On Monday nights, fellow author, Drew Wagar runs a Twitch livestream all about science fiction, fantasy and writing. At the end of 2022, he had the idea to use the streams as a sort-of book club, where we would collectively look at old (public domain) sci-fi novels. Our first piece of “homework” was to read some of H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds if we hadn’t already read it. I’d personally never read it, though I was familiar generally with the story from movies and TV. So I downloaded a copy and started reading…

A Twilight-zone inspired science fiction short story collection from J.D. Sanderson. Anthologies and short story collections really are great, aren’t they? I’ve come to enjoy them over the last couple of years, and it’s one of the more unexpected things to come out of my journey back into reading science fiction. Especially from fellow independent authors. There’s a goldmine of great ideas and exceptional work to be read, that all too often doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

Dr Becky’s YouTube channel is great. I really enjoy the way that she talks about the new discoveries in astrophysics and astronomy. I started watching her videos on and off maybe a year or so before the launch of the JWST, but particularly since the telescope’s launch, her videos have been a great way to keep track of the new discoveries and observations it’s making. I’ve been fascinated by black holes ever since I was a child and so I was quite excited when Dr Becky announced that she was releasing this book…

I’ve seen Legends & Lattes going around the writing community for a long time and heard a great many good things about it. I had it sitting in my wishlist on Amazon for ages, waiting for a good moment to buy, and then when that time came along, the author had the audacity to get a trad publishing deal and for the book to be republished by Tor, which meant it disappeared and I “had” to wait for it to become available again…

The Shield Road was my final read of 2022. I blasted through it during that nebulous span of days between Christmas and New Year where time has no meaning and the human body subsists on the excess snacky bits we over-bought before the festive season. I’ve seen snippets of Dewi’s work before on Twitter, and - seeing the sheer quality of his prose - I knew I would have to pick up The Shield Road as soon as possible.

It took me a while to get through Children of Dune, not because it’s not good - because it is, very much so - but because November and December are heavy months for me, and I didn’t find the time nor the inclination to read very often. So it took a lot longer than I would have liked, and in fact, I finished it just before Christmas. There’s a lot about Frank Herbert’s writing that’s really grown on me as I’ve continued through the series…

You all know by now how much I adore Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing, so it comes as no surprise that I would be over the moon about the prospect of learning more of the art of writing from her. Steering the Craft is a fantastic short guide packed with lots of great insights and writing exercises across a range of different aspects of the craft. Mainly aimed at the kind of writer who’s been doing this thing a little while and wants to hone their craft, it’s an excellent resource for both lone and group work. As such, it doesn’t go over the basics like how to create characters, build fictional worlds etc… But focuses more on style.

Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama has been recommended to me a lot over the last year or so, and for good reason. It’s one of the heavy-hitters of classic science fiction, one many would consider an “essential” read. I’m not so prescriptive as that. Even though I fully believe in the benefits of reading widely, and of having a mixed repertoire of the classic and modern - especially as a writer - I also believe that people should read whatever they want to read, and not to be made to read something that doesn’t suit them. That said, Rendezvous with Rama is one I would highly recommend…

It’s been a while since I last dipped my toes into the Earthsea Cycle. The Farthest Shore was the end of an internal trilogy, and it felt like it brought things to a close, but the story didn’t end there. In Tehanu, we revisit Tenar, twenty-five years on from her escape from The Tombs of Atuan, and we watch Ged wrestle with the consequences of his sacrifice in The Farthest Shore…

I’ve been interested in reading Neuromancer for a while, so you can imagine I was thrilled when my wife’s cousin lent me her copy of the book. It’s sat on my shelf for a while though, because, y’know, TBRs be like that sometimes. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went in to reading it. I have encountered the cyberpunk aesthetic minimally - mainly through movies like Blade Runner, or games such as Cyberpunk 2077…

Before I started reading Accretion, Dianne warned me on Twitter to “buckle up”, and… Oh boy, yeah. It’s been a wonderful journey going through this space opera saga, and I’m looking forward to reading its conclusion with Luminiferous. Apologies to everyone for the delay in putting out this review. I recently reviewed Gareth L. Powell’s Light of Impossible Stars and About Writing, and for some reason my brain was adamant I only had two reviews to write, not three. So when I did the previous two reviews…

Well, here’s a first for the blog: a review of a non-fiction book! I recently read the new expanded edition of Gareth L. Powell’s About Writing. As a writer myself, I’m keen to learn more about the craft and improve. One great way to do this is simply to write (this is, in fact, the most important way), another is to take advice from established writers. For new (and not so new) writers, there’s so much rich knowledge to be gleaned from those who have been immersed in the industry for a long time…

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally read Light of Impossible Stars. Last time - when I reviewed the second book in the series - I said I wouldn’t leave it too long before reading the last book, but it took more time to get to than I had anticipated. Having now finished the trilogy, I can say with confidence that it is an absolute masterwork. Carefully and meticulously crafted, there’s not a word or phrase used idly. Before I dive into the review proper, I wanted to talk briefly about the prose in a broad sense across the whole series…

Very unusually for me, I went straight into Ephemeris immediately after finishing Heliopause. I have so many books on my TBR that I tend to like jumping around, like sampling everything at a buffet. But this time, I went straight from book one to book two in the same series! Ephemeris has an odd description: it’s a prequel, sequel and concurrent companion piece to Heliopause all at the same time. This kind of out of the box thinking is one of the many reasons I have come to love indie publishing.

As with all the books on my TBR, I’ve been meaning to read the Questrison Saga for a good long while now, ever since I first saw J. Dianne Dotson pop up in the Twitter writing community, and now here we are: Heliopause, the first book in the four-part space opera series. In many ways I’ve felt like Dianne’s passion to create this universe that’s sat with her for a long time has parallels with my own approach to the Augment Saga. And that’s intriguing.

Science fiction and futurism are not exclusive to any one culture, and often we find ourselves - in the white western world, at least - reading all our SFF from the same cultural sources. However, we are enriched both as readers and writers when we diversify the types of stories we read in our beloved genre. It makes us more understanding, gives us greater empathy, and broadens our scope for ideas. There are wonderful stories out there from people writing from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and early on in my renewed reading journey, I decided…

This was a tricky book to review. I had been meaning to pick up Faraway Sky, Ocean Deep for a long time - ever since Alan announced he had completed his first NaNoWriMo project, in fact, which is an amazing achievement all its own. Writing over fifty thousand words in a single month is mind boggling to me, and I absolutely applaud his determination and discipline in getting it done.

An intriguing science fiction novella by James McLean, offering a taste of things to come. I received a copy of this book after the author ran a giveaway on Twitter around its release, and I was thrilled (and surprised) to have won! Carrion Crew is a sci-fi novella by James McLean, who you may remember as one of the authors I recently interviewed.

The Lords of Midnight is an adventure strategy game that was released for the ZX Spectrum in 1984, written and created by Mike Singleton. This 2018 novel - the first in the Midnight Chronicles - by Drew Wagar is the official novelisation of that classic game. The story behind the creation of this book is a fascinating tale all on its own, but one I’ll leave to Drew (contained within the book’s Author’s Note). Now, I need to be clear here: I never played the game - it came out four years before I was born - in fact I hadn’t heard of it until relatively recently.

When I first read Dune, I knew I wanted to continue to read more in the series. I really enjoyed the first and wrote a review to that effect here. My appreciation for the book only deepened when I finally got a chance to see Denis Villeneuve’s masterful film adaptation of its first half, and I am absolutely hyped for the next installment. Meanwhile, I will be sporadically reading my way through the rest of Frank Herbert’s six-part series…