Author Archive: Gareth D Jones
Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 edited by Julie E. Czerneda (book review).
I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of the Nebula Awards winning novels over the past few years, so it seems like the members of the SFWA who vote for the awards have pretty good taste. The annual ‘Nebula Awards Showcase’ volumes contain the winning novellas, novelettes and short-listed short stories, as well as excerpts from the […]
The Consuming Fire (Interdependancy book 2) by John Scalzi (book review).
Last year’s book, ‘The Collapsing Empire’ by John Scalzi, was a riotous, no-holds-barred imperial space opera that was a lot of fun and introduced us to the intriguing setting of the Interdependancy. The sequel is ‘The Consuming Fire’, which follows on with the same set of characters as they face up to the imminent collapse […]
Brick Journal #53 – October 2018 (magazine review).
A review copy of Brick Journal # 53 arrived in good time to coincide with the return to TV of ‘Lego Masters’, which I enjoyed watching last year. ‘Brick Journal’ is packed with articles about and interviews with Lego model designers, instructions for various models and other Lego-related articles of interest to AFOLs (Adult Fans […]
Legion: The Many Lives Of Stephen Leeds by Brandon Sanderson (book review).
“That was fantastically, amazingly brilliant,” I said as he closed the cover on ‘Legion: The Many Lives Of Stephen Leeds’ by Brandon Sanderson. “Really?” Bartholomew sneered from his position by the window. Bartholomew wasn’t real – none of the other people in the room were – but that didn’t stop him having an opinion. “That’s […]
The Moons Of Barsk (book 2) by Lawrence M. Schoen (book review).
I thoroughly enjoyed Lawrence M. Schoen’s debut novel ‘Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard’ a couple of years back and became enchanted with his tale of arboreal elephants on the planet Barsk and their limited relationship with the multi-special Alliance of Worlds. In ‘The Moons Of Barsk’, we meet some of the same characters again: the historian, […]
Dogs Of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky (book review).
Rex is a bio-engineered dog designed for war, given limited autonomy to command his small troop of other creatures and sent out into the anarchy of the civil war raging through Mexico. His world is quite straightforward: kill enemies, don’t kill friends and obey orders. When it starts to become unclear who falls into which […]
Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar (book review).
Lavie Tidhar creates wonderfully vivid worlds in his books. Worlds where the strange and bizarre intertwine with the mundane, where history is slightly different and where Jewish culture and language permeate the tale. In ‘Unholy Land’, the Jews have a homeland in East Africa known as Palestina and the horrors of the holocaust did not […]
By The Pricking Of Her Thumb (A Real Town Murder) by Adam Roberts (book review).
Adam Roberts is a great player with words, constructing lyrical prose and playful dialogue without any care as to whether it falls strictly within the rules of English grammar or whether indeed the words could be found in a dictionary. Private detective Alma, her partner Marguerite and several of the other characters she encounters like […]
Game Of The Gods by Jay Schiffman (book review).
The first thing that struck me about Jay Schiffman’s debut novel ‘Game Of The Gods’ was the characters’ quirky names, which struck me as somewhat Vancian and made a nice change from the usual run-of-the-mill popular name derivatives. There are characters called Dariox Vinyl, Pique Rollins, Spiro de Yerusalom and Veriton Glass. Some of these […]
One Way by S.J. Morden (book review).
I guess comparisons with Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ are inevitable for S.J. Morden’s near-future Mars thriller, ‘One Way’. I can’t really make those comparisons directly though as I’ve only seen the film and not read the book of ‘The Martian’. Mars has almost its own personality: ancient, dusty, red and forbidding. It has featured in […]
