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…

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…

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.

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…

The fantastic speculative fiction short story collection from Gary J. Mack. Grab a punnet! One of the really unexpected things I’ve discovered since getting back into reading fiction is how much I enjoy anthologies. I started on that route with the excellent Nine Streams of Consciousness and was pleasantly surprised, and I’ve since added a few to my TBR list. Impossible Fruit by Gary J. Mack is my second such short story collection, and it is absolutely fantastic.

The multi-award winning utopian science fiction novel in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish universe. Jeez, people, just please read this book. Honestly. This is the first time I’ve gotten to open up my new Library of America hardbacks of Le Guin’s Hainish series, and they’re wonderful. This story is in volume two of the set. The reading experience was much better than I expected. Normally I’m a lover of paperbacks, and to a lesser extent, ebooks. I’ll choose either of those over a hardback.

I have a confession to make: I read one of these novelettes around the middle of last year, but I totally blanked on doing a proper review of it here on the blog. That was Investation, the perma-free short fiction available from Frasier’s website for newsletter signups. So, since I recently got done reading his newest work, Rememory, I thought I would rectify my error and review both now

I’ve probably done this in the wrong order. I watched the Apple TV+ adaptation’s first season (and made comment on it here) before starting to read the book. I’ve had the book for a little while though - I bought it before the TV series came out in September, but TBRs are a funny thing like that. All it really means is that this review will have a short section of comparison to the show, seeing as I first gave my views on it without having read the book. Now that I have, I understand the stark contrast between the two from a first-hand perspective, and I have some thoughts that I’ll put together after the review of the book itself. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is held to be one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, it spawned the concept of the Galactic Empire and was highly influential for almost everything that came after it - including Dune. This is a long one, so strap in.

The dark but utterly brilliant second book in the Embers of War trilogy by Gareth L. Powell. Even better than the first, Fleet of Knives is a fantastic sequel that dives right into the action and pulls no punches. Much moreso than in Embers of War, there’s clear inspiration taken from the movie Aliens and, reader, I’m here for it.

Apple TV’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic, millennia-spanning, galactic-scale sci-fi series is a mixed bag. Now, I have to preface this by saying I have come into watching this show (almost) completely blind. I have not yet read the novels, though I do have the first Foundation book sitting on my shelf ready for when I finish my current read…

A strange and powerfully imaginative space opera novella from Gareth L. Powell and Peter F. Hamilton. Light Chaser is the result of a collaboration between two masters of space opera: Gareth L. Powell and Peter F. Hamilton. It’s a new novella that was published back in August, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it ever since I saw the preliminary marketing earlier this year…

I first heard of this book in the Twitter writing community, where I saw it being posted regularly in #writerslift threads and its premise immediately caught my attention. After a while I saw that the author, P.J. Sky, had the Kindle version up on a free promotion and I took the opportunity to claim it for later. And it has taken me quite a long time to get to, to be honest…

So I… Guess I like spiders now? #TeamPortia. Children of Time is the Arthur C Clarke award-winning science fiction novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky. I first heard about Adrian on Twitter and I knew instantly that I had to put his SF work on my TBR. As I’ve mentioned a few times before on this blog, I wasn’t particularly well read in SF when I started writing and I’ve spent the better part of the past year rectifying that, going from some of the classics of the genre to the modern day.

After having been asked by absolutely no-one, I thought I’d share a list of all the books I’ve got on my TBR. And because I have taken it upon myself to post up a review for every book I read, you can consider this a kind of sneak-peek at the reviews you can look forward to in the future on this blog, plus get an idea of the kind of books that have captured my interest…