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I'm surprised Martin Martin's On The Other Side got shortlisted for a Clarke Award. To be sure, it brings a unique narrative voice to the dystopian future canon. But it's also derivative and muddled. Spoilers! More »
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Eco-political, frantic, and undeniably epic, Paul McAuley's latest novel The Quiet War was nominated for a Clarke this year. It's time to check out this hard science tale of gene wizards and posthuman separatists. More »
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Young-adult authors have conquered science fiction with a mixture of angst, romance, and the discovery that adults are wrong. But Cory Doctorow's Hugo/Nebula-nominated Little Brother puts a geeky, subversive spin on that formula. Spoilers! More »
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Making Money, Terry Pratchett's Nebula-nominated, thirty-somethingth novel in Discworld series, could be a subtitled, "a comic fantasy on contemporary themes," ie the large-scale consensual fraud that is a banking system. More »
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Alastair Reynolds' House Of Suns, shortlisted for the Clarke Award, is a novel of ideas, with all that implies. The space-opera epic throws a dizzying blizzard of concepts at the reader, sacrificing character-development. Spoilers below. More »
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In Sheri S. Tepper's The Margarets, nominated for the Clarke, a woman's identity is shattered into seven parts, each going on interplanetary missions to save humanity. This is magical space opera mixed with hardcore eco-politics. More »
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With his first novel, David J. Schwartz attempts to imagine ordinary people, in a realistic setting, who gain Superpowers. It's one of the finalists for the Nebula Award. More »
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Zoë's Tale, the last book in the Old Man's War sequence by John Scalzi, has just been nominated a Hugo for best novel. It deals with the harrowing complications of interstellar politics and teenage girls. More »
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Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem comes out next week, and there's something very timely about his tale of aliens on a parallel Earth whose inhabitants are locked into an occasionally-catastrophic conflict between scientific and religious institutions. The planet Arbre, which is very much like Earth in some ways, differs from our world one major respect. Its religious and scientific institutions are essentially reversed. Monks called the avout live ascetic lives studying science in gracious, ancient "maths," while the so called "saecular" world is populated with Deolators (god-worshipers) who are obsessed with religion and technology. Stephenson's world-building skills, honed by the exacting work he did on his recent Baroque Cycle trilogy, are at their best here. Anathem is that rarest of things: A stately novel of ideas packed with cool tech, terrific fight scenes, aliens, and even a little ESP. More »
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One of the charmingly weird things about Charles Stross' new novel Saturn's Children is that he manages to include every single cliche of sexual perversion you've seen on the net — and make them somehow fit plausibly into the plot. The author of the critically-acclaimed Halting State has written a fast-paced thriller about Freya, a sexbot designed to service humans, who lives in a solar system where humans died out 300 years before. A freak among bots, she's programmed to look like and lust after something that doesn't exist. Her life is meaningless and depressing until she takes a job smuggling black market "pink goo" (human cells) for a shady bot named Jeeves. There's a lot to enjoy (and mull over) in this often-satirical novel, and one of the most interesting parts is that Freya comes from a line of "Rhea model" sexbots who share memories and lovers — just like the beautiful cylons in Battlestar Galatica do. More »
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