I’ll be honest: before joining the Twitter writing community, I had not heard of Gareth L. Powell. But as soon as I announced myself as a writer on the platform and started using the hashtags, Gareth was there, following me because he’s awesome and follows all writers. Though my attention was drawn by his humourously titled Ack-Ack Macaque series…

As a sci-fi fan, you’d probably expect that I had already read Frank Herbert’s Dune a long time ago. Sadly that’s not the case. It’s yet another of those books I strangely missed. Knowing this, and knowing that Denis Villeneuve’s movie adaptation was on the horizon, it was one of the first books I had in my sights when I decided to get back into reading…

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science-fiction, and the book which established Le Guin as a major player in the genre, The Left Hand of Darkness is a truly fascinating read. The book has strong feminist themes and explores the concept of androgyny against the backdrop of an alien first-contact scenario…

This being the very first time I’ve read Asimov’s work for myself, I had absolutely no idea what to expect going in. Isaac Asimov is one of the heavyweights of science-fiction; a pioneer for many of the ideas and concepts that we take for granted in the genre today…

I was very late to the Culture party. The first time I heard of Iain M. Banks was when The Hydrogen Sonata came out in 2012, and that, only in passing. Years went by and I kept hearing snippets of things about the Culture series, from people who respected it highly. So on the strength of that, I decided to pick up one of the books, and what better place to start, I thought, than at the very beginning?