year, bringing together bestselling authors in celebration of the publishing phenomenon that is, Escape Pod. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read any short fiction so when I discovered an anthology was due to be published celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the magnificent podcast Escape Pod I decided it was high time to remedy that oversight. This collection features fifteen science fiction tinged visions of our world and beyond and it’s just a bit awesome. Some random thoughts about each story – Citizens of Elsewhen by Kameron Hurley – If you’re going to protect history and the progenitors of humanity, then you need to get it right. Even if that means re-doing a mission over and over again. Kameron Hurley doesn’t mess about when it comes to kicking this anthology off. The nature of life, existence and how we shape our future is dissected and laid bare in just a handful of pages. I’m…

We all have to work to live, even if it is an illegal survey for oil in the rapidly melting Arctic. Software engineer Isobel needs to eat like everyone, and that’s how she fell into the job that leads her to the most northerly place on our planet. As part of a weathered crew of sailors, scientists and corporate officers she sails into the ice where their advanced software Proteus will map everything there is to know. A great icebreaker leads their way into the brutal environment, and the days grow longer, time ever more detached, as they pass through the endless white expanse of the ice.  But they are not alone. They have attracted the attention of seals, gulls and a hungry, dedicated polar bear. The journey to plunder one of the few remaining resources the planet has to offer must endure the ravages of the ice, the bear and time itself. Regular readers of The Eloquent Page will be aware of my fondness for apocalyptic fiction. It’s a sub-genre I constantly find myself drawn towards. Always North by Vicki Jarrett is an introspective character study of a woman watching our destruction and I absolutely loved it. The novel…

Please note The Rosewater Insurrection is a direct sequel to Rosewater. With that in mind it is likely, if you are not familiar with the first book in the Wormwood trilogy, then what follows may contain some minor spoilers. Consider yourself warned! All is quiet in the city of Rosewater as it expands on the back of the gargantuan alien Wormwood. Those who know the truth of the invasion keep the secret. The government agent Aminat, the lover of the retired sensitive Kaaro, is at the forefront of the cold, silent conflict. She must capture a woman who is the key to the survival of the human race. But Aminat is stymied by the machinations of the Mayor of Rosewater and the emergence of an old enemy of Wormwood… Last September I read the first book in The Wormwood Trilogy, Rosewater by Tade Thompson. It was one of my highlights of 2018. The sequel, The Rosewater Insurrection, has recently been released and picks up where events left off. The city of Rosewater has become a focal point, not just for Nigeria, but for the entire planet. A vast city-sized entity, known as Wormwood, is slowly changing the world we inhabit….

Please note, events in There Before The Chaos take place after the end of The Indranan War trilogy. If I were you, I’d be inclined to read those three books first, if you haven’t already. If you don’t then it is highly likely this review will contain spoilery type stuff. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. The battle for the throne is over. The war for the galaxy is just beginning. Hail Bristol, former gunrunner and newly-crowned Empress of Indrana, looks forward to retiring her gun and rebuilding her Empire in peace. After a bloody civil war laced with regicide, betrayal, and foreign plots, Hail and her people are braced for years of necessary reconstruction and reform. But when Indrana’s closest ally asks Hail to intervene in an interstellar military crisis, she must instead embark on the highest stakes diplomatic mission the Empire has ever faced. Caught between two alien civilizations at each other’s throats, she must uncover each side’s true intentions before all of humanity becomes collateral damage in a full-blown galactic war. As a book reviewer, who has been around for a while*, I find myself in an incredibly fortunate position. From time to time publishers send me…

Rosewater is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry and the helpless—people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers. Kaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome, and doesn’t care to again—but when something begins killing off others like himself, Kaaro must defy his masters to search for an answer, facing his dark history and coming to a realization about a horrifying future. A strange alien presence has arrived on Earth and set up residence in the middle of Nigeria. In this special location, a town has grown up over a handful of years. Rosewater is a melting pot of different people and different attitudes. It doesn’t matter if you are seeking religious enlightenment, dabbling in some corporate greed, or a vicious drug dealing thug, Rosewater offers opportunity for all. Kaaro makes for a compelling protagonist. He is not what you would call a traditional hero, quite the reverse in fact. He is a coward, a thief and is disinterested in just about everything except himself. The problem is…